Blood Red

Holdstedter looked around to make sure none of the people in the bar was paying them any attention. No one was, except there was a brunette looking him over like he was a fine cut of meat. “I think he either did something to his wife, or he did something to someone else. He looked like he was ready to shit his pants when we pulled up.”

“Maybe. I don’t think he has the balls.”

“Listen here, Boyd, and listen well. Brian Freemont is a dangerous man. He gets into power.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He thinks too much like me, and I get into power.”

“Yeah? What do you do about it?”

“I have a beer and then hope I can get lucky. Nice game of hide-the-salami and I feel plenty powerful again.”

“You’re gonna have a kid that way, you know. You should wait until you’re married.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

“So we put him down as a suspect?”

“Yeah, we do. I looked over dispatch’s records. There’s a while last night when he didn’t call in to report his location and he didn’t write a single ticket. He had time to get home and do something to her if he really wanted to.”

“You think it was that bad between them?”

Holdstedter shrugged his broad shoulders and got a sour look on his pretty-boy face. “I think anyone married to him would be miserable. I also think he looks at other women too much to be a good husband.”

“Nothing wrong with looking, Danny.”

“There’s looking and then there’s looking. If that boy had x-ray vision, every woman in this town would have reason to slap his face off.”

“Okay. We keep him as a suspect.” Boyd picked at the fries surrounding his burger and then decided to have a sip of beer instead. “So what the hell is going on in this town, Danny? How come we have so many missing people and not a body anywhere?”

“Maybe they’re all leaving town.”

“Some of them, sure. I can see that with the college girl and all, but ten-year-old corpses don’t walk away. And whatever the hell happened with the Falcones, I can bet they didn’t climb out of that car and skip their asses out of town for a little fun.”

“Yeah,” he grinned and took another sip of beer. “So a few maybe stayed here, but other than the corpses and car-crash victims, maybe they just left town.”

“That’s what I like about you, Danny. You’re an optimist.”

VI

Maggie was feeling a little tender when she got back to her apartment. The Baptist minister apparently liked his women submissive and he liked to fuck like a bunny on Spanish fly. Maggie visited him right after the Presbyterian. She was almost done with the list. Part of her was happy about that, because it was a lot of work with men who apparently weren’t getting any regularly. She was also a little saddened because she was having a good time with the whole lot of them.

Ben was outside, sitting on the ground near his front door. His head was hanging low and his knees were up so high they almost reached his shoulders.

“Ben? What are you doing out here?”

He looked up slowly, and she saw that he’d been drinking. He was ripped.

Ben shrugged his shoulders and waved his hands around aimlessly. “Thinking I maybe fucked up.”

He didn’t normally curse, and he wasn’t exactly a legend around school for his drinking habits. She walked over to where he was sitting and looked down at him. “What’s wrong?”

“That damned cop.”

“Oh, shit, Ben. He didn’t find out it was you, did he?”

“No. His wife is missing.” He looked miserable.

She shook her head. “What’s that got to do with you?”

“He said it was my fault. Accused me of doing something to her.” He shook his head with the slow, deliberate actions of a drunk who didn’t want to lose everything in his stomach.

“Did you do anything to his wife?”

“What?” He looked up sharply and immediately regretted it. Ben leaned back against the wall, his eyes moving fast behind closed lids and his face an unpleasant shade of green in the darkness. “No, Maggie. I don’t even know what she looks like.”

Maggie squatted down on her haunches next to Ben and tried to look into his eyes. His face was tear-streaked and he was sweating alcohol in the cool night air. She reached out her hand and touched his cheek, making him look at her.

“Then you didn’t do anything and he’s just a dick, Ben.”

“But maybe she left him because of me.”

“What? Because you hid his money and put it back?”

He nodded his head and simultaneously leaned his face against her palm. “Yeah. ’Cause I’m a bastard and hid his money.”

“Ben, he was blackmailing girls and raping them; they didn’t want it, but he made them do it. The only bastard here is him. If she left him because of anything, it’s because she finally saw what you saw.”

He shook his head and blinked his eyes several times. His bottom lip jutted out and pulled toward his chin. He was on the verge of tears over something he had no control over, because he’d been doing something genuinely nice for a girl he barely even knew.

“Still my fault. Maybe he deserved what I did, but what did she ever do?”