Phil felt like a pressure cooker about to blow its seam. “What is your point?” he asked as calmly as he could.
“My point is you lied to me.”
Silence.
“How did I lie to you?”
If looks could kill, Phil would be dead now, a dozen times over. Her eyes leveled on him. “Before you and I did anything, I asked you, didn’t I? I asked you if you were still involved with Vicki. And you said no.”
“And that was the truth!” he yelled.
“So what was she doing in your room with you standing there with a towel wrapped around your waist.”
“She had a problem,” he said. “She got beat up, and she needed a place to sleep.”
“So you thought your bed would suffice?”
“She slept on my couch! I didn’t touch her! And I just got done telling you—I didn’t have sex with her!”
More silence, but it was not a contemplative kind of silence; it was a mocking one. “So you’re telling me,” Susan asked, “that, since you’ve been back to town, you haven’t slept with her?”
“I—” Phil began. If there was one thing he could never do, it was lie to her. If he lied, he was as phony as the phoniest guy on earth.
“Well,” he admitted, “I did once. But not today. It was last week—before you and I even went out.”
She seemed to sit in a dull shadow generated by her own anger and disappointment. It made her bright-blond hair less bright, her blue eyes like ruddy stones. Her voice sounded just as ruddy when she said, “I’d have to be out of my mind to believe a load of crap like that.”
“Susan, you’ve got this all wrong—”
She mockingly glanced at her watch, then looked up at him again. “Oh, you’re still here?”
Phil turned and went out the back through Mullins’ office. Why flog a dead horse? She’ll never trust me in a million years, he realized. I fucked it all up—good job, Phil. I wonder what else you can fuck up today. He could scorn himself forever, but that would not change the fact that there was nothing else he could do.
clank!
Out by the back driveway, Phil looked to his left. The door stood open to the old lockup, which Mullins had converted to a supply room. He must be in there now, Phil deduced, noticing both the patrol cruiser and Mullins’ own sedan still in the lot. Probably getting more coffee and Red Man. Phil strode on toward his car. It was back to Sallee’s, to start all over again now. The low moon shone pasty yellow, just rising over the top of the station. Cricket sounds throbbed steadily.
Phil turned again, much more abruptly this time, at yet another sound coming from the old lockup.
The sound of breaking glass.
It was probably nothing—The chief probably dropped a coffee pot—but Phil thought it best to investigate anyway. What if it wasn’t Mullins? What if someone was actually breaking in? Yeah, the rednecks around here are even stupid enough to bust into a police supply room, Phil considered.
The building stood merely as a drab cinder block edifice about the size of a typical trailer. Phil entered cautiously. A single low-watt bulb lit the dusty hallway. Another door stood open at the end. Phil decided not to call out; in the event that someone was burgling the place, the element of surprise would work greatly to his favor.
He walked very quietly to the next door, peeked in, and—
What the hell is this?
—noticed at once that this was no supply room. It was what it always had been. A jail.
Three barred cells lined the wall. The first two were empty. Mullins bent over before the third, picking pieces of glass off the floor.
“Ya fuckin’A-hole dimwit. Ya busted a perfectly good glass,” Mullins griped.
But who was he griping to?
“Hey, Chief?” Phil spoke up. “What gives?”
Mullins glared up, his fat, round face inflamed. “What the hell are you doing here!” he shouted.
Then Phil saw why his chief was acting so guilty. In the third cell, which Mullins claimed had been empty for years, sat an unshaven, overweight young man.
A prisoner, Phil realized. Mullins had a prisoner in here all this time and never told me…
««—»»
“For shit sake! I was gonna tell ya!” Mullins insisted.
“Yeah, right, just like you were gonna tell me about how for the last six months you’ve been finding mutilated bodies all over goddamn town!” Phil was so mad he was shaking. “Yeah, you were gonna tell me, Chief, only you didn’t! Christ, you never would’ve told me if I hadn’t found out on my own!”
“Phil, you’re jumpin’ the gun here. Let me ex—”
“Goddamn, Chief! Everything you tell me is a crock of shit! And now this—” Phil extended a hand to the third jail cell. “You tell me you haven’t used the lockup for anything but a supply room, and now I walk in and see you’ve had a prisoner in here all along! What the hell’s going on?”
“Well, if you’d shut up and quit yelling a minute and let me fuckin’ talk—”
Once again, Phil couldn’t help but feel totally betrayed by his boss; this was the third or fourth time Mullins had oddly withheld information from him. Red-faced, then, he jerked his gaze into the cell. “And who the hell is this guy anyway?”
“His name’s Gut Clydes,” Mullins said. “Just another local punk selling dust and raising hell. Came in here one night all wired up and crazy, saying he’d been attacked by Creekers.”
“Creekers?” Phil asked, as astonished as he was outraged. “This fucking guy was attacked by Creekers, and you wouldn’t let me question him?”
“He said he was attacked by Creekers,” Mullins corrected. “Don’t believe a word of it—he was hallucinatin’, the fucker could barely walk, he was so high on dust.”
“No, I weren’t!” exclaimed the guy in the cell. “And it’s true, it was Creekers that jacked us up that night. And it was Creekers who killed my buddy.”
“Shut up, ya A-hole,” Mullins replied, “before I kick ya straight into the county can. Probably what I shoulda done in the first place.”
“What did you charge him with?” Phil asked.
“Nothing. I’m just lettin’ him dry out for a while.”
Phil rolled his eyes big-time. “Chief, you can’t just keep a guy in jail without charging him and filing with the DA for an arraignment.”
“Shore I can; this is a personal matter. I’m not charging the kid on account of his daddy’s a friend of mine. Figure I’ll let him dry out in there a while, and hopefully the fat punk’ll learn his lesson. Besides, he don’t want to leave—don’t believe me, go ahead and ask him. And I didn’t bother tellin’ ya about him ’cos I wanted to wait till he’d gotten his head straightened out before I let you question him. Shit, for a week he wasn’t talkin’ nothin’ except the craziest load of malarkey you ever heard, and he ain’t much better now.”
None of this sounded right, but it was beginning to occur to Phil that nothing Mullins said ever sounded right. True, chronic PCP users frequently required several days or even weeks to detoxify enough to regain their mental coherence, and it was also true that they frequently hallucinated. But at this precise moment that didn’t matter much.
“You think I’m bullshitting you, don’t ya?” Mullins challenged, his steely eyes leveling.
“Yeah,” Phil said. “I think I do.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think any more.”
“All right,” Mullins grumbled. “The fucker’s crazier than a possum in a shithole, but don’t take my word for it. What do I know, I’ve only been the fuckin’ chief around here for thirty fuckin’ years. Go ahead and question him, then you can tell me about all the great reliable information you got out of the guy. Go ahead, go ahead, waste all your time—see if I care.” And with that final objection, Mullins huffed out.