Micky-Mack gulped and nodded.
“Now git!”
Micky-Mack sprinted away with the determination and zeal that came with blessed youth.
However, Helton remained stock-still in the middle of the room…
He’d asked God to help him get a fix on this devil-lovin’ fiend named Paulie and shore as hail God had answered his prayer, because when the voice on that blasted cellphone had said Thibald Caudill sends his regards, Helton knew in the space of half-an-instant who Paulie really was and why he had murdered young Crory Tuckton so horribly.
And for those on the edges of their seats wondering what the sinister King Edward cigar box contained, the author will completely ruin the element of suspense by making that revelation now.
It contained several rusty and quite well-used 3 1/4-inch hole-saw blades.
— | — | —
Chapter 4
(I)
The crowd had gathered at the crime scene. “Step on back, folks,” Deputy Chief Dood Malone ordered once he’d disembarked from the patrol car. “Make way.” The crowd parted, the act of which led Malone through a fidgeting and enraged aisle of human bodies. It was one of the southside houses—the bad blocks—that the crowd congregated before, after Mitzy Crooker had spied the atrocity while walking her dog. She’d immediately run home and called the police, then subsequently blabbed her discovery to the entire neighborhood.
Well holy jumpin’ FUCK, Malone thought, spinning the tips of his handlebar mustache when he saw the puppy’s head on the stake.
One other county car sat parked right up in the yard; from the house, meanwhile, emerged Malone’s day-shift sergeant, a lanky, stoop-shouldered man with an overly large adam’s apple: Sergeant Boover.
“Shit, Boover. Another one?”
“Another one, Chief,” the younger man said and wiped his brow in spite of the chill. “Another dog head and another smack house. Place done full up with stolen insulin needles, spoons, candles, and empty baggies.”
“But the house is clear?”
“It is now. Must’ve been more cowboys just moved in, so Vinchetti’s bagmen sent ’em this warning. Then they took off.”
Fuckin’ Vinchetti, Malone thought. The oddest thing. DEA had sent Malone the tip sheet: Paul Vinchetti III, big-time heroin and underground porn dealer from New Jersey. Mafia. But the guy was so insulated, no one could touch him. No evidence.
Boover spat some chaw juice. “Just hard to figure, you know, Chief? Little town like Pulaski and we got a Mafia drug lord working the turf.”
“That’s the way they do it now. They’re movin’ out of the big cities to set up shop in little burgs like this ’cos the law-enforcement budgets are so piss-ant. Kind’a makes sense. I mean, look at Pulaski. Sleepy little town, sure, but it’s sittin’ right in the middle of the bigger towns like Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and Radford; then we got the cities like Roanoke, Richmond, Lexington, Charleston easy drivin’ distances. Shit, twice last month we caught middle-class white kids drivin’ all the way from Manassas to buy smack in Pulaski. Why? ’cos there’s no heat. DEA’s got their hands full just with crack and State’s neck-deep with meth. Meanwhile, smack slips back in between the cracks and grows and grows—it’s all the rage now, movin’ out the urban ghettos.” Malone nodded in angst. “Fuckin’ Vinchetti’s pretty damn smart. He’s gettin’ over on everyone, and even though we know he’s the guy, we got nothin’ on him. Every time the feds get close, Vinchetti cuts loose a bunch of lawyers like those guys who got O.J. off.”
“The motherfucker could walk right by us and wink and we couldn’t do shit,” Boover observed. “Unless we had the balls to—”
Malone cast a stern look and shook his head.
“You ever seen the guy?” Boover asked, to change the subject they’d all thought about but never voiced.
“Yeah, couple of times. Word is he bops between here, New York, and Jersey; when he’s here, he stays at the Caudill Mansion with his wife—”
“Marshie Caudill,” Boover acknowledged. “There’s a match made in heaven. Best-lookin’ stripper in town winds up hitched to a fuckin’ don.”
“And that’s where he met her, too. She worked that strip joint since she was 16 but then bought the damn place once her father died and left her all those mineral rights and money.”
“You figure Marshie’s got anything to do with Vinchetti’s smack business?”
“Naw. She’s just arm-candy and a piece of ass,” Malone felt certain, for as attractive as Marshie Vinchetti was, she was twice as stupid. “What I heard is they spend some’a their time at the Mansion, but most at some ritzy townhouse just out’a Newark. Don’t see as much’a Marshie, not since her baby died. Her first kid, that little snot ‘Becca, lives at the house here all the time while she’s in school. Gotta servant looks after her.”
“Fuck ’em all,” Boover sputtered, arms crossed. He looked disgustedly at the staked dog’s head in the present yard. “And now we got this. One’a Vinchetti’s guys…killing puppies…”
“Where’s the rest of the dog?”
“Dude chucked what was left in the back yard by the door. He always puts the head on a stick in front and leaves the rest in back so when the cowboys split, they see that too. Yanked the skin right off the pooch, then slit its belly open. Cute, huh?”
“And you know damn well the poor mutt was still alive while all that was happenin’.” Malone shook his head again. “Who the fuck could do somethin’ like that?”
“Like the feds said. Probably a bagman from Venezuela—that’s where the dog-head thing comes from. Shit, they probably eat dogs in that shit-hole third-world commie dive.”
Malone was getting depressed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the dog’s head: that of a tiny white poodle.
“Whose dog is it?”
“Adeline Parker—”
“Shit.”
“She’s over there, bawlin’ her eyes out.”
“I’ll talk to her. Try to clear the rest’a these folks out,” and then Malone walked dejectedly to the fat, jowly old woman blubbering in the yard.
“Aw, gosh dang, Adeline, I cain’t tell how sorry I am ’bout your little dog,” he began.
The old lady was inconsolable, boo-hooing to such extremes—God bless her—that Malone fantasized kicking the unpleasant old blue-haired biddy hard in the ass. “You find the evil varmint done this to my little Fluffy! You find him, Chief! If’n you don’t I’ll use all my power in the community to see that you never get elected again.”
Here we go. Malone put his arm about her shoulder and tried to urge her back in the direction of her house. “We’ll find him, all right, Adeline. I give ya my word, and when we do find him…he’ll up’n pay dearly.”
“Aw, bullshit!” Adeline gruffed. “You police these days ain’t got the spine to do things right no more. No, no, not like the good ole days. If yawl had any balls, like real men, you’d catch this monster’n kill him! But, no, no, you’ll be more concerned with his fuckin’ rights! Makin’ shore he gets a fair trial! Anyone tortures a puppy ought’a be tortured hisself!”