Debritto heard the rustle of her skirt as she walked away. He tried to move his right hand to find the gun but it was impossible, his mind trapped in a block of ice. He pitted his rage at her against the terror of his own helplessness. He would not be beaten by a woman, by a weak, brainless cunt. She probably hadn’t given him a fatal dose. Too soft to make irrevocable decisions, too sentimental to exercise full power. He tried to concentrate on remembering the poisons she’d said she used. How stupid to mention them. If the paralysis faded he could tell the doctors, who’d know the antidotes. But concentration was difficult lying there paralyzed on the roof. He tried to squeeze his attention back to the poisons she’d named. He heard a female voice whispering in his ear, but it was another woman speaking. His mother’s voice told him, ‘You are evil. Corrupt with evil. Sick with evil. Mad with evil. Evil, evil, evil.’
Debritto’s rigid body barely twitched when he tried to scream. This couldn’t be his mother. He had no memory of her. She’d died when he was five months old. That’s what his father had told him. Why should he doubt his father? He’d always told him the hard truth. No, it had to be the poisons – some sort of auditory hallucination.
‘You were born evil. Full of sickness and rot. Shame of my flesh. Shame of my heart. You know my voice from the womb. You have dreamed my dreams. I gave you life. I gave you life, and you defiled it. Now I’ve come to take it back.’
Tape Transcript (partial):
Interrogation of Elwood and Emmett Tindell, brothers (ID Access LCR 86755)
File: OPERATION NEST EGG
Tonopah Emergency Field Office, Nevada
April 10, 1987
Present: Reg. Sup. Keyes; agents Stanley, Dickerson, Peebe
PEEBE: Okay fellas, I want you to tell it to Supervisor Keyes. He’s flown in after a hard day, so keep it short and to the point.
ELWOOD: We got the same deal still? No charges on us – nothing; half of any reward or business deals; you take brother Emmett to the hospital and get his nuts fixed up; we get us a new Camaro and two thousand bucks each? That what we talking?
EMMETT: El, you’re fucking hopeless. Don’t tell ’em shit.
ELWOOD: Don’t fret on me, Em; your big brother knows what he’s doing. We’re in the big time here. This is CIA, not your sheriffs and highway troopers. This is national law. They can deal. So, Mr Peebe, Mr Keyes, how about it?
KEYES: That sounds reasonable to me. However, since we’re overburdened with paperwork, would you take twenty thousand in cash to cover the car and the medical bills yourself? You still get half of any reward money, walk out of here clean.
ELWOOD: You got the money on you, I wouldn’t mind looking it over.
KEYES: Dickerson? Show him. You can count it later. You don’t walk till you pass the polygraph, though.
ELWOOD: The what?
KEYES: Lie detector. We pay for truth and punish bullshit.
ELWOOD: I got no problem with that. Brother Em, how about you?
EMMETT: Officers, he’s been using drugs something fierce ever since he was a baby. There’s lots of things he thinks are true that ain’t even close.
ELWOOD: Why are you being like this, Em? We got outer-space invaders running around and you don’t want to cash in. Your nuts still swoll and achy, that it? Getting whopped in the nuts always did get you strange. Remember when we were seven and that red-headed Simmons girl liked to kick your nuts up your throat for waving your pee-pee at her? Remember? You got real fretted and grumpy, and––
KEYES: I’m sure you both had charming childhoods, but I’m much more interested in what happened this morning on Highway Ninety-five.
ELWOOD: Well sure. Okay. Me and Emmett was driving along, heading up to Reno to see if we could get us some jobs, and––
PEEBE: [to Keyes] Car was stolen in Phoenix yesterday. We just put the make and numbers out on the us-only line, Phoenix west, but it was already on a general APB.
ELWOOD: Hard to look for work without a car.
KEYES: Forget the car. Never happened. Go on.
ELWOOD: So we’re driving along about an hour after sunup and we see this guy sitting alongside the road. Kinda got his head tucked down on his chest and his hands over his face. Looked like maybe he was feeling puny. So me and Em, we pull over, see if he’s all right. But this guy – said his name was Herman – he wasn’t even next door to right. We seen that straight off. One thing, he’s wearing fucking bowling shoes, I mean right out there in the sage-brush and all. Bowling shirt, too. Name of some construction company on the back – Rice Construction, Price, something like that. He’s packing his bowling ball with him, and he’s got this backpack and real nice briefcase, too. Weird. Like he don’t know if he’s a bowler, forest ranger, or banker. What’s weirder, he’s crying. Not ‘boo-hoo,’ you know, but his eyes are ’bout as red as granddaddy’s long johns and his cheeks are all wet and streaky. But what’s––
KEYES: What’d this guy look like? Age? Size? Eye color?
PEEBE: We got it in detail already; went out with the car description on our line. I can run it by you quick.
KEYES: Quick.
ELWOOD: Hold on, dammit. It’s just getting to the really weird––
PEEBE: [to Keyes] Mid-twenties, six feet, hundred sixty to eighty pounds, blue eyes, brown hair, scar on right temple, dressed as described.
KEYES: White man?
PEEBE: Yes sir. Sorry.
EMMETT: He’s just jerking your chain. Ain’t too many blue-eyed spades or spics I ever saw.
ELWOOD: You guys want to hear the weird part, or what?
KEYES: Okay, let’s hear it. The guy was crying …
ELWOOD: So naturally I ask him what’s wrong. And he says, ‘I think I was remembering a dream my mother had when I was in her womb.’ You got that? Guy fucking thinks he’s remembering dreams from inside his mama? Me and Emmett weren’t much for school, but you don’t need no graduation papers to see this guy is bat-shit loony, maybe run off from a nuthouse or something. His eyes looked crazy, too, kinda glassy and far away, and he generally looked all grungy. So wasted, me and Em had to help him get in the backseat.
KEYES: How much help? I mean, did he voluntarily enter your vehicle?
ELWOOD: Pretty much, yeah. We said we’d take him on to Reno, wouldn’t even make him pay for no gas. Me and Em was being nice.
PEEBE: Spare us. No charges, right? Just what happened.
ELWOOD: So we’re driving along and talking with this guy – Brother Em’s at the wheel, me riding shotgun, this Herman weirdo in the back – just getting acquainted, you know, and I ask him what he’s got in his bags and briefcase, just out of being curious. And he says real matter-of-fact, real cool, that he’s got extra clothes and shit in the little backpack, a grill in the bowling bag, and in the briefcase he’s got about twenty thousand dollars, cash money. So––
EMMETT: El, you dumb shit, he said grail. Grail, not grill.
ELWOOD: Me and Em’s been arguing over this all afternoon, but grill – like for cooking up meat – is what I heard. Struck me as kinda odd, too, that he’d be packing around some little grill in a bowling bag,’ specially since it looked like it already had a bowling ball in it. So I asked him if we could see this grill. He said seeing the grill was something you had to earn. So I said how ’bout seeing the money, and son of a bitch if he don’t say ‘Sure’ and open it right up. I took a good eyeful – never seen so much in my life – and then I looked at Em, and Em was looking at me. Me and Em been poor ever since we got orphaned off when we was pups. We––