Kiss of Death

AT FIFTEEN MINUTES before two A.M., I slipped out of my room at the Happy Hours into the humid late June night. Way off on a distant highway, I heard an eighteen-wheeler roar by the dot on the map that is Belle Valley. During the two minutes I waited in the shadows, only three cars sped past the motel.

Leaving the Skylark parked in front of my door, I moved swiftly down Cook Street to the corner, and turned south on Franklin toward Webster.

The sidewalks in this little patch of the town were deserted, and the houses mostly dark. Only about one in three streetlights were working, creating eddies of glimmer and eddies of gloom.

At the corner of Franklin and Webster, shards of glass crunched beneath my running shoes. I saw that the globe above my head had been smashed. The milk-colored spheres on the other streetlights were intact; the bulbs inside the darkened ones must have burned out. I’d observed such a feeling of apathy in Belle Valley that I wondered if anyone who lived on the street had bothered to call the power company to report the dead lights. Maybe someone had phoned, and was put on eternal hold, still waiting to speak to a human being.

While driving around this afternoon, I saw that everywhere I looked there were manifestations of defeat, an attitude of “why bother.” It was in the faces of the residents, in the poor maintenance of their homes and streets and public buildings.

There was a working streetlight at the corner of Franklin and Webster, but the rest of the block where the monster slept was dark.

Being careful to walk quietly and stay in the shadows, I reached number 404 Webster. No longer was there a sliver of flickering light from a television set coming through the crack below the front window shade. The decrepit van was still parked in the driveway. It didn’t look as though it had moved since I’d cruised by hours earlier.

On one side of 404 there was a small vacant lot, overgrown with weeds and littered with junk, apparently the neighborhood dumping ground. On the other side, separated by approximately thirty feet of dirt and dying vegetation, was number 406 Webster. It was a single-story cracker box, only marginally more well cared for than the place I was about to break into.

A window on the side of 406 faced the yard. My greatest danger—on the outside, at any rate—was that someone in 406 might pass the window and see me opening the hatchlike cellar door into 404.

The glowing dial on my watch told me it was ten minutes after two A.M. I’d calculated that by this hour, Ray Wilson should be in deepest sleep, and most likely to be caught unawares. At least, that was the plan.

I crept to the cellar hatch, stepping cautiously, keeping my breathing shallow and silent. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness so that I could make out the shapes of objects, if not details.

There was a rusty padlock on the hatch. Damn! I would have to use the lock pick on a door after all. But as I ran my fingers over the rough metal I realized that the lock wasn’t locked. Maybe there was too much rust, or Ray Wilson forgot to press the arm into the mechanism. I didn’t care why. The only thing that mattered was that I would be able to get into the cellar.

I ran my fingers all the way around the cellar door and found no other obstacle. Without making a sound, I removed the padlock from the metal strap of the hasp and placed it on the ground. Grasping the edge of the wood with both hands, I eased the door up an inch.

Nothing stirred on Webster Street, but I couldn’t risk more noise from a corroded hinge. I would have given a thousand dollars for a can of WD 40, but when you don’t have what you need, you improvise.

Holding the door in place with one hand, I used an old photographer’s trick that Ian had taught me years ago in Africa. Before digital cameras, it was something we did to clean 35-mm negatives for printing when we had to work fast and under primitive conditions, without luxuries like dust-free cloths. I took my thumb and index finger and rubbed them on either side of my nostrils, making “nose grease,” then massaged my homemade lubricant into the hinges. It took four applications, and I’d had to add some saliva, but it worked. I could open the door hatch, without it creaking, far enough so that I could squeeze inside.

Lying flat along the edge of the opening, with the cellar’s cover resting on my back, I managed to pull the flashlight from my waistband, point it into the blackness below, and press the switch.

The narrow tunnel of light showed me that I was staring into what had once been a storage cellar for coal. There were still a few black lumps of the anthracite scattered along the floor. This hatch had been used for delivery of the coal; the chute was still in place. A truck would back up to the hatch and dump the coal down the chute and into the cellar, to be burned in a furnace and keep the place warm during harsh Ohio winters.

There was nothing near the opening that I could use to descend into the cellar, so I maneuvered my legs and rear onto the chute and started to slide. It was filthy, but that old chute saved me from having to jump down a good ten feet and chance breaking an ankle. In the unlikely event that I began to make a habit of breaking and entering, I’d be sure to bring a rappelling rope and hook, just in case.

At the end of the chute, I landed on the cellar floor with a thump. Not too loud, but I switched off the flashlight, crouched into the damp darkness and listened.

While I counted slowly to 120, I tried to keep my breathing shallow because of the basement’s unpleasant stench. It smelled of rats.

Like the odor from a hostile skunk, the stink of rats is unmistakable, and impossible to forget. I hadn’t encountered that smell since Walter rescued me twenty-four years ago, but I recognized it instantly. This time the experience was different, because I was different. Tonight I was repelled, but I wasn’t afraid. At least, I wasn’t afraid of the four-legged vermin on Webster Street.

After two minutes with no sound of movement from above, I stood up, clicked on the flashlight again, and examined the contents of the basement. There was an ancient furnace with the door hanging half off, several sagging cardboard boxes without tops. Newspapers and old clothes spilled out of them. In front of the boxes was a wooden kitchen chair. It lay on its side, with one of the back legs broken off.

The bed had no mattress, only the metal frame and coiled springs. I reached into my left-hand pocket for the roll of duct tape. Assuming that I survived my first encounter with Ray Wilson this morning, I wanted to be ready for the second.

With as little sound as possible, I tore strips of tape from the roll into twelve-inch lengths and attached several strips to each of the four corners of the bed.

When I finished the preparations, I turned away—and accidentally kicked an empty gasoline can. My misstep sent it rattling and banging across the basement’s concrete floor. To my ears, it sounded as loud as a clash of cymbals.