Cody Falk rose at six-thirty the next morning and stood on his back porch with a bath towel around his waist and sipped his morning coffee. Once again, he seemed to be posing for envisioned admirers, his strong chin tilted up slightly, coffee cup held sturdily aloft, his eyes slightly dewy through my binoculars. He looked out at his backyard as if surveying his fiefdom. In his head, I was pretty sure, a voice-over for a Calvin Klein commercial played.
He raised a fist to stifle a yawn, as if the commercial had begun to bore him, and then he sauntered back inside, closed the sliding glass doors behind him, and threw the lock.
I left my spot and drove around the block. I parked two houses down from Cody’s and walked up to his front door. Three hours ago, I’d found his backup keys tucked away in a magnetic Hide-a-Key caddy attached to the underside of his drainpipe, and I used them to let myself in.
The house smelled of those potpourri leaves people buy at Crate & Barrel, and it looked like Cody had ordered the rest of the house from the same catalogue. It was rustic, Santa Fe mission chic right down the line. A cherry-wood dining set sat just off to my left. The seat-cushion prints were faux Native American and matched the rug underneath. An oak chest and hutch with Aztec moldings served as Cody’s liquor cabinet, and it was fully stocked, most of the bottles only a third full. The walls had been painted dark gold. It looked like the kind of room an interior decorator would try to sell you on. Step out of Boston and into Austin, Cody, you’ll feel so much better about yourself.
I heard the shower turn on upstairs, and I left the dining room.
In the kitchen, four high-backed bar stools surrounded a butcher-block table in the center of the floor. The blond oak cabinets were half full, mostly goblets and martini glasses, a few canned vegetables, some Middle Eastern rice mixes. Judging by the stack of takeout menus to gourmet supermarkets and restaurants, I determined Cody didn’t cook in much. The sink held two plates, rinsed clean of food, a coffee cup, three glasses.
I opened the fridge. Four bottles of Tremont Ale, a carton of half-and-half, and a container of pork fried rice. No condiments. No milk or baking soda or produce. No sense that there’d ever been anything in there but the beer, the half-and-half, and last night’s Chinese.
I went back through the dining room and entrance foyer and I could smell the leather in the living room before I entered. Again, a southwestern motif-dark oak chairs with hard straight backs supporting cranberry leather. A coffee table on stubby legs. Everything smelled well-oiled and new. A stack of magazines and glossy circulars on the coffee table seemed typical of the owner—GQ, Men’s Health, Details, for Christ’s sake, and catalogues to Brookstone, Sharper Image, Pottery Barn. The hardwood floors gleamed.
You could photograph the lower half of the house and put it in a magazine. Everything matched, yet nothing gave any discernible clues to the owner himself. The gleaming hardwood floors only accentuated the warm, dark coldness of the place. These were rooms meant to be looked at, not enjoyed.
Upstairs, the shower shut off.
I left the living room and climbed the stairs quickly, tugging gloves over my hands as I went. At the top, I removed the lead sap from my back pocket, listened outside the bathroom door as Cody Falk exited the shower stall and began to dry himself. The plan, such as it was, was simple: Karen Nichols had been raped; Cody Falk was a rapist; make sure Cody Falk never raped again.
I lowered myself to one knee and looked through the peephole into the bathroom. Cody was bent at the waist, drying his ankles, the top of his head pointed directly at the door. He was roughly three feet away.
When I kicked the door in, it hit Cody Falk in the head and he stumbled back and then fell on his ass. He looked up at me, and I hit him with the sap about a quarter of a second before I realized the man on the floor wasn’t Cody Falk.
He was blond, and large, a bit overly defined in the arms and chest. He flopped back on the Italian marble and arched his back and then wheezed like fresh tuna tossed to a loading dock.
There were two doors leading into the bathroom—the one I’d come through and one to my left. Cody Falk stood in the one to my left. He was fully clothed and held a lug wrench in his hand, and he smiled when he swung it at my head.
I took a step back, and the guy on the floor wrapped his arms around my ankle. Cody’s swing missed my left eye socket by a whisper, but it tagged my ear, and a holy city’s worth of cathedral bells rang in my head all at once.
The guy on the floor was strong. Even in his weakened condition, he yanked back hard on my leg. I stomped on his head and punched Cody in the mouth.
It wasn’t much of a punch. I was off balance, and my ear was buzzing, and I never was much of a boxer in the first place. Still, it caught Cody off guard, lit up something surprised and self-pitying in his eyes. Most important, it backed him up.
The guy on the floor screamed when I stomped his head a second time. I pulled my leg from his grasp, and took a step toward Cody. Cody touched his lips and raised the wrench again.
The guy on the floor managed to snag my pant leg and twist it, and I stumbled.
Cody gasped in surprise as the stumble served up my head like a tethered balloon.
With the second hit, everything in the room turned a squishy gray, and my shoulder spun into the wall.
The guy on the floor got up on his knees and rammed his head into the small of my back, and Cody beamed as he raised the wrench over his head.
I don’t remember the third hit.
What exactly should we do here, Leonard?”
“Just what I’ve been saying, Mr. Falk. Call the police.”
“Ah, Leonard, it’s a bit more complicated than that.”
I opened my eyes and saw double. Two Cody Falks—one solid, the other transparent and ghostly—paced the kitchen. He drummed his fingers on the countertops and kept licking at the cut on his swollen upper lip.
I was on the floor, back against a wall, feet against the base of the butcher-block counter. My arms were tied at the wrist behind me. I felt around back there with my fingers. Twine of some sort. Not necessarily the best thing to tie someone up with, but it still did the trick.
Cody and Leonard weren’t looking at me. Cody paced back and forth along the counter by the sink. Leonard sat up on a bar stool, a towel filled with ice pressed to the back of his head. A few red pimples lined the side of his neck, and his large jaw jutted out of his small face like Lincoln’s on Rushmore. A steroid case, I guessed, sculpting his muscles and fighting ’roid rage until his joints turned necrotic. All to impress chicks he’d be too impotent to fuck when game time finally rolled around.
“Guy broke into your home, Mr. Falk. Assaulted both of us.”
“Mmm,” Cody touched his upper lip gingerly. He glanced down at me, his two heads moving quickly, and my stomach eddied.
I met his eyes as he gave me a broad smile and matching wave of his hand. “Welcome back, Mr. Kenzie.”
I smacked my lips together against the taste of cotton balls dipped in battery acid. He knew my name, which meant he probably had my wallet. Not good.
Cody squatted down by me, and the transparent Cody jelled a bit more with the solid Cody, so now it was like looking at one and a half Codys instead of two.
“How you feeling?”
I gave him a grimace.
“Not so good, huh? You going to puke?”
I bit down on some bile in my chest. “Trying not to.”
He tilted his head toward the butcher block. “Leonard puked. He also has a nasty bruise on his lower spine from hitting the floor. He’s kinda pissed off, Patrick.”
Leonard scowled at me.
“What’s Leonard’s capacity here?”
“He’s bodyguard.” Cody slapped my cheek, not too hard, but not too gently, either. “After you and your friend came to visit that time, I thought I might need some protection.”
“And the WWF was having a yard sale?” I asked.
Leonard leaned over the counter and the muscles in his forearm flexed. “Keep talking, bitch. Just—”
Cody waved him off. “So where is your friend, Pat? The big dumb one who likes to hit people with tennis rackets.”
I tried to tilt my head in the direction of the front of the house, but it hurt too much and the nausea kicked in double-time.
“Out on the street, Cody.”
Cody shook his head. “No, no. We took a walk while you slept this off. There’s no one out there.”
“You sure?”
A wisp of doubt flickered in his eyes, then vanished. “He’d have come crashing through here by now, I think.”
“When he does, Cody, what are you going to do?”
Cody pulled a .38 from his waistband, waved it in my face. “Shoot him, of course.”
“Sure,” I said, “make him mad.”
Cody chuckled, then shoved the gun barrel up against my left nostril. “Ever since you humiliated me, Pat, I’ve dreamed of something like this. Gives me a hard-on, to tell you the truth. What do you think of that?”
“I think your erogenous zones need rewiring.”
He pulled back on the hammer with his thumb, dug harder into my nostril.
“So, you going to kill me now, Cody?”
He shrugged. “I gotta be honest, I thought I’d killed you up in the bathroom. I’ve never knocked someone out before. I’ve never even tried.”
“Beginner’s luck, then. Kudos.”
He smiled, slapped my face again. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, both Codys had returned, the transparent one just to the right of the real one.
“Mr. Falk,” Leonard said.
“Hmm?” He peered at something on the side of my head.
“This is bad news. Either call the police, or we take him someplace and do him.”
Cody nodded, then leaned in to take a closer look at the side of my head. “You’re bleeding pretty bad.”
“From the temple?”
He shook his head. “More the ear.”
I noticed a distant, high-pitched hum in there for the first time. “Inner or outer?”
“Both.”
“Well, you did take a few good swings.”
He seemed pleased. “Thanks. I wanted to make sure I did it right.”
He took the gun barrel out of my nostril and sat back on the floor in front of me, kept the .38 pointed at the center of my face.
As I watched, the idea grew in his brain, and an icy realization billowed in his eyes and sucked the heat out of the room.
I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“What if we really did kill him?” Cody asked Leonard.
Leonard’s eyes widened and he put the towel filled with ice down on the counter in front of him.
“Well…”
“You’d expect a bonus, of course,” Cody said.
“Mr. Falk, sure, yeah, but we’d need to really think this through.”
“How so?” Cody winked at me from the other side of the gun hammer. “We have his wallet and keys. That’s his Porsche parked in front of the Lowensteins’. We pull the car into the garage, dump him in the trunk, and then drive him somewhere.” He leaned forward, grazed the gun barrel across my lips. “And shoot—no, stab him to death.”
Leonard’s wide eyes met my own.
“You know, Leonard,” I said, “you ‘do’ me. Just like in the movies.”
Cody reached out and slapped me again. It was starting to get annoying.
“Killing someone,” Leonard managed, “is not something you just decide to do, Mr. Falk.”
“Why’s that?”
“It, ahm…well—”
“It’s not easy,” I said to Cody. “There’s always things you forget.”
“Such as?” Cody seemed only mildly curious.
“Such as who knows I’m here. Who would figure out I was here, in either case. Who would come looking for you.”
Cody laughed. “And, lemme see if I remember this—‘burn down my restaurants and paralyze my dumb fucking ass’? Is that right?”
“For starters.”
Cody gave it some thought. He leaned his head against the butcher block and his lids fell to half-mast and he watched me with a burgeoning excitement. He seemed giddy, like a twelve-year-old at his first peep show.
“I really like this idea,” he said.
“Great, Cody.” I gave him an emphatic nod. “I’m happy for you.”
He opened his eyes wide and leaned in close to me. I could smell the bitter mixture of coffee and toothpaste on his breath.
“I can already hear you screaming.” A slim tongue flicked up to the cut on his lip. “You’re on your back and it’s arched and I stab you in the chest.” He sliced a clenched fist through the air. “And I pull the knife back out and I stab you a second time.” His eyes glistened. “And then a third. A fourth. You’re screaming your head off and the blood’s popping up in spurts from your chest, and I just keep stabbing.” He sliced the air several more times, his mouth broadening into a rictus grin.
“No way…” Leonard said, and then his throat dried up. He swallowed several times. “Mr. Falk? No way, if we’re going to do this, we can get him out of here until nightfall. That’s, like, a long time away.”
Cody kept his eyes on me, studying me the way you’d study an ant trying to carry away your napkin at a picnic. “We move him out through the garage, put him in the trunk of his car.”
“And then what?” Leonard said. His eyes flashed my way, then back to Cody. “We drive him around all day? In a ’63 Porsche? Sir? We can’t do him in the daylight. It won’t work.”
Cody got a look on his face like it was Christmas Eve and he’d just been told he couldn’t open his presents until morning. He turned his head and looked back at Leonard. “Are you going gutless, Leonard?”
“No, Mr. Falk. Just trying to help here.”
Cody looked at the clock on the wall above my head. He looked out at his backyard. He looked at me. Then he slammed his palm on the floor several times and screamed, “Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!”
He dropped to his knees and kicked out the cabinet door below the butcher block.
He reared forward like an animal, the tendons stretched on his neck, and screwed his face up into mine until the tips of our noses touched.
“You,” he said, “are going to die. You understand, prick?”
I didn’t say anything.
Cody butted his forehead into mine. “I asked if you understood.”
I gave him a flat and bloodless glare.
He butted his forehead into mine a second time.
I bit down against the sharp stabs of pain filling the front of my skull and still said nothing.
Cody slapped my face and then scrambled to his feet. “What if we kill him right here? Right now?”
Leonard held out his huge hands. “Evidence, Mr. Falk. Evidence. Let’s say one person knew or even suspects he was coming here and then he turns up dead. A forensics team, right? They’ll find pieces of him in places you never thought they’d go. Cracks in the running boards you didn’t even know existed will have chunks of his skull in it.”
Cody leaned against the butcher block. He ran his palm over his mouth several times and breathed heavily through his nostrils.
Eventually, he said, “So we keep him here till dark. That’s your advice.”
Leonard nodded. “Yeah, sir.”
“And then take him where?”
Leonard shrugged. “I know a dump in Medford will do the trick.”
“A dump?” Cody said. “Like someone’s shitty apartment? Or an honest-to-God dump?”
“An honest-to-God dump.”
Cody gave it a lot of thought. He circled the butcher block a few times. He ran some water in the sink, but instead of running his hand through it and wiping his face, he just leaned over and sniffed it for a while. He stretched until the muscles in his lower back cracked. He looked at me several times and chewed his inner cheek.
“All right,” he said eventually. “I can live with this.” He smiled at Leonard. “But it’s cool, isn’t it?”
“What’s that, sir?”
He clapped his hands together hard, then clenched them into fists and raised them over his head. “This! Leonard, we have a chance to do something monumental. Monu-fucking-mental!”
“Yes, sir. In the meantime?” Leonard leaned into the butcher-block counter and looked as if a semi had settled across his shoulder blades.
Cody waved his hand. “In the meantime, I don’t fucking care. He can watch pornos with us in the living room. I’ll cook eggs and spoon-feed him. Fatten the calf and all that.”
Leonard looked like he didn’t have a clue what Cody was babbling about, but he nodded and said, “Yes, sir. Good idea.”
Cody dropped to his knees in front of me. “You like eggs, Pat?”
I met his smiling eyes. “Did you rape her?”
He cocked his head to the left, stared off into space for a bit. “Who?”
“You know who, Cody.”
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re the most logical suspect or I wouldn’t be here.”
“She wrote me letters,” he said.
“What?”
He nodded. “You didn’t know that part. She’d write me letters asking me why I wasn’t getting her signals. Wasn’t I man enough?”
“Bullshit.”
He giggled and slapped his thigh. “No, no. That’s the great part.”
“Letters,” I said. “Why would Karen Nichols write letters to you, Cody?”
“Because she wanted it, Pat. She was dying for it. She was as cock hungry as they all are.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t believe me? Ha! Hang on, I’ll get them.”
He stood up and handed the gun to Leonard.
Leonard said, “What am I supposed to—?”
“Shoot him if he moves.”
“He’s tied up.”
“I pay your freight, Leonard. Don’t fucking back-talk me.”
Cody walked out of the kitchen and then his footsteps charged up the stairs.
Leonard placed the gun on the counter and sighed.
“Leonard,” I said.
“Don’t talk to me, bitch.”
“He’s warming to this idea. He’s not going to—”
“I said—”
“—chill out by noon, if that’s what you’re hoping.”
“—shut your fucking hole.”
“Killing someone, he’s thinking, how ballsy. A new experience.”
“Shut up.” Leonard placed the heels of his hands over his eyes.
“And when he does, Leonard, I mean come on, you think he’s smart enough not to get caught?”
“Lotta people don’t.”
“Sure,” I said, “but this is strictly A ball around here. He’ll fuck up. Take a kill trophy home with him, tell a friend or a stranger in a bar. And then what, Leonard? You think he’s going to stand tall when the DA shows up?”
“I’m telling you to shut the—”
“He’ll roll like a bowling ball on a ski slope, Leonard. Give you up like he’s buttering toast.”
Leonard picked up the gun, pointed it at me. “Shut up or I’ll do you myself. Right now.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just one thing, Leonard. Just—”
“Stop saying my name!” He lowered the gun, put his hands to his eyes again.
“—one more thing, and I’m not shitting around here. I got some ugly, ugly friends. I mean, pray the cops get to you first.”
He raised his head, pulled his hands from his eyes. “You think I’m scared of your friends?”
“I think you’re starting to be. And that’s smart, Leonard. You ever done time?”
He shook his head.
“Bullshit. My guess is you’ve even run with a crew or two. Strictly North Shore, I’m guessing.”
He said, “Fuck off. You think your shit talk can scare me? I got a black belt, motherfucker. I’m a seventh degree—”
“You could be the bastard love child of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, Leonard, and Bubba Rogowski and his crew will eat you up like rats on a bag of ground beef.”
Leonard picked up the gun again when he heard Bubba’s name. He didn’t point it. He just gripped it.
Upstairs, Cody’s footsteps hammered the floor as he ran back and forth in the bedroom.
Leonard blew air out his rubbery lips. “Bubba Rogowski,” he whispered, then cleared his throat. “Nope. Never heard of him.”
“Sure, Leonard,” I said. “Sure.”
Leonard looked at the gun in his hand. Then looked into my face.
“Really, I—”
“’Member the Billyclub Morton hit, Leonard? Come on. He was a North Shore guy.”
Leonard nodded, and his left cheekbone developed a small tic.
I said, “You heard who did Billyclub, didn’t you? I mean, it’s one of his more notorious hits. I hear Billyclub’s skull looked like a tomato blown apart by dynamite. Heard they had to ID through dentals. Heard—”
Leonard said, “Okay, okay. Okay? Fuck.”
A drawer was wrenched off its runners upstairs, and Cody screamed, “Eureka!”
I resisted the urge to toss a panicky look over my shoulder or up at the ceiling. I kept my voice calm and soft.
I said, “Leave, Leonard. Take the gun with you and walk away. Do it now and do it fast.”
“I—”
“Leonard,” I hissed. “Either the cops or Bubba Rogowski. Someone’s going to nail you on this. You know it. Cody’s strictly Toys ‘R’ Us in this department. No more fucking around, you piece of shit. You’re either in this to the wall or you’re walking now.”
Leonard said, “I don’t want to kill you, man. I just—”
“Then, go,” I said softly. “No more time. Now or never.”
Leonard stood. He placed a sweaty palm on the butcher block and took several deep breaths.
I straightened my back against the wall and pushed up, felt my head swim and a momentary numbness find my nose and mouth as I reached my full height.
“Take the gun,” I said. “Go.”
Leonard looked at me, his face a mask of stupidity and fear and confusion.
I nodded.
He ran a hand over his mouth.
I held his eyes.
And then Leonard nodded.
I resisted the urge to chuck a sigh of relief the size of a mountain out of my lungs.
He walked past me and let himself out the glass door that led to the back deck. He didn’t look back. Once he reached the deck, he picked up speed, lowered his head, and cut through the yard, let himself out the side gate.
One down, I thought, shaking my head and puffing air into my cheeks to try and clear my vision.
I heard Cody’s footsteps approach the staircase.
One to go.