“Murray dear what are you doing?”
Elizabeth Rockwell was just coming out of the bathroom when she heard a booming floor-thump in the back bedroom … she’d warned Murray repeatedly about his weights, they belonged in the garage not the house.
“Murray?”
The door to the bedroom was closed, Murray wasn’t answering her … until he made a strange sound, like a pig grunting. That was a new one even for Murray.
Walking toward the bedroom Elizabeth wasn’t pleased to hear another crashing thump, another pig grunt. “Murray darling Mommy’s had a bad day, she has a splitting headache and isn’t in the mood for silly buggers.”
Just then the bedroom door opened, presenting Elizabeth with the second most extraordinary sight she’d ever seen in her life … the most extraordinary being when she walked into Donald Growler’s room seven years ago and found Hope’s head on a shelf.
He stood there half naked, wearing black trousers but no shirt and no shoes. Strips of white cloth torn perhaps from a sheet and soaked through with blood wrapped Growler’s left foot. He held his left arm crooked and close to his body like a broken wing that was swollen in one specific spot as if the forearm were a snake that had swallowed a softball … the swollen area horribly discolored. Growler’s hair was wild, in his right hand he held a machete that Elizabeth recognized … Murray had seen it in a catalog and pestered her until she bought it for him, he said he could use it to “clear brush,” though of course there was no brush around Elizabeth’s house and Murray ended up keeping the machete in the garage where he would occasionally play with it, maybe pretending he was leading a safari and fighting off natives, you never knew what films played in Murray’s mind. Blood was everywhere on Growler, it specked and splattered his torso … and that normally handsome face looked like half the sufferings of hell, his expression mixing pain and anger and betrayal with a kind of wild demonic joy.
The black trousers were loose and rode low on his hips and Elizabeth could see, just above the waistband, tattooed blue on Growler’s lower belly, the eyes and horns of Satan … as if Satan were peeking out from Growler’s pants, maybe to guide him what should be done next.
Her pistol was back in the kitchen drawer.
“Where’s Murray?” she asked.
“I know who killed Hope,” Growler said.
“Where’s Murray?”
“You’re going to make a phone call, arrange a meeting at Cul-De-Sac.” Considering Growler’s ruined condition he spoke with amazing clarity and calm … having within the last hour used his entire stash of cocaine, some externally on his spiked foot, the rest internally up his nostrils, an amount of powder that should’ve wired him like Broadway but in fact simply managed to counterbalance what he would have otherwise been suffering.
“Please tell me you haven’t hurt Murray, he’s just a boy.”
“Murray’s in on the bed,” Growler said reassuringly. “Now let’s make that call. Then we’ll go to Cul-De-Sac and—”
“I want to talk to Murray.”
“Need you to drive because the last cabbie I had really freaked out—”
“I want to talk to Murray first.”
“Jesus.” Growler turned to speak into the bedroom. “Murray, say something to Mommy.”