began to splash on the windshield. Just as Lee reached to turn on the windshield wipers, his cell phone rang. He fished it out of his jacket and tossed it to Butts, who put the phone to his ear.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Captain.” He put the phone on speaker.
“Is Lee there?” It was Chuck, and he sounded anxious.
“Yeah—I’m driving,” Lee called over the sound of the rain, which was escalating into a downpour. “We’ve got you on speakerphone.”
“Hey, listen, are you guys about done out there?”
“Yes, we’re about to head back—why, did something happen?” Lee asked, with a glance at Butts.
“Not exactly,” Chuck said evasively. “It’s—well, it’s Krieger. She’s mad as a nest of hornets and she’s on her way over here later.”
“Oh,” said Lee. “And you don’t want to face her alone, is that it?”
“How soon can you get here?” Chuck sounded miserable.
Chuck Morton’s one weakness—if you could call it that—was his helplessness at the hands of strong women, especially when they were angry. Lee had seen his friend face down an entire station house of disgruntled cops and lead a group of riot police through an angry mob of protesters. At Princeton when there was a dorm fire it was Chuck who dashed into the building to see that everyone got out safely—against the orders of campus police. But women were another story. Lee didn’t even ask what Krieger was upset about—they’d find out soon enough.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re on our way.”
Butts turned the phone off as the sky let loose with a deluge of biblical proportions. The sound of the rain was deafening, as though someone were sitting on the roof pounding on tin buckets with sticks. Lee slowed the little sedan to a crawl and turned on the headlights.
Safety in numbers, he thought. That’s what Chuck wanted. Well, they might outnumber Krieger, but they wouldn’t necessarily outgun her—he could tell from their one meeting that she could be a formidable adversary. It was too bad that they were wasting precious time and energy in-fighting when there was a much more dangerous adversary out there taunting them to catch him—or her. With women like Krieger in the world, Lee thought, not for the first time, they couldn’t necessarily assume their killer was a man.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“What are you standing there looking at, boy? Give me a hand! Come on, don’t cry—remember, crying is for sissies and women. Do you want to be a woman, boy?”
His father’s face was red, and there was sweat under the rim of his green John Deere tractor cap.
“Do you want me to cut off your little pecker so you can be a little crybaby girl? No? All right, then, stop crying—that’s better. There’s a little man for you. Now, give me a hand and open the door for me. Good—that’s good. Now get the trunk for me—open it wide. Hurry up—this is heavy, you know. All right, now get in the car.
“We’re going down to the river … because we have something to do there. Mommy has been bad—very, very bad, and you remember I told you what happens to bad women? Do you? Well, that’s right—that’s why we have to take her to the river.”
She must have done something so awful to make Daddy so angry. I wonder what it was. Maybe she tried to cut off his pecker and make him like a girl, so he had to stop her. I would have to stop someone if they tried to do that to me. I
would have to, because I’m just like Daddy. That’s what he always tells me: you’re my little man, just like me.
He bent down to pick up the heavy object, a dead weight inside the black plastic tarp. He remembered worrying that if they left the tarp down at the river, they would have to find something else to cover the tractor so it didn’t get wet in the rain.
That night, lying in bed, he heard a freight train passing in the night. Its horn blared a harsh chord, mournful and plaintive and lonely. The whistle rose in pitch as it approached, then descended as the train sped by, the Doppler shift creating a feeling of mystery and loss. The wheels clanked and screeched sharply; he could picture the sparks flying as the train rounded the bend, metal grinding on metal. He imagined the engineer at his post, peering into the blackness as the mechanical beast churned through the night, spewing smoke and ash as it clattered through towns