Prior Bad Acts

14

WITH RARE EXCEPTIONS, Stan Dempsey had not slept for more than an hour at a stretch since he had walked into the Haas home on that fateful August evening, now more than a year ago. What sleep he got was fractured with nightmare images and emotions so strong he had no idea what to do with them.

He had been a simple man all his life. Quiet to the point that kids in school had thought him damaged in some way. He had really never had a friend in the way most people thought of friends. No slap-on-the-back buddies to drink with and watch sports with. Those things held no interest for him.

From childhood he had wanted to be a police detective like Joe Friday on Dragnet. He had been a voracious reader of detective stories and had starred in many of his boyhood daydreams. He always got his man.

He had served in the army and taken two years of junior college. When he finally made it to the police academy, he had worked harder than anyone in his class. The day of his graduation had been one of the proudest days of his life. The day he had made detective had been the pinnacle. His only dream had come true.

That his dream had now soured into this broken, bloodstained nightmare that was his life crushed him. Crushed his spirit, his sense of self, his sense of order in his world. He felt as though a huge black iron anvil had fallen from the sky and landed on him, and the feelings he had always kept so neatly contained had been forced from their box and were trying to come out through his eyes, his ears, his mouth, the tips of his fingers.

His superiors in the department worried that he might have an anger-management issue, that he might have a nervous breakdown. They would have been terrified to know the things that really went on in his brain-thoughts of retribution, brutal vengeance, striking out at anyone he perceived to be on the wrong side of what was right. As his anxiety increased with the approach of the trial, the less he felt able to control those thoughts and the emotions that went with them.

News that Karl Dahl had escaped had reached him via the ten o’clock news Friday night. Stan could hardly remember the next couple of hours. He had gone into a rage. The pressure in his brain had been such that he had believed his head was going to explode, that he would be found that way on the floor of his living room, and everyone would assume he had killed himself.

He had overturned furniture. He had kicked a hole in a wall. He had gone into a closet and brought out every gun he owned. He had emptied his service weapon into his couch. That none of his neighbors had called the police was testimony to how his neighborhood had gone down over the years.

Between outbursts, he had fallen into fitful bouts of sleep wherever he happened to be in the house-on the living room floor, at the dining room table-only to wake and find the rage hadn’t spent itself yet.

Karl Dahl was loose in the city, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Hell, no one had even thought to bother to call and break the news to him. Every cop in the city would be out beating the streets for Dahl, except for him. The brass had sat him down at a desk. He might as well have been chained to it.

Stan prowled restlessly through his small house, breathing too hard, the pressure building in his head again. The night was over. Saturday was breaking.

Stan looked at the television set on his kitchen counter. Channel 11 had dumped their usual Saturday-morning lineup of fishing shows and light local interest in favor of covering the escape of Karl Dahl and the beating of Judge Moore.

A news reporter stood in the street across from the county jail, explaining the way the riot had begun with another inmate attacking Dahl. All hell had broken loose. Ambulances had been called. The situation, the condition of some of the inmates, had been such that corners had been cut on procedure and safety. Somehow no one had cuffed the unconscious Karl Dahl to the gurney that he rode to HCMC.

Cluster fuck, Stan thought. The most important collar of his career was being ruined by stupidity and carelessness. Evil had been set loose to move at will through the community. Good people and their children were vulnerable.

Stan pulled a box of cereal from the cupboard and set it on the counter, going through the motions of making breakfast just to do something normal, just to expend a little energy, like opening a pressure valve ever so slightly.

On the television, they had gone from the jail to a scene of police cars prowling the dark streets, to a shot of the government center, to a shot of the parking ramp adjacent to it, to a head shot of Judge Moore.

She wore the robes and a serious expression that made her seem aloof. Her eyes were the color of a winter sky-a cold, piercing blue-gray. Stan knew she could use that look to make a man feel like he was nothing more than a cockroach crawling at her feet.

A reporter live in the parking ramp was talking about the assault on Judge Moore. The scene was still taped off, and numbered markers on the concrete showed where possible evidence had been discovered, bagged, and tagged.

Judge Moore, fresh from ruling for the defense in the matter of Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts, had entered the ramp from the skyway. The perp had come out of the shadows, attacking her from behind. He had knocked her down and struck her and struck her and struck her…

Stan felt himself flush not only with anger but with excitement. A part of his mind he didn’t recognize came with the thought that she’d gotten what she deserved. She needed some sense knocked into her. She needed to know what it was like to be a victim, to feel that helpless, to be that terrified.

Stan had never been a violent man, but neither had he ever been the man he was now, in the wake of the Haas murders. He felt himself enjoying the idea of striking Carey Moore, venting his rage and frustration on her. And the rage and frustration doubled because she could make him feel these feelings, which went against the nature he’d had most of his life.

These thoughts swarmed in his brain as Stan tried to open the new box of Total with raisins. He couldn’t get his blunt-tipped fingers under the edge of the flap. He had no fingernails to scratch at it.

He felt his head start to pound. He could hear it in his ears, a roaring that sounded like the sea was inside his skull. He could feel the pressure building and building.

The television was showing Judge Moore’s home on Lake of the Isles. A brick fortress for the princess safe behind her gate, safe inside a security system. She had probably believed the Karl Dahls of the world could never touch her.

The box top wouldn’t give. Stan dug at it with his fingers, fumbled the box, dropped it to the floor. As he bent to pick it up, the pressure in his head nearly made him pass out.

He flung the box down on the counter, grabbed a knife, and began stabbing the box over and over, his rage boiling over the rim of his control.

He jabbed the knife down again and again with such force that the tip was biting into the old linoleum countertop. He was aware that that sound was coming out of him and that it was a raw, animal call that came from a place so deep and primal inside of him he knew no other way to access it.

Cereal flew in all directions. He knocked the milk carton sideways, and milk spewed out of it. The knife stuck hard into the countertop, and he cut himself trying to pull it out. He grabbed the sugar bowl and threw it and smashed it, and sugar went everywhere.

All because of Carey Moore.

All because of careless jailers.

All because of Karl Dahl.

His life was out of control, all because of people who didn’t care anything more about him than if he was a speck of dirt on the floor. His life meant nothing. All the good he had done in his life meant nothing.

Clamping his hands around his head, tears streaming down his face, Stan Dempsey slid down to the kitchen floor and sat there with his back against the cabinets and his mouth torn open as if to scream. But no sound came out of him now, and no one was there to hear it if it had.

Karl had catnapped beside the ragman off and on during the night, stirring at the least sound coming down the alley. He would awaken and sit up for a while to listen. He passed the time absently sawing long clumps of matted hair from the ragman’s head, using the steak knife he’d found in the shopping cart.

The police car had not come back, and no one had come looking for his dead friend under the stairs behind the upholstery shop.

Anonymity had come with darkness. Now the new day was at hand, and with it a keen tension at the idea that he would be out among the public. But people would glance over him, not see who he was but what he was. And in their minds people would dismiss him as being beneath their notice. After all, they had more important things on their minds-an accused triple murderer was walking their streets.

Karl felt he should move, slowly begin to put some distance between himself and the hospital, and between himself and the corpse under the stairs.

The first order of business was to relieve himself, then find something to drink. His throat hurt something awful from the choking Snake had given him. He could feel it was all swollen inside. His voice box didn’t feel right, and he could barely swallow. The mother of all headaches was banging inside his damaged skull.

He crawled slowly out from under the stairs on his hands and knees and worked his way up to standing. A rusted old van with faded blue paint sat parked off to the side of the small loading dock behind the upholstery shop. It looked to have died there. One tire was flat to the rim. The radio antenna had been fashioned from a wire coat hanger.

Karl went over to it and relieved himself on the far side of it, then turned the side mirror so he could see himself. The whites of his eyes had turned bloodred, the blood vessels bursting as he had struggled for air during the attack. His face was bruised and swollen, his lip split and crusted with blood. He didn’t look himself at all, and that was a very good thing for a man in Karl’s current position.

Taking one matted rope at a time, he shoved the hair he had cut from the dead man’s head halfway up under the wool cap, letting the ends trail down his forehead and down the sides of his face, giving himself one more layer of disguise.

Pushing the ragman’s shopping cart, Karl made his way down the alley, checking in the trash along the way. Some worker had left half a bottle of beer sitting on a vegetable crate behind the diner. Karl helped himself, then climbed up on the Dumpster he had hidden in, and scored a pork chop bone with some meat still on it and a piece of liver that had dried to the texture of shoe leather. He sunk his teeth into the cold, greasy meat of the pork chop.

“Hey! Get outta my trash!”

A squat man in a dirty apron and dirtier thin white undershirt came out the back door of the restaurant. He wore a dingy white knit cap on his head, rolled up on the sides, and a lot of blue tattoos on forearms roped with muscle.

“Get out, you crazy old lice head! Get the fuck outta here!”

Karl threw the pork chop bone in his direction, turned, and left, his shopping cart rattling over the pitted, uneven pavement of the alley. At the end, he turned the corner, went around to the front of the block, parked his shopping cart where he could see it, and went inside the diner through the front door.

A large woman with jet-black hair up in a bun, and a face like a cigar store Indian, came away from the counter with a ferocious expression and a damp rag in one hand.

“Hey, you! Out!” she shouted. She had an accent he thought might be Greek.

Karl pulled a twenty out of his coat pocket and shook it at her. For the first time since he’d been choked, he tried to speak. His voice was as rough as the back of a rasp, and it hurt like hell to use it.

“I got money,” he said. “All I want is a cup of coffee, ma’am, and maybe some eggs. I got money. Please, ma’am?”

The woman stopped a good ten feet away from him and gave him the eye.

“I’m down on my luck, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t mean no harm. You can take the whole twenty if that’s it. I just want a square meal. It ain’t often I can afford to have one someone else ain’t throwed out first.”

She was still glaring at him, her arms crossed beneath her ample bosom. “You can’t eat here. You scare my customers.”

There were no other customers in the place.

“Please, ma’am? Just a cup of coffee. A biscuit. Anything…”

The woman appeared unmoved, but the fact that she hadn’t started screaming at him seemed a good sign to Karl.

“If you could be so kind, ma’am,” he said softly. “The Lord loves them what helps the down-and-out.”

The waitress snorted at that, turned on the heel of her orthopedic shoes, and walked off.

Karl wondered if she would go into the kitchen and tell the squat man to come run him off. Until he would find out, he watched the news on the television that was bolted to the wall above the diner counter.

He was the news. His escape, the search for him, the warning to citizens not to approach him but to call the police if they thought they had spotted him. Larger than life, Karl thought, and it pleased him. It wasn’t often in his life that he had been considered important.

When the newspeople moved on to the next story, it was of Judge Carey Moore. She had been attacked in a parking ramp last night and rushed to the Hennepin County Medical Center. Karl wondered if she had been there at the same time he had. That would be something, he thought, that the woman who had championed him that very day would be in the same emergency room as him, and maybe even because of him.

She had been the talk of the county jail. Much of it lewd and crude talk, because she was a beautiful woman and all men in prison tended to think about-besides getting out-was having sex. The notion that she was a judge excited them all the more. To take a woman in a position of power and dominate her was a very erotic fantasy. Karl felt it working on him as he watched file footage of Judge Moore giving a press conference.

Her eyes were large and unblinking, her expression very serious. Her mouth was every man’s wet dream-the upper lip a perfect Cupid’s bow, the lower one full and slightly down-turned, as if she was on the verge of a pout. Her neck was smooth and pale and elegant.

Karl had never known a woman like that, not in any sense of the word. She was an angel. She was his angel.

The television was showing a picture of her home. A live shot, the crawler on the bottom of the screen said. It was a beautiful brick house with a neat yard and a black iron fence. Not a mansion, but the kind of a house a lady would live in.

The reporter talked about how people in that neighborhood were never bothered by terrible crimes, but a crime had been visited upon one of their own. How one of their own was paying the price for siding with a murderer.

Live near Lake of the Isles, Candy Cross, Channel 3 News.

Lake of the Isles…What a fine-sounding place…

The large Greek lady came across the room of empty tables, still scowling, but with a styrofoam carton and cup. She set them on the table and stepped back before Karl’s lice could jump on her.

“Here,” she said. “But you can’t eat here. You scare my customers. Go away.”

“God bless you, ma’am,” Karl whispered, and handed the woman the twenty.

She folded the bill and stuffed it down her cleavage.

She didn’t come back with change.