Friday (Serial) Fiction: Devils Walk Through Galveston, Ch. 9

Christmas is fast approaching.  If you’re looking for a good book to give as a gift, give Devils Walk Through Galveston.  Here’s the latest serial installment, with the story heating up fast.  Chapter 9 below:

The prologue, Chapter 1 (which introduced the crime and criminal), Chapter 2 (which introduced the police officers), Chapter 3 (the seduction of the initial victim), Chapter 4 (which follows the fleeing killer), and Chapter 5 (police begin tracking the killers) and Chapter 6 (backstory of Eli, one of the key police officers) were earlier, Chapter7,  (the killers make their way to Galveston), Chapter 8, (Searching through Houston’s underbelly) and now Chapter 9 (John fleeing Galveston).  I hope you enjoy it. Please read it and share (noncommercially).  Go to Amazon and get the book for the rest.

9.  John fleeing, Judas pushing him north

            John looked up with the bloody knife in his hand, the body at the floor.  Blood draining out of her onto his boots, into the tile grout.  Judas stared him down, grabbed John’s neck with one hand, John’s knife hand in the other.  Pleading, incredulous:  “What did you do, man?  Why?”

John stared back silently.  Said, “She surprised me.  I was out of my mind.  God, what did I do?”

Judas, pulling John off the bloody spot, onto another area of the floor, saying: “We have to find out if there is anyone else home.  Quietly.  Leave the shotgun there.  Don’t touch her.”

John: “O.k., Judas, ok.”

“No, it’s not o.k.  This is a fucking island.  And not a big one.  I wanted to stay here for a while.  It’s easy to get lost in Galveston.  No one here fucks with you and all of eccentric Texas ends up here after a while.  We’ve got to find a way off now.  And, it’s a fucking island with a six lane car bridge out.  With no sidewalks on that bridge.”

“Can’t we rest here a while?  Find some place to squat?”

“Not here.  Look around you.  This is a nice, big house.  A nice, rich white woman.  Folks will come calling.  And, they’ll start looking for someone new in town after rounding up all their own fuckups.  Maybe they’ll pin it on one of their own.  But not if we’re here for someone local to point to. We’ve got to get a bus out of here on the quick.  Let’s look around here, quiet.  Keep the knife.  But don’t kill any fucking kids.  Let’s just hope there aren’t any here or they aren’t awake.  We’re going to need to get some money, something we can pawn and settle down in Houston for a while.  We can get lost there.”

“O.k., o.k.”

So they started around the house.  Looking through the kitchen cabinets for an envelope of cash she might have around.  Less likely now with ATM machines and everyone taking credit and debit cards.  Still they checked quickly.  Moved upstairs quietly and found the master bedroom on the right.  A huge walk-in closet half filled with men’s suits that cost more money than they’d ever see.  Looked in the man’s jewelry box, past the watches and cuff links.  Found a pile of hundreds in the little drawer.  John put it in his pocket.  He looked through the shoe boxes in the back corner of the closet and found one that weighed too much.  Found a baggie with a half-pound of cocaine. Opened his backpack,  Put the coke in it.  Walked to the dresser and found another jewelry box, a woman’s this time.  Found a pair of diamond earrings that must have cost a fortune.  Saw some smaller, still big.  John palmed the huge ones. 

Judas smacked him in the head:  “What the fuck are you going to do with those?  They’re way too big.  We can’t fence them.”

John: “Maybe we can sell them to a drug dealer or rapper.” 

“Rappers buy theirs legit.  Drug dealers are the first people cops’ll go to about this crime.  And, they’ll give your ass up real quick.  Get the smaller earrings.  We can fence those much more easily.”

“O.k.”

“Let’s get out of here, now.”

They walked down the stairs quietly, past the woman on the kitchen floor, around the pool of spreading blood.  John starting to scratch his neck.

Judas seeing this, growing concerned: “Let it go, John.  Let it go.”

Paused at the back door, looking out through the glass for the direction least likely to have someone watching.  Looked for back doors with glass and uncovered windows for gardeners or lawn-men.  Spotted the house on the left with all the shades closed and no cars in the driveway.  Headed out that way.  Quietly down back streets for a mile, head down, not making eye contact with anyone or anything.  Turning regularly down different streets back toward the Industrial Road and the Galveston Island Transit Station.  Hoping the bus would come soon. 

A quick trip through Galveston.  Catching a short commuter bus back to the industrial hell of Texas City and refinery flares burning orange and dirty.  Getting off by the Mall of the Mainland.  Picking up city busses heading northwest to Houston.  Changing five times. 

John got off the last time on Telephone Road in southeast Houston.  Found an hourly motel with weekly rates.  Paid cash and settled in among the strip joints, massage parlors and modeling studios.  The honky tonks playing the same sad boleros in the languages of their neon signs out front.  Places with metal detectors and weapon-check lockers. 

He settled into a room half the size of the closet he’d just left.  With a hotplate in the corner and a bed with a rubber mattress cover under threadbare, brown-stained sheets.  Paid cash for the first week.  Put the do-not-disturb sign on the door handle with a bag of groceries in the minifridge and a bottle of cheap whiskey.

§§

The briefing with the Texas Rangers took place at midnight at the Houston Police Headquarters.  HPD homicide, as well as homicide detectives from every city in the area was there.  Galveston Police were scouring their city, rolling every homeless grifter they could find.

By one a.m. they knew they were looking for a man who rode the rails, had no fingerprints, and killed women.  Mostly, he seemed to pick them up in bars.  He wore smooth bottom cowboy boots, was built thin, white or light skinned Latino, and apparently otherwise nondescript.  No one in the bars that the women were in the night before they died seemed able to provide any details beyond saying that a medium height, thin but not skinny white guy had been there.  They didn’t recall what he drank.  Didn’t recall him talking much.  He didn’t cause a stir.  Didn’t make friends either.

There were no guns.  Only knives or snapped necks.  He was incredibly strong for his size.  Also patient and smart.  There was never any evidence of rape.  If there was evidence suggesting sex, there was bleach poured over the woman’s body, so no DNA evidence. No semen inside them.  Any dishes were washed when the police got there.  Usually still warm.  No saliva samples.  There seemed no motive for the murders, which made it worse.  Also no point.  And no type of woman.  Some rich, some poor.  Some white, some black or latina.  Never much missing from the house.  Sometimes forced entry into the home.  Most times not.  Always women murdered, though there were some dead grifters along the train tracks between the cities in the days between the murders.  That could have been anybody.   They didn’t even know if it was only one guy acting alone.

He seemed to ride box cars between cities, stopping off for a while, moving on.  There was sometimes a few months between murders, sometimes just a few days.  Never two in the same city in the same week.  Kill and move on.  No one remembering anything much about him.  They had twenty total women murdered from Santa Fe to Louisville, but most in Texas.  All within two miles of railroad tracks.

The Ranger paused and looked up.  Vincent raised his hand, was called on and said: “So, we know there is a medium sized white guy with cowboy boots and no fingerprints killing women in towns along train lines.” 

The Ranger: “Yes.”

“Beyond that, we don’t know shit.”

The Ranger, visibly annoyed: “Right.  We don’t know shit.” 

“You going to give us more to work with or just hope for the best?”

“One, fuck off.  Two, we’re working on it.”

“Why are we here if that’s all you’ve got?  You know how many white nondescript grifters are in this city?”

“Yes, I do.  This is going to hit the papers tomorrow morning in Galveston, then Houston by the afternoon.  The papers are going to start linking it up.  We are going to have to set out a warning for people living along train tracks to lock up, get a dog, get a shotgun, something.  That’s not going to go well.  The train tracks in Houston run through some of the richest areas of town, West University, Bellaire, the Washington Avenue Corridor and twenty-five new bars with every hot twenty year old in the city.  The shit is going to hit the fan.  You need to start looking.  Turn this city upside down.”

Vincent was unmoved, unsettled, too.  “You said he rides the rails and doesn’t commit two murders in a row in the same city, the same week.  We’re not Galveston, but pretty fucking close.  What makes you think he isn’t gone already.”

“We talked to the railroads.   They know this is going on.  Every railyard in a hundred mile radius is on lockdown.  He’s going to have to sit here or take a bus out.  And he apparently doesn’t like to ride Greyhound.”

§§ 

So the police searched through the trailer parks of the northwest side, the industrial shacks by the ship channel.  Pasadena and Deer Park police checked the ice houses by the plants and refineries.  They checked the bars and massage parlors of Southwest and North Houston where the Latin and Asian immigrants settled.  But there were more murders every day. Drug deals gone wrong, petty crime and gang banging.  Husbands catching wives cheating.  Wives catching their husbands and mysterious heart attacks happening.  Potentially poison, but no one cared that much.  And still the human traffickers brought women in to work the spas and cantina whorehouses, families in to work the sweatshops.  Drug mules ferried in loads of weed in containers on the backs of trucks carrying other loads.  Seals broken and fixed.  Gate guards bribed.  The business of the city moved on, churned through the days and nights.  Texas Rangers searched the crimes and talked with law enforcement around the country, trying to piece together the crimes, get something more they could go on. Some motive or connection.  They searched the criminal databases for past convicts likely to repeat.

They had to find someone quickly.  The random murders had to stop. People understood killing for a reason.  People could not abide killing for fun.

§§

John and Judas sat holed up in the motel room off of Telephone Road.  Thin walls and a half-assed air conditioner.  Sipping whiskey.  Hot and restless.  Warming frozen taquitos on the hotplate. 

John woke to see Judas sitting by the window, smoking and sipping some of the whiskey. 

John asked, “You been out?”

Judas: “For a minute.  Just sitting here resting, thinking a bit.”

“What about?”

“I think we need to stay here a while.”

“I thought we were going to be here a week and move on.”

“I think we need to lay low a little longer.  Stay away from the trains.”

“I hate busses.  I can’t be next to someone that long in that cramped space.  Getting up here from Galveston was enough.”

“I know, and we can’t walk anymore.  Not out here.  Too many small town sheriffs will still pick you up for vagrancy.  They can’t call it that anymore.  But they’ll get our asses again for jaywalking and we’ll spend two weeks in jail.”

“When can we go?”

“It may be a little while, until something else comes up, another rig blows up in the Gulf, maybe.”

John stared up at the ceiling.  There were brown circle watermarks extending out, wrapping around the pipe leak.  The stucco bulged out slightly.  Judas said, “We’ve got some cash, some jewelry to pawn.  Let’s go through most of the cash first, then find a good place to fence the jewelry.  The police will be looking for it. If we have to wait a long time, we can sell the cocaine wholesale. That’ll give us enough to last quite a while.”

“Why don’t we sell it now get a car and get out of here.”

“Too dangerous.  In too many ways.”

“I’m tired of running.”

“No.  You’re tired of staying put.”