FOR RENT

By Zachary Helton

"You should be careful if you're going to be here for long," the young officer had said. "Vast majority of the time, the perpetrator returns to the scene of the crime." He had fixed his eyes on Luther's, displaying what appeared to be an earnest concern for the older gentleman's safety. A more experienced cop had overheard this and given the younger a hard, openhanded slap on the back of the head.
"Don't tell him that horse shit," he'd said, and, addressing Luther, "he probably learned that on Perry Mason, or whatever they're showing instead of Perry Mason these days."
Luther hadn't responded; he'd already gotten all of the information he required from these lazy bums, namely "who's going to clean up all of this God damned blood?"
Not us sorry that's not our thing we just write them up you're going to need new carpet that's for sure.
There was a time – Luther's memory was getting spotty but he was pretty sure on this point – there was a time when a couple of capable young men would have seen an older man's predicament and offered a hand, come by after their shift, help a senior rip up some carpet just because it was the right thing to do. But now they had cell phone calls to take, video games to play, e-mails to write. So Luther was alone, on the floor just outside of the bedroom in the chilly house, trying to negotiate the tip of his crowbar under the line where the wood of the hallway met the bedroom's carpet. His back kept him from bending over to do it, or taking a knee. Hell, his knees kept him from doing that too. He sat, legs partially crossed with the tool in his hand like some prone child tapping blocks into holes.
Down on the crowbar he pushed and up came the edge of the carpet. From there it was a simple matter of ripping the carpet to the nearest corner, after which he had much more leverage. He didn't have to pull it far; the blood stain covered most of the floor.
Damn it Greg, he thought to himself, couldn't you have done the old lady in on the linoleum? What did my carpet do to you?
He shouldn't joke, he knew. But he hadn't said it aloud, and he couldn't be held accountable for what was...
Luther dropped his corner of carpet and pressed a pair of fingers to his lips. He'd almost retched. There was more blood under the carpet, a lot more. It'd soaked right through the carpet and the padding underneath and when he pulled it all up it was like peering into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the smell...
He wasn't going to do this one alone, that was for sure. Six properties and he hadn't had to call in outside help for repairs in eleven years. But he'd need help on this one, and help that wouldn't talk about it later.
I'll drive into town, pick up a few Mexicans. No more than two hours work, half an hour here and half back... better do it first thing in the morning. Are ants attracted to blood?
With great effort Luther lifted himself off the floor and stood to stretch his back, noting that he'd left his crowbar on the ground. He contemplated it for a second, decided that it was where he'd need it tomorrow anyway.
He'd inspected the second floor now, or at least the parts he could get to without ruining his shoes. Carefully, squinting to see individual steps in the near-darkness, he made his way downstairs. The electric company couldn't have already heard that the house was vacant. How long had the family been without electricity? Couldn't they afford candles? How do people sink so low?
It didn't help that it was coming up on November. Days were getting shorter all the time. Out the window the sun was approaching the horizon, another old man past ready for the bed. Luther decided that he'd have a quick look around. If he was going all the way into town tomorrow he might as well get everything he'd need to make the place rentable again.
Won't get shit for it he resigned himself. Nobody wants to live in a murder house. Scared of ghosts and bad mojo and the like. Too much real bad shit in the world to worry about the fake bad shit. Didn't get shit for the place last go around neither. "Too isolated." Used to call that "privacy," but now they'd rather bunk up next to each other like the Chinks.
The room closest to the back door was, Luther thought, perhaps the most unsettling. More unsettling than the cockroach paradise that had once been a kitchen, now three trash bags deep, years worth of coffee ring stains permanently painting the counters. Worse than the bathroom, the tub's surface a cracked desert wasteland of dried mold. Possibly worse than the slaughterhouse of a master bedroom. Luther opened the door to the worst room and saw nothing at all. Bare white walls, not so much as a hint of a disturbance in the grain of the shag carpet. The other rooms had been chaotic, filthy, but this one didn't look like it had been stepped into in the two years the family had lived there. Why?
Luther was timid to enter. What did they know that he didn't? Did it smell bad? He sniffed. No, it smelled better than the rest of the house, that was for sure. He paced the room, checked every corner, but nothing seemed out of order. Had they needed a clean, unblemished spot in the midst of the apparent insanity that had taken hold of their lives? Was this the manifestation of some obscure obsessive-compulsive disorder? Could medical science really have terms for the kind of mentality that leads a man to snuff out his entire family?
Luther stared out the window at the line of trees set off from the house. He recalled meeting Gregory Russo for the first time. He'd called and set up an appointment and met Luther at the house. The two of them had walked from room to room, undoubtedly walked through this very space, and Greg had checked out the house while Luther had checked him out. On paper Greg looked like a real loser: bad credit, no education, spotty work history. But experience had told Luther that you don't know a man until you know a man. He'd served with men just like Greg in the big one, men whose bravery and valor hadn't been factored into their credit scores. Greg hadn't fought a war; so few of his generation had. Still, he seemed honest, and the rent check had always arrived on time. Nothing had seemed off about the man until they had shook hands and walked outside that first day. Luther imagined he had come alone, but walking out onto the carport he saw a woman in the front seat of Greg's Honda. She didn't wave, didn't smile. In the back seat, two young girls -- twins, perhaps -– were engaged in an animated discussion heard only by themselves. They never got out of that car, not once the whole time Luther was there.
The sun touched the horizon now, a hazy orange ball warning the Earth's inhabitants that it was time to go home. It must be six thirty, Luther estimated. He couldn't verify this: in the rush to get to the property after the police had called he'd forgotten his watch, and he had never owned a cell phone. "Who the hell would I talk to?" he'd rasped to the nurse who had gone over his paperwork when he'd broken a finger. No wife, no kids, no worries.
Just ask Greg.
Luther left the room, his absence making it completely empty once more. He pulled the door to; he liked the room better that way.
One more room to assess, and he'd purposely saved it for last. He had a feeling that he'd wish to leave immediately after looking in on the girls' room. Maybe it was too sad, these dead little girls glanced once in the back seat of a car. Maybe films had spooked him on the idea of twins. There had been that one with Jack, back when the Twilight Drive-In was still in business and Luther had any desire to take a girl out. Luther wasn't scared of twins or ghosts or movies, but the diminishing light and absolute quiet made him suddenly wish he were anywhere else.
The girls' room was a mess, but at least nothing seemed wildly unusual about it. The ground was littered with toys – stuffed animals and dolls and broken crayons and other things obscured by shadows. Luther's eyes were immediately drawn to the walls. Barely a square inch of wall under the four foot level was free of... "artwork." Crayon pushed hard into the walls, big chunks of wax accumulated at the inception of every stroke.
Great. Luther added sandpaper and paint to his mental list. Staring at his defiled walls, repeating his list over again to promote memory, it struck him that not one bit of the cacophony of wax before him depicted a discernible figure. No trees or houses or smiling stick figures labeled MoM. Just swirling masses of random color – dashes of red and smears of brown. There was nothing so definite as a circle or a square.
Only one bed, he noticed. Did they share it? It would have been a tight fit, if the girls had grown at all in the two years since he'd seen them. There were no sheets, just a series of brownish-yellow stains on the mattress. They slept directly on the mattress, then. Or maybe the cops had taken the sheets off and hauled them to police headquarters as evidence. They hadn't told Luther how the girls had died. The wife had most likely been done in with a hand ax - a fact that Luther confirmed after checking the tool shed he kept on the property. But no one had said how the girls had died, and this room wasn't nearly in the same state as the upstairs bedroom.
Probably never get that ax back, Luther lamented.
There was a scraping from below. Three, maybe four seconds. Luther froze, listened, dreaded. He exhaled. Only rats, he thought.
"Only" rats? Had the darkness made him that susceptible to paranoia and superstition that he was relieved to have rats on his property? Rats were an expensive burden to rid yourself of, and if they were down in the basement there was no telling what sort of nest they'd made for themselves.
I'll have the Mexicans check it tomorrow, he decided.
He turned toward the door and asked himself if there was some specific reason he was avoiding looking in the closet. "Sissy coward," he said softly. He opened the closet.
A few miniature outfits hung from clothes hangers on a bar Luther had hung himself over twenty years before. Tiny shirts and pants that could have fit large dolls... Luther had to look away. The bottom of the closet had a good layer of toys just like the room, but something metallic caught Luther's eye. The sun had set now, and he had to squint to make it out. Kicking aside a stuffed unicorn, Luther saw beer cans. A dozen or more beer cans, partially crushed and stuck away in a corner. It hit him that he'd been registering the smell of old yeast since he opened the closet, but just now thought about it.
I guess they drank when they played with the girls, Luther thought. Hoped. It was an unpleasant thought, but better than...
He didn't have to think it. He was interrupted by the scraping sound again. It was longer this time, more insistent. Luther shivered despite himself. It was a huge basement. There could be a hundred or more rats in there. But why would they stop and start like that?
Luther left the room abruptly. The main hallway was pitch black. The end of it was marked only by a rectangle of pale light – the open door. Quickly, but not so quickly as to admit his fear, Luther pushed through the darkness. His left hip grazed what he remembered was a small table. It stung, would probably leave a bruise, but at the moment Luther didn't want to make noise and draw attention to himself. It was silly, he knew. Attention from what? Rats? He held his breath until he had emerged from the door, swiftly pulling it closed behind him.
The outside calmed him some. It was chilly, but not so late in the year that he could see his breath yet. The cold was sobering, and the surrounding countryside looked serene in its early-night blanket of blue. He walked at a normal pace to his pick-up truck and got in.
Luther sat there for a second and regained his composure. In the floorboard of the passenger side he found a light jacket and put it on. Beneath it was a large flashlight, the heavy kind with a handle.
I need to go see how many rats are down there. See if I call the exterminator or just buy traps. More than that, maybe, he needed to prove to himself that he wasn't losing his mind.
He saw the lights come up over the hill before he heard the sound of the engine. The overwhelming fear he'd experienced in the house washed over him again. His blood ran cold as the source of the lights came into view. A small four-door sedan. Too dark to get the make on it. Was it... a Honda?
"Vast majority of the time, the perpetrator returns to the scene of the crime."
Surely Greg wasn't coming back to pick up something he'd forgot. Hopefully the bastard had left the state, the country even. Hopefully he'd gone right into town, rented a room, and swallowed the business end of a shotgun. Hopefully he wasn't coming back, cross-eyed and crazy as the night he'd murdered three people, Luther's good ax in his hand, planning on staying in an empty, lightless house where...
The car puttered past and rounded a corner, out of sight.
Luther chuckled quietly and got his flashlight.
It wasn't that his bravery had returned. He was still in the grip of a fear he hadn't known in sixty-four years, since he'd laid in that ditch with the dead men and listened to the endless explosions. Luther needed to go back into that house to remind himself that there was nothing to fear in the dark, that nothing could be more terrifying than the capability for cruelty of the human heart. But as he approached the house he could not bring himself to gaze into the windows, so fearful was he of seeing anything but emptiness.
When he reached the front door he fumbled for his keys, only to realize after stabbing them into the lock that he hadn't locked the door in the first place. The door opened with a penetrating creak. Luther put his light on. Its illuminating cone gave form to the house's sparse interior. Instinctively he flashed it up the staircase, as if the swiftness of his motion would scare away tormented souls. There was nothing there.
He stepped down the hallway lightly, knowing that the sound of his own footsteps might cause his heart to race even more still. Funny, he thought, how everything looks so much different at night. He passed the table he'd bumped upon his escape minutes before, but didn't stop to push it back against the wall. He cast the light to his left, shone it in the girls' room. The decorated walls didn't just look defiled now, they looked sinister. Luther looked away. He stood before the door under the stairs, the door to the basement. He didn't want to go in; he very much did not want to go in. But he knew that he wasn't leaving until he inspected the basement, and he had a very strong urge to leave. Just then he heard a tapping from above – probably just the house settling or a squirrel on the roof or something else mundane, but it reinforced his desire to vacate, so down into the basement he went.
The first thing that hit him was the stench. There must have been a burst pipe or something. A heavy, pervasive fecal odor hung in the air. Luther lifted his shirt over his nose in an attempt to filter the smell. It didn't help much.
The basement was large – the length and width of the entire house – and unfinished. Mold stuck out from the seams where cinder blocks connected to make the walls. Pipes and wires traversed the ceiling, but Luther couldn't pick out the leak. As he'd suspected, the Russo family hadn't stored anything in the basement; they didn't have much. Luther checked the walls but saw no holes for rats to enter and exit from. He turned his attention to some stacked up cardboard boxes. A few contained Luther's old books and albums. Things he'd never look at again but sentimentality wouldn't allow him to discard. So he kept them at this house, which boasted much more storage space than his own. The last tenants had left a few boxes, too, much to Luther's chagrin. He'd told Greg Russo that he could keep what was in them or he could throw it away, just not to complain. There was nothing of any real value, Luther had already thought of that. Just some chipped plates and dishes, and some Christmas decorations.
Behind the boxes, tinsel and wreaths had been strewn on the floor. A foot-tall plastic Santa had been swept into the corner.
Luther turned slowly to face the box behind him that should have been empty but wasn't. The flaps on top were pushed back and a figure stood up and looked at Luther with lifeless eyes that seemed unaffected by the brightness of the flashlight.
Vast majority of the time, the perpetrator returns to the scene of the crime.
Sometimes they never leave.