poor man's mickey spillane

she came in on a cessna. he was waiting for her on the far end of the tarmac in his beat-up, shitty 1970's muscle car. her hair was high, stiff and bottle black and i was sure she was from tennesee. he had black hair too, but his was slicked into a highly reflective homage to elvis with cheap pomade. he sat shirtless in the heat of the car pulling absently at his long sideburns. she walked off the plane and headed straight for him. the next time i looked at them he had slipped into his shirt and they were locked in a desperate, sweaty, white trash embrace. it was ugly and i looked away. soon they were on the road headed for his bus conversion, which was also an extended cab truck and an actual house with a foundation and a yard. 3 little girls waited for them. i had been caulking the edge of one of their bunkbeds earlier in the day and i was worried that it wouldn't be dry by their bedtime.

fast foward to that night and the little girls were tucked in and sleeping. the grandfather was asleep in his pajamas in the front seat of the bus. a woman entered and startled the old man out of his sleep. her intention was to murder the man and the woman, but when the old man voiced his alarm, she gave him a whack with a machete on his forearm and then continued until he was dead. his cries woke up the little girls and while the woman was occupied with hacking the old man to death, they ran behind her out the door and hid themselves in the fog that blanketed the ground. the killer murdered the man and the woman and then searched briefly for the little girls, but the fog reached to her waist and the area was too great to search for very long. even though the woman passed very near them several times, the little girls remained invisible to her. the woman left and the children stayed hidden until the police arrived.

as the police processed the scene and i heard them say the perpetrator had to be a man because the act was too violent. just then one of the little girls came walking down the hall and asked me about her hamster, i didn't have the heart to tell her that her hamster had been killed too. i went out and got another hamster and when i put it in her hands her face lit up. i remember thinking it was good that children had compartmentalized perspective because even though she had just experienced this horrifying and grisly event, she was filled with absolute joy over the baby hamster she now held in her hands.

the bodies of the man and woman were covered in sheets and one of the detectives that stood over them was dressed as a poor man's mickey spillane; cheap suit, bad shoes and a faux fedora that held lineage closer to a porkpie hat. i remember thinking he would never be able to get to the bottom of things.