Knorath, Joe - Jack Daniels 03 - Rusty Nail by Konrath Page A

looked at Herb, and we both put our hands on our holsters. He pushed the door open, and I went in fast and stepped quickly to the left.
    The house was dark and smelled like something had died under the floorboards. A single fly buzzed around in the stuffy, fetid air. I located a switch on the wall and flipped it on, bathing the room in a sickly yellow glow from a bare forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling.
    The room took the word
mess
to new heights.
    There were several stacks of old newspapers, piled high as my shoulder. A dozen broken television sets, some older than me, lined up along the walls. A large box of rusty gears sat atop a cracked aquarium filled with dry grass. The walls were bare, except for a dusty framed portrait of a severe-looking Jesus, staring down from heaven. The caption beneath read:
God is always watching.
    Herb followed me in, pausing to look around. He was humming something softly, which I recognized as the violin riff from the shower scene in
Psycho.
    I stepped over a bushel basket of balled-up Wonder Bread bags, and walked toward the doorway at the end of the room.
    “Mr. Kork?”
    “In the kitchen.”
    He had a cracked, broken voice, like he might burst into tears. I navigated more garbage and peeked through the doorway.
    A painfully thin old man stood in the tiny kitchen, his entire body twitching and shaking from Parkinson’s disease. He wore a stained white undershirt that hung on him like drapes, and a pair of beige slacks, equally stained, with holes in both knees. His face was a skull with a thin layer of age-spotted skin stretched over it. Thin, colorless lips. A hook nose. Bulbous, rheumy eyes. His head was bald, but he had bushy white eyebrows long enough to comb, and enough ear hair to stuff a pillow.
    I showed him my star.
    “I’m Lieutenant Daniels. This is Sergeant Benedict. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
    He nodded, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “About the devil. Questions about the devil.”
    I stepped closer, the stench of his body odor preventing me from getting within touching distance.
    “What about the devil, Mr. Kork?”
    “Well, you know all about the devil, don’t you? You’ve met him.”
    “I’ve met the devil?”
    Parroting tends to draw people out, make them more compliant. Even if they weren’t making sense.
    “The devil. Charles. My son. Terrible boy. Knew it from the day he shot out his mother’s cloaca.”
    “Cloaca?” Herb raised an eyebrow.
    “Her dirty bits. Female parts. His mother was a harlot. The whore of Babylon. Bore me the devil for a son, praise Jesus Christ Almighty in heaven above.”
    Bud made the sign of the cross, then fished a black rosary from his pocket and kissed it with trembling lips.
    I frowned. This wasn’t our guy. He couldn’t have made the video of Diane’s death, or shot at me in her house. He was too disconnected, too frail, the Parkinson’s too advanced.
    “Where is your wife, Mr. Kork?” Herb asked.
    “Roasting in the flames of hellfire.”
    “Do you have other children?”
    Kork looked beyond us, into space. “Had a daughter. My blessed little angel. Helper and defender of mankind. She sits at God’s right hand and watches me from heaven, protects me from sin and from myself and from unnatural urges.”
    “She’s deceased?”
    His eyes glazed over. “Taken from me. By Charles. The devil took my angel. Matthew 4:1; ‘then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.’ Corruption of the flesh, of the soul, my poor little girl.”
    “Do you have any other relatives, Mr. Kork?”
    He shook his head. “No flesh of my flesh, no blood of my blood.”
    “Cousins? Nephews?”
    He made fists and pounded on his thighs. “NO FLESH OF MY FLESH AND NO BLOOD OF MY BLOOD!”
    This wasn’t getting us anywhere.
    “Jack . . .” Herb nudged me and pointed with his chin. Behind Kork was a refrigerator, old enough to still be called an icebox. Next