Death Ray Butterfly

Chapter Four

My assistant, Kelley, is pestering me to talk about the girl Racine. People love to talk about her nowadays, since she got all mixed up in things and became so famous, and who was it who knew her way back when, when she was nothing, just getting started out? I guess I had my chances to nip that sucker in the bud, but what are you going to do when the kid is only twelve and facing life for a butchery so appalling that no one could believe it?

She was some kind of orphan I'm told, raised by the criminal mastermind sometimes known as Dennis Hobbs. Hobbs always claimed he worked for Jimmy Kruzel but I always suspected it was the other way around. Kruzel was kind of wimpy for an organized crime boss, always sniveling his way through interviews, whining about the room being cold, or the chair being hard on his butt. Kruzel owned all the riverboat gambling, it's true, but I think it was in name only. Hobbs had something on him and was using him like a front man.

Hobbs himself, though, what a piece of work. Man was wide as he was high and spoke in such a low voice and so softly you could never make out what the hell he was saying. Sounded more like the distant rumbling of a freight train than an actual human being talking. I remember some nights getting so pissed off I had to leave the room and turn on the TV just to hear the sound of an intelligible human voice.

Hauled that bastard in so many times, it wasn't funny. Then he had this little girl he was always towing around. Said he had to take her to school, pick her up from school, help her with her homework, always some excuse he thought would get him out of coming down to the station. Crazy. There'd be some killings on the docks and everybody knew that Hobbs was in it up to his elbows. We'd come around, me and some rookie partner they were always saddling me with, and I'd be like, come on Hobbs, time to take a ride, and he'd go, “heck, officer” - son of a gun was always calling me 'officer' like he didn't know my name and rank – “I got to take my little girl to her dance recital tonight. She won't stand for it if I don't take her. Come on, officer, give a dad a break.”

Like I gave a damn about giving breaks! I'm a cop, for Christ's sake. But he'd get those big old sad eyes going and my partner, always some wet-behind-the-ears little flake, he or she would get all sobby into it too and I'd just have to leave it, come back later. And damn if that little girl of his wasn't up to her knees in blood as well. Heard the strangest things about that kid, like she was literally born of the devil and some devilette, whatever you call those female demons, I forget the term. Long straight black hair, black eyes, thin as a rail, pale as a ghost, Racine came out of nowhere and was always tagging along her adopted papa Dennis.

She never said much, neither. Times I brought her in, always for murder or attempted murder - she never did anything less, never anything petty or small about that kid - she would never say a word. Knew her rights. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever even heard her voice back then outside of pleading "not guilty, your honor". They never sent her up for anything, never had the evidence, never had the witnesses. Clean as a whistle, every time, but the word was she had killed at least a dozen times, and rarely only a single person when she'd done it, usually a spree. They said she used a variety of weapons on her criminal occasions; guns, knives, swords, machetes, whips, chains, poison, acid. Girl had a repertoire.

Of course she vanished, that's how she got famous. Vanished but kept popping up from time to time, like the spirit she resembled. Rumors every day, years later, people claimed they'd seen her, same as she always used to be; somewhere between fifteen and twenty, you could never be sure, though she had to be more than fifty by then. Last I saw that Racine she was smiling at me from the back of a getaway car. Like always, she was getting away!