I sipped it.
Nope.
The cookies were okay, though.
About an hour later I was upstairs lying in the bed reading an Andrew Vachss novel when Beverly came in. It sounded like the Battle of the Bulge down there. JoAnn was arguing with her. That wasn’t old news. JoAnn was a Philadelphia lawyer at heart.
“She won’t mind,” I heard JoAnn say.
“JoAnn,” I heard Beverly say quite loudly. “I don’t want to hear anymore about it, and that’s final. Now shut up, or I’m going to paddle your little butt.”
JoAnn let out a scream, and I heard her retreat to her room and slam the door.
I sighed. I slipped my marker into the Vachss book, placed it on the nightstand and went downstairs.
Beverly looked on the verge of an explosion.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” Beverly said. “I tell you, these kids are driving me crazy. JoAnn wants to take a dead rat to school. A mouse. I don’t know. One of those little rodents.”
“A dead rat?”
Bev waved me into the kitchen. I followed and watched Beverly get a glass out of the cabinet and take a pitcher of tea out of the refrigerator and pour herself a glass. She drank about half of it, poured the glass full again.
“Let’s go on the deck,” she said.
We went. Bev took a deck chair and sat down and sipped her tea. I leaned against the railing. Bev said, “First off, I see you saw Bill is in the paper.”
“Yeah.”
“Your mother is beside herself.”
“Bless her heart,” I said. “What did you tell her?”
“Nothing,” Bev said. “I tried to reassure her best I could. Said we didn’t think he had done what the paper said. You know? BS… Hank, honey, I hate to sound like a weak sister, but I’m not so sure we should get involved. I don’t know how innocent Billy really is. Since money and women were involved weht=", anything could have happened.”
“A woman killed and raped in her bed? Four others tortured and murdered in his home. You think he’s capable of that?”
“No. Not really. Did you see the lawyer?”
“Yes,” and I told her what Virgil told me.
She listened intently, said, “I’m sorry if I seem cowardly and short tempered. But I’m cowardly and short tempered. And I’m tired. JoAnn has nagged me to death. Take her to the store, she’s got to have everything in there. Gimme this. Gimme that. And this dead rat business, it’s driving me over the edge.”
“What’s the dead rat business?” I asked, hoping for a domestic crisis I could involve myself with.
“She found a dead rat… mouse, whatever the damn thing is, out by the drive. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Beverly got up and I followed. There was a dead critter lying in the grass next to the garage. I bent down and looked at it. It was covered with ants. It wasn’t a rat or a mouse. It was a mole.
“It’s a mole,” I said.
“Yeah,” Beverly said. “Well, that doesn’t change things. She’s determined to take it to school tomorrow for show and tell.”
“A dead mole?”
“That’s what she says. She says she’s got to take it, and I told her no, of course, and she’s nagged me all afternoon.”
“I sort of like the idea,” I said. “Yo, Ms. Nichols, look what I got for show and tell. A stinking, ant-covered, dead mole.”
“I’m not laughing, Hank. I thought it was funny when I first heard it, but I’ve been hearing about it now for a couple of hours. She won’t take no for an answer. Her whining is turning my brain to mush. I’m ready to beat her with the dead rat.”
“Mole.”
“Another thing. She wanted me to stop beside the road and look at a dead armadillo, and a skunk. I’m worried about her.”
“That’s normal curiosity. She’s finding out about death. It’s not even scaring her. It’s fascinating her. Kids take death in doses, to inoculate themselves against the reality of it. We all do.”
“I don’t remember wanting to look at dead things.”
“You didn’t grow up in rural areas either. You didn’t see a lot of dead things. She’ll get past it.”
Beverly looked at her watch. “Oh, hell. Time to go get Sammy.”
“I’ll do it.”
“No,” Bev said. “Actually, a little time on the highway, hoping an innocent pedestrian will cross my path, might be just what I need to cheer me up.”
· · ·
After Beverly left, I wenty lheight="0e in the house and knocked on JoAnn’s bedroom door and called her name. She invited me in with reluctance. She was lying on her bed with her thumb in her mouth holding her teddy bear Fred. Fred was so much a part of JoAnn, he had, in our minds, developed a personality. We treated him like family.
I gave JoAnn a pat on the head, then gave Fred one.
“Ohhh, thank you,” JoAnn said in a wee-bear voice.
“What’s this about a dead rat?”
JoAnn held up Fred and moved him from side to side. She had Fred say, “JoAnn wants to take it to school.”
“I don’t want to talk to Fred,” I said. “This isn’t for bears, this is for girls to talk about. Come on, JoAnn. Tell me about the dead rat. It’s actually a mole, by the way. I looked at it.”
“I want to take it to school for show and tell,” she said.
“It has ants on it and it stinks.”
“I want to show the ants for show and tell, too.”
“What about the stink?”
“I guess.”
“Look,” I said. “Let me make you a deal. You talk to your teacher and tell her what you want to do, and see what she says. She says you can bring a dead rat—mole—to school, then it’s okay with me. All right?”
She thought that over.
“Can I take my rock collection?”
I guess my idea about her asking the teacher was a good one. She knew in her heart of hearts Ms. Nichols wasn’t going to allow a dead mole in her classroom. I realized then that JoAnn had mostly been in a battle of wills with her mother. The kids did that to us all the time. It wasn’t always that they wanted a certain thing, they just didn’t want to be told they couldn’t have things their way. It was a small way of controlling their universe, which they were gradually beginning to realize was bigger than they were.
At that moment, I understood that attitude perfectly.
The rock collection became JoAnn’s focus. She got out of bed and got the cigar box she kept it in and we looked at rocks. They weren’t unique rocks, but they meant something to her. She had gotten them at places that reminded her of fun and friends.
We finished looking at the rocks and I fixed her a snack of cereal and a glass of milk. When she finished we went upstairs to the TV room and I put on cartoons. She settled in to watch She-ra, Princess of Power, and I went back to the bedroom to read my book, but, good as it was, I couldn’t keep my mind on it. The phone rang.
It was Arnold.
“I got Billy,” he said.
“Good. I’ll be over tonight. I got a few more old clothes Bill can wear. My stuff is too big on him, but yours would swallow him.”
“Whatever. And Bubba?”
“Yeah.”
“Watch your ass.”
19
The rain had almost stopped and water dripped from the tree branches that overhung the road, fell in clear pearls onto my hood and windshield, exploded in all directions like shards of glass. The blacktop had the sheen of fresh-licked chocolate and there was a slight chill inside my truck that was more cozy than cold.
As I drove into Arnold’s driveway, I saw a hot, white, web of lightning patch its way across the sky above the mobile home, beyond the trees where the woods started. I killed the truck’s lights and engine and got out, leaned on the open door, cautious for Arnold’s dog, but the dog didn’t bark. The wind howled in the bottles in the bottle tree. I could see the door to Arnold’s double-wide was cracked slightly and light was falling
out of there and onto the ground as if pressed there by a heavy weight.
Arnold’s truck was riding flat on all the tires, and I knew without having to look, they had been slashed, and I knew too that the universe had shifted slightly again, and this time I was not on the fringes of that crack, but was well within it.
I stood with the truck door open, feeling uncertain and nervous. The hair on my neck and arms pricked and I could feel my testicles growing small, pulling up inside of me. I was glad the inside door light of my truck no longer worked, so I wasn’t framed in a perfect light for someone to pop off a shot at me. Then again, if they were close enough, it wouldn’t take much of a shooter to hit me, not if they were behind me, leveling a rifle on my spine.
I looked around and didn’t see anyone. I slipped back into the truck and got the .38 and stuck it in my coat pocket and took the shotgun off the rack and pumped one up. Through the windshield I saw the white web of lightning again. It had moved somewhat to the west.
I put the truck keys in my pocket and got out of the truck. The wind was blowing wet and cold, but I was streaming perspiration. Yet, I felt colder than the wind would have made me had I been bare chested.
I pushed the door of the truck almost closed and started walking wide of the mobile home, moving around back. I listened carefully as I went, half-crouched, not knowing what to expect, but thinking of Fat Boy and Cobra Man. I didn’t hear anything unusual, just the wind hooting in those bottles and whining out through the wrecks in the lot.
I went around the home and came up on the back end of the carport and slipped in there and found Arnold’s dog. He was lying in a pool of blood beside the right, front, flat tire of Arnold’s truck. I bent down and touched him. He was slightly warm. He hadn’t been dead long.
I tried to swallow, and it was as if I were trying to gulp down a whole orange. I finally got it down, forced myself to get up and move around the pickup, back toward the front door where the light fell out along the ground. I pushed my back against the home and slid along till I came to the door. I leaned out to look inside, hoping like hell I wouldn’t suddenly see the eye of a gun poking out of there.
I took a deep breath and held it and let it out slow and easy. I put one foot on the steps and used the shotgun to ease tghts dnhe door wide. I started to call for Arnold or Bill, but the words wouldn’t come. I knew I was taking a chance not calling them, because if they had been attacked, and were still in there, they might have a gun, and be waiting, and instead of who they wanted, they might get me.
The other side of the coin was whoever had done this might have dispatched both Bill and Arnold, and could be waiting for me on the other side.
And conceivably they had done what they wanted and gone home.
I wobble-kneed up the steps and into the home, crouching low, spinning left and right with the shotgun. When I turned right, I froze.
The light was from a lamp on the kitchenette counter, and the light was marred by a big shadow that hung in its beam; a shadow like a scarecrow dangling from a post.
Only it wasn’t a scarecrow.
It was Billy.
· · ·
In the center ceiling of the dining area was a false beam—a desperate decoration to make some fool think he was in a chateau—and from that central beam hung Bill. There was a belt wrapped around his neck, and it had cut deep into his flesh and the blood around it had crusted. The belt was connected to the beam by a large nail driven through leather and wood. The kind of nail you used when you’re doing some serious carpentry business; damn near a spike.
Bill’s body was motionless and his mouth was open, and though his tongue stuck out only a bit, it was thick and purple and nearly filled his mouth. His face was very dark and overripe and its darkness made his teeth appear false. His eyes were jutting from his head like quail eggs trying to roll out of a chute. The oversized pants I had given him had fallen down some and the Christmas shorts were revealed. His arms hung at his side. He had crapped his pants and the watery shit ran down his leg and into his socks and shoes, dripped to the floor beneath him, onto the hammer with which the nail had obviously been driven. A chair was overturned nearby.
The smell of shit and my fear were not the only thing that filled the room, there was another odor, sour and even more sickening, that I couldn’t identify.
I worked on the orange in my throat again, got it down and went across the trailer into Arnold’s bedroom, the shotgun before me like a talisman.
Nothing in there. No sign of a struggle.
I checked his bathroom. Nothing. Except the commode was full of shit and toilet paper.
I came out and went the length of the home and looked in the bedroom at the far end and found nothing. The bathroom yielded only the fact that Bill had used the razor I bought him to shave. It lay on the edge of the sink and the sink was filled with whisker stubs and shaving cream scum.
I came back and closed the front door and locked it. I laid the shotgun on the kitchenette counter and saw there was a note there, signed by Billy. I knew what that would be without reading it. A suicide note.
I ignored it.
I got the overturned chair and climbed up and took out my pocket knife and cut the belt and tried my best not to let Billy just drop, but it was too much weight and he did. He rolled in the puddle of shit and on top of the hammer. His face turned up, showing me those dull, blue quail egg eyes of his. From where I stood, it looked as if a tear, like a fish scale, was lodged in the corner of Bill’s right eye. The lamp light played off of it, magnified it.
I got down off the chair and went back to the counter and looked at the note. It was Bill’s handwriting all right. It read:
To Everyone:
Satan held me in his arms for years. I leave now to join him because there is no where else to go. I hope God will forgive me for what I have done to the children more than anything else. I hope God will set me free from Him, the dark one, but if not, I join him now and will suffer his torments to the beat of his leathery wings. I hope that Uncle Arnold and Uncle Hank will let the Dark One go.
William S. Small.
The handwriting was Bill’s, but the purple style wasn’t. Bill wasn’t clever enough to be purple, and the reference to Satan was bullshit. And what was meant by he hoped Arnold and I would let the Dark One go? What was the stuff about the children? And Bill’s name wasn’t William. A few people called him that, but they didn’t know him well. They were making an assumption. His birth certificate name was Bill, not short for anything, and he never went by William of his own accord. He thought it was too stuffy sounding. Whoever had made him write that note hadn’t known that. Or maybe it was Bill’s way of trying to inform us that he was being made to write it; a private message from him to me.
And why would he have gone to the trouble to shave before killing himself? It could have gone that way, but I doubted it. Had he wanted to look good in his last moments? I couldn’t imagine Bill, vain as he was, shaving, then checking himself out in my baggy old clothes with Santa shorts on underneath. Wasn’t his style.
I felt weak suddenly and had to sit down. I took the chair that Bill had supposedly used to send himself across the dark divide, and pulled it over to the counter and sat so I’d be near the shotgun. I put my head between my legs and tried to breathe slowly.
Why were Arnold and I being connected to this now, and where the hell was Arnold? Who had made Billy write that note?
As I sat there and thought, I realized the smell of shit was still in the room, but the smell I had sniffed earlier, behind it all, was fading. I remembered what Bill had said about Cobra Man. That he had a powerful odor.
But how had Cobra Man and Fat Boy found him here?
I thought that one over and came up with a simple scenario. Fat Boy could have checked all the angles, came up with the taxi outfit eventually. Got the taxi driver to talk about this strange fare he took to Sleepy Time Tourist Courts.
The taxi driver would have done that eas
y enough if Fat Boy convinced him he was with the police. Or maybe Fat Boy might have passed Bill’s picture around the motels till he found the right place. Then, just as he and Snake were about to make their move, Arnold showed up, took Bill away. Fat Boy and Snake watcands phed, followed them here, went ahead with their plans to take Bill out of the picture. The same plans they would have followed had they found him in the motel room.
“We found him Chief Price, but shit, little fucker hung himself.”
Case closed.
Kind of sweet, really.
But what about Arnold? Where was he?
I went over and looked at Bill again and came to the conclusion that his pants, pulled down like they were, were that way because someone had held his legs and tugged on him, helping the belt choke him. Some bastard had to have a lot of emptiness inside him to do something like that.
I imagined too clearly Bill hanging there, his hands free but useless to liberate him from the belt, and someone, Cobra Man or Fat Boy, holding his legs while he slowly choked to death.
I decided to turn out the light the killers had left on. I took the note, creased it a couple of times and put it in my wallet. I used a wash rag from the sink to wipe up the light switch and all the things I had touched. I put the rag back, and used my hand in my coat pocket to open the front door and go outside.
Outside, I walked around the mobile home again and found nothing. I went to the truck, got my flashlight, and made the walk another time, widening my circle. I found Arnold’s rod and reel lying on the ground. I bent down and picked it up by the grip. My hand became wet with blood. I wiped the grip in the grass, took out my handkerchief, wiped my hands clean, then used the handkerchief to pick up the rod again. I examined it. The line was extended, but the crappie hook was gone off the end. I held the flashlight to the end of the line and gave it a hard look. It had been cut.
I determined that since it had stopped raining only a short time ago, the blood was fresh, otherwise it would have been washed away. I had probably missed the last of this night’s events by only minutes.