by Jack Ketchum
“Cut it out, Eddie. You’re trying to spook me.”
“Damn right I am.”
“It’s just a job, Ed. I’m not going to marry the guy.”
He was making her uncomfortable, though. It was the first she’d known Ed Anderson to make her uncomfortable about anything, and certainly not on purpose. She needed the goddamn job. There weren’t that many of them open for kids this late in the season. She’d left the last one, the Dairy Queen, because her boss had accused her of stealing from the till. And even though they went through the receipts again and they’d tallied and even though he’d apologized sort of she’d never stolen a dime from anybody and wasn’t about to work for someone who thought she might be capable of it. The Dairy Queen was a lousy job anyway. On your feet all night long, five to midnight. Though she didn’t expect that changing sheets and doing people’s dirty laundry would be a whole lot better.
But it was something. And her father had made it clear to her that if she wanted college next year she’d damn well better pull her weight. And she wanted college very much. So she was going to pull her weight. She’d have done it anyway even if she hadn’t been accepted at B.U., if for no other reason than to make enough money to get out of town like her older sister Ruthie’d done. There was nothing about Sparta with the exception of Ed to keep her here and she expected to be free of her father and his precious Sparta Realty and all her parents’ self-important phony connections as soon as humanly possible.
“I committed myself, Ed. I told her I’d be there. Listen, I can handle Ray.”
“The best way to handle Ray Pye is to keep the hell away from him.”
“I can do that too. It’s a motel for godsakes. This time of year there are people all over the place. What’s he going to do, attack me in the laundry room in broad daylight? You’re a sweet silly man and you’re crazy about me, aren’t you.”
She kissed him and gave him a hug.
“I love you,” she said. “I could eat you up.”
She reached down under the covers and he was up, or well on his way up. Ed was no fifteen-minute man but he was a half-an-hour man and she supposed that at his age that was really not half bad at all.
She stroked him. His lips traced the side of her breast.
“You remember the day we met, Eddie?”
“Mmmm-hmmmm. Strawberry shake.”
“And you asked for crushed pineapple in it, three spoonsful in the shaker and I thought you were crazy. Then you made me try it and it was delicious. And you got this great big smile on your face and said, I wouldn’t lie to you. Why would I lie? And you’ve never ever lied to me since, have you.”
“No.”
“Then tell me the truth. Are you going to be sad when I leave?”
“Tonight?”
“I mean when I leave. Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to handle that okay?”
“Hell, Sally. I’d never have expected you in the first place. I surely never expected you to stay. You’re young and you’re too good and too smart for this little town. You’ve got all sorts of places to go. I’m happy taking you day to day.”
“Then you know what?”
She shifted slightly away from him.
“What.”
She climbed over and straddled him, sunk him into her slowly and then deep and began to gently rock.
“That’s what,” she said.
Chapter Seven
Monday, August 4
Tim
Tim crossed the Andover Post Office parking lot, opened the door and stepped into the blast of air conditioning and used his key on the box. The package from Sammy was there just as he’d said it would be along with a handful of junk mail. He took it all out and locked it again and walked out the door into the sun. Simple as that. Sammy worked the mailroom for the First National Bank of Irvington so the hash was packaged like a box of checks, which for a pound of the stuff was the perfect size.
He dumped the junk mail in the basket at the curb and got into the car he’d borrowed from his boss at Center Hardware where his father had his shop. Gene was a pretty nice guy. Gave him an entire hour for lunch which was just what he needed to drive to Andover and back and still stop by his house for a few minutes in order to drop the hash. He put the box in the cluttered glove compartment and drove back to Sparta, careful to obey all the lights and traffic signs and stay within the speed limit.
His father’s battered truck was parked in front of the hardware store exactly as he’d thought it would be. His father almost always brown-bagged his lunch and he’d done so today. His mother’s old Plymouth was parked in front of the A&P where she worked as cashier. He stopped at the light and went on.
On his lawn the grass needed cutting. The shrubs were looking scraggly and needed watering. The pavement was cracked where the cement met the brick-and-mortar steps and there was a half-piece of brick missing out of the bottom one. You’d have thought his father, who was supposed to be so all-around handy, would have gotten around to both these things long ago.
He used his key in the door and smelled last night’s ham and cabbage wafting toward him from the kitchen. He went upstairs to his room, sat down on the bed under the poster of John Lennon in his granny glasses—a photo Ray despised—and opened the package. He had plenty of time. He needed to check the weight. He got the scale out of his dresser and took the two layers of foil off the tarry brown brick of hash and placed the brick on the scale and saw that the weight was fine.
He went to the bathroom and got one of his father’s double-edged Gillettes out of the medicine cabinet. This was the part that always got to him, always made him excited, the part that always scared him. Not the pickup and the drive but this. Getting the razor blade. Unwrapping it. Going back to his room.
It was almost sexy.
If Ray knew he’d absolutely shit. It was one thing to cut a dime bag or two out of a pound of grass for his own use. But hash was harder to come by these days and Ray’s personal favorite. So hash was another thing entirely.
He sat down on the bed again, set an old dog-eared copy of National Geographic on his lap and began to shave the sides of the brick, just the thinnest of cuts on all four sides. Ray would never miss it. He never checked the weight. Either he trusted Tim as much as he said he did or figured that Tim would never dare to cross him.
But he’d been shaving the stuff for months now. What was the point of muling for Ray, doing pickups of both grass and hash, handling the risky stuff, if you couldn’t take a bit off the top? His cut of the profits was good but it wasn’t near what Ray was getting, it was half that, because Ray had all the connections and he didn’t.
He knew that one day Ray might check the weight and he didn’t like to think what would happen then. He might get away with saying that his scale was fucked, say that it was Sammy who’d short-weighted them and that the scale hadn’t caught it. He might get away with that. But then he’d probably have to deal with Sammy. He didn’t even know Sammy. Sammy was just a voice on the phone. But it was a mean voice and Ray said that Sammy came from Newark originally and everybody knew that Newark was one tough city.
No matter how you looked at it shaving the hash was dangerous.
And maybe that was why he was doing it in the first place, something strictly for himself that had nothing to do with any considerations for Ray, to strike out on his own for something he wanted. Which you couldn’t do without getting into some kind of shit, without some risk, without some potential danger. He sure wouldn’t admit it to Ray and would hardly admit it to himself except at times like this but he felt like his whole goddamn life was under Ray’s thumb sometimes, he had since they were kids. But especially after that night in the woods. He’d felt the tilt in their relationship even then. He’d thought it would go away. That things would tilt back to normal again. They hadn’t. It was four long years ago. Far too long for it to still be affecting his life the way it did.
And it wasn’t
right.
He hadn’t done the shooting, Ray had. So how come he felt like he was the guilty party while Ray didn’t even seem to think about the goddamn thing or mention it unless he needed something from Tim or Jennifer? How come he felt all tied up by this fucking secret to the point where he always seemed willing to do exactly what Ray wanted him to do, went where Ray wanted to go and when he wanted to go there?
He guessed this could count as his own little rebellion.
It was probably about all he could muster.
And Ray was basically pretty good to him, right?
Sure he was.
Fuck it, he thought. You think too much. Just deal with the hash.
He smoothed down the edges of the brick with his thumb so they wouldn’t look cut so recently. Wrapped the shavings in one piece of foil and rewrapped the brick with the other. He put both in his drawer behind his sweatshirts. He’d deliver the brick tonight. They were supposed to go to the movies.
He took the razor blade into the bathroom and washed it in the sink, dried it and replaced its paper wrapping and put it back in its box and closed the cabinet. As always it amused him to know his father was going to shave with that blade one of these days and if he knew where the blade had been before he put it to his face he would have gone ballistic.
So that he had a secret from Ray and one from his father too.
These were the kind he liked. Secrets were a kind of power.
Ray always said so.
You owned them.
He went downstairs and locked the door behind him and drove to Center Hardware. By the clock on the wall he was ten minutes late returning from his lunch break.
Neither his father nor Gene seemed to care.
Chapter Eight
Schilling
He sat at his desk, worrying the thing like a dog with a knotted rope in his teeth.
He couldn’t shake Barbara Hanlon.
Last night trying to sleep he kept seeing her standing drunk and half naked in the doorway with her drinking buddy Eddie. Then he’d picture her four years back. He’d got to thinking how fragile people were. You could kill them with guns or cars or whiskey or just enough despair. A life could turn over in a second or it could grind down over the course of years, so slowly you barely even noticed.
He had to wonder how his own life was doing.
There wasn’t a whole lot in it.
The case he was working sure didn’t help. This one was as stupid as they got.
Sixty-five-year-old guy by the name of Cooley is having a yard sale. All kinds of junk spread out over the lawn. His neighbor, one Michael Allen Nicholas, thirty-five, comes over and accuses Cooley of selling some of his dead father’s stuff. This hammer and that chisel and this lawn chair. They all belonged to his dad and now Cooley’s selling them out there in front of the house. Cooley denies it. At which point Nicholas grabs him by the throat, throws him to the ground, grabs a meat cleaver off one of the fold-up card tables and threatens him with it. Then he evidently decides that maybe the cleaver’s going just a bit too far so he tosses it away and starts beating up on this guy who’s thirty years his senior, starts choking him, until another neighbor, a woman who is more like Nicholas’ age but only half his weight, pulls him off, by which time another neighbor has called the police.
He was calling this the Attention Shoppers Case.
According to Nicholas, all he did was push Cooley.
According to Cooley’s bruised face, bloody lip and swollen black eye and the strangulation marks around his neck, he did slightly more than that.
The truly weird thing was that nobody could find the cleaver. The last thing anybody remembers was Nicholas tossing it over his shoulder in the general direction of the house. Did somebody steal the thing while all this was going on?
Where in hell was the cleaver?
It was exactly this kind of detective work that could make you want to go home and pull up the covers and spend the day in bed.
He’d asked Barbara Hanlon to call him if and when she decided she needed help with the drinking but he wasn’t holding his breath. He thought there was probably only one real way he could help her anyway and that involved Ray Pye. But as far as the department was concerned Pye had been a dead issue for years now.
Pye had marched into the office one day, every inch the concerned citizen and admitted to being in the campground the afternoon of the murder. Though not, he said, that night. Even admitted to seeing the two girls and talking with them and then, he’d said, he’d moved higher on up the mountain in order to give them some privacy. Which was how he explained the match of the footprints on the packed earth of the campsite to his damn-fool cowboy boots. But there were too many footprints at the site so Schilling didn’t buy a short casual visit. Pye had hung around a while. Of that he was sure.
He’d allowed them to search his apartment.
They found no .22 rifle in the apartment and Pye denied ever having owned one. His parents backed him up on that. And they found nothing that might have belonged to Elise Hanlon or Lisa Steiner. Questioning known acquaintances produced nothing though he and Ed had both thought Tim Bess might have known something, that he seemed a little squirrelly. If he did he wasn’t saying and with nothing on Pye to go on there was no real way to press him.
They never found the camping gear. Not a scrap. They combed the woods for days. A whole team of cops and helpful citizens.
Pye expressed concern. He was alone that night he said, in bed reading a book, sacking out early after a long day hiking various sections of the campgrounds. He even produced the book, a Louis L’Amour western novel. Schilling doubted Pye was much of a reader but he’d managed to read that one anyway. They practically made him write an essay on the thing.
The bottom line was they couldn’t shake him. The guy was good. He and Ed came back to him over and over again for months because basically they had nothing and nobody else until finally the mother complained—the mother, not Pye. Pye stayed even-tempered and cooperative through the whole damn thing. The chief ordered them off and made it clear that the order was final.
End of investigation.
Pye was a punk and a senior-year high-school dropout whose buddies were all kids younger than he was and who they suspected was dealing dope to those same kids and other citizens on a pretty regular basis. But they couldn’t get him on that either. Drug busts were few in Sparta and none of the dope they did confiscate had been traced to him. They shook him down personally on two occasions in the high-school parking lot and both times he wasn’t carrying. That didn’t mean it wasn’t why he was hanging out there. The fact that he held down a job at his parents’ motel didn’t mean a damn thing. The motel was a nothing situation. A bone his parents were throwing him to keep him off the streets that was only halfway effective.
Schilling had wondered at the time why the kid hadn’t been drafted. So he called up the local draft board. Pye was too short, they said. Pye was five feet three inches tall. Which explained the high-heeled cowboy boots.
The kid was nothing if he wasn’t vain.
It occurred to him that they had a new chief these days. Tom Court had retired a month ago and the new man, Jackowitz, was an import from Newark PD and wouldn’t know a whole lot about the case except that it was an unsolved murder, fairly rare in these parts. But there were plenty of other things more urgently demanding his attention. He wouldn’t know much about Pye either. Probably that left him free to take another crack at the kid if he wanted to just for old times’ sake.
He decided he did want to.
He kept visiting Elise’s drunken mother in his head.
He wondered if Ray had a .22 rifle lying around these days. Maybe the kid had relaxed his guard.
At five Schilling filed the Attention Shoppers paperwork in his drawer, got in his car and drove the four blocks over to Teddy Panik’s.
As he pulled into the parking lot Lenny Bess was just getting out of his pickup. Lenny was a carpenter
and restorer who rented a shop in the back of Center Hardware from Gene Huff. Lila had used him once to repair the legs on the pie safe they’d inherited from her mother, and he’d done a good job. Lenny saw Schilling’s car pull in and waved and waited for him at the door.
Schilling greeted him and they shook hands and together they went inside. For a Monday evening the bar was crowded. He saw Ed down at his usual spot at the end. He knew Lenny would hang around up front with his buddies Walter Ursul and Fred Humbolt so he stopped a moment just to be polite.
“How’d you get the stitches, Len?”
It looked like four of them, beginning at the widow’s peak and then up into the thin gray hair. Bess smiled.
“Two-by-four fell on me off the goddamn stacks at the yard. You’d think I’d know how to juggle ’em better by now, huh? How’s the pie safe holding up?”
“Holding up just fine.”
It had gone to Arizona with Lila and the kids. He had no idea how it was doing.
“Do me a favor, will you? If you’ve got any more work for me or if you hear of any, I’d appreciate your giving me a call. Money-wise the whole damn winter was a bitch and I’m still behind.”
“Sure. Be happy to. Tim working?”
Bess shrugged.
“I got him something at the hardware store. He works a couple of weeks, doesn’t show up for a couple of weeks. Gene’s a prince to put up with him. Kids, y’know? What can you do.”
“I know. Listen, Lenny, you have a good one.”
“You too, Charlie.”
You couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. Lenny was a hard worker just trying to get by. Not many folks around here had reason to hire a restorer. Most of the year-round locals could do their own light carpentry. So jobs were always scarce until the summer owners arrived needing this or that repair and Lenny had plenty of competition from younger men even then. His wife held down a checkout job at the market. They needed the cash. The kid did nothing.
The kid hung around with Ray Pye.
He walked down to the end and shook hands with Ed and Teddy across the bar. There wasn’t a seat vacant so he stood beside Ed and ordered a Dewar’s rocks and Teddy poured one. Ed didn’t look real happy. He didn’t look drunk—Ed was never drunk—but he didn’t look happy.
