EYE TO EYE
“I’d help you if I could,” the boy said. “But I can’t.”
“Can’t, hmm?” Boz asked, standing over him. Peering down at the top of the brown cowlick. “Can’t? Or don’t wanta?”
His partner, Ed, said, “Yup, he knows something.”
“Don’t doubt it,” Boz added, hooking his thumb around his $79.99 police baton, genuine imported and gleaming black.
“No, Boz. I don’t. Really. Come on.”
An engine-block-hot dusk. It was August in the Shenandoah Valley and the broad river rolling by outside the window of the sheriff’s department interview room didn’t do anything to take the edge off the temperature. Other towns, the heat had the locals cutting up and cutting loose. But Caldon, Virginia, about ten miles from Luray—yeah, that’s the one, home of the cave—was a small place, population 8,400. Heat this bad usually sent most of the bikers, trash and teens home to their bungalows and trailers, where they stared, groggy from joints or Bud, at HBO or ESPN (satellite dishes being significant anticrime measures out here).
But tonight was different. The deputies had been yanked from their own stupors by the town’s first armed robbery/shooting in four years—an honest-to-God armored-car stickup, no less. Sheriff Elm Tappin was grudgingly en route back from a fishing trip in North Carolina and FBI agents from D.C. were due later tonight as well.
Which wasn’t going to stop these two from wrapping up the case themselves. They had a suspect in the lockup and, here in front of them, an eyewitness. Reluctant though he was.
Ed sat down across from Nate Spoda. They called him boy behind his back, but he wasn’t a boy at all. He was in his mid-twenties and only three years younger than the deputies themselves. They’d all been at Nathaniel Hawthorne High together for a year, Nate a freshman, the other two seniors. Nate was still skinny as a post, had eyes darty and sunken as any serial killer’s and was known throughout town for being as ooky now as he was in high school.
“Now, Nate,” Ed said kindly, “we know you saw something.”
“Come on,” the boy said in a whiny voice, fingers drumming uneasily on his bony knee. “I didn’t. Really.”
Boz, the fat cop, the breathless cop, the sweaty cop, took over when his partner glanced at him. “Nate, that just don’t jibe with what we know. You sit on your front porch and you spend hours and hours and hours not doing diddly. Just sitting there, watching the river.” He paused, wiped his forehead. “Why d’you do that?” he asked curiously.
“I don’t know.”
Though everybody in town knew the answer. Which was that when Nate was in junior high, his parents had drowned in a boating accident on the very river the boy would gaze out at all day long while he read books and magazines (Frances at the post office said he subscribed to some “excruciatingly” odd mags, about which she couldn’t say more, being a federal employee and all) and listened to some sick music, which he played too loud. After his parents’ deaths an uncle had come to stay with the boy—a slimy old guy from West Virginia no less (well, the whole town had an opinion on that living arrangement). He’d seen the boy through high school and when Nate hit eighteen, off the kid went to college. Four years later Ed and Boz had served their stint in the service, becoming all they could be, and were back home. And who showed up that June, surprising them and the rest of the town? Yep, Nate. He booted his uncle back west and took to living by himself in that dark, spooky house overlooking the river, surviving, they guessed, on his folks’ savings account (nobody in Caldon ever amassed anything that lived up to the word inheritance).
The deputies hadn’t liked Nate in high school. Not the way he dressed or the way he walked or the way he didn’t comb his hair (which was too damn long, scary long). They didn’t like the way he talked to the other kids, in a sick whisper. Didn’t like the way he talked to girls, not healthy ways, not joking or gossiping, but just talking soft, in that weird way that kind of hypnotized them. He’d been in French Club. He’d been in Computer Club. Chess Club, for Christ’s sake. Of course he didn’t go out for a single sport, and just think about all those times in class when nobody could answer Mrs. Hard-On’s question and Nate—the school’d advanced the nerd bone-whacker a couple years—would sashay up to the board to write the right answer in his fag handwriting, getting chalk dust all over himself. Then just turn back to the class and everybody’d stop snickering, ’cause of his scary eyes. Got picked on some, sure. Got his Keds boloed over the high-tension wires. But who didn’t? Besides, he asked for it. Sitting on his porch, reading books (probably porn) and listening to this eerie music (probably satanic, another deputy had suggested) . . . Well, sir, he was simply unnatural.
And speaking of natural: Every time a report of a sex crime came in, Boz and Ed thought of Nate. They’d never been able to pin anything on him but he’d disappear for long periods of time and the deputies were pretty sure he’d vanish into the woods and fields around Luray to peer through girls’ bedroom windows (or more likely boys’). They knew Nate was a voyeur; he had a telescope on his porch, next to the rocker he always sat in—his mother’s chair (and, yep, the whole town had an opinion about that too). Unnatural. Yep, that was the word.
So the Caldon Sheriff’s Department deputies—Ed and Boz at least—never missed a chance to do their part to, well, set Nate straight. Just like they’d done in high school. They’d see him buying groceries and they’d smile and say, “Need a hand?” Meaning: Why don’tcha get married, homo?
Or he’d be bicycling up Rayburn Hill and they’d come up behind him in their cruiser and hit the siren and shout over the loudspeaker, “On your left!” Which’d once scared him clean into some blackberry bushes.
But he never took the hints. He just kept doing what he was doing, wearing a dark trench coat most of the time, living his shameful life and walking out of Ed’s and Boz’s way when he ran into them on Main Street. Just like in the halls of Hawthorne High.
So it felt pretty good, Ed had to admit, having him trapped in the interview room. Scared and twitchy and damp in the summer heat.
“He had to’ve walked right by you,” Boz continued in his grumbling voice. “You must’ve seen him.”
“Uhm. I didn’t.”
Him was Lester Botts, presently sitting unshaven and stinking in the nearby lockup. The scruffy thirty-five-year-old loser had been a sore spot to the Caldon Sheriff’s Department for years. He’d never been convicted of anything but the deputies knew he was behind a lot of the petty crimes around the country. He was white trash, gave the nasty eyeball to the good girls in town and wasn’t even a lip-service Christian.
Lester was currently the number-one suspect in this evening’s robbery. He had no alibi for five to six P.M.—the time of the heist. And though the armored car’s driver and his partner hadn’t seen his face, what with the ski mask, the robber’d carried a nickel-plated Colt revolver—exactly the type of gun that Lester had drunkenly brandished at Irv’s Roadside not long ago. And there’d been a report last week that somebody with Lester’s build had stolen a half pound of Tovex from Amundson Construction. Which was the same explosive used to blow the door off the Armored Courier truck. At six-thirty tonight they’d picked him up—he was sweating a storm and acting plenty guilty—hitching home along Route 334, even though he had a perfectly good Chevy pickup at home, which fired up the first time Ed turned the key, just to test out if Lester’s claim that it “wasn’t runnin’ ” was true. He’d also been carrying a long hunting knife and fumbled the answer when they’d asked him why (“Well, I just, you know, am.”).
The sheriff’s department Procedure Manual had explained all about motive, means and opportunity in investigating felonies. Boz and Ed had scoped all that out in this case. It was sweet and simple. No, there was no doubt in their minds that Lester had done the job. And because Nate’s property was on a direct line from the heist to where they picked up Lester, there was also no doubt that Nate could place him near the scene of the crime.
Boz sighed. “Just tell us you saw him.”
“But I didn’t. That wouldn’t be the truth.”
Nerd then, nerd now. Christ . . .
“Look, Nate,” Boz continued, as if speaking to a five-year-old. “Maybe you don’t get how serious this is. Lester whacked the driver of that armored car over the head with a wrench while he was peeing in the men’s room at the Texaco on Route Four. Then he went out to the truck, shot the driver’s partner in the side—”
“Oh, no. Is he okay?”
“Nobody’s okay, they get shot in the side,” Boz spat out. “Lemme finish.”
“Sorry.”
“Then drives the truck to Morton Woods Road, blows the back door off. He loads the money into another car and takes off, heading west—directly toward your place. We pick Lester up on the other side of your property a hour ago. He had to go past your house to get to where we found him. What d’you think about that?”
“I think it . . . Well, it seems like it makes sense. But I didn’t see him. I’m sorry.”
Boz reflected for a minute. “Nate, look,” he finally said, “we just don’t see eye to eye here.”
“Eye to eye?” Nate asked uncertainly.
“You’re in a different world from us,” the deputy continued, exasperated. “We know the kinda man Lester is. We live in that sewer every day.”
“Sewer?”
“You’re thinking you’ll just clam up and everything’ll be okay,” Ed filled in. “But that’s not how it’ll work. We know Lester. We know what he’s capable of.”
“What’s that?” Nate asked. Trying to sound brave. But his hands were clenched, trembling, in his lap.
“Using his damn knife on you, what d’you think?” Boz shouted. “Jesus. You really don’t get it, do you?”
They were doing the good- and bad-cop thing. The Procedure Manual had a whole section on it.
“Say you don’t finger him now,” Ed offered gently. “He gets off. How long you think it’ll take for him to find you?”
“ ’Cause he thinks I’m a witness, you mean?”
“Find you and gut you,” Boz snapped. “Why, it’ll be no time at all. And I’m beginning not to care.”
“Come on,” Ed said to his partner. “Let’s go easy on the poor kid.” Then looked at Nate’s frightened face. “But if we get him for armed robbery and attempted murder . . . He’ll go away for thirty years. You’ll be safe.”
“I want to do the right thing,” Nate said. “But . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Boz, he wants to help. I know he does.”
“I do,” Nate said earnestly. And scrunched his eyes closed, thinking hard. “But I can’t lie. I can’t. My dad . . . You remember my dad. He taught me never to lie.”
His dad was a nobody who couldn’t swim worth shit. That’s all they knew about his dad. Boz plucked his shirt away from his fat chest and examined the black patches of sweat under his arms. He walked in a slow circle around the boy, sighing.
Nate cringed faintly, as if he were afraid of losing his gym shoes again.
Finally Ed said in an easy voice, “Nate, you know we’ve had our disputes.”
“Well, you guys used to pick on me a lot in school.”
“Hell, that? That was just joshing,” Ed said earnestly. “We only did it with the kids we liked.”
“Yeah?” Nate asked.
“But sometimes,” Ed continued, “I guess it got a little out of hand. You know how it is? You’re fooling around, you get pumped up.”
Neither of them thought this little salamander had ever been pumped up (for Christ’s sake, a man does at least one sport).
“Look, Nate, will you let bygones be bygones?” Ed held out his hand. “I’ll apologize for all of that stuff we done.”
Nate stared at Ed’s meaty hand.
Burning bushes, Ed thought, he’s gonna cry. He glanced at Boz, who said, “I’ll second that, Nate.” The Procedure Manual said that after the subject has been worn down, the bad cop comes around and starts to act like a good cop. “I’m sorry for what we done.”
Ed said, “Come on, Nate. What d’you say? Let’s put our differences behind us.”
Nate’s spooky face looked from one deputy to the other. He took Ed’s hand, shook it cautiously. Ed wanted to wipe it after they released the grip. But he just smiled and said, “Now, man to man, what can you tell us?”
“Okay. I did see someone. But I couldn’t swear it was Lester.”
Ed and Boz exchanged cool glances.
Nate continued fast. “Wait. Let me tell you what I saw.”
Boz—who of the two had worse handwriting but could spell better—opened a notebook and began to write.
“I was sitting on my porch reading.”
Porn, probably.
“And listening to music.”
“I love you, Satan. Take me, take me, take me . . .”
Ed kept an encouraging smile on his face. “Go ahead.”
“Okay. I heard a car on Barlow Road. I remember it because Barlow Road isn’t real close but the car was making a ton of noise so I figured it had a bad muffler or something.”
“And then?”
“Okay . . .” Nate’s voice cracked. “Then I saw somebody running through the grass, heading down to the river across from my place. And maybe he was carrying some big white bags.”
Bingo!
Boz: “That’s near the caves, right?”
Not as sexy as Luray’s maybe, but plenty big enough to hide a half million dollars. Ed glanced at him and nodded. “And he went into one of ’em?” he asked Nate.
“I guess. I didn’t see exactly ’cause of that old black willow.”
“You can’t give us any description?” Boz asked, smiling but wishing oh so badly that he could be a bad cop again.
“I’m sorry, guys,” Nate whined. “I’d help you if I could. All that grass, the tree. I just couldn’t see.”
Pussy faggot . . .
But at least he’d pointed them in the right direction. They’d find some physical evidence that would lead to Lester.
“Okay, Nate,” Ed said, “that’s a big help. We’re going to check out a few things. Think we better keep you here till we get back. For your own protection.”
“I can’t leave?” He was brushing at the cowlick. “I really wanta get home. I got a lot of stuff to do.”
Involving Playboy and your right hand? Boz asked silently.
“Naw, better you stay here. We won’t be long.”
“Wait,” Nate said uneasily. “Can Lester get out?”
Boz looked at Ed. “Oh, hey, be practically impossible for him to get outa that lockup.” Ed nodded.
“Practically?” the boy asked.
“Naw, it’s okay.”
“Sure, it’s okay.”
“Wait—”
Outside, they walked to the squad car. Boz won the toss and got in the driver’s seat.
“Oooo-eee.” Ed said, “that boy’s gonna sweat up a storm every time Lester rubs his butt on his chair.”
“Good,” said Boz and sped out onto the road.
They were surprised.
They’d been talking in the car and decided that Nate had made up most of what he was telling them just so he could get home. But, no, as soon as they started down Barlow Road, they spotted fresh tire tracks, even in the failing evening light.
“Well, lookie that.”
They followed the trail into the grove of low hemlock and juniper and, weapons drawn, as the Procedure Manual dictated, they came up on either side of the low-riding Pontiac.
“Ain’t been here long,” Boz said, reaching through the grill and touching the radiator.
“Keys’re inside. Fire it up, see if it’s what the boy heard.”
Boz cranked the engine and from the tailpipe came the sound of a small plane.
“Stupid for a getaway car,” he shouted. “That Lester’s got wood for brains.”
“Back her out. Le
t’s take a look.”
Boz eased the old car into a clearing, where the light was better. He shut off the engine.
They didn’t find any physical evidence in the front or back seats.
“Damn,” Boz muttered, poking through the glove compartment.
“Well, well, well.” Ed called. He was peering into the trunk.
He lifted out a large Armored Courier cash bag, plump and heavy. He opened it up and pulled out thick packets of hundred-dollar bills.
“Phew.” Ed counted it. “I make it nineteen thousand bucks.”
“Damn, my salary without overtime. Just sitting there. Lookit that.”
“Where’s the rest of it, I wonder.”
“Which way’s the river?”
“There. Over there.”
On foot, they started through the grass and sedge and cattails that bordered the Shenandoah. They searched for footprints in the tall grass but couldn’t find any. “We can look for ’em in the morning. Let’s get to the caves, have a look-see there.”
Ed and Boz walked down to the water’s edge. They could clearly see Nate’s house overlooking the bluff. Nearby were several cave entrances.
“Those caves right there. Must be the ones.”
They continued along the riverbank to the spindly black willow Nate had mentioned.
This time Boz lost the toss and dropped to his hands and knees. Breathing heavily in the hot, murky air, he disappeared into the largest of the caves.
Five minutes later Ed bent down and called, “You okay?”
And had to dodge another canvas bag, as it came flying out of the mouth of the cave.
“Lordy, whatta we got here?”
Eighty thousand dollars, it turned out.
“S’the only one in there,” Boz said, climbing out, panting. “Lester must’ve planted the bags in different caves.”
“Why?” Ed wondered. “We find one around here, we’d just keep searching till we found the rest.”
Twisted: The Collected Stories Page 12
