The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  “No,” groaned Andrew.

  “He said that there were two very persistent rats that he wanted to exterminate. He finds their ‘droppings,’ he said. Shooting was too good for them—that’s what he said. He was going to trap them, cut them up into a stew, and feed them to the cats in the house—one spoonful at a time. That was this morning. Not half an hour ago. He thinks it’s funny.”

  “I’m afraid he …”

  “And what’s more,” interrupted Pickett, “there can’t be any doubt at all that he was tailing me the other night when I got in from Vancouver. No doubt at all. Am I right? Admit it. No more talk about coincidences. I don’t believe in them.”

  “You’re right, so help me. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. We’ve got to act.” Andrew stared out the window at the empty fields trailing past, fields across which trooped Uncle Arthur’s league of silver-bearing turtles. “What I can’t quite fathom,” he continued, squinting at Pickett, “is what in the hell is going on.”

  Pickett checked his watch. They banked down the off-ramp and turned up onto the boulevard, heading home. “I’ll come around later,” said Pickett. “I’ve got to spend a couple of hours in the library. Maybe I’ll find out. Wait for me, though. If he catches you snooping through his room alone …”

  “He won’t,” Andrew said. “He won’t catch me at all. I’m too many for him. I know how to handle his sort. You should have seen his face when he got the note in the mail—utter bewilderment. He was a rudderless boat.” Andrew was cheered for a moment by the memory, but it didn’t last. He gritted his teeth with determination. Pennyman! The son of a bitch. Andrew would take steps, immediately.

  “He’s got to be kept that way then—off-balance. Especially until we’ve got a handle on this.”

  “Leave it to me,” said Andrew.

  Pickett slammed his fist into his open palm. “What we’ve got to know is why he’s going around town threatening people. And don’t lose that spoon, for God’s sake. Get on it as soon as we’re home. I’ll go up with you.”

  “No, don’t. Rose and all. We’ve got to make it look as if we’ve been out fishing all morning. We can’t burst in full of mysteries and plans. Did you shove your tackle box into the gunnysack?”

  Pickett nodded as Andrew pulled into the curb. “Haven’t got much done on the painting end, eh? What’s that mess of paint by the window there?”

  Andrew cut the engine. “That’s the result of espionage. How about the tackle box?”

  “Yes. It’s in the gunnysack, along with my fishing jacket and my thermos.”

  “Great,” said Andrew, climbing out of the car and going around to the trunk. In a slightly too-loud voice, just for the sake of an open window, he said, “Not bad for a morning’s work, eh?” And he held the weighted gunnysack up with both hands, winking at Pickett.

  His friend took it from him. “Heavy!” he said. “Must be—what?—twenty pounds if it’s an ounce.”

  “Whoppers,” said Andrew. He felt guilty suddenly, but faintly proud of himself for not actually lying. And no one was listening anyway, probably. Or watching. He slammed the trunk and watched Pickett deposit the sack in his car, climb in, and finally drive away after an elaborate amount of warming up the engine and racing the motor. Then, steeling himself, he walked into the backyard whistling, as if he’d spent a satisfactory morning.

  Rose was in the kitchen, washing dishes, and Aunt Naomi sat at the table sipping coffee, looking oddly well. “You smell like fish,” Naomi said, wrinkling her nose.

  Andrew smiled cheerfully. “One of the hazards of the sport. What’s this? Trix? Aunt! Trix? You? You’re after the prize! What is it?” He picked up the box and studied the back. “A glow-in-the-dark squid! Have you got it out of there yet?” He tilted the box, angling the little colored balls of cereal so as to see to the bottom, and nearly spilling them onto the table top. “Here it is!” He hauled out a little cream-colored, glitter-sprinkled squid, three-inches long and made out of rubbery plastic. Grinning at Naomi and then at Rose, he said, “You two should have been quicker. It’s mine now. My advice is that you empty the whole box into a bowl next time. Then root out the prize, and pour the cereal back into the box. You don’t really even have to wash the bowl afterward—just dust it out.” He pocketed the squid.

  Rose whacked him on the shoulder with the dish towel. “I’m glad you made a morning of it,” she said, hanging the towel up and dusting the sink with scouring powder. “It’s what you need. The prize in the Trix is your reward for getting up early. Catch any fish?”

  Andrew nodded weakly. “You should have seen the starfish I caught on a Mounds bar.” He clicked his tongue, as if to imply that the sea had been full of creatures that morning, that there was nothing he hadn’t hauled in. “Pickett just tossed a full gunnysack into his trunk—must have weighed twenty pounds.”

  He was a pitiful case—sneaking around. It was shameful, and he knew it. If he’d been up to something important, really important, if he were sure of it, then why in the hell didn’t he just up and tell her? Because he wanted to protect her? Partly. Because it all looked very much like nonsense? Yep. Because he wanted desperately to play the hero, to make it clear in the end that he’d had the entire business in hand all along, and that, like Uncle Arthur, his seeming madness had deadly serious method in it? That was it. He’d like to be a hero, wouldn’t he?—casting down the villain Pennyman. It was pride and vanity. He saw through himself too damned clearly, and sometimes, when he was in a mood, he half-hated himself for it. Why couldn’t he let himself rest? Why was he possessed day to day with the knowledge that he just wasn’t good enough? Sometimes it made him want to throw up. He kissed Rose on the cheek and hurried up the stairs and into the bedroom before he was forced into any more lies.

  The spoon was still there behind the books. It was faintly warm when he picked it up, and his palm seemed to retract at its touch, to draw back into itself like the antenna of a snail, repulsed by the feel of it. And it seemed monstrously heavy. The weight of it made him sag. He was suddenly tired. He’d been up early. All this Pennyman business was draining him. It was Pennyman, God damn him, that possessed Andrew with all these doubts about himself. That was the man’s nefarious strength. That was how he worked. Andrew’s back ached awfully, and there was nothing in the world that he wanted to do more than lie down and sleep.

  He fought it though. Sleep was too easy. There was a job to be done. There was the matter of his shredded self-respect. He pocketed the spoon and headed back downstairs slowly, hanging onto the rail, saying nothing to Rose or Naomi as he ducked out into the cafe. He looked around, wondering, then picked up a pint glass, chose a half-dozen random spoons from the silverware box, and dropped them in, sliding the pig spoon in among them. It was a perfect disguise. He put the glass up on the wooden shelf that ran around half the room, ending against the stones of the fireplace. Sitting among books and knickknacks, the glass full of spoons looked innocent—just another decoration—and well above eye level so as not to catch anyone’s casual attention. Feeling considerably lighter, but still fighting the compulsion to sleep, he headed out for the garage to fetch the paintbrush pickling in thinner. It was time to roll up his sleeves.

  Pennyman’s room was almost exactly as it had been two nights earlier. The man was psychotically neat. The only change was that the room smelled differently—only the old-house smell now; the window was shut against the ocean breeze, and there was no telltale hint of fish elixir or perfume.

  The rest of the house was quiet. Rose had gone out with Aunt Naomi—the old woman’s first outing in nearly a year. Dr. Garibaldi had come around that morning and been sent away after exclaiming that Naomi’s recovery had been almost miraculous. He’d never seen anything like it. But then he’d never seen anything like the disease, either, which he still referred to euphemistically as “general debilitation,” and so his surprise, perhaps, didn’t signify as heavily as it might have. He’d found just a hint o
f internal bleeding, and that bothered him, but until Naomi could come in for tests … Naomi, at the moment, wasn’t interested in tests.

  Pennyman was out, too. Mrs. Gummidge was out. Andrew and Pickett had fastened the chain locks on the doors. If someone tried the front, the two would hear the rattling and close things up, then head out through the back door and into the garage, leaving that door unlocked, and pretending—if the locked-door business were commented upon—that they had no notion that the front door had been locked at all. No one would guess that they’d been up rifling Pennyman’s things—except Pennyman, of course. He was the type to glue hairs to drawer fronts with saliva, then check later to see if the bond had been broken.

  Who cared though? Pennyman knew that they were on to him; and they knew he was on to them. So what were the odds? Andrew was tempted to make the break-in obvious. Maybe he should slip in two or three times a day all week long, just to confound Pennyman, who would have to begin to think that all the breaking in and subtle ransacking was without purpose—which it very likely was, since neither Andrew nor Pickett had the foggiest notion what it was they were after.

  Andrew patted his pocket. In it was the rubber squid out of the cereal box. He pulled it out and regarded it, grinning at the look of morose wisdom on its face. It was bound for one of Pennyman’s socks. Pickett wouldn’t approve at all. He took this whole business deadly seriously. What he didn’t grasp was that Pennyman apparently did, too, and therein lay the beauty of the squid-in-the-sock notion. Pennyman wouldn’t be able to fathom it, any more than he’d fathomed the letter in the mail. And Andrew was fairly sure that the letter business had been over Pickett’s head too. “What did you write?” Pickett had asked, puzzled. Then he repeated Andrew’s phrase several times to himself, as if trying it out on his tongue. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “Why cigarettes? Wasn’t there a song like that—‘Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette’? How did that go?” He had hummed a bit, remembering, convinced that there was a message hidden in the lyrics; there must have been. He’d never caught on. That sort of thing was entirely a matter of instinct, not brains; you couldn’t think through it and come up with anything but nonsense. That’s why it worked so wonderfully on men like Pennyman. Andrew knew it was best not to tell Pickett about the squid until later. He nearly laughed out loud, thinking of Pennyman slipping the sock on, unawares, and then starting in horror. Was it a tremendous insect? A severed toe? He’d shake the thing out onto the floor, standing back out of the way. His face would go blank, and he’d curse …

  “You take the bureau,” said Pickett suddenly from across the room. “Wake up. Let’s get this done and leave, for heaven’s sake.”

  Andrew blinked at his friend. “Of course.”

  Pickett bent down in front of the bed alcove and carefully slid open a drawer. “Easy does it, now. Let’s not give him the slightest clue.”

  “Call me Slippery Sam,” said Andrew, sliding open dresser drawers until he found the socks. There they were, all of them folded flat, arranged in neat little heaps from light to dark. Andrew slipped the squid into a cream-colored sock, halfway down the first pile, then very carefully felt around the edges of the drawer and between the socks. There was nothing. The drawer beneath it was filled with underwear—most of it silk. Andrew was disgusted with the idea of searching through it, but he did. Beneath the shorts and T-shirts was a monumental elastic supporter, strung with mesh plastic to better keep its shape and bringing to mind the exoskeleton of a cephalopod or a particularly loathsome amphibian. It was obviously custom-built. Andrew whistled under his breath and held it up.

  “Put that back!” hissed Pickett.

  “What on earth! …” Andrew began. “Certainly no human being … !” He was struck suddenly silent with the idea of retrieving the squid and of dropping it into the elastic garment like a bucket down a well. He could stretch the waistband across the frame of the casement and fire the squid through Ken-or-Ed’s living room window. He eased the sock drawer open again in order to fetch out the squid, wondering if he was allowing things to go haywire. Shooting the squid out of the supporter would pretty clearly break the cardinal rule demanding artistic subtlety. Somehow. It was best not to determine exactly how. He would compromise, and merely leave the squid in the supporter. Pickett had agreed that Pennyman be kept off balance, hadn’t he? Andrew glanced at Pickett, whose back was turned, and then shoved the doctored supporter back in among its neighbors, smoothing the whole mess out and sliding the drawer closed.

  In the middle drawer he found nothing but shirts—a tiresome lot of them, starched, buttoned, and folded. It occurred to him that, in the interests of excess, he could with very little risk dredge up about a hundred rubber creatures and load up every blessed piece of Pennyman’s clothing …

  He found nothing in the fourth drawer but ties and handkerchiefs and a pair of suspenders in a plastic case. The top drawer was the inevitable junk drawer—very neat, though, and three-quarters empty. There was a can of spare change, a couple of pocketknives, and several road maps—one of downtown Vancouver. Andrew held it up for Pickett to see and then put it back. Next to the maps lay a vinyl checkbook—the broad sort of double book that a businessman would carry.

  Here was pay dirt. Each of the checks had been torn off of an attached stub, and each stub had written onto it a neat record of whom the check had been paid to. It was Pennyman’s fetish with neatness again—everything orderly and labeled. Andrew wondered how many times a day Pennyman washed his hands. The information on the stubs meant almost nothing to him—just random names and dates. He and Pickett could run the lot of them down, of course, but it would take weeks, and what good would it do them in the end? They’d discover, no doubt, who it was that cleaned Pennyman’s shirts and where he had his hair cut, but they hadn’t time for that sort of wasted effort.

  On a sudden hunch, Andrew counted back on his fingers, calculating the date on which he’d tracked Pennyman to Moneywort’s shop. Sure enough, there’d been a check paid out—to a man with an Asian name, on The Toledo. Andrew couldn’t quite make out the spelling of the name, beyond the fact that it was short and started with a K. It was substantial, too—nearly a thousand dollars. That would be for the elixir. Pennyman had walked away in that direction carrying a live carp in a bag, and had appeared at home two hours later carrying a vial of the elixir. It stood to reason. Andrew pulled the pen off the checkbook and wrote the information on the palm of his hand, just as a precaution against forgetting it, then idly flipped to the next check stub. It had been written out to Edward Fitzpatrick.

  Ken-or-Ed. Right across the street. Andrew was flabbergasted. What did it mean? Pennyman had paid the man off. All that business about the planning commission—that was all a charade, a hoax. Pennyman had set it up. It had cost him two hundred dollars. Jack Dilton! He was probably some drunk they’d found slumped on the counter down at Wimpy’s.

  For a moment Andrew was tempted to fly into a rage, to turn Pennyman’s room upside down, the lying, stinking … Kissing Rose’s hand! The whole incident rushed back in upon him, and it took an effort of will not to rip the checkbook in half. He counted to ten, very slowly. He heard Pickett whistle just as he was telling himself to put the checkbook back. He could use the information. If he tore it up, Pennyman would know all. Andrew would have played his hand, and a damned poor one at that.

  “Look at this,” Pickett said. Andrew slid the checkbook back into the drawer, closed it, and stepped across to help Pickett, who kneeled in front of the lower, right-hand drawer beneath the bed. In it, spread open, was a leather bag of silver dimes—thousands of them. “What in the world …”

  “All silver?” asked Andrew.

  Pickett slid his hand through them, letting them run through his fingers as if he were an adventurer in a pirate’s cavern. He nodded.

  “Looks like.”

  “Do you think he just keeps them? I keep pennies, for heaven’s sake. They’re not evidence of anything.” />
  “You’re not going around town sawing people in half, either. Lord knows what they’re for, though. They don’t do us any good, do they?”

  Andrew shook his head. “What’s that wrapped in paper there? Looks like books, doesn’t it?”

  Pickett hauled it out—an almost-square parcel wrapped in butcher paper and with the ends folded and taped like the ends of a Christmas present. “Tape is pretty new,” Pickett said, worrying up a corner of it. “It hasn’t stuck tight yet. Should we chance it?”

  “Of course we’ll chance it. Let’s steal them and replace them with Reader’s Digest condensed.”

  “None of that,” said Pickett. The tape pulled back without ripping a bit of the paper. It would stick down again well enough. Andrew bent in over Pickett’s shoulder, watching his friend unfold the package carefully. The sight of the top volume staggered him: Hula Moons, by Don Blanding, the poet—one of the five books that had been stolen from Andrew’s bedroom. It hadn’t been the Atlantean after all. It had been Pennyman all along.