Black House js-2

by Stephen King

  “Do you smell it?” Dale asks him.

  Jack nods. Of course he does. He’s smelled it already today, but now it’s worse. Because there’s more of Irma out here to send up a stink. Much more than what would fit into a single shoe box.

  Tom Lund has produced a handkerchief and is mopping his broad, distressed face. It’s warm, but not warm enough to account for the sweat streaming off his face and brow. And his skin is pasty.

  “Officer Lund,” Jack says.

  “Huh!” Tom jumps and looks rather wildly around at Jack.

  “You may have to vomit. If you feel you must, do it over there.” Jack points to an overgrown track, even more ancient and ill-defined than the one leading in from the main road. This one seems to meander in the direction of Goltz’s.

  “I’ll be okay,” Tom says.

  “I know you will. But if you need to unload, don’t do it on what may turn out to be evidence.”

  “I want you to start stringing yellow tape around the entire building,” Dale tells his officer. “Jack? A word?”

  Dale puts a hand on Jack’s forearm and starts walking back toward the truck. Although he’s got a good many things on his mind, Jack notices how strong that hand is. And no tremble in it. Not yet, anyway.

  “What is it?” Jack asks impatiently when they’re standing near the passenger window of the truck. “We want a look before the whole world gets here, don’t we? Wasn’t that the idea, or am I—”

  “You need to get the foot, Jack,” Dale says. And then: “Hello, Uncle Henry, you look spiff.”

  “Thanks,” Henry says.

  “What are you talking about?” Jack asks. “That foot is evidence.”

  Dale nods. “I think it ought to be evidence found here, though. Unless, of course, you relish the idea of spending twenty-four hours or so answering questions in Madison.”

  Jack opens his mouth to tell Dale not to waste what little time they have with arrant idiocies, then closes it again. It suddenly occurs to him how his possession of that foot might look to minor-league smarties like Detectives Brown and Black. Maybe even to a major-league smarty like John Redding of the FBI. Brilliant cop retires at an impossibly young age, and to the impossibly bucolic town of French Landing, Wisconsin. He has plenty of scratch, but the source of income is blurry, to say the least. And oh, look at this, all at once there’s a serial killer operating in the neighborhood.

  Maybe the brilliant cop has got a loose screw. Maybe he’s like those firemen who enjoy the pretty flames so much they get into the arson game themselves. Certainly Dale’s Color Posse would have to wonder why the Fisherman would send an early retiree like Jack a victim’s body part. And the hat, Jack thinks. Don’t forget Ty’s baseball cap.

  All at once he knows how Dale felt when Jack told him that the phone at the 7-Eleven had to be cordoned off. Exactly.

  “Oh man,” he says. “You’re right.” He looks at Tom Lund, industriously running yellow POLICE LINE tape while butterflies dance around his shoulders and the flies continue their drunken buzzing from the shadows of Ed’s Eats. “What about him?”

  “Tom will keep his mouth shut,” Dale says, and on that Jack decides to trust him. He wouldn’t, had it been the Hungarian.

  “I owe you one,” Jack says.

  “Yep,” Henry agrees from his place in the passenger seat. “Even a blind man could see he owes you one.”

  “Shut up, Uncle Henry,” Dale says.

  “Yes, mon capitaine.”

  “What about the cap?” Jack asks.

  “If we find anything else of Ty Marshall’s . . .” Dale pauses, then swallows. “Or Ty himself, we’ll leave it. If not, you keep it for the time being.”

  “I think maybe you just saved me a lot of major irritation,” Jack says, leading Dale to the back of the truck. He opens the stainless steel box behind the cab, which he hasn’t bothered to lock for the run out here, and takes out one of the trash-can liners. From inside it comes the slosh of water and the clink of a few remaining ice cubes. “The next time you get feeling dumb, you might remind yourself of that.”

  Dale ignores this completely. “Ohgod,” he says, making it one word. He’s looking at the Baggie that has just emerged from the trash-can liner. There are beads of water clinging to the transparent sides.

  “The smell of it!” Henry says with undeniable distress. “Oh, the poor child!”

  “You can smell it even through the plastic?” Jack asks.

  “Yes indeed. And coming from there.” Henry points at the ruined restaurant and then produces his cigarettes. “If I’d known, I would have brought a jar of Vicks and an El Producto.”

  In any case, there’s no need to walk the Baggie with the gruesome artifact inside it past Tom Lund, who has now disappeared behind the ruins with his reel of yellow tape.

  “Go on in,” Dale instructs Jack quietly. “Get a look and take care of the thing in that Baggie if you find . . . you know . . . her. I want to speak to Tom.”

  Jack steps through the warped, doorless doorway into the thickening stench. Outside, he can hear Dale instructing Tom to send Pam Stevens and Danny Tcheda back down to the end of the access road as soon as they arrive, where they will serve as passport control.

  The interior of Ed’s Eats will probably be bright by afternoon, but now it is shadowy, lit mostly by crazed, crisscrossing rays of sun. Galaxies of dust spin lazily through them. Jack steps carefully, wishing he had a flashlight, not wanting to go back and get one from the cruiser until he’s taken care of the foot. (He thinks of this as “redeployment.”) There are human tracks through the dust, trash, and drifts of old gray feathers. The tracks are man-sized. Weaving in and out of them are a dog’s pawprints. Off to his left, Jack spies a neat little pile of droppings. He steps around the rusty remains of an overturned gas grill and follows both sets of tracks around the filthy counter. Outside, the second French Landing cruiser is rolling up. In here, in this darker world, the sound of the flies has become a soft roar and the stench . . . the stench...

  Jack fishes a handkerchief from his pocket and places it over his nose as he follows the tracks into the kitchen. Here the pawprints multiply and the human footprints disappear completely. Jack thinks grimly of the circle of beaten-down grass he made in the field of that other world, a circle with no path of beaten-down grass leading to it.

  Lying against the far wall near a pool of dried blood is what remains of Irma Freneau. The mop of her filthy strawberry-blond hair mercifully obscures her face. Above her on a rusty piece of tin that probably once served as a heat shield for the deep-fat fryers, two words have been written with what Jack feels sure was a black Sharpie marker:

  Hello boys

  “Ah, fuck,” Dale Gilbertson says from almost directly behind him, and Jack nearly screams.

  Outside, the snafu starts almost immediately.

  Halfway back down the access road, Danny and Pam (not in the least disappointed to have been assigned guard duty once they have actually seen the slumped ruin of Ed’s and smelled the aroma drifting from it) nearly have a head-on with an old International Harvester pickup that is bucketing toward Ed’s at a good forty miles an hour. Luckily, Pam swings the cruiser to the right and the driver of the pickup—Teddy Runkleman—swings left. The vehicles miss each other by inches and swerve into the grass on either side of this poor excuse for a road. The pickup’s rusty bumper thumps against a small birch.

  Pam and Danny get out of their unit, hearts pumping, adrenaline spurting. Four men come spilling out of the pickup’s cab like clowns out of the little car in the circus. Mrs. Morton would recognize them all as regulars at Roy’s Store. Layabouts, she would call them.

  “What in the name of God are you doing?” Danny Tcheda roars. His hand drops to the butt of his gun and then falls away a bit reluctantly. He’s getting a headache.

  The men (Runkleman is the only one the officers know by name, although between them they recognize the faces of the other three) are goggle
-eyed with excitement.

  “How many ja find?” one of them spits. Pam can actually see the spittle spraying out in the morning air, a sight she could have done without. “How many’d the bastid kill?”

  Pam and Danny exchange a single dismayed look. And before they can reply, holy God, here comes an old Chevrolet Bel Air with another four or five men inside it. No, one of them is a woman. They pull up and spill out, also like clowns from the little car.

  But we’re the real clowns, Pam thinks. Us.

  Pam and Danny are surrounded by eight semihysterical men and one semihysterical woman, all of them throwing questions.

  “Hell, I’m going up there and see for myself!” Teddy Runkleman shouts, almost jubilantly, and Danny realizes the situation is on the verge of spinning out of control. If these fools get the rest of the way up the access road, Dale will first tear him a new asshole and then salt it down.

  “HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, ALL OF YOU!” he bawls, and actually draws his gun. It’s a first for him, and he hates the weight of it in his hand—these are ordinary people, after all, not bad guys—but it gets their attention.

  “This is a crime scene,” Pam says, finally able to speak in a normal tone of voice. They mutter and look at one another; worst fears confirmed. She steps to the driver of the Chevrolet. “Who are you, sir? A Saknessum? You look like a Saknessum.”

  “Freddy,” he admits.

  “Well, you get back in your vehicle, Freddy Saknessum, and the rest of you who came with him also get in, and you back the hell right out of here. Don’t bother trying to turn around, you’ll just get stuck.”

  “But—” the woman begins. Pam thinks she’s a Sanger, a clan of fools if ever there was one.

  “Stow it and go,” Pam tells her.

  “And you right behind him,” Danny tells Teddy Runkleman. He just hopes to Christ no more will come along, or they’ll end up trying to manage a parade in reverse. He doesn’t know how the news got out, and at this moment can’t afford to care. “Unless you want a summons for interfering with a police investigation. That can get you five years.” He has no idea if there is such a charge, but it gets them moving even better than the sight of his pistol.

  The Chevrolet backs out, rear end wagging from side to side like a dog’s tail. Runkleman’s pickup goes next, with two of the men standing up in back and peering over the cab, trying to catch sight of the old restaurant’s roof, at least. Their curiosity lends them a look of unpleasant vacuity. The P.D. unit comes last, herding the old car and older truck like a corgi herding sheep, roof-rack lights now pulsing. Pam is forced to ride mostly on the brake, and as she drives she lets loose a low-pitched stream of words her mother never taught her.

  “Do you kiss your kids good-night with that mouth?” Danny asks, not without admiration.

  “Shut up,” she says. Then: “You got any aspirin?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” Danny says.

  They get back out to the main road just in time. Three more vehicles are coming from the direction of French Landing, two from the direction of Centralia and Arden. A siren rises in the warming air. Another cruiser, the third in what was supposed to be an unobtrusive line, is coming along, passing the lookie-loos from town.

  “Oh man.” Danny sounds close to tears. “Oh man, oh man, oh man. It’s gonna be a carnival, and I bet the staties still don’t know. They’ll have kittens. Dale is gonna have kittens.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Pam says. “Calm down. We’ll just pull across the road and park. Also stick your gun back in the fucking holster.”

  “Yes, Mother.” He stows his piece as Pam swings across the access road, pulling back to let the third cruiser through, then pulling forward again to block the way. “Yeah, maybe we caught it in time to put a lid on it.”

  “Course we did.”

  They relax a little. Both of them have forgotten the old stretch of road that runs between Ed’s and Goltz’s, but there are plenty of folks in town who know about it. Beezer St. Pierre and his boys, for instance. And while Wendell Green does not, guys like him always seem able to find the back way. They’ve got an instinct for it.

  11

  BEEZER’S JOURNEY BEGAN with Myrtle Harrington, the loving wife of Michael Harrington, whispering down the telephone line to Richie Bumstead, on whom she has an industrial-strength crush in spite of his having been married to her second-best friend, Glad, who dropped down dead in her kitchen at the amazing age of thirty-one. For his part, Richie Bumstead has had enough macaroni-tuna casseroles and whisper-voiced phone calls from Myrtle to last him through two more lifetimes, but this is one set of whispers he’s glad, even oddly relieved, to listen to, because he drives a truck for the Kingsland Brewing Company and has come to know Beezer St. Pierre and the rest of the boys, at least a little bit.

  At first, Richie thought the Thunder Five was a bunch of hoodlums, those big guys with scraggly shoulder-length hair and foaming beards roaring through town on their Harleys, but one Friday he happened to be standing alongside the one called Mouse in the pay-window line, and Mouse looked down at him and said something funny about how working for love never made the paycheck look bigger, and they got into a conversation that made Richie Bumstead’s head spin. Two nights later he saw Beezer St. Pierre and the one called Doc shooting the breeze in the yard when he came off-shift, and after he got his rig locked down for the night he went over and got into another conversation that made him feel like he’d walked into a combination of a raunchy blues bar and a Jeopardy! championship. These guys—Beezer, Mouse, Doc, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill—looked like rockin’, stompin’, red-eyed violence, but they were smart. Beezer, it turned out, was head brewmaster in Kingsland Ale’s special-projects division, and the other guys were just under him. They had all gone to college. They were interested in making great beer and having a good time, and Richie sort of wished he could get a bike and let it all hang out like them, but a long Saturday afternoon and evening at the Sand Bar proved that the line between a high old time and utter abandon was too fine for him. He didn’t have the stamina to put away two pitchers of Kingsland, play a decent game of pool, drink two more pitchers while talking about the influences of Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein on the young Hemingway, get into some serious head-butting, put down another couple of pitchers, emerge clearheaded enough to go barrel-assing through the countryside, pick up a couple of experimental Madison girls, smoke a lot of high-grade shit, and romp until dawn. You have to respect people who can do that and still hold down good jobs.

  As far as Richie is concerned, he has a duty to tell Beezer that the police have finally learned the whereabouts of Irma Freneau’s body. That busybody Myrtle said it was a secret Richie has to keep to himself, but he’s pretty sure that right after Myrtle gave him the news, she called four or five other people. Those people will call their best friends, and in no time at all half of French Landing is going to be heading over on 35 to be in on the action. Beezer has a better right to be there than most, doesn’t he?

  Less than thirty seconds after getting rid of Myrtle Harrington, Richie Bumstead looks up Beezer St. Pierre in the directory and dials the number.

  “Richie, I sure hope you aren’t shitting me,” Beezer says.

  “He called in, yeah?” Beezer wants Richie to repeat it. “That worthless piece of shit in the DARE car, the Mad Hungarian? . . . And he said the girl was where?”

  “Fuck, the whole town is gonna be out there,” Beezer says. “But thanks, man, thanks a lot. I owe you.” In the instant before the receiver slams down, Richie thinks he hears Beezer start to say something else that gets dissolved in a scalding rush of emotion.

  And in the little house on Nailhouse Row, Beezer St. Pierre swipes tears into his beard, gently moves the telephone a few inches back on the table, and turns to face Bear Girl, his common-law spouse, his old lady, Amy’s mother, whose real name is Susan Osgood, and who is staring up at him from beneath her thick blond bangs, one finger holding he
r place in a book.

  “It’s the Freneau girl,” he says. “I gotta go.”

  “Go,” Bear Girl tells him. “Take the cell phone and call me as soon as you can.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and plucks the cell phone from its charger and rams it into a front pocket of his jeans. Instead of moving to the door, he thrusts a hand into the huge red-brown tangle of his beard and absentmindedly combs it with his fingers. His feet are rooted to the floor; his eyes have lost focus. “The Fisherman called 911,” he says. “Can you believe this shit? They couldn’t find the Freneau girl by themselves, they needed him to tell them where to find her body.”

  “Listen to me,” Bear Girl says, and gets up and travels the space between them far more quickly than she seems to. She snuggles her compact little body into his massive bulk, and Beezer inhales a chestful of her clean, soothing scent, a combination of soap and fresh bread. “When you and the boys get out there, it’s going to be up to you to keep them in line. So you have to keep yourself in line, Beezer. No matter how angry you are, you can’t go nuts and start beating on people. Cops especially.”

  “I suppose you think I shouldn’t go.”

  “You have to. I just don’t want you to wind up in jail.”

  “Hey,” he says, “I’m a brewer, not a brawler.”

  “Don’t forget it,” she says, and pats him on the back. “Are you going to call them?”

  “Street telephone.” Beezer walks to the door, bends down to pick up his helmet, and marches out. Sweat slides down his forehead and crawls through his beard. Two strides bring him to his motorcycle. He puts one hand on the saddle, wipes his forehead, and bellows, “THE FUCKING FISHERMAN TOLD THAT FUCKING HUNGARIAN COP WHERE TO FIND IRMA FRENEAU’S BODY. WHO’S COMING WITH ME?”

  On both sides of Nailhouse Row, bearded heads pop out of windows and loud voices shout “Wait Up!” “Holy Shit!” and “Yo!” Four vast men in leather jackets, jeans, and boots come barreling out of four front doors. Beezer almost has to smile—he loves these guys, but sometimes they remind him of cartoon characters. Even before they reach him, he starts explaining about Richie Bumstead and the 911 call, and by the time he finishes, Mouse, Doc, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill are on their bikes and waiting for the signal.