by Bryan Gruley
Now D’Alessio gave her an uneasy grin. “Hello there, darling,” he said.
“Jody,” Breck said. “This man is no threat to anyone but himself.”
“Really?” D’Alessio said. “Who the hell are you anyway?”
Breck addressed the townspeople. “This is what matters to you?” I leaned into the gap between the trailers, looking for Whistler; I’d lost him. “A hockey game? You’ve lost one of your own, another two are in jail, and this is what matters? Perhaps even God cannot help you.”
The crowd started yelling again and moving toward Breck. “Get back, goddammit,” Jody yelled, stepping toward them, the blade of the shovel next to her head. “You’re scaring our kids.”
Breck turned to her. “Stay where you are, please, Ms. Frost.”
“Thank you, Mr. Breck,” D’Alessio said. “She’s a spunky one.”
Jody glared first at D’Alessio, then at Breck, threw her shovel to the ground, and stomped back inside her trailer, slamming the door.
“Look,” D’Alessio said. “We’re trying to meet you halfway here.” The mob hear-heared. “Let Tex go and we’ll put some pressure on Dingus to let Tatch go. Hell, nobody thinks he did anything anyway.”
Breck took his wire-rims off, wiped them on his sweater, put them back on. “You are a fool, Mr. Candidate,” he said. “Surrounded by fools. Matthew and the rest of us want nothing to do with you or your pathetic schemes.”
Soupy poked me in the shoulder. “Trap.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Look, idiot.”
I turned and saw Whistler scrabbling up the hill behind us. He fell to one hand, then an elbow as his sneakers slipped in the snow and mud. He stopped at the backhoe and wrote something in his notebook. Then he disappeared behind it. I turned back to Breck.
“You are on private property,” Breck told the throng. “I am asking you to remove yourselves now.”
“Or you’re gonna do what, mister?” someone shouted.
“How about we remove you, huh?” someone else cried.
The door on Jody’s trailer swung open and she came bounding out, wearing a camouflage jacket, hair pulled away from her face in a rubber-band ponytail. Instead of a shovel, she was holding a double-barreled shotgun. She stopped halfway across the clearing and raised it to her shoulder, aimed in the direction of the throng. They gasped as one. “Call the police,” someone shouted, and I saw cell phones come out, people punching keys.
“No,” Breck said, turning to Jody. “We are not them, Jody. Please. Put the gun away.”
“We’ve been pushed around enough,” she said.
“Listen to him, Jody,” D’Alessio said. “You’re just going to get yourself in trouble.”
She leveled the barrel at D’Alessio. “Back off, fuckface.”
D’Alessio looked at Breck. “‘Fuckface,’ eh? That some new born-again-”
The boom of the shotgun cut him off and sent the crowd shrieking and diving into the snow, jumping behind trailers, racing down the two-track and off into the woods. D’Alessio keeled over backward into the mud. I clutched at the trailer next to me for balance and stepped into the clearing. Jody had lifted the barrel so that her shot flew into the sky. But D’Alessio remained on his back, apparently unconscious, perhaps fainted. I froze, watching to see if Jody, smirking at the fallen D’Alessio, would shoot again.
Only Breck saw Tex.
The boy burst from the trailer door behind another woman, almost knocking her down. “Dammit!” she screamed, while Breck swiveled and crouched for a tackle. Tex was barefoot in long johns and a T-shirt. “Tex,” I yelled as Soupy pushed out from behind me and moved into the clearing.
Tex started first toward the scattering townspeople, but Breck scrambled over to cut him off, so Tex swerved and almost slipped down but held his feet and sprinted at Soupy and me, his eyes not seeing us, his feet churning snow, Breck gaining on him. I heard women and men bellowing from the other side of the clearing, some of the voices coming closer, Tex yelling as he ran, “Get away from me!”
Breck was close enough to try a flying tackle when Soupy jumped in front of him and threw a hip check that would have made a Red Wing proud. Breck flopped sideways with a grunt. He was back on his feet in an instant and, before Soupy could get his hands up, smacked Soupy hard in the shoulder with the heel of a hand. Soupy toppled over and I stepped up and took a run at Breck, but he jumped aside and I spilled face-first into the snow. Breck started up the hill as I got to my feet. “Don’t do it, Matthew,” he called out. “You are not their servant.”
Jody Frost was shouting, “I’ll shoot, dammit, I’ll shoot again,” as the Fleders and Clayton Perlmutter ran past her in pursuit of Breck. “Get that man,” Perlmutter wheezed, a few steps behind the Fleders as they gained on Breck. The shotgun went off again. There was more screaming. Everyone but Tex and Breck flung themselves facedown in the snow. “Goddammit, Jody,” Bart Fleder yelled. “You got some balls.”
We all jumped up and started scrambling again up the slippery ridge, but Breck had nearly caught the barefoot, half-naked boy who wanted to play a game of hockey. Tex weaved left and then right and then left again, dodging the ditches, slipping Breck’s grasp. “Stop now, Matthew,” Breck kept calling, but Tex kept plowing up the hill through the twilight. About twenty yards beyond him I spied Luke Whistler, peering out from between a pair of birches on one side of the gullies, scribbling in his notebook.
“Luke,” I yelled. “Help!”
Either he didn’t hear or he didn’t think he should intervene, because he kept looking around where he was standing and writing in his notebook, as a reporter probably should have. “Whistler!” I screamed again, and now he shuffled out from the trees, sliding sideways in his sneakers as he stuffed his notebook in his vest. His gaze was fixed on Breck.
“The boy,” I yelled.
“Stop that prick,” Soupy said.
“Grab him,” Perlmutter called out.
“The boy.”
Breck was almost in reach when Tex veered right to skirt a ditch and lost his footing. He slid legs first into the trench, grabbing in vain at the snow rimming the edge. There was a hard whump and then the cry of a boy in sudden, anguished pain. I saw his hair tossing back and forth above the lip of the ditch and then I came up to the edge of the hole alongside Breck and Soupy and saw Tex bellowing and holding his left leg with both hands, writhing in the blackened snow. The Fleders came up next and then Perlmutter, who took one look at Tex and lost his lunch. I noticed cop lights flashing on the tree trunks around us.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Whistler said.
An ambulance took Tex away.
Sheriff Dingus Aho cuffed Breck and read him his rights.
“Am I being charged?” Breck said.
“We’ll get to that in due course,” Dingus said.
Darlene stood to the side, staring at Breck. As Skip Catledge opened a cruiser back door, Breck screwed his head around to look back up the hill. Dingus clapped a hand on the back of his neck.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Breck said.
“Shut the hell up,” Dingus said, shoving Breck into the car.
I looked where Breck had looked and saw Whistler still poking around on the hill.
“I’m out of here,” Soupy said. He went skittering along the edge of the clearing, around the back of the trailers, sidestepping the ditches as he climbed. He stopped briefly to pick up the last beer he’d dropped when he hip-checked Breck.
Two paddy wagons rolled up. Catledge and Darlene went to each of the trailers. The doors creaked open, the residents straggled out. There were about twenty in all, men and women, a few children. I’d seen them at the IGA, counting out pennies for their purchases; standing in line at the once-a-week food pantry maintained by the senior center; at Enright’s, begging Soupy to extend them a little more credit for half a shell of beer to wash down the twenty-five-cent pickled egg they’d fished out of the jar on the bar. I h
ad seen their faces but I hadn’t seen them, knew their names but didn’t know them. Soupy liked to say they were people with no lives. But here, I thought, on a lonely hill above the lake, they have a life, or at least they believe they do.
The police put the children in a trailer with Lisa Royall and told her to keep them inside while the other adults from the camp were taken for questioning. Catledge herded Jody Frost and the others into the paddy wagons while Jody tried to twist free, yelling, “Why aren’t you arresting D’Alessio and those other assholes?” Lisa watched from her trailer door, trying not to cry, and I saw children’s faces peeking through tattered drapes on a window next to her. “None of this would have happened,” Lisa shouted, “if you all would just leave us alone.”
D’Alessio, who’d been resuscitated by a paramedic, watched the arrests, then started down the hill on his own. Dingus ordered Darlene to bring him back and put him in a cruiser. “Are you sure, Sheriff?” she said. “Don’t we have enough-”
“That’s an order, Deputy,” he said.
Darlene chased him down. As she cuffed him, he shouted at Dingus, “What the hell in the world can you charge me with, Sheriff?” Dingus glanced over his shoulder, said, “Trespassing,” and then turned to me. “Get your boy,” he said, pointing at Whistler, “and get out of here, before I arrest you, too.”
Whistler drove us to town. The car reeked of garlic, its backseat piled with old Roselli’s Pizza boxes. In a Toronado, that’s a lot of boxes.
“You find anything on that hill?” I said.
“A lot of dirt under the snow,” he said.
“You think this is it?” I said. “Is Breck the Bingo Night guy?”
“He’s got motive, right? Avenge his grandfather?”
“Seems like,” I said. “But you think he’d actually kill someone?”
“Maybe it was an accident.”
“It’s a dead body either way, remember?”
“Do the cops have any hard evidence? Anything that could really put anyone away?”
I recalled what Shipman had said about Tatch and Mom possibly saying something about Breck. “Tatch may have given him up,” I said.
“You know what sucks?” Whistler said. “We don’t have a paper until Saturday.”
“It’s worse than that,” I said.
I told him about the Pilot ’s fate. It wasn’t clear what would happen to the two of us, I said, but I assumed we would either be laid off or farmed out to some other Media North property, maybe even Channel Eight.
“So it’s Friday and that’s it?” Whistler said.
“Look at the bright side,” I said. “More time with Tawny Jane.”
Whistler scowled. “I should have stayed at the damn Free Press. ”
We remained silent as he turned onto Main. He pulled to the curb in front of the Pilot, cutting across the angled parking spaces as if he didn’t plan to stay. “You mind filing something about that circus to the Web? I’ll drop by the cop shop.”
“OK,” I said. “You want to hear about my trip downstate? Pretty interesting stuff.”
“Later, for sure,” he said. He looked at his watch.
“Maybe meet for a beer.” I pushed my door open. Snow had begun to fall. “Let’s go out with a bang, eh?”
“Yep.” He didn’t sound like his heart was in it, though. Luke Whistler’s survival, I thought, depended on having a newspaper to write for. “So they cleared that whole hill?”
“There’s just the Royall woman and some kids left.”
“OK. Call you later.”
I wrote my story, locked up, and walked to my house through sheets of snow. A plow trundled past me on Main, blade clanking, yellow lights blinking in the whiteness. A bit late, I thought, but that’s how it went in a county short of cash.
My pickup truck was covered in white. I opened the driver’s door and stepped back so the snow on the roof didn’t cascade onto my head. I reached in and started the engine to defrost the windshield and grabbed a long-handled brush and used it to scrape the outside of the truck clean. The snow brushed across my bare knuckles but I didn’t feel it much because I’d been back in Starvation Lake long enough that I was accustomed to the cold.
My phone rang. I climbed inside the truck and turned up the fan and felt the heat blow around me. Coach Poppy was calling. He was at the hospital in Traverse.
“Tex has a high-ankle sprain,” he said. “He’s lucky he didn’t break something.”
“That’s terrible.”
“What the hell’s the matter with this place?”
“I’m actually trying to find out.”
“I know it’s hardly the priority right now, and I hate to say it, but we don’t stand a chance against the’Fitters without Tex.”
“Unless Dougie plays out of his mind.”
“We’ll show up,” Poppy said. “The town needs something.”
“Be thankful the Rats got this far. At least nobody’s going to be blaming somebody for the rest of their lives. Tell Tex to hang in there.”
I looked at empty Main Street, recalling the cars and trucks parading to the rink for the Mic-Mac game two nights before. Blaring horns and jam-packed bleachers would make no difference against the Pipefitters. Not without our star winger.
I turned the truck off. It had to be too hectic at the jail to see Mom yet. I thought I’d make myself some supper, take a quick nap, then go down. After that, I’d get with Whistler and make a plan for publishing the last issue of the Pilot.
“Gus.”
The voice came from outside my window. Skip Catledge was playing a flashlight beam just below my face. I rolled the window down.
“Are you deaf?” he said. “Almost broke your window.”
“Thinking.”
“Follow me, please.”
“Follow you where?”
The lights on the cruiser parked behind me began to flicker on my rear window. “Just do it,” Catledge called out.
TWENTY-THREE
Silhouettes of reporters and cameramen and townspeople slid back and forth against the fluorescent glow of the glass-walled lobby of the Pine County Sheriff’s Department. “Mob scene,” I said to myself.
Catledge steered past the main entrance and headed toward the rear lot where the cops parked. As I followed, I saw Tawny Jane standing next to the Channel Eight van, smoothing her hair back in a side-view mirror.
Catledge stopped his cruiser and stepped out and opened the chain-link fence to the rear lot. After I pulled in, he got out again and closed the fence. We parked near the back door to the jail. I stepped out of my truck.
“Isn’t that fence automatic?” I said.
“Froze up,” Catledge said. “Dingus doesn’t have the budget to fix it.”
He ushered me through two buzzing doors. Everything was as brightly lit as a school cafeteria. I saw Dingus emerge from his office fingering a set of keys. “This way, son,” he said.
Catledge peeled off. The sheriff led me into the women’s wing of the jail, through a locked door, then through another, and finally into a dim gray corridor lined on both sides with cells. He stopped at the third one on the right. Through the bars I saw Mom, curled up beneath a wool blanket on a narrow bed, asleep. I felt the urge to reach in and stroke her shoulder, comfort her somehow. Dingus held a finger to his lips and shook his head. “Just wanted you to see,” he said.
He didn’t speak again until he’d closed his office door and indicated the angle-iron chair facing his desk. “Sit,” he said. The room smelled of mustard and salt. A hot dog for dinner, I thought. Probably cooked in the microwave in the shift room.
I sat. I’d been in the same chair many times while trying to wheedle information out of the sheriff, who usually leaned back and smiled through his handlebar mustache, his way of saying he wasn’t about to help me.
Dingus wasn’t smiling now. He sat and picked up his phone and hit a button and said into the handset, “Stand by,” then hung up the phone. He brushed some cr
umbs off the blotter, set his bowling-pin forearms down, and leaned toward me. Besides the phone and the blotter, the only things on his desk were a stapler, a set of black handcuffs, a file folder half an inch thick with papers, and a framed picture of his girlfriend, Barbara. He opened a drawer, took out a box of staples, closed the drawer, and set the box on the desk.
“Did you give my mother a sleeping pill?” I said.
He ignored that. “Where’ve you been?” he said. His Scandinavian singsong made it hard sometimes to tell whether he was just fooling around. Tonight, I was pretty sure he was not.
“You brought me here, Dingus.”
He plucked a row of fresh staples out of the box, then picked up the stapler and pulled the top half back to expose the carriage. “Figured you’d be out in the lobby with the other buzzards,” he said.
“Has my mother been charged?”
He slipped two sheets of paper out of the file folder, fitted them into the stapler, and punched it down with a fist. “Should she be?” he said.
“I can’t imagine with what.”
Dingus set the stapled sheets aside, took two more from the file folder, and slammed the stapler so hard that it flipped on its side. “How about obstruction of justice?”
“That would only apply if she actually knew anything.”
He righted the stapler. “What is it you hockey guys say? ‘You can’t hit what you can’t catch’?” He slammed the stapler again, this time without any paper in it. “Well, you can’t see what you can’t see, can you? Excuse me.” He picked up his phone and hit a button. “Now, please,” he said into the phone. Then he addressed me again. “Be warned, sir, although she’s your mother, you would be ill-advised to cover for her, legally speaking.”
“You think I’m covering for her?”
“Have you retained legal representation?”
“Why should I?”
“Your prerogative,” he said. “But let me tell you something: We do not believe that Bea slept as soundly Sunday night as she claims.”
“She said she woke up to go to the bathroom.”
