Beetle followed a stone path between two towering fir to the reception. A placard in the window read: “Great Rates, Free Movie Channel, Imaginary Friends Stay Free.” He opened the glass door, stepped inside, and wrinkled his nose against a spoiled cheese smell. He crossed the thick-pile, hunter-green carpet to the front desk. It was currently unmanned. He rang the small brass bell on the counter. A moment later a wizened old man emerged from the back room. He wore pastel slacks and a heavy wool cardigan buttoned to the neck. Gray hair curled out from beneath a beat-up Baltimore Orioles baseball cap. A rosy blush colored his cheeks, nose, and ears. He fixed Beetle with bright blue rheumy eyes and said, “Help ya?”
“A room for the night, please,” he said.
“Ranger, huh?” the man said, reading the bars on Beetle’s right sleeve. “Was in ’Nam myself. Spent most my time in a resettlement village, twenty miles southwest of Da Nong, three miles from the 5th Marines Combat Base. Supposed to be hell on earth, target practice for the commies, but I didn’t see no combat my entire tour. Never met no Rangers neither. They weren’t officially incorporated until a few years ago, that right?”
“A room, please,” Beetle said.
The man studied him for a moment, then nodded. “You’re in luck.” He produced a key attached to a piece of red plastic from beneath the counter and dangled it between his thumb and index finger. “Got one room left.”
Beetle thought of the empty parking lot but didn’t say anything.
“It’s a superior suite so a little pricier than the others,” the man went on. “But it got a private balcony and views of the Chaguago National Park you won’t soon forget. Guests say they like to sit out there with their coffee in the morning. If you’re lucky, you might spot a whitetail or elk. Had a few moose about too. You haven’t seen nothing until you’ve seen a buck with a full set of antlers. They shed them each season, you know. The lot simply drop off. Found a set myself few years back. Was going to put them on the wall over there, but couldn’t find nobody to mount them without charging an arm and leg. How many nights you say?”
“One,” Beetle said, taking out his wallet.
“Suit yourself.” The man glanced at the wad of bills in the wallet sleeve. It was a discrete glance, no more than a flick of the eyes, easy to miss. But Beetle didn’t miss much. “That’ll be forty-nine ninety-nine,” the man said reasonably. “Say, I’ll make it an even forty nine, give you change for the soda machine.”
“Forty nine bucks for one night, huh?” Beetle said just as reasonably.
The man nodded. “That’s right.”
“That the going rate, or the sucker rate?”
The man blinked. “Huh?”
“I asked you if that was the going rate, or the sucker rate?”
“The sucker rate?”
“Do I look like a sucker?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why are you treating me like one?”
“No, sir, I’m not—”
Beetle grabbed the old man around the throat, moving fluidly and quickly. He pulled the shylock’s face close to his own. “Let’s do this again,” he said quietly. “I’d like a room for the night.”
“Nineteen…ninety-five…”
“You didn’t ask me what type of room I’d like.”
“They’re all…same…”
Beetle stared into the shylock’s terrified eyes. They had popped wide, blood vessels webbing the whites. Why he wanted to live so much, Beetle didn’t know, didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything anymore—not even, he realized, getting ripped off in some shitty backwater motel.
Beetle released the old cheat, who stumbled away, wheezing, cowering. Then he slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and scooped up the key.
Without looking back, Beetle crossed the reception to the staircase that led to the second floor. At the top of the stairs a bronze placard on the wall indicated that rooms 200-206 were to the left, 207-210 to the right. The key was labeled 209, so he went right. Pink carpet and floral wallpaper had replaced the hunter-green carpet and paneled wood of the reception. The spoiled cheese smell remained.
At his room Beetle inserted the key into the lock, opened the door, and flicked on the light. The interior was larger than he’d expected and included a kitchenette with wood-trimmed white cabinets. The lavender bedspread matched the upholstery on the armchair in the corner. A TV was bolted to a Formica table, next to a fake flower arrangement. White satin curtains that looked like they came from the inside of a coffin were drawn across the pair of doors that gave to the balcony.
Beetle upended his rucksack on the bed and messed through his clothes until he found the one-liter bottle of Stolichnaya vodka he’d brought at a Piggly Wiggly in Columbia that morning. He twisted off the cap, took a drink, and set the bottle next to the television set. Next he unzipped a toiletry bag and withdrew a matte black M9 Beretta and a fifteen-round magazine, which he set next to the booze.
Tonight, he decided in a vague, almost blasé way, not wanting to acknowledge what he was thinking. If he did, if he contemplated, reflected, felt, he would become too emotional, and he wouldn’t do it. And it had to be done. Sooner or later, it had to be done.
Tonight.
Shrugging out of his fatigue shirt—WALKER written above the right breast pocket, US ARMY above the left—Beetle went to the bathroom and drew water for a hot shower.
Chapter 10
“We don’t need a stretcher in there. We need a mop!”
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
“I just let go,” Noah said monotonously, almost to himself. “I didn’t push him. He was trying to take the hockey stick from me. I just let it go.”
He and Steve were standing a few feet from the dead boy. Both had turned their backs to the body.
“That radiator shouldn’t have been leaning there against the wall like that,” Steve told him. “It was a hazard.”
“Fuck!” Noah ran his hands up and down his face. “Fuck! I’m in deep shit, aren’t I?”
“It was an accident.”
“Yeah, an accident…an accident.” He shook his head. “What the hell was he doing, Steve? Attacking us like that? We knocked on the door, didn’t we? We called out, said we needed to use the phone. Robbers don’t do that, do they? So what the fuck was his problem?” He shook his head again. “This is fucked. This is so totally fucked.”
“Listen,” Steve said, “I’m going to go give one last look upstairs for that phone. There were a couple rooms I didn’t get to. If I can’t find it, though, we need to get moving. We can explain what happened here to the cops after we get help for Jeff and Jenny.”
Noah stiffened, his disposition instantly flipping from tempestuous to calculated. “Whoa, hold up a sec, Steve. Slow down. We haven’t discussed this yet. I mean, what are we going to tell them?”
“The cops?” Steve said. “What do you mean? We’re going to tell them the truth—the kid attacked you. He fell and knocked the radiator on his head.”
Noah snorted. “You think they’ll believe that?”
“That’s what happened, man. What do you want to tell them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, I don’t know…but why do we even need to mention the kid?”
Steve stared at him. “Because he’s dead, Noah.”
“I know that! But, look, nobody knows we’ve been here, right? Nobody knows we stopped. We can hide the body in the woods or something.”
“Hide the body?” Steve said.
“He’s already dead.”
“Are you kidding me? Jesus Christ, Noah! We’re not hiding his body in the woods. This wasn’t your fault.”
“No one’s going to believe—”
“It was an accident—”
“His teeth marks are in my fucking hand! Look!” Noah thrust his hand out so Steve could see the bloody wound. Several deep teeth punctures formed a half moon in his flesh. “How’s that going to look, huh?”
“He attacked you
. You were restraining him. It was self-defense.”
“We broke into his house!”
“We were getting help for Jeff and Jenny. It was an emergency. The cops will understand that—”
“Dude!” Noah exclaimed. “We’re a bunch of boozed-up out-of-towners. Jeff smashes his car while he’s half soused and jumping from coke. Yeah, he was, did a couple lines when you and Jenny were under the bridge. You think the cops are going to have much sympathy for him? Much sympathy for us getting him help? Then another boozed-up out-of-towner—this one testing positive for pot—breaks into a house and kills a kid who’s trying to protect his home from what he believes are burglars. Shit, Steve, the cops aren’t going to be on our side in this. They’re going to be gunning for us. What I did might not be premeditated murder, but it sure as hell is manslaughter. I’ll go to prison.”
Steve frowned. He hadn’t thought about the full ramifications of their collective actions. But Noah was right, wasn’t he? They’d been drinking. Not only that but Jeff was high on coke and Noah thoroughly stoned. “Fuck, Noah…” He cleared his throat. “Okay, let’s say you’re right. Okay? Maybe you’re right. But hiding his body… It won’t work. They’ll find it. They’ll have dogs.”
Noah’s eyes brightened, became intense. “Then we drive it somewhere, somewhere far away.”
“There’s blood all over the floor.”
“We can clean it up,” he said urgently, almost manically. “I’ll clean it up right now.” He jerked his head about, as if searching for a mop.
“No,” Steve said, aware his dithering was encouraging his friend. “No,” he added more firmly. “Forget it, Noah. Forget it.”
“Dude!” Noah grabbed his arm. “We can do this!”
Steve tugged free. “We have to report this.”
“We can’t—”
“We’re reporting this!”
“Jesus! Don’t you—”
“Yeah, I do! I understand!” Steve said, stepping away, putting space between them. “And I’m sorry, Noah, but we’re doing this right. We start lying, it’s only going to get worse—a lot worse.”
Noah shook his head disgustedly.
“It’ll be okay,” Steve told him. “It will.” He softened his voice. “Don’t worry, man. We’ll sort this all out.”
Then he was gone around the corner, back upstairs.
Noah remained where he was, thinking.
Lonnie Carlsbaugh shoved through the front doors of Randy’s Bar-B-Q and tottered out into the cold, starless night to his car, trying his best to keep in a straight line. He had driven home from Randy’s beer-eyed too many times to count, and he had no reservations about doing so this evening, even after polishing off what must have been seven or eight pints of Coors Extra Gold. Given that it was that time of month again—that time being the end of the month—he had no cash on hand and put the beers on his tab. Randy knew he was good for it. One thing Lonnie did, and did well, was pay his debts. Every two weeks, after receiving his workers’ compensation check from the government, he would stop by Randy’s for a beer and to clear his tab. Keith and Buck and Daryl and his other pals would show up throughout the course of the evening to get away from their wives, and he’d square up with them whatever he owed them from their Tuesday night Texas Hold ’Em games. This would usually leave him with just enough money to pay any outstanding utility bills and pick up a few groceries. He didn’t eat much himself, but his son Scottie could eat a man out of house and home. Last week Scottie’s cunt of a schoolteacher had the nerve to call up Lonnie in the middle of the day, like he had nothing better to do than waste his time talking to her, and ask if Scottie was eating breakfast because he had been caught stealing his classmates’ snacks at recess time. She also blamed what she called “hunger pains” for his rowdy behavior and poor attention span. Lonnie told the stupid cunt Scottie was eating just fine, had eggs every morning. And that was mostly true. He ate whatever the hen laid. That was usually one egg, but sometimes it might be two. And on the days the hen laid a zero—well, how was that Lonnie’s fault? He couldn’t control the biology of a chicken. He wasn’t fucking God, was he?
It really pissed Lonnie off, Scottie’s teachers calling him up like they did. Didn’t they understand he was a single father doing the best he could for the boy? Georgina, his wife and the boy’s ma, had died in childbirth from something the doctors had a big fancy word for. That had been shitty luck. Georgina might not have been a looker, but her family had money coming out of their collective gazoo. Her parents bought him and Georgie the house for their wedding gift, and furnished it with stock from one of their furniture stores. Lonnie had been in the crosshairs to manage one of those stores. But when Georgie died the family didn’t want anything to do with him or Scottie. So he was stuck raising the boy by himself. And it hadn’t been easy either. No sir. But he’d done it, hadn’t he? He’d raised Scottie fine and well. So what if the boy had a few behavioral problems. Hell, all kids did. What was a parent to do about that? Let them live and learn and fend for themselves, was Lonnie’s mantra. That’s how you built character. That’s how Lonnie’s father raised Lonnie, and he’d turned out all right.
Lonnie made it to his rusted puke-green Buick Skylark without falling on his ass and spent a good ten seconds finding the right key to unlock the door. He dropped in behind the steering wheel with a great sigh of satisfaction. His eyes drifted closed, and when he realized this, they snapped back open. He slapped himself across the face to wake himself up, got the car going, and reversed, bumping off a particularly high part of curb. The Skylark’s back bumper kissed the road loudly.
Lonnie mumbled something incomprehensible, shoved the column shifter into drive, and accelerated. He didn’t drive too fast because clouds of fog hung low over the streets, turning the largely residential neighborhood into something out of a monster movie. At the corner he turned left onto Westside Lane. Some of the houses he passed had jack-o-lanterns sitting in their front windows or out on their front stoops, though only two were lit from within with candles.
Halfway down the block Lonnie spotted his first trick-or-treaters: a little girl dressed as a princess with fairy wings sprouting from her back and a little boy dressed in a full-body tiger suit with a limp tail that dragged on the sidewalk. The mother walked a few feet behind them. She was on the chubby side, but not a bad looker. Lonnie had seen her around town before. You saw everyone around town now and then in a township of nine hundred souls. He thought she might work at the art gallery on Edgeview Street, but he couldn’t be sure because he’d never gone in, only glanced through the window when walking past on random occasions.
Seeing the woman and her kids made Lonnie think about Scottie again. He’d promised to take the boy trick-or-treating tonight. Scottie had even made a mask to wear. Lonnie frowned. How had he forgotten? Well, he hadn’t, had he? Not really. It was more a case of time getting away from him. He went to Randy’s for a couple beers, and those couple beers turned into eight. What was he supposed to do about that? He couldn’t control time, let alone turn back the clock. He wasn’t fucking God, was he?
Maybe he’d buy Scottie a chocolate bar tomorrow, surprise him with it at dinner? Sure, that was a good idea. He’d get him one of those Twix bars he liked, because there were two cookies in the package, which made him think he was getting more bang for his buck.
Lonnie made a right onto Mayapple Drive, then a left on Colony Drive, passing six more trick-or-treaters. Then he was on Stanford Road, leaving Boston Hills behind him.
Trees closed in around him, their canopy blotting out the silvered light from the full moon. He flicked on the high beams and kept the speedometer needle at sixty miles an hour. The fog was just as bad as it had been in town, and although there might no longer be kids to worry about, there were plenty of deer in these parts, and some of them were plain suicidal. Last summer he’d been driving back from Randy’s in the early hours of the morning, nicely licked and minding nobody’s business but his
own, when a whitetail bounded right in front of him, like it got its wires crossed or something. It took out the car’s left headlight, crunched the bumper, but at least had the courtesy to die in the process. Lonnie tossed it in the trunk, happy to feast on choice cuts of venison for the next while. The following day he noticed the damage to the car, of course, the blood and fur glued to the broken headlight, but he had no memory of the accident. By the time he discovered the carcass in the trunk a week later it was covered in a squiggling film of maggots, and he had to scoop the goopy remains out with a shovel.
Anyway, a run-in with a suicidal deer wasn’t the only reason Lonnie was driving cautiously. He needed time to react, slow down, block the road, if those out-of-towners came his way. Lonnie didn’t know why Cleavon couldn’t tell him whether they were lookers or not, but Cleavon was like that, a rancorous old crabapple who’d bitch if you hung him with a new rope. Still, if any of the does were half as pretty as the last one—Betty Wilfried, according to her driver’s license—he’d be a happy man. It was a shame pretty Betty had gotten so beat up in the crash. Weasel had been too aggressive, scared her a bit too much, because she’d smashed her car bad enough to break half the bones in her body and face. Still, Lonnie hadn’t complained. A fuck was a fuck, and broken or not, Betty Wilfried had been a great fuck.
Noah knew Steve was wrong, he couldn’t fess up, they had to get rid of the body. Otherwise he was facing prison time—and what was the prison sentence for manslaughter? Five years? Ten? Hell, even one year would be too long. He’d be locked up with murderers and rapists, people who’d been in the slammer before, knew the system, knew how to work the guards. He’d know nothing. He’d be alone, surrounded by sheetrock and iron bars and gang members aligned from the housing projects they came from. They’d each want a piece of a young, straight kid like himself. Some big black or Latino dude trapping him in the shower and telling him how much he was going to love their good time up his sugah ass. And when he wasn’t getting raped he would likely be getting the piss beat out of him in the exercise yard, or the cafeteria, maybe even in his own goddamn cell. Because he’d be a kid killer, pretty low on the totem pole. It wouldn’t matter that the boy’s death had been an accident. The lowlifes he was locked up with would believe what they wanted to believe, rumors would swirl, accounts would become embellished. He’d be finished. Hell, he likely wouldn’t make it to the end of his sentence alive.
World's Scariest Places: Volume Two Page 10
