The Second Mouse

by Archer Mayor

  Mel stared sourly at the shot glass he’d just smacked down onto the bar top. “You’re not much fun since you stopped drinking.”

  Ellis glanced up from his Diet Coke and took in the rows of bottles across from them, his face suddenly flushed with guilt. “Feel better, though,” he said in a neutral tone, hoping the poor lighting would shadow his expression.

  “I don’t give a shit about that,” Mel answered him, not moving. “You’re lousy company. That’s all I know. You and Nancy, both. Might as well be goddamned Holy Rollers.”

  Ellis pursed his lips. He didn’t like Mel referring to Nancy. He felt he wore his feelings for her like a scent, available to anyone who took the time to notice. He found himself not mentioning her around Mel, and then worrying that the other man might pick up on the omission. Like the booze—he’d stopped taking it for her sake. This whole thing was driving him crazy.

  They were at Piccolo’s, a bar near Benmont, Bennington’s old mill district and its perpetual low-income neighborhood. It was the kind of establishment that hard drinkers retired to after the polite bars had called it a night. Tellingly, the sheriff’s office was just around the corner. Ellis had resisted Mel’s invitation to join him, fearful of how the atmosphere might undermine his newborn abstinence. But now that he was here, he’d discovered that the old urge was less strong than in the past—something he ascribed solely to Nancy.

  Not that there’d been much choice in the matter. Mel’s invitation had amounted to a command—at least as Ellis had treated it.

  “There,” Mel said suddenly. “That’s the guy.”

  Ellis looked up into the long mirror reflecting the dark room behind them. A young man with long, greasy hair and a soiled red baseball cap was walking among the decals of beer logos adorning the mirror’s surface.

  “See him?” Mel insisted.

  “Yeah,” Ellis acknowledged carefully.

  “That’s High Top—the one I was telling you about.”

  Ellis watched the man, dreading what might be coming next. “Dumb name.”

  “It’s ’cause his brain’s fried. Too much dope. Doesn’t even need it anymore to get where he’s going. Not that that stops him.”

  “What do we want with him?”

  Ellis’s tone clearly lacked the enthusiasm he once might have shown. Mel straightened and gave him a painful jab in the arm. “What the fuck do you care? You his mother? You actually give a shit if he lives or dies?”

  Ellis hesitated. There was a time when he might not have. But the past couple of weeks had felt like a rebirth. Not that he could admit any of that to this man. “No.”

  “What we want with him, douche bag,” Mel continued, “is information. That’s the key to a good business deal. I told you that already. How many times?”

  He expected an answer. Ellis rubbed his arm. “A bunch.”

  “It’s like asking a food nut about the best place to eat,” Mel said. “This guy’s a drug nut. Guess what we’re going to ask him?”

  Ellis covered the small lurch in his stomach by taking a sip of his Coke. Another job in the works. Not exactly a surprise, but it still struck home with a dreaded familiarity. He didn’t answer.

  Mel didn’t notice. He was winding up, his eyes tracking High Top’s journey around the room as he glad-handed a collection of acquaintances. “What do you think about when you think about Bennington?”

  Frankly, Ellis thought, it was Nancy. “I don’t know,” he answered.

  “It’s a port of entry,” Mel told him. “Like a place where cargo ships have to enter and declare what’s on board. You know? Like a customs . . . whatever they call it.”

  Ellis got the point. “Right.”

  “And guess what’s entering?”

  Gee, Ellis thought, the dread deepening. “Drugs?”

  This time it was a slap on the back instead of a jab. “You got it. Now guess who they got to declare to?”

  Ellis didn’t bother. Mel was already laughing. “That’s it, ol’ buddy—you and me. We’re going into the taxing business. Steal from the rich and give to the poor, and we’re the poor. Those guys wanna get off the interstate and avoid Brattleboro and the state cops and come sneaking in the back door, they gotta pay us a little off the top.”

  Mel signaled to the barkeep to bring him another shot. Reluctantly, Ellis looked at High Top with more interest, now that he knew they would inevitably meet. He was scrawny, in his early to mid-twenties, unshaven and unwashed, with the bright eyes and nervous smile of a man with damaged synapses. Not much as a single target—below even the bingo guy they’d rolled a couple of weeks ago.

  But Ellis was less sure of what he’d lead to. Mel’s hypothetical about what they would eventually ask this man had him worried. There were several key drug portals into Vermont, and Bennington, with major highways into both Massachusetts and New York, was one of them—all the more prized because it didn’t straddle a high-visibility interstate.

  And where there was that kind of traffic, there also tended to be some very ruthless men. Not the kind of people they’d dealt with in the past.

  “What’s High Top know?” he asked.

  Mel laughed. “Not what, Ellis, my man—who. In his messed-up, brain-fried way, that pathetic little toad is the keeper of the keys—the guy who’ll lead us to the land of the pharaohs.”

  Ellis didn’t comment. His view of how to reach the promised land was beginning to lie elsewhere, and for the first time in his life, he was pretty sure someone like Mel would not be his passport—with or without High Top.

  But old habits die hard, and Ellis was having difficulty formulating how he could forge a new path. If he was lucky enough to end up with Nancy, he’d also have to be ambitious enough to get a full-time job, something he’d never done. In the meantime, while dreading the inevitability of the familiar, he found himself just going along.

  “You been hearing about all those car radio rip-offs?” Mel was saying.

  “Yeah,” Ellis answered vaguely, not sure that he had.

  Mel motioned with his chin at the reflected scene in the mirror. “Well, he’s the guy doin’ it. I saw him. He’s actually pretty good. Real fast. Made me wonder, though, what he was up to. I mean, why so many, and why all of a sudden?”

  Ellis was unsure if the question was rhetorical or demanded a response. Hedging his bets, he muttered, “Yeah.”

  That seemed adequate. Mel nodded. “Right,” he said, and went back to watching his quarry. A few minutes later, he nudged Ellis in the arm again, this time less violently, and pushed a ten-dollar bill onto the bar top. “Let’s go.”

  Ellis looked up, startled, and saw High Top in the mirror, angling toward the front door. He let out a small groan, unheard by his companion, who’d already shoved free of his stool and was taking off like a raptor.

  They reached the sidewalk on Depot Street in time to see their angular prey doing a jittery march down County Street, heading away from Benmont.

  “Where’s he going?” Ellis asked, regretting the question instantly.

  Mel glared back at him. “The fuck do I know? Just keep your mouth shut and hang back.”

  But it was Mel’s voice that made High Top glance for just a split second over his shoulder at them. Half fried, perhaps, but still clinging to self-preservation. Despite the two of them looking as if they’d merely left the bar at the same time, High Top nervously crossed the street to put some distance between them.

  Mel cursed under his breath. He gestured to his younger colleague to come abreast of him. “Say something loud and give me a push,” he ordered quietly.

  Ellis understood and began a playacting skit that made them look like a couple of drunks sorting through an argument as they staggered down the sidewalk. Across the way, they saw High Top give them a second look and noticed the tension fade from his gait.

  Once more, as so often in the past, Ellis felt the adrenaline beginning to stir in him, along with the self-loathing that increasingly accompanied
it.

  The charade lasted as far as the intersection of County and the heavily traveled Route 7 corridor, one block up. There, whether because he was still pursuing his original destination or merely testing them again, High Top suddenly bolted across the still significant traffic to the far side.

  “Little shit made us,” Mel swore, snapping out of his role and looking for a gap in the flow of cars before them. “Not as brain-dead as I thought. Come on.”

  For a man of his build, Mel could move fast when he had to, and Ellis was hard put both to keep up and not get run over. In the latter effort, however, he caused an oncoming driver to lean on his horn, and like a bell at a horse race, that signal made High Top put his head down and take off.

  They were in an unusual part of Bennington, given the burgeoning development on both sides of them. Here, just north of County Street, in a demilitarized zone separating where the malls were settling in and where the original town was located, there was an undulating spread of lawns and parkland bordering the banks of the Roaring Branch Brook—an offshoot of the Walloomsac that had once powered the area’s many mills. This was open land, a park dotted with a few trees and the scattered buildings of the veterans’ home and the State Office Complex, but it was dark and quiet and easy to get lost in.

  Which was clearly High Top’s intention.

  By the time they hit the other side of Route 7, Mel and Ellis were loping like lumbering hounds after their quarry’s flickering shadow, all subterfuge evaporated. Each was an unlikely choice for a footrace—where the prey appeared light and wiry, he’d been handicapped by self-abuse and poor health, and where the hunters should have been slowed by their bulk alone, their ambition more than compensated.

  All three dove deeper into the park’s gloomy embrace, the latter two closing in.

  A single slip finally ended it. High Top hesitated as he approached a small hedge by the water’s edge, cut right too late to get around it, and felt his feet go out from under him.

  Mel pinned him to the ground like a mastiff on a hare.

  “Jesus H. Christ, you little bastard,” Mel panted, spitting into the grass by the other man’s ear, “what the fuck you take off like that for?”

  “What d’you think?” High Top coughed, squirming to get free. “You came after me. What d’you guys want?”

  Ellis was standing bent over, breathless, his hands on his knees, watching the two of them, unable to speak.

  Mel shifted around so that he sat astride High Top’s waist, his large hands keeping the other man’s shoulders pressed to the ground. The sound of the water nearby forced him to lean forward to be heard. Around them, barely visible between the screening trees and bushes, the town’s lights glimmered like cautious fireflies keeping their distance.

  “We want to find out what you been up to.”

  “I haven’t been up to nuthin’. I don’t even know you guys.”

  “You didn’t need to,” Mel told him. “Now you do.”

  High Top’s eyes moved from one to the other of them fearfully. He was clearly at a loss.

  “Okay,” he said cautiously.

  “Why you been stealing radios?” Mel asked.

  A split second of calculation crossed High Top’s face, virtually unnoticeable, before he smiled and said, “For money, duh.”

  But Mel had seen it clearly. His hands moved in, closer to the small man’s throat.

  “You sure you want to stick with that?” he asked, adding, “Duh?”

  “Maybe some drugs, too,” High Top conceded.

  Mel swiveled his shaggy head toward Ellis. “Maybe some drugs, too, he says.”

  Ellis didn’t respond, still watching. Waiting. Unsure of what was happening, as confused as their victim about exactly why they were doing this.

  Mel returned to High Top. “Who’re you getting these drugs from, little man?”

  Again that tiny crafty glimmer, instantly suppressed. “You know—people. Around.”

  Mel’s thumbs caressed High Top’s carotids. “Let me tell you what I heard. How ’bout that?”

  The smallest of nods, followed by an almost inaudible “Sure.”

  “I heard there was a new pipeline in town. A coupla guys from New York—cousins. That they take in trade and money, both.”

  High Top looked up at him, expecting more.

  So did Ellis, surprised by this new intelligence, but Mel merely asked, “So?”

  High Top hesitated. “So what? I don’t know.”

  “They’re not why you’re stealing radios? A freak like you? How many radios you steal so far?”

  The question caught the kid off guard. “Fifty, maybe.”

  Mel laughed. “You’re a one-man crime wave. Jesus, man. What’re their names?”

  High Top scowled. “Who?”

  For the first time, Mel applied his thumbs where they’d been simply poised. High Top’s eyes snapped open, and he struggled under Mel’s considerable weight.

  Mel let off and let the boy gasp for a few seconds before saying, “You get what’s going on here, you little shit? This is not a conversation. This is where you answer what I ask you. You got that?”

  He was met with a silent nod, and Ellis saw in the addict’s face that his appreciation of the situation had sharpened.

  As had Ellis’s. He looked around nervously, as if hoping a staircase might appear from the night sky to give him a way out.

  “Okay,” Mel said. “Let’s try it again. Who’re the two guys?”

  “What’re you gonna do?” was the response.

  Mel straightened, his surprise obvious. “What d’you give a fuck what I’m gonna do?”

  “You don’t wanna mess with them.”

  Mel leaned forward again, applying pressure to High Top’s throat. “You stupid goofball, I don’t need a guardian angel. Give me the goddamn names.”

  He held on longer than last time, until it looked as though his victim might pass out. Ellis was pacing back and forth, shoving his fists in and out of his pockets, gripped equally by panic and indecision.

  Once more, Mel let go. High Top’s recovery was slower, more measured. His hands, which before had thrashed against Mel’s brawny forearms, merely fluttered to both sides, as if following commands radioed in from far away.

  “I only know one,” he finally said in a whisper all but swept away by the passing water. “Name’s Bob.”

  “Bob what?”

  “Don’t know—funny last name . . . sounds like Nemo or something.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Benmont.” High Top gave the number.

  “What’s the routine?” Mel demanded. “How do they check you out?”

  “They got people they trust.”

  “Who are they? You must’ve passed muster.”

  Ellis didn’t know how the young man managed it, but he actually sneered up at Mel. “You gotta know them, dummy,” he said.

  Ellis never knew what prompted the remark. It seemed like such a foolish thing, to gamble everything on a one-liner.

  But without a doubt, High Top had made a choice, as was clear from his final expression. As Ellis stared in horror and Mel, in disgust, bore down one last time with both thumbs, the look in the kid’s eyes, just before they dilated and went lifeless, was triumphant.

  Mel grunted afterward, placed one hand flat against the body’s chest, and used it to shove himself back up to a standing position.

  Ellis had to remember to breathe. “Mel. You killed him.”

  Mel shrugged. “Yeah. Little asshole.”

  Ellis took a step back, the realization of what had happened in the proverbial blink of an eye overtaking him like a nightmare. “You killed him,” he repeated in a whisper.

  Mel was gazing down at his handiwork appreciatively, as if what decorated the grass was just another project. Ellis had seen the same look that day in the woods when they’d reduced all those glass bottles to silvery glints with the machine guns. Mel’s face was the embodiment of pur
e pleasure following a job well done.

  “Why?” Ellis asked, transfixed by the corpse.

  Mel seemed genuinely baffled. “Why not? Who’s gonna miss him? I got what I wanted.”

  “We could’ve followed him. It was just an address.”

  Mel scowled. “What the fuck is your problem? You know this kid?”

  Ellis shook his head, tearing his eyes away from High Top and finally looking straight into Mel’s shadowy face, studying it as if it had sprouted new features.

  “That’s not the point. You killed him. That’s huge.”

  Mel took two steps toward him, making him flinch. “What d’you think we’re playing at, Ellis?” he asked.

  The answer was absolutely honest. “I don’t know.”

  “You think we just been jerking around, banging people, ripping them off, waiting till we can retire to three hots and a cot and all the butt fucking we can handle in some federal lockup? That what you think?”

  Ellis didn’t answer.

  “That’s your dream, bucko. Not mine. My idea of success is not a shit-hole trailer and a bitchy old lady whose butt is starting to sag. I got a plan.” He tapped the side of his head before pointing at the body nearby. “And that little cockroach doesn’t amount to shit on my shoe along the way.”

  Ellis was momentarily distracted by some of what he’d heard. “You goin’ to dump Nancy?”

  Mel’s eyes widened. “What the . . . ? You got a tongue out for my wife?”

  Ellis held up both hands, feeling his face redden and hoping the darkness would provide enough cover. “Jesus, Mel. Where’d you get that? You’re like one person to me, the two of you. What you just said surprised me, is all.”

  Mollified, Mel shrugged. “Fuck, I don’t know. What do you want to do with him?”

  They both returned their attention to the body, Ellis suddenly grateful for its presence.

  “Whatever it is, we better do it now,” he suggested.

  Chapter 11

  Joe Gunther followed the receptionist across the very room imagined in most visions of bureaucratic hell: huge, no windows, an oppressively low acoustic ceiling, and rows of harsh fluorescent lighting, inhabited by people nestled in tiny chest-high cubicles. It made Joe think of refugees crowded into a sports arena, their identities reduced to a cot in the middle of the floor. In that light, the decorations in the work spaces he passed—family pictures, flowers, posters portraying Hawaii—became life preservers.