Not many people came up to him afterward, and the only one besides the minister who looked him in the eyes was Frank. He knew Frank had known his aunt and uncle a long time ago, when he was a boy himself.
Billy was scared of cops, knew cops didn’t like him, so he’d always tried to find somewhere to go on the few occasions when Frank had come to the house. The first time, a few years ago, he’d seen Frank’s truck with the big lights and police decals on it pull into the front yard and he’d gotten scared, figured someone was coming to take him to jail even though he couldn’t remember doing anything wrong. He’d gone out the back of the house and into the shed and just stayed there, not knowing what to do. After a while his uncle had figured out where he’d gone and come into the shed with Frank.
There’d hardly been room in the shed for the three of them. His uncle was a big man too and he had that little half smile of his—he knew Billy probably thought he was in some kind of trouble—when he’d introduced them, both of them towering over Frank in the cramped little shed, Frank looking up at him with those cop’s eyes that Billy had seen everywhere he’d been. Billy didn’t know what he’d done wrong and then he could see Frank’s eyes change as he realized that Billy was actually scared of him, scared that he’d be taken away.
4
Frank dropped Billy off with a quote unquote stern warning to stay the hell away from kids and schoolyards. The rest of the day was just another day in Mayberry. Frank went back to the station, caught up with some paperwork—which he hated and always put off until the very last minute—and chewed Brent out about his cavalier approach to regular shift hours. At least he started to until Brent pre-empted him with an unnecessarily graphic description of his four year old’s bout with fever and diarrhea. His wife had been up with the poor kid all night and Brent had to take over when she just caved. That was the story, anyway, and he was sticking to it. Wheelock came in at the end of his shift and got out of there before Frank could talk to him at all.
The next couple of days were even quieter than usual. It was early September and already the mornings started with an acrid, fallish edge to the air and the low hanging fog over the river that just reminded Frank of the inevitability of winter. It would be a while yet, but it was coming.
There was a student ghetto of sorts on a couple of streets bordering the university and along with a couple of bars downtown it would be—probably—the only source of any disturbance for the next couple of weeks as the students settled in and decided whether they were going to work or party. Even then it would pretty much just be the weekends and Thursday nights. Most of the university people, students and staff alike, tried to make Fridays as light as possible so Thursday nights were open season, both in the beaten-up ‘unofficial’ student housing and in the bars where traditionally the campus jocks and wannabes would butt heads with the locals until they finally figured out that tangling with woods and construction workers wasn’t a good idea.
After that the traditional, uneasy line of demarcation between college kids and townies would settle in around mid October. It had always been like that, even when Frank was a kid in his teens. Nothing had changed.
When he’d come back to town after twenty years of police work in Pittsburgh he’d at first seen that as a good thing, even reassuring. He was too young to retire, just too old to want to continue what he’d been doing and more specifically where he’d been doing it. Until his parents had passed away—his mother first, followed only a year or so later by his father—Frank made dutiful but short visits home, but like adult sons and daughters everywhere he’d beaten himself up about not doing that frequently enough, and especially so now that they were gone. The irony of that—finally coming back to stay only after they’d passed away—wasn’t lost on Frank, but they had been comparatively young and he’d thought time to be on his side. It wasn’t, and by the time he’d realized that it was too late, that phone calls were no substitute for being there, being part of their lives.
When he was in Pittsburgh they’d been only a couple of hundred miles down the road, after all, but after a rotation Frank was usually too wiped out to do anything other than drink a couple of beers and stare at the television set. It had cost him one short-lived marriage, a couple of relationships, and when his dad passed away Frank realized it had also cost him the opportunity to give something meaningful back to his mother and father. He felt adrift, orphaned, and the only touchstone he had was where he had come from.
When the job as chief came along Frank decided to go for it, make the change while he still had time. The implied glamor of the big city homicide pedigree and the hometown history had made him an easy walk-on. It was the perfect set of circumstances, marred by the fact that the timing was years off the mark, too late for his parents to see their son come home.
There was a honeymoon period, but after that ended Frank began to remember why he’d left town in the first place. On the surface the place looked like a Norman Rockwell wet dream, a bucolic college town. Everybody thought they knew everybody else even though they could spend their entire lives without saying more than a dozen words to each other, all of them convinced that it was the best place in the world, even though most of them had never been more than a few hundred miles from where they were born. Most of the town bloodlines were Scotch-Irish, with all the reserve and just plain bloody-mindedness that went with it.
It wasn’t an ‘open-arms’ kind of place.
The rest of the week stayed quiet except for a few of the usual scuffles and a couple of domestics. Thursdays were usually very long days for Frank—he still had to make a point of being around Thursday nights and weekends, not comfortable with just going home and being available by phone. He had two distinct types on the force—old hands like Brent and young inexperienced kids like Wheelock. Both types had their drawbacks.
He didn’t come in until fairly late Friday morning, and he hadn’t even poured a coffee for himself when Lori came in and tossed the local paper on his desk.
“Page five,” she said cryptically, “Scoop’s editorial.”
Frank sighed. Jenkins.
Except, for once, it wasn’t. Instead it was a pile of shit about the need to protect schoolchildren from ‘predators’. A description of a ‘recent incident’ that didn’t mention any names but left little doubt that either Billy Dancer or his evil twin had been caught ‘lurking’–Karl Jamieson, aka Scoop, had really used that word—around a school playground. And how the local police—meaning Frank—didn’t seem to take that stuff seriously.
It was crap. He took the paper with him.
“Karl around?”
The receptionist looked at him strangely. Frank reminded himself to stay cool. He knew the impression he could create when he was pissed off.
“He’s here somewhere, Chief...”
“Thanks.”
Frank just kept on walking past the receptionist’s little pressboard fort and into the large open space, dotted with various cubicles, that served as what Karl Jamieson always referred to as ‘the bullpen’. Steers, more likely, Frank thought. Jamieson’s office was in the corner farthest at the back. He was on the phone when Frank walked in. Frank didn’t wait, waving the rolled up newspaper in Jamieson’s face.
“What the hell was that all about?”
Karl looked at him, annoyed, and then spoke into the phone.
“I’ll get back to you on that, okay? Chief Stallings is here.”
Jamieson never lost a chance to name drop, Frank thought, even though he was probably just ordering lunch. He put down the phone and stared at Frank. He was wearing a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a loosely knotted tie hanging from his collar—his ‘Front Page’ look, no doubt. He probably had a bottle of Jim Beam stuck in a desk drawer, even though if he actually took a drink it would probably make him sick.
“What is it, Frank?”
“That hatchet job you did on Dancer. Not to mention me and the department.”
&nb
sp; Karl got all huffy.
“I didn’t name any names, Frank.”
“You didn’t have to. How many other people in this town look like Dancer?”
Karl grinned.
“It was a pretty good description, wasn’t it?”
Frank felt like grabbing his tie and yanking him across the desk.
“If you’d done something like that to anybody else in this town they’d sue your ass. With Dancer you figure you can get away with it.”
“Just doing my job, Chief.”
“Bullshit. Even if I’d brought him in that’s just a simple loitering charge. Ninety-nine per cent of the real newspapers in the world wouldn’t even bother to write it up. You tried to turn it into a feature article.”
“I thought it was important. I still do.”
“More bullshit. You’ve got no news around here so you just make some up. You make him seem like a child molester.”
“Jeez, Frank—you see a guy like that hanging around a kids’ playground at recess, what the hell do you think he’s there for?”
“He’s friggin’ harmless and you know it. And up here,” Frank tapped himself on the temple, “he isn’t much more than a kid himself. He’s slow, Karl, you know that. Not a mean bone in his body.”
“He could still be a pervert.”
Frank took a very deep, very audible breath and looked over Karl’s head at the wall for a long moment. Karl decided to take a more conciliatory approach.
“Let’s agree to disagree on this one, Frank, okay?”
“Not a chance,” Frank waved a hand at the paper, “There’s nothing in that article—”
“—editorial—”
“—nothing in that piece of shit editorial but innuendo about what he’s doing in a schoolyard and how there should be extra security and God knows what else. All speculation, no facts – ”
Karl seized on that.
“Hold it right there. How much do any of us know about this guy? He’s only been here—what? Five years?” five years in this town not being enough to establish local residence, “We don’t know what he did before that, we don’t know anything about him.”
“Didn’t stop you from cutting him up, though, did it? Where the hell did you get this from in the first place?”
“You know I can’t tell you that, Frank. I can’t reveal sources. Nobody would talk to me.”
“Nobody talks to you now, Scoop.”
5
Adrienne Simmonds had read the paper too. The editorial seemed florid, overblown, and now she felt somewhat ashamed of the whole thing. She still thought she’d been right to call the police, but she’d been surprised when the man from the newspaper followed up. Somehow he’d heard about the incident—she supposed that was his job, and he was certainly better at that part of it than writing. Thankfully her name hadn’t been mentioned, although everybody in the school knew about the incident and knew she’d made the phone call. She was still sure she’d done the right thing, in spite of the condescending attitude the police chief had taken with her.
The editorial’s tone rang of righteous outrage and a tinge of hysteria, an attempt to make the incident into a harbinger of some kind of crisis. Adrienne knew there were probably a lot of people who’d buy into that, especially in a place like this.
She wondered again what she was doing here, other than fulfilling some kind of misguided desire to make a complete change, to cure the hangover from a broken relationship that in itself had been a hangover from her first marriage.
Now it seemed that the pieces of her former life were reconstituting themselves and coalescing into...well, it was a work in progress, wasn’t it? Hopefully it would take her away from what she felt right now.
It was beginning to look like her daughter Emily had been right. She had pleaded that her last year of high school was not the time in her life to be separated from her friends—and that the move wasn’t right for her and probably not her mother either. In the end Emily had stayed behind and Adrienne had gone ahead with the move. It was hard to tell which of them had felt more betrayed by the other.
Adrienne didn’t like it at all—for one thing, friends had never seemed that important to Emily. Either Adrienne had completely misread her own daughter or else she was being abandoned in reverse. She was starting alone in a strange place—it would be difficult enough by itself and even more so without her daughter there. But Emily had argued that it was an awful time to leave behind her friends and everything she’d grown used to just to follow her mother into a town that might not work out anyway. Adrienne couldn’t find any way to refute the logic and knew pulling rank wouldn’t work at all. Emily had turned eighteen in July. She’d lost a year in school—neither Emily or Adrienne thought of it as ‘failed’—since it had coincided with Adrienne’s first separation from Greg, Emily’s father and the man Adrienne had finally divorced. Nothing had been the same since.
They eventually decided—more correctly, Emily did—that Emily could stay with her best friend Julie’s family. Adrienne’s disappointment was not just due to the relative ease with which Emily had decided to let her go on alone– it was also in the way that Emily had suddenly anointed Julie as her ‘best friend’ for the sake of expedience. Adrienne knew that in the manner of teenage girls everywhere, Julie was the pilot fish to Emily’s shark. Bad way to think about your own daughter, she chided herself, but she knew—not without a perverse sense of pride—that at the same age she’d been a shark too.
Something had happened over the summer to change the arrangement, though—and it hadn’t taken long. Emily had called only three weeks after Adrienne had moved—on her own—to Strothwood, and Adrienne knew she’d handled the phone call badly. She’d talked to Emily for close to an hour and came away knowing nothing more specific than that Emily wanted to come and live with her after all. She knew her response should have been to get the facts right first, told Emily that unless the situation was completely unmanageable she should honor her commitment, but all of that evaporated before the fact that she missed Emily, missed being a mother—and she needed support of her own in a strange place that really wasn’t working out. She was lonely. The truth was that she really wanted Emily with her and that for the entire conversation she was walking on eggshells, afraid to say or do anything that would cause Emily to change her mind.
Someone else was thinking about sharks that night. He was driving, and when he was doing this, just driving slowly around through darkened streets, he always felt like what he knew he was...an apex predator.
He liked the term and the feeling it gave him. It was a feeling of power, and it tested him sometimes, tested his control.
Control was necessary, important. He treated the core of the town itself as a no-fly zone. The streets were usually nearly deserted at this time of night, especially in the summer when the students were away, but occasionally an opportunity would present itself that he knew he shouldn’t act on. So far he hadn’t. Too close to home, too much chance that the stark emptiness of the streets would highlight his passing as if a spotlight had been thrown on him. Too much chance that somebody peering fearfully out through parted drapes would make a connection.
He could go out on the highway but he knew from past experience that more often than not it would lead to nothing. It took time and patience, and the small number of strays would have thinned out with the fall weather. He thought he could hold himself back for a while longer.
6
Billy was trying to make himself small—not easy for him under any circumstances and especially not in the tiny diner. He took another drink of the coffee, draining the cup, and then set it back down. The waitress—he wasn’t good with names but thought her name was Dawn—stayed where she was at the other end of the formica counter. She’d always been nice to him before, even smiling at him sometimes, asking if he wanted more coffee even if he still had some, but now it was like he wasn’t there at all.
Billy didn’t read newspapers so he didn�
�t know about the story but he could tell something was wrong. He wanted to ask for more coffee, didn’t want to go outside yet. There were four men at a corner table near the window, and he was somehow aware they were talking about him even though he couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying. They were big, heavy, strong—not as big as Billy but tough—they looked tough. Every now and then one of them would say something and they’d all snicker. The air in the diner felt ugly.
He recognized all of the men, although he didn’t know all their names. He’d just seen them around town, some more than others. They’d never acted this way toward him before, not like this. The waitress went over to them, coffee pot in hand, and started to refill their cups. He heard one of the men say something to her, then heard her say something back. Their voices were pitched low and he couldn’t make out the words. Then he heard the scrape of a chair moving back against the worn linoleum floor and somebody moving toward him.
“The lady wants to lock up and go home,” the man was standing close to him, just behind his left shoulder. His voice was just loud enough for his friends at the table to hear. He was trying to sound like somebody in a movie. He was the biggest one, Billy thought, nearly as big as Billy himself. The man leaned in closer, “Time for you to leave.”
He made Billy feel ashamed, like he wasn’t fit to be there. The man kept standing there, too close. He could hear him breathing through his mouth. Just out of the corner of his eye Billy could see one of the man’s big hands, half curled up on its way to becoming a fist. Billy knew it was cold outside and even though he’d put off leaving the diner he knew it would be better to leave now, make coffee at home if he still wanted it when he got there. He stood up, careful to do it slowly and not bump the man—it came to him, the man’s name was Watts—or give him an excuse to do more.
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