by Still Life
Eleven
The commercial district of Medicine Creek, Kansas, consisted of three dun-colored blocks of brick and wooden shopfronts. It took Corrie three, perhaps four heartbeats to reach its edge. As she jammed on the accelerator, the rusted frame of the Gremlin began to shake. There was a pile of some three dozen tapes littering the space between the front seats: her favorite death metal, dark ambient, industrial, and grindcore music. She riffled through them with one hand, passing over Discharge, Shinjuku Thief, and Fleshcrawl before finally selecting Lustmord. The dislocated, eldritch sounds of “Heresy, Part I” began to fill the small car. Her mother refused to let her play her music out loud in the house, so she’d retrofitted a tape player to the old Gremlin.
Speaking of her dear, nurturing parent, it was going to be a bitch going home. By now, her mother would be half drunk, half hungover—the worst combination. She decided she’d drop this Pendergast guy off at the old Kraus place, then go park under the powerlines and kill a few hours with a book.
She glanced over at the FBI man. “So, what’s with the black suit? Somebody die?”
“Like you, I’m rather partial to the color.”
She snorted. “What’s this catch you were talking about?”
“I need a car and driver.”
Corrie had to laugh. “What, me and my stretch AMC Gremlin?”
“I came by bus and I’m finding it rather inconvenient to be on foot.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. The muffler is shot, the thing goes through a quart of oil a week, there’s no AC, and the interior is so full of fumes I’ve got to keep the windows open, even in winter.”
“I propose compensation of a hundred dollars a day for the car and driver, plus a standard rate of thirty-one cents per mile for fuel and depreciation.”
A hundred bucks was more money than Corrie had ever seen at one time. This couldn’t be happening, it had to be some kind of bullshit. “If you’re a hotshot FBI special agent, where’s your own car and driver?”
“Since I’m technically on vacation, I haven’t been issued a car.”
“Yeah, but why me?”
“Quite simple. I need someone who knows Medicine Creek, who has a car, and has nothing better to do. You fit the bill. You’re no longer a minor, correct?”
“Just turned eighteen. But I’ve got another year of high school. And then I’m out of this Kansas shithole.”
“I hope to have concluded my work here long before school begins next month. The important thing is, youdo know Medicine Creek—don’t you?”
She laughed. “If hating is knowing. Have you thought about what the sheriff’s going to think about this arrangement?”
“I expect he’ll be glad you found gainful employment.”
Corrie shook her head. “You don’t know much, do you?”
“That lack of knowledge is what I hope to rectify. Leave me to deal with the sheriff. Now, do we have a deal, Miss Swanson?”
“A hundred bucks a day? Of course we have a deal. And please, do I look like a ‘Miss Swanson’ to you? Call me Corrie.”
“I shall call you Miss Swanson and you shall call me Special Agent Pendergast.”
She rolled her eyes and swept purple hair out of her face. “Okay,Special Agent Pendergast.”
“Thank you, Miss Swanson.”
The man slid a wallet out of his suit coat and removed five hundred-dollar bills. She could hardly take her eyes off the money as he casually unwired her broken glove compartment, placed the bills inside, and wired it back up. “Keep a written record of your mileage. Any overtime beyond eight hours daily will be paid at twenty dollars an hour. The five hundred dollars is your first week’s pay in advance.”
He pulled something else out of his suit coat. “And here is your cell phone. Keep it turned on at all times, even when charging at night. Do not make or receive personal calls.”
“Who am I gonna call in Shit Creek?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. And now, if you’d be so kind as to turn the car around and give me a tour of the town?”
“Here goes.” Corrie glanced in her rearview mirror to make sure the coast was clear. Then she swung the wheel around violently, braking and accelerating at the same time. The Gremlin slewed around in a one-eighty, tires squealing, and ended up pointed back in the direction of town. She turned to Pendergast and grinned. “I learnedthat playingGrand Theft Auto on the computers at school.”
“Very impressive. However, I must insist on one thing, Miss Swanson.”
“What’s that?” she said, accelerating back toward town.
“You must not break the law in my employ. All traffic rules must be strictly obeyed.”
“Okay,okay. ”
“The speed limit on this road is forty-five, I believe. And you have not buckled your seatbelt.”
Corrie glanced down and saw she was going fifty. She eased down to the correct speed, then slowed even further as they entered the outskirts of town. She tried to fish the seatbelt out from behind the seat, the car swerving back and forth as she drove with her knee.
“Perhaps it would be more convenient if you pulled off to the side of the road to do that?”
Corrie gave an irritated sigh and pulled off, retrieved the belt, and buckled herself in. She started up again with another screech of rubber.
Pendergast settled back. The passenger seat was broken, and he reclined into a semi-supine position, his head just barely at the level of the window. “The tour, Miss Swanson?” he murmured, eyes half closed.
“Tour? I thought you were kidding.”
“I am anxious to see the sights.”
“You must be on drugs. The only sights around here are fat people, ugly buildings, and corn.”
“Tell me about them.”
Corrie grinned. “Okay, sure. We’re now approaching the lovely hamlet of Medicine Creek, Kansas, population three hundred and twenty-five and dropping like a stone.”
“Why is that?”
“Are you kidding? Only a dipshit would stay in a town like this.”
There was a pause.
“Miss Swanson?”
“What?”
“I can see that an insufficient, or perhaps even defective, socialization process has led you to believe that four-letter words add power to language.”
It took Corrie a moment to parse what Pendergast had said. “ ‘Dipshit’ isn’t a four-letter word.”
“That depends on whether you hyphenate it or not.”
“Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Joyce all used four-letter words.”
“I see I am dealing with a quasi-literate. It is also true that Shakespeare wrote:
In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls,
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay.”
Corrie looked at the man reclining in the seat beside her, his eyes still half closed. He was seriously weird.
“Now, may we continue with the tour?”
Corrie glanced around. The cornfields were reappearing on both sides of the road. “Tour’s over. We’ve already passed through town.”
There was no immediate response from Pendergast, and for a moment Corrie worried that his offer would be rescinded and all that money in the glove compartment would vanish back into the black suit. “I could always show you the Mounds,” she added.
“The Mounds?”
“The Indian Mounds down by the creek. They’re the only thing of interest in the whole county. Somebody must’ve told you about them, the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives’ and all that bullshit.”
Pendergast seemed to think about this for a moment. “Perhaps later we will see the Mounds. For the present, please turn around and pass through town once again, as slowly as possible. I wouldn’t want to miss a thing.”
“I don’t think I’d be
tter do that.”
“Why not?”
“The sheriff won’t like it. He doesn’t like cruising.”
Pendergast closed his eyes completely. “Didn’t I say I would concern myself with the sheriff?”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
She pulled to the side of the road, made a nice three-point turn, and headed back through town at a crawl. “On your left,” she said, “is the Wagon Wheel Tavern, run by Swede Cahill. He’s a decent guy, not too smart. His daughter is in my class, a real Barbie. It’s mostly a drinking establishment, not much food to speak of except Slim Jims, peanuts, the Giant Pickle Barrel—and, oh, yeah, chocolate eclairs. Believe it or not, they’re famous for their chocolate eclairs.”
Pendergast lay motionless.
“See that lady, walking down the sidewalk with the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo? That’s Klick Rasmussen, wife of Melton Rasmussen, who owns our local dry goods store. She’s coming back from lunch at the Castle Club, and in that bag are the remains of a roast beef sandwich for her dog, Peach. She won’t eat at Maisie’s on account of Maisie being her husband’s girlfriend before they got married about three hundred years ago. If only she knew what Melton gets up to with the gym teacher’s wife.”
Pendergast said nothing.
“And that dried-up old bag coming out of the Coast to Coast with a rolling pin is Mrs. Bender Lang, whose father died when their house was burned down by an arsonist thirty years ago. They never found out who did it, or why.” Corrie shook her head. “Some think old Gregory Flatt did it. He was the town drunk and kind of nuts, and one day he just sort of wandered off into the corn and disappeared. Never found his body. He used to talk about UFOs all the time. Personally, I think he finally got his wish and was abducted. The night he disappeared there were some strange lights in the north.” She laughed derisively. “Medicine Creek is an all-American town, and everybody’s got a skeleton in his closet. Orher closet.”
This, at least, roused Pendergast, who half opened his eyes to look at her.
“Oh, yes. Even that dippy old lady whose house you’re staying in, Winifred Kraus. She may act pious, but it’s all a crock. Her father was a rum-runner and moonshiner. Bible-thumper, too, on top of that. But that isn’t all. I heard that when old Winifred was a teenager, she was known as the town vamp.”
Pendergast blinked.
Corrie snickered, rolled her eyes. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going on in Medicine Creek. Like Vera Estrem, who’s doing the wild thing with the Deeper butcher. If her husband ever finds out, there’s going to be blood. Dale Estrem’s the head of the Farmer’s Co-op and he’s the meanest man in Medicine Creek. His grandfather was a German immigrant and during World War II he went back to fight for the Nazis. You can imagine what the town thought of that. The grandfather never returned. Screwed the whole family, basically.”
“Indeed.”
“We’ve got our share of nutcases, too. Like that tinker who comes through here once a year and camps out in the corn somewhere. Or Brushy Jim, who did one tour too many in Vietnam. They say he fragged his lieutenant. Everybody’s just waiting for him to ‘go postal’ one of these days.”
Pendergast had lain back in the seat again. He looked asleep.
“Anyway. There’s the Rexall Drug. That empty building is where the Music Shop used to be. There’s Calvary Lutheran Church. It’s Missouri Synod. The pastor is John Wilbur. A fossilized specimen if ever there was one.”
There was no response from Pendergast.
“We are now passing Ernie’s Exxon. Don’t get your car fixed there. That’s Ernie himself at the pump. His son’s the biggest pothead in Cry County and old Ernie doesn’t have a clue. And that old wooden building is Rasmussen’s, the dry goods store I told you about. Their motto is, ‘If you can’t find it here, you don’t need it there.’ I’ve always wondered where ‘there’ was. There’s the sheriff’s office on the left, but I hardly need to pointthat place out. And there’s Maisie’s on the right. Her meatloaf is just edible. Her desserts would give a hyena the runs. Uh-oh, I knew it. Here he comes.”
Corrie watched in the rearview mirror as the sheriff’s cruiser pulled out of the alleyway, lights flashing.
“Hey,” she said to the motionless Pendergast. “Wake up. I’m getting pulled over.”
But Pendergast seemed sound asleep.
The sheriff came right up behind her and gave his siren a crank. “Please pull off to the side of the road,” his voice rasped through the loudspeaker atop the car. “Remain inside your vehicle.”
It was the same thing that had happened to her at least ten times before, only this time Corrie had Pendergast in the car. She realized the sheriff probably hadn’t seen him, he was sunk so low in the seat. His eyes remained closed even through the siren and the noise. Maybe, she thought, he was dead. He certainly looked dead.
The door of the cruiser flung open and the sheriff came sauntering up, billy club flapping at his side. He placed his meaty palms on the open passenger window and leaned in. When he saw Pendergast, he jerked back abruptly. “Jesus!” he said.
Pendergast opened one eye. “Problem, Sheriff?”
Corrie enjoyed the look that came over the sheriff’s face. His entire face flamed red, from the fuzz-covered folds of skin piled up against his collar to the tops of his hair-clogged ears. She hoped Brad would age just like his father.
“Well, Agent Pendergast,” Hazen said, “it’s just that we don’t allow cruising back and forth through town. This is the third time she’s been through.”
The sheriff paused, obviously awaiting some kind of explanation, but after a long silence it became clear he wasn’t going to get any.
At length, Hazen pushed himself away from the car. “You may go on your way,” he said.
“Since you’ve taken an interest in our movements,” said Pendergast in his lazy drawl, “I should inform you that we’ll be driving through town again, and perhaps even a fifth time, while Miss Swanson shows me the sights. After all, Iam on vacation.”
As Corrie looked at the darkening expression on Sheriff Hazen’s face, she wondered if this so-called Special Agent Pendergast really knew what he was doing. It was no joke making an enemy like Hazen in a town like Medicine Creek. She’d been stupid enough to do it herself.
“Thank you for your concern, Sheriff.” Pendergast turned to her. “Shall we go, Miss Swanson?”
She hesitated a moment, looking at Sheriff Hazen. Then she shrugged.What the hell, she thought, as she accelerated from the curb with a little screech and a fresh cloud of black smoke.
Twelve
The sun was settling into a bloody patch of cloud along the horizon as Special Agent Pendergast exited Maisie’s Diner, accompanied by a slender man in a Federal Express uniform.
“They told me I’d find you in there,” the man said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”
“Quite all right,” Pendergast replied. “I wasn’t especially hungry.”
“If you’ll sign for it now, I’ll leave everything by the back door.”
Pendergast signed the proffered form. “Miss Kraus will show you where to put it all. Would you mind if I take a look?”
“Help yourself. Takes up half the truck.”
The shiny FedEx truck was parked outside the diner, looking out of place on the dusty, monochromatic street. Pendergast peered into its interior. Along one wall were perhaps a dozen large boxes. Some had labels readingPERISHABLE—CONTENTS PACKED IN ICE .
“They’re all from New York,” the driver said. “Starting a restaurant or something?”
“It’s my deliverance from Maisie.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Everything seems to be in order, thank you.”
Pendergast stepped back and watched the truck glide off into the soupy evening. Then he began strolling east, away from the dying glow of the horizon. Within five minutes, he had left the town of Medicine Creek behind. The road stretched ahead like a dark faultline in the
corn.
He quickened his pace. His errand was a vague one, an intuition more than a certainty. Intuition, Pendergast knew, was the end result of the most sophisticated kind of reasoning.
Twilight and crows rose from the fields, and the smell of cornstalks and earth drifted on the air. Headlights appeared, grew larger, and then a huge semi-trailer came shuddering past, leaving dust and diesel in its wake.
Two miles out of town, Pendergast stopped. A dirt track ran away from the road here, angling off to the left between walls of corn. Pendergast followed it, moving with long silent strides. The track began to rise more sharply, heading for a dark cluster of trees on the horizon, surrounding three dark low outlines framed against the dusky sky: the Mounds. Leaving the corn behind, the track turned into a trail. Ahead were the trees, giant cottonwoods with massive trunks, bark as rough as fractured stone. Broken limbs lay scattered on the ground, clawlike branches upturned.
As he entered the shadowy confines of the grove, Pendergast paused to look back. The land fell away in a long, gentle declivity toward the town. The distant streetlights formed a glowing cross in the sea of dark corn. The Gro-Bain plant lay south of town, a low cluster of lights all by itself. The creek lay between them, a meandering line of cottonwoods that snaked through the landscape of corn. As flat as the land looked at first sight, it had its gentle undulations, its rises and its bottomlands. The point on which he stood was the highest for many miles.
The summer darkness had fallen heavily on the land. If anything, the air had grown muggier. A few bright planets glowed in the dying sky.
Pendergast turned and walked deeper into the darkness of the grove, becoming virtually invisible in his black suit. He followed a trail that wandered uncertainly through rabbitbrush and oak scrub. After another quarter mile, Pendergast stopped again.
The Mounds were just ahead.
There were three of them, low and broad, arranged in a triangle, rising twenty feet above the surrounding land. The flanks of two of the mounds had worn away, exposing limestone ledges and heavy boulders underneath. The cottonwood trees were thicker here and the shadows were very deep.
