GRAVEWORM

by Curran, Tim

  33

  Two shots and three beers into it, Steve Crews was beginning to feel the pain and uncertainty peeling off in layers like ice. He was over at the Jolly Roger Saloon on Elm, almost breathless after the Tigers made a sweep of the Cardinals, Verlander pitching another no-hitter. Comerica Park was sold out and he hadn’t seen much of that in recent years since the glory days of 1984 at Tiger Stadium. It was looking like Detroit just might make it this year, that the hopes and prayers of the fans just might be answered and with Cabrera on board, it just might happen at that.

  Here was reason to celebrate.

  And although Steve was secretly pleased and the alcohol had greased the skids of that pleasure, his mind was still fixed on Tara. Who she was. What she was. And maybe, what she was becoming.

  This is why he came to the Jolly Roger.

  Escapism.

  And there was no purer form of escapism than beer and baseball. The bar crowd was a little light and save for a few rowdy Tiger fans that had gotten off work earlier that day and came right to the bar for pizza, baseball, and a good drunk, it was pretty quiet. Which was okay with Steve. Whenever there was something on his mind, his mouth didn’t work so good and the lost art of conversation was truly lost. Just him at the end of the bar, the rowdies in the back room. A few sprinkled in-between. Chuck Finchley tending bar. And good old Finch, he didn’t say much at all, which made him one hell of a bartender.

  Now that the game was over, there wasn’t much to do but think.

  Which was exactly what Steve had come to the Jolly Roger to avoid.

  Here he was, thirty-three years old, doing pretty good with his career. Nice car. Nice toys. Money in the bank. He figured he had a lot to offer for a guy that had shown up in town six years before in a rusty Toyota without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. He’d landed the job at Northern Financial, cemented his position with sweat and determination and now he was a partner. Things were good. And up until today he was pretty certain that he was in love with a great girl and she was in love with him and, given time, they’d get married and set up housekeeping and everyone would live happily ever after. Oh, he was still in love with her, all right, but he had no fucking idea what she was feeling or even thinking and he was starting to second-guess his plans on the little pink house with the white picket fence and all the accessories that came with it.

  Because, honestly, he didn’t know who Tara was anymore.

  And part of him was thinking it did not want to know.

  Some crazy, half-assed survival mechanism was kicking in, wanting him to pull his business out before it got burned. It was sensing trouble, danger, what have you, and it was trying to point him away from it all, trying to make him recall a life when baseball, beer, and pizza were enough. But a world also that had long ago been flooded-over, scrubbed clean by the rising waters of emotion and attachment.

  “I’m not walking away,” he said then, feeling his voice right down into his chest. “I’m not going anywhere. Not after this long.”

  “What’s that?” Finch said, staring at a Coors commercial on the tube.

  “Said I could use one more.”

  Finch brought a Bud Light over, popped the cap, collected his money.

  Steve thanked him and Finch said, “Yeah.”

  So much work he’d put into this relationship with Tara. The tightwire he had to walk around her sometimes, the mood swings and stubborn tenacity when it came to raising her kid sister up right. Steve had put up with it all, knowing that sooner or later Lisa was going to fade from the scene and go off to college or get a job somewhere and then it would be just the two of them. That was worth the bullshit, he figured. Because he wasn’t the sort of guy who fell in love easy, but when he fell, look out. Tara had come after him originally and with a determination that had scared him more than a little bit. But when the dust settled, he figured he was damn lucky to have her.

  Though still, even now, that sort of attachment frankly scared him.

  Maybe it was Megan’s fault.

  Because before he came scurrying into Bitter Lake with his tail between his legs, there had been a girl named Megan in Milwaukee. She was the polar opposite of Tara: small, petite, blonde. You had to kick her pretty hard to get her to say boo… unlike Tara, who was seething with a dozen conflicting emotions just under the surface on an hourly basis. Megan was wound tight. So tightly that you couldn’t even get a peek at what was going on inside. Then one day, seemingly without rhyme or reason, Megan seized up. She hit the floor of a convenience store and had to be removed by two paramedics. There was nothing physically wrong with her. She just had the mother of all panic attacks and lost it. After that, she couldn’t stand crowds. Then she refused to go outside. Then she refused to step foot outside her own bedroom. Somewhere along the line, she quit eating and bathing and had a complete nervous breakdown.

  Steve hung in there through it all.

  For a year he hung in there.

  But Megan never recovered. Not really. All the secret terrors and anxieties she’d worked so hard all her life to keep under lid had come bursting out. And never, ever would they go back in again. The last Steve saw of her, she was shuttled off to a private mental health facility in Illinois by her father.

  And sitting there at the Jolly Roger, Steve could still see that look in her eyes. Like she had peered directly into the inner, violent turmoil of her own soul, saw her true face, and in seeing it would never be the same again.

  What really scared him was that Tara had a look like that in her eyes when he’d visited her today.

  And what exactly did he think about that? He didn’t know, not for sure, only that it reminded him too much of the Megan situation and the idea of that insanity happening to Tara was a screw slowly turning in his belly. He didn’t think he could go through something like that again. And what were the odds that he’d fall in love with two separate women and they’d both lose their minds? Chances seemed to be wholly against it. Yet, he had the awful, inescapable feeling that it was happening.

  And judging from Tara, it might be worse this time.

  Megan had just lost it, become completely nonfunctional in every sense of the word. But with Tara it was a slightly different flavor. She seemed functional, perhaps too functional, too driven, too fixated. Like there was something out there she was setting her sights on and nothing in this world or out of it could stop her from reaching it.

  Jesus.

  But you could see it in her eyes, Steve knew, that deadly intensity. She might look at you but she wasn’t seeing you. She was looking right through you, right through walls and furniture and the world at large… looking at something out there. Something she did not dare turn her back on, if that nonsense she was spewing could be believed.

  She had said some things that not only made no sense but were downright disturbing. There were things out there, she claimed, that were waiting for you to relax so they could creep up and get you, take you unaware. You could not relax your vigilance. She had seemed almost militant about this.

  Monsters, she said.

  What the hell did that mean? Was it some kind of symbolic or metaphorical thing, a representation of life’s bullshit? Monsters?

  Monsters, Steve. Fucking monsters. When the lights go out, that’s when the monsters come.

  Good God.

  Steve swallowed down his beer in one drink, never having felt so utterly helpless in his life. Even the Megan thing had not hit him like this. Because, honestly, that had come from inside Megan, but this thing with Tara… he could not be sure that it wasn’t as much of an external influence as an internal one.

  He felt desperate.

  Edgy.

  A blind man fumbling about in the darkness. He wanted to help Tara, get her through this, but where could you even start? He needed something. A point of reference and he didn’t even have that.

  Nobody can help me, Steve. This is the jungle. And it’s dark.

  “Hey, Finch,” h
e said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Another beer down here. And another one after that.”

  “Okay.”

  When in doubt, Steve figured, get good and fucked up.

  34

  The phone booth.

  Tara stood there waiting, a chill breeze coming off Bitter Lake and rustling fallen leaves around the beach house. She checked her watch. She was on time. He had said 9:30. No doubt he would make her wait, twist the knife in her a little because that’s how he enjoyed himself.

  Ring, she thought.

  The beach house sat on a tree-lined lick of land that jutted out into the lake. There was nothing out there but the beach, the house, the cold water lapping at the sand. She could not have imagined a more desolate spot than this. In the summer, it was crowded, but once fall pinched a blush into the foliage it was deserted. Dead.

  She lit a cigarette, the glow from her lighter almost blinding in the gloom.

  She listened to the water breaking on the sand, heard a far-off cry of some lake bird. It sounded sad, displaced. The wind blew, driving a chill up her spine.

  Behind her, the road wound out, connecting the beach with Lyman Park. She could see it over there, a few stray streetlights casting spotty illumination in the cavernous, sullen darkness. Empty benches. An abandoned playground. The war memorial. All the picnic tables had been taken away. Nothing over there but the bandshell far in the distance, the big oaks and elms creaking in the wind, leaves rustling through the yellowing grasses. The hooks on the flagpole rope dinged out a hollow rhythm. A lonesome sound.

  Tara pulled off her cigarette, beginning to feel the impatience like teeth inside her, gnawing.

  The phone rang.

  She reached out for it with an almost reflexive action… then stayed her hand.

  Let him wait… let him get nervous.

  A voice in her head demanded to know exactly what she thought she was doing, gambling with Lisa’s life, but she did not know. Only that this was more than predator and prey now, more than victimizer and victim… the lines were slowly being blurred. Maybe it was time the boogeyman learned that.

  But Lisa… Jesus, he has your fucking sister!

  Tara picked up the phone. The receiver was cold against the side of her face. “I’m here,” she said, not a hint of nerves in her voice.

  “Why didn’t you answer?” the boogeyman wanted to know and she could almost smell his hot and fetid breath over the line. “When I call, you answer. You better not even think of fucking with me, Tara. This is my game; not yours. I make the rules. You do as I say.”

  “I will,” she said, exhaling smoke into the night.

  “See that you do.” He paused. There was a rubbery noise like he was chewing on his lip. “This is all about trust, Tara. About keeping promises… do you understand that?”

  “Yes. I understand. I always keep my promises. Always. And I expect others to keep them to me.”

  Like before, his breathing spiked. An animal sensing danger. “Listen to me, cunt. Don’t you threaten me. You piss me off and I’ll kill your sister. I’ll cut her tits off and send them to you. Do you understand me?”

  Tara bristled, but did not shake. “Yes. I only want you to understand me. You said if I played the game the way you wanted it played that you would give my sister back to me. I will play. Just the way you say. I will keep my promise. And you had better keep yours. I’ll do what you want, whatever it is, but I want my sister back, alive and unharmed. That’s the deal. I will not go back on my promise and you better not go back on yours.”

  This shook him, his breathing was very hard, almost rasping now. He was making moist, blubbery sounds like there was too much spit in his mouth. “You don’t threaten me! You fucking silly cunt! I have your sister! I’m in charge! I call the shots! I’m the one with the power and you had better—”

  “Shut up,” she said and he did. Immediately.

  Maybe it was her tone, but his buttons had surely been pressed and he acted accordingly. A fear rose up in her that he might hang up, but he didn’t. He was still on the other end, breathing.

  “I’m not threatening you. We have a game to play. Then I want my sister. You will give her to me. If you don’t…” Tara paused, feeling something hot and black bubbling up inside her. “… if you don’t, I’ll come for you. I’m very patient. I can wait years to find you, but I will find you. The law will not be involved. Just you and me. That’s my promise. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She was expecting him to rant and rave and several times in the ensuing silence, he started to breathe very hard, grinding his teeth and making something like a low growling sound in his throat… but he did not rant. “I understand,” he said in a voice that was almost wounded. “Now we understand each other.”

  Tara knew without a doubt that it had been the very tone of her voice that had clipped his wings and de-nutted him. Here was a man who was used to being chastised by a woman. Maybe his mother. Maybe his wife or sister. There was something in that hard-edged, inflexible yet female tone of her voice that had stopped him. Tara made a note of it.

  “You’re over at the bandshell, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Tara knew he was lying. There was a weak, almost childish undertone to his voice now like a little boy that had been caught playing with himself. She looked across the lake toward the park. The shadowy hulk of the bandshell. “Yes, you are. You’re over there. I can almost feel you.”

  “You keep this shit up, Tara,” he said, trying to reinsert his control, “your sister will be feeling something, too. She’ll be feeling my knife slitting her throat.”

  “That’s enough.”

  Ah, he’d found a weak spot and now he attacked it. “I can shut her fucking air off anytime I choose, Tara. I can make her suffocate down there. Do you have any idea what it’s like to suffocate in a box down in the ground? Do you know how she’ll suffer… gasping for air?”

  Crude. Pedestrian, really. It was supposed to make her swoon with terror, make her beg his forgiveness. But she was not begging. She was intuiting, feeling, knowing what he was and what he wasn’t and understanding that like any puppet, there were certain strings you could pull and certain others you could not.

  “Tell me about the game.”

  “On the stage at the bandshell you’ll find a box. Inside the box is something you’ll need to start playing the game. Come and get it. Wait by the phone. I’ll call you.”

  “What’s in the box?”

  He started giggling and hung up.

  Tara leaned against the white clapboard wall of the beach house and tried to catch her breath. There was something inside her that was enjoying this too much, that was asserting its dominance a little more with each passing hour. But she was still a woman in mortal fear of her sister’s life and now and again, it was this that simply floored her. Floored her and made her feel like she had been stepped on.

  “Get it together,” she said. “We’ve got a game to play.”

  And the scary thing was, it didn’t even sound like her own voice.

  35

  Frank Duvall came into the Jolly Roger in a bad mood.

  It had been one of those days when you want to jump in the deepest hole you can find and then pull the dirt in after you.

  Frank was a building contractor. The guy you called when you were putting up a house and you didn’t want to have to go through the bullshit of separately contracting carpenters and plumbers and electricians and the whole ball of wax. You called Frank and Frank jobbed it all out for you. You didn’t deal with twenty people, you dealt with one: Frank.

  Thing was, the housing market had been in a slump for years now and lowering the interest rates and prime lending hadn’t done shit to revitalize it. It was so low that its belly was leaving drag marks on the ground which meant that every contractor and construction firm and tradesman out there was doing everything but selling off their sisters to get any work they could. Every
one was low-balling, bidding in the basement, and more than one contractor had gone toes-up trying to underbid his competitor. That was the reality of the slump. Nothing like the good, fat days when there were so many jobs you had to literally shut the phone off to stave the flow of offers.

  Now it was bidding.

  You put in secret, sealed bids and then chewed your fingernails to the nubs and hoped by God and the saints that yours was the low one because if you didn’t generate some income and pretty soon, not only would the banks be taking the farm from you but the very air you breathed.

  He’d put in three bids this week. One was for a tract of low-income housing on the east side of Bitter Lake. The other was for an assisted-living complex out by the Mission Point Clinic. And the third was for an executive house on the far shore of the lake that some rich cat from Chicago wanted to put up. These were three nice deals, if you could land them. They would curl up in your lap like cozy, fat tabbies and purr their delight while you were purring yours. The low-income housing was federally-funded which meant a steady cash flow; the assisted living complex was strictly corporate, big bucks; and the executive house… well, sweet and sweet, guys like that rich fellah had money to burn.

  So Frank had been excited.

  He was seeing green. Problem was, it wasn’t just local outfits bidding on these, but contractors and firms from as far away as Green Bay and Milwaukee. Big, state-wide outfits that could afford to bid low because they could make it up in the sheer volume of business they were doing. So, there were an awful lot of thumbs in these pies. The low-income housing project went to a construction joint out of Racine. Strike one. Then the assisted-living complex went to a big-money contractor out of Appleton. Strike two. Frank wasn’t liking it much by this point and his fingers were a little sore from all the nail-chewing he’d been doing.

  But he was still at bat.

  The executive home could tide him over nice.