by Laird Barron
"Dogs woulda ripped his balls off."
"I want the cameras. That's it."
"Okay. Where?"
"Where . . .the gate, for certain. Front door. Pool building. Back yard. We don't use the tool shed. Savage can run everything through there. Guess I'll need to hire a security guy—"
"A couple of guys."
"A couple of guys, right. Savage can take care of that too."
"It'll be a job. A few days, at least."
"Yeah? Well, sooner he gets started . . . ."
"Okay. Is that all?"
Wallace nodded. "For now. I haven't decided. Night, Dee."
"Night, Boss."
7.
Billy Savage of Savage and Sons came in before noon the following day and talked to Delaney about Wallace's latest security needs. Savage had silver, greased down hair, a golfer's tan and a denture-perfect smile. Wallace watched from his office window as Savage and Delaney walked around the property. Savage took notes on a palm-sized computer while Delaney pointed at things. It took about an hour. Savage left and returned after lunch with three vans loaded with men and equipment. Delaney came into the office and gave Wallace a status report. The guys would be around for two or three days if all went according to plan. Savage had provided him a list of reliable candidates for security guards. Wallace nodded blearily. He was deep into a bottle of blue label Stoli by then. He'd told Delaney he trusted his judgment—Hire whoever you want, Dee. Tell Cecil to leave Helen be for a while. I'm sick of that screaming.
She's asleep, Mr. S. They doped her up last night and she's been dead to the world ever since.
Oh. Wallace rubbed his eyes and it was night again. He lolled in his leather pilot's chair and stared out at the cruel stars and the shadows of the trees. "You have to do something, Wally, old bean. You really do." He nodded solemnly and took another swig. He fumbled around in the dark for the phone and finally managed to thumb the right number on his speed dialer. Lance Pride, of the infamous Pride Agency, sounded as if he had been going a few rounds with a bottle himself. But the man sobered rather swiftly when he realized who had called him at this god-awful hour. "Wallace. What's wrong?"
Wallace said, "It's about the accident."
"Yeah. I thought it might be." And after nearly thirty seconds of silence, Pride said, "Exactly what do you want? Maybe we should do this in person—"
"No, no, nothing heavy," Wallace said. "Write me the book on the Choates. Forward and back."
Pride laughed bleakly and replied that would make for some unpleasant bedtime reading, but not to worry. "Are we looking at . . .ahem, payback?" He had visited the hospital, sent flowers, etcetera. Back in the olden days, when Wallace was between wives and Pride had only gotten started, they frequented a few of the same seedy haunts and closed down their share. Of course, if Wallace wanted satisfaction over what had happened to Helen, he need but ask. Friend discount and everything. The detective was not a strong-arm specialist per se, however he had a reputation for diligence and adaptation. Before the arrival of Delaney, Wallace had employed him to acquire the goods on more than one recalcitrant landowner—and run off a couple that became overly vengeful. Pride was not fussy about his methods; a quality that rendered him indispensable. "I'll skin your cat, all right," was his motto.
Wallace thanked him and disconnected. He stared into darkness, listening for the strange, intermittent cries from his wife's room.
8.
It was a busy week. On Tuesday, Doctor Green paid a visit, shined a light in his eyes and took his pulse and asked him a lot of pointed questions and wrote a prescription for sleeping pills and valium. Doctor. Green wagged his finger and admonished him to return to physical therapy—Hesse, the massively thewed therapist at the Drover Clinic had tattled regarding Wallace's spotty attendance. Wednesday, the hospital sent a private ambulance for Helen and whisked her off to her monthly neurological examination. She came home in the afternoon with a heart monitor attached to her chest. Kate told Wallace it was strictly routine, they simply wanted to collect data. She smiled a fake smile when she said it and he was grateful.
He sat with Helen for a couple of hours in the afternoons while Kate did laundry and made the bed and filled out the reams of paperwork necessary to the documentation of Helen's health care service. Helen was losing weight. There were circles beneath her vacant eyes and she smelled sick in the way an animal does when it stops eating and begins to waste from the inside. There was also the crack in her face. The original small fracture had elongated into a moist fissure. Wallace gazed in queasy fascination at the pink, crusty furrow that began at her hairline and closed her right eye and blighted her cheekbone. The doctors had no explanation for the wound or its steady encroachment. They had taken more blood and run more scans, changed some medications and increased the dosage of others and indicated in the elegant manner of professional bearers of bad tidings that it was a crap shoot.
Meanwhile, men in coveralls traipsed all over the grounds setting up alarms and cameras; Delaney interviewed a dozen or so security guard applicants from the agency Billy Savage recommended.
Wallace observed from the wings, ear glued to the phone while his subordinates in Seattle and abroad informed him about the status of his various acquisitions and investments. His team was soldiering on quite adequately and he found his attention wandering to more immediate matters: securing his property from the depredations of that ghoulish figure and getting to the bottom of the Choate mystery.
Pride had the instincts of a blue ribbon bird dog and he did not disappoint Wallace's expectations. The detective only required three days to track down an eyewitness to history, one Kurt Bruenig of the Otter Creek Bruenigs.
"The Choates were unsavory, you bet." Kurt Bruenig wiped his mustache, took a long sip of ice tea. A barrel of a man, with blunt fingers, his name stitched on the breast of an oil-stained coverall. His wrecker was parked outside their window booth of the Lucky Bucket in downtown Olympia. "Nasty folk, if you must know. Why do you want to know, Mr. Smith?"
Wallace's skull felt like a soccer ball. He cracked the seal on a packet of aspirin and stirred seltzer water in a shabby plastic drinking glass. He swallowed the aspirin and chased them with the seltzer and held on tight while his guts seesawed into the base of his throat.
"Somethin' wrong?"
"How's your lunch?" Wallace gestured at the man's demolished fish and chips basket.
"Fine."
"Yes? How's the fat check you got in your pocket? Look, there's more in it for you, but I'm asking, and my business is mine." Wallace caught Delaney's eye at the bar, and Delaney resumed watching the Dodgers clobber the Red Sox on the big screen.
"Hey, no problem." Bruenig shrugged affably. Tow truck drivers dealt with madmen on a daily basis. "The Choates . . .our homestead was the next one over, butted up against Otter Creek."
"Pretty area," Wallace said. He placed a small recorder on the table and adjusted the volume. "Please speak clearly, Mr. Bruenig. You don't mind, do you?"
"Uh, no. Sure. It went to hell. Anyways, they were around before us, 'bout 1895. My great-granddaddy pitched his tent in 1910. Those old boys were cats 'n' dogs from the get-go. The Choates were Jews—claimed to be Jews. Had some peculiar customs that didn't sit well with my kin, what with my kin bein' Baptists and all. Not that my great-granddaddy was the salt of the earth, mind you—he swindled his way into our land from what I've been told. I suppose a fair amount of chicanery watered my family tree. We come from Oklahoma and Texas, originally. Those as stayed behind got rich off of cattle and oil. Those of us as headed west, you see what we did with ourselves." He nodded at the wrecker, wiped his greasy fingers on a napkin. "My dad and his tried their hands at farmin'. Pumpkins, cabbage. Had a Christmas tree farm for a few years. Nothin' ever came of it. My sister inherited when my dad passed away. She decided it wasn't worth much, sold out to an East Coast fella. Same as bought the Choate place. But the Choates, they packed it in first. Back in '83—right after thei
r house burned down. We heard one of 'em got drunk and knocked over a lantern. Only thing survived was the barn. Like us, there weren't many of them around at the end. Morgan, he was the eldest. His kids, Hank and Carlotta—they were middle-aged, dead now. Didn't see 'em much. Then there was Josh and Tyler. I was in school with those two. Big, big boys. They played line on a couple football teams that took state."
"How big would you say they were?" Wallace asked.
"Aw, that's hard to say. Josh, he was the older one, the biggest. Damned near seven foot tall. And thick—pig farmers. I remember bumpin' into Josh at the fillin' station, probably four years outta high school. He was a monster. I saw him load a fifty-five-gallon drum into the back of his flatbed. Hugged it to his chest and dropped it on the tailgate like nothin'. He moved out to the Midwest, somewhere. Lost his job when the brewery went tits-up. Tyler, he's doin' a hard stretch in Walla Walla. Used to be a deputy in the Thurston County Sheriff's department. Got nailed for accessory to murder and child pornography. You remember that brouhaha about the ring of devil worshipers supposed to operate all over Olympia and Centralia? They say a quarter of the department was involved, though most of it got hushed by the powers that be. He was one of those unlucky assholes they let dangle in the wind."
Wallace hadn't paid much attention to that scandal. In those days he had been in the throes of empire building and messy divorces. He said, "That's what you meant by nasty folk?"
"I mean they were dirty. Not dirt under the nails from honest labor, either. I'm talkin' 'bout sour—piss and blood and old grotty shit on their coveralls. Josh and Tyler came to school smellin' half dead, like they'd slaughtered pigs over the weekend and not bothered to change. Nobody wanted to handle their filthy money when they paid down to the feed store. As for the devil worshiping, maybe it's true, maybe not. The Satanist rap was sort of the cherry on top, you might say. The family patriarch, Kaleb Choate, was a scientist, graduated from a university in Europe. It was a big deal in the 1890s and people in these parts were leery on account of that. A Jew and a scientist? That was askin' a bit much. He worked with Tesla—y'know, the Tesla coil guy. My understanding is Tesla brought him to America to work in his laboratory and didn't cotton to him and they had a fallin' out, but I dunno much about all that. One more weird fact, y'know? Wasn't long before rumors were circulatin' 'bout how old man Choate was robbin' crypts down to the Oddfellows Cemetery and performin' unnatural experiments on farm animals and Chinamen. We had a whole community of those Chinese and they weren't popular, so nobody got too riled if one turned up missin', or what-have-you. And a bunch of 'em did disappear. Authorities claimed they moved to Seattle and Tacoma where the big Chinese communities were, or that they sailed back to China and just forgot to tell anybody, or that they ran off and got themselves killed trespassing. Still, there were rumors and by the time my great-granddaddy arrived, Kaleb Choate's farm was considered off limits for good honest Christians. 'Course there was more. Some people took it into their heads that Choate was a wizard or a warlock, that he came from a long line of black magicians. There were a few, like the Teagues on Waddel Creek and the Bakkers over to the eastern Knob Hills, who swore he could mesmerize a fella by lookin' into his eyes, that he could fly, that he fed those Chinamen to demons in return for . . .well, there it kinda falls apart. The Choates had land and that was about it. They were dirt poor when I was a kid—sorta fallen into ruin, y'might say. If Old Poger made a bargain with 'em, then they got royally screwed from the looks of it. I wonder 'bout the flyin' part on account of my sister and her boyfriend, Wooly Clark, claimed Josh could levitate like those yogis in the Far East, swore to Jesus they saw him do it in the woods behind the school once when they were necking. But hell, I dunno. My sister, she's a little soft in the brain, so there's no tellin' what she did or didn't see . . .
"Anyhow, the Bruenigs and the Choates had this sort of simmerin' feud through the years—Kaleb kicked the bucket in the '40s, but our families kept fightin'. Property squabbles, mainly. Their pigs caused some problems, came onto our land and destroyed my grandma's garden more than once. The kids on both sides liked to cause trouble, beat hell out of each other whenever they could. I guess the grown men pulled that too. My uncles got in a brawl with some of the Choates at the Lucky Badger; all of 'em were eighty-six'd for life and Uncle Clover did a month in the county lockup for bustin' a guy over the noggin with a chair."
Wallace said, "So, did you ever notice anything unusual going on?"
"You mean, like was the deal with Tyler an isolated incident or were the old rumors all true? Maybe we had a bona fide witch coven next door?" Bruenig shook his head. "There were some strange happenin's, I'll grant. More complicated than witches, though."
"Complicated?"
"That's right, partner. Look at the history, you'll notice a few of the Choates were eggheads. Heck of a deal to be an egghead yet spend your whole life on a farm, isn't it? Buncha friggin' cloistered monks—unnatural. You had Kaleb's son, Morgan, he owned the land until they sold out and he was a recluse, nobody ever saw him, but I heard tell he was an astronomer, wrote a book or somethin'. Then you got Paul Choate—Dr. Creepy, the kids called him; he taught physics at Evergreen in the '70s and did some research for NASA. But he wasn't even the smartest of the litter. We knew at least three more of those guys coulda done the same. Hell, Josh was a genius in school. He just hated class; bored him. Me, I always thought they were contacted by aliens. That's why they all acted so weird."
"You're shitting me," Wallace said.
"No, sir. You gonna sit there and tell me you don't believe in the ETs? This is the twenty-first century, pal. You oughta read Carl Sagan."
"You read Carl Sagan?"
"'Cause I drive a wrecker I'm a dumbass? Read Sagan, there's plenty of funky stuff goin' on in the universe."
"Okay, okay," Wallace said. "Tell me about the aliens."
"Like I said, it goes all the way back to the beginnin', if you pay attention. Within a decade of Kaleb Choate's arrival, folks started reportin' peculiar sightin's. Goat men in the Waddel Creek area, two-headed calves, lights over the Capitol Forest—no airplanes to explain that away. Not then. People saw UFOs floatin' around the Choate fields month after month in 1915 and 1916, right when the action in Europe was gettin' heavy. Some of it's in the papers, some it was recorded by the police department and private citizens, the library. It's a puzzle. You find a piece here and there, pretty quick things take shape. Anyhow, this went on into the '50s and '60s, but by then the entire country was in the middle of the saucer scare, so the authorities assumed mass hysteria. There were still disappearances too, except now it wasn't the Chinese—the Chinese had moseyed to greener pastures by the late '40s. Nope, this was mostly run-of-the-mill, God-fearin' townies. Don't get me wrong, we aren't talking 'bout bus loads. Three or four kids, a couple wives, a game warden and a census taker, some campers. More than our share of bums dropped off the face of the earth, but you know that didn't amount to a hill of beans. These disappearances are spread thin. Like somebody, or somethin' was bein' damn careful not to rouse the natives.
"Of course, as a kid I was all-fired curious 'bout morbid crap, pestered my dad constantly. I pried a little out of him; more I learned Hardy Boys style. Got to tell you, my daddy wouldn't talk 'bout the Choates if he could help it; he'd spit when someone mentioned 'em. Me and my sister got ambitious and dug into the dirty laundry. We even spied on 'em. Mighty funny how often they used to get visitors from town. Rich folks. Suits from the Capitol drove out there. Real odd, considerin' the Choates have always been looked down on as white trash—homegrown eggheads or not. That's what got me thinkin'. That and I saw Morgan and his boys diggin' in their fields at night."
"Mass graves?" Wallace said dryly.
Bruenig barked a wad of phlegm into his basket. "Huh! Better believe it crossed my mind. Told my pappy and his eyes got hard. Seems granddad saw 'em doin' the same thing in his day. Near as we could tell they were laying pipe or cable, all acros
s their property. They owned about three thousand acres, so there's miles of it, whatever it is. Then there were the pylons—"
"Pylons. Where'd you see those?" Wallace's interest sharpened.
"Farther back on their land. Long time ago a road wound around there—it's overgrown now, but when it was cleared there were these rocks sittin' out in the middle of nowhere. Sorta like that Stonehenge deal, except it was just one or two in each field. Jesse, my sister, counted twenty of 'em scattered 'round. She said they looked like peckers, and I have to admit they did bear a resemblance."
"Any idea who made them?"
"No. I mentioned it to a young geologist fella, worked for the BLM. He got interested, said he was gonna interview the Choates, see if they'd built on tribal grounds. Never heard from him again, though. He was barkin' up the wrong tree anyway. Those rocks are huge; least two tons each. How the Indians supposed to move that kinda load? Otter Creek—puhlease. Not in your lifetime. Plus, I never seen rock looked like those pylons. We don't have obsidian 'round here. Naw, those things are ancient and the ETs shipped 'em in from somewhere else. Probably markers, like pyramids and crop circles. Then the Choates come along and use 'em to communicate with the aliens. Help 'em with their cattle mutilations and their abductions. Don't ask me why the aliens need accomplices. No way we'll ever understand what makes a Gray tick."
Wallace turned off the recorder, slipped it in his pocket. "Is that all, Mr. Bruenig? Anything else you want to add that I might find useful?"
"Well, sir, I reckon I don't truly know what that could be. My advice is to steer clear of the Choate place, if you're thinkin' of muckin' 'round that way. You aren't gonna find any arrowheads or souvenirs worth your time. Don't know that I hold with curses, but that land's gotta shadow over it. I sure as hell don't poke my nose around there."
9.
Wallace's favorite was the dead woman on the rocker.
