The Bookshop From Hell

by David Haynes

  That had always been the way, right from the beginning. The teachers, the learned men and women, had rallied against him, instructing their people that he didn’t have the power. Either that he didn’t exist or if they led good and virtuous lives, they would be able to evade his clutches.

  He laughed. It didn’t make any difference what kind of life they lived. They were his playthings, his toys, his sustenance. He could do whatever he liked with them and they could do nothing to stop him. His extensive library illustrated that perfectly.

  Nevertheless, he hadn’t survived so long by being clumsy and reckless. Teachers usually picked up on things faster than even the cops. The cops asked questions, but never suspected a bookstore. How the hell could an old man and a bookstore cause so much devastation? He was dismissed immediately. Teachers, though, they asked the same questions but their thinking wasn’t always based on logic and reasoning. They knew too much. And the ones that studied the subjects, the real books that existed on the fringes, they were just better off left to their own devices. Ignored.

  This teacher looked like trouble, someone to avoid. And if ever things got to the stage where it was intolerable or dangerous – and they had in the past, a few times – he’d just up sticks and move on. Plenty more fish in the sea and all that.

  But that was a last resort. It really was. The thought of abandoning all this fun was almost intolerable in itself. He was greedy. It was his only fault and it sometimes clouded his judgment.

  He edged away from the window and sat down behind the counter. Silver Lake was just another hick town going to hell. Literally.

  *

  “Why the hell are we dumpster diving?” Brad Simmons whined. “It stinks bad out here.”

  Paul Weaver stood back and watched Brad pushing garbage around in the dumpster. They were in the rear yard at the hospital, away from the clinical waste but still in the garbage disposal area. He was right, it did stink but it would be worth it. All this stuff was going off to be incinerated and some of it was valuable. Too valuable to simply burn.

  Brad threw a bag over his shoulder. “This what you’re after?”

  Paul pulled the bag open and looked inside, smiling.

  “Hey, you going to help me down from here?”

  He looked up, tempted to leave Brad in the dumpster, then reconsidered. He might need him for something like this again. He offered his hand and hauled Brad’s frame down.

  The tabards just weren’t right. They didn’t give the same impression as a cop uniform did and they certainly didn’t look as good. He pulled one of the discarded uniforms out and held it up to the street light. There were two neat little holes in the chest and around those holes was a whole lot of blood. He threw it back into the dumpster, pulled another out. It was perfect, just a splash of blood around the collar. He held it against himself and swore. The cop who’d worn it must have been a lard-ass.

  He threw it at Brad. “Put this on,” he said.

  The last one didn’t have any holes in the shirt either but there was a little more blood around the shoulders. He held it to his chest. It was the right size. Who cared about a bit of blood? It gave his new position more weight; a battle-hardened cop who’d seen more than his fair share of action. Perfect.

  “Really? You want me to wear this? Some guy just died in it.”

  Paul pulled off his own grubby vest and slid into the shirt. It was a little damp but as he buttoned it up, he felt the power slide into his body. He felt strong, righteous.

  “Put it on, deputy,” he ordered.

  The final straw for the tabards had been when that prick Dan Law gave him the finger. He wouldn’t have done that if they’d been in uniform, in a cop car. The chances of getting his hand on a cruiser were zero, but he knew where there might be a supply of police uniforms. The dumpster at the hospital. They had even managed to get a couple of spares too.

  As he drove back into town, he prayed Law would still be parked up outside the bookstore. He’d tell him to move along and when he got mouthy, which he would, they would put him in the back of the truck and take him out to the woods for a talking-to. It would sure be nice if he resisted.

  Paul wound down the window and rested his elbow in the opening.

  “Come on, Paul, it’s cold!” said Brad.

  Man, he was really starting to grate. The constant whining and moaning about…about everything.

  “I need it open,” he replied. “I can hear the town then.”

  Brad laughed, spitting out a half-chewed candy bar. “Hear the town! Goddamn it, Paul! Who the hell do you think you are? Kojak? Jesus…”

  “Shut the hell up!” he shouted. “Hear that?”

  Gunfire echoed down the street toward them. It was accompanied by smashing glass. Paul stamped on the gas, heading straight for the source. He was doing eighty when he hit Main Street. The truck’s bald tires squealed on the blacktop, losing traction. He fought to keep it going straight. The cops, the paid cops, didn’t have problems like this.

  “Slow down!” Brad shouted, pinning himself back against the seat.

  Paul didn’t slow down, until they passed Sandy’s.

  “Hey, isn’t that Lori?” Brad asked.

  Paul eased down on the brake. Up ahead, two figures sprinted out of the diner and ran down the street. They were hand in hand. It took him a moment to register Lori’s short blond hair and her red jacket. It took him less time to see Dan Law.

  “What’s she doing with Law?” Brad asked. He was either being stupid or trying to wind him up.

  “Shut up,” he snapped. “We’ve got work to do.”

  He pulled up outside the diner. The windows were shattered, glass all over the sidewalk. Another round of fire erupted from the back. He pulled the Springfield from his pants.

  “Bring your rifle,” he said to Brad. He was angry. No, not just angry, his stomach burned with rage. He wanted to take hold of Law and feed him the muzzle of the gun, paint the town red with teacher brains. And Lori, the two-timing bitch, well she was going to get a stern talking-to later. He might even have to take her up to the woods and tell her how things were going to work from now on. He couldn’t have that level of disrespect going unpunished.

  He climbed out of the truck. That would have to wait. Right now, he had a job to do.

  “I don’t think we should go in there,” Brad said. “Some guy’s waving a gun about inside.”

  “You’re a deputy,” Paul told him, moving around the hood. “Either do your job or go home.”

  “Jeez, Paul. I don’t know. This is getting…”

  There was another shot. This time it came from the back of the building.

  Paul ran inside, pushing his way through the mangled doorway.

  “Police!” he shouted. “Stay where you are!” He glanced about, holding the gun out in front of his chest. There was a lot of blood over at the counter; tufts of bleached blond hair on the top of the register.

  He heard Brad take a deep breath behind him. “Same guy who robbed the bank?”

  Paul didn’t answer. It had to be. He stepped through the glass, wincing at the crunch of each step. One of the swing doors to the kitchen was hanging off, the other riddled with blackened holes. The marks of a shotgun.

  “Come on,” he whispered, “keep moving.” A good cop didn’t take a step back, no matter what was waiting for him on the other side of the door. They kept moving forward. He touched the Silver Lake PD star on his chest and pushed the mangled door with the muzzle of his gun.

  “We’re coming in,” he shouted. “Put down your weapon!”

  There was a deafening blast and then a searing heat tore at his right shoulder. The rest of the shot smashed into the wall beside his head. He dropped to the floor. It was greasy, not with spilled food but with blood. The cook was a couple of feet away, the part of his head above the eyes missing.

  Paul’s arm ached but the shot had only grazed him, bitten a chunk out of his police uniform. He smiled. It was his first rea
l injury. His own memento, not that of the cop who’d previously worn the shirt.

  “You better get out here!” he shouted. “I can see you.” He couldn’t, although he was pretty sure he knew where the shot had come from – to the left of the walk-in freezer.

  “What’s going on?” Brad whispered from the other side of the door.

  “Stay where you are,” he hissed. He didn’t want Brad getting in the way, stealing his glory. His arrest.

  He moved from lying to crouching and then inched forward. He was covered behind the giant oven.

  “Come on, man!” he shouted. “Let’s do this the easy way.”

  A deafening explosion sounded. Pots and pans clattered to the floor. The pump on the shotgun clicked again.

  “Discharging a firearm at an officer? Robbing a diner and a bank? Man, you are screwed. Don’t make me come back there.”

  There was a loud click and then the pump-action on the shotgun sliding again. Another click, and then another pump. He was out of ammunition. Paul smiled but he didn’t stand up, not yet. He didn’t want to take any chances.

  He peeked between the maelstrom of pots and pans. The guy was crouched in the corner, just off to the side of the freezer doors. Paul couldn’t see who it was until the man pulled the pantyhose off his face.

  “Dave Pope? Is that you, Dave?”

  Dave owned the farm just on the other side of the old bridge. He’d been a couple of grades above Paul and Brad in high school. He was just as ugly then as he was now.

  “Call me Butch!”

  “Okay, Butch. Well, I’m Sundance and out there is Jesse James.”

  He raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. There was a loud click and nothing else.

  Paul stood. Dave looked him up and down. “You’re not a cop, you’re just a drunken bum.”

  Paul took a few steps toward him. “Whatever you say, Butch, but I’m putting you under arrest.”

  “Fuck you!” He got to his feet, pumped the gun again and stepped forward. He pulled the trigger, pumped it again and fired.

  “You’re all out,” Paul said, pointing his gun at Dave.

  Dave carried on walking toward him. “You won’t take me alive!”

  “Okay.” Paul shrugged and put a round in the middle of Pope’s face.

  He stood over the twitching corpse and fired another round into his chest. Dave’s body was still. “You take a shot at an officer, you get what you deserve.”

  A second later Brad charged through the door, rifle at the ready. He looked at Paul. “You okay?”

  Paul nodded. “Guess we won’t have to worry about any more holdups around town.” He thought for a moment. “Help me take him out to the truck before any Rainworth cops show up. We do things differently around here and I don’t want them interfering in Silver Lake PD’s business.”

  35

  Sometime after 3am, when Rainworth PD locked down the scene at the diner, someone fixed home-made gallows out of scaffold poles to the front of Silver Lake PD.

  Dave Pope, or Butch as he preferred to be known, was hanging from the gallows with a cardboard sign around his neck. Part of the sign was smeared with blood but the message was clear:

  Dave Pope – bank robber. Diner thief. Murderer. Sentenced to hang. By order of the New Silver Lake PD.

  Dave Pope’s face was almost unrecognizable, his head blown apart by a bullet, but everyone knew it was him. By seven o’clock a small crowd had gathered around the dead man, but nobody bothered to take him down. They were stunned.

  At around seven-thirty, the high school kids started filing past. None of them continued their journey to school.

  But it wasn’t until a little after eight that the trouble started. The family of Bob Morton, the security guard at the bank who had been shot dead by Pope, arrived to see the spectacle. Bob’s wife, their three grown-up kids and Bob’s brothers all came to see the slayer of their husband, dad and brother strung up.

  At ten past eight, Dave Pope’s wife rolled into town looking for him. She expected to find him holed up in Sandy’s or asleep in the park, as he was apt to do recently. In the back of the truck she had her two sons, Lewis and Shaun, to help lift their dad onto the flatbed. She saw the crowd and pulled over. She didn’t like to come into Silver Lake very often, she didn’t recognize half the town anymore.

  As Mo Pope walked across the street, the crowd parted with a whispered hush. Her two sons, as big as they were dumb, trailed her. When she reached the front of the crowd, she screamed and fell to her knees. She covered her face and cried for several minutes. The only people who tried to help her up were her sons but she resisted them.

  “Fetch him down!” she screamed. “Fetch him down!”

  Nobody moved except Lewis and Shaun but as they attempted to lift their dad from the noose, someone threw a rock at Shaun. It hit him on the back of the head and bounced off. He rubbed at the spot and turned around.

  “Who did that?” he yelled.

  Another rock was thrown. It was obvious who had thrown it. The husband of the diner waitress who’d been shot stood on the far side of the crowd. He had red rings around his eyes, giving him the look of a demon. He held another rock in his hand and cranked his arm to throw it.

  “I say leave the fucker there! He killed my Paula!” He hurled the rock. It missed Shaun and hit Dave in the already-pulverized face. Bob Morton’s family cheered.

  “This isn’t right!” someone shouted. “We need to take him down!”

  “Leave him!” another voice yelled.

  Elsa Morton, all seventy-three years of her, threw an apple toward Dave. It hit the sidewalk next to Mo Pope and exploded, showering her with sweet fruit.

  She screamed again. Shaun, enraged by being hit by the rock, picked it up and hurled it back where it had come from. His aim was terrible and it hit one of the onlookers in the face, breaking her nose.

  Shaun grunted and turned back to the task of fetching down his dad. Bob Morton’s eldest son, Richard, didn’t want him to succeed and stormed through the crowd, taking hold of Shaun and pushing him away. It was no mean feat; Shaun Pope was six and half feet tall and well over two hundred and fifty pounds, but Richard Morton was mad. His father was dead and the guy who murdered him was rightfully strung up. He needed to stay where he was until everyone had seen what happened to people who tried to take what didn’t belong to them.

  Shaun staggered slightly but kept his hold on his dad. Richard punched him this time, square on the chin. Shaun toppled backward, still holding his dad’s trouser leg. The scaffold and the corpse fell with him, landing in the crowd.

  People screamed and at least three people were knocked unconscious by the falling poles. Lewis Pope jumped on Richard Morton immediately and knocked him to the ground, stamping on his head as he fell. Another scream sounded. This time it was Elsa. She ran toward Mo Pope and kicked her in the ribs as she knelt. For a woman of her age, it was a surprisingly agile and powerful move.

  Mo rolled onto her side, crying. A hand reached out of the crowd, someone who felt pity on the woman, and tried to pull her up. Another hand knocked it away immediately and a scuffle broke out.

  It didn’t take more than thirty seconds for the fighting to spread from the gallows to the farthest reaches of the crowd. It didn’t seem to matter who was right or who was wrong, nobody knew that anyway. In a small town, there were always underlying resentments simmering just below the surface. It only took an event like this to ignite those annoyances and make them explode.

  The street became a bloodbath within a few seconds of brutal fighting. Those who weren’t fighting got trampled or injured by flying fists. Dave Pope’s body was kicked around like a deflated soccer ball, flattened and turned into something from the butcher’s counter at the grocery store. There would be no open casket for him. On the floor beside his body was a book. Nobody noticed it, but it fell from his pocket when his body was pulled off the scaffold. It was destroyed in the melee.

  Someone managed
to uproot the bench that had stood outside the PD for seventy years. They used it to smash the windows of the PD, either deliberately or accidentally nobody could tell, but the windows on the ground floor were destroyed. There were no police officers in the station. The officers who had come to deal with the diner homicide had all gone back to Rainworth. Nobody, at least nobody involved in the fight, called for them to attend. They were too busy trying not to get killed.

  There was only one law in Silver Lake and it was sitting in a truck fifty yards back up the road. The occupants were eating pork rinds and watching the spectacle. Maybe later they might have to round up a couple of the more aggressive troublemakers. The Pope boys maybe, and the old Morton lady might have to come in. But for now, Paul Weaver and Brad Simmons were happy to let it run its course.

  The point was made, the sign clear. Dave Pope had broken the law and had paid the price for it. That was how it was, how it should always be. The New Silver Lake PD was in charge now, so beware any wrongdoers.

  Paul reached into the back seat and rummaged in the sack he’d taken from Dave Pope at the diner. There had been a little over two hundred bucks in there. He removed fifty and handed it to Brad.

  “Wages,” he said.

  36

  Emily couldn’t have sex anymore, not for a while anyway. It was painful down there, and since waking up this morning there was a smell too. Unpleasant and strong. If she wanted more, she’d have to go to the clinic and get some medicine, maybe get tested while she was at it. Her parents hadn’t noticed her discomfort yet, but it was only a matter of time before they realized something wasn’t quite right with their darling little girl.