by Chris Bauer
My phone signal was back. Some texts were queued up from Vonetta.
Dude I upgraded your phone service. First month’s on me
Phone store in Rancor has the order so get your ass over there
You wanna cancel after a month I don’t give a fuck you cheap bitch but while you’re on this case you need better service. N btw fuck you
“Fine, Netta,” I said aloud. “And fuck you too, sweetie.”
In front of the gates now. They were open wide enough for a car to fit through. Tess stretched upright in her seat like a prairie dog on high alert, jerked her head left and right multiple times. If she saw something, anything, she’d paw the window. She stayed seated, but she was tensed up. I pulled the van through the parted gates.
No difficulty finding my way. The No Vehicles Past This Point sign was knocked over on its side, the chains once attached to it snaking along the blacktop, leaving a gap between two huge upright boulders, a twisted chrome car bumper and other debris scattered there as well. I needed a closer look, so I reached for my door handle. Tess was in my face.
“Sorry, young lady.” She gave me some side-eye. “You guys need to sit this one out.” No reason to tempt fate with a huge black hole somewhere out there.
Tess bristled when she saw my Glock emerge from behind my back, commenced her pretty-please stubby tail wag. I cupped her face, told her again it wasn’t going to happen. After a quick grab of my halogen lantern, I climbed out of the van.
Gravel was underfoot as I walked, then blacktop, then a step up onto a concrete slab. A walk across the slab and I was at the railing. And here was our pothole.
This was one rather large pothole.
My mouth went into high gear, chatting up a Tourette’s blue streak, spitting profanities into the dark. The gun went back into my jeans and my fingers found my keychain. Better. I illuminated what I could of the pit with the lantern.
Red lights, deep. They looked like car taillights.
A vehicle down there? How in the fuck…?
I squinted to get a better read, concluded that yes, there was a car where it shouldn’t have been. The chrome bumper mangled near the boulders, 1960s vintage, meant there was a good chance it was the car I was tracking. I texted Vonetta.
Netta I’m in the park
I see you counsel. I see the car on the gps. Less than 50 ft from you. Reel him in
Not gonna happen. 50 ft as the crow flies but another 150 ft down at the bottom of the pothole. Car is history
Wtf? He in it?
How the hell would I know if he’s in it? It’s 150 ft into middle earth. Fill you in later
I ran the lantern beam around the attraction’s perimeter. There—a break in the iron railing that merited a closer look. On my way on foot.
The railing was lifted out of the way. I looked closer at the area behind me. Unobstructed and flat for forty, fifty yards or more. A Thelma and Louise runway. Except I guessed Mr. Linkletter wasn’t down there with the car. Mr. Linkletter was a coward. He molested children.
I canvassed the immediate area. My lucky day: an empty Poland Spring plastic water bottle near the edge of the pit. Maybe it would be good for a scent. DNA too, maybe, if it were ever to come to that.
Another look down into the pothole would have made sense, but not from this vantage point, where there was no railing. I moved over to a railed section. Here I got the view I needed. Yes, it was a car, and it was in the deepest section of the pit, the front end not visible, like it had jammed itself or crawled part way into a cave. Aside from the glowing taillights, I saw a blob of white with cherry red against layers of sandstone and shale. White metal, red side panel trim. Looked like what I was after, a vintage sixties Impala, surrounded by jagged gray and brown bedrock and a black coal seam.
White and red, like the bloodied rat Tess had dragged out of the coal mine today. How symbolic. Wait, some movement down there, something scurrying. No shit. Forget the symbolism, it was a rat. And it was white.
What kind of sick fuck did something like this? My only answer was he was a grandstander. This was The Stephen Linkletter Show, starring Stephen Linkletter. Bail-jumper, predator, and tourist attraction vandal.
I walked back to my van. In the glow of the interior lighting I checked out the Poland Spring bottle, gave Tess a sniff. Fungo was eager for the same and got it. Tess’s ears perked up; Fungo growled. Maybe it was Mr. Linkletter’s scent, maybe it wasn’t. But whoever’s scent it was, they now had it.
We were done here. This late-night trespass, into a closed state park… Interesting, but no bounty. Time for a 911 call. But a point of fact was I didn’t know for sure that the car didn’t actually have someone in it. I pulled my phone from my pocket.
“You! In the van! Reach both hands out your window so I can see them. Now!”
Tess and Fungo went berserk at the voice, the two of them wanting out of the van. We heard no vehicle, no footsteps. I did as asked while shushing my dogs. They calmed down, but maintained a low growl.
“Stay in your vehicle, please, while I call this in!”
‘Please?’ Did I hear that right? Did he just say ‘please?’
“Badge me,” I called, so I would know what or whom I was dealing with. In my side view mirror I saw him start slowly forward, his industrial strength flashlight trained on my empty hands still reaching through the open van window as he’d requested. I tasted the sweat collecting on my upper lip. My adrenaline gave him the benefit of the doubt. But this dude was in a world of hurt if he had bad intentions.
He passed through the red glow of my van’s taillights. I gauged his size in the side mirror, the glow strong because my foot was on the brake pedal. No bigger than five-six, and he was wide.
He stopped next to the rear tire, his left hand shoulder-high with his flashlight. In his right hand, no gun. Something rectangular; his badge, raised next to his face. It was on a tether, and the tether was still around his neck. I saw the shape of his hat, a wide, circular brim, and sitting back on his head, too big for him.
A park ranger. He couldn’t be armed else he’d have had it out by now. And he was nervous.
“I’m Park Ranger Cadet Trevor Stovall,” his shaky voice said. “I need to report this.”
Christ. Not even a full park ranger, a Smokey the Bear cub.
In my head: Colonel Klink, shrinkydinks, smokey slinky kinky cubby ratfink...
“Counsel Fungo, Pennsylvania State Police, retired,” moved ahead of my diuretic queue. “I need to get out of my van. My dogs—”
“No! Stop. Is there anyone else in the van with you and your dogs, ma’am?” The voice was less shaky this time, more in control.
“No.”
“Fine. Stay where you are, please.”
Again with the please. I humored him, my hands still out the window, his flashlight showcasing them. I took my foot off the brakes. The red glow from my van’s taillights dimmed.
I gave the kid credit for getting the drop on me. I heard no car engine, but he couldn’t have gotten here on foot. Far as I knew, there was nothing, no homes, stores, nothing around here for miles.
Another tap on the brake pedal told me. The brake lights reflected off the chrome of a Vespa Scooter parked well beyond the boulders, near the front gate. So he was at least old enough to drive. Or sort of drive, considering his transportation choice.
He put a phone to his ear. Someone was verbally kicking his ass.
“… but… uh-huh. No, that’s why I called. Uh-huh. But I’m sixteen. But… aw, c’mon, Aunt Dody….”
After I passed some ID through the window, Trevor—or more likely his aunt—let me exit the van without me having to get rude with him.
“Aunt Dody knows who you are, Miss Fungo. She says you were at the bowling alley today.”
No shit. Floyd the bowling shoe guy got the word out. Good for you, Floyd. “Your aunt yelled at you for approaching me in the van, didn’t she?”
“Well, sort of. Yeah. Look, I just wan
na do my part.”
The two of us were on the concrete slab overlooking the pothole. We shined our lights in. They illuminated some of the hole, the bottom still shadowy except for those beady red taillight eyes and Mother Nature’s glacial handiwork. Impressive.
“Pretty cool hole, huh?” young Trevor said. “Wanna hear about it?”
He rattled off a bunch of wiki info on glaciers that a nerdy park ranger cadet would know. In a nutshell: a melting glacier dripped into an indentation in the bedrock. Rock fragments, sand, and gravel from the glacier spun into the indentation and carved out, after billions of gallons of melting water rushed into it, an elliptical hole through layers and layers of stratified bedrock. A geological masterpiece. This one also had a black coal seam running through it.
“So, Trevor, any chance you saw what happened here tonight? How that car got where it is?”
He shook his head no. “I was at St. P’s. It must have happened before I came by on patrol.”
“St. P’s?” I said, with trapeze and on my knees on my lips ready to go right behind it, but my face contorted itself while I choked the words back. My furrowed-brow WTF look suffixed the contortion. Combined, they did a good job of blaming him for my not knowing what St. P’s was.
“You know, St. Possenti’s.” He blinked. When I didn’t acknowledge him, his next blink was an eyelid flutter. A tell. He’d slipped and said too much. St. Possenti’s was probably somewhere he shouldn’t have been. His next comment would be measured.
“At bingo. I was playing bingo. But don’t tell my aunt, okay, ma’am? She doesn’t want me hanging at St. P’s. Then I went on patrol. When I saw your van here after dark, I called her.”
Bingo. Sure, whatever. I suspected it wasn’t like chunky Trevor here would have been covering for a high school flash house-trashing party. Not in his chick magnet Park Ranger Cubby Cadet outfit, and with a scooter. His bingo story was BS, but I gave him a pass on it.
“My lips are sealed. But you called your aunt?” My pathetic look hinted at my opinion, which was you’re a wimp, kid.
“You don’t know my aunt,” he said.
Trevor told me about the Rancor Town Watch. They were well organized and proud of Rancor’s crime-free heritage. Round the clock patrols. Citizens of all ages participated. And his Aunt Dody—Dody Heck—ran it. She was the last top cop the town had, he volunteered; she was now retired.
I asked him what the Watch would do about someone sabotaging the town’s only tourist attraction.
“About the car? I dunno. Nothing, I hope. I kinda like it. It looks cool down there. I suppose they’ll look for the person who did it, make him pay somehow. You said it’s an old Chevy? Awesome.”
I told him the equipment they’d need to haul the car back up. A wrecker, a big one, the kind that could tow a semi, plus a couple hundred feet of strong chain or cable.
I took another look into the hole while Trevor relayed this info to his aunt, him still taking flack from her. I liked him. A teenager with a Vespa; took guts for that to be his ride. I leaned over the railing, lowered my lantern down a bit. Nothing much visible at this distance other than the car’s back end and its taillights, still with juice, but faint. It was a miracle the car’s gas tank hadn’t exploded.
“Plus a cave spelunker, Trevor, or at least the fire department,” I called over my shoulder. “Someone sure-footed.” One final gander at this nightmarish hole, then I would call it a night.
Maybe not. From deep in the hole, the dimming Impala’s brake lights flashed.
I was an item now. The firemen and the EMTs hadn’t wanted to wait for daylight after hearing my story about the taillights. I also met Dody Heck, Trevor’s aunt, another bowler, and shaped like her nephew Trevor but bigger. I kept my promise to him: no mention of bingo, whatever bullet that helped him dodge.
The battered Chevy Impala was lifted out of the pothole and onto a flatbed truck. Its white convertible top survived three-quarters of the drop to where the cave spelunker peeled the canvas off a jagged piece of bedrock like a burst gum bubble. Yes, someone was in the car, but not in the driver’s seat. In the trunk. A dead someone, his face all beat to shit, half of it blown away from a gunshot. This discovery almost but not quite validated my plea for urgency after I saw the taillights flash. Except the caver found no one else down there, alive or dead, human, rat, or otherwise, and a brake pedal clear of all debris, leaving no answer as to who or what had tapped it. Certainly not the dead guy in the trunk, considering the damage the gunshot had done to his head. The car’s front end plugged a hollowed-out coal seam that terminated into cave rubble. No exit, as far as the caver could tell, from the pothole into middle earth.
No way into the hole other than from above, and no other way out, although a geologic survey the firemen brought showed the pothole was once connected to a coal mine. An EMT took my statement. The equivalent of a ghost story or an alien encounter or some middle earth hobbit tale from a woman with no business being out this late other than for nefarious reasons, his expression said, but I stayed with it.
“Sometimes a traumatized mind plays tricks,” the young, male EMT had offered, humoring me. “Probably just a malfunction of a battered car, a short circuit or something.” He stayed away from me after that. They all kept their distance, like I was a lunatic.
The answer I settled on: it was a rat. Had to be big. Large enough to depress and hold down a brake pedal for at least a half a minute. Except I was having trouble with the half-a-minute part. And maybe the part that it was a rat too.
The road was empty this early in the morning. At four a.m. my dogs were sacked out in the van, exhausted from being cooped up while at the pothole. I was on Rancor Boulevard, heading back to catch a few hours of sleep. My deputies had made nice with Trevor, Tess especially, even let him feed her a treat. His park ranger khakis helped; Tess liked people in uniform. I passed the spot where the pickup truck’s gun-toting driver had finished off the deer he hit last night. Bloodstains on the shoulder, but no leftover roadkill, which meant venison steaks for him and his family, maybe his neighbors as well.
Farther down the road I entered the curve where the other car had run out of gas overnight, the car now gone.
I jammed the brakes, did a U-turn, stopped hard on the opposite shoulder and glared at something glistening on the ground inside the periphery of my headlights.
Another discarded plastic bottle of Poland Spring.
I picked it up.
16
A knock on the door to Andy’s B&B owner’s suite at four in the morning.
“The woman in the room below us,” an elderly male guest asked a groggy Andy, “is she all right?”
His mother, Charlotte, was having a rough night, not a new occurrence. Andy let himself into her room, tried to roust her from a dream with a few shakes to her silk pajama shoulder. “Ma. Mom. Charlie—”
His mom’s scrubbed, smooth-skinned face was pulled tight, terrified. She uttered soft, contained screams, then one loud one, accompanied by rambling dream-speak. A night terror, the kind that only seniors with long, chaotic memories could conjure. Her ramblings coalesced into coherence, but she was still in the grip of the nightmare. She finally woke up.
“My Andrew. My Andy. The blood—”
“Yes, Ma, I’m here. I’m all healed, Ma. I’m okay. Shhh…”
“Maurice—”
And here was where Andy always stumbled, having to tell his mother once again that this part of the nightmare remained true. He got through the explanation about his father as tenderly as he could, comforting her like she had comforted him during his childhood years. In tonight’s aftermath they shared a subdued cry together, side by side in bed, Andy hugging her. His mother’s melancholy lifted.
“I told her no, I wouldn’t allow it,” Charlotte said, fully lucid.
Not a rambling comment. Andy knew where she was going, his mother’s face grim. “It wasn’t your choice, Ma.”
“Too dangerous,” she
said. “Kitty had no right.”
“To her, Ma, it wasn’t a right. To her, it was an obligation.”
Kitty Buchinsky. His father’s sister. Aunt Kitty had survived a don’t-fuck-with-me hardline childhood in West Virginia coal country. Their father fought in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. The largest armed rebellion since the Civil War, with striking coal miners facing off first against a detective agency then against a sheriff’s department then the State Police then the US Army. A hundred-plus dead, nearly a thousand coal miners arrested, among them Andy’s grandfather. When he was released, the family left the state and relocated to Rancor, Pennsylvania, where there were coal-mining jobs from a more benevolent employer, and where Andy’s dad Maurice was born. A hunter and a coal miner, and no stranger to firearms, the grandfather taught his children Kitty and Maurice well.
Late fall the year of the bank robbery trials, Kitty hadn’t returned to work after the court rendered the not guilty verdicts. To the uninformed, she was on another bender, in perfect character for her. Two weeks on the road, they all assumed, in bars and clubs. In reality, she was on a mission.
The masked bank robber with the shotgun, her brother’s murderer, she found in lower New York state. Kitty played the party girl role, never a stretch for her. In a shitty pickle-tickle motel room she trap-doored him into hell’s abyss with one gunshot to the head.
The next two bank-robbing men she tracked to Ohio. Two point-blank executions, all business, soon as she got into their cars.
Three bullets, three not-guilty verdicts overturned. Justice served, in the person of one Aunt Kitty.
Her many boyfriends never knew this history; the two husbands she buried never knew it either. No one ever knew anything until Kitty deemed that her nephew Andy was ready for the truth twenty-five years later. Ready also to accept the encumbrance that went with it.
Bravo, Charlotte said to Kitty when she’d confessed to her. Bravo, Andy, age thirty, had agreed. Rightful, satisfying outcomes. Then Kitty told them more: she hadn’t stopped with the bank robbers.