by Jack Ketchum
His shooting was usually better. But after the first shot Tim and Jennifer set up this fucking racket and it unnerved him. So that he had to go in up close after the first five shots and they’d moved around the tree by then and he didn’t like that, that was dangerous because who the hell knew what kind of condition they’d be in, whether they’d have enough left in them to try to fight or run or what? But he was lucky. The one still standing had given him a clean clear head shot and he’d taken her out with a single shot to the eye.
The other one, the redhead slumped against the tree wasn’t going anywhere.
He was surprised, though. It wasn’t like the movies.
People took a lot of killing.
Six shots counting this one. Four for the brunette alone. Shoulder face neck eye.
He doubted he’d need a seventh for the redhead.
“What’re we going to do, for god’s sake?” He was fucking tired of Tim asking him that. If he hadn’t felt so basically good at the moment, if the whole thing wasn’t so goddamn cool he’d have been annoyed. But you had to be patient with Timmy.
“We’re gonna bury ’em, Tim. Then we’re gonna pack up all their gear and dump it. Nobody’ll ever know they were even around here. That sound like a plan to you? Huh?”
“I want to get out of here,” Jennifer said. She was standing to one side and wouldn’t even look at them, wouldn’t even look at the body. Bodies. While he could hardly stop looking.
“Bury ’em? Bury ’em with what?” said Tim. “You see any shovels around?”
“You and Jennifer are going to take the Chevy over to my place. There’s a spade and a pitchfork in the storage shed. Nobody’s home so don’t worry. Meantime I’ll tidy up. Get their stuff together. Kill the campfire so it won’t attract attention. Gimme your flashlight. Look, here’s the keys. This one’s to the storage shed. Remember to lock up when you’re done. And Tim, you drive. I think Jennifer’s a little upset at the moment. And you drive carefully, you hear? You keep to the speed limit and take your time. Don’t go fucking up on me.”
“I won’t.”
“I want Tim to drop me off at my house.”
“No you don’t. You just think you do.” He went over and hugged her. “Listen, Jen. You’re a part of this. I want you to be part of this. It’s important to me. You’ve never done anything like this in your whole life and you probably never will again. Me and Tim, we could still get drafted, who knows? And then you never know how many people we’d have to kill. But for you this is a first-and-only. You’re gonna remember tonight for-fucking-ever.”
“I don’t want to remember.”
He leaned in close and whispered in her ear.
“You will, Jen, once we’re through. I promise you.”
He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her gently on each eyelid. It almost always worked. It always seemed to soothe her.
“Now you guys get out of here. And be careful.”
He watched them walk down the path and disappear into the dark. He didn’t worry about them finding their way without the flashlight. They knew the place almost as well as he did. They’d do what they were told and they’d do it quietly and they’d do it right and that would make them accomplices. Accessories to murder, which was exactly what he wanted.
It occurred to him that he had a couple of slaves now.
He checked in on the redhead. Her breathing was shallow. She hadn’t moved. You could see her tits through the blood-soaked T-shirt. From the waist up she might as well have been naked the way the shirt was plastered to her body. They were good tits. Small but not half bad.
It would be interesting to see how long she took to die.
He’d shot a rabbit once, blew the hell out of its high-quarters and he’d done that, watched and waited. The rabbit took maybe five, six minutes to die and started twitching at the end like somebody had plugged it into a wall socket.
He took a walk around the campsite. They didn’t have a lot of stuff. Probably just here for the night. There was the tent, two new sleeping bags inside along with a second good new battery-operated lantern which he thought he just might keep and a knapsack with nothing but clothes in it, two different sizes, expensive and clean and neatly folded.
Bitches. Lesbo assholes. They never would have given him the time of day.
They wouldn’t be able to now.
Just outside the tent there was another knapsack containing a can of Off insect spray, a paperback of a book called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and another called Death in Venice, a writing pad and pen, an old, beat-up Swiss army knife, paper plates and plastic forks and knives, an unopened pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint which he pocketed and a half-full pack of Juicy Fruit which he didn’t. They had a cooler with three Pepsis inside and four cans of ginger ale, an open pack of hot dogs wrapped in cellophane and another of burger meat, rolls to go with each, a plastic bottle of mustard and another of catsup, a can of beans and a can of sauerkraut.
Not a goddamn beer anywhere so he popped a Pepsi.
He checked on the redhead. Still breathing. No twitching.
Tough little fucker.
Tougher than the rabbit, anyway.
He didn’t want to miss it when she started twitching.
He finished off the Pepsi and put the empty back in the cooler and pulled the sleeping bags out of the tent and rolled them and tied them off, set the lanterns and knapsack aside and struck the tent and threw the wooden pegs into the fire. The fire reminded him that he was hungry. The fire was still going pretty strong so he unwrapped two of the hot dogs and found the same sticks the girls were using and threaded one stick through each of them and shoved the sticks into the spaces between the rocks they’d used to surround the fire so that the hot dogs would hang over it but wouldn’t fall in. He unwrapped two rolls for when they were ready and unpacked the bottle of catsup.
Most people liked mustard. He didn’t.
He gathered together the tent, cooler, sleeping bag, knapsacks, lanterns and his .22 in a nice neat easy-to-handle pile for when Tim and Jennifer got back and by then he figured the dogs needed turning so he did that and popped another Pepsi.
He checked the redhead.
Still breathing. Hadn’t moved. He watched her for a while.
Still no twitching. Nothing. Even with the nice tits the girl was fucking boring.
He ate the hot dogs squirted with plenty of catsup, wishing halfway through the second one that he’d bothered to toast the rolls but figured fuck it and finished off the Pepsi. He was feeling pretty good about what he’d done here and was still doing so he took time to sort of savor it. Then he kicked away the stones around the fire and turned on the flashlight and kicked dirt over the logs and embers until the smoke was just a thin white trickle in the surrounding darkness and both his feet hurt inside the black leather cowboy boots. Then he went to check the girl again.
The girl was gone.
Not dead gone. Gone.
Off in the fucking woods somewhere.
She was head shot for chrissake! How could she fucking do this? How come he hadn’t heard her? He felt a rush of pure animal panic until he saw the drops of blood leading off through the woods and realized that she couldn’t have been gone long or got far, not in that condition and felt the panic turn to anger then because he realized that the girl had fucked him over royally anyway.
Fucked him over just by getting away.
He had to follow her, he had no goddamn choice but to follow her but in the meantime the problem was that what the hell were Tim and Jennifer going to think when they got back and found that both he and the girl had gone? They were due back pretty soon now. They could freeze up. Go bullshit on him. Take the car and just drive the fuck away. He wouldn’t put it past them. They were just high school kids for chrissake. Without him around to tell them what to do they might easily screw up and leave him alone out here to deal with this all by himself.
His prints were all over everything. They had to dum
p all this stuff. And to dump it they needed the car.
Shit!
You bitch, he thought. Wait till I get my hands on you. No rifle this time. You’ll wish you had died.
All this stuff, my fingerprints over all of it and he thought of all he’d touched and then he thought of the knapsack and the writing pad and pen inside the knapsack and realized that he could still tell them what to do even if he wasn’t here to tell them so he ran over and tore the thing open and found the pad and pen and wrote STAY PUT! in the biggest letters possible and propped the pad up on the ground with the knapsack in back of it to hold it in place and got the battery-operated lantern and turned it on so that the pad was flooded with light, you couldn’t miss the goddamn thing unless you were blind and he picked up the rifle because you never knew, he intended to kick the shit out of her, absolutely, do her with his bare goddamn hands but he might have to down the bitch first again, the smart-ass lesbo cunt and then he started after her.
Part One
“Mary McGrory said to me that we’ll never laugh again. And I said, ‘Heavens, Mary. We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.’”
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, November 1963
Chapter One
Friday, August 1, 1969
The Cat/Schilling
The cat dodged Charlie Schilling’s feet as he made his way across the parking lot to Panik’s Bar and Grille. The cat was two years old, amber-eyed and mostly black except for a patch of white to one side of her nose and white paws and another white patch on her belly. She was hungry but then she was mostly hungry and had been for three months now since her owners, two young newlyweds from Hopatcong, had driven her to Sparta and dropped her off on the quiet street behind Paul’s Deli and driven away. Their new baby daughter was allergic. The cat didn’t know about allergies, only that where once she’d been well-fed and warm and cared for by humans whose presence rather comforted her now she was alone and cold nights and nearly always felt a rumble in her belly. She dodged Schilling’s feet because Shilling was a big man and unfamiliar and big men had been known to kick.
Schilling wouldn’t have dreamt of kicking her and certainly not today.
He walked into the yellow twilight of the bar and Ed Anderson was just where he’d expected him to be, down at the end of the bar leaning over a Bud and talking to Teddy Panik, who owned the place. It was four-thirty, Happy Hour, and it was Ed’s practice to leave no Happy Hour at Panik’s Bar and Grille until six o’clock when it was over. Ed called it Going to the Meeting. He’d never attended a business meeting in all his fifty-two years but celebrating that fact was precisely the point.
He walked past Dave Lenhart and Phil Preston and said hi to Billy Altman and Sam Heinz and Walter Earle who interrupted their conversation about who made more money, Willie Shoemaker or Lew Alcindor to say hello back to him and sat down on the stool next to Ed. Teddy poured him his usual Dewar’s and soda and both he and Ed knew Charlie well enough to see that something wasn’t right, to let him have a while before saying anything. It was Ed who finally asked.
“She died,” Charlie said.
“Who?”
“Elise Hanlon. Life support all these years and what was the point. Word came to the station a little after noon.”
“Aw hell, Charlie. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You know I went to see her about a month ago and it looked to me like she was already dead. Nothing but skin and bones. But she wouldn’t let go. Or they wouldn’t let her let go. Another one, Teddy.”
“Sure.”
He stared straight ahead at the faded blowup of Bogie as Sam Spade over the register. Bogie was flanked by Gehrig and Mantle. Behind him over the cigarette machine the neon Miller sign was buzzing again. He thought that Teddy should either fix the damn thing or throw it out. The buzzing was a pain in the ass. But Teddy was partial to Miller and sold a lot of it. Everybody seemed to want to drink Miller these days, everybody but him and Ed. It called itself the Champagne of Bottled Beers but to him it tasted like panther piss. Weak panther piss at that.
He wasn’t going to kick a cat but trashing a neon sign probably would suit his mood exactly. Except he couldn’t do that to Teddy. Teddy was hooked on panther piss and they paid him to hang the sign.
“We worked like hell on that one, Charlie. You know we did.”
“Yeah, we did. And look where it went. Down the toilet.”
“Absolutely true.”
“My partner along with it.”
“Absolutely untrue, my friend.”
Charlie looked at him. Ed was the most decent, honest guy he’d ever met and he’d never known him to kid himself about anything. Well, maybe about one thing—Sally Richmond. But he thought he was kidding himself about this.
“What are you telling me? That’s not the reason you left the department? Come on, Ed. Bullshit.”
“I left the department because I was tired. Not because of Elise Hanlon or Lisa Steiner or even Ray Pye.”
Pye was the kid they’d tried to nail on it. Except that Pye wouldn’t nail.
“We’ve had this talk before, Charlie. I’ll give it to you one more time. I won’t say it wasn’t a factor. Sure it was a factor. But I put on the uniform ten years earlier than you. Plus I’ve got six years on you age-wise. Let me refresh you, my friend. When I started out in this town you didn’t lock your doors, you left ’em open even if you weren’t home in case the neighbors needed something, pliers or a cup of milk or something and you weren’t around to loan it to them. You didn’t worry about stealing. Hell, we’re lakes district, half the homes in town are closed up all winter. But you didn’t worry about break-ins in the wintertime, you worried about the pipes freezing. From fifty to fifty-nine we had exactly one homicide. And that was Willie Becker and his wife both drunk as Chinamen slugging it out in the living room, him nailing her with an uppercut he probably never knew he had in him.
“Ten years, fifteen years ago a cop’s job in a town like Sparta was mostly helping people, not chasing after punks and bad guys. You made sure the kids got to school all right mornings and stayed there and that the drunks got home to their wives at night. You cleaned up after traffic accidents, fender-benders mostly for god-sakes and stood in the street directing traffic during Kiwanis Karnival or heavy weather. You worked with the volunteer fire department and the first-aid department. Sure, there was the occasional assault and battery, the occasional store theft, the occasional vandalism. But, Charlie, we were helping cats out of gutters. See what I mean? I didn’t sign on for the reason the kids do now, to catch the bad guys. I signed on because it was a good thing to do and a way to do a little good.
“And then the world went and changed on me. Since Kennedy died, maybe a while before, I dunno, things seem all shot to hell.”
Ed ordered another beer and Teddy poured it. Teddy was listening in on them but you’d never know it. Not that he was nosy. Teddy just wanted to know what his patrons had on their minds. He wasn’t a particularly smart man, but you could count on him to be curious and you could count on him to be discreet.
“I didn’t want to be that kind of cop, Charlie. I didn’t want to look at Lisa Steiner’s shot-dead body four years ago and I didn’t want to look at another. Not ever. I know you’ve seen some since then. That’s not for me. I’m not sure it’s for you exactly either, you want to know the god’s honest truth. But that’s your business, old buddy, your call. Teddy’s got a good corned beef sandwich with potato salad at two-twenty-five today. Nice and lean. I recommend it highly.”
There was a clock on the wall next to Gehrig with a plaque under it saying IRISH TIME, but no clock with the real time. Schilling stared at it without really seeing it. Teddy was Polish but he’d bought the bar from an Irishman and never bothered to change the clock or anything else about the place. He wondered if Teddy knew what time it was in Poland.
“I’ve got to go talk with the mother.”
“No you don’t. Why?”
/>
“You know why.”
“It was four years ago, Charlie. She stopped calling, what, two-and-a-half years ago? Let it ride.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
“You already did the most you could do for chrissake.”
“You don’t get it.”
“Okay, I’m a dope. Tell me what I don’t get.”
“I don’t care anymore, Ed. Most of the time I just don’t give a shit. I used to want to nail that Pye kid real bad. I went from that to figuring he’d slip up one of these days and I could wait. I went from that to figuring we’d never nail him, not for anything. Not even for a parking ticket and guess what? We didn’t. I had a woman couple of nights ago over on Cedar Street, little white house next to the corner. Noise complaint, two in the morning. She’s new here and I think there’s something going on between her and the neighbors, bad blood or something.
“Anyhow the uniforms go over and she’s lying on the floor unconcious, stark naked with her panties pulled over her head. She’s been raped so bad she can barely stand. A year ago, two years, it would have made me mad as hell. Now it’s like it’s the ass end of another real bad day, you know?”
“See? Same kind of blues I got. Only you got it a little later.”
“No. You’re wrong. You’re telling me you quit because the job description changed, you didn’t want to chase the bad guys. I’m staying on because I do want to chase the bad guys, I always did, but jesus, I need something to shake me.”
“They catch this joker?”
“Jokers. Three mean boozers from Dover. One of them’s her ex-boyfriend and the other two are his army buddies. She ID’d them right away. And all I’m thinking is, these guys are incredibly stupid. They should have killed her. Now how about that? I’m thinking if they killed her they might have got away with it.”
“Shit, Charlie. That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
“You get no argument from me. That’s my point.”
Altman, Heinz and Earle had moved on to a loud discussion about who was the better fighter, Joe Louis or Mohammed Ali, who Altman still insisted on calling Cassius Clay. The juke was blaring out a Frankie Valle tune.