by Gorman, Ed
He cleared his throat. He tried to sit up and couldn’t quite do it. “I didn’t need partners.”
“If you’d followed the plan, you wouldn’t have been stuck pretending to be in a coma for three months.”
“I didn’t mind it.”
“And you call me a lunatic. You popped your partners. You cut the girl. You cut her and then you killed her because you like feeling a knife chewing through cartilage.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“The girl was our inside player. She was the one who got us the alarm codes. She was my granddaughter.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. You would’ve done her anyway. And me, if she hadn’t sent me the video feed.”
“That’s why you drove off.”
“Yeah.”
“And you committed yourself? And waited? In the hospital?”
“Yeah.”
“But. But you could’ve taken me at any time. Why? Why did you wait?”
“I had to make sure you had the key on you,” I said. “I wanted the score. I’m a thief.”
I kicked him in the face, then slung him over my shoulder and walked out the back door. He didn’t have much struggle left in him but he squirmed around and mewled a bit. I marched down the path through the dunes out to the beach. I tossed him down. Emily’s chaise lounge was still where it was the last time she’d laid on it, but it was almost completely covered by sand now. I dug it out and there was a pretty sizeable hole left over. I buried the Kid in it and smoothed the sand out and placed the lounge over the spot. I sat down for a while watching the waves roll in.
• • •
TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of more than twenty novels, including The Cold Spot, The Midnight Road, Headstone City, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s a four-time winner of the Stoker Award and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the International Thriller Writers Award, and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. Learn more about him and his work at his website, www.tompiccirilli.com.
PATTERNS
By Richard A. Lupoff
Keweenaw Bay Gazette
Keweenaw Bay, Michigan
July 5, 1940
Mr. Zachary Grand
Editor-in-Chief
Grand Publications
143 West 43rd Street New York, 16, New York
Dear Zach,
Well, you’ll never guess who turned up here in Keweenaw Bay a couple of days ago. Tony LoPresto! What the heck was Tony doing in this little town? Bet you’ve never heard of it. But there he was.
I was on my lunch break, stopped into Helen’s Café for a chicken salad sandwich and an icedcoffee, and there he was sitting at the counter. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
Tony LoPresto! Carried me right back to the days of the Three Cheshire Cats. Remember the Three Cheshire Cats? Of course you do! Tony was as surprised to see me as I was to see him, but as soon as we both got over the shock we started exchanging biographies. It’s been what, six, seven years, right, seven years since we said good-bye to North Cheshire Central College. Funny how three fellows who were roommates for four years, formed the best little swing trio that northwestern Massachusetts has seen, chased co-eds, shared homework, got into and out of trouble with the local law, and somehow managed to escape with bachelor’s degrees, can disappear outof each other’s lives as if they’d never known each other.
But I guess that’s life.
Would you believe that Tony is police chief of Napoleonville, the flower city of Bayou Richelieu, Louisiana? He still loves bird-watching and he was up here on vacation, field glasses in one hand and notebook in the other, studying the local feathered wildlife. Stopped into Helen’s for his ham and eggs and ran into me.
Two of the Three Cheshire Cats back together! Naturally we reminisced about good old North Cheshire Central College, good old President Lucas Smith, poor old Professor Percival Dunning, and all the great times we had together. And of course, the Three Cheshire Cats. I still play a little piano, although just for fun. Tony says he hasn’t touched his trumpet in years. Do you still keep your old bull fiddle around, Izzy — or should I say Zach?
When your name came up, Tony told me that you went back to your old hometown and got a job in the publishing world. How things change, don’t they? Good old Isaac Goldberg, editor of the North Cheshire Literary Quarterly, is now Zachary Grand, editor of Grand Adventures, Grand Western, Grand Mystery, and Grand Ghost Stories.
Did I leave anything out?
Those pulp magazines are a far cry from the Literary Quarterly, I guess, but everybody has to earna living. Who would have thought I’d become production manager of the Keweenaw Bay Gazette?
Tony says you’re always looking for new talent, which is how he discovered you’re “Zachary Grand.” I’d like to try my own hand at something like that. Being over on the production side of the Gazette is okay, but I sometimes get an itch to try writing the stuff instead of printing it. Thought maybe thesad end of poor old Dunning might furnish the ingredients for a story. Might even find a place in your Grand Mystery pulp. Just let me know, old roomie.
It’s been fun reminiscing about the old days anyway, please write back when you get a chance.
Meow, Cats, Meow!
Robert “Bobcat” O’Brien
• • •
Keweenaw Bay Gazette
Keweenaw Bay, Michigan
July 15, 1940
Mr. Zachary Grand
Editor-in-Chief
Grand Publications
143 West 43rd Street New York, 16, New York
Dear Zach,
It was great to hear from you after all these years. I know you must be dreadfully busy there at Grand Publications, running all those magazines, and I’m actually flattered that you remembered me as you did. I’malso flattered that you asked about my job here at the Keweenaw Bay Gazette. A small-town weekly is a far cry from your line of big magazines.
Actually, what I do here at the Gazette is not so different from the work I did on the North Cheshire Literary Quarterly when you were the editor-in-chief. My title here is “production manager,” but in fact I’m pretty nearly the whole production department. The owner is a fellow named Jack Miller. Editor-in-chief is Tim Holcomb, although in fact he’s also our chief reporter, feature writer, and advertising salesman. I’ll send along a half dozen recent issues so you can see what we’re all about.
What passes for hard news in Keweenaw Bay is the opening of hunting season in the fall and fishing seasonin the summer, weddings, funerals, and births, and graduation at the local high school. Come out here for a visit and you’ll think you’re in an Andy Hardy movie.
My job — well, I set type, pull and read proofs, lay out pages, and even run the press. We set type on a second-hand Mergenthaler Linotype that we got at a bankruptcy sale at the Kearsarge Recorder when they went belly-up. Of course at the Quarterly we hand-set type and ran vellum on a letter press. Out here werun newsprint on a small rotary, a Goss Sextuple that’s older than Methuselah but still runs okay. Not nearly as pretty as the Quarterly, but a whole lot cheaper.
You know, I’ve been thinking about the old gang at North Cheshire since Tony LoPresto was here. You and Tony and I were quite the trio, weren’t we, and I mean that in more ways than one. I’ve been thinking about some of the young ladies we chased, too. Remember Carolyn Deering, Annie Mayfield, Jennie Lipton? I’ll admit, I used to dream about Annie. What a girl! What a figure! I wonder what ever became of Annie and the others.
And the professors, oh, weren’t there some characters in the faculty? Shakey Simmons, Henry von Eisen, Percival Dunning. Poor guy. Remember how he used to whisper his lectures? Well, not exactly whisper, but you remember that soft, breathy voice he always used. Remember how he got it?
Oh, you wouldn’t, of course. He didn’t like to talk about it, never mentioned it in class, I only remember him talking about it one time. It was at one of his Friday night s
oirees. He used to invite a few students in to his apartment there in Wellington Hall on Friday nights. He’d lay out sandwiches and serve brandy and put on music, and we’d talk about everything from the benzene ring to Schopenhauer to the history of the Hittites. Of course there was a certain amount of pairing off, too. Normally coeds wouldn’t have been in a men’s dorm but Dunning used to invite them to his parties and nobody complained.
I’m sure he would have invited you, Izzy. He always spoke highly of you. But you were over in Great Cheshire at the synagogue on Friday nights. I had a lot of respect for you, Izzy. I think you were the only Jew at Central Cheshire, and you didn’t bother to deny it, you took whatever you had to and you stood up for who you were.
That rat von Eisen, Henry von Eisen, I remember he used to rag you every chance he got. I don’t know why he hated Jews but he certainly did, and he never missed an opportunity to slam you, pal. Percival Dunning would never have done that, it just happened that he held his gab-fests on Friday nights and you couldn’t attend.
Anyway, one Friday Percival must have had a little too much brandy. I remember he had his radio on. He used to play records most of the time, he was a big fan of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frederick Delius and Gustav Holst, but once in a while he’d turn on the radio instead. The news came on and there was something about the election in Germany, this thug who was running against old President von Hindenberg. Dunning got pretty upset about it.
When the news went off somebody asked him why he was so agitated. Dunning said that the Great War was starting up again, this bum Hitler was worse than the Kaiser and the slaughter was going to happen all over again.
Everybody else said, Look, Hitler lost the election, there’s nothing to worry about, but Dunning just sat there looking unhappy and drinking brandy. Finally a coed, I think it was actually Carolyn Deering, put her handon Dunning’s hand and asked him why he cared so much about Europe, it was three thousand miles away anyhow.
Dunning was English. Of course you knew that, Izzy, you could tell from the way he talked, right? Everybody knew he was English.
What he told us was that he’d been a Tommy in the Royal Fusiliers in the Great War. He’d been in the Battle of the Marne. There were Spads and Fokkers flying over and cannons going off and both sides were using poison gas. I thought they had gas masks but I guess they didn’t work very well, and poor Dunning wound up gassed.
He said he was nearly dead. His comrades to the left and the right in the trench were dead. He was lying in the bottom of the trench, water and mud nearly a foot deep. He had no food. He was so weak he couldn’t move, just lay there with his rifle at his side pointing up in the air, the bayonet fixed.
The Germans tried a charge, and a German soldier must have lost his footing. He fell into the British trench, landed on Percival’s bayonet. It went right through his gut. The German landed on Percival and Percival was too weak even to crawl out from under him. The German was as good as dead, he would have been better off dead but he wasalive. He was screaming in pain. Then he just moaned and cried.
Percival said it took the German a day and a night to die. Finally a German graves registration unit camethrough and pulled the corpse off Dunning and took it away, and one of the Germans noticed that Dunning was alive. They pulled him out of there and sent him to a field hospital and he spent the rest of the war in a prison camp.
That was why he always whispered, Izzy. It was his lungs. They were ruined by that poison gas. It was a miracle that he didn’t die. Didn’t die then, I mean.
Say, I’m sorry to ramble on like this, Izz. I know you’re a busy man and you have plenty ofwork to do. And I have to get back to setting type myself. You didn’t say anything about my writing for your magazines in your last letter. What do you think? Do write when you get a chance, Izz. We old Cheshire Cats have to stick together!
Meow, Cats, Meow!
Robert “Bobcat” O’Brien
• • •
Keweenaw Bay Gazette
Keweenaw Bay, Michigan
July 20, 1940
Mr. Zachary Grand
Editor-in-Chief
Grand Publications
143 West 43rd Street New York, 16, New York
Dear Izzy,
I’m glad you got a kick out of those copies of the Keweenaw Bay Gazette I sent you. The owner, Jack Miller, wanted to know if we might get a subscription out of you. When I told him I doubted it he made me pay for the copies and postage. What a cheapskate! Well, I guess he’s a businessman and he has to watch expenses.
I hope you didn’t mind my mentioning your being a Jew and all, and your attending synagogue in Great Cheshire. I wonder what Percival Dunning would think of the war in Europe if he were alive. He predicted it back in ’31, I think it was, when Hitler ran for President of Germany against old Paul von Hindenburg. Was it ’31? No, ’32, I think. Of course Hitler lost but that was only a temporary setback for him, wasn’t it?
And I wonder what Henry von Eisen thinks. He used to talk about Hitler and his theories of Aryan purity. I wonder what he thinks nowadays. Remember how he used to hate That Man in the White House, said he was secretly Jewish, his real name wasn’t Roosevelt at all, it was really Rosenfeld and he was part of the International Zionist Movement and that we needed a Hitler in America to stop Rosenfeld from selling out the country to the Jews? And where is that rat von Eisen now?
Hey, I don’t need to tell you about this, do I? Sorry, Izz.
I had a nice letter from Tony LoPresto this week. He’s back in Louisiana, of course. Who would have thought our fellow Cheshire Cat would turn out to be the Sherlock Holmes of the Bayou Country? Back in our undergrad days it seemed as if Tony’s only interests were the time he spent on the bandstand and the football field.
Man, could he play that horn! He could have given lessons to Ziggy Elman or Harry James. And when he put down his trumpet and put on a North Cheshire uniform, those pads and that leather helmet, he was something else! You wouldn’t think a barrel-shaped guy like Tony, North Cheshire’s own Two-Ton Tony, could move the way he did. But ...
Remember the big game in ’32 against Willow Lakes Institute? The way Tony snagged that pass from the Willow Lakes quarterback in our own end zone, and dodged his way the length of the field to win the county championship for us? Beautiful! And then he turned around and batted .380 for our baseball team in the spring of ’33.
But now he’s running Bayou Richelieu like J. Edgar Hoover. Who would have guessed?
I’ve been thinking about your magazines, Izzy. Somebody like Tony LoPresto could make a great character, don’t you think? I don’t mean to make a pest of myself and I always enjoy hearing from the old gang, but you haven’t responded to my questions about writing for your pulps. I hope I’ll hear from you soon.
Meow, Cats, Meow!
Robert “Bobcat” O’Brien
• • •
Keweenaw Bay Gazette
Keweenaw Bay, Michigan
August 2, 1940
Mr. Zachary Grand
Editor-in-Chief
Grand Publications
143 West 43rd Street New York, 16, New York
Dear Izz,
You are a prince of a fellow, Izzy! Not a word from you in a week and a half, and suddenly there’s a package on my desk at the Gazette, all the way from New York City. Once Tim Holcomb, the editorin-chief, saw the return address he couldn’t wait for me to open it, and when he saw what was inside he didn’t know what to make of it. I think he suspects you’re trying to lure me away from the bright lights and fast action of Keweenaw Bay and get me to come to the big town to work for Grand Publications.
And I just might do it, too, if I got the right offer. (That isn’t a hint, old roomie, I’m just pulling your leg.)
Still, copies of Grand Adventures, Grand Western, Grand Mystery, and Grand Ghost Stories all in one heavy bundle made quite a stir around the Gazette office.
I took Grand Adventures over to Helen’s Café and
spent my lunch hour poring over it. It’s quite a magazine. I know you’ve got your competition, but they’ll have to go a long ways to top Grand Adventures. That was some picture on the cover. That guy Saunders can sure paint up a storm! That native gal was really something. I hope you don’t get into trouble with the censors over it.
And the story was every bit as good as the picture. Splash Shanahan is some hero! I thought the nasty Sea Lynx was going to put a knife between his ribs at any time. Good writing, good story-telling. I’ll bet you never dreamed you’d be publishing yarns like this one when we were working together on the North Cheshire Literary Quarterly.
Some of the other stories were just as good, and of course there are all the other magazines you sent me. Grand Ghost Stories is next up on my nightstand. I don’t mind a good scare every now and then. You are one heck of a pal, Izzy!
You know, thinking about the old days, recalling the times we all had together puts me in a funny mood. Remember the night you rolled that old Cole roadster on your way back to North Cheshire from Great Cheshire? You showed up at our digs in Warren Hall with your clothes ripped up and blood all over, but you were mainly worried about your car.
What a night that was! I didn’t think you ought to make your weekly pilgrimage to your synagogue, but I’m not a very religious person and I can only stand back and respect people who are, like yourself. Still, pitch black out, temperature down around zero, sleet in the air, ice on the roads, and what had to be an out-of-season nor’easter blowing. You were lucky to get home alive, Izzy.
Tony and I got a few of the gang to hike out to the Cheshire Pike in the middle of the night. At least the storm clouds had blown over and the moon was as big as a wagon wheel. Still, there were ice crystals in the air and the roadway as slick as a mirror. Took every muscle in the gang to set that old Cole back on its wheels, but once we did the flivver started up and ran. And you were lucky at that not to crash into the landfill out there, roomie. If you had you’d never have made it back to campus and nobody would ever have found you, most likely. But after all of that, your Cole got you back to the dorm. What a car! They don’t make ’em like they used to, I’ll tell you that, Izzy.