“What about Uncle Louie?”
Pitch, grinning, returned the bottle to the table, rubbing his chin as a sly smile crept across his face. “Hmm, he didn’t come out so well.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Pitch said, chuckling. “I didn’t cash him in. He and a shit-load of my clients lost a great deal of money… everything, I’m afraid.”
“What’re you talking about? Do you know what the fuck you’ve done?”
“What? What have I done?”
“Nobody cheats my uncle.”
“I did.”
“Do you know who Uncle Louie works for? They’ll track you down and cut you into little pieces.”
“I doubt that,” Pitch said, laughing.
“They will hunt you down.” Hastie looked Pitch dead in the eye. “They won’t stop until they find you, no matter how long it takes. They’ll never stop looking.”
“Yeah, well, there are a whole lot of people looking for me today. And I’ll bet your uncle and those greasy Italian bastards he works for would just love to get their hands on you right about now.”
Hastie reached for the whiskey, and the realization smacked him like a left hook.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? I introduced you to Uncle Louie and you fucked him over. He’s mobbed up to his eyeballs. You know that. Those people don’t forget. Ever.”
“They can’t hurt me, Jimmy. Nobody can.”
“They can’t hurt you,” Hastie sneered. “Do you know what you’ve—”
“Again with that shit,” Pitch cut him off, but Hastie kept talking, “I can’t ever go back home again. By now my uncle will have every scumbag and lowlife bum in New York City looking for me.”
“Nobody can hurt me, and as long as you’re with me, nobody can hurt you.”
“Nobody can hurt you. They’ll squash you like a bug and carry both of us back to New York in those goddamn suitcases.”
“Nobody can stand up to my power, Jimmy. Not you, not them, nobody.”
“What? You think ‘cause you can hypnotize somebody, you can thumb your nose at them? Are you crazy?”
“Crazy? I’ll show you how crazy I am.”
Hastie sat on the couch, shaking his head, wondering if he would ever see his mother again.
“Did I ever tell you how old I am?” Pitch asked him.
“No.”
“Care to guess?”
“Fuck, I dunno,” Hastie said, voicing his aggravation. “Forty?”
“I was born in 1862.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m sixty-seven years old, Jimmy.”
“Yeah, and I’m the tooth fairy.”
“Jimmy,” Pitch said, and leaned forward in his chair. “Look me in the eye.”
“Aw, geez, not that shit again,” Jimmy said, as his stomach shriveled into a hard, tight ball, and Pitch’s eyes began to glow, the room sway and the hair on Hastie’s neck bristle, and then stand straight up. He tried to turn away, but everywhere he looked he saw Pitch’s dark blue eyes staring back at him, pulsating… glowing, as that lilting voice floated gently on the air…
“I grew up in Virginia.”
Words swirled through the room, and the floor dropped away, ushering Hastie into the thousand mile drop of an elevator whose cable had just been severed. He stopped falling and a scene began to form: a brown-haired man playing poker in an aged tavern, drinking ale from a wooden cup, the clothes he wore seen only in the history books from Hastie’s childhood. Moments later, the same man lay writhing naked atop a woman while another man kicked the door off its hinges and came roaring into the room, struggling violently with the gambler, who stabbed him, while behind them the woman screamed, and beat him with clenched fists, grabbing his hair as he turned and plunged the knife, and kept plunging and stabbing until she lay motionless on the bed.
“The year was nineteen hundred and three.”
The gambler galloped away on horseback, across fields and meadows and rolling hills, until the horse pulled up lame and he struck out on foot, following a trail across the mountain Hastie had just driven over.
“I saw them, not fifty yards down the mountain, carrying guns and knives and a hangman’s rope.”
As if looking through the fugitive’s eyes, Hastie watched the posse charge up the mountain, briars and bushes rushing by as the man scrambled through the dense underbrush. Hastie could almost feel the thorns ripping his shirt, tearing pieces of skin from his arms as the fugitive raced his way up the mountain.
“And then I saw him.”
The man ran into a clearing, and gasped. A stranger with black hair, and piercing eyes the same dark blue as Pitch’s, stood in the middle of the woods. He wore a top hat and a fine suit of clothes, but no shoes. The gambler followed him into a cave, where a small mound of burning wood cast strange, misshapen shadows on the wall while the dark-haired man transformed into a horribly grotesque creature, and the gambler changed, too. No longer the gambler, his hair grew darker, and then turned black as the stranger’s. Then his eyes glazed over and all the color faded away, disappearing until nothing was left but two solid white orbs, whose color began to slowly reappear, the pupils etching back into place, filling in until they were the same dark blue eyes of the stranger.
“I saw the man I used to be…”
Suddenly, three men were in the cave, and as Hastie watched he understood that the dark-haired newcomer in the fine clothes was Pitch, and the gambler wringing his hands in the faint firelight of the cave was the man Pitch had once been. He watched the demon hand Pitch a sack full of glittering stones, and Pitch run out of the cave, across the clearing onto a narrow dirt trail.
“They didn’t even know it was me.”
Pitch changed again, his body and clothes melting and melding, until he stood on the path wearing the filthy garb of a coal miner. His face was old, the skin cracked and dry as the posse charged up and Pitch pointed at the cave, and they disappeared into an opening that quickly sealed itself shut, muffling the pain-filled shrieks that filled the air as the filthy old miner transformed into the man standing before Hastie in this very room…
The room stopped spinning, and Hastie’s feet touched solid ground.
The fuck are you? he wondered, vaguely aware of Pitch’s eyes having released him.
Pitch turned away and picked up the Jack Daniels, took a swig and chased it down with the cold and refreshing ice water. As Hastie’s eyes began to focus, Pitch continued, “You see, Jimmy. I haven’t changed, haven’t aged a single minute in the last twenty-six years. I was forty-one when I went up the mountain, and I’m still forty-one.”
“How can that be?”
“I made a deal with that… creature.” Pitch shuddered, as if thinking back to that night. “I haven’t aged, and I’ll never age… as long as I come back every thirteen years and give him what he wants.”
“What’s that?” Hastie asked, not sure if he really wanted to know or not.
“You’ll find out,” Pitch said. “You’ll find out tonight!”
Chapter Fourteen
John Fraley sat in his office at the Whitley National Bank, admiring his hand-crafted walnut desk. The desk, a gift from his father, had ebony inlays and escutcheons, intricate leaf carvings on the knees of its cabriole legs. It was one of his most prized possessions, and when he leaned over and placed his palms on the smooth surface, polished to perfection, he saw his face reflected in the desktop.
This was his favorite part of the day. After opening the bank and getting his employees off to their daily routines, Fraley liked to grab a cup of coffee, retreat to his office and spread the daily paper out on his desk. This morning, he looked down at the newspaper’s headline, and found nothing but trouble:
STOCK PRICES SLUMP $14,000,000,000
IN NATION-WIDE STAMPEDE TO UNLOAD
Fraley imagined what it might be like for the stockholders and bond traders out in New York, wondering how it would be to go to bed one night,
healthy, wealthy and wise, only to wake up the next morning, penniless and without a pot to piss in. Was what his cousin said true, that rich people were jumping off rooftops and out of windows?
He scanned the article, sipping coffee and shaking his head, and for once in his life, he was glad to be a big fish in the very small pond of Whitley, West Virginia. Hard times were coming, of that there could be no doubt; here, there and everywhere, all across the nation. But at least he hadn’t lost everything, like those poor folks in New York.
Fraley turned the page and saw more bad news, gave his head a disgusted shake and closed the paper, folded it and tossed it aside. Finished with his coffee, he ran a hand across his bald head, stood up and walked across the room, down the hallway into the bank’s lobby, where Amy Farrell stood behind the teller’s cage, cashing a check for Marty Donlan. His other employee, Cathy Brooks, busied herself by counting out bills and punching the keys on her adding machine. A vehicle rumbled up to the curb, its engine sputtering and coughing a couple of times before it finally died. Fraley stepped up to the window, fingering his gold tie-clasp as he looked out at an old beat-up GMC pickup, its tailgate missing, the rear window cracked. The faded-black truck, with its Kentucky license plate, was a rolling hunk of rust-spots and blistered paint, its flaked-metal bed riddled with gaping holes.
Three men got out, dirty-looking individuals who probably hadn’t bathed in a week.
Fraley turned away from the window, glancing over at the counter as Marty Donlan, who had just pocketed his cash, turned and walked across the room, to the front door. The door opened and Marty stepped aside, allowing the men to enter. Then he walked past them, out the door as one of them closed it behind him.
Two of the men stood by, fidgeting nervously, and that made Fraley nervous. He took a couple of steps toward them. “Can I help you fellas?”
The man in front stepped forward, grinning. Tall and thin, gaunt-looking, with a couple of day’s stubble on his face, he had brown eyes and short brown hair. He wore a long black coat that hung down around his ankles, and Fraley, realizing the man was clutching something inside the coat, took a backward step.
“Yessir,” the man said as he pulled his coat back, lifted a double-barreled shotgun and leveled it at Fraley. To his companions he said, “Lock the door.”
The one closest to the door, who looked very young—a kid, really—locked it.
The other, short and fat, pulled a pistol from beneath his faded denim jacket and ran behind the counter, reached down the front of his pants and pulled out an empty pillowcase, and told Amy Farrell to fill it up.
Amy stood frozen in place, trembling, eyes wide as the short bandit pointed the pistol at her face. “Fill it up, goddamn you!” he yelled. Then he smiled, revealing an ugly set of tobacco-stained buckteeth, Fraley cringing as he imagined they guy’s foul breath washing across the frightened woman.
Their leader jabbed the shotgun into Fraley’s belly.
“Tell her, fat-boy,” he sneered.
“Go ahead, Amy,” Fraley called out in a calm and soothing voice. “Give them the money so they can get on out of here.”
“That’s right, Amy,” Buckteeth teased. “Gimme the money and I’ll leave you be.”
Amy opened her drawer with shaking hands, pulled out a stack of bills and dropped them into the pillowcase.
“All of it!”
She cleaned out the drawer and the filthy bandit went on to Cathy Brooks, who had stood quietly by, watching the event unfold. He held the pillowcase open in front of her. Wordlessly, she cleaned all the cash and coins from her drawer and dumped them into the sack.
“That’s a good girl,” Buckteeth said, stroking a hand down her long brown hair.
Then to his partner, “Purdy, ain’t she?”
“Leave her alone!” Fraley yelled.
“Easy, hero,” the gaunt man said, nudging him with the gun.
Fraley felt the barrel dig into his gut as his knees began to wobble, and hoped like hell the guy’s finger wasn’t on the trigger.
“Ain’t much here, Clem,” Buckteeth called out.
“That’s okay,” the leader said. “Mister Bank-Man’s gonna clean out his safe for us. Ain’t ya?”
“I can’t,” Fraley said. “I don’t have the combination.”
“Bullshit,” Clem said, and then slammed the rifle butt into Fraley’s belly, doubling the banker over and dropping him to his knees, hands clutching his stomach as he gasped.
“I swear. My father’s the only one who knows it, and he’s over in Charleston.”
Clem placed the barrel directly on Fraley’s forehead. “Mister,” he said. “Get up and open that fucking safe.”
“Look,” Fraley said. “You’ve got plenty. Get out before somebody wanders in and something bad happens. Get out while the gettin’s good. You’ve cleaned us out.” He hoped they would buy it. There was twenty thousand dollars in the safe, and if they got their grubby hands on that, the bank would be cleaned out. The whole town would be cleaned out.
“You must really love your money,” Clem said. To Buckteeth, he called out, “Bring that bitch over here, Charlie.”
Buckteeth stuck his pistol in the waistband of his jeans, grabbed Cathy by the arm and pushed her around the counter, across the room until they stood in front of Clem, and John Fraley, who had struggled to his feet.
“She is a pretty one, ain’t she, Charlie?”
“Sure is. Look at that long hair, and those ruby red lips. Boy, I’d love to see those suckers wrapped around my cock.”
“I bet you would,” Clem said, his smile cruel, his stare cold and unforgiving.
Cathy, who had started to tremble, pleaded with them to stop.
“Banker-Man don’t care about himself,” Clem said. “Maybe he cares about what happens to you.”
“Please,” Fraley said. “Just leave us alone. Just leave.”
“Look at them tits.” Buckteeth grabbed the collar of Cathy’s dress and ripped the flowered pattern, exposing her bra, her chest and stomach, the waistband of her underwear. “Lordy,” he said, and fished a knife from his pocket and pried open the blade, slid it between the cups of her bra and sliced them free, pulled back the fabric and gaped wide-eyed at her breasts.
“Please, Mister Fraley,” Cathy whimpered, as the kid guarding the door said, “Wow!”
Buckteeth closed the knife and dropped it into his pocket, grabbed a breast in each hand and squeezed them; put the nipples between his thumb and forefingers, guided a breast into his mouth and started to suck.
“Mister Fraley! Dear God! Please!” Cathy cried out, sobbing, tears running down her cheeks as the man assaulted her.
“Okay!” Fraley shouted. “Okay! Leave her alone!”
“You gonna open that safe?”
“Yes, just make him stop.”
“Leave her be, Charlie.”
But Buckteeth didn’t stop. He kept squeezing her tit and sucking her nipple, grabbing her other breast and kneading it as well, all the while moaning and groaning and slobbering on her chest.
“Stop it, Charlie!” Clem yelled.
“Fuck you,” Buckteeth mumbled as Clem raised the shotgun, swung it around and rapped his partner with its stock, drawing a surprised yelp from the man as he grabbed the side of his head, and Cathy immediately crossed her arms, covering most of her breasts.
Clem pointed the shotgun toward the counter. “Go get the other one,” he said, and Fraley started across the room.
“Do somethin’ stupid,” Clem called out to him, “and I’ll blow this’un’s tits off.”
Fraley went behind the counter and escorted Amy back to Cathy’s side, took his jacket off and draped it around Cathy.
“Take us to the safe,” Clem ordered. To the boy at the door, he said, “Get over here and keep an eye on these women, Johnny. Either one moves a muscle, shoot ‘em both. Come on, Charlie, you’re goin’ with us.”
Johnny, Charlie and Clem. Fraley told himself to remem
ber their names. He doubted they were smart enough to use fake ones. The thought that he might not be alive when they left had not yet entered his mind.
He led them down the hallway, to a locked room, where he took out his key ring. Fumbling around until he held the right key, he opened the door and stepped across the threshold, and the two robbers followed him through. Fraley flipped a switch and light filled the room, revealing a metal door with a combination lock built into it.
“Get it open,” Clem said. “Quick.”
Fraley, standing next to the door, twisted the dial a few times, grasped a metal bar and gave it a tug, and the door swung open.
Clem grinned. “Clean it out,” he said, and his bucktoothed accomplice hurried into the vault, where stacks of crisp new bills lined a shelf against the far wall: hundreds and fifties, twenties and tens, fives, twos and ones. He grabbed the stacks one at a time and shoved them into the pillowcase. When he was done, the sack almost full, he stepped out of the vault.
“Lordy, Clem,” he said. “We struck it rich!”
Clem, smiling, the shotgun by his side, held his free hand out to Fraley. “Give me your keys,” he said, and Fraley handed over his key ring.
“Didn’t know the combination, huh? That’s what he said, wasn’t it, Charlie?”
“Damn sure was.”
Fraley glared at the shotgun-toting thug. “Just take your damn money and get out.”
“Thanks, I will,” Clem said, and then hefted the shotgun and swept it forward, smashing the stock into the bank manager’s cheek, dropping him straight to the floor, blood flowing from a gash in his face as he banged a knee against the hardwood and rolled over, watching as they ran from the room, laughing and whooping and hollering like a couple of kids playing Cowboys and Indians.
* * *
Earl Peters stood in front of Henry Walker’s Esso station, watching Henry Jr. pump gas into his car. In the doorway stood Henry Sr., his enormous beer gut hanging over his waistline. After all was said and done, Vonda Peters wound up inheriting twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars from her father’s estate. Where all that money came from, nobody knew, not even the lawyer, who had sat dumbfounded holding a life insurance policy from a New York firm, issued the day before Clifford and his wife had passed. The house and its furnishings, the furniture in the store and the building had netted them another two grand. With sugar going for six cents a pound, bread nine cents a loaf, and a gallon of Henry Walker’s gas for twelve cents, things were looking up for the Peters’ family. With newspaper headlines heralding the economy’s demise, stocks and bonds plummeting to ground-zero, Earl and Vonda seemed to be on top of the world. Earl had grimaced at the five hundred dollar price tag on their newly-purchased car, but it really was just a tiny drop from the bucketful of money they had come by.
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