"Maybe you should call Mike or someone," Maureen suggested. "See if they know anything about this."
"Yeah," he said absently, but he wasn't really in the mood. He spent the rest of the afternoon mopping up the bathroom floor and washing the throw rug, leaving it on the upper deck to dry out.
It was a hot day and it segued into a hot night, and when they went to bed they left the windows open and turned on a fan.
They were undressing on their respective sides of the bed when, from the road outside, there came the sound of screeching brakes.
And a muffled thump.
"Jesus shit! Is this day ever going to end?" Barry pulled his pants back up, threw on his shirt, and stormed up the stairs.
He assumed that someone had hit a deer or javelina , and he expected to find a worried driver out of his car and checking the grill and front bumper for dents while an animal corpse lay on the asphalt illuminated by headlights, but that was not the sight that greeted him when he stepped outside.
It was a hit and run. The vehicle--whatever it was--was speeding away, down the hill, already lost in the pines, but in the last faint vestiges of red taillight glow, Barry saw a small crumpled form on the road. His first thought was that a child had been hit, and he ran down the driveway, legs j pumping as fast as they could. But halfway there, he knew it wasn't a child.
It was Stumpy.
Barry reached the street. The deformed man lay unmoving in the center of the roadway, his limbless body twisted into a shape that caused Barry's breath to catch in his throat.
He looked back toward the house and was grateful to see Maureen standing on the porch. "Call 911!" he screamed. "Stumpy's been run over!"
He felt for a pulse, placing his fingers on the clammy and heavily corded neck, but that was something he'd written about and seen in movies, not something he actually knew how to do, and though he felt nothing he was not sure if that was because Stumpy was dead or if it was due to his own medical ineptitude. He leaned down, placed his ear next to the open mouth, listening for the sound of breathing, but could not hear anything.
He knew enough not to move the body, but he didn't know CPR or any resuscitative techniques, and it wasn't until Maureen came out with her flashlight that he was certain Stumpy had been killed.
"He's dead," she told him. "There's no way he could've survived being run over like that. You can see where the tires went over him."
Indeed, now that he looked more closely, Barry saw blood seeping from beneath the body, saw pieces of intestine poking through rips and tears in the side of the callused torso. The eyes were staring glassily at nothing.
Just in case, Maureen bent down and felt the neck, touched the lips, pressed an ear to the chest, but in answer to Barry's quizzical look, she shook her head.
They were expecting a platoon of people: sheriff, deputies, firemen, ambulance drivers, medics, the whole gamut of emergency workers that such an incident would have brought out in a civilized area of the country. But ten minutes later a single ambulance pulled up, lights and siren off, and Sheriff Hitman emerged from the vehicle alone.Hitman walked toward them with a not particularly hurried gait, a notebook in his hand.
Barry pointed an accusing finger at Stumpy's body. "He's dead!"
The sheriff nodded curtly. "Yeah."
"You took your goddamn time getting here! And why aren't there any paramedics? How did you expect to revive him or treat him or ... or stabilize him?"
"I knew he was dead," Hitman said simply.
Barry wanted to punch the sheriff's reptilian face. He was filled with anger, but he knew that anger was only partially directed at the sheriff's dereliction of duty.
"I didn't say that he was dead when I called 911," Maureen pointed out.
"Yours wasn't the only call."
Barry looked over at Maureen, and they shared the same thought without saying a word. No one else was out this late, there were no other homes on this immediate section of the street, no crowd had gathered or onlookers had come by. The only other person who could have called it in was the driver who had hit him.
They told this to the sheriff and he dutifully took the information down, promising to trace the call and find out where it came from, but Barry had the feeling that Hitman would do no such thing. After describing how they'd heard the accident from inside the house and rushed out to find the body, the two of them stood next to each other and watched the sheriff lift Stumpy and deposit him into the rear of the ambulance. There was no stretcher, no body bag, just the naked battered corpse crumpled on the metal floor of the vehicle.
Hitman shut the double doors. "Thanks for all your help," he said without looking at them. He strode to the front of the ambulance, got in, and drove away.
"That was weird," Maureen said, stunned.
"No shit."
"He didn't even take photos of the crime scene or anything. Don't you think that stuff is pretty standard in any kind of investigation?"
"I don't know what to think," Barry admitted.
"What kind of sheriff is he?"
They walked back into the house, shutting and locking the door behind them. Once again, they undressed and got into bed, but as much as he tried to divert his mind to other subjects, Barry kept seeing Stumpy's broken body and dead staring eyes, kept feeling the clamminess of the man's rough skin, and it was a long, long time before he fell asleep.
They'd arranged several days earlier to play tennis with Mike and Tina in the morning, and after a quick breakfast of Total and orange juice, they walked down to the courts, rackets in hand. It was a Sunday and it was early, but the Stewarts were already there and had obviously been warming up for some time. Mike's light blue shirt had a huge sweat stain on the back, and the court was littered with fluorescent balls.
"Practicing," Maureen whispered. "They're afraid we'll beat 'em."
"Yeah." Barry smiled thinly. Playing tennis was the last thing on his mind right now, and he was here only because Maureen had said it would be rude to cancel. "We need all the friends we can get," she told him.
They walked past the Stewarts' Acura and Barry opened the metal chain-link gate.
"Howdy neighbor!" Mike raised his racket in greeting.
"Good morning!" Maureen answered.
They stepped onto the court, the two women hugging, the men shaking hands. Barry had not yet told Mike about his encounter with Audrey, and he'd asked Maureen not to tell Tina anything either. The Stewarts and Hodges seemed to be closer to each other than either of them were to Barry and Maureen, and he could not be certain where their loyalties lay. He did not think either Mike or Tina were into anything kinky or were aware of Audrey's proclivities, but their friendship with the other couple might make them predisposed to believe any alternate version or explanation, no matter how far-fetched. And at this point, the last thing Barry needed was an eroding of his reputation.
They decided to volley first, and they split up: men on one side, women on the other. It was an easy, non taxing back-and-forth, allowing them to talk as they warmed up, and Barry described the night's excitement, explaining how Stumpy had been run over in front of their house and how the sheriff had made little effort to disguise the fact that there wouldn't be an investigation.
Mike looked taken aback. "What?"
"That's what happened. Then Hitman drove away ..." He shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished.
"That's not possible," Mike said. "I just saw Stumpy less than an hour ago."
Barry felt a familiar tingle at the back of his neck. "Stumpy's dead."
"No, he's not. I saw him."
"Where?"
"I was running the loop. You know, the same way we ran that time?" He gave Barry a warning look. "And I saw him sitting by the side of the road off Ponderosa Circle. Well, not sitting exactly. Lying. Or whatever the hell he does. Anyway, he was there and making those retard noises--"
"Mike!" Tina admonished.
"Well, they are! And, as usual, I said hi to him, p
retended to be polite, and ran on by. That was it."
Mike obviously believed what he was saying, did not appear to be lying, and that was what was so disturbing. Both of them couldn't be right.
And if neither was wrong ... A man passed by. He smiled and waved.
"Hey, Travis!" Mike called out. "You heard anything! about Stumpy being killed in a hit-and-run accident?"
"Killed? I don't think so! That geek was rootin ' around in Merl's compost pile this mornin '! I had to chase him out with a shovel!"
"Thanks!" Mike called out.
The other man nodded and kept walking.
"I know what I saw," Barry insisted.
"I saw it, too," Maureen added.
Mike shrugged. "Well, I know what / saw." He shook his head. "Let's just forget about it. You two get your butts on , the other side of that net. Me and Tina are in the mood to whip 'em."
But Barry could not forget about it. His distraction probably cost them the match, but he didn't care, and after they said their good-byes and walked back up the hill to home, he told Maureen he was going for a walk.
"Oh no you're not," she said.
"What are you talking about?"
"You think you're tricky? I know what you're planning to do."
"What?" "Look for Stumpy."
"How do you do that?" he demanded, caught.
"I know you. I've lived with you all these years, and I know the way you think."
He tried to explain. "Look, we both know Stumpy's dead. We both saw it. I just want to confirm the fact."
"Why don't you call the sheriff?"
"Yeah, like we'd get an honest answer from him."
"Well..."
"You're welcome to come if you want."
Maureen shook her head. "I've had enough exercise for one day. I'm going to take a nice cool shower and read a good magazine. You can play Hardy Boys by yourself."
"Wish me luck."
"Luck."
He walked down to the bridle trail and headed up the path toward where he had first seen Stumpy. The trail ran through the forest just below Ponderosa Circle, where Mike claimed to have spotted him this morning.
He had no idea what Mike and that other guy had seen, but no matter what they thought, it had not been Stumpy, and he was going to prove it.
The dirt pathway wound through a copse of manzanitas and dipped into a muddy runoff channel. Barry avoided the mud by stepping on a series of half-protruding rocks, then followed the trail between an oversized boulder and an exposed section of hillside before it once again leveled off and continued through the trees and foliage.
He'd gone much farther than he had that first time, and he stopped for a moment to rest. As he'd expected, as he'd known, there was no sign of Stumpy. He had no idea what was going on, why anyone would try to fool others into thinking Stumpy was alive, how they could actually do such a thing, how they could physically accomplish the deception, but he had no doubt that the association was mixed up in it somehow. The motives were murky, and he couldn't figure out what anyone could hope to gain from such a ruse, but it appeared to be what was happening nonetheless.
He was about to turn back and make that call to the sheriff when he heard a noise off to the left. A heavy rustling in the bushes. Barry's heart leapt in his chest. It could have been a bird, could have been a javelina, could have been a mountain lion, could have been a hundred other things. But he knew it wasn't. He'd heard that sound before.
He recognized it.
No, he told himself. It wasn't possible. Stumpy was dead. He'd seen the broken body. Maureen had checked it. Hitman had confirmed it.
A branch snapped, leaves soughed.
This really was something out of one of his novels, and I in his mind he saw the sheriff dropping the body off at the j coroner's, saw Stumpy resurrected, saw the limbless body snaking out of the morgue, flopping up the highway in the dead of night, inching through the underbrush to get back to Bonita Vista.
There was the sound of moaning coming from somewhere around ground level, and he turned, got ready to run. What if Stumpy was a zombie?
Or a vampire? Or something worse? It was broad daylight, but he felt like a little boy confronted with the prospect of walking down a dark alley after seeing a scary movie.
Stumpy flopped onto the path, crying out.
Only... It wasn't Stumpy. It was someone else. Another dirty naked man with no arms or legs who forced himself forward with spastic thrashing movements, head and chest bobbing up and down, bloody genitals scraping dirt and twigs. Burrs and bristles were caught in the wild hair, and the face had only one eye, that one clouded and opaque. The other was a deeply hollowed out hole. Two cracked teeth were all that was left in the bruised and puffy mouth.
There was something familiar about that mutilated face, and though he was seized with panic and the instinctive urge to flee, Barry remained rooted in place, staring. He knew why Mike and that other man had been fooled. At a casual glance, even at a not-so-casual glance, this looked like Stumpy. But the differences were there if one bothered to take a look, and as the limbless man squirmed across the path toward a thicket of ferns, screaming incoherently while jagged stones scraped underbelly skin, it came to him.
Kenny Tolkin .
He squinted, staring, imagining a blue patch over the missing eye. He recognized those features, distorted as they were, and his mouth was suddenly dry.
"Kenny?" he said.
The new Stumpy looked up at him blankly and howled intongueless impotent rage.
Barry finished off another beer and dropped the can on the wooden floor of the deck with the others. He was living in a horror novel. His life had become his work--only he wasn't sure he could actually sell such oddball shit to readers and have them buy it. Psychotic friends, yes. Ghosts and ageless demons, sure. But a malevolent homeowners'
association that dismembered members for being late with their dues? It was too close to reality to be truly fantastic and thus allow readers to suspend disbelief, yet not realistic enough to be taken seriously on any sort of naturalistic level.
He grabbed another can from the ice chest, popped the top, took a swig.
He ran down a list of titles in his mind. Horror fiction was his reference point, and if he could just ascribe a cause to what was happening, if he could just determine a source, he could at least start to think about strategies, at least know what he was up against and plan for it. But there didn't seem to be a ready explanation. Bonita Vista was not built atop burial grounds to his knowledge, it wasn't the scene of some heinous murder or historic wholesale butchery. He doubted that the homeowners' association was an ancient fertility cult a la Harvest Home or The Ceremonies, and the likelihood that Satan was behind it all was practically nonexistent.
So what did that leave?
He didn't know, and that was what frustrated him.
Thinking about Kenny Tolkin squirming along the ground with his newly cauterized stumps dragging his damaged genitals, it occurred to him that the homeowners' association had killed Stumpy and that they had done so in order to hide what they'd done to Kenny. Hitman was oh Obviously in on it, and their plan to quietly dispose of the deformed man's corpse and substitute the other, pretend as though nothing had happened, probably would have worked had Stumpy not been hit in front of Barry's house. They'd screwed up there. That had been a miscalculation. The new Stumpy had obviously fooled Mike, and he would probably pass muster with everyone else as well. But he and Maureen had seen. They'd been there when it happened.
Despite what Ray had said about the courts siding in favor of homeowners' associations and ruling against the rights of individuals, a lot of this shit was illegal. It had to be. There was no way that mutilation and murder would be sanctioned by any law enforcement agency or member of the judiciary.
Except, of course, for Corban's beloved sheriff.
He tried to think this through logically. If he called the FBI or some outside law, would they be able to prove tha
t what he said was true?
Kenny had no fingerprints to match, no teeth to correspond with dental records. If his DNA was on file somewhere, that might work. Or his blood type. But chances of that were pretty damn slim.
Hell, would they even be able to find Kenny, or would the association have him hidden away by then?
Or killed?
And what were the chances of finding Stumpy's corpse? It was no doubt scattered ashes by now with no paper trail documenting the steps.
Barry finished the beer, dropped the can on the pile, his brain starting to throb.
And what if he did turn them in, what if he did report the association?
Would that make him and Maureen targets? Would that put a price on their heads?
He tried to think about the situation from a novelist's perspective, tried to figure out what he would do, how he would have his protagonist get out of this predicament if this happened in one of his books, but he could not seem to come up with anything remotely helpful. The alternative-sitting on his ass and saying nothing--was morally repugnant. As was the thought of flight, escaping under the cover of darkness or anonymity and disappearing into the outside world, never to return to or think about Bonita Vista ever again.
So what were their choices?
He wished Ray were here. The old man could always be counted on to offer a balanced view of any situation and to come up with plausible courses of action. He also had a knowledge of Bonita Vista and the association that came with history. He'd possessed insider insights, something that Barry would never have and that was irreplaceable.
But Ray was dead.
They'd killed him, too.
Barry sat alone on the deck, staring out at the canyon lands as the sun went down, watching the shadows of the pines lengthen and take over the land.
And from somewhere in the trees, he heard Kenny howl.
The meatloaf was nearly done, Grandma Mary had already arrived, and the rest of the family was moving chairs and pulling out the leaves of the table for Sunday dinner, but there was still no sign of Weston.
The Association Page 22