Larry Boots, Exterminator

by John Inman

  I traipsed across my mother’s lawn, through puddles already standing. Her houselights were on, and the front porch light was lit as well. I was about to pound on her door, then thought better of it and tried the knob instead. The door was unlocked. I eased it open and peeked inside. Suddenly I remembered the wrench back on my car seat and wished I had brought it with me.

  At that moment, my mother’s voice called out from the yard behind me. I peeked back outside, then moved around to the side of the house where I was hit in the face with a flashlight beam.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she called out through the slashing rain.

  My mother was there in the side yard. She was wearing a fluffy housecoat that would probably never be the same again. It hung around her, clammy and soaked. Her feet were bare and muddy, and she was on her knees, stacking shards of ceramic into little piles around her. Her prized collection of garden gnomes had bit the dust.

  “What happened?” I screamed above the storm. “Why don’t you wait till the rain stops?”

  At that moment, a bolt of lightning streaked over our heads, and my mother and I both jumped. The crack of thunder that followed came fast, and it came loud. We jumped again.

  I bent down and plucked the flashlight from her hand, pointing it down at her instead of letting her point it up at me. Watching me, she held a hand over her eyes to repel the rain and maybe the glare of the light. Water was pouring off her face, her hair slicked flat to her head.

  She indicated the shattered figurines all around her. “He did this on purpose!” she yelled. “I saw him through the window with a club, pounding my poor gnomes into the ground, shattering them to pieces. Why would he do that, Larry? Why would he do such a thing?”

  I pulled her up off her knees and all but dragged her toward the front porch.

  “Take care of it when it stops raining,” I cried. “Let’s get you inside.”

  Once I pushed her through the front door, she whirled on me like a cat. She aimed a shaking finger back at the lawn. I had never in my life seen her as furious as she was at that moment.

  “Did you see what he did? Did you see? How did he even know they were there?”

  I stepped forward and pulled her trembling, muddy, waterlogged body into an embrace.

  “I’ll get you wet,” she demurred, and I offered up an ironic tut. I was already wet, maybe even wetter.

  “You keep saying he,” I said. “Who do you think it was?”

  She pulled herself up to her full five feet two inches. “I don’t think, I know!” she railed. “Why I ever thought he was perfect for you, I’ll never know!”

  That stopped me cold. “What? What did you say?”

  She stripped the muddy robe off her shoulders and dropped it at her feet with a splat. She stared down at it sadly. “That poor thing is ruined,” she mumbled to herself.

  I gripped her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Who are you talking about? Are you talking about Kenny? Why do you think he has anything to do with this?”

  She gave me a glare that would have killed a lesser man, then peeled herself out of my arms and crossed the room on legs that were already shaking from the cold. Through the wet nightgown she wore, I could see every inch of her naked, bony frame.

  She scooped something off the couch and threw it at my feet.

  “How do I know it was him?” she bellowed. “That’s how! I found it outside in the mud!”

  I stared down at the object at my feet. It was Kenny’s white cane, broken in two. It was still smeared with filth from where she had picked it up in the yard.

  “Are you telling me you saw Kenny out in your yard?”

  For the first time, she hedged. “Well, I saw somebody.” She pointed to the cane. “And then I found that! What else am I supposed to think?”

  The implication of what I was hearing began to soak in. “Oh Christ,” I said. “Oh please God, no.”

  With trembling hands, I groped for my cell phone. I was shaking so badly it took three tries to punch in my home phone number.

  For the umpteenth time that night, I listened to my fucking phone ring and ring and ring while no one answered.

  “Lock yourself in!” I screamed, heading for the door.

  “Why?” my mother screamed back.

  “You still got a gun?”

  She took umbrage at that. “I always pack heat. Why?”

  “Then keep it handy!”

  “Why?”

  “Just fucking do it!”

  Before my mother could scream at me again, I raced back into the rain and ran for the car.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I HEADED straight for the house. My house. Traffic was practically nonexistent, thank God. Ignoring speed limits and barely slowing for stop signs, I tore through the city like a man who’s lost his mind. The storm was at its peak now, the rain a deluge, the wind thrashing everything it touched. The gusting was so bad, I had to fight the wheel to keep the car on the road. Branches torn from trees were whistling through the air in front of me. I swerved twice to avoid ones big enough to smash a windshield. As if I wasn’t breaking enough laws, over and over again, as I drove, I punched Kenny’s number repeatedly into my cell phone. When that didn’t work, I thumbed in the landline number at the house. Kenny didn’t answer that either.

  By the time I arrived home, my heart was in my throat, and I was so furious and scared I could barely think. I leaped from the car and then slid to a stop two steps later. A strange automobile was parked under a streetlamp at the end of my driveway. I froze for a moment, standing there in the rain, staring at it. It was an old clunker. A Ford LTD that looked like it had been driven through three or four demolition derbies and lost every one of them. No one was inside. The front driver’s side window was down, letting the rain pour in, drenching the seat. The window must have been broken. I leaned inside and pulled the headlight switch. The lights came on, barely penetrating the rain. I stepped around to the front and eyeballed them. The left headlight was pale yellow, about to go out. The other was just fine.

  “Fuck!”

  I started running down the driveway to the house, sloshing through puddles, the rain in my eyes. The lights I had left off inside the house less than two hours before were now burning bright in almost every window. The joint was lit up like there was a party going on. At the front door, I reached for the knob… and stopped. Drenched, chilled to the bone, and sobbing for breath, I caught the glitter of broken glass in the wet grass at the side of the walk. The windowpane leading into the foyer beside the door was smashed, shards of it scattered everywhere. I could see the sheen of water and scattered leaves on the hardwood floor where the wind had swept the rain inside.

  Rather than squeeze my way through the broken window, I grabbed the doorknob instead. To my horror, it wasn’t locked. I threw the door open and rushed inside, screaming Kenny’s name. I lifted my head and screamed his name louder. The house stood stubbornly silent around me.

  The only sound to be heard was the rumble of thunder outside. Strobes of lightning seared the sky, igniting windowpanes like bomb blasts. Thirty- and forty-foot eucalyptus trees surrounding the property creaked and snapped in the wind. I could hear them through the walls. I prayed none of them would be uprooted and come crashing down onto the house.

  Still calling Kenny’s name, I tore through every room on the ground floor.

  I hurled myself from doorway to doorway. In the dining room, a chair was overturned in the middle of the floor. Another had been flung halfway across the room, taking out a potted plant, scattering potting soil to hell and back and toppling a floor lamp. Curtains were torn from a window in the den, a big-screen TV had tumbled off a table there, and a dozen books were unshelved and left lying in a heap on the floor.

  Whatever else happened, Kenny must have given Davis a hell of a chase. But where is he now?

  In the kitchen, I crunched across broken china on the floor. The remnants of a tuna sandwich had been trampled
into the tile. It was the tuna sandwich that stopped me in my tracks. When had the dogs ever left a tuna sandwich unclaimed on the kitchen floor?

  Where the hell were François and Chuck? And where the hell was Kenny?

  I called out the dogs’ names, for a change, and finally got an answer. From farther back in the house, a whimper competed with the sounds of the storm. Then I heard a hesitant hello yip.

  I followed the sounds to the guest bedroom behind the kitchen. When I pushed open the door, I was almost bowled over by the two standard poodles. Their tail stubs were wagging, but they still looked pissed. Chuck was even limping a bit, as if someone might have kicked him.

  Then I understood. Davis had lured them into the back bedroom and locked them inside. Had he done that before he went after Kenny? And with the dogs silenced, did Kenny hear Davis coming for him at all? Or was he taken completely by surprise?

  Again, at the top of my voice, I screamed Kenny’s name.

  Fighting back worried tears, I raced to the stairs and rocketed up to the second floor. Breathless now and almost weeping with panic, I chased myself from door to door, searching each and every room. The house was undamaged up here, everything in its place.

  The sight of my landline phone parked at the corner of my desk in the bedroom caught my eye. I was just about to snatch it up and dial 911 when I heard a new noise. It was coming from outside. From off the veranda.

  I swept through the clattering vertical blinds and rolled the screen door out of the way. The deck was a mess. Chairs and chaise lounges had been tossed around like toys. All the leaves were torn off the ficus tree in the corner. But this damage was from the storm, I figured, not from any of the drama that had occurred inside the house. Locked in terror, I stood buffeted by the wind, washed down by an icy rain that chilled me to the bone. I cocked my head to the side, listening. A snap of lightning and a sharp cough of thunder made me duck. I moved to the rail to stare out over the canyon.

  I had hiked the canyon once, a couple of years earlier when I first moved into the house. It carved a deep jagged scar for miles through the heart of the city all the way to the bay. At the bottom, juniper and pepper trees and wild yucca plants, half-dead, half-blooming, blanketed the ground. Towering eucalyptus trees stood tall enough to poke their heads above the rim of the canyon, like shaggy old men peering over a fence. Usually the valley floor was as dry as dust, but in a downpour like this, I knew the storm would have raised a flowing creek in the canyon’s depths. Even standing on the deck, I could hear it far below, gurgling and chuckling through the underbrush.

  In the daylight, a few homes around the perimeter offered scattered views into the interior of the canyon. But on a moonless night such as this, and further hidden by the blinding storm, anyone at the bottom might as well have been standing on a different continent. He was invisible to every eye from above. For all intents and purposes, he didn’t exist at all.

  “Kenny!” I yelled, leaning far over the rail, cupping my hands to my mouth, aiming my screams downward into the trees and the shadows. “Kenny, can you hear me!”

  From far below, for just an instant, I thought I heard a voice down the hillside, past where the thirty-foot support beams propelled the deck out over the gully. Faint. Fighting against the storm. Straining to be heard. Pleading.

  “Kenny!” I screamed again.

  And this time I heard the voice more clearly. It was him all right. He returned my yell, but his cry was cut short as if someone had ripped the air from his lungs. Or perhaps struck him in the face. That thought caused me to bellow in rage. “Kenny!”

  “Wait!” I cried into the rain and the wind, down through the darkness and into the bushes and the whipping trees. “I’m coming, Kenny! I’m coming!”

  I heard a laugh then. A nasty, unholy laugh.

  “No, Larry, don’t!” Kenny cried, louder now, as if he had determined in which direction to point his cries. “Don’t do it! That’s what he wants!”

  Another voice, a deeper voice, wailed out on the heels of his cries. “Come on down, faggot! Your boyfriend and I are freezing our asses off down here. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Again Kenny cried out my name, but again he was silenced as if he had been struck.

  Furious, I whirled and raced through the house. I flew down the staircase, taking three steps at a time and damn near breaking my neck. The dogs snapped and snarled in my wake, chasing me as fast as they could go, caught up in the urgency. Even Chuck’s limp seemed to be forgotten. At the door, however, I held them back. They tried to rush past me, but I stood firm. They would be no help outside in the storm, so I slammed the door in their faces, closing them inside.

  Outside, alone again, it took me a second to decide which way to go. Finally I realized I didn’t really have a choice. I tore off across the lawn toward the corner of the house. There, the lawn sloped steeply down, and under the deck looming over my head, I thought I might find respite from the downpour, but I was wrong. The wind was whipping the rain slantwise beneath the deck and across the side of the house. The blast of a gust when I cornered the house almost knocked me off my feet.

  Just before the canyon walls dipped precipitously down from the sloping edge of the property, there was a thick stand of jade plant, as high as a fence, separating my side yard from the canyon below. Arms raised, I waded into it like a man fighting a high surf, and to my surprise, the jade offered almost no resistance at all, its brittle, fat branches snapping left and right as I crashed and crunched my way through.

  Once past the jade, I lost my footing. My feet shot out from under me, and I went sliding on my ass down a long bank of rain-soaked ice plant, placed there to prevent erosion. I was brought up short at last by a wire fence that separated the deepest parts of the canyon from the rest of the world.

  I hauled myself off the ground and shook off the pain of a multitude of bumps and scratches, then clambered over the fence, earning another contusion or two along the way.

  The ground was more level here at the bottom of the canyon. I steered by the intermittent flashes of lightning. The gurgling of the newborn brook that the storm had brought to life sounded more like the beginnings of a flash flood when I stood this close to it. The rippling water was still hidden behind the wall of bracken and trees that covered the valley floor, but I knew it was in there somewhere, and I knew I had to be careful not to stumble into it or I’d be washed all the way down to the bay.

  Before ducking into the trees, I stopped long enough to cry out again, calling Kenny’s name into the wind and rain, trying to figure out which direction I should take. This time there was no answer. Whether he was being held silent or the storm prevented me from being heard, I didn’t know. So I plowed on, crashing into the deeper shadows beneath the trees.

  As I tripped and clawed through the weeds and icy, dripping tree limbs, I began to understand a few things. John Allan Davis had orchestrated that whole ridiculous gnome-bashing party at my mother’s house beautifully. He had used it to lure me away long enough for him to grab Kenny. Being blind, Kenny would have been almost helpless against his attack. Still, I thought with a rueful smile, Kenny had led the bastard on a merry chase through the house. They had damn near destroyed the place. I had to give Kenny credit for that. But my smile died quickly enough when I realized I had no idea what shape Kenny was in now. Or even where the hell he was.

  I groped through the underbrush, trembling with cold, teeth chattering, berating myself for not bringing a flashlight or a coat—or even my heavy wrench, which I could’ve used as a weapon or to batter branches out of the way. The damn thing was still sitting on the seat of my car. I supposed as far as hitmen went, I was pretty pathetic, but it was too late to worry about it now. I plunged on through the icy, rain-soaked brush, limbs slapping me in the face, with only brief spates of visibility offered under the guise of lightning strokes slashing across the sky.

  The mud was ankle-deep here. It was all I could do to wade through it withou
t getting my shoes sucked off. At a place where the canyon dug its deepest trench through the city, I sloshed to a stop and listened. I could hear voices again. Well, one voice. It was Davis. He seemed to be orating to the heavens. Jabbering on about this and that, every other word out of his mouth a curse word. Periodically he would break into laughter, like the lunatic he was.

  Once, when the laughter came, closer than I had previously imagined it to be, I also heard the unmistakable sound of flesh smacking flesh. Like a slap. Rendered without warning, without sympathy. A gasp followed. A gasp of pain. And it was that final sound that gave me wings.

  I lunged ahead, crashing through the thickest foliage I had been up against yet, and a moment later, I burst through into an open glade. It was such a surprise, I stopped for a minute to catch my breath. The downpour was lighter here, repelled by the canopy of a vast sprawling pepper tree, its trunk curled up out of the earth like a wizened old hag holding her green, threadbare cape above her head to fend off the rain.

  On the opposite edge of the glade, I spotted the rain-fed stream at last, a cataract of bubbling water, tumbling and gurgling and chasing itself down the canyon wall and across the floor. So far the water had not spilled over the streambed banks, but if the rain kept coming down like it was, it soon would.

  Again, I could only see for brief seconds at a time. And even then only when the lightning sizzled overhead and that brief burst of light filtered down to where I stood.

  But this time when I gazed around, I realized suddenly that I was not alone. Kenny was there, thank God. On his knees in the mud. And John Allan Davis was there too. Standing over Kenny with a fistful of Kenny’s hair gripped in his fist.

  “I’m here, Kenny,” I said so he’d hear my voice. So he’d know I was close. Forcing a calmness I didn’t feel. “I’ve come.”