In the Mood - [Millennium Quartet 02]

by Charles L. Grant

  Arn slumped against a portico post and flicked his unfinished cigarette onto the tarmac. “The preacher.”

  “Reverend Lanyon Trask his own self.”

  “You know, that guy must own that damn station. It’s like he’s on every time you look.”

  “It just seems that way, Arn,” Bergman said sympathetically. “It just seems that way.”

  “Well, if it seems that way,” he answered angrily, “why the hell was he on for all those poor souls?” He gestured angrily at the building. “Every damn one of them.”

  “That we know about,” Bergman corrected gently. “We didn’t check inside every time, and they didn’t always remember.”

  “You want to take a bet?’’

  “Nope.”

  Arn took off his cap and rubbed his face, hard. “Some kind of mass hypnosis.”

  “A secret electronic transmitting signal.”

  “Unimaginable charisma.”

  “The power of prayer.”

  They looked at each other and laughed, Bergman so hard he had to take off his glasses to wipe his eyes, Arn so hard he began to cough. When the spasm passed and they had sobered, he replaced his hat and hitched up his belt. Rubbed a finger under his nose. Touched the handle of his side-holstered gun as if for luck.

  “You know, Carl,” he said quietly, as he looked at the dust the wind had left behind, “sometimes I think that guy is right, you know?”

  “About what?”

  “The end of the world.”

  “Arn, look—”

  “I mean, Jesus,” he said, shaking his head, stepping to the curb, into the sun. “We’ve got people flipping out because of some TV preacher, we got people robbing grocery stores instead of banks, we got winter coming up and there’ll probably be rationing and we don’t even got a war on, we got this guy over on Polk who shotgunned his neighbor because the poor sap didn’t want to invade Canada to hijack some wheat, we got... we got...” He clamped his mouth shut and stuck out his chin, defiant and trembling. “Mag watches this Trask guy, you know. She does. Really. She goes to church with her mother, and she watches this guy when she thinks I don’t know it. My own daughter, Carl. My own daughter.”

  Bergman gripped his shoulder. “Religion’s not a bad thing, Arn. You know that. God isn’t a bad thing.”

  Arn didn’t answer. He knew Carl was right. At least about God; he wasn’t so sure about the other. But he couldn’t help feeling a little lost these days, a little helpless. And if Mrs. Grauer and the others all felt the same way, no wonder they flipped. The pressure was too great.

  The doors opened and a nurse hurried out. “Dr. Bergman?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Mrs. Grauer. She’s singing again.”

  Arn smiled, nodded to Carl that he should go ahead, go on in, I’ll be okay, and took a step toward his patrol car. Then he turned and said, “Hey, Carl.”

  Bergman looked over his shoulder, an eyebrow raised.

  “It can’t be all that bad.”

  Bergman smiled tentatively, waiting.

  “At least she knows the words.”

  * * * *

  3

  Les started for the house, thinking he had had enough of thunder and wind and horses for one day. If Fran wasn’t busy, he would pack them into the Jeep and head for town. Dinner, a movie, a bar, get home and rip off their clothes and roll around in the living room. He may not be a kid anymore, but the day he got too old for that was the day he’d stick his head in the chipper and let his brains mulch the garden.

  He was halfway there when he heard the noise.

  A frown, a tilt of his head, and he turned.

  It was Royal, and the other horses milled around him, butting each other lightly, nipping harmlessly at the nearest flank, the nearest neck.

  “Now what the hell are you up to?” he said.

  Royal pushed out of the herd, head bobbing, tail slapping.

  Les grinned and pointed. “Hey, are you looking at me? Are you looking at me? Are you looking—”

  Royal snorted and began to run at the fence.

  Les’s grin faded as soon as he realized how wrong he was.

  It wasn’t a run.

  It was a charge.

  * * * *

  4

  Kyle didn’t know if he was in love or not, but he sure hoped he was. Otherwise, all this misery would just go to waste.

  By the time he spotted the tracks, his legs ached, there was a definite blister rising on his left ankle, the jacket hanging over his shoulder had gained a hundred pounds, and all the sweat had apparently turned the dust beneath his clothes to clammy mud.

  He had half a mind to stop at Hummaker’s and use the old man’s phone, call home and ... he shuddered.

  No. Not even if he lost his leg or got run down by a car would he call Isolde for a ride. Jesus, what kind of name was that, anyway? His father called her Solda, but Kyle refused to. “Solda” was familiar; there was no way he wanted her to think he was getting familiar.

  Bitch.

  Bleach blonde, no hips, chest out to Kentucky, and a fast hand with the checkbook. Ignoring him as if he didn’t exist, smiling at him only when his father was in the house. Just like all the others.

  He wished life was like TV sometimes, so he could sit down with his father and tell him man-to-man what he felt, what he saw. Without getting his head knocked off. Which the old man had tended to try now and again. Not so much these days, though. Kyle was taller than him now, and outweighed him by forty, fifty pounds.

  Now all he did was threaten to cut him out of the will, not send him to college ... worse, make him work in the store.

  He shuddered again and trudged on. It could be worse, though. His father could be like Sharon’s. Before the freak went to jail.

  Maybe that last part wouldn’t be so bad, actually. At least the son of a bitch would be out of his life.

  He grunted and walked on, limping deliberately to keep as much weight off his ankle as he could, feeling the blister rub against the leather, feeling the pain and hoping he wouldn’t be crippled for life. He grunted. He would make it okay. Only a half dozen blocks up, a couple over, and he’d be home. He could do it. No sweat. And it’d be worth it, being a gimp for the rest of his life, because Saturday he was going to the game with Sharon.

  * * * *

  5

  Les tripped over an exposed pine root, spun, and fell back against the side of the house, arms out to either side, hat long since fallen to the ground.

  “Les?”

  He blinked sweat from his eyes and tilted his head back.

  Fran had her head out the kitchen window, concern in her eyes, a smile on her lips. “What are you doing?”

  “Royal,” he gasped, and saw her look up.

  “What about him? Is he all right?”

  Les couldn’t speak. His throat was too dry, his lips felt cracked, and his lungs simply wouldn’t give him enough air. He could only let himself slide to the ground and search for the palomino.

  “Les?”

  Royal stood at the paddock fence, reaching over, nibbling at the top of a tall weed.

  Les didn’t get it. The horse had charged him, no question about it. Jumping the fence shouldn’t have been a problem.

  “Les?”

  Why had he stopped?

  “Les, damnit, if you’re having a heart attack, I am really going to be pissed.”

  He waved a heavy hand—I’m okay, just winded—and dried his face with a sleeve. But when he tried to push himself up, he discovered his legs wouldn’t work, shifting around but not supporting.

  While Royal ate the weed, and watched him.

  * * * *

  6

  1

  G

  eorge Trout was tired of rapists, serial killers, mass murderers, child beaters, wife beaters, killer hookers, love-triangle murders, freak-show killers, killers for God and country and the Almighty Dollar, lynchings, muggings that ended in someone’s cut throat, polic
e killers, priest killers, mother killers, nun killers, gangs and hitmen and vigilantes and postal workers who decide to wipe out whole zip codes.

  He was also tired of being called the “Fish Man” by half the ignorant teenagers in town, whose cumulative brain power didn’t even approach that of his terpsichorean namesake; or “Santa” by just about every child under nine who wasn’t Jewish; or “St. Nick” or “Saint” by adults who ought to know better but thought they were being clever or original; or the name of just about any actor, the more obscure the better, who happened to match his physique and facial and cranial hairstyle.

  That he kept his thick wavy hair to his shoulders was pure vanity.

  That he didn’t shave off his beard was pure superstition.

  He had done it one summer when he couldn’t stand the itching, and his life had taken a nosedive straight into the toilet. By the time it had grown back, pure white and thicker than it had even been before, his new career had taken off, and try as he might to prove himself a rational man, he couldn’t bring himself to pick up the razor again.

  That he didn’t exercise more to lose a few pounds and inches was simple laziness. He was not a gourmand; he just liked to eat. He wasn’t obese because, he sincerely believed, he also liked to walk, a couple three miles pretty much every day when the weather was halfway decent, and he would not stoop to having junk food meals just because he didn’t feel like leaving the house for a meal.

  Walking calmed him.

  Walking helped him decide what to do next.

  Walking got him out of the house when the house felt as if it were going to crush the life out of him.

  And walking this afternoon was a way of trying to figure out what had caused that almighty thunder and very peculiar wind.

  Just past the Gillespie house, the road swept south around a moderately sharp bend, straightened when it reached his home, and passed through what in better times would have been fields thick and high with corn. Halfway along, it became Madison Street, curved again, and darted back into town to eventually become its main shopping district. A single black loop with an occasional break for a dirt road for the farmers.

  By the time he had reached the small county sign that marked the change in names, he knew he had made a mistake.

  The fields were nearly bare, what little crop there had been this year already harvested. To his left stubble and dry dirt until they met Oakbend Creek; to his right, stubble and dry dirt until the land humped in abrupt, low wooded hills. Climb those hills and he supposed it wouldn’t be long before he fell into the Mississippi.

  Depressing; the landscape was depressing, and he turned around immediately, angry with himself because he knew, finally admitted, he just did not want to work.

  He didn’t care about the thunder, he didn’t give a damn about the wind—he just needed some, fresh air. He needed to clear his head of its current project so he could concentrate on the increasingly unpleasant feeling that he had made a huge, potentially disastrous mistake.

  John Bannock was a good man, had indeed saved him thousands over the years in taxes and avoided bad investments, but he was not now, and probably never would be, a nonfiction writer. The sold articles were blips in an otherwise steady line, more to do with George’s influence with editors than anything John had ever put on paper.

  The material he had gone over that morning proved it.

  Although the man had proved to be a natural interviewer, the kind of guy you talked to without feeling you were being interrogated, what he had come up with was ... nothing new.

  Men and women on death row were hardly original thinkers.

  Death, family, the afterlife or not, remorse or not, bitterness or not, legacies, the crimes themselves over and over and over again ... whatever George had thought Bannock would uncover amid all that misery and self-examination wasn’t there.

  A lot of words on a lot of paper, full of sound and not a whole hell of a lot of fury.

  He shook his head and prayed he wouldn’t have to do the rest of the work himself. That rather defeated the purpose of collecting a few bucks without having to lift more than a finger or two. Unfortunately it didn’t look good. Not good at all.

  He patted his flushed face with a tartan handkerchief, glanced at the damp cloth with distaste, and jammed it back into his hip pocket. The only time he didn’t mind sweat was when he shared it with a woman, so why, he wondered, had he fallen into the preposterous habit of wearing a white suit all the time? With, mind you, a gold-thread waistcoat and matching tie. Not to mention the embroidered suspenders. When the hell had that nonsense started?

  It seemed particularly ludicrous these days, when merely stepping off the porch attracted half the county’s dust to the tailored Italian linen.

  To take a stroll in it on a day like this was insane.

  The obvious thing to so, the only sensible thing to do, was to go on home.

  He didn’t.

  He couldn’t.

  He mopped his face again.

  He couldn’t face one more photograph of a corpse, one more high school yearbook picture of a pretty young thing who ended up on a morgue slab, one more wedding portrait of a young man who subsequently burned his whole family to death.

  One more picture of a dead baby.

  He lived in a dark-brick-with-white-trim graveyard, and he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  * * * *

  2

  Being chief of police was too often too political for Arn’s taste, and one of the ways he fought it was to keep his office on the first floor with the rest of the department, instead of on the more fancy second or third with the department heads and the mayor. Some of the force didn’t much care for it, having the bossman around all the time; others found it a lot easier to suck up when they didn’t have to walk so far.

  Arn paid neither group much attention—he had worked his way rapidly up through the ranks, patrolman to detective to here, and he wasn’t about to let ass kissers and grumps spoil the love he had for the job.

  Except the paperwork.

  He hated the paperwork.

  He sat at his desk and glared at the reports his lieutenants had passed on, waiting to be read and signed. His bright idea. Being chief also didn’t mean he should be kept out of the loop. But on days like this, when the bad guys were at a minimum and everyone on every shift had decided to catch up, he almost wished he were walking a beat again.

  His smile, therefore, was genuine when Rafe stepped into the office.

  “Chief?”

  Arn sighed.

  It was that tone.

  “We got another one, right?”

  Schmidt shook his head. “Worse.”

  * * * *

  3

  Sharon sat on the porch steps and stared at the clump of trees across the road. She had changed into a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes to sweep off the porch, and now the chill that underlay the afternoon’s warmth felt good on her skin. She had begun to feel a little stupid for walking out of school like that, and didn’t want to be inside when the telephone rang.

  The school, Mom? No, they didn’t call. I was probably outside. Why?

  They had probably already called her, but every ounce of innocence she could muster would come in handy for the explosion sure to come.

  She looked up the road, following it as far around the bend as she could. Trout’s house was hidden, even in winter, because the trees up there were mostly pine, with a few oak thrown in for autumn color. In fact, most people thought her house was the last on the street, and she knew Fish Man did little to correct the impression.

  Queer; weird; the man was bizarre.

  Down the road about a hundred yards, on the other side, was the Yermans’ place, empty now because they had gone to Florida for some family thing or other. Nice people, but forever trying to convert people into eating carrots instead of steak. Which, considering the area they lived in, was kind of like trying to convince Mag that worshiping the Devil was more fun than w
atching that Trask guy on TV.

  But their money was good.

  She got ten bucks a day for walking around the house, making sure no windows were broken or doors were open, picking up fallen branches, stuff like that. Sweep the porch like she did for Mr. Bannock—only that was for free, and he didn’t know about it—and lug home any deliveries that might be made.