Here she was, all her little chickens come home to roost. She could feel it. Tonight she would pay for what she had done: to Velma Everett, for stealing nights with her husband; to her own son, for the part she had played in removing his father from their lives. One way or another, she would pay. She could feel it just as she could feel the cool breeze the air conditioner was blowing across her bare arms.
They had circled the town, gone from one end of it to the other, and then back again. Jack’s eyes never left the road. He hardly spoke. Tricia wanted to engage him in conversation, to talk him back down from wherever he was, but she didn’t know what to say, or how to approach him. She wanted to ask about Velma, but what if that sent him over the edge? Obviously he had done something horrible to her, unless he’d been out butchering a hog in his brand new Armani suit, and Tricia didn’t think that was very likely. But for fear of screaming and then not being able to stop, she had to say something, anything. So she turned to Jack, and said, “Where are we going?”
Jack, eyes still on the road, said, “Don’t know about you, but I sure could stand for a nice cold beer right about now.”
Tricia’s eyes lit up.
“Me, too,” she said. Getting a beer would be a good thing, because getting a beer meant getting off this road, out of the car and into a bar, a store, maybe; someplace there would be people to cry out to for help. He really had gone off the deep end, if he was going to walk into somewhere in his blood-spattered outfit. And he probably would—up to this point he had given no indication whatsoever that he even knew the condition of the clothes he wore. Just marched slowly around—much as he had earlier this afternoon in front of the Wagon Wheel—like a zombie being drawn forward by some kind of irresistible force.
They were in town now, heading down Main Street. Tricia could hardly wait for the car to stop. She was going to throw the door open, jump out and haul ass screaming all the way to the sheriff’s office.
Past the schoolyard they went, past the courthouse with its ancient town clock. Soon they would be at the Wagon Wheel—where else could they be going, she figured, if he wanted a nice cold beer?
Jack screeched to a fishtailing stop in the middle of the street, directly in front of Jim Kreigle’s general store. Tricia, thrown sideways into Jack, barely had time to register what had happened before he once again clamped that iron grip of his around her wrist. She cried out with pain as he kicked his door open, and began hauling Tricia across the Caddy’s slick leather seats and into the roadway. She bounced off the metal frame of the open doorway and onto the asphalt, kicking her legs against the street as he pulled her toward Jim Kreigle’s store.
“Jack!” she cried out. “Please! You’re hurting me!”
He hauled her to her feet as if he were lifting a straw dummy from the trunk of his car, and then led her onto the wooden porch of the general store. Tricia wanted to cry out for help, but she was too frightened to even try. She could just see those powerful hands of his latching onto her throat, the bones would crack and she would go limp, the air would suddenly go away, and she would spend the last few seconds of her life gasping and drowning in her own blood.
She kept her mouth shut and stumbled forward, across the floor and in through the doorway. Behind them, Jack Everett’s Cadillac stood sideways in the middle of the street, the driver’s door open and the headlights burning, exhaust pluming out from the tailpipe as the engine ran on.
“Kreigle!” Jack called out. “Get your ass out here!”
And there came Jim Kreigle, out of the office that stood directly behind his cash register. He had left the door to his office ajar, and as Jack pulled Tricia up to the counter, she could see Helen Kreigle slumped over her desk, a huge chunk of her skull missing from her ear up to the crown of her head. There was blood on the wall, bits of bone and pieces of dark matter stuck to the beige plastic side of the computer monitor her ruined head languished beside. A torrent of red ran down her face, drip-drip-dripping onto a sticky mess that had pooled beneath her chin.
Tricia stood there, her eyes wide, her mouth agape. “What… ” she said. “What… what… ”
The words she was trying to say, were ‘What have you done?’ She could clearly see them bobbing on the surface of her fractured mind, but all she managed to get out was a squeaky little ‘What’, that obviously no one besides herself could even hear.
Footsteps thudded across the porch.
Somebody was coming.
Thank God, Tricia thought. Thank fucking God!
The door slammed open and in walked Chester Roebuck, who stopped and looked calmly about the room, smiled and said, “It’s getting there, isn’t it… the time.”
He crossed the floor, not stopping until he stood at the counter between Tricia and Jack, and Jim Kreigle, who stood behind the cash register as if it were just another boring Saturday night spent at his old country store. Chester could see Helen Kreigle’s dead body slumped over her desk—Tricia knew he could. If she could see straight to it, she knew that from his vantage point, he had to be able to see it, too. He most definitely could see the dried blood from one end of Jack Everett to the other, the hand he had clamped so securely around Tricia’s wrist and the stark look of absolute terror stitched across her panic-stricken face. Yet there he stood, smiling, as if he too were out and about on a Saturday night not much different than any other that had occurred in his life.
“Beer, Kreigle,” Jack said.
“Ohhh, yeahhh” Chester Roebuck said. “We’re gonna need beer, plenty of it.”
Kreigle turned, left the counter and marched down the aisles to the wall-sized coolers at the rear of his store. Moments later, he returned bearing a case of Rolling Rock beer. Icy vapors rose off the bottles as he set the case on the counter, pulled a bottle loose and cracked it open, tipped it up and took a long gulping pull from it.
In all the time Tricia had been coming into Kreigle’s general store, even as a small child with her mother, she had never seen nor heard tell of Jim Kreigle drinking beer or any other alcoholic beverage. As far as she knew, Jim Kreigle was a God-fearing man, a friend of the church who took his standing in the community quite seriously. He was not the sort to dabble in alcoholic revelries, certainly wasn’t the kind of man anyone would have expected to kill his own wife. Yet there he was, guzzling beer like it was going out of style, and there she was with half her brains either blown out or bashed right out of her skull, the rest of them dripping down the side of her face.
The pain generated by Jack’s iron grip, excruciating now, soon began to overwhelm her.
“Jack,” she said. “My wrist. You’re hurting me.”
“Don’t worry, sweet pea,” he said. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Tricia felt a slight wobble in her knees, as a queasy sensation generated by those prophetic words began squirming through her stomach. She swooned a bit, but didn’t go down because Jack held her upright. She began to babble, “Jack, please, Jack, think about what you’re doing, think about—”
A car pulling up out front stopped her in mid-sentence. A door creaked open, and then slammed shut. Footsteps sounded on the wooden porch. Moments later the door opened, and Rusty Piersol stepped inside.
“The hell is Jack’s Caddy doing in the middle of the street?” he said. He was smiling, but that didn’t last long.
“Rusty!” Tricia cried out, as Jack turned to face Rusty Piersol in all his blood-spattered glory.
“Good God, Rusty,” she said. “Help me!”
Rusty stood before Jack Everett, the front of Everett covered in what could only have been dried blood, the hand he’d clamped around Tricia Reardon’s wrist obviously causing her an extreme amount of agony.
“The hell’s going on here?” he said. He went for his gun but Jim Kreigle was quicker—his hand came up from the counter, clutching a .357 magnum tightly in its grip. Fire roared from the barrel and Rusty Piersol’s head exploded in a showering hail of blood and brain and fragments of bone. His
feet rocked back and his hands came up level with his chest, clawing air as blood pumped from the shattered remains of his skull. He went over like a falling tree, down on his back where he lay silent and still, while a gushing red river spread dark bits of matter across Jim Kreigle’s hardwood floor.
“What is wrong with you people?” Tricia cried out. “What is wrong with you!”
Kreigle, who had calmly slid his pistol inside a drawer beside the cash register, came around the counter as Chester Roebuck swept an assortment of candies and treats off a flat display table that stood centered in front of the aisles. He kicked the candy out of the way, and stood there, smiling as Jack Everett pulled Tricia begging and pleading across the room, until the two of them stood before Chester Roebuck, and Jim Kreigle, who had made his way silently over to them.
“Please,” she said, as Roebuck thumbed open the metal snap that held her jeans in place.
“Don’t,” she whimpered, as he unzipped her pants and pulled them down and off, and Jack held tightly to her.
“Stop it!” she cried out, as Jack grabbed her wrists and old man Kreigle grabbed her ankles, and she was hoisted up and onto the display case, naked from the waist down as her legs were spread far apart and, Chester Roebuck, long and lean and stiff as a board, stepped forward ready for action. He moved in closer, his pants bunched around his ankles, something more horrifying than anything a dark and fevered mind could possibly have imagined dangling from a bloody length of string looped round his neck.
She screamed when he grabbed her by the shoulders.
Screamed again when he entered her.
And kept on screaming the whole time he pumped savagely in and out of her.
Chapter Eighteen
The moon was high and full when Justin and Mickey turned onto Reardon’s street. A cool breeze rustled the tree branches while a shimmering field of stars painted the sky above them. The lights were on in Mickey’s house, and Tricia Reardon’s dark blue Hyundai sat in the driveway. The living room was lit up but not the front porch, which struck Justin as kind of odd, seeing how she surely would have been expecting Mickey to come home, sooner or later; Justin too, if she remembered he was sleeping over tonight. But everything about Tricia Reardon was odd these days, from the hours she kept to the company she ran with. So seeing the unlighted porch really shouldn’t have struck Justin one way or the other. But for some reason, it did.
“Aw, man,” Reardon said as they pulled up in front of the house. “The one night I don’t want her around, and right here she is.”
They laid their bikes down in the grass. Justin slid his backpack off the handlebars and followed Mickey through the yard, up onto the porch, where they stopped and looked at each other. The door stood open, slightly ajar. They waited a moment in front of it, listening. No noise came from inside the house, no laugh-track from the television, no music from the radio—another in a long line of things Justin found to be quite odd, but apparently not Reardon, who said, “Man, I can’t believe this.”
He grabbed the doorknob, and gave his shoulders a shrug. “Oh well,” he said, and Justin, who knew Mickey Reardon better than anyone in their community, including Mickey’s own mother, could already see the wheels turning, the gears whirring as a series of alternate plans began tumbling through that crooked, conniving mind of his. Even if Tricia Reardon was home, and stayed home, that wouldn’t keep Justin and Mickey away from the carnival. She had to go to sleep, sometime—or knowing Tricia Reardon lately, pass out—and when she did, they’d be out Mickey’s bedroom window faster than greased lightning.
Mickey gave the door a little push. Swinging it inward revealed a dimly-lit living room, one devoid of people, and now that odd feeling was crawling up Justin’s back like an army of prickly-legged spiders. Maybe it was the cloud working on him, or what he and Mickey had seen out at Godby’s field this afternoon, but something wasn’t right here—he could feel it. They stepped through the doorway, and Mickey slammed the door shut. “Hey Mom!” he called out. “You in here?”
“What if she’s asleep?” Justin said.
“What, at six o’clock in the evening?”
Justin didn’t really believe she was asleep. He wasn’t sure what he believed, or what he thought they might find—Tricia Reardon with her throat slit, bleeding out in the bathtub, hanging by her neck from the shower fixture?
Maybe, he thought, he should give those comic books and the horror DVDs a rest, watch a comedy or two, for chrissakes!
Justin tossed his knapsack on the couch and Reardon went down the hallway, flipping on lights and calling out to his mother, who, by now, Justin had figured, wasn’t home at all. How could she be home and not answer her son, who was making enough noise to get the both of them tossed out of Sunday morning services?
Moments later, Reardon came back down the hallway. “She isn’t here,” he said. There was disappointment in his voice, a touch of dismay, maybe, as if he just couldn’t believe she had gone off and left him alone again.
“But that’s a good thing,” Justin said. “Right?”
“She’s not here, so, yeah, that’s a good thing. But her car’s here and that means her scuzzball boyfriends are picking her up at the house now, and that shit ain’t good at all. Not by a long shot.”
“Dude, your dad took off—what’s it been, like, two months now?”
“Six weeks.”
“Your mom’s pretty. What’s she supposed to do, sit around like a nun until he decides to show his ass back up?”
“She’s supposed to be a mom—my mom. She ran his ass off, her and her nagging-ass bullshit. The least she can do is not cheat on him while he’s gone.”
And there it was, in a nutshell. Mickey Reardon’s father had abandoned his family, but Reardon couldn’t face it—he couldn’t let go. So he laid the blame at his mother’s feet, even though everyone in town knew Rick Reardon to be a loser, a womanizing musician who had never been able to support his family by actually playing music. He’d been fired from as many jobs as he’d quit, and now he’d taken off one more time than he’d come back. Justin could see it—everyone in town could see it. Someday, Justin figured, Mickey Reardon would finally accept the reality of his situation, that his father taken his guitar and rode away one moonlit Saturday night while Mickey was sleeping over at Justin’s house, leaving his young son behind. Someday, Justin hoped, his friend would see things for what they were and go on with his life, which, really, was what his mother seemed to be doing, the only thing she could do, now that he was gone.
“How would you like it if your mom was out fucking some old bastard behind your dad’s back?”
Obviously, Justin thought. Today wasn’t going to be the day.
“I wouldn’t like it.”
“Damn right you wouldn’t. Grey-haired bastard old enough to be her grandfather, and she’s sleeping with him? While I sit here by myself every goddamn night?”
“You’re right,” Justin said. “I wouldn’t like it.”
Justin sat down on the couch, and Reardon flopped down in an easy chair opposite him. It was an old chair with threadbare cushions. White lace doilies sat on each armrest, hiding—Justin remembered—a ripped piece of fabric covering from one of the arms. A flat screen television sat in a pressboard entertainment center, a stereo receiver below it. The clock on the wall read: 6:15
Neither boy spoke for a while. Finally, Reardon said, “Why’d he do it?”
It was a question Justin had heard many times these past few weeks, one he had no answer for. “I don’t know, Mickey,” he said
“Why would he go off like that? I mean, they fought and everything, but it wasn’t that bad. Why would he take off and never get in touch with us again—with me again? I can understand him not wanting to talk to her—she ran his ass off. But what about me? What the hell did I do?”
“Maybe he’s just waiting for the right time. You know, waiting for everything to blow over.”
Justin didn’t really believe thi
s, but what was he going to do, tell his best friend his father was a low-life loser who didn’t care about anybody but himself? They’d been down that road before, and it hadn’t worked out too well for either of them, had nearly, in fact, cost them their friendship.
“I just wish he’d stop waiting and come on home.”
“Me too, man,” Justin said, then, “Not to change the subject… ”—which, really, he was more than happy to do—“but what’re we gonna eat tonight?”
“I don’t know… I thought we’d get a pizza or something, but since we’re going to the carnival, maybe we’ll just wolf down a couple’a corndogs or something, some cotton candy and candied apples.”
“Really,” Justin said. “Who needs pizza when the carnival’s in town?”
“Not us,” said Reardon.
“Damn straight,” Justin said. He leaned forward and stood up, grabbed his knapsack and started across the floor. “I’m gonna toss this in your room.”
“You’re not gonna take a shower, are you?”
“Shoot no!” Justin said. “I just told Mom that to make her happy. I’ll grab one in the morning, before I go home.”
“Good, for a minute there, I was afraid I might have to kick you out of the He-Man Woman Haters Club.”
“Not me, dude,” Justin said. “I’ve got a lifetime membership.”
Justin walked down the hallway, to Mickey’s room. He flicked on the light and tossed his knapsack on Reardon’s bed, and then stood for a moment checking out the posters covering his friend’s wall. An Iron Man poster was tacked a couple of feet above his headboard; lower, and off to the left, was the X-Men poster featuring Professor Charles Xavier, Storm, Jean Frost and Wolverine. Justin had presented the poster to Mickey on his tenth birthday. On the other side of the headboard, Magneto, Sabretooth and Mystique stood shoulder to shoulder in stark defiance of their X-Men nemesis. On the wall opposite the headboard was an action shot of Larry Bird shooting a jump shot in his Celtic-green uniform. He was Rick Reardon’s all-time favorite basketball player, and probably the last thing Mickey saw before he drifted off to sleep at night, a sad reminder of the father who was no longer around.
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