He wasn’t there.
Puzzled, she scanned the foot court and wondered what in the world had happened to the boy. She finally spotted him sitting at one of the tables. His head was cradled face down on his crossed arms and his entire body jerked spasmodically. Terribly frightened for him, Jeanie leaped over the counter, dashed to where Lester sat shivering and huddled down next to him.
She shook him gently by the shoulders. “Lester, what is it?” she cried. “What’s wrong?”
He mumbled something that she couldn’t understand.
“I can’t hear you! Are you hurt? Talk to me, Lester!”
He slowly raised his head and stared at her with the eyes of a doe caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.
“He’s in my head, Jeanie. Get him out of my head. I don’t want to do that, Jeanie. I don’t! I don’t!”
Jeanie ran for the button under the cash register that summoned security and hoped they had the number to call for an ambulance.
An hour later Dr. Holloway shook his head and stared across the desk at Lester Mede’s mother.
“I have no idea what’s wrong with Lester, Mrs. Mede,” he said. “I tested him every way I could think of but I didn’t find a thing. All he tells me is that somebody was in his head and wouldn’t get out. When I asked him if that somebody was still in there, he said no, not now. I don’t know what to make of it.”
Mrs. Mede looked off into space for a moment, then turned back to the doctor. “Is there anything else we can do?”
“Not that I know of. He seems normal now, at least as far as Lester is concerned.” Dr. Holloway stood and walked around his desk. “I’ll look the test results over one more time. If I find anything unusual I’ll give you a call. You might as well take Lester home.”
Dr. Holloway spent the next hour and a half checking Lester Mede’s test results. Finally, he concluded that he had done all there was to do. There was nothing physically wrong with Lester.
But Mr. and Mrs. Mede had to find Lester another job. He refused to go anywhere near the mall.
For anything.
Ever.
Chapter Nine
September 25, 2004
The Right Reverend Rimer Tillotson of the Trinidad Church of Divine Prayer sat on a bench near the food court waiting for his wife and daughter. He had been there for almost two hours. His trousers were rumpled, his shirt was twisted around his waist and his shorts had crept up so far he felt like a gelding. The two women in his life had, apparently, crawled down every aisle in every store in the south wing on their hands and knees dragging a loaded cement mixer behind them. They had returned briefly to deposit with him several plastic sacks full of booty. Then they swept off to assault the north wing.
The Right Reverend Rimer Tillotson sighed and slid his lanky frame farther down on the bench. He wondered at the difference between men and women when it came to shopping. Women, he had observed, needed to run their fingers across every item of merchandise in sight whether they were interested in buying it or not. Men, on the other hand, dashed into a shop, grabbed what they needed and ran out. There were more important things to do than shop.
The Right Reverend Rimer Tillotson laid his head back and dozed off, lulled by the constant muttering of the plastic monkeys and parrots that blended smoothly with the white noise emitted by the waterfall and the endless string of shoppers. He dreamed of an earlier time, a time when he had been unencumbered by responsibilities of family and church. He dreamed of his youth when he was a high school student, living for ball games and after-game dances with the nubile young ladies of his class. He dreamed of fumbling in the darkened back seat of his father’s Pontiac. He dreamed of…
Reverend Tillotson jerked awake with a grunt and looked around. The bench where he was doing his penance had a commanding view of the entrance to the video arcade. Kids of all sizes dashed in and out accompanied by squeaks, whistles, groans and assorted electronic noises from the thirty-eight video games inside. A girl in early puberty stood just inside the arcade entrance working the joystick of a game called Attack From Planet Zeta. He took off his glasses and polished them with the tail of his shirt, which had finally weaseled its way out of his waistband. Then he perched them back on his nose and took a better look at her. She wore a pair of shorts that displayed tiny half-moons of buttock and a halter-top that must have belonged to her younger sister. Her face was slick with sweat and the soft blonde down on her forearms flashed in the garish light from the game. Her nipples stood out like tiny pencil erasers inside the halter-top. Her right hand slid up and down the joystick.
The Right Reverend Rimer Tillotson had a massive erection. He pulled one of the sacks his wife had left with him onto his lap, slid a hand beneath it and squeezed his member.
Ten minutes later, when her quarters ran out, Geraldine Mockey stamped a foot and scowled. She reached behind her, pulled the skimpy legs of her shorts down over the half-moons of her tiny butt and strode from the arcade. Reverend Tillotson rapidly collected his wife’s sacks. Then he stood up and followed the young girl through the mall.
Behind the food court to the left was a hallway that housed five pay telephones, a water cooler, a stamp machine, the rest rooms and a storeroom for janitorial supplies. Geraldine Mockey wiggled her way toward the ladies’ room. Reverend Tillotson trotted along behind her with all the grace of a young colt. He held the sacks of goods in his left hand to cover his crotch. His fly was now open and his right hand was inside his trousers massaging his throbbing penis. His entire universe consisted of those tiny half-moons of Geraldine’s ass where they peeked once more from beneath her shorts.
Geraldine disappeared.
Reverend Tillotson stopped dead in the center of the hall, dismayed. When he concluded she had entered the ladies’ room, he looked about for somewhere to wait. Across the hall was the janitor’s closet. He hesitated a moment then sidled over to the door, stopped and looked around. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him. He released his penis, reached out and turned the knob. The door swung silently open. He backed swiftly inside and shoved the door almost closed, leaving a two-inch gap.
Seven minutes later a relieved Geraldine stepped from the ladies’ room. Directly across the hall a door swung open and a voice called to her. Geraldine swung her head in that direction, snapping her chewing gum impatiently.
The Right Reverend Rimer Tillotson stood just inside the closet leering at her. His trousers were around his ankles. He was whipping his willy with one hand and making come-hither gestures with the other.
Geraldine Mockey ran screaming toward the main hall. The Right Reverend Rimer Tillotson grimaced, unloaded on his left shoe, suddenly realized what he was doing and slammed the door shut in horror.
Geraldine Mockey dashed frantically past the BurgerBuddee, screaming like a hurricane in a flute factory. Billy Curran glanced up from his labors when he heard the first shriek. He recognized Geraldine from English class and wondered what the twit was yelling about. The old saw about walking and chewing gum sprang immediately to mind. In Geraldine’s case, he figured, chewing gum was all she could handle. Adding walking to the mix would blow one of her circuits. Billy wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his uniform shirt and dropped the basket filled with frozen French fries into the grease. Then he trotted toward the freezer for more of the same.
He hated lunchtime. In fact, he hated any time at all when anybody wanted to eat at BurgerBuddee, particularly if they wanted fries. He grabbed three sacks of the offending article, slogged back to stand in front of the oil-filled vat and glanced at the order monitor mounted above the cooker. There were orders for eight more pockets of fries. He sighed, ripped another sack open and dumped the contents into an empty basket.
Billy Curran hated working at BurgerBuddee almost as much as he hated Florida. He and his father, Don, had moved to Trinidad just before the start of the school year. The previous five years of their lives had been one disaster after another. First, Don’s wife
had divorced him and moved to Idaho to live with a steel worker. Three years after that Don lost his job at the Cincinnati foundry where he had been employed for seventeen years. Father and son were forced to live on Don’s unemployment check plus whatever he could earn by doing odd jobs for cash. One morning as Don was sitting in the living room considering the robbery of an armored truck a letter arrived from a cousin in Chiefland, Florida. He wrote of a shortage of truck drivers in the area and wondered if Don would be interested in moving south.
“Do lawyers hang around courthouses?” Don asked himself as he headed for the phone.
A company in Perry was happy to offer him a job. At first he rented a house in town but Perry didn’t thrill either Don or Billy. The two of them drove from town to town on the weekends, found a house they liked and moved to Trinidad four months after arriving in Florida.
Billy thought the best part of the south was winter. There was no snow to shovel and it was possible to play basketball all year round. But when the first summer hit him, Billy thought he would melt and run down into his own socks. He couldn’t get cooled off. And then, to clinch the deal, the only job he could find was in this lousy burger joint in front of the French fryer where it was at least fifteen degrees hotter than it was outside at high noon in August.
“Come on, Billy, what the heck are you doing? That cooker is only half full. You’re holding up production,” Carol Joiner, the day manager, yelled in his ear.
Billy snapped his head up, glanced at the monitor and filled another basket. He pulled the first one out and saw that in another ten seconds those fries would have been extra crispy—like the Famous Chicken next door. He hoped Carol hadn’t noticed. He flipped the basket upside down on the loader table and refilled it. Then he stopped moving altogether and stared at the wall in fascination. It seemed to be sliding off into the distance. It swept through a green valley and disappeared behind a mountain.
The frantic noise of lunchtime in the fast food joint faded and was replaced with the sound of a forest in the spring. Billy smiled and looked around.
He stood in a wooded glade filled with trees and flowers. Visible through the branches was the tip of the mountain behind which the restaurant wall had vanished. The peak was covered with snow. A gentle breeze ruffled his hair. Billy looked down. At his feet was a clear stream that flowed from somewhere in the mountain. The stream was so clear he could see trout swimming along the bottom. The water looked so cool, so clean. And Billy was drenched with sweat. There were a few leaves floating on the water at his feet.
Billy leaned over, flipped the leaves out of the way and plunged his head into the refreshing water of the stream.
“Holy shit!” Rupert Swan screamed.
Carol Joiner whipped around with a scowl on her face, ready to rip a large chunk out of Rupert’s ass, but stopped with her mouth open. Rupert had turned almost white despite the fact that his ancestors had arrived on a slave ship from Africa. He was pointing a trembling finger in the direction of the French fryer. Carol spun about.
Billy Curran was sliding slowly down the side of the oil-filled vat, legs quivering, arms flapping mindlessly. Carol ran around the grill toward him but stopped dead in her tracks when his head rolled around to face her. He stared at her with blackened, empty eye sockets. His face was a ruined mass of cracked and charred flesh. His nose and lips had shriveled into nothing and his naked teeth flashed whitely in the glare of the fluorescent lights.
Then Billy Curran crumpled into a heap on the floor, shuddered once more and was still.
Carol Joiner screamed and fainted. Rupert Swan collected himself enough to dash to the wall phone and dial 911.
Jonathon Holloway, the coroner, shook his head and looked up at Gerhart. “This is without a doubt the most horrible thing I’ve seen in my entire life,” he declared. “Christ on a bicycle! What in the world would possess a perfectly healthy kid to stick his head into a vat of boiling oil?”
Gerhart shrugged. “Beats me, but according to everybody there, that’s exactly what happened. Maybe he was on something. The black kid, Rupert, said he glanced up just as this guy was tossing fries out of the cooker onto the floor. Then he yanked out the basket and stuck his head in the oil.” He flipped the sheet over Billy Curran’s face. “Is that girl all right? What’s her name? Joiner?”
“She’ll be fine. Just shook up. Can’t blame her. Must have been a hell of a shock.”
Carol Joiner had come around while they were loading Billy’s body onto a gurney. Everybody in the BurgerBuddee that hadn’t been engaged in throwing up had made a great effort to keep from looking at the horrible thing on the floor. Two employees carried Carol to a corner, propped her up and stood around with paper cups full of water, waiting for her to revive. Holloway had looked her over before leaving with the body.
“I imagine the kid died pretty quick,” Gerhart said.
“Believe me, if it took a half minute it was too long. I would guess the shock simply shut down his entire nervous system. Have you been able to find his family?”
“There’s just his father. He’s a truck driver, but nobody knows who he works for, where he is or when he’s coming home. I’ve left a message on his answering machine and a note on the front door. I also talked to the neighbors and they promised to call me when he shows up. I didn’t tell them what it was about.” Gerhart wiped a hand across his mouth. “I don’t look forward to telling him his son is dead. Especially under these circumstances. If you’re finished with the body, let’s put him in the cooler. I don’t want somebody coming in here and seeing him without any warning.”
Gerhart reached across the table for the salt. “Of all the messes I’ve seen, that one was the worst,” he said.
Virginia grimaced and poured herself some more iced tea. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.
“Even if you wanted to, which you never do, I wouldn’t tell you about this one. It’s too horrible.”
“Thank you.” Virginia glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go.”
“What is it tonight?”
“Hospital auxiliary. I’m introducing our new pediatrician to the hospital volunteers. It’s just in the cafeteria. Probably not more than an hour.”
“You know, if you could figure out how to get paid for all this stuff you’re involved in, I could retire.”
Virginia stood and picked up her purse from the kitchen counter. “But you wouldn’t retire, would you? You love the job too much. Just leave the dishes. I’ll put them in the dishwasher when I get back.”
Gerhart stared after her, wondering where he had gone wrong.
When Don Curran pulled his rig into the lot next to his house two days later, Jerry Baxwell, his neighbor, put down the hedge clippers, walked over to the tractor trailer and spoke quietly to him for a moment.
Don Curran went into the house and called Gerhart. As gently as possible, the Chief of Police explained what had happened to Billy. The silence on the other end of the phone seemed to last forever. When Gerhart failed to get any response from the instrument he hung up and drove quickly to Curran’s house.
Don Curran was still sitting on the floor holding the receiver in his lap when Gerhart looked through the open front door. Curran rocked back and forth and muttered Billy’s name over and over as the tears rolled unchecked down his cheeks. Gerhart took the phone gently from Curran’s hand and called Holloway, who arrived ten minutes later. He gave Curran a shot in the left arm, then he and Gerhart helped the grieving man into bed.
Gerhart went next door and spoke with Jerry Baxwell and his wife. They promised to keep an eye on Curran and call Gerhart immediately if he needed help. Then Gerhart went back to the station to look for Curran’s relatives.
Chapter Ten
September 28, 2004
When the beeping started Delbert Rollins shifted his gaze from the antique car magazine he was reading to his watch. It was 2:00 A.M. Time to make another round. He closed the magazine, cast one last, longing
look at the 1934 Dodge pickup truck on the cover and stood to go to work.
As he walked slowly through the mall corridors he thought about “his” truck. He had been after it for the better part of his high school and college years. Now that he was finally going to graduate with a degree in Mechanical Engineering he figured he would make an effort to buy the old 1946 Studebaker pickup. Harmon Zimmer’s father had bought it brand new just after the war. It was still in the Zimmer family. The first time Delbert Rollins got a good look at it, he was nine years old. The old truck was dark green with a brown leather seat and white steering wheel. Delbert, his mouth open, had stood and stared until his father grabbed him by the arm and led him away. The truck still sat in the same shed where it had lived for the past forty-nine years, although nobody drove it anymore. Sometime during the winter of 1968 an Alberta Clipper had screamed into Florida and stayed for two days. It kept the natives indoors in droves and froze the water in the Studebaker’s engine block, cracking it wide open between cylinders three and four. Since the truck was twenty-two years old and they didn’t make Studebakers anymore, Mr. Zimmer just left it in the shed and forgot about it. Delbert, however, hadn’t forgotten it. When he got this last check from the mall security job he was going to go out there and stand flat-footed in front of the screen door until Mr. Zimmer sold him the thing. And then he was going to pull it home, take it apart and…
Delbert stopped in the middle of the mall corridor, frowned slightly and looked around. He could have sworn something had moved just at the edge of his vision. He slowly swung his head from left to right to listen for odd noises, as a finger hovered over the panic button on his belt. The button activated an alarm at the police station, and a red dot on the wall map in the security office would pinpoint his location.
Genesis of Evil Page 7