by Cole Alpaugh
“Yeah, well it’s either that or I’m selling vacuums door to door,” Cobb said. “And, hey, one more thing?”
“Yeah?”
“With all the shit going on with the paper, I know we all forgot what you’re still dealing with. I’m sorry about your daughter. I’m real sorry. Don’t give up hope.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.” Bagg clicked his phone shut to cut off the call with his old friend.
Bagg listened to the snoring bear in the back of his Jeep for a while before twisting the key and heading north on Route Nine. He shifted gears gently, trying not to wake her. Their duo could travel a lot more incognito without a slobbering bear hanging out the back window.
“I could always run away and join the circus,” Bagg told the sleeping bear. “That’s what people do, right?”
* * *
Back at the Absecon Golf and Country Club, Officer Gates finally came to, wobbling to his knees and gathering up his weapon, glasses, and baseball-style uniform cap. Dizzy and suffering a miserable headache, the young cop nervously checked his immediate surroundings for any sign of the beast. The last thing he remembered was taking aim as it prepared to attack, but then everything went black. Gates reached up and found a knot on the right side of his head. His fingertips came away dotted with small spots of coagulated blood, making his stomach roll and pitch and his head swim again. Christ, he hated blood. Lurching forward onto all fours, the young cop threw up his breakfast, then dry-heaved as tears squeezed through his clenched eyelids.
What would his father have to say about this little cluster fuck? Officer Gates moaned from the thought. “Norman! Norman!” he could almost hear the kids and their taunting chant. Who the fuck names their kid after a psychotic movie killer? And just when the joke was getting old, the goddamn movie studios released a sequel to start round two of the torment.
“The bear attacked me,” Gates told the deserted snack shack. “I tried to fight it off, but it threw me down to the floor. I thought I was going to die.”
Gates got hold of his breathing and replayed the lie in his head to see how it fit.
“I couldn’t risk discharging my weapon,” he explained. “The newspaper guy …”
Gates hit a wall right there. He figured the bear took off, but where the hell was the reporter? And what about the girl and the goddamn EMT? Gates climbed to his feet as the dread began to spread through his body. He shakily made his way back through the front of the snack shack, his weapon again leading the way, his hat stuffed in his back pocket. He was half expecting to find a mangled reporter, and then a mangled waitress and EMT. They’d be all chewed to hell, having been torn from the back of the ambulance and partially eaten.
But the only things outside the small building were singing birds and his own Absecon police cruiser. The ambulance was gone, as was the reporter’s Jeep. And not a single sign of a wild bear.
“Thin air,” Officer Gates told the tweeting birds, holstering his gun and making his unsteady way toward his vehicle.
“Fore!” came a distant warning, and Gates understood it was shouted in his direction. He ducked and covered his already throbbing head with his arms, cringing as he waited for impact. His first reaction was relief as the shot came up a good fifteen yards shy of him. But the ball one-hopped the hard tenth hole tee area and smashed through the driver side window of his cruiser.
“Just fuck me.” Gates stepped up to his car, not bothering to look at the golfers. Officer Gates had resigned himself to small things like golf balls shattering his windows. Those things were easy enough to explain and weren’t something to worry about. He had the bear and the reporter and his father to think about right now.
Opening the cruiser door, Gates brushed a glittering pile of safety glass off the seat and climbed in. The radio on his hip crackled as the dispatcher sent one of the other officers to meet a subject to take a report on a stolen bicycle.
Officer Gates fingered the microphone talk button on his shoulder but didn’t press it right away. The bear was gone and so was everyone else. If a phone call had gone into dispatch about an officer down, this place would look like Grand Central Station by now, and a bird outside his broken window tweeted to confirm it was not.
Officer Gates found himself at a crossroads as to what to do.
“Nothing,” he whispered to himself, starting the cruiser. “None of this shit happened.”
Gates slammed his foot on the gas pedal, spinning tires throwing divots of Kentucky bluegrass high in the air, as he raced past the approaching twosome.
Chapter 24
Slim Weatherwax woke up scared to death someone had up and buried him alive in the night again. His fourth and final wife, Missy Delilah, had conspired with her half brother to dig a hole out behind Slim’s barn and then drag the drunken, passed-out Slim into the muddy grave. Missy Delilah and Slim had only met a few weeks prior, and the relationship had been of the whirlwind variety, to say the least.
It had been a marriage of convenience in so much as Slim needed a woman to cook his meals, while Missy Delilah had been looking for a semi-responsible, home-owning man who she could kill and take over his house, or so he would later come to understand.
Missy Delilah secretly hated to cook, which led to a few bumps in her scheme, as well as the end of their marriage. She quickly grew impatient, jumping the gun by trying to bury Slim before he was sufficiently soused to stay in the hole. Missy Delilah had been kind enough to fill Slim in on all her pent-up hate during their final night together out by what was supposed to be Slim’s final resting place.
The plan might have also gone smoother if she’d waited for her half-brother to arrive at the scene of the crime, since he probably would have had done a better job of hitting Slim with the shovel as he climbed up the side of the muddy hole.
“What the hell you doin’, Missy Delilah?” Slim asked, spitting out manure-tainted dirt, having regained consciousness during the burial process.
“You stay dead, Slim!” she shouted down at him. “I went to a whole lotta trouble.”
“Help me outta here,” Slim pleaded, clawing his way up the side of the four-foot deep hole that was pretty well lit by the floodlight he’d installed over the old barn’s back door.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere!” she hollered, giving up on shoveling to turn the long handled tool into a deadly weapon. Missy Delilah held the shovel high over her head, slamming it down with a whoosh and wet smack in the dirt next to Slim’s head.
“You almost hit me!” The quart of whiskey he’d recently tossed back, along with his pants being loaded up with heavy dirt, made climbing a slippery business; he felt like a deer navigating a frozen pond.
“Hold still, Slim.” She used her sweetest voice and took two shorter swings, both also near-misses.
Slim retreated from this whack-a-mole game with his crazy new wife. “I thought you loved me.” He sat with his long legs crossed under him in the center of the hole, feeling a bit sad and defeated, despite having survived so far. He’d never gotten any sort of handle on the whole marriage thing.
All the dragging, shoveling, and whacking had taken its toll on the new bride, and she, too, needed a break. Missy Delilah slumped down on the hump of earth that had been removed to create the hole. From the way she handled the shovel, he could tell she had a hand coated in new blisters.
“Ain’t nobody could love a man like you, Slim,” she said down into the hole. “You didn’t even bother to shower when we went to the preacher. You goes to work, then comes home drunk, only to park your boney carcass in front of the TV and start drinkin’ some more. And you got a naked whore tattooed on your chest!”
“Sunshine,” Slim said from the hole.
“What?”
“The tattoo is a picture of my first wife, Sunshine.”
“I hate you, Slim Weatherwax!” Missy Delilah began balling her eyes out. The shovel dropped from her hand.
“It’s okay,” Slim said. “I mostly hate me, too
.”
In Atlantic City, Slim had slept through the noise of Enrique’s cannon blast. He wasn’t even stirred by all the screams and hollering as the ornery tiger tore apart the poor old Pisani brothers. Slim had never trusted big cats, what with how they sprayed piss everywhere and, well, had a tendency to go nuts and kill people. Not in a million years would his Gracie have hurt a flea—and she had plenty—let alone a human being.
Slim wished he hadn’t also slept through the gunshot that blew a hole in the nasty cat, but he’d been sleeping like a baby when the shit hit the fan in the parking lot. A total whiskey, beer, and gin-sodden baby, that was.
Slim woke up confused as hell, pinned underneath several hundred pounds of tent canvas. It hadn’t been laid out and rolled like it was supposed to be but instead had been hurriedly crammed in the back of the storage truck. The storage truck held the soft egg crate packaging, which made it a perfect spot to nestle in with a bottle or two and avoid any extra last-minute chores. The old saying of being out of sight, out of mind, was music to Slim’s ears. The foam matting had also saved him from being crushed because it had allowed his long, thin body to sink down under the heavy weight of the canvas. He also couldn’t budge an inch until a couple of the gofers started unloading the truck the next morning.
Slim climbed down the metal truck steps into a blazing sun, immediately regretting he hadn’t saved a little hair of the dog. It got that way, though. As the years rolled on, you just drank until it was gone. Back in the good old days, you sometimes passed out with a little something left in the bottle.
Slim blew his nose on his sleeve and walked down toward the water to take a piss. His fifty-something-year-old body felt twice that, and he knew the ache in his neck was going to hang around for days. But there was nothing new about waking up not knowing where the Christ he was. Hell, since his fourth wife had kept his house in the divorce and turned him into a confirmed bachelor, Slim rarely knew or gave a crap where he woke up. And most days, he didn’t even care if he woke up at all.
Shaking off the last of the piss, Slim stuffed his pecker back in the roost and went to check Gracie’s cage on one of the big trucks. He felt bad not tucking her in, but she knew how to open the latch and mooch a drink from one of the dog bowls. A while back, Slim had unlocked her cage one night at the end of a week-long bender. He’d climbed inside and slept like a baby for two whole days and just never bothered with the lock again.
Everyone knew Gracie was gentle, but nobody was stupid enough—even when they were drunk—to screw around with a bear. Even a bear in a pink tutu.
It didn’t take Slim long to find her cage empty, but he still wasn’t all that worried. Hell, it took a load out of his workday not to be scooping out bear shit and changing the hay, since she’d started climbing out and finding a quiet place to do her business on her own. Not that Slim didn’t catch hell when somebody took a load of garbage to the dumpster and slid on a pile of steaming bear shit, falling on their ass.
Catching crap from some garbage monkey or ride jockey was worth it, though. And Gracie always came right back. She scared pretty easy, and being a toothless bear takes away some of your advantage, should you come across something wanting to fight.
Gracie knew better.
But where the hell was she? Slim put a hand up to his forehead to shade his eyes, scanning the marshy flats, looking for some big, bent-over critter trying to squeeze one out. Slim took a walk around the outside perimeter of the trucks and all the busy setup work going on. His head hurt too badly to call for her, but the uneasy feeling starting to well up in his gut got his feet moving.
Not by the water, and not anywhere off the gravel road. Slim marched faster, realizing they were on some sort of island made by a salt water canal slicing in an arc from the ocean inlet to the east.
“Where’s Pisani?” Slim asked the first clown he walked up to, whose old makeup stains etched a wide frown across the lower half of his face.
“Which one?”
“Enzo,” Slim said impatiently. “Where’s Enzo?”
“Dead,” said the clown. “Tiger killed him last night.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, no shit, Slim.”
“Well, where’s Donato?”
“Dead. Tiger killed him, too.”
“You seen Gracie?”
“Ain’t seen her all mornin’,” the clown said. “Maybe she’s off takin’ a dump.”
“Yeah, I’m hopin’ so.” Slim went to find his old Ford pickup. He’d lost his license after his seventeenth DUI a few years back, and one of the Pisani brothers had told him he had to have one of the Mexican kids drive it. Who the hell was going to clean up after the bear if Slim got his ass thrown in jail?
If the door was left open, Gracie sometimes climbed up in the cab and slept on the soft vinyl bench seat. Her big old claws had torn the heck out of the seats, dirty yellow stuffing bulging out here and there. But the long seat was a perfect fit for her body, and there was usually a nice cross-breeze because both side windows had been broken out long ago.
Slim Weatherwax made his shaky legs do double-time across the mucky brown grass, prayin’ to Jesus his Gracie was in his F-100 snoring away the morning.
Chapter 25
Bagg made his way north, checking both sides of the road for any sign of a traveling circus. The smaller two lane highway where the caravan was last seen joined up with the Garden State Parkway for a couple miles, then split off to head back toward the shore. Bagg figured that unless the convoy intended to make a break for New York, they’d stick close to the tourist spots along the Jersey Shore.
A conspicuous, slow-moving circus procession making its way through small towns could only get so far without being noticed by a gas attendant or a convenience store cashier. Bagg was confident he could quickly confirm whether or not they’d taken this route.
He pulled his Jeep into a convenience store parking lot in West Tuckerton, parking in the spot farthest from the building. The bear was hunkered down in the back, still snoring.
“How’s it going?” Bagg asked the first boy who made eye contact with him outside the front door. The teenagers were lounging in the shade of the building’s overhang, some sitting against the brick facade, while others had upended heavy plastic milk crates for chairs. All the boys seemed to have cigarettes dangling from their mouths. Bags of partially eaten junk food and soda cans were strewn about.
“Kay,” said the boy. They all appeared equally bored.
“You guys happen to see a line of trucks come through here?”
“Yeah,” said the boy. His friends all shook their heads in agreement. “A whole shitload of semis loaded up with bulldozers,” the boy lied. “I think they headed down Great Bay toward the beach. Ain’t that right, Marco?”
Marco shook his head in agreement and flicked his butt out into the parking lot to smolder.
“No, I’m looking for a different kind of trucks,” Bagg said. “It’s a circus. You haven’t seen a circus come through here?”
“Oh, yeah,” the first boy said again, cocking his head and making an aw-shucks motion with his shoulders. “They rolled through right after the bulldozer trucks, right Marco?”
“Yep, they sure did.”
As a reporter, Bagg was naturally skeptical and caught on pretty quickly when bullshit was being directed his way. “And the circus followed the bulldozers down … what road was it?”
“Great Bay Boulevard,” Marco answered. “You make a left out of the lot, then take the second right and keep on goin’.”
“It kinda takes you into the middle of nowhere,” the first boy warned. “But that’s where they were headed.”
“To nowhere?” Bagg asked.
“Yeah, well, to the middle of nowhere,” Marco answered and several of the boys stifled girlish-giggles.
“Look, guys, I have something that belongs to them and I really need to track them down.”
“You a cop?” One of the boys now seemed a l
ittle more interested. “You don’t look like no cop.”
“I’m a reporter.” From inside his shirt, Bagg pulled the press pass he still wore on a chain to show the boys.
A cop would have been much more interesting, appeared to be their reaction as they settled back down on their crates. Who gave a fuck about a reporter?
“You loan me five bucks?” another of the boys asked, and Bagg knew this conversion was going in the wrong direction.
“I got something I can show you,” Bagg said, and several boys hooted.
“Hey, we got somethin’ to show you!” they said in unison, laughing and grabbing at their crotches.
Just then, the bear let out a low roar from the far side of the lot, apparently to announce she was awake, hungry, and stuck in the back of a Jeep.
“What the hell you got in there, mister?” All the boys were suddenly on their feet.
“I told you, I have to find the circus. Bring that stuff.” Bagg pointed down at the half eaten fruit pies and powdered doughnut packs and led the boys toward his Jeep.
The Jeep Wrangler was rocking on its springs from the great weight of its dark, hulking passenger. The boys slowed as they approached, keeping the weird reporter guy between them and whatever had let out the roar.
Bagg took the food scraps and walked to the open back window. Despite her rumbling tummy, the bear seemed to be hiding from the approaching humans and trying to keep quiet. But when she caught scent of the food, she pressed her nose right up against the door hinge where there was just enough space for odors to pass through. She made heavy chuffing noises, apparently pulling the scent toward her with deep, wet breaths. She sounded like a vacuum cleaner sucking up spilled water.
“Sounds like a giant snake,” Marco whispered to the other boys.
“Sounds like an alligator,” another said, as they started to crowd toward Bagg. The nearest boys in front tried to hold their ground.
“C’mon, sweetheart,” Bagg crooned to the bear, reaching in to rub the big mound of fur barely visible above the top of the door. “I have something for you.”