Scare Tactics (20 page)

Toby was trying to break his door down with the stool he stood on to reach the top shelf in his closet. But Angela didn’t stir in her bed.

“
Show yourself,
”
Layne said through gritted teeth. “I want to see you, Buster.”

“
CHEEEEERRRRRRIIIIIIOOOOOO
!”

Glass shattered at the back of the house.

Layne was up and running barefooted with the keys to the bedroom doors. He opened MaryLyn’s door first. She had smashed one of her windows with something, tied a knotted sheet to the bed.

He couldn’t get near the window because of the broken glass on the floor. He turned and ran down the stairs and out the front door in time to see MaryLyn, in her nightshirt, flying across the front lawn toward a footbridge that crossed the creek.

Cheercheercheercheercheer

He caught up with MaryLyn on the other side of the footbridge, before she could clamber up the steps to the street and the edge of the billowing ice cloud that surrounded Buster Dockins’s truck. She was wild in his arms, her eyes blank as ancient pennies.

“LetgoletgoIwant—”

Layne slapped her. She went rigid, then sobbed, spraying his face with tears.

“
I
hate you!
”

“No, honey, no, stay away from the ice-cream man! He wants to hurt Daddy!”

“Noit’sthebesticecreamintheworldandyou’readirtyLIARliarLIAR!”

Layne carried her back across the footbridge, looking up at the street. No more Cheer-i-o. The frigid cloud was dissipating; he could barely make out the shape of the truck as it drove slowly up the street. In moments it had disappeared.

He stood on the lawn with the limp girl in his arms, staring up Oak Hill. So now he knew something he could use to stay alive a little longer while he laid plans to get rid of Buster.

With the kids under lock and key again in Toby’s room he got Angela up. No easy matter. She had slept as if drugged, oblivious to the uproar, but that was probably part of it, he thought.

He spent an hour and a half explaining it to her, as dispassionately as he could manage.

Angela stared at him as if he were mad. Then she tried, pitifully, to humor him. Then she wanted to call her parents. Patiently Layne went through the whole thing again. Angela broke down in hysterics.

By the time she was over it, Layne had her and the kids packed.

—

He was back in town by five the next afternoon. He didn’t like the way the house felt with Ange and MaryLyn and Toby gone. But they would be safe at his parents’ place outside Cincinnati. And he had at least four hours until it was dark.

Some of that time he spent in his well-equipped basement workshop welding nipples to narrow copper tubes, a lot of tubing, and constructing his nets of flimsy chicken wire. The bumper on the front of his Silverado pickup was chrome steel, an inch and a half thick. He needed only to do something about protecting the windshield before he drove across town to pick up the most essential items in his arsenal.

—

“Suppose he don’t show tonight?” Papa John said. He shifted his bulk in the chair he’d pulled up to the living-room windows and sighed. “The fool things we do when we’re kids. What did Virg threaten you with if you didn’t do like he said and take the brake off Buster’s truck?”

“The usual. Pain and humiliation in equal measure.” Layne rubbed his jaw, thinking about the day it had happened. Though his hand was well scrubbed, it still smelled faintly of the storm sewer where he’d been working the last hour before midnight.

“Buster’s truck was parked up there in front of Jo Denny Battle’s house. But he didn’t have the wheels turned against the curb like he ought to have done.”

“No.”

“So Virg gave him a five to make change, and when Buster had a handful of quarters and fifty-cent pieces, Virg pretended he’d been shoved by somebody and rammed a shoulder into Buster. And some of that silver went rolling down the hill with Buster in hot pursuit.”

“That’s when I climbed up in the cab of the truck and let the brake off. At least I had sense enough to make sure there weren’t any little kids standing behind it.”

“What you figured on, the truck would just roll down the street and into the barricade, with no harm done; except Buster would’ve been dancing up and down on the sidewalk fit to pop a blood vessel, and everybody having a good laugh at his expense.”

Layne nodded. “About the size of it. But I never checked where the front wheels were, so the truck didn’t roll straight. Buster was down on his hands and knees trying to fish some change up out of the storm sewer. I don’t know why he never heard us yelling. Maybe he was a little deaf. Maybe his hand got stuck in the grate. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve wished—”

“You didn’t show good judgment, but it was an accident.”

“Because of me, five men are gone. Somewhere.”

“Think it’ll help if old Buster gets us, too? Let’s keep our minds on the business here.” Papa John tipped his head back and swallowed the last of his Michelob. “It’s early yet. Think I’ll just tap another of these. How about you, Layne?”

“No. Help yourself,” Layne said, staring glumly at the street, which was well lighted in the vicinity of the barricade. He and Papa John had concealed the booby traps well. But then there was no telling just what they were dealing with.

Papa John heaved himself out of his chair on the third try and walked ponderously through the dining room, the chandelier shaking overhead. Layne uneasily checked his watch, then turned his head and called, “John? Any of your brood mad enough to want to kill you?”

He heard the refrigerator door open. Papa John laughed.

“Hell, I don’t think so. Had to ground Pistol Pete for riding his bike to Flat Shoals after dark. He’s always had the worst temper in the family, but this time he took it like a man.”

“It’s after twelve. It’s me Buster really wants, you were just a bystander that day, but I’d feel better if you called your house to see that everybody’s accounted for. You know what I ...”

Layne’s voice trailed off. Papa John didn’t answer. He heard the beer bottle hit the kitchen floor, then an entire shelf of the refrigerator came out with a crash. Layne jumped and ran.

“John!”

Layne heard sounds like a dog drinking, like water being powerfully sucked down a drain. The big man was rooted to the floor, hands at his sides. His face was white, and as Layne watched from the door it began to melt; his beard slid down his chest like a tree in an avalanche. The eyes, glacéed chestnuts, followed, slipping and sliding until they were absorbed by a thick churning mass like a milkshake in a blender. His fingers dripped on the linoleum, on packaged hot dogs and a head of lettuce and a jar of mustard. Papa John shrank so swiftly inside his clothes they appeared to be standing there without him. Then the clothes collapsed as if they were falling off a line and the hairs of his beard withered to filings, to mouse dust; the liquid, slurping sounds receded.

—

At least an hour passed before Layne came to his senses. He had trampled down some of the fence surrounding Angela’s garden and was lying facedown between rows of leafy green things, hands plunged into fragrant tilled earth. His face was smeared with dirt, he tasted it on his tongue.

Cheer Cheer Cheeeerrrrriiiiooooo
!

He hated it: hated the sound. He hated all the days of his childhood when he’d given in to fear of Virg Constable. But most of all, he hated Buster Dockins. Layne lifted his head, glaring.

“Come and get me, you bastard.”

I’m ready for you.

The Cheer-i-o Ice Cream truck, wrapped in a spiffy cloud of frost and liquid gold and moonshine, puttered down Oak Hill and came to a stop a few feet from the barricade. He couldn’t see well enough to penetrate the fog, make out the driver. But who else? Layne got to his feet, dirt clinging to his unshaven chin and clothes, and walked slowly down the driveway past his own truck, parked nose to the street.

The door on the driver’s side of the refrigerated truck opened slowly and Buster Dockins got out. From a hundred feet away, Layne could feel the quick drop in temperature, and he shuddered in his short-sleeved shirt. He had a hand in the back pocket of his khaki work pants. Buster grinned and whistled at him like Harpo Marx, and Layne threw up his other hand, wincing at the blue norther hitting him in the face.

“You and me, Buster; the way it should have been all along.”

Cheercheercheercheeriiiiiiii

The music pumping faster out of his wobbly old wreck of a truck. Buster with a hand shading his eyes looking this way and that, as if scouting for children, his rubbery lips pressed together in dismay. Layne smiled crookedly and slogged on into the deepening cold, his one hand stiff now, no feeling in the fingers, the other hand still in his back pocket.

Ah!
Buster, ignoring Layne, reacted as if he’d spotted someone in the distance. Layne didn’t fall for the pantomime. He was nearly to the last, sadly withered willow tree beside his driveway, and that’s where he’d installed the board with the kick switches, all of his wiring strung from tree to tree through the big sycamores behind the barricade. Their heavy branches arched out and over Buster’s foggy truck. A few more feet—

Buster held up a white-gloved hand.
Wait.
He turned and threw open both side doors of the freezer and Layne stumbled, almost losing his balance on the corduroy bridge that now glittered with a coating of ice. Almost lost his mind, because, lined up inside the coldly smoking freezer was a cryogenic nightmare: all of the West End Bunch, rigidly at attention for his inspection. Kent Bafler the next to last, Holy Bible welded beneath his arm like a licorice wafer, then the latest and to Layne saddest addition, Papa John, a slight, perplexed smile on his face:
I’d rather be having a Michelob.

Layne hesitated, then kept walking, the fog around him now, the cold like pliers on the end of his nose, his Angers. Buster wrung his gloved hands ecstatically and reached into the freezer. He held up two ice-cream bars. Layne didn’t have to be told what was beneath the shiny pink and gold wrappers.

His lips were numb, even his tongue felt frozen, but Layne, pausing again at the edge of the footbridge where the plywood board with the kick switches had been concealed, got it out:

“Too bad, Buster. They’re in Cincinnati, and you’re fucked.”

Buster turned his head as far as his broken neck would allow, plucked a silver whistle from one pocket of his white shirt, put it to his lips, and blew.

Two kids came tumbling out of the front seat of the cab, screaming ecstatically.

MaryLyn Bannixter, age eight. Toby, age five.

“Oh, my God—”

“You scream!” MaryLyn said to Toby.

“You scream!” Toby said, pointing to MaryLyn.

“
Who
screams?” Buster yelled, jumping in between them, holding the ice-cream bars high above his head.

“
We all scream for ice cream!
”

“What k-k-kind of ice cream, kids?”

“
Cheeeerrrrrriiiiiooooooo!
”

“MaryLyn! Toby! Get away from him!”

“And it’s the best ice cream in the whole world!” Toby recited, licking his lips in anticipation, looking straight at his father as if he were in a school play.

Buster bowed at the waist, grandly handing out an ice-cream bar to each child. They tore at the wrappers.

Layne jumped off the end of the bridge and with jabs of his booted foot began closing switches on the electrical board he had constructed earlier.

Small explosive charges went off in the ice-covered trees at the base of Oak Hill. Weighted nets of chicken wire floated down toward the refrigerator truck and Buster looked up in consternation.

While he was distracted, Layne went after his children. He snatched MaryLyn’s head back by the hair as she was about to bite into the ice-cream man-on-a-stick, turned, and batted the other chocolate-coated replica of himself from Toby’s hand. He got a better grip on both of them and dragged them out from under the chicken-wire net.

Another charge went off and suddenly the net was electrified, there was a hissing of acetylene and propane gases from the tanks he had concealed inside the storm grate a few feet from the back wheels of Buster Dockins’s truck.

Layne pulled the propane jet lighter from his back pocket, flicked it on, and tossed the lance of blue-white flame in the direction of the storm drain. Then, with a writhing, squealing child under each arm, Layne took a fast look back at Buster, who was impotently hopping up and down inside the chicken-wire net that had shaped itself to the boxy truck.

“You’re a ghost, Buster! Act like one—vanish!”

He pushed both children down the hill to the creek as the propane streaming out of the sewer ignited. There was a blinding flash and concussion.

Layne dragged the stunned, crying children across the footbridge toward their house. He fell to his knees and looked again. A fireball had blackened the trees at the end of the street. The barricade was burning briskly; the asphalt in the street beneath Buster’s truck had bubbled and puckered.