“So what’s this for?” Moorhouse asked, before he realized he shouldn’t be asking.
“A magistrate’s fee you could call it.”
His eyes darted from the money to the white packet.
He slipped the envelope in his desk and poked the powder, soft as baby talcum, with the end of his Cross pen.
HE HAD THREE
shots of Wild Turkey—trying to convince himself that he was celebrating—and lay back in the camper, listening to Willy Nelson sing “Crazy.”
Pellam had this theory that made for a very optimistic life. You kept considering the worst that could happen to you and then, when it didn’t, whatever
did
happen wasn’t so bad.
Who couldn’t be cheerful with that kind of philosophy?
So, close to drunk, Pellam told himself that the worst had happened.
A,
he’d gotten fired from a job he needed and
B,
that was the one job in the world—outside of being independently wealthy—that he was temperamentally suited for.
C,
the rumor would already be burning up Sunset Boulevard that he was personally responsible for cratering a damn fine movie.
D,
he still hadn’t found the man who’d killed his friend. And
E,
the woman he was spending a lot of time thinking about was mad at him for some reason he couldn’t for the life of him figure out (this would be Meg, not Janine. Or . . . oh, Trudie. Too late to call her today. He would tomorrow).
He heard the car pull up.
He hoped it would be Meg though he knew it wasn’t. It’d be Janine. Pellam knew what had happened: the old man was balling his current old lady under a DayGlo Hendrix poster and somebody got stood up.
Come on, Janine, please, baby. Free love. Give peace a chance. Up against the wall. . . .
Pellam was whiskey giddy, almost happy. The
worst had happened. He was immune. And here was a big, horsy warm woman to bed down with.
The worst—
He swung open the door.
—had already happened.
The dirt and stones caught him square in the face before he got his hands halfway up to cover his eyes. He went blind. He inhaled a good bit of Cleary debris and started choking.
There were two of them. And one was big, a bear. He grabbed Pellam’s shirt and pulled him easily out of the camper. He stumbled and, off balance, went down on his knees. Got dragged a few feet.
His eyes were burning, he was coughing loud and spitting out the bitter dirt.
“Come on, asshole, stand up,” a brisk voice whispered. Arms slid under his chest. The bear tugged him up. Pellam uncoiled his legs. The top of his head collided with jaw.
“Shit, motherfucker! Cut my tongue. Shit, shit, shit!”
Pellam kicked out at the other, a smaller guy, who easily sidestepped the boot.
What he’d done—the lunging up—was just a reaction. But he knew it was a mistake. Guys like this, local tough guys, you don’t play with. You just stay as clear away as you can, rolling and dodging until you get a good crack. You don’t sting them; you hit them hard once or twice, really hard. Try to break their head. Make them think you’re going to kill them. They’ll leave, cussing you out and making it sound like you’re not worth the trouble.
What happened was they’d come to have fun and Pellam had just pissed them off. Now it was going to get bad.
The bear punched him hard on the first offered target—his shoulder, which didn’t hurt much, but then he got him in a full nelson, pressed Pellam’s chin down to his chest. Pellam was taller—so the bear couldn’t lift him off the ground but the huge man kept him immobile. The other one came in for some low gut swings, right into the muscles, which knocked his wind out and sent blasts of nausea up through his chest. The bear said to no one, “My tongue bleeding? Shit, I think it is. God
damn,
that hurts.”
Pellam opened his eyes but couldn’t see a thing through the mud and tears. He gasped, “What do you want? You want money?”
The bear bent his head down further and the words got lost in a gurgle.
No, what they want is to beat the living crap out of me . . .
The smaller one came in close, aiming for Pellam’s face, but couldn’t get his fist in because the bear’s fat elbows were in the way. “Hey, turn him loose for a second.”
Which is when Pellam gasped, shuddered and went completely limp.
“Shit, what happened?” The bear relaxed his grip. “Is he dead? Fuck. What’d you do?”
“What’d I do? I didn’t do nothing. I just—”
Pellam broke free, felt his shirt rip down the back as the bear grabbed for it and swung a feint with his
left fist at the smaller assailant, who dodged to the side. Right into Pellam’s sweeping right fist. The snap of the man’s nose cartilage was real satisfying; the howl that accompanied it was even more delightful.
Pellam turned to meet the bear but the big man was already on top of him. He picked Pellam up, right off the ground. “So you want to play rough, huh?” he asked.
“I don’t want to do anything! I want—”
The bear slammed him into the side of the camper. Something snapped but it sounded more like metal than bone. Pellam fell to the ground, gasping, then got to his knees. The bear was battering him wildly, connecting often enough so Pellam couldn’t stand. The pain swirled through his body.
Finally he gave up, he lay still. Exhausted, gasping. “Enough. Okay.”
In the distance was a siren. “Let’s get out of here,” the bear said.
“Oh, God, this hurts,” his partner offered. “He broke my nose. He broke my fucking nose.”
The bear whispered, “Shut up, will you?”
Pellam, trying to breathe, started to crawl under the camper. He felt the big hands reach down and grab him by the ankle. They pulled him back then reached into his pocket. Not his wallet pocket, which he would’ve expected, but his front shirt pocket. Why there? It was empty.
The siren wailed closer.
Pellam heard:
“Let’s get the fuck outa here.
Move
it.”
“My nose, man. You didn’t—”
“Move it, asshole.”
He heard doors slam, and the throaty, crisp sound of a motor firing up, a squeal of tires.
Pellam spit blood and tried to catch his breath. Fucking odd . . . He supposed it wasn’t a robbery—they left his wallet and watch, ignored everything in the camper and only went through one pocket. If they’d been here to deliver a get-out-of-town message they’d had plenty of time to deliver it but hadn’t.
He coughed and made it halfway to a sitting position, lay back down.
The cop car skidded to a stop on the other side of the camper. The siren shut off and he saw the strobe of colored lights on the trees.
His hand strayed to the pocket the bear had rummaged through. He felt the present.
Oh, Christ, no . . .
He pulled out the little glassine envelope. Coke or speed. A gram, easy. Oh, Lord. Felony possession. Pellam stared at the packet through muddy eyes.
He heard their voices. “Okay, let’s find him. Search everything around the clearing.”
Pellam started coughing again, deeply, as the cops rounded the camper. He recognized the two deputies even though neither was wearing their trademark sunglasses.
“Well, sir,” the deputy said, “looks like you had some more of that bad luck after all.”
No, don’t go after the thugs. Stand there and bust my chops, why don’t you? . . .
“You all right, sir?” The other one asked.
He helped Pellam to his feet. He was coughing, choking. “Water, please, some water.”
“Sure, no problem.” The first deputy stepped into
the camper and came back with a cup of water. Pellam took it and swallowed the whole thing down. Breathing desperately, his chest heaving, like a nearly drowned man on land once again.
“Can you stand up, sir?”
Pellam was frowning, watching the other deputy going over the clearing with his flashlight, inch by inch.
“Yeah, I can.”
“Good.” The deputy smiled. “Because you’re under arrest.” He glanced at his friend. “Read him his rights. And search him.”
“
AND YOU DIDN’T
find anything?” Moorhouse asked the sheriff.
The mayor squinted against the brilliant sunlight streaming into his office early on Sunday morning.
“Nothing. My deputies searched like you told us. But they didn’t find anything.”
“You’re sure? No drugs? All these movie people do drugs all the time,” Moorhouse said.
Which Tom knew because he and the wife read
People.
But he also knew they’d searched like a son of a bitch and found zip.
“He was out when they found him?”
“Nosir. But he was down, lying under the camper. He couldn’t have thrown anything far enough so’s we’d miss it. We combed the ground. And I mean combed.”
Moorhouse warily asked, “Any idea who he was mixing it up with?”
“Nope. You want, I can ask around.”
Moorhouse shook his head. “No. Pellam probably started the fight.” He motioned with his head toward the Sheriff’s Department, with its small lockup. “Can’t blame some local kid for getting tough with
an asshole from the Coast thinks he owns the place. Any evidence of the, you know, the gas bomb in the clinic?”
“Nope.”
“Had to’ve been him though.”
“You’d think,” the sheriff said. But uncertainly. He kept looking at Moorhouse curiously, playing with the big hammer of his chrome-plated .357.
The mayor grimaced.
Now I got an envelope of LSD or PVC or whatever the hell it is out loose somewhere in town. Where was it? What if some kid gets a hold of it? Christ.
“What about Pellam?” he asked the sheriff. “He okay?”
“Seems to be. Brought him in last night, blood all over him. He went into the john at the station and puked his guts out. I thought maybe we oughta get him to the hospital, but—”
“The hospital that he tried to fucking burn down.”
“Uh,” Tom said noncommittally. “He seems okay now.”
“We better have a little talk with him,” Moorhouse said. “Bring him in.”
HANDCUFFED.
Standing in front of this small-town shine, who was wearing his favorite baby-blue suit.
And handcuffed, for Christsake.
“Mr. Pellam, let me say how sorry we are about what happened. Things like this you don’t usually see here. Cleary’s a peaceful place.”
“Surprising,” said the sheriff. “That it happened, I mean.”
Pellam nodded to him and squinted against the cold, brutal sun that poured in through the smeared windows. The worst pain was in his right hand—the knuckles—where he’d hit bone.
“Why’d I spend the night in jail?”
“Oh.” Moorhouse swivelled back in his green leatherette chair. “You were arrested for D&D. Didn’t the deputy read you your rights?”
“Sure he did, Mayor,” the sheriff offered.
Pellam asked, “D&D?”
“Drunk and disorderly conduct. How do you plead?”
April fool.
Had to be a joke. Pellam even gave them a short laugh. “I got jumped by two assholes knocked on my door, dragged me out and beat the hell out of me. That’s not D&D.”
Moorhouse smiled patiently. “Guilty or not guilty.”
“Not guilty. Have you found the two assholes?”
The sheriff’s turn: “Seems the other perpetrators—”
“Other
perpetrators?” Pellam laughed.
“—escaped. We searched for evidence but didn’t find any.” He turned to Pellam. “You weren’t real helpful when it came to the description, sir.”
Pellam raised his hands. The chrome bracelets jangled with a dull sound. “Somebody threw a truckload of dirt in my face before they started working on me.”
Moorhouse said, “Well, under the law, of course, we don’t need the others. We can prosecute the one we caught. And that’s you. Now, I’m taking off my mayor’s hat and putting on my magistrate’s.” He consulted an empty wall calendar. “I’m setting trial for one week. About bail—”
“What do you mean, one week?”
“I’m a very busy man.”
“Good. Let me go. I’ll be one less burden for you.”
Moorhouse looked him up and down—the shirt stained with dirt and ruddy-black dots of blood, the blotched jeans, the hair upended from a night on a stiff pillow.
“To be honest with you, sir, we aren’t inclined to keep you around here for any length of time ourselves.”
Sir sir sir . . .
The sheriff rocked on his thick heels; a board creaked.
The light was painful as a dull razor. Pellam’s eyes were watering. He waited. Moorhouse was trying to tell him something. Something he was supposed to be picking up on. Something that was not quite right for the town magistrate to be asking—even
this
town magistrate.
Pellam sniffed and blinked the tears.
“You got a cold, sir?”
“That truckload of dirt I was mentioning.”
“Ah.” Moorhouse looked at the sheriff. “Tom, why don’t you leave us be for a minute.”
“Sure, Mayor.” The lean man pivoted on his heels and walked out of the room in as near to a march as a man could get without Sousa playing in the background.
“Pellam, your presence here’s been, what’s the word? Disruptive.”
“No more disruptive than two assholes driving around town beating up people who’re minding their own business.”
“Ha, there you go.” Moorhouse shook his head. “Did you know that the clinic near to burned down last night?”
Pellam blinked. Trying to make the connection, how this figured in his case. He asked, “What, exactly—”
“You know what was destroyed in the fire?”
Oh. Interesting. He said, “Those drugs the Torrens boy had.”
“Yes, sir.” Moorhouse raising an eyebrow.
“Oh, come on, you charging me with arson too? You’ve got no probable cause for that.”
Moorhouse’s other eyebrow joined the first and they seemed to be asking:
How come you’re so familiar with words like “probable cause”? How come, sir?
“Mr. Pellam, you’re the kind of outside influence isn’t good for our community.”
“Outside influence might be just the ticket,” Pellam said, “you being the inside influence.”