Authors: Jack Ketchum
No matter how you looked at it shaving the hash was dangerous.
And maybe that was why he was doing it in the first place, something strictly for himself that had nothing to do with any considerations for Ray, to strike out on his own for something
he
wanted. Which you couldn’t do without getting into some kind of shit, without some risk, without some potential danger. He sure wouldn’t admit it to Ray and would hardly admit it to himself except at times like this but he felt like his whole goddamn life was under Ray’s thumb sometimes, he had since they were kids. But especially after that night in the woods. He’d felt the tilt in their relationship even then. He’d thought it would go away. That things would tilt back to normal again. They hadn’t. It was four long years ago. Far too long for it to still be affecting his life the way it did.
And it wasn’t right.
He hadn’t done the shooting, Ray had. So how come he felt like
he
was the guilty party while Ray didn’t even seem to think about the goddamn thing or mention it unless he needed something from Tim or Jennifer? How come he felt all tied up by this fucking secret to the point where he always seemed willing to do exactly what Ray wanted him to do, went where Ray wanted to go and when he wanted to go there?
He guessed this could count as his own little rebellion.
It was probably about all he could muster.
And Ray was basically pretty good to him, right?
Sure he was.
Fuck it
, he thought.
You think too much. Just deal with the hash
.
He smoothed down the edges of the brick with his thumb so they wouldn’t look cut so recently. Wrapped the shavings in one piece of foil and rewrapped the brick with the other. He put both in his drawer behind his sweatshirts. He’d deliver the brick tonight. They were supposed to go to the movies.
He took the razor blade into the bathroom and washed it in the sink, dried it and replaced its paper wrapping and put it back in its box and closed the cabinet. As always it amused him to know his father was going to shave with that blade one of these days and if he knew where the blade had been before he put it to his face he would have gone ballistic.
So that he had a secret from Ray and one from his father too.
These were the kind he liked. Secrets were a kind of power.
Ray always said so.
You owned them.
He went downstairs and locked the door behind him and drove to Center Hardware. By the clock on the wall he was ten minutes late returning from his lunch break.
Neither his father nor Gene seemed to care.
He sat at his desk, worrying the thing like a dog with a knotted rope in his teeth.
He couldn’t shake Barbara Hanlon.
Last night trying to sleep he kept seeing her standing drunk and half naked in the doorway with her drinking buddy Eddie. Then he’d picture her four years back. He’d got to thinking how fragile people were. You could kill them with guns or cars or whiskey or just enough despair. A life could turn over in a second or it could grind down over the course of years, so slowly you barely even noticed.
He had to wonder how his own life was doing.
There wasn’t a whole lot in it.
The case he was working sure didn’t help. This one was as stupid as they got.
Sixty-five-year-old guy by the name of Cooley is having a yard sale. All kinds of junk spread out over the lawn. His neighbor, one Michael Allen Nicholas, thirty-five, comes over and accuses Cooley of selling some of his dead father’s stuff. This hammer and that chisel and this lawn chair. They all belonged to his dad and now Cooley’s selling them out there in front of the house. Cooley denies it. At which point Nicholas grabs him by the throat, throws him to the ground, grabs a meat cleaver off one of the fold-up card tables and threatens him with it. Then he evidently decides that maybe the cleaver’s going just a bit too far so he tosses it away and starts beating up on this guy who’s thirty years his senior, starts choking him, until another neighbor, a woman who is more like Nicholas’ age but only half his weight, pulls him off, by which time another neighbor has called the police
.
He was calling this the
Attention Shoppers
Case.
According to Nicholas, all he did was push Cooley.
According to Cooley’s bruised face, bloody lip and swollen black eye and the strangulation marks around his neck, he did slightly more than that.
The truly weird thing was that nobody could find the cleaver. The last thing anybody remembers was Nicholas tossing it over his shoulder in the general direction of the house. Did somebody
steal
the thing while all this was going on?
Where in hell was the cleaver?
It was exactly this kind of detective work that could make you want to go home and pull up the covers and spend the day in bed.
He’d asked Barbara Hanlon to call him if and when she decided she needed help with the drinking but he wasn’t holding his breath. He thought there was probably only one real way he could help her anyway and that involved Ray Pye. But as far as the department was concerned Pye had been a dead issue for years now.
Pye had marched into the office one day, every inch the concerned citizen and admitted to being in the campground the afternoon of the murder. Though not, he said, that night. Even admitted to seeing the two girls and talking with them and then, he’d said, he’d moved higher on up the mountain in order to give them some privacy. Which was how he explained the match of the footprints on the packed earth of the campsite to his damn-fool cowboy boots. But there were too many footprints at the site so Schilling didn’t buy a short casual visit. Pye had hung around a while. Of that he was sure.
He’d allowed them to search his apartment.
They found no .22 rifle in the apartment and Pye denied ever having owned one. His parents backed him up on that. And they found nothing that might have belonged to Elise Hanlon or Lisa Steiner. Questioning known acquaintances produced nothing though he and Ed had both thought Tim Bess might have known something, that he seemed a little squirrelly. If he did he wasn’t saying and with nothing on Pye to go on there was no real way to press him.
They never found the camping gear. Not a scrap. They combed the woods for days. A whole team of cops and helpful citizens.
Pye expressed concern. He was alone that night he said, in bed reading a book, sacking out early after a long day hiking various sections of the campgrounds. He even produced the book, a Louis L’Amour western novel. Schilling doubted Pye was much of a reader but he’d managed to read that one anyway. They practically made him write an essay on the thing.
The bottom line was they couldn’t shake him. The guy was good. He and Ed came back to him over and over again for months because basically they had nothing and nobody else until finally the mother complained—the mother, not Pye. Pye stayed even-tempered and cooperative through the whole damn thing. The chief ordered them off and made it clear that the order was final.
End of investigation.
Pye was a punk and a senior-year high-school dropout whose buddies were all kids younger than he was and who they suspected was dealing dope to those same kids and other citizens on a pretty regular basis. But they couldn’t get him on that either. Drug busts were few in Sparta and none of the dope they did confiscate had been traced to him. They shook him down personally on two occasions in the high-school parking lot and both times he wasn’t carrying. That didn’t mean it wasn’t why he was hanging out there. The fact that he held down a job at his parents’ motel didn’t mean a damn thing. The motel was a nothing situation. A bone his parents were throwing him to keep him off the streets that was only halfway effective.
Schilling had wondered at the time why the kid hadn’t been drafted. So he called up the local draft board. Pye was too short, they said. Pye was five feet three inches tall. Which explained the high-heeled cowboy boots.
The kid was nothing if he wasn’t vain.
It occurred to him that they had a new chief these days. Tom Court had retired a month ago and the new man, Jackowitz, was an import from Newark PD and wouldn’t know a whole lot about the case except that it was an unsolved murder, fairly rare in these parts. But there were plenty of other things more urgently demanding his attention. He wouldn’t know much about Pye either. Probably that left him free to take another crack at the kid if he wanted to just for old times’ sake.
He decided he did want to.
He kept visiting Elise’s drunken mother in his head.
He wondered if Ray had a .22 rifle lying around these days. Maybe the kid had relaxed his guard.
At five Schilling filed the Attention Shoppers paperwork in his drawer, got in his car and drove the four blocks over to Teddy Panik’s.
As he pulled into the parking lot Lenny Bess was just getting out of his pickup. Lenny was a carpenter and restorer who rented a shop in the back of Center Hardware from Gene Huff. Lila had used him once to repair the legs on the pie safe they’d inherited from her mother, and he’d done a good job. Lenny saw Schilling’s car pull in and waved and waited for him at the door.
Schilling greeted him and they shook hands and together they went inside. For a Monday evening the bar was crowded. He saw Ed down at his usual spot at the end. He knew Lenny would hang around up front with his buddies Walter Ursul and Fred Humbolt so he stopped a moment just to be polite.
“How’d you get the stitches, Len?”
It looked like four of them, beginning at the widow’s peak and then up into the thin gray hair. Bess smiled.
“Two-by-four fell on me off the goddamn stacks at the yard. You’d think I’d know how to juggle ’em better by now, huh? How’s the pie safe holding up?”
“Holding up just fine.”
It had gone to Arizona with Lila and the kids. He had no idea how it was doing.
“Do me a favor, will you? If you’ve got any more work for me or if you hear of any, I’d appreciate your giving me a call. Money-wise the whole damn winter was a bitch and I’m still behind.”
“Sure. Be happy to. Tim working?”
Bess shrugged.
“I got him something at the hardware store. He works a couple of weeks, doesn’t show up for a couple of weeks. Gene’s a prince to put up with him. Kids, y’know? What can you do.”
“I know. Listen, Lenny, you have a good one.”
“You too, Charlie.”
You couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. Lenny was a hard worker just trying to get by. Not many folks around here had reason to hire a restorer. Most of the year-round locals could do their own light carpentry. So jobs were always scarce until the summer owners arrived needing this or that repair and Lenny had plenty of competition from younger men even then. His wife held down a checkout job at the market. They needed the cash. The kid did nothing.
The kid hung around with Ray Pye.
He walked down to the end and shook hands with Ed and Teddy across the bar. There wasn’t a seat vacant so he stood beside Ed and ordered a Dewar’s rocks and Teddy poured one. Ed didn’t look real happy. He didn’t look drunk—Ed was never drunk—but he didn’t look happy.
“What’s up, buddy?”
“Ah, just an old ex-cop with a worry.”
“So what’s the worry?”
“Sally’s working at the Starlight. Today was her first day.”
He nodded. “Jesus. Ray Pye.”
“Right, Ray Pye. I tried to talk her out of it but you know Sally.”
He didn’t actually. Only what Ed had told him about her. But he did know about kids.
“They all figure they’re invincible,” he said.
“And we know that they’re not.”
“You tell her that Pye might be a double murderer?”
“I told her. I think I even managed to scare her a little. But I don’t think I scared her near enough. Maybe I should have gone into all the grisly details.”
“Maybe you should have.”
“Christ, she’s just a kid, Charlie.”
“You know better than that. We scare kids all the time. Helps ’em think sometimes. You just don’t want her to see what you used to do for a living every goddamn day right up close and personal. I don’t guess I blame you. You want me to talk to her?”
He looked at him and nodded again and sipped his beer. “Yeah, Charlie, I think I do.”
“No problem. In fact it sort of fits in with some other plans of mine.”
It took him a moment but Ed got it. “You saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Got a new boss, Edward. He hasn’t chewed my ass yet. I figure it’s time I gave him the chance to.”
“I really think this stinks, Ray.”
“So? You think it stinks. Okay, fine. I don’t fucking
feel
like it, get it? End of subject, all right?”