The Pines (38 page)

“Uh-huh.” Buzby scribbled. “Yeah, sure. Where’d you say he was hiding again? Sure, I gotcha. You’re gonna check it out yourself, and I’ll wait to hear from you. Right.” He grinned at Mills. “So when you coming back? Huh? Oh, Cathy’s fine, I guess. I ain’t seen her. You know how busy we are, shorthanded like this. Well, listen, Steve, thanks a lot for checking in, and you’ll call me soon as you know something, right?” He hung up and leaned back in his chair. “That moron.” He crowed with laughter.

“What?”

“We done finally caught a break, that’s what.” Frank sat up straight, reached for the phone again. “And he wants to handle it hisself.”

“You mean the cars? You hear something?”

“The police dick just told me how to get the heat off a us and the troopers outta the frigging woods.” Buzby rummaged through his desk. “So we can get back to business.”

“’Bout time.”

“Let me tell ya—ain’t never been so frigging paralyzed. Got eighteen cars just sitting. What’s the number for the state cops? Never mind.” He dialed. “Listen, go outside and use the other phone. See if you can get hold a some a your buddies, then get your partner in here. Hello, operator? Connect me with the state police. Yeah, it’s an emergency call from Chief of Police Frank Buzby.”

Distant cries drifted down the road, then a cracking noise. As he twisted the steering wheel, he saw a puff of white smoke ahead.

He cursed himself. As a wave of uniformed troopers zigzagged toward the central buildings, he spotted Frank’s cowboy hat and a couple of people he recognized as Buzby’s cronies.

The buildings were surrounded.

He should have guessed what Buzby would do, should have gotten here sooner. But Athena hadn’t wanted to be left alone, and he’d promised to file a missing-persons report about Pamela, and then…

A trooper waved him back. He left the Volks on the road.

The clearing blazed white as Frank’s vigilante buddies and the troopers converged on what had to be the gin mill. As Steve ran forward, someone yelled, “Hey you, get back! You up there, quit firing until I say so!”

He flashed his ID and was let through. An officer kept shouting at the paint-blistered building, ordering someone to come out, to throw down any weapons. “Nobody wants to hurt you now. Just do what I’m telling you.”

The troopers began to mutter. Again, Steve spotted Frank’s cowboy hat and moved toward it. Suddenly, the troopers grew silent.

The door to the gin mill slowly opened.

“That’s it. Come on out now.”

At first, nothing moved in the shadowed doorway, then a wild thing charged, a knife clutched about its head with both hands. With an animal cry, it streaked for the nearest cop.

Steve heard a nearby rookie whisper, “Oh Jesus.” Then guns began to go off. He saw Buzby rock backward with the recoil of his rifle.

The redheaded man with the knife jerked from side to side, clouds of dust rising from his shabby clothing with each blast. It seemed he would never hit the ground.

“Stop firing!” Steve heard himself shouting. “For God’s sake, stop firing!” Then others took up the cry. He was already running forward when a final burst rolled the body onto its back.

Steve reached it first. He knelt. He couldn’t guess how many shots had struck their target, but only reddening shreds of clothing maintained the figure’s shape. A bullet had cracked the skull open just above the left temple; yet the broken face smiled. Like seeds spilling from a sack, the contents of the split forehead seeped out and streaked the face, mingling with and becoming part of that horrid, secret smile.

He felt sand in his teeth. In all probability, this was the man who killed Barry. Yet he felt no hatred. Only pity and disgust. He could see the troopers cautiously entering the gin mill, and men gathered about him now as well, staring at the ruined corpse. And still he felt no sense that justice had been done, not even as he pried the knife from the man’s clenched fist. It was an ordinary Buck knife, the handle mother-of-pearl, its milky opalescence spotted with blood.

“I don’t know as you should be touching that.”

“Leave him be. That’s the guy whose partner got it.”

He dropped the knife beside what remained of the stomach. He turned his back on the gathering men and caught a glimpse of Buzby—grinning, deep in a furtive-looking conversation with a state police captain.
We’ll never know now, not for sure.
Sick and angry, Steve hurried away, not trusting himself to speak to anyone.
Never know the why or the how.

“Hey! There’s a kid up here!” A trooper stuck his head through the narrow second-story window. “He’s all tied up!”

With a single movement, the crowd ran toward the building. From inside, somebody began screaming “Ernie!” over and over in a desperate panic. A cop bellowed at the trooper in the window.

“What? Yeah, he’s all right,” he shouted back. “Just looks a little spooky.”

“Lucky to be alive,” another trooper muttered. “Probably would’ve found him staked out in the woods next.”

Steve pushed past him and kept walking.

Her car idled in the middle of the road. The motionless figure within just stared through the windshield, stared through the clot of people ahead, at the ruined thing at their feet, at red seepage in the sand.

“Athena?” She didn’t seem aware of him. Gently, he reached through the window, putting a hand on her shoulder. “’Thena?”

Madly battering at his vision, branches clawed at his jacket. His boots crashed through the brush. He looked back over his shoulder, and a tree knocked the cap from his head, but he never slowed, not even when his breath came in roaring stabs and his eyes felt ready to burst. He staggered and nearly collided with a pine but kept on with great stumbling strides, the sweat soaking through his jacket.

Spencer fled deeper into the woods. He’d seen the police approaching his home, seen their stealth and numbers, and had gotten out just in time.

Al knew revenuers when he saw them.

Though she’d been eating for some time, the bowl in front of her still seemed to be full. He watched her surreptitiously. Apparently engrossed with the soup, she never actually brought any of it to her mouth but solemnly spooned the dark liquid as though dredging for a corpse.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Gritty. Sorry. Not your fault. I swear I can taste sand in everything anymore.” At last, she put the spoon down. “It’s beginning to get dark. We should start to lock up.”

Water trickled loudly into the sink. He twisted the faucet shut and wiped soapy hands on his pants before touching her cheek with a damp palm. “Athena, it’s over. They got him.”

She said nothing, but studied his face with desperate hope.

He caressed her hair, dark with flickering lights trapped within its coils. He looked at her slim body beneath the man’s shirt that hung so loosely on her. He watched her face. “Don’t you understand? It’s over.”

In the dimming yard beyond the screen door, a cluster of starlings shrieked and flurried.

She closed her eyes. “Steve…” She laid her hand on his, trying to draw his sureness into herself. “There’s nothing out there? Getting closer in the dark?”

He simply took hold of her hand.

“I chew my nails,” she told him after a moment.

“So I see.”

“You got sunburned today.” She touched the side of his face.

He put his arms around her, and she laughed sadly against him. He pressed his lips to her forehead.

When the boy’s cries came, she gently pushed him aside, nothing on her face betraying the least surprise. Not moving, he just listened to her mount the stairs. Then he turned the heat off under the coffee and rubbed a hand across his eyes.

Leaving the kitchen and climbing the stairs, he followed the shouts to the attic.

“Pammy’s blood! My friend—Pammy’s blood comin’ outta his mouth!”

“It was a nightmare. Only a nightmare.”

Steve found her rocking the boy in her arms.

“My poor baby. It’s over. Oh Matty.” Forcefully, she repeated, “All over.”

Friday, August 14

Rattling the newspaper in irritation, she scanned an article about a local mayor’s involvement in a toxic dumping scandal. “Now there’s shocking news. A crooked politician. Imagine.” A boxed follow-up story just below it described New Jersey’s pollution problem in depressing detail. Continuing to mutter under her breath, Doris turned back to the front page and reread the account of the death of a serial killer at Munro’s Furnace. The paper really played it up big—right across from the headline about the record heat wave, above the bit about the red tide near Brigantine.

At least Athena’s safe now, she thought. Sighing, she lowered the paper and looked down at her bandaged foot. The trap had severed a muscle, which might easily take longer to heal than a broken bone. Her glance continued around the small hospital room, everything ice blue and smelling of disinfectant. The slanting windows looked down on a sun-pounded lot. Shifting on the bed, she tried to find a comfortable position and toyed with an unlit cigarette. She checked her watch: almost time for more medication.

She didn’t like taking it. It made her brain fuzzy, and lately there’d been nightmares about that last drive with Steve, that night he’d driven her to the hospital. She’d been practically fainting at that point, barely able to make out his words, but in her dreams she heard him clearly. He seemed to be speaking about Barry, about fighting with Barry the day he died. “…squeezed and his eyes got very large, and that made me feel, not happy exactly, but like release was on the way, and the harder I squeezed the faster it came, and the feeling ran up my fingertips to my shoulders and then spread to…”

Just a dream. A drug dream. No, no more painkillers. She gritted her teeth and wished Athena would call.

Gazing at the pile of well-thumbed magazines on the night table, she sighed again, in boredom this time, and reopened the newspaper, amusing herself by reading about another casino scandal. Then her eyes wandered to a tiny account of a tractor-trailer driver arrested for drunk driving on the turnpike. The rig had turned out to contain radioactive materials. “Swell. Wipe out half the state that way.” She began leafing through pages in exasperation, stopping at a headline that read grandmother kills boy in ritual. She skimmed the piece. After neighbors had complained of a bad smell, a woman in Newark had been arrested for murdering a four-year-old in some sort of exorcism. She read down a bit farther. The child’s body was badly burned, and police had taken scrapings from the walls of the oven.

People are crazy, she thought and turned the page.

The lumps in the pancake batter wouldn’t go away. Athena stabbed them with a fork. She stirred them furiously, tried squashing them under the surface as though to drown them, but they only stuck to the tines. “This doesn’t look right.” She glanced over at Matty to see if he was impatient for lunch, but he just sat at the table and stared out the screen door. She watched him without seeming to. He was so still, so quiet.

Dropping the fork, which immediately disappeared into the batter, she pulled a chair over and climbed up on it. She dug through the kitchen cabinet, trying to find where Pam had put the eggbeater. With one hand, she steadied herself against the wall—its texture like the flaking skin of an elderly lizard—as she crashed and rattled things around on the shelves. No eggbeater. She did, however, find a utensil that vaguely resembled a cross between a cheese grater and brass knuckles, the proper function of which she couldn’t imagine. “Oh well, maybe this’ll work.” Hopping down, she got the oil out from under the sink and put the large skillet on the burner, turning the flame way up.

The dog lifted his head from the floor and sniffed the thin odor of scalded metal.

She tried mashing the lumps, and batter dribbled over the side of the bowl. She glanced over at the boy, who continued to sit in silence, still apparently traumatized by Pamela’s…disappearance. She didn’t know what to do to help. As she reached for the wooden spoon on a hook, heavy objects in her pockets banged against the stove. “Oh, I forgot. Look what I found while I was cleaning your room, Matthew. It’s those stones you used to play with. Remember?” She hopped down, but he only stared impassively. “Don’t you want them?” She felt his forehead again—no fever—but those hot, sunken eyes disturbed her. She touched the metallic sheen of his hair, lightly stroked the curling blades. “I’ll just put them h ere for you.” She laid the stones on the table.

“Oh well, here goes.” Trying to watch the boy over her shoulder, she spooned batter into the skillet. But she’d filled the pan with cooking oil, the way she’d seen her grandmother do when making dumplings, and the pancake batter spattered and spread across the bottom, dry lumps bobbing to the surface. “Hell.” She stirred the mess distractedly, then turned off the burner. “Pancake stew.”

She looked around the kitchen at the litter of flour and spilled milk and eggshells. It seemed she’d dirtied every dish they owned. Even the old iron stove, which hadn’t seen use since Wallace installed the reconditioned propane range ten years ago, looked filthy. It occurred to her that this might be the first time anyone had ever cooked in this kitchen without Dooley underfoot looking for handouts. She scowled at the dog who watched in plain dismay. “Might as well dump this mess.” She took hold of the iron skillet, burning herself and cursing. Already singed brown at both ends, the dish towel she’d been using as a potholder lay soaking in the sink.