Black House (Page 143)

It might have been the beer, it might have been inattention, but for one reason or another they had wandered off the highway and, in the deep black of a rural night, found themselves on the edge of an almost nonexistent town named Harko. Harko could not be found on their gas-station road map, but it had to be close to the Illinois border, on either one side or the other. Harko seemed to consist of an abandoned motel, a collapsing general store, and an empty grain mill. When the boys reached the mill, Sal and Harry groused about being exhausted and hungry and wanted to turn back to spend the night in the motel.

Sonny, who was no less worn out, rode back with them; the second they rolled into the dark forecourt of the motel, he had a bad feeling about the place. The air seemed heavier, the darkness darker than they should have been. To Sonny, it seemed that malign, invisible presences haunted the place. He could all but make them out as they flitted between the cabins. Sal and Harry jeered at his reservations: he was a coward, a fairy, a girl. They broke down a door and unrolled their sleeping bags in a bare, dusty rectangular room. He carried his across the street and slept in a field.

Dawn awakened him, and his face was wet with dew. He jumped up, pissed into the high grass, and checked for the motorcycles on the other side of the road. There they were, all three of them, listing over their stands outside a broken door. The dead neon sign at the entrance of the forecourt read HONEYMOONER’S BOWER. He walked across the narrow road and swept a hand over the moisture shining black on the seats of the motorcycles. A funny sound came from the room where his friends were sleeping. Already tasting dread, Sonny pushed open the broken door. If he had not initially refused to make sense of what was before him, what he saw in the room would have made him pass out.

His face streaked with blood and tears, Sal Turso was sitting on the floor. Harry Reilly’s severed head rested in his lap, and an ocean of blood soaked the floor and daubed the walls. Harry’s body lay loose and disjointed on top of his blood-soaked sleeping bag. The body was naked; Sal wore only a blood-red T-shirt. Sal raised both his hands — the one holding his prize long-bladed knife and the one holding only a palmful of blood — and lifted his contorted face to Sonny’s frozen gaze. I don’t know what happened. His voice was high and screechy, not his. I don’t remember doing this, how could I have done this? Help me, Sonny. I don’t know what happened.

Unable to speak, Sonny had backed out and flown away on his cycle. He’d had no clear idea of where he was going except that it was out of Harko. Two miles down the road, he came to a little town, a real one, with people in it, and someone finally took him to the sheriff’s office.

Harko: there was a bad place. In a way, both of his high school friends had died there, because Sal Turso hanged himself six months after being committed to a state penitentiary for life on a second-degree murder charge. In Harko, you saw no red-winged blackbirds or woodpeckers. Even sparrows steered clear of Harko.

This little stretch of 35? Nothing but a nice, comfortable woodland. Let me tell you, Senator, Sonny Cantinaro has seen Harko, and this ain’t no Harko. This don’t even come close. It might as well be in another world. What meets Sonny’s appraising eye and increasingly impatient spirit is about a mile and a quarter of beautiful wooded landscape. You could call it a mini-forest. He thinks it would be cool to come out here by himself one day, tuck the Harley out of sight, and just walk around through the great oaks and pines, that big pad of felt beneath his feet, digging the birds and the crazy squirrels.

Sonny gazes at and through the sentinel trees on the far side of the road, enjoying his anticipation of the pleasure to come, and a flash of white jumps out at him from the darkness beside a huge oak tree. Caught up in the vision of walking alone under that green canopy, he almost dismisses it as a trick of the light, a brief illusion. Then he remembers what he is supposed to be looking for, and he slows down and leans sideways and sees, emerging from the tangle of underbrush at the base of the oak, a rusty bullet hole and a large, black letter N. Sonny swerves across the road, and the N expands into NO. He doesn’t believe it, but there it is, Mouse’s goddamn sign. He rolls ahead another foot, and the entire phrase comes into view.

Sonny puts the bike in neutral and plants one foot on the ground. The darkness next to the oak stretches like a web to the next tree at the side of the road, which is also an oak, though not as huge. Behind him, Doc and the Kaiser cross the road and come to a halt. He ignores them and looks at Beezer and Mouse, who are already some thirty feet up the road, intently scanning the trees.

"Hey," he shouts. Beezer and Mouse do not hear him. "Hey! Stop!"

"You got it?" Doc calls out.

"Go up to those ass**les and bring them back," Sonny says.

"It’s here?" Doc asks, peering into the trees.

"What, you think I found a body? Of course it’s here."

Doc speeds up, stops just behind Sonny, and stares at the woods.

"Doc, you see it?" Kaiser Bill shouts, and he speeds up, too.

"Nope," Doc says.

"You can’t see it from there," Sonny tells him. "Will you please get your ass in gear and tell Beezer to come back here?"

"Why don’t you do it, instead?" Doc says.

"Because if I leave this spot, I might not ever be able to f**king find it again," Sonny says.

Mouse and Beezer, now about sixty feet up the road, continue blithely on their way.

"Well, I still don’t see it," Doc says.

Sonny sighs. "Come up alongside me." Doc walks his Fat Boy to a point parallel with Sonny’s bike, then moves a couple of inches ahead. "There," Sonny says, pointing at the sign.