Black House

"What is it?" Jack asks impatiently when they’re standing near the passenger window of the truck. "We want a look before the whole world gets here, don’t we? Wasn’t that the idea, or am I — "

"You need to get the foot, Jack," Dale says. And then: "Hello, Uncle Henry, you look spiff."

"Thanks," Henry says.

"What are you talking about?" Jack asks. "That foot is evidence."

Dale nods. "I think it ought to be evidence found here, though. Unless, of course, you relish the idea of spending twenty-four hours or so answering questions in Madison."

Jack opens his mouth to tell Dale not to waste what little time they have with arrant idiocies, then closes it again. It suddenly occurs to him how his possession of that foot might look to minor-league smarties like Detectives Brown and Black. Maybe even to a major-league smarty like John Redding of the FBI. Brilliant cop retires at an impossibly young age, and to the impossibly bucolic town of French Landing, Wisconsin. He has plenty of scratch, but the source of income is blurry, to say the least. And oh, look at this, all at once there’s a serial killer operating in the neighborhood.

Maybe the brilliant cop has got a loose screw. Maybe he’s like those firemen who enjoy the pretty flames so much they get into the arson game themselves. Certainly Dale’s Color Posse would have to wonder why the Fisherman would send an early retiree like Jack a victim’s body part. And the hat, Jack thinks. Don’t forget Ty’s baseball cap.

All at once he knows how Dale felt when Jack told him that the phone at the 7-Eleven had to be cordoned off. Exactly.

"Oh man," he says. "You’re right." He looks at Tom Lund, industriously running yellow POLICE LINE tape while butterflies dance around his shoulders and the flies continue their drunken buzzing from the shadows of Ed’s Eats. "What about him?"

"Tom will keep his mouth shut," Dale says, and on that Jack decides to trust him. He wouldn’t, had it been the Hungarian.

"I owe you one," Jack says.

"Yep," Henry agrees from his place in the passenger seat. "Even a blind man could see he owes you one."

"Shut up, Uncle Henry," Dale says.

"Yes, mon capitaine."

"What about the cap?" Jack asks.

"If we find anything else of Ty Marshall’s . . ." Dale pauses, then swallows. "Or Ty himself, we’ll leave it. If not, you keep it for the time being."

"I think maybe you just saved me a lot of major irritation," Jack says, leading Dale to the back of the truck. He opens the stainless steel box behind the cab, which he hasn’t bothered to lock for the run out here, and takes out one of the trash-can liners. From inside it comes the slosh of water and the clink of a few remaining ice cubes. "The next time you get feeling dumb, you might remind yourself of that."

Dale ignores this completely. "Ohgod," he says, making it one word. He’s looking at the Baggie that has just emerged from the trash-can liner. There are beads of water clinging to the transparent sides.

"The smell of it!" Henry says with undeniable distress. "Oh, the poor child!"

"You can smell it even through the plastic?" Jack asks.

"Yes indeed. And coming from there." Henry points at the ruined restaurant and then produces his cigarettes. "If I’d known, I would have brought a jar of Vicks and an El Producto."

In any case, there’s no need to walk the Baggie with the gruesome artifact inside it past Tom Lund, who has now disappeared behind the ruins with his reel of yellow tape.

"Go on in," Dale instructs Jack quietly. "Get a look and take care of the thing in that Baggie if you find . . . you know . . . her. I want to speak to Tom."

Jack steps through the warped, doorless doorway into the thickening stench. Outside, he can hear Dale instructing Tom to send Pam Stevens and Danny Tcheda back down to the end of the access road as soon as they arrive, where they will serve as passport control.

The interior of Ed’s Eats will probably be bright by afternoon, but now it is shadowy, lit mostly by crazed, crisscrossing rays of sun. Galaxies of dust spin lazily through them. Jack steps carefully, wishing he had a flashlight, not wanting to go back and get one from the cruiser until he’s taken care of the foot. (He thinks of this as "redeployment.") There are human tracks through the dust, trash, and drifts of old gray feathers. The tracks are man-sized. Weaving in and out of them are a dog’s paw-prints. Off to his left, Jack spies a neat little pile of droppings. He steps around the rusty remains of an overturned gas grill and follows both sets of tracks around the filthy counter. Outside, the second French Landing cruiser is rolling up. In here, in this darker world, the sound of the flies has become a soft roar and the stench . . . the stench . . .

Jack fishes a handkerchief from his pocket and places it over his nose as he follows the tracks into the kitchen. Here the pawprints multiply and the human footprints disappear completely. Jack thinks grimly of the circle of beaten-down grass he made in the field of that other world, a circle with no path of beaten-down grass leading to it.

Lying against the far wall near a pool of dried blood is what remains of Irma Freneau. The mop of her filthy strawberry-blond hair mercifully obscures her face. Above her on a rusty piece of tin that probably once served as a heat shield for the deep-fat fryers, two words have been written with what Jack feels sure was a black Sharpie marker:

Hello boys

"Ah, f**k," Dale Gilbertson says from almost directly behind him, and Jack nearly screams.

Outside, the snafu starts almost immediately.

Halfway back down the access road, Danny and Pam (not in the least disappointed to have been assigned guard duty once they have actually seen the slumped ruin of Ed’s and smelled the aroma drifting from it) nearly have a head-on with an old International Harvester pickup that is bucketing toward Ed’s at a good forty miles an hour. Luckily, Pam swings the cruiser to the right and the driver of the pickup — Teddy Runkleman — swings left. The vehicles miss each other by inches and swerve into the grass on either side of this poor excuse for a road. The pickup’s rusty bumper thumps against a small birch.