Black House (Page 85)

Pam and Danny get out of their unit, hearts pumping, adrenaline spurting. Four men come spilling out of the pickup’s cab like clowns out of the little car in the circus. Mrs. Morton would recognize them all as regulars at Roy’s Store. Layabouts, she would call them.

"What in the name of God are you doing?" Danny Tcheda roars. His hand drops to the butt of his gun and then falls away a bit reluctantly. He’s getting a headache.

The men (Runkleman is the only one the officers know by name, although between them they recognize the faces of the other three) are goggle-eyed with excitement.

"How many ja find?" one of them spits. Pam can actually see the spittle spraying out in the morning air, a sight she could have done without. "How many’d the bastid kill?"

Pam and Danny exchange a single dismayed look. And before they can reply, holy God, here comes an old Chevrolet Bel Air with another four or five men inside it. No, one of them is a woman. They pull up and spill out, also like clowns from the little car.

But we’re the real clowns, Pam thinks. Us.

Pam and Danny are surrounded by eight semihysterical men and one semihysterical woman, all of them throwing questions.

"Hell, I’m going up there and see for myself!" Teddy Runkleman shouts, almost jubilantly, and Danny realizes the situation is on the verge of spinning out of control. If these fools get the rest of the way up the access road, Dale will first tear him a new ass**le and then salt it down.

"HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, ALL OF YOU!" he bawls, and actually draws his gun. It’s a first for him, and he hates the weight of it in his hand — these are ordinary people, after all, not bad guys — but it gets their attention.

"This is a crime scene," Pam says, finally able to speak in a normal tone of voice. They mutter and look at one another; worst fears confirmed. She steps to the driver of the Chevrolet. "Who are you, sir? A Saknessum? You look like a Saknessum."

"Freddy," he admits.

"Well, you get back in your vehicle, Freddy Saknessum, and the rest of you who came with him also get in, and you back the hell right out of here. Don’t bother trying to turn around, you’ll just get stuck."

"But — " the woman begins. Pam thinks she’s a Sanger, a clan of fools if ever there was one.

"Stow it and go," Pam tells her.

"And you right behind him," Danny tells Teddy Runkleman. He just hopes to Christ no more will come along, or they’ll end up trying to manage a parade in reverse. He doesn’t know how the news got out, and at this moment can’t afford to care. "Unless you want a summons for interfering with a police investigation. That can get you five years." He has no idea if there is such a charge, but it gets them moving even better than the sight of his pistol.

The Chevrolet backs out, rear end wagging from side to side like a dog’s tail. Runkleman’s pickup goes next, with two of the men standing up in back and peering over the cab, trying to catch sight of the old restaurant’s roof, at least. Their curiosity lends them a look of unpleasant vacuity. The P.D. unit comes last, herding the old car and older truck like a corgi herding sheep, roof-rack lights now pulsing. Pam is forced to ride mostly on the brake, and as she drives she lets loose a low-pitched stream of words her mother never taught her.

"Do you kiss your kids good-night with that mouth?" Danny asks, not without admiration.

"Shut up," she says. Then: "You got any aspirin?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing," Danny says.

They get back out to the main road just in time. Three more vehicles are coming from the direction of French Landing, two from the direction of Centralia and Arden. A siren rises in the warming air. Another cruiser, the third in what was supposed to be an unobtrusive line, is coming along, passing the lookie-loos from town.

"Oh man." Danny sounds close to tears. "Oh man, oh man, oh man. It’s gonna be a carnival, and I bet the staties still don’t know. They’ll have kittens. Dale is gonna have kittens."

"It’ll be all right," Pam says. "Calm down. We’ll just pull across the road and park. Also stick your gun back in the f**king holster."

"Yes, Mother." He stows his piece as Pam swings across the access road, pulling back to let the third cruiser through, then pulling forward again to block the way. "Yeah, maybe we caught it in time to put a lid on it."

"Course we did."

They relax a little. Both of them have forgotten the old stretch of road that runs between Ed’s and Goltz’s, but there are plenty of folks in town who know about it. Beezer St. Pierre and his boys, for instance. And while Wendell Green does not, guys like him always seem able to find the back way. They’ve got an instinct for it.

11

BEEZER’S JOURNEY BEGAN with Myrtle Harrington, the loving wife of Michael Harrington, whispering down the telephone line to Richie Bumstead, on whom she has an industrial-strength crush in spite of his having been married to her second-best friend, Glad, who dropped down dead in her kitchen at the amazing age of thirty-one. For his part, Richie Bumstead has had enough macaroni-tuna casseroles and whisper-voiced phone calls from Myrtle to last him through two more lifetimes, but this is one set of whispers he’s glad, even oddly relieved, to listen to, because he drives a truck for the Kingsland Brewing Company and has come to know Beezer St. Pierre and the rest of the boys, at least a little bit.

At first, Richie thought the Thunder Five was a bunch of hoodlums, those big guys with scraggly shoulder-length hair and foaming beards roaring through town on their Harleys, but one Friday he happened to be standing alongside the one called Mouse in the pay-window line, and Mouse looked down at him and said something funny about how working for love never made the paycheck look bigger, and they got into a conversation that made Richie Bumstead’s head spin. Two nights later he saw Beezer St. Pierre and the one called Doc shooting the breeze in the yard when he came off-shift, and after he got his rig locked down for the night he went over and got into another conversation that made him feel like he’d walked into a combination of a raunchy blues bar and a Jeopardy! championship. These guys — Beezer, Mouse, Doc, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill — looked like rockin’, stompin’, red-eyed violence, but they were smart. Beezer, it turned out, was head brewmaster in Kingsland Ale’s special-projects division, and the other guys were just under him. They had all gone to college. They were interested in making great beer and having a good time, and Richie sort of wished he could get a bike and let it all hang out like them, but a long Saturday afternoon and evening at the Sand Bar proved that the line between a high old time and utter abandon was too fine for him. He didn’t have the stamina to put away two pitchers of Kingsland, play a decent game of pool, drink two more pitchers while talking about the influences of Sherwood An-derson and Gertrude Stein on the young Hemingway, get into some serious head-butting, put down another couple of pitchers, emerge clearheaded enough to go barrel-assing through the countryside, pick up a couple of experimental Madison girls, smoke a lot of high-grade shit, and romp until dawn. You have to respect people who can do that and still hold down good jobs.