No sign of the van, either.
Why in hell would anybody want to steal a van that stunk like that?
Okay. He had stolen it. But that was different.
Dufault glanced around carefully to make sure there were no Boyers lying in ambush in the shadows under the carport, none strolling up the front street, then walked up the empty drive to the back of the house and stooped down to pop a basement window.
The window was a tight squeeze and took a patch of skin off your ribs the size of a Checker cab, but you managed to wriggle through feet first and drop inside. The first thing that hit you was the stink. The same stink as the van, it rose up at your nose and walloped you. Dufault knew this had to be Zeke’s room, the smell must have got in his clothes.
Dark in here. You couldn’t see. Dufault stumbled over something bulky in the middle of the room, and cursed. Trust a dope like Zeke to leave a thing where you’d trip over it, lying here heavy as a rolled-up rug. Dufault gave it a kick, feeling his foot thud into the thing, hearing a kind of a hiss as he moved on.
His mind already working out what he was going to do.
Fix Zeke the freak. The guy had a taste for parlor games, huh? Okay. See how he liked it when he came home and found his own parlor all warped over. And a nice little note of his own there to welcome him, seeing he liked poetry so much. Something like:
At least it rhymed.
Dufault moved into a short hallway, some light here filtering down the staircase, then went softly up the basement stairs on his tippy-toes to the main floor of the house.
Silence.
Not a soul in the place.
Which was pretty much fine with him. Just the way he wanted it. Make this a quick visit. Do what he had to do, in and out before the big dork knew what hit him.
Dufault brought his hands together in a smack, savoring the moment. Get to it, now. Then his nostrils twitched. That smell again. Whew! It sure did stink like the devil in here.
“Now what?” Ma yelled.
They’d got the tire changed, drove on another thirty miles, and now, would you believe it? the car had stalled. The engine letting out a terrific gasp and giving up.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a vapor lock.” Louie spoke loud so Ma could hear him. She was still inside the car, he was here under the hood. He had the air cleaner off and was poking at the choke valve with a screwdriver when Ma squirmed in behind the wheel.
He heard her say, “I’ll start this thing!” and he said, “No, not yet—”
But that was as far as he got.
Ma turned the key, the starter engaged, and a ten inch spike of blue flame shot out the top of the carburetor, scorching Louie’s eyebrows, causing him to throw himself backwards in a reflex action and bash the crown of his head on the lip of the uplifted hood.
“Wow! Oh, Ma — wow!” Louie walked around in circles, all stooped over, touching his shriveled eyebrows with one hand and cupping the rising lump on the top of his head with the other. “Oh, that hurt, Ma! Oh, wow!”
Ma said: “Can’t nothing go right on this trip, now we got to go and get a vapor lock? Jesus. What is a vapor lock?” She looked at him out the window. “What are you wandering around for? You gonna get this car going so we can get home some time this year, or what?”
“Oh, wow, Ma!”
Ma got out of the car.
“Stand up straight, I can’t talk to you when you’re hunched over staring at the ground like that. Like some kinda — I don’t know — elephant man. Listen. I got an idea. Your dad used to have this old car, it wouldn’t start. What he used to do is push it, get the thing rolling, and when he’d holler, I’d pop the clutch for him—”
“Ma. This car’s an automatic.”
“So?”
“It doesn’t have a clutch — oh, wow, that hurts. We’d have to get it going fifteen, twenty miles an hour...”
“You can’t run that fast?”
“Not pushing a car, Ma!”
“Well, what are you gonna do then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if we had some methyl hydrate—”
“What’s that?”
“You spray it into the carburetor, it’s really volatile—”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means it burns really good, and it—”
“Why’n’t you say so.” Ma leaned back into the car and dipped into her purse. “Okay,” she said, “let me get under that hood this time, and you turn the key.”
She bent over the fender, her broad backside jutting out, the tips of her toes just meeting the road. No use arguing. Louie got in behind the wheel. When Ma hollered, he gave the ignition one more try, and this time there was a blast like a shotgun, white smoke boiled up, and the engine caught, growled, and roared. Ma stepped back and slammed the hood. Stood there in front of the car like an apparition, with thin tendrils of white smoke clinging to her head. She walked around to the passenger’s side, got into the car, and shoved something back in her purse.
“Holy cow, Ma,” Louie said, impressed. “What was that stuff?”
“Hair spray,” Ma said. “Very volatile. See, I know about that. There was this woman once, she turned a can of lit hair spray on a man was trying to mug her.”
“Really? What happened?”
“The fence broke.”
“What fence?”
“The one he took off and galloped through with his clothes on fire.”
“Ma, that’s terrible. Was he hurt?”
“I don’t know. But he got hurt later. When I took an’ beat the flames out of him with one of the fence boards, I think he might of got a busted rib outa that. Saving his life. Would you drive the car?”
Dufault worked quickly and methodically. He’d never done anything like this before, what he had in mind. Tossed a room or two sure. You had to sometimes. Like when you broke into a place, you knew they had something small and valuable stashed away and you had to find it and get the hell out in a hurry; but never anything like this — deliberate.
He began uncertainly by turning things upside-down.
Sofa, chairs, coffee table, end tables, television, stereo — all this junk the Boyers had. Look at it. A shelf of old Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias that, Jeez, weighed half a ton. Turn ’em over. Ornaments, kitchen appliances — the ones he could lift. Dishes. Pictures on the walclass="underline" a black velvet painting of Elvis and a calendar of a horse’s head hanging over a fence. Upside-down. After a while he was really getting into it, beginning to feel creative. Like with the thick candles he found in the cupboard when he was doing the kitchen, and got an idea, and went around to the upside-down lamps on their upside-down tables, and unscrewed the bulbs and jammed the candles into their place.
The light bulbs, let’s see... Put them in the refrigerator.
And an armload of clothing out of the clothes closet — stuff that stuff in the oven.
If you used your head a bit, there were all sorts of gags you could play on a dork like Zeke the freak.
Then he came to the bathroom.
He pointed the shower head straight up — a nice touch — and was down on his haunches eyeing the bolts that held the toilet to the floor, thinking what a great effect it would make if he could somehow turn the commode over, too, when he caught a sudden, sharp whiff of that smell again. Whew! Like a dead body here in the room with him. A second later he felt something slap the bare skin at the small of his back, something damp and heavy, and he twisted around and saw the giant lizard staring back at him with its tongue hanging out...