“You ain’t haulin’ shit, chump, ’cause that chain was down. Somebody else cut it.”
“Sure, Stokes, and water runs uphill, too, right? One of these days I’ll catch you with those boltcutters of yours and wrap them around your thieving hillbilly neck.”
Rage pinkened Stokes’s face. “Them’s some pretty rough words from a pussy. Just ’cause you got a gun and a badge, that don’t mean you can go fucking people around all you please. I ain’t scared of you, Morris, and one day I’m gonna kick your ass so bad you’ll think you died and come back as a soccer ball.”
“Talk is cheap, Stokes, and I can tell you talk a lot. Why don’t you just kick my ass right now?”
“No, not now, pussyman. When the time is right.”
Joanne was still groveling on the ground, her voice a shrill echo. “Oh, Lenny, I can’t find my shirt. Help me find my shirt.”
“Ditz,” Stokes replied. “It’s in the car. You took it off ’fore we came in.”
“I didn’t think you owned a shirt,” Kurt said to her. (Joanne was one of the more popular topless dancers at the Anvil, and commonly spent more time without a shirt than with one.) “Why bother owning things you never use?”
Blushing hot red, she stood up, but before she could cover her breasts, Kurt’s light scanned her upper body, purely by accident, of course. In the gritty glow, her flesh gleamed fish-belly white, starkly diverse against large, pink nipples. She quickly crisscrossed her arms and shouted, “You’re doin’ that on purpose! Stop shining that light on me, you pervert!”
Kurt laughed out loud. “Here you are half nude and going down on a guy in a mine shaft, and you call me a pervert. That’s the best joke I’ve heard all week. Don’t worry about it, Joanne. I’ve seen your tits before. Everyone has.”
Joanne held her arms tighter to her chest, radiating anger and embarrassment. Stokes said, “Why don’t you lay off, jack? We weren’t hurting no one.”
“You’re trespassing, which is against the law, for your information, and I know damn well you cut that chain. And did it ever enter that cement-filled head of yours that coming in here could get you killed? This place was due for a cave-in about fifty years ago… Get out of here, both of you. Find someplace else to make whoopee. I’ve got more important things to do than waste time arresting you two airheads.”
Stokes leered in the brittle light. “You’re just a fuckin’ pig, that’s all you are.”
“Yeah, and let this pig give you some sound advice. The next time I catch you in here, you’ll be in the county jail faster than you can say sodomy”—he turned to the girl—“and that goes for you too, Miss Nude America. See what kind of tips you get doing your striptease in the dyke tank.”
“You can’t talk to me like that!” she shrieked at him. “Lenny, he can’t talk to me like that!”
“Don’t worry, babe,” Stokes said, and turned to leave. “He’ll get his. Come on.”
“Oh, Lenny?” Kurt said. “I haven’t seen your wife lately. Did you beat her into a coma again, or did she finally walk out on you?”
“Vicky knows better than to walk out on me. But then that’s none of your goddamned business, is it?”
“Sure it is, Stokes. And get this—the next time I hear of you beating up on that girl, I’ll personally shove this flashlight so far up your ass you’ll be able to flick the switch with your tongue.”
“We’ll see about that, pig. Oink, oink.”
In the narrow light, Kurt watched Stokes and the girl stumble away toward the mine opening until he could no longer see them.
He remained in the manway for some time, standing detached and odd. He thought about Stokes and Joanne Sulley, tasting the acrid secret guilt of being pleased that Stokes was still openly cheating on his wife. How much longer could Vicky last with him? She must know of his adultery. That aside, Kurt’s behavior had been inexcusable. Police officers were to treat all people with professional objectivity, but by now he would not even bother lying to himself, or trying to rationalize his unacceptable conduct. When it came to Lenny Stokes, Kurt was simply not a respectable police officer. He knew this now; he’d known it for years. Stokes was more than just a typical town rowdy; it was a personal thing. Kurt hated Lenny Stokes. Hated his guts.
More thoughts then, ugly, hurting thoughts of Vicky Stokes, and the things Lenny did to her, and must do to her, the beatings, the puffed eyes, bruises turning sallow-black, and the time at the Anvil when Stokes had hit her so hard that blood came out of her ear. It all made him sick, sick at the moving parts of this world, sick at himself. Too many times the daydream spilled round his brain like some rancid, luminous liquid, the vision of his own revolver pressed hard against Stokes’s temple. The hammer dropping…
He closed his eyes, shook his head till the craze of edging thoughts and scenes had spun away. He continued to stand there, inexplicably, in this absurd mine. Darkness smoked over him from the right, the left, and behind. It chilled a hollow, lonely place in his heart, the silence thickening. He turned the flashlight on and off several times in rapid succession, eyes acclimating indecisively from the strobic exposures of white to black, white to black, and he dared himself, in the childish way, to leave the flashlight off and just stand there, but didn’t for the equally childish fear that something black, half seen, and hideous would reach out, snatch the light away, and crackle laughter.
Still more thoughts came, weird, disconnected, impossible thoughts.
The flash back on, he pointed its piercing beam ahead into the mine. From somewhere beyond, water dripped ticking clocklike; dust floated finely across the light. The shaft passage descended deeper and deeper, an endless bore into the earth. Abruptly he turned and began to walk out, the walk becoming a trot, and by the time he’d made it back outside, he actually had been running, because during that last second before breaking away, a final thought had come—the macabre notion that something within the depths of the shaft had been watching him the whole time.
— | — | —
CHAPTER TWO
The corpse lay at her feet.
Vicky Stokes was leaning forward on the couch, knees touching, her head in her hands. She had been crying for an hour.
It was only a dog, a pet, yet in secret she confessed that this current sense of loss affected her harder than any she had known. She remembered the grief she’d felt, several years back, when learning that her parents’ house had burned down with them in it—nothing compared to this. They’d never cared about her, they’d thrown her out of the house at eighteen; still they were her parents, but she mourned the loss of her dog more.
You know you’re a loser when the only friend you have left is a dog.
And she was beginning to realize now that that’s what she was—a loser, who waitressed at a carnal, seedy tavern in a nowhere town with a degenerate tyrant for a husband.
She’d been married to Stokes for a year and a half. The biggest mistake of her life, but she couldn’t blame herself completely because she’d learned of Lenny’s true character only after they’d been married. It was a hard consolation to swallow, though, and she would always hate a small part of herself for ever having gotten involved with him. It might be different if he loved her, as she’d once thought, but Lenny Stokes was not capable of anything close to love. Vicky had learned this the hard way, the painful way. As far as Lenny was concerned, a wife was a commodity, someone to cook his food, clean his house, and earn money. All Lenny had was this house his father had left him; he didn’t have a real job, though he did make a lot of money selling pot and PCP to all the hippie kids in Bowie, and burglarizing homes in Crofton and some of the other wealthier area communities. The weekly check Vicky brought home from the Anvil was used for groceries and bills.