And then she understood. The sly stick had been puffing up his image with his lady, inventing someone young who’d come on to him previously, all horny.
She gave the stick man a pitying look. ‘You ought to know better,’ she said, grabbing Pauly’s arm to head to his car.
It was late, almost closing time, and other nuts, full of booze and hot for trouble, were percolating in that parking lot as well. The two punks sitting at the bar had come out and were giving some guy crap about his highly waxed red Pontiac. ‘We could run right over you, dipshit,’ one of the punks was saying. ‘Steamroller that red Pantyac.’
For an instant, she pitied the two punks as much as the Pontiac’s owner. They were dirt poor farm boys, facing nothing but another sunup on a broke farm. She knew their anger. She felt it herself, every time she crossed the river for another suffocating night at the phone company.
Another couple of men, whose faces she couldn’t see, were hanging back at the edge of the parking lot, sitting on the hood of an old junker car. By the way they were aiming their heads they weren’t watching the spectacles of the punks or the drunk woman and her stick of a man. They were watching her and Pauly. It creeped her out.
‘Fine place for a drink,’ Pauly said as they got in his car.
‘Every night is freak night in Grand Point.’
They pulled out onto the highway, but no sooner had they crossed the bridge into Grand Point proper than Pauly started driving funny, speeding up then slowing down. He ran a red light at the courthouse, punched the gas for two more blocks then swung onto a street lined with houses, cut his lights and stopped. He reached to tilt the rearview to better see behind.
‘Car trouble?’ She turned around to look, knowing it wasn’t.
‘Someone’s following us. He pulled out of the Hacienda with his lights off, staying back, but I saw flashes off his chrome. When I sped up, he sped up. When I slowed, he slowed.’
‘An Important thinks he owns me,’ she said, her voice all quivery.
For a moment he said nothing, and she was afraid he’d push her out of the car. Then he gave out a sigh. ‘Well, it could be me.’
‘That debt? You owe it here, in Grand Point?’
‘So long as it’s paid back by dawn I’m OK,’ he said, not really answering. He started up the Buick.
She quickly brushed away a tear before Pauly could see. Part of her wanted to tell him to drive her home, but a bigger part wanted to stay with him, no matter what. He could change her life.
‘OK, then,’ was all she said.
FIVE
They drove without talking, him checking the rearview, her watching through the back window. No headlights lit the night behind them, which meant exactly nothing.
He turned into a gravel parking lot just before Big Pine Road and killed the engine. For a moment, they watched without talking, the only sound the tick-ticking of the wasp’s big motor cooling down. The road behind them stayed dark.
‘False alarm,’ she said, not really believing it.
‘My overactive imagination,’ he said, not likely believing that either.
The long, low building across the road was a blurred dark shape, almost invisible against the slightly lighter night sky because it had no windows. Sitting at the town line between Grand Point and absolutely nothing to the south, east, and west, everybody knew the Wren House was a Jekyll and Hyde sort of place. It was good enough for eating during daytimes and early evenings, but after that it welcomed a rough crowd – gamblers and workers at the sulky track north of town, folks who liked dark places. There’d been two stabbings there in the past year.
‘I come here to play dice sometimes,’ Pauly said.
And probably to lose the money he owed the debt for. ‘How long will you be?’ she asked, hating herself for sounding so scared and seventeen.
‘There are always guys in there packing lots of cash. I’m going to roll a few times to be friendly, then find someone to cash my check.’
‘The gambling’s in the basement, I heard.’ She didn’t like the idea of waiting alone upstairs, especially if they’d been followed.
‘Have a drink at the bar. I won’t be long.’
Nothing appeared as they walked across the road. Still, she couldn’t help asking, ‘Ten or fifteen minutes?’
‘No more.’
The Wren House was almost as dark inside as it was out. The walls were dark wood, shiny in spots from old grease. Cheap bird pictures, the kind on calendars from insurance companies and muffler shops, covered some of it, but most were curling off their thumbtacks. More women than men, most of them fat and greasy like the walls, sat smoking in twos and threes at the red-checkered tables, sucking on whiskey mixes and longnecks, likely waiting on men downstairs gambling.
Downstairs, too, was the drain. There wasn’t a kid in town, Pinktown or snooty Grand Point regular, who hadn’t heard about the drain. Past the gambling rooms was supposed to be something the public never saw – a room with a special sloped floor stained with blood. Most said it was for quartering beef for the restaurant upstairs, but plenty believed more than livestock had been cut to bleed down there.
She did not like this place. ‘Only fifteen minutes, for sure?’ she asked again, making sure to take a stool where the mirror behind the bar would show anyone coming up on her.
‘Twenty minutes, tops.’ He took one of the two gin bucks he’d ordered and disappeared down the hall.
‘Alone tonight?’
She almost jumped off the stool. Her attention had drifted after some minutes, or else she would have smelled the man’s oily mix of Brylcreem hair jizz and Jade East cologne slithering up on her. He was about forty, had a gold front tooth, and wore an honest-to-mercy lime green leisure suit with white threading at the collar.
The wood handle of a gun bulged from the white-piped waistband of his green pants.
‘My boyfriend’s just downstairs,’ she said quickly.
‘I’m nice, when you get to know me,’ he said.
It was as far as he got. Pauly had come up and pushed between them.
‘Ready to go?’ he said straightaway, sweating like he was fevered.
Gold Tooth stepped back, but only a little. ‘I’m getting to know the lady,’ he said.
‘Fuck off,’ Pauly said, turning his back to the man.
‘Cash your check?’ she asked Pauly.
‘No need.’ He pulled back his front pants pocket to show a wad of bills. ‘They think I’m going to the john. No way I’m letting them win all this back.’
‘Pay your debt?’
‘Later.’ He glanced, nervous, down the hall, toward the stairs that led to the basement.
They hurried to the door, and out into darkness.
BOOK II: RIDL’S STORY
SIX
Tuesday, June 22, 1982
Jonah Ridl eased the open old Volkswagen to a rattling stop and shut off the engine. The shoulder of the road, high above the river and the town beyond, would be good for the first pictures.
He held his hand out, palm down. Steady. Eddings might have been right; maybe it was finally time for crime.
He lit a cigarette and studied the scene below. ‘Bucolic,’ Eddings had said. ‘Bring me bucolic.’
That looked to be no problem. A pristine cement bridge, as bright a white as if Tom, Huck and the gang had painted it just that morning, crossed a sparkling Royal River. Bright green leafy trees, lush with full summer, lined the bank beyond, shading what was sure to be a picturesque burg, dozing in the mid-afternoon heat, beneath a sun as happily yellow as the un-rusted portions of his convertible. It all reeked of bucolic.
He grabbed the old Canon FT-QL, hefted himself up to half-standing and fired four fast shots over the windshield. He knew the cheesy caption Eddings would love: ‘American pastoraclass="underline" June, 1982. The day death came to bucolic Grand Point, Illinois.’