“Why would he do that?”
“To divert attention away from himself. I think Mr. Pudd would be just as angry with whoever sold me the creatures as he is with me.”
“So your supplier gave Pudd your name, then claimed not to know what you were planning to do with the bugs?”
“That is correct, yes.”
“What's the supplier's name?”
“Bargus. Lester Bargus. He owns a store in Gorham, specializing in exotic insects and reptiles.”
I stopped taking notes.
“You know the name, Mr. Parker?” asked Franklin.
I nodded. Lester Bargus was what people liked to call “two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.” He was the kind of guy who thought it was patriotic to be stupid and took his mother to Denny's to celebrate Hitler's birthday. I recalled him from my time in Scarborough High, when I used to stand at the fence that marked the boundary of the football field, the big Redskins logo dominating the board, and get ready to face a beating. Those early months were the hardest. I was only fourteen and my father had been dead for two months. The rumors had followed us north: that my father had been a policeman in New York; that he had killed two people, a boy and a girl-shot them down dead, and they weren't even armed; that he had subsequently put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. They were made worse by the fact that they were true; there was no way of avoiding what my father had done, just as there was no way of explaining it. He had killed them, that was all. I don't know what he saw when he pulled the trigger on them. They were taunting him, trying to make him lose his temper with them, but they couldn't have known what they would cause him to do. Afterward my mother and I had run north, back to Scarborough, back to her father, who had once been a policeman himself, and the rumors had snapped at our heels like black dogs.
It took me a while to learn how to defend myself, but I did. My grandfather showed me how to block a punch and how to throw one back in a single controlled movement that would draw blood every time. But when I think back on those first months, I think of that fence, and a circle of young men closing in on me, and Lester Bargus with his freckles and his brown, square-cut hair, sucking spit back into his mouth after he had begun to drool with the joy of striking out at another human being from the security of the pack. Had he been a coyote, Lester Bargus would have been the runt that hangs at the margins of the group, lying down on its back when the stronger ones turned on it yet always ready to fall on the weak and the wounded when the frenzy struck. He tortured and bullied and came close to rape in his senior year. He didn't even bother to take his SATs; a new scale would have been needed to assess the depths of Bargus's ignorance.
I had heard that Bargus now ran a bug store in Gorham but it was believed to be merely a front for his other interest, which was the illegal sale of weapons. If you needed a clean gun quickly, then Lester Bargus was your man, particularly if your political and social views were so right wing they made the Klan look like the ACLU.
“Are there a lot of stores that supply bugs, Mr. Ragle?”
“Not in this state, no, but Bargus is also regarded as a considerable authority nationally. Collectors consult with him on a regular basis.” Ragle shuddered. “Although not, I should add, in person. Mr. Bargus is a particularly unpleasant individual.”
“And you're telling me all this because…?”
Franklin intervened. “Because my client is certain that Mr. Pudd will kill him if someone doesn't stop him first. The gentleman in Boston, who has acted as a conduit for some of my client's more mainstream products, believes that a case with which you are currently involved may impinge upon my client's interests. He suggested that any assistance we might be able to provide could only help our cause.”
“And all you have is Lester Bargus?”
Franklin shrugged unhappily.
“Has Pudd tried to contact you?”
“In a way. My client had been sequestered in a safe house in Standish. The house burned down; somebody threw an incendiary device through the bedroom window. Fortunately, Mr. Ragle was able to escape without injury. It was after that incident that we took Mikey on as security.”
I closed my notebook and stood up to leave. “I can't promise anything,” I said.
Ragle leaned toward me and gripped my arm. “If you find this man, Mr. Parker, squash him,” he hissed. “Squash him like a bug.”
I gently removed my arm from his grasp. “I don't think stiletto heels come that big, Mr. Ragle, but I'll bear it in mind.”
I drove over to Gorham that afternoon. It was only a couple of miles but it was still a wasted trip, as I knew it would be. Bargus was aging badly, his hair and teeth almost gone and his fingers stained yellow with nicotine. He wore a No New World Order T-shirt, depicting a blue United Nations helmet caught in the crosshairs of a sniper's sight. In his dimly lit store, spiders crouched in dirt-filled cases, snakes curled around branches, and the hard exoskeletons of cockroaches clicked as they crawled against one another. On the counter beside him a four-inch-long mantid squatted in a glass case, its spiked front legs raised before it. Bargus fed it a cricket, which skipped across the dirt at the bottom of the case as it tried vainly to evade destruction. The mantid turned its head to watch it, seemingly amused by its presumption, then set off in pursuit.
It took Bargus a few moments to recognize me as I approached the counter.
“Well, well,” he said. “Look what just rose to the lip of the bowl.”
“You're looking well, Lester,” I answered. “How do you stay so young and pretty?”
He scowled at me and picked at something jammed between two of his remaining teeth. “You a fag, Parker? I always thought you was queer.”
“Now, Lester, don't think I'm not flattered, but you're not really my type.”
“Huh.” He didn't sound convinced. “You here to buy something?”
“I'm looking for some information.”
“Out the door, turn right, and keep going till you hit the asshole of hell. Tell 'em I sent you.”
He went back to reading a book, which, judging from the illustrations, appeared to be a guide to making a mortar out of beer cans.
“That's no way to talk to an old high school buddy.”
“You ain't my buddy, and I don't like you being in my store,” he said without looking up from his book.
“Can I ask why?”
“People have a habit of dying around you.”
“You look hard enough, people have a habit of dying around everybody.”
“Maybe, 'cept around you they die a whole lot quicker and a whole lot more regular.”
“Then the sooner I leave, the safer you'll be.”
“I ain't holdin' you.”
I tapped lightly at the glass of the mantid case, directly in the insect's line of vision, and the triangular head drew back as it flinched. A mantid is the most humanlike of insects; it has its eyes arranged so that it can see forward, allowing it depth perception. It can see a certain amount of color, and it can turn its head to look over its “shoulder.” Also, like humans, it will eat just about anything it can subdue, from a hornet to a mouse. As I moved my finger, the mantid's head carefully followed the motion while its jaws chomped at the cricket. The top half of the cricket's body was already gone.
“Quit botherin' it,” said Bargus.
“That's quite a predator.”
“That bitch would eat you, she thought you'd stay still long enough.” He grinned, revealing his rotting teeth.
“I hear they can take a black widow.”
The beer can mortar book now lay forgotten before him. “I seen her do it.” Bargus nodded.