Chapter Eleven
Old Doc was the first one over the Carvers” back fence. He surprised them all (including himself) by going up easily, needing only a single boost in the butt from Johnny to get him started. He paused at the top for a second or two, setting his hands to his liking. To Brad Josephson he looked like a skinny monkey in the moonlight. He dropped. There was a soft grunt from the other side of the stakes.
“You all right, Doc?” Audrey asked.
“Yeah,” Billingsley said. “Right as rain. Aren’t I, Susi?”
“Sure,” Susi Geller agreed nervously. Then, through the fence: “Mrs Wyler, is that you? Where did you come from?”
“That doesn’t matter right now. We need to-”
“What happened out there? Is everyone all right? My mom is having a cow. A large one.”
Is everyone all right? That was a question Brad didn’t want to answer. No one else did either, from the look.
“Mrs Reed?” Johnny asked. “Dave next, then you?”
Cammie gave him her dry stare, then turned back to Dave. She murmured in his ear once more, stroking his hair as she did so. Dave listened with a troubled expression, then murmured back, just loud enough for Brad to hear, “I don’t want to.” She murmured again, more vehemently this time. Brad caught the words your brother near the end. This time Dave reached up, grabbed the top of the fence, and swung himself smoothly over to the other side. He did it, so far as Brad could see, with no expression save that look of faint unease on his face. Cammie went next, Audrey and Cynthia boosting. As she gained the top, Dave’s hands rose to meet her. Cammie slipped into them, making no effort to keep hold of the fence for safety’s sake. Brad had an idea that at this point she might have actually welcomed a fall. Maybe even a broken neck. Why did you send us out here, Ma? the kid had shouted, perhaps intuiting that his own eagerness to go-and Jim’s-would never serve as a mitigating circumstance in her mind. Cammie would always blame herself, and he would probably always be willing to let her.
“Brad?” That was a voice he was glad to hear, although he rarely heard it sound so soft and worried. “You there, hon?”
“I’m here, Bee.”
“You okay?”
“Fine. Listen, Bee, and don’t lose your cool. Jim Reed is dead. So’s Entragian from down the street.”
There was a gasp, and then Susi Geller was screaming Jim’s name over and over again. To Brad, who was emotionally as well as physically exhausted, those screams roused annoyance rather than pity… and the fear that they might draw something even less pleasant than the big cat or the coyote with the human fingers.
“Susi?” The alarmed voice of Kim Geller from the house. Then she was screaming, too, the sound seeming to cut the moonlit air like a sharp whirling blade: “Soooooo-zeeeeee! Sooooozeeeeee!”
“Shut up!” Johnny yelled. “Jesus, Kim, SHUT UP!”
For a wonder she did, but the girl went on and on, shrieking like a misbegotten fifth-act Juliet.
“Dear God,” Audrey muttered. She put her palms over her ears and ran her fingers into her hair.
“Bee,” Brad said through the fence, “shut that Chicken Little up. I don’t care how.”
“JIM!” Susi screamed. “OHHHH GAWWWD, JIM! OH GAWWWD NO! OH-”
There was a slap. The screams were cut off almost at once. Then:
“You can’t hit my daughter! You can’t hit my daughter, you bitch, I don’t care what ideas you’ve gotten from… from affirmative action! You fat black bitch!”
“Oh, fuck me til I cry,” Cynthia said. She clutched her own double-dyed hair and squeezed her eyes shut like a kid who doesn’t want to watch the final few minutes of a scary movie.
Brad kept his open and held his breath, waiting for Bee to go nuclear. Instead, Bee ignored the woman, calling softly through the fence: “Are you sending his body over, Bradley?” She sounded completely composed, for which Brad was completely thankful.
“Yeah. You and his mother and his brother catch hold of him when we do.”
“We will.” Still cool as a cucumber fresh out of the crock.
“Kim?” Brad called through the stakes of the fence. “Mrs Geller? Why don’t you go on in the house, ma’am?”
“Yes!” Kim said pleasantly. “I think that’s a good idea. We’ll just go in the house, won’t we, Susi? Some cold water on our faces will make us feel better.”
There were footfalls. The snuffling began to diminish, which was good. Then the coyotes began to howl again, which was bad. Brad looked over his shoulder and saw chips of moving silver light in the tangled darkness of the greenbelt. Eyes.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Cynthia said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Audrey said.
Brad thought: That’s what I’m afraid of. He turned and took hold of Jim Reed’s shoulders. He could smell, very faintly, the shampoo and aftershave the kid had used that morning. Probably he’d been thinking about the girls as he applied them. Johnny took a nervous look behind them-at those moving chips of light, Brad assumed-then moved down Jim’s body until he had one arm around the dead boy’s waist and the other supporting his butt. Audrey and Cynthia took his legs.
“Ready?” Johnny asked.
They nodded.
“On three, then. One… two… three.”
They raised the body like a quartet doing a team bench-lift. For one horrible moment Brad thought his back, having supported a shamefully large gut for the last ten years or so, was going to lock up on him. Then they had Jim’s body up to the top of the fence. The dead boy’s arms hung out to either side, the posture of a circus acrobat inviting applause at the climax of a fabulous stunt. His open palms were full of moonlight.
Beside Brad, Johnny sounded on the verge of cardiac arrest. Jim’s head lolled limply backward on his neck. A drop of half-congealed blood fell and struck Brad’s cheek. It made him think of mint jelly, for some mad reason, and his stomach clenched like a hand in a slick glove.
“Help us!” Cynthia gasped. “For Christ’s sake, someone-
Hands appeared, hovered above the blunt fence-stakes for a moment, then broke apart into fingers which grasped Jim’s shirt and the waistband of his shorts. Just as Brad knew he couldn’t hold the body another second (never until now had he really understood the concept of dead weight), it was pulled away from him. There was a meaty thud, and from a little distance away (the Carvers” back porch was Brad’s guess), Susi Geller voiced another brief scream.
Johnny looked at him, and Brad was almost convinced the man was smiling. “Sounds like they dropped him,” Johnny said in a low voice. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face, then lowered it. The smile-if it had been there in the first place-was gone.
“Whoops,” Brad said.
“Yeah. Whoops-a-fuckin-daisy.”
“Hey, Doc!” Cynthia cried in a low voice. “Catch! Don’t worry, safety’s on!” She lifted the.30-.06, stock first, standing on her toes in order to tip it over the fence.
“Got it,” Billingsley said. Then, in a lower voice: “That woman and her idiot daughter finally went in the house.”
Cynthia climbed the fence and swung easily over the top. Audrey needed a push and a hand on her hip for balance, and then she was over, as well. Steve went next, using Brad’s and Johnny’s interlaced hands as a stirrup and then sitting up top a moment, waiting for the pain in his clawed shoulders to subside a little. When it had, he swung over the fence to the Carvers” side and pushed off, jumping rather than trying to let himself down.
“I can’t get over there,” Johnny said. “No way. If there was a ladder in the garage-”
Wh-wh-WHOOOOO!…Wh-wh-WHOOOOOOO!
From almost directly behind them. The two men jumped into each other’s arms as unselfconsciously as small children. Brad turned his head and saw shapes closing in. Each was hulked up behind a pair of those glinting semi-circular moonchips.