Bad Men (2003) Page 5

  But the emplacements built to house them remained, great man-made mountains along the island’s southeastern shore, and gradually they were reclaimed by grass and bushes and shrubs. A network of tunnels ran beneath them, their great iron doors now hanging from broken hinges, but even the bravest of the youths stayed away from the tunnels. Doors that stood open one day would be inexplicably locked by the next. There were echoes where there should not have been echoes, and lights where there should have been only darkness. The island’s teenagers were content to use the remains of the emplacements for biking or, if they were of a more adventurous cast, for driving cars diagonally down at the maximum possible speed, their occupants wrenching the wheel to the right or left at the last possible moment and coming to rest facing the road, sweat streaming down their faces, still shrieking in exhilaration.

  That was how Sylvie Lauter and Wayne Cady had come to be out here. They had boosted an old Dodge from the garage of one of the summer houses, since even if the car was damaged during their activities, it would be many months before the damage was discovered, assuming, of course, that they did not harm it so extensively that it had to be abandoned at the emplacement, as had happened on more than one occasion.

  The couple had been drinking, for there were cans found strewn across the back seat of the car. Judging by the number of fresh tracks along the emplacement, they had managed two or three runs before Cady lost control of the car, sending it careening at top speed into the oak tree. There were still heavy tire treads marking the car’s final path, and fragments of glass and metal lay strewn around the tree, its bark now heavily pitted and speckled with the sap that had bled from within it. Flowers had been placed around its base, along with a couple of beer cans and a pack of Marlboros with two unsmoked cigarettes left inside.

  Joe Dupree ran his fingers along the great gouge in the tree, then rubbed them together, crushing grains of bark beneath his fingers. Wayne Cady had hit the steering column with so much force that it entered his chest, killing him within seconds. His girlfriend struck the windshield hard, but her death was caused by the crushing of her lower body. Old Buck Tennier, whose house lay about a quarter of a mile from the emplacement, had heard the sound of the crash and called the cops. By the time Dupree and Lockwood reached the scene, Buck was kneeling by the car, talking to Sylvie. It was then that she had spoken her last. The two cops cut Sylvie and Wayne from the car using the jaws of life after Doc Bruder, who was still registered as an assistant ME, declared them dead at the scene. The bodies were driven to the station house, in the back of the island’s sole ambulance, prior to being transported to the mainland. Dupree had taken on the task of telling Sylvie’s father and mother, and Wayne Cady’s layabout dad. They had all cried in front of him, even Ben Cady, although Ben had been pretty liquored up when Dupree got to his door.

  The huge policeman shivered. He kicked at the glass with the toe of his boot and stared into the darkness of the forest as Richie Claeson’s words returned to him.

  The others, in the woods.

  The island had been quiet for so very long.

  Now, something was awake.

  Chapter Two

  Harry Rylance spread the map over the hood of the rental Mazda and watched as a bead of sweat engulfed Galveston. He had a vague recollection that Galveston had once been pretty much washed away and subsequently rebuilt. Harry had been to Galveston, and why they had bothered to rebuild the place was beyond him. Maybe he was just bitter. He’d once been ripped off by a Galveston hooker who stole his wallet while he was taking a post-coital leak, and ever since then he had been unable even to hear the word “Galveston” spoken without tensing inside. Thankfully, the opportunities to hear anyone talking about Galveston were comparatively few, which suited Harry just fine.

  Now here he was looking at a dark patch of sweat slowly seeping into the map around that selfsame thieving-hooker hole in the ground. It could be a sign, he thought. Maybe if he hung his head over the map and let another bead of sweat drop, it might just hit the page and tell him where he was, because unless it did, Harry Rylance was likely to remain abso-fucking-lutely lost. That would have been okay with Harry if he had been alone on this godforsaken stretch of dirt road. Well, not okay, exactly, but at least he would have been able to figure out where he was in relative silence. Instead—

  “Do you know where we’re at yet?” said Veronica, and there was that bored, whining tone to her voice that just seemed to burrow into Harry’s skull from somewhere right above the bridge of his nose and then keep going until it hit the center of his brain and began picking idly at whatever it found there.

  Well, there it was. Harry wasn’t alone. He had Veronica Berg with him, and while Veronica was pretty much all that a man could wish for in the sack, and a whole lot more (Harry was not an unimaginative man, but the things that Veronica was prepared to do once her back hit the sheets came close to frightening him at times), she could be a righteous pain in the ass outside the bedroom. She sat in the passenger seat, her shades on, an elbow propped up on the open window, a cigarette dangling from her fingers sending hopeless smoke signals up into the winter sky.

  And that was another thing: it was unseasonably warm. Hell, it was January, and January had no business being hot. Harry Rylance was from Burlington, Vermont, and in Burlington, Vermont, January meant skiing and freezing your ass off and shoveling out the driveway. If you were sweating in January in Vermont, then you were indoors and the heat was up too high. The south was no place for a man to be in January, or any other time, if you asked Harry. Harry didn’t do Dixie. He gave up looking at the blue-veined map of the United States in his Rand McNally road atlas, resigned to the fact that his attempt to exchange the trees for the forest had left him no wiser than before, and returned his attention to the local map. Harry wasn’t a great reader of maps, a fact that he tended to keep to himself. A man who admitted publicly that he couldn’t read a map might as well start riding sidesaddle and listening to show tunes. Harry wondered if it was some kind of condition he had, like dyslexia. He just couldn’t connect the map, with its tracery of blues and reds and its smears of green, to the landscape that he saw around him. It was like showing him the interior of a body, all veins and arteries and bloody meat, and asking him if he could tell who it was yet.

  “I said—” Veronica began again.

  Harry felt the pressure building in the center of his forehead. Her voice was drilling away nicely now. If she kept this up, his head would cave in.

  “I heard you. If I knew where we were, we’d be someplace else.”

  “The hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that if you’d give me a damn minute’s peace, then maybe I could figure out where we are and get us where we’re meant to be instead.”

  “You should have stayed on the highway.”

  “I came off the highway because you said you were bored. You wanted to see some scenery.”

  “There is no scenery.”

  “Well, welcome to the south. The Civil War was the best thing that ever happened to this place. At least it brought in some visitors.”

  “You shouldn’t have listened to me.”

  “You didn’t give me much choice.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me.”

  “Hey, I already got a wife back home. I don’t need another one.”

  “Fuck you, Harry.”

  And he could hear the hurt in her voice and knew that he’d have to worm his way back into her affections if he had any hope of expanding his sexual horizons in the company of Veronica Berg. The annual convention of the Insurance Providers of America wasn’t likely to be so riveting that Harry would want to spend the entire weekend sitting in the middle of a bunch of seersuckers, nursing a hard-on. He reached in through the car window and touched her moist skin lightly with the palm of his hand. She pulled her face away from him, sending him a clear signal: if she wasn’t going to let him touch her face with his hand, then there was a pretty
good chance that the rest of her skin would remain a covered mystery to him as well unless he started making up some lost ground.

  “Baby, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  She dabbed at a make-believe tear with the tip of a finger. “Yeah, well, you ought to be more careful about what you say. You can be very hurtful sometimes, Harry Rylance.”

  “Sorry, “he repeated. He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, trying to ignore the taste of nicotine on her breath. That was another thing: her damn smoking. If there was one thing—

  “Harry, there’s someone coming!”

  He looked up, and sure enough, there was a cloud of dust and fumes heading their way. He skipped away from Veronica, took the map in his hand, and waved it at the oncoming vehicle. As it drew closer and the dust cleared some, Harry could see that it was a blue Ford truck, twenty years old at least. Behind the wheel was a young man with blond hair parted on the right and hanging down over one eye. He stopped and brushed the hair back onto his head with his fingers as he looked at the older man.

  Behind him, he heard Veronica purr in approval. The kid was good looking, Harry noticed, maybe a little on the pretty side because of that blond hair, but still a fine-looking young man. Harry wondered if he was turning queer, then decided that the mere fact that he was worried about turning queer probably meant that he wasn’t. Still, thought Harry, that kid better not do anything that might offend the law, because if he went to jail, his cell mate would never have to buy cigarettes again.

  “You lost?” asked the kid. His voice was a little high, almost eerily so. Harry walked over to him and realized that the young man was older than he had first appeared: early twenties at most, but he had the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy waiting for something to happen below his navel.

  Fucking backwoods freak, thought Harry.

  “Took a wrong turn somewhere back down the road,” said Harry, which wasn’t actually an admission that he was lost but wasn’t saying that he knew where he was either. It was a man thing.

  “Where you bound?”

  What the fuck? Where you bound? Who talked like that?

  “We’re headed for Augusta.”

  “You’re a long ways from Augusta. That’s a whole ’nother state away.”

  “I know that. We were planning on taking our time.”

  “You on vacation?’

  “Business.”

  “What d’you do?”

  “I sell insurance.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you sell insurance?”

  Harry’s brow furrowed. This was all he needed. The kid was obviously some kind of redneck retard driving a clapped-out old Ford up and down back roads, looking for folks to bother. They hadn’t been off the plane more than two hours and already the weekend was turning to shit.

  “People need insurance.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, suppose something happens to them. Suppose you crashed your truck, what would you do?”

  “It ain’t my truck.”

  Jesus.

  “Okay, well suppose you crashed it anyway, and the guy whose truck it is wanted something done about it.”

  “I’d fix it.”

  “Suppose it was so badly damaged that it couldn’t be fixed?”

  “There ain’t nothing I can’t fix.”

  Harry wiped his hand across his face in frustration.

  “You get hurricanes down here, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “What if your house blew away?”

  The young man considered this, then nodded.

  “If I had a house,” he said, then started the truck up again. “Follow me,” he told Harry. “I’ll take you where you need to go.”

  Harry smiled in relief and trotted back to the car.

  “We’re going to follow him,” he told Veronica.

  “Okay with me,” she said.

  “And put your tongue back in your mouth,” said Harry. “You’re getting drool on your chin.”

  They followed the truck for five miles before Harry started to worry.

  “The hell is he taking us?” he said.

  “He probably knows a shortcut.”

  “A shortcut to where? Louisiana?”

  “Harry, it’s his country. He knows it better than we do. Calm down.”

  “I think the kid’s retarded. He was asking me about insurance.”

  “You sell insurance. People ask you about it all the time.”

  “Yeah, but not like that. The kid acted like he didn’t know what insurance was.”

  “Maybe he had a bad experience once.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like trying to make a claim on your firm.”

  “Very funny. And it’s our firm.”

  “I just answer the phones. I don’t sell bum policies.”

  “They’re not bum policies. Jesus, you talk like that to other people about what we do?”

  “If they’re not bum policies, how come they don’t pay out like they should?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Fuck you, Harry.”

  “Now where is he going?”

  Ahead of them, the Ford had made a right and was pulling up in front of an old farmhouse. The kid got out of the car and walked up the steps to the door, then opened it and disappeared inside.

  “I don’t believe this,” said Harry.

  He followed the driveway until he reached the old Ford. The place looked as if it had seen better days and could now hardly remember them. Trees bordered the yard, but it wasn’t clear why they were needed because Harry couldn’t see another house anywhere nearby. Once this might have been a working farm. There was a barn off to the right, and Harry saw a rusting John Deere standing in the open door, but its tires were flat and its exhaust was severed. He glimpsed overgrown fields through the trees, but nothing had been harvested from them in a very long time. The only thing being farmed here was dirt and weeds. It was quiet too: no dogs, no people, hell, not even a couple of scrawny chickens trying to survive on dust and stray seeds. A porch ran along the front of the house, great teardrops of white paint flaking from it. Paint was falling too from the facade, and from the window frames and the door. The whole house seemed to be weeping.

  Harry opened the car door and called after their guide.

  “Hey, kid! What’s the deal?”

  There was no reply, and suddenly Harry, who considered himself a calm man, all things considered, lost it.

  “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!”

  He climbed out of the car and stomped up to the house. Behind him, he heard Veronica telling him to wait up. He ignored her. All he wanted to do now was get back on the highway, find a hotel, and hit the bar. Hell, maybe they might just drive into the night until they got to Augusta, and screw the idea of taking their time and kicking back along the way. Veronica could just kiss his ass.

  He reached the door and peered into the house. The entrance led straight into a living room. All the drapes were drawn and the room was shrouded in darkness. He could see the shapes of chairs, and a TV in the corner. Facing him was a kitchen and, beside that, a bedroom that had been converted to storage. To his left, a flight of stairs led up to the second story.

  Despite the heat, all of the windows were closed. There was no sign of the pretty boy.

  Harry stepped inside, and his nose wrinkled. Something smelled bad in here, he thought. He heard flies buzzing.

  “What’s happening?” said Veronica, and there was that whining tone to her voice again, except this time Harry barely noticed it.

  “Stay there,” he called back. “And lock the car doors.”

  “What—”

  “For Christ’s sake, just do it!”

  She was quiet then, but he heard a snapping sound as the doors locked. Beyond him, the darkness remained untroubled by sound or mo
vement, but for the noise of the insects, still invisible to him.

  Harry stepped into the house.

  Many miles to the north, two police officers sat at a table in the Sebago Brewing Company in Portland’s Old Port. It was shortly after four o’clock and already growing dark. There were few tourists around at this time of year, and the streets, like the bar, were quiet. There was talk of a storm brewing, and the coming of snow.

  “I like it better without the tourists,” said the first cop. She was small and dark, with short hair that barely troubled the nape of her neck. Her limbs were slim, and she appeared almost delicate out of uniform, but Sharon Macy was strong and fast. Cute too, thought Eric Barron. In fact, very cute. She’d joined up only six months before, and in that time it was all that Barron could do to stop himself hitting on her. Barron was smart, and he’d watched as the other cops had made moves on her in bars and clubs, hiding wedding bands in some cases, as if Macy would be dumb enough to fall for that. But Barron had held back, and now he believed that he was one of the few cops who could safely suggest to Macy that they head out for a beer or two after a tour, y’know, to unwind. He could feel her starting to trust him, to relax in his presence, and she didn’t seem to mind any when he patted her arm or let his leg rest against hers. Baby steps. Barron was a great believer in baby steps. It might actually have made him a decent cop, if he had cared to be: not flashy, or glory seeking, but conscientious and careful. Unfortunately, Barron wasn’t a decent cop. He had a lot of people fooled, maybe, but even the ones who considered him adequate at worst wouldn’t have used the word “decent” of Barron. He gave off a bad vibe. Nobody was ever going to ask Barron to baby-sit a kid, or pick up a daughter after cheerleading practice. It wasn’t anything that could be put into words, exactly, but if you were a parent, then Barron was the kind of guy who put you on your guard. Local kids, even the real troublemakers, knew better than to mess with him. Barron liked to pretend that it was because they respected him, but secretly he knew better. He could see it in their faces, those of the boys in particular.