For fear of the night, p.7
For Fear of the Night, page 7
Half-expecting the cruiser to come shrieking up behind him, he headed north—slowly, in deference to the heat—peering in the cluttered shop windows and wondering as always what in hell people actually did with all the junk on display, junk that carried prices that would shame a city merchant. Wobbly ashtrays of polished seashells, tea towels with embroidered sailing ships, sailing ships in bottles, brown girls in grass skirts, woven straw hats, salt water taffy, toy lobsters and bathtub fish, glasses and mugs and plates and cups with scenes of an idyllic beach Jersey never had in its life.
He supposed most of it ended up in closets, in boxes stored in attics or basements, dragged out on moving day and weighed against the memories the sight of them sparked.
Like his earlier photographs, he decided, the ones he used as yardsticks to measure his progress—they were necessary only when he told himself they were. The rest of the time they were gladly forgotten.
My, he thought with a briefly raised eyebrow, your mind is simply crawling with profundities today, Mr. Graham. You think you’re going to need a shovel anytime soon?
He grinned and walked on, dodging pedestrians who paid him no heed, idly watching the traffic moving past the shops. As he passed the Summerview Diner and spotted Sal through one of the oval windows, his stomach lurched; but before he could head for the steps and the cool air inside, he promised himself food later. A carrot while he hunted, a reward for doing whatever had to be done.
At last, his head bowed and shoulders slumped under the drag of the sun, he came abreast of a block-long swath of well-kept lawn edged with whitewashed stones, and centered with a flagpole. The town hall. Single story in front, two stories behind, its fresh brick facade incongruous among the older clapboard buildings around it.
A sprinkler sprayed a tenuous rainbow over the grass, and he watched it for a while, and a pair of sparrows taking a bath, before turning into a narrow, shrub-lined walk that led to a wide doorway at the building’s rear corner, the entrance to the police station.
But the closer he drew to the white, Police-marked globe jutting from the wall above the door, the more foolish he began to feel. Kilmer, a decidedly unimaginative man, was going to laugh him back onto the street for complaining about a mysterious message on an answering machine.
Jesus Christ, Dev, have you lost your effing mind?
And the more he thought about it, the slower he walked, his hands slapping his thighs. Less than five yards from the entrance, he stopped. It was, after all, only a voice. Realistically, nothing more than an unpleasant jolt at the end of a less than successful day. Coming at a time when he was tired, somewhat anxious, perhaps even overly receptive to anything that even faintly smelled unusual.
It was nothing more than a voice.
Only a voice that just happened to be hers.
The decision to leave was just about made when a patrol car abruptly raced out of the back parking lot, siren blaring as it bumped onto the street and swung south. He watched it for a moment, and started when a hand dropped hard on his shoulder.
“Turning yourself in, Graham?”
Devin barely moved. “You got a murderer on the loose?” he replied with a nod toward the speeding cruiser.
“Beats me,” said Marty Kilmer. “I don’t know what’s going on, I just work here. Wouldn’t surprise me, though. Not this week.”
Devin gave the taller man a quick smile and wondered how his latest publicity campaign was faring—an attempt to get everyone to call him Martin now that he’d made sergeant. He suspected it wasn’t working; despite the man’s height and heft, his face was too young, his hair still too carrot-top bright. Martin was too sober; Marty was just right.
“So what’s the matter, Dev? Don’t tell me you’ve lost a dog or something.”
Another patrol car passed them, engine racing, spinning lights dying, heading for its slot near the door. It parked with a jerk and bob, and two patrolmen yanked two men from the back seat and hustled them none too gently inside.
“A crime wave,” Devin said lightly.
Kilmer only swept off his hard-peaked hat and wiped his brow with a grey-sleeved forearm. “I’ll tell you something, Dev,” he said solemnly, squinting up at the sky. “Just between you and me and the gatepost, the last two or three days have been a bitch around here, and I don’t know if it’s just coming on Labor Day or what. People are getting themselves mugged, robbed, pushed around by punks, you name it, and the chief’s on our asses from dawn to quitting time. Christ, the whole place’s falling apart, y’know? Next thing you know, we’re gonna be like all the other towns on the shore, for god’s sake. Jesus, I should’ve been a priest. At least my mother’d be happy.”
Devin commiserated with a grunt, trying not to smile because the man sounded like he’d been enforcing the town’s laws sixty years instead of being only twenty-nine. At the same time, however, he was positive now that his own problem wasn’t worth the trouble. Again he started to turn around, but Kilmer stopped him with a puzzled look.
“So, you got a beef or what? Your cameras gone? Your place trashed?”
He shrugged. “No, but… ,” and he gestured toward the door, which swung open as if he’d willed it, and another patrol pair ran for their vehicle.
“Hey, look, it can’t be any weirder than what I’ve seen lately. Even old Mary’s acting off the wall, and that’s saying something, you know what I mean? Do you believe, and I ain’t shitting you, Dev, do you believe some idiot that runs a couple of concessions on the boards, a guy named Opal, Jesus Christ, he claims some of the other guys are using unfair business practices to keep him from earning a decent living.” Kilmer dusted at his tight-fitting grey shirt. “Shit, Dev, I don’t even know what the hell that’s supposed to mean.”
“Ghosts,” Devin said then, trying not to sound as though he were accepting a dare.
Kilmer slapped on his hat, adjusted it carefully, and stared. “Ghosts?”
Oh lord, Devin thought, I should have stayed in bed. “Well, not ghosts exactly. Only sort of.”
The policeman hitched his gun belt and stared again. Quickly, and knowing how incredibly like an old maid he was sounding, he explained about the voice, reminded him about Julie Etler’s death and burial when Kilmer frowned his ignorance of the name, and wondered aloud if there was anything he could do about it. He, Devin, that is; he had already figured out that the police couldn’t do a thing. Especially not with all this other stuff going on.
“Well, you’re right there,” Kilmer agreed without much regret. “If I were you, I’d pass it off as a sick joke and leave it at that.”
“Yeah. I guess.” And winced when his stomach growled loudly.
The policeman laughed loudly and slapped his shoulder. “First thing, pal, you’d better get yourself something to eat before you keel over and I have to scrape you up. Second thing, let me know if it happens again. It ain’t obscene calls, nothing like that, so we can’t bother the phone company, but maybe we can think of something, okay?” There was nothing else to say. Devin nodded, shook the man’s hand, and walked off, knowing he’d accomplished nothing, yet feeling better for having tried.
Then he noticed that his shadow, slipping to his left off the curb, seemed dimmer, less defined, virtually vanished in the grass. He checked the sky for rain clouds or fair weather puffs, saw nothing, and looked down a second time. The shadow was the same. And there was a weakness to the day’s light he hadn’t noticed before, a vague blurring of definition that gave him a brief moment of vertigo before his stomach growled again and he knew it had to be hunger deceiving his vision. A decent meal would cure him, and after that he’d stop in at Gayle’s shop and let her soothe his rugged brow, bolster his ego, and perhaps even let him know that he was taking the message too seriously. As unnerving as it had been, he certainly couldn’t believe it was really Julie Etler.
Not even when he brought to mind the picture he had taken.
A long block from the town hall, he was distracted by a group of children in bathing suits, gathered in a ragged circle just around the corner to watch a bearded teenaged boy painstakingly drawing a picture of a sea gull with powdered chalk on the pavement. At the top of the already completed, simple white frame, there was a shoe box that held a few silver coins, a few one-dollar bills.
While it wasn’t great art and would vanish in the next rain, he was impressed, and when the boy glanced up to see who belonged to the new shadow, Devin nodded his appreciation, received a grateful nod in return. Among the kids there were a few giggling comments that the wings were too large, the eyes crossed, but the shirtless artist only joked back, teasing, growling, feinting a punch at a chubby kid’s tummy.
It was so normal, and at the same time so special, that Devin reached for his camera, and muttered a silent damn when he remembered where it was.
That figures, he thought; it happens every time.
Then the sputtering of a motorcycle made him look down the street, to a huge chrome-and-black machine smoking toward him under the spotted shade of the trees lining the curb. The driver was small, barefooted, and his helmet had a black visor that made him appear headless.
Neither the kids nor the artist paid it any attention.
Devin looked away as well, leaning forward to see over a kneeling girl, while his left hand fumbled in his pocket for some change to leave behind.
He almost didn’t acknowledge the altered sound of the engine until its sudden, uneven racing turned his head just as the driver rose in his seat, jumped the bike over the curb, and came straight toward them.
There was no time for anything but a hoarse yelled warning before he shoved frantically at every child he could reach to get them out of the way, at the same time spinning around to face the bike without knowing what to do.
The visor reflected nothing, dead black without form, and as Devin braced himself with arms outspread, the motorcycle swerved at the last possible moment and leapt back into the street—the unmistakable sound of the driver’s laughter almost lost in the engine’s roar.
Immediately, a crowd of onlookers surrounded the now crying children, trying to soothe them while a few thanked him for his quick reflexes, a few more giving belated futile chase that ended half a block later. One man hurried back toward the police station, but Devin, once assured none of the kids was hurt, pushed his way clear and walked as slowly as he could down the street, toward the diner.
His hands were shaking, his throat was dry, and as much as he told himself that it was only some beer-drunk on a suicidal tear, he couldn’t shake the notion that the bike had been aimed at him.
SIX
The lobby of the Oceantide Savings and Loan was cool, almost ludicrously cold, and the mosaic tiles of its floor were damp and dangerously slippery from a recent cleaning. Yet Stump Harragan was determined to take as much advantage as he could of the comfort the building offered before he had to step back out into the heat and get himself on the pier. The money he had brought—the previous night’s receipts hardly worth the counting—had been duly counted and deposited, each of the tellers had been duly flirted with, and he had spent an unexpectedly disappointing fifteen minutes jawing with bank manager Samuel Planter, who didn’t dare not take the time because Stump wasn’t just one of the bank’s best customers—Harragan also knew the stiff-jawed, pompous man as Dumbo Planter, from back in the bad days when the two of them had been pretenders to the throne of chief Southside terror, over in Philadelphia.
It was a fact not generally known along the Jersey shore, and Stump enjoyed the squirming torment he knew he was causing. To his way of thinking, the chicken-scrawny pea-brain had it coming. It was all well and good that badass Dumbo had dragged himself out of the gutter and into the rarefied realm of the black middle class, complete with weekly trimmed beard, Ivy League accent, and a three-piece tailored suit that hid the foreign beer he guzzled every night. A feat surely to be proud of, all things considered, and considering their common roots. But the man had a tendency to let things slip his mind, and Stump figured it was his duty to play conscience whenever he was in the mood.
The trouble today was the mood was there, but the jibes, the innuendo, the gentle reminders had come out like whining, and for the first time in ages, Planter had bested him, and was smug about it without repentance.
It was surely a bad sign, and Stump rolled his shoulders to shed a ghostly chill of impending distress, stepping aside when a rouge-cheeked matron in paisley passed him, her gaze letting him know that she knew a bum when she saw one.
Shit and damn, he thought; shit and damn.
Nothing for it now; he had no choice but to feed a vice every doctor in his life from Georgia to Jersey had told him was lethal, no potential about it—he pulled a half-smoked black cigar from his shirt pocket, glanced at the discreet No Smoking sign on the fake marble pillar he was leaning against, and fished a scratched tin lighter from his shorts. The guard at the entrance watched him carefully, and Stump made a show of flipping back the lid and thumbing the wheel before noticing with shocked widened eyes the admonition above his head. His best martyr’s expression saddened his face, and he walked heavily to the door, where the guard tipped his hat politely and pushed at the revolving door to give him room to leave.
“Thank you, sir,” Stump said with a slight bow. “Appreciate the kindness.”
“Stuff it, Harragan,” the man whispered as he smiled. “You still owe me twenty bucks.”
Stump’s abrupt laugh was loud and high, and he stepped out to the street with a snap of his fingers, a wink to the sky. Maybe it won’t be such a bad day after all; the fat bastard cheats at cards and expects to be paid. Waiting was good for what ails the soul. And Chuck Geller’s soul was definitely ailing, even a quack could see that from a dead mile away. The bloated, fat-nosed man was the damnedest turnaround bigot he’d ever known, and he’d definitely pay up, sooner or later, just to keep the chump coming back for more.
Meanwhile, he figured the anticipation would do the man a whole world of good.
Unfortunately, anticipating the mood of the crowds this past week hadn’t been doing him a bit of good at all. Not at all. It was going to hell on a handrail around here, and he couldn’t figure it out. Most of the rides were half empty, there weren’t nearly the right screams from the big wheel, and first thing this morning he’d discovered three of his cables nearly chewed through. Had he switched on the power before checking, the pier would have gone up like the Fourth of July.
Shit and damn.
The biggest weekend of the season coming up, including Memorial Day, and folks were suddenly behaving like they were poorer than Georgia clay.
For a second he was even tempted to abandon his plans for tonight, plans that had thus far taken him miles along a road he had previously thought too dark to travel. The way things were now, though, he’d probably end up killing himself, and wouldn’t Geller have a laugh at that, the white prick.
Shit. And damn.
None of it was working, he thought glumly as he turned the corner; shit and damn, I oughta retire. And he thought nothing more when a motorcycle barreled past him on the sidewalk, slamming him into the wall.
“Son of a bitch, what the hell now, Jesus wept,” Chuck Geller muttered angrily, banging through the bank’s revolving door when he saw the sleek motorcycle jump the curb on its rear tire and disappear around the corner where Harragan had gone. God damn, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.
One hand was hard on his gun, the other holding onto his hat, and he moved as fast as his shifting weight would take him, part of him knowing he shouldn’t be leaving his post, the rest of him not giving a damn because wouldn’t you know it, there was the old black sitting on the pavement, legs out, eyes closed, hands limp on the concrete.
“Christ in heaven,” he said softly when he knelt and saw the blood on the wall. With his luck, the cotton-head would be dead. “Hey, Stump, you okay?”
The motorcycle was gone, the stench of its exhaust heavy in the heat.
The old man didn’t move.
A shadow covered Geller then, and he snapped, “Get a damned doctor, will ya?” over his shoulder. It was time to play the game, make himself look good.
“What’s going on here, Mr. Geller? Why did you leave your post?”
“You blind, buddy? The man’s been hurt. Get a doctor before he croaks, huh?”
The shadow didn’t move, and exasperation puffed him to his feet, where he came face to face with that asshole Planter, whose expression of concern seemed more like a pout. The bank manager stared down at Harragan, looked up and down the street, and Geller finally shoved him away impatiently and returned inside. Several of the tellers were watching him anxiously, and he told the nearest one to call the police, told the one beside her to get hold of a doctor.
That, he figured with a nod, ought to cover his ass with the cops.
Planter came in behind him, wiping his palms fastidiously with a handkerchief, lips puckered in distaste. “He’s coming around,” he said, and walked away toward his office.
“What?” Geller stared after him, took a step forward and immediately turned it into an about-face before he did something stupid. Harragan or no Harragan, this was no time to be slugging a boss. Especially a black one. Back home the jackass wouldn’t have gotten off the farm; here, on the other hand, he had to treat him like he was normal.
Damn; and three days to go before his vacation began.
Voices outside took him back through the door, and he used his best official voice to part his way through a group of quietly chattering women standing around the fallen man.
Harragan moaned softly then and opened his eyes. “Jesus,” he said.
“Closer to it than you know, you lucky bastard. You okay?” He watched while Harragan put a steady hand against the back of his head and pulled it away to stare at a thin line of blood across the pale palm. “Man, you could’ve gotten killed, you know? You could’ve been squashed.”
“Where’s the bike?”
