Bitch Creek (27 page)

Under the glass counter where Stanley was leaning lay jumbles of gold watches, pearl necklaces, diamond rings. Behind him in a locked rack stood a row of shotguns and rifles. The bookshelves along the walls were jammed with old-looking, leather-bound volumes, and there were tables piled with lamps and vases and crockery, computers and cameras and television sets, bowling balls and ice skates and, yes, fishing equipment.

Every item, Calhoun imagined, told a sad story.

Stanley Karp swept his hand around the shop. “Whatever you have,” he said to Calhoun, “I assure you, I've already got ten of them. Here, let's have a look.”

Calhoun fished into his pocket and came out with the plastic bag that held the lump of gold he'd found in the ground beside the cellar hole. He put it on the counter. “It looks like a piece of something,” he said, “not the whole thing. Something that broke. I'm wondering what it was. It's gold, isn't it?”

Stanley held the bag up to the light and squinted at it. “Hmm,” he mumbled. He opened the bag, reached in with a tweezers, and took out the little hunk of gold. Then he twisted a jeweler's loupe into his right eye and peered at it intently. “Huh,” he said. “It's gold, all right.”

“Well?” said Calhoun.

Stanley was rotating the tweezers, looking at the gold lump from all sides. “Interesting,” he murmured. He dropped it back into the bag, removed the loupe from his eye, and looked up at Calhoun. “Have you been robbing graves, my friend?”

Calhoun thought of that foot sticking out of the ground, and he thought of Sam Potter, who'd died up there in the fire almost sixty years ago. He shook his head. “I found that in the dirt,” he said. “But I don't think it was anybody's grave. Why?”

“I could be wrong,” said Stanley, “but I think you've got yourself somebody's gold tooth here.”

“A tooth?”

“Not a whole tooth, of course. A gold crown. Take a look.” 

Calhoun plucked it from the bag with Stanley's tweezers and peered at it through the loupe. It did indeed look like a piece of tooth, although if Stanley hadn't said it, Calhoun probably wouldn't have figured it out. The top was flat and irregular like a molar, and the bottom had sharp, jagged edges, as if it had broken off.

Calhoun dropped it into the bag, sealed it, and stuffed it back into his pocket. “Thanks, Stanley,” he said. “I owe you.”

“I suppose it would be impolitic to ask why you are carrying somebody's gold tooth in your pocket.”

Calhoun shook his head. “I wish I knew myself,” he said.

Kate's Bait and Tackle was less than a mile from Stanley Karp's pawnshop. Calhoun was tempted to drop in. He'd like to talk to Kate about his conversations with Amy Sousa and Blaine up in Craigville, and maybe he'd show her the gold tooth he'd dug up from beside the cellar hole in Keatsboro. He'd tell her that he'd seen Stanley Karp. Kate liked Stanley, referred to him as “that sweet man.” She'd have to smile when he mentioned Stanley.

He'd ask her to speculate with him, help him invent scenarios, and maybe he'd tell her about how Ralph had found that foot the other night, but how when he'd gone back there with the sheriff, it wasn't there, so he guessed it wasn't real.

But it had been Calhoun's idea that they stay clear of each other until it was all over with. Fred Green was trying to shoot him. He didn't want Kate involved.

So he headed west and drove home.

About the time he pulled into his driveway, he realized that he was exhausted. He'd hardly slept for the past couple of nights, and now his eyes burned and his head ached and his stomach churned.

He bounced up the rutted driveway, and when he pulled up in front of the house, he sat there in his truck for a minute, looking around.

Nothing looked different.

He slid his Remington out from behind the seat, took the box of shotgun shells from the glove compartment, and loaded up. Double-ought buckshot this time, serious ammunition that could kill a man at sixty yards—the hell with that birdshot that wouldn't even break the skin. Then he and Ralph went inside. Nothing looked different inside, either.

It was a hot summer afternoon, but inside, with the roof shaded by the pines and a breeze sifting through the screens, it was cool and dim.

He found the portable phone, sat at the kitchen table, and called Sheriff Dickman. He told the woman who answered that it was important, and when he gave her his name, she put him through.

“What's up, Stoney?” said Dickman.

“I've got some information for you,” said Calhoun. “But you've got to promise me something first.”

“Oh?”

“There's something I want to take care of by myself. Promise you won't interfere with that.”

“How can I promise that if you don't tell me what it is?”

“I'll tell you after you promise,” said Calhoun.

“And if I don't, you'll hang up, right?”

“You got it.”

He heard the sheriff blow an exasperated breath. “Okay, Stoney. We'll do it your way.”

“You promise?”

“Sure.”

So Calhoun told him how somebody—Fred Green, he assumed—had come in the night and had taken a couple of potshots at him with a .22. He also summarized his interview with Amy Sousa up in Craigville and his conversation with Blaine. He told him that Stanley Karp had identified the gold nugget as part of a tooth.

The sheriff listened without interrupting, and when Calhoun finished, he said, “I'll send a deputy up there to protect you, Stoney.” 

“No,” said Calhoun. “I can protect myself. I want to handle this. That's your promise. That you'll let me take care of it. The sonofabitch shot Lyle, and now he's coming around here, Sheriff. Do you see?”

“I see that you are pigheaded and stupid, my friend.”

“You promised.”

Dickman sighed. “So I did.” He chuckled. “I assume it would not be breaking any promise if we happen to find the man and take him into custody before he manages to shoot you dead.”

“No,” said Calhoun, “that would be okay. I wouldn't mind that at all.” 

“I'll get the word around that he's armed and dangerous. Every state cop and sheriff's department in Maine will get that word.” 

“Okay,” said Calhoun. “Good.”

“Stoney?”

“Yeah?”

The sheriff cleared his throat. “Nothing. I just hope to hell you know what you're doing.”

“Actually,” said Calhoun, “it's funny, but I do. I am pretty confident that I know exactly what I'm doing.”

After he hung up with the sheriff, Calhoun went to the bedroom and leaned the shotgun against the wall beside the bed. He picked up the alarm clock from the bedside table. It was a few minutes after three in the afternoon. He wound up the clock and set the alarm to go off at six, to give him time to shower and have a cup of coffee before he had to meet Millie. Then he shucked off all his clothes, threw back the covers, lay down, and pulled the sheet over him. The pillow smelled like Kate.

Ralph was sitting on the floor beside him with his ears cocked, staring at him, wondering what in hell he was doing, going to bed in the middle of the day.

“We're probably going to be up all night,” Calhoun explained to Ralph, “so I need to grab a nap. You be sure to bark if you hear anything. This is your watch. I'll take over in three hours.”

Then he rolled onto his belly and went to sleep.

The alarm clock in his head went off before the one beside the bed, as it always did. It interrupted a jumbled dream in which Calhoun seemed to be running through a swamp. Children who shouted in some foreign language were chasing him and shooting at him, but in the dream that wasn't what frightened him. He was naked in the dream, and every step he took rubbed him against big scythe-shaped leaves with sharp, jagged edges that sliced his skin. He ran awkwardly with his scrotum cupped in both hands and his feet sinking into the mucky earth while bullets rattled in the canopy of dense foliage overhead and high-pitched children's voices echoed in the humid swamp. He was sweaty and out of breath. His legs and chest and arms were bleeding. Finally he flopped to the ground and slid onto the wet black earth under a bush with leaves as big as elephant ears, and there, lying on her back under that bush, was a woman, also naked, with her arms open to him, smiling and beckoning.

He backed away on hands and knees, somehow knowing that she was more lethal than the armed children who were chasing him.

In the dream, he'd recognized her, and now, in that half-place between sleep and consciousness, he realized that she was someone from before, an actual woman, someone who'd participated in his life. He'd seen her face clearly and had spoken her name in the dream, but now, with his eyes open, he couldn't remember either her face or her name.

He shut his eyes for a minute, trying to recover the memory of her. But she was gone.

He sat up. His sheet was soaked from his sweat. The alarm clock on the bedside table read 5:56. He reached over and turned it off before it jangled, then swiveled around and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to shake off the dream.

Ralph was lying in the doorway with his chin on his paws, facing into the living room, alert for intruders.

Calhoun had had naked dreams in the hospital. They'd usually involved threats to his groin area. The shrinks took these dreams to be a good sign, a symptom of his normality. Basic Freud, was their diagnosis. You have secrets, Mr. Calhoun, and you fear exposing them, of letting others see the real you. Plus, of course, you've got a classic castration complex. Everybody has such dreams, they insisted.

Calhoun didn't know about anybody else's dreams. But his convinced him that he was anything but normal.

The hospital shrinks had gone after the symbolism of his dreams. They'd explained how the unconscious mind assembles disparate images and fragments, mostly events and mind-flashes from the “dream day,” distorts and rearranges them, and creates a story that, when taken literally, reveals nothing. The trick, they'd told him, was to deconstruct the dream, to identify its separate parts and to abstract its themes.

Calhoun was a literalist. He wanted to know such things as the location of the swamp, and when and why he'd been there, and who the children were who were chasing him with guns, and the name of that naked woman, and how and when and where he'd known her, and why she frightened him more than bullets.

He had no interest in exploring his psyche, in reading whatever symbolic messages his unconscious mind decided to send him in dreams, the way it sometimes sent him hallucinatory naked bodies in trout streams and feet sticking out of the earth. He already knew he was seriously messed up.

He got up and padded barefoot into the kitchen, where he filled the electric coffeepot and switched it on.

Then he went into the bathroom and took a long, cool shower, and by the time he came out, the dream, and the fear and sadness that it had left lingering in his soul, were all washed away.

He toweled himself dry, detoured to the kitchen to pour himself a mug of coffee, and took it into the bedroom. He pulled on a pair of chino pants and a shirt, picked up his shotgun, and whistled to Ralph. “You're coming with me,” he told him.

Ralph stared at him for a moment, then scrambled to his feet and jogged to the door.

Calhoun switched on the outside floodlights. It would be dark by the time he got back, and he hoped—but doubted—that the light might give an uninvited visitor pause. Then he went outside. He unloaded the shotgun, dropped the three shells into his pocket, slid the gun behind the front seat of the truck, held the door for Ralph, and got in himself.

It was quarter to seven. He'd be right on time to meet Millie.

C
ALHOUN PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT
beside Juniper's at five minutes before seven. Millie's Cherokee, a new Toyota pickup, and a rusting old Ford Crown Victoria were the only other cars in the lot.

He took a rawhide bone from his pocket and gave it to Ralph. “Chew on this instead of the upholstery,” he said.

Ralph sat there on the passenger seat holding the bone by its end so that it was sticking out of the side of his mouth like a big lumpy cigar, with that so-you're-deserting-me-again look on his face.

Calhoun left the windows open a few inches, got out, and locked the doors. He tapped on the roof by way of saying good-bye to Ralph, who had moved behind the steering wheel and was curled up on the seat with the bone between his front paws, determined to sulk.

Calhoun went into Juniper's. He glanced into the dining room on the right. An elderly couple sat at a table by the window studying their menus. Otherwise it was empty.

He found Millie at the bar talking with the same bartender who'd been there Saturday. Kevin was his name, Calhoun recalled. Kevin was leaning his elbows on the bartop, grinning at Millie under that little Clark Gable mustache of his. Millie was sipping what looked like a gin and tonic, smiling up at Kevin from around the straw, flirting back at him just as hard as he was flirting with her.

Calhoun hitched himself onto the barstool beside Millie. Kevin straightened up, nodded at Calhoun, and moved away.

Millie's hand snaked around Calhoun's neck, and she tilted up and kissed his cheek. “Hey, big guy,” she whispered in a poor Mae West imitation.

“Hiya, sweetheart.” Bogie, also poor.

She chuckled. “I got here early.” She made a show of looking at her wristwatch. “And you, of course, are precisely on time. How terribly Stoney of you.” She held up her glass. “My second. Empty.” Her eyes darted toward Kevin, who was down the other end of the bar with his back to them. “Oh, Kev-in,” she sang.

He turned and came to them with a fresh gin and tonic in one hand and a Coke in the other. “Way ahead of you, Millie.” To Calhoun he said, “Coke, right?”