Butcher (25 page)

“Insufficient? You mean it bounced?” The nail still hurt. Perhaps his brain was leaking out of the hole, slowly evaporating.

“That's right. We need you to make up the two hundred dollars, Ray, plus there is an additional ten-dollar charge for putting the check through. Did you want us to take that out of your account or do you want to come in and pay it?"

“Marsha, may I call you back immediately on this?” he asked. She said yes, and they hung up. He tried to reach Doug and got nothing. He dialed the operator and a phone company employee assured him the lines were still working. He tried the number again and got nothing. Calmly, one hand on his brain hole, he dialed O and this time got an A T & T operator.

“Could you try a number for me please? I'm having difficulty getting it to ring. Water in the terminals, I guess."

“Sorry you're having difficulty, sir. Glad to help.” The man told him this in a sincere, pleasant tone. Good ol’ efficient A T & T. They'd get this call through, even if the floodwaters were coming. The busy signal rang loud and clear, a fast busy, unlike the ones Meara was used to.

“Uh, listen, could you make sure that number's working? I couldn't get it to ring and, you know, now it's busy."

“You want me to verify if it's busy?"

“Yeah. Please."

“You realize you'll be charged extra for verification of a B-Y sir?"

“
I'll
be charged?"

“Yes, sir. There is an extra charge.” The man told him how much.

“You gotta be shittin’ me, Jack. I gotta pay extra to find out if a phone is in working order?"

“Yes, sir.” Meara told him never mind and hung up. Again he didn't break the phone.

The telephone rang. He hoped it would be Doug straightening the mess out. It was Rosemary, mad as a wet hen.

“Just who in the flaming hell do you think you
are
you two-timing—” Mercifully the phone lines were going out and he barely heard fragments of her cursing. The phrase “gutless, lying bastard” was an endearment that broke through the crackle. Her voice was suddenly loud and clear. “What kind of weasel are you, Ray?"

“What got under your saddle?” he asked, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.

“I'm getting goddamn sick of hearin’ about this bitch from Kansas City you're running around all over town with, and you and I are gonna get one goddamn thing
straight
and I mean—” She was really shrieking at him. It was like a series of poisoned darts entering his left ear, and he was afraid they'd poke through and meet the nail hole, and what little remained of his gray matter would leak out once and for all, so he pulled the phone straight out of the wall.

Rosemary James, A T & T, Sprint, Western Electric, Whatever Sweepstakes, General Electric, Ma Bell, siding salesmen, the nice lady at the bank, the weather girl, teleconferencing boiler rooms, and at least half the assholes working for the phone companies, the Army Corps of Engineers, Rancho Uranus, the Department of Agriculture, the VA, Doug Siefer—he threw the whole taco about a hundred yards out into the field.

Verify
that
.

1-55

S
honey's was fairly crowded. A busload of folks on the way to either the Opry or Branson were lined up at the food bar loading plates, and the tables and booths were abuzz with eating sounds.

The waitress named Sherri looked up and saw a nightmarish vision, the stink of him warning her first, but not preparing her for the sight. A vastly fat, humongously big man waddled toward her in stained T-shirt and filthy battle fatigues, oblivious to the folks around him. One poor fellow, who didn't see the human parade float behind him, was almost knocked headlong into the food bar.

It stopped in front of Sherri and sound rumbled from its innards.

“You got pancakes or waffles?"

“Yes, sir,” she said, fighting to smile in the poisonous proximity of his stench. “We have pancakes."

“Got blueberry?"

“No, just plain. They're scratch-made, though. Real good,” she said.

“How many in an order?"

“Two in the short stack. That's $2.39. Or we have the tall stack, that's three,” she said brightly, figuring him for a tall stack.

“Three?” he sneered. “Three pancakes?” He couldn't believe it.

“Yes, sir."

“I'll take a tall stack. No, bring me two tall stacks on the same plate.” He'd been ready to order thirty, as an appetizer, but he, too, smelled something. Heat. Probably a plainclothes dick or undercover heat. His vibes were never wrong.

The waitress brought the two tall stacks in due time and he put all the butter pats on the six pancakes, pouring approximately half the jar of syrup onto them one by one as he built a layer. It would do as an appetizer. He stood, wadding up the dripping food, turning to survey the watchers. He'd felt out his audience the way an intuitive actor will. A smile split his face as the shark's mouth opened and accepted the stack of pancakes, butter, and syrup. There was no chewing. He merely swallowed, inhaling the food. Every eye was glued to him, but one man in particular was looking at him funny. The gaze was steadier. Perhaps this was the cop.

Chaingang, his left hand dripping from the pancake snack, smiled at the man and approached his table. People fought back revulsion as his aroma wafted across their plates. He maneuvered himself so that he was to the right of the seated man, leaned over, beaming and friendly, and asked, “Aren't you Ted Goldberg from frannus's?"

“Huh? No,” the man said, turning, backing up slightly as the befouled leviathan breathed toxic waste into his face. The thing's massive left paw was patting his shoulder in a warm gesture.

“Oh! I'm sorry,” the beast rumbled. “You look like Ted, from the American Legion cremmer. You got a twin,” he boomed, waving good-bye. Friendly chap. Big smile. You sure couldn't judge a book by its cover.

Chaingang waddled to the cash register, leaving behind his blinding odor, the image of a two-legged beast-man, and an immense sticky handprint of maple syrup on the back of the man's new polyester jacket.

New Levee Barrow and Route W

F
erris and Donnie Meuller and Donnie's oldest boy Scott were in Donnie's big silver V-boat. They'd played out the catfish around Stocker's Store and were letting the current take them back, fishing their way back in the fast-moving floodwaters, letting the current scrieve the boat, propelling them downstream.

A man could get into the big, heavyweight outlaw cat real good if he knew where to fish. Hit ‘em about half an hour before dawn, go back around five and catch another fine mess before suppertime. They were hitting livers the way the rich gobble caviar—they couldn't get enough of it.

The water gushing through Lyman Hole Lateral sluiced into the St. Petersburg Ditch and overflowed the banks, moving out over 221 and the tree-clogged drain canals where the big boys liked to hang out and feed. From the bottom of the canal, which was Lateral Three on the maps, the St. Pete Ditch carried about eight and a half feet of moving river water, and as the drainage ditches continued to overflow into this fast-moving stream it became a rushing nine-foot-tall wall of water that buried everything in its path.

At the outskirts of Bayou City the nine-foot moving wall, with the power of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee rivers behind it, smashed across the fifty-four-inch drainage culvert, flooding the banks of the ditches adjacent to the already full Bayou City sewer lagoon, moving out across 218 and the highway bypass that was now the bottom of a swiftly moving lake.

An ever-building, merging, growing wave of water overflowed the Cedar Isle Slough, Old Route 17, Catch-basin Ditch, and the set-back levee itself, joining the backwaters of the Cumberland, Platte, Missouri, and God-only-knows how many overflowing tributaries. This entire mass with a life all its own now swirled, flowed, and intermixed, becoming an unstoppable force of nature, spreading, moving, inching inland over what was no longer dry land, the water seeking its own level, moving higher and higher, putting everything it touched beneath it.

“Oh,
shit!"
Ferris screamed.

"Lookout!"
Donnie screamed at Scott, and the three of them tried to strike out at the black thing suddenly looming in the pathway of the V-boat. The first to hit it was Ferris, who caught a good shot on the blade of the oar, catching it against the unyielding steel. The oar splintered as it smacked back into Scott's paddle, knocking it into the water, then smashing him down into the boat as the broken oar whacked him in the nose. Donnie got a halfway good stance but the oar slid over the slick metal as their prow collided with what was later discovered to be the left front fender of a Mercury Marquis. The boat took a hit, shooting Donnie Meuller out into the water, where he plunged over his head, beginning to panic as he could not move in the coat that now felt as if it weighed two hundred pounds, caught in a current too strong to swim against, and only a lucky probe with the broken oar saved him from drowning.

Bayou City

T
wo hours later Scott was having his nose taped, the men had changed clothes, and Sharon Kamen was in the back seat of one of Jimmie Randall's cop cars, on the way to the station.

“Has Chief Randall learned something, do you know—about my father?"

“They just told me to bring you to the office,” the uniformed driver, a female cop, said in a flat, noncommittal tone.

The building was a bustling beehive of activity, and she was immediately taken into the chief of police's presence. “Good morning, Sharon,” he said. “Let's go in here.” He escorted her to a room she hadn't been in before, a bare conference or interview-type room with a heavy steel table and chairs. He asked her to have a seat, and she could hear a conversation on the other side of the open doorway. It was a noisy office, with constantly ringing telephones and a steady murmur of voices and assorted sounds adding to the hubbub.

In a few seconds Randall reentered the room, followed by five other men and the woman officer who'd brought her to the administration building.

“Sharon, this is Special Agent Petergill."

“We've met, Jimmie,” the FBI man said.

“Hi."

“How you doin'?” Petergill said, his smile cordial but official looking. Sharon had an awful wave of premonition.

“Fine,” she said.

“We've found your father's car,” Petergill said. She listened to the explanation of how the vehicle was found. What the circumstances were. Where. Why she couldn't go out there.

“There's not much to see now, anyway, Sharon. Water's almost completely over the car. We put a man in to get the plates and double-check the VIN, but it got too rough to do much more.” He left some of the obvious unsaid. “We can't take chances with men diving now in that water. It's coming in too fast. But I doubt if much—uh—evidence could be found.” She nodded. “This is not going to be easy, Sharon, but we need to talk seriously about the possibilities. I'm sorry to put you through it, but—"

“I understand. I appreciate everything you're doing to find Dad,” she said quietly. There was an awful feeling of pressure in her upper chest, and it seemed suffocatingly warm in the room.

“It doesn't look real good for finding Mr. Kamen. I don't say we can put a lot of stock in the fact we found the car where it was. But the thing is, you see, it is unlikely your father would have been in that area driving before the water pushed in. I think it's possible that somebody wanted to create the impression your father drove into the backwater. Aside from the various ways we know that didn't happen, that road was still being traveled by vehicles three days ago. Obviously, if Mr. Kamen had been around here on an investigation that recently, there would have been some contact."

“But what if Dad had an accident or hit his head or something and got amnesia and he's out there wandering around?"

“Sharon,” the FBI man said, speaking so softly she had to strain to hear each word, “true amnesia's so rare it's hardly worth considering. I think because of the nature of what your father was trying to do, we have to at least face the possibility that something has happened. I know it's tough, but I'm afraid that's what it's beginning to look like. I would have been more optimistic
not
finding his car. But,” he shook his head again, “it doesn't look good."

“No, I understand. I can see that."

“Now I think it's incumbent on you to start taking precautions accordingly. I know you've worked very hard to find some trace of your father, and you've handled this in a professional—” Somebody had come in and whispered to the woman officer and she in turn said something to the FBI man.

Sharon caught “—Raymond Meara."

“We'll be a few minutes,” he said, and the uniformed men left. He turned back to Sharon. “Your friend Mr. Meara's out there. As I was saying, you both have been trying to help, but at this point the best thing is to let us handle it. We don't want to—” he chose his phrase, “create unnecessary problems."

“Are you in charge of the investigation?” she asked.

“Ah!” His face took on a pained expression. “In communities like this we don't generally get into jurisdictional hairsplitting. It's better to work together until we see what shakes loose. There's actually been no crime here, so the investigation is a missing-persons case officially, until such a time as it becomes a federal matter for the Bureau. But we naturally will give any help to Chief Randall, or the state and county people, that we can.” He smiled at her. She had the impression he was a decent, just man. All these guys were decent men. So was her dad—he was decent. “Don't give up on your father yet, though. This doesn't have to mean anything. But you need to understand the potential seriousness and, obviously, from here on you need to let us handle the question-asking. Okay?"

“Sure.” She thought about what she'd done so far. Her futile interviews and fruitless travels down the muddy side roads and flooding arterial highways of rural Clearwater, Mississippi, Scott, and New Madrid counties. Even if the police said they weren't pursuing an investigation, what more could she do? Follow the old New Madrid physician's advice and start making a list of the ministers over fifty? Is that what her dad had done?