Scratch Fever (11 page)

He stood there a moment and let the cool air cool him down.

Then he went back in. To Sherry.

He examined her feet.

“Sons of bitches,” he said.

“They hurt. They really hurt.”

“Second-degree burns. You’re lucky.”

“Oh, yeah. Lucky.”

“They’ve started to blister. Third degree would’ve been trouble. I’m going to get you some cold water to soak them in.”

“Please.”

He got a pan with ice and water in it and eased her to a sitting position, and she slid her feet in, making a few intake-of-breath sounds, but seeming to like it, once done.

“I should get you to a hospital,” he said. “I should get you to an emergency room.”

“How can you do that?” she said. “They’ll want to know how it happened. I don’t know what this is about, but I know you. And I know this isn’t something you’ll want the police or anybody in on.”

He scratched his head and said, “Right. Burns on the feet are dangerous, though. You need a doctor.”

“Sara’s boyfriend is a doctor.”

“Sara? At the club?”

“Right.”

“Will he keep his mouth shut? Will he make a post-midnight house call?”

“He’s a married doctor. He’ll do anything Sara asks him.”

“Good. What’s Sara’s number?”

“It’s in the back of the phonebook.”

“I want you to stay with her for a few days.”

“Where will you be?”

“I don’t know yet. I don’t know what this is about, either.”

He got up to go to the kitchen to call Sara.

“Did you know those two men?” Sherry asked.

He turned and looked at her. For all she’d been through, she looked terrific, sitting there in a short black nightie, soaking her feet.

“Yeah,” he said. “A couple of guys who work for Hines.”

“Hines. Isn’t he connected?”

“Yeah, Hines is Family. That bothers me. I haven’t had any Family trouble for a long time.”

“You going to talk to Hines?”

“He’s out of town. And anyway, those two were Family, out of Chicago, before they got assigned to Hines. They could’ve got their orders from somebody other than Hines. With Hines out of town, that almost seems likely.”

“You’ve got Family friends.”

“There’s Felix, that lawyer I always dealt with. But if I call him, he’ll lie to me, if I’m on the shit list again. I don’t know. I think I’m going to have to go out and knock heads together and see what’s going on.”

He went to the kitchen.

“Nolan!” she called out

He came back out and said. “What?”

“I almost forgot. There’s a message for you on the answer machine. A long one.”

“Oh?”

“It’s from that friend of yours.”

“Jon?”

“Yes. It sounded like he was in trouble. Maybe this has something to do with that.”

But before she had finished her sentence, Nolan was in the kitchen playing the message. He listened to it twice.

He came back talking to himself, saying, “Julie, alive? If so, how is she connected to anybody Family? I don’t get it.” Then, to Sherry: “Did those guys hear that message? Did they get that out of you?”

“No,” she said. “I kept thinking they’d want to know, if they’d known to ask. But they didn’t ask, and I was happy to keep it from them.”

“Good girl.”

“You missed your deadline, you know. You were supposed to go after your friend if you got home by twelve-thirty.”

“Well, I didn’t. And he isn’t here yet, so I’m going after him anyway. It’s my only lead.”

“Did you call Sara?”

“Not yet. Listen. Tell her nothing. Nothing about how you got the burns. Nothing about the shooting. I’ll let her know I’ll make it right by her, for helping, no questions asked. Then I’ll have to bandage your feet up, best I can, till her doctor friend can apply proper dressings at her place.”

“Okay.”

“Then I got to bury something in the woods, and I’m off.”

“You mean that guy downstairs? Sally? You killed him?”

“Yeah, I killed him. But I don’t mean him. I’ll dump him someplace. He doesn’t rate a burial. I’m talking about my dog.”

3

9

JON CAME TO.

He knew three things immediately: he was in the back seat of a car, on his side; it was dark, so it wasn’t morning yet, or anyway the sun wasn’t up; and his head ached so bad, his eyes hurt.

He sat up; it took some doing, but he sat up. His hands were behind him, and he could feel the cold steel of handcuffs; his legs were bound at the ankles with thick, heavily knotted rope, like the handiwork of a very ambitious, sadistic Boy Scout.

Or Girl Scout.

He looked out the window to the left. The dyke, Ron, black leather jacket, ducktail, and all, was standing in an arrogant slouch, listening to Julie talk.

Julie.

She was still wearing the white outfit, but the tinted glasses were gone, an affectation she presumably dropped during more private moments. She was gesturing as she spoke, and occasionally she would reach out and touch Ron’s face, casually.

The two of them were standing in the midst of a big open graveled area, a parking lot. This car Jon was in the back of was one of only two cars parked in it The other one was a low-slung sportscar, a Porsche, Jon thought, the color of which he couldn’t make out—something light pastel—and the owner
had
to be Julie.

Behind them was a building that appeared to be an old brick warehouse, but there was a neon sign, which wasn’t on, over a covered entryway, indicating it had been converted into something else. A restaurant or a club, maybe. He couldn’t tell, exactly; he couldn’t really see that well.

He tried to make out what they were saying, but it was muffled; they were a good twenty feet away. He pressed his ear to the glass of the car window and listened. He began to pick up some of the conversation.

“Just hold onto him for me,” Julie was saying.

“You want him to disappear forever, he can,” the dyke said.

“Not yet. In a day or two, maybe.”

“It don’t matter to me. I’d soon cut his throat as look at him.”

A sick feeling swept over Jon—not nausea: hopelessness. A physical sense of hopelessness.

Then he didn’t hear anything. He took his ear away from the glass and looked out the window, and Julie and the dyke were kissing. There was a full moon tonight, but it didn’t lend much romance to the scene, the way Jon saw it.

Then the big sandy-haired guy with glasses, the Incredible Hulk guy, came out of the warehouse, and Julie and Ron broke it up; Julie walked to meet the guy, and the dyke just stood there, hands on her butt, looking sullen. Julie and the guy talked for what seemed forever and was maybe five minutes.

How the fuck could she be
alive
, anyway?

He and Nolan had driven to Ft. Madison and seen the twisted, burnt wreckage of the car she’d been in. Or was supposed to have been in. Didn’t make sense.

But what did make sense, where Julie was concerned? The only thing you could count on was she’d use her looks to manipulate those around her. Like she had with that poor dead bastard Rigley, the Port City bank president.

She’d put him up to it They didn’t know it at first but it became obvious as soon as she came into it. Rigley could never have done it on his own.

Rigley had come into the Pier, about a year ago, and announced to Nolan that he recognized him as one of the men who had held his bank up two years before. Rigley then blackmailed Nolan, and Jon, into helping him rob his own bank, to cover up an embezzlement The robbery had gone off without a hitch, but when it came to making the split at Rigley’s cottage on the Cedar River, he and his beautician girlfriend, Julie, put a double-cross in motion.

But at the last minute, the banker panicked, and when Julie fired a shotgun meant for Nolan, Rigley got in front of the blast. Nolan dove for the girl, but she swung the now-empty shotgun around and whacked him in the head, and he went down.

Jon was under the dead banker. He pushed the corpse off and grabbed for the girl’s arm as she fled, but she caught him in the gut with the gunstock, and then again on the back of the neck, when he doubled over.

Moments later he came to, grabbed his .38 from off the floor, and went out after her.

Julie was in her yellow Mustang, the laundry bag of money sitting in back like a person.

He had her in his sights, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoot. Couldn’t kill her.

So he shot at her tires; maybe hit one.

Then she was gone.

And minutes later he and Nolan were pursuing her. There were only two ways she could go: back to Port City, which on the heels of the bank robbery was unlikely, or toward West Liberty, a little town near where she’d lived before moving into Rigley’s cottage.

On the outskirts of West Liberty, they saw it: the Mustang, with a flat tire, pulled over on the shoulder.

In front of it was a blue Ford that said WEST LIBERTY SHERIFF’S DEPT. on the side. Julie was in the back seat of the Ford. So was the sack of money.

The sheriff or deputy or whatever, a pudgy-faced guy with a weak chin, close-set eyes, five o’clock shadow, and a western-style hat, sat in front, getting ready to pull out on the highway, into town. He apparently had stopped Julie for driving recklessly in a car with a flat tire, and stumbled onto something a bit bigger.

Julie saw Nolan and Jon as they drove by, but didn’t alert the sheriff. Nolan and Jon drove back to Iowa City to sit it out.

That night, back at the antique shop, in the upstairs living quarters, they kept the radio on and the TV too, waiting for news of the West Liberty arrest. It never came.

“I think we been snookered,” Nolan said. “I think that West Liberty hick was in on it with her.”

“Nolan, that’s nuts,” Jon had said. “She couldn’t’ve planned ahead for a flat tire. She couldn’t’ve put something that complex together.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.”

“So now what?”

“We keep waiting.”

The next morning it was on the news: on a narrow bridge on the highway outside Ft. Madison, a gas tanker truck struck a car, head on. There had been an explosion. The two men in the truck were killed, as was the woman driving the car. Several thousand dollars in burnt bills in Port City bank wrappers linked the young woman driving the car to yesterday’s Port City bank robbery. In the days to come, the woman, though burned beyond recognition, was identified as the dead bank president’s mistress. The cops put a scenario together for the robbery and its aftermath that did not, thankfully, include Nolan and Jon.

But Nolan had not been satisfied. He went to Ft. Madison and looked at the burnt wreckage of the Mustang.

“I think we been snookered,” he said again.

Again, Jon said, “You’re nuts. She was running, and it all caught up with her.”

“You mean God killed her?”

“Well . . .”

“He doesn’t have that good a sense of humor.”

There was one thing Nolan could still do, and Jon drove him, after a good month had passed, to West Liberty. The weak-chinned deputy sheriff—whose name was Creel—lived in a little white frame house a few blocks from the outskirts of town—a few blocks from where he stopped Julie’s Mustang. So at two in the morning one night, with Jon at his side, Nolan knocked on Creel’s door.

Creel answered in his pajamas. Nolan, wearing a ski mask, put a gun in Creel’s neck.

Within the house, a female voice from upstairs called, “Honey? Is something wrong?”

Nolan said softly, “Nothing’s wrong.”

Creel looked at Nolan wide-eyed, slack-jawed; he looked at Jon standing just behind Nolan, also in a ski mask, also with a gun.

“Nothing’s wrong, honey,” Creel called back. “Just some sheriffing!”

And Nolan walked the deputy around back and had him sit in a swing on a swing set. Creel had kids, apparently.

“Tell me about Julie,” Nolan said.

“What?”

“Tell me why you didn’t turn Julie and that money in last month.”

And Creel did something amazing: he started to cry. He sat in the swing and cried.

Then he talked.

“I was nuts about that cunt. She had a beauty shop in town. For two years I tried to make her. I usually don’t cheat around, but that cunt was s-o-o-o-o-o-o beautiful. And she laughed at me when I came onto her.
Two years
I tried making her.”

“Get to the point.”

“There’s not much to tell. I saw this car driving wild. Flat tire. Pulled it over and it was this Julie. She had a shotgun, but it was empty. And she had a bag of money. All that fuckin’ money. She said, ‘You hear about the Port City bank job this afternoon?’ I said yeah. She said, ‘This is the money. Hundreds of thousands here. Nobody knows I got it but you.’ Jesus, I said. She says, ‘You want to be rich and fuck me whenever you want?’ I didn’t say nothin’. She says, ‘Rich,’ and reaches for my dick. ‘Nobody’s home at my place,’ I says. My wife and the kids was at her mom’s in Des Moines, for Christmas. She says, ‘Drive us there, then. Now.’ And I did.”

Creel started laughing.

“We parked the Mustang in back here, in the garage, and took the bag of money in and plopped it on the kitchen table. She and I sat and played with the money and laughed. Then we went upstairs to the bedroom and, sweet Jesus, I fucked her. Three times, and it was . . . nothing like it, ever. We was in bed together, and I drifted off to sleep, thinking it was a dream, a crazy dream. I woke up a couple hours later, handcuffed to the bed. Alone in the house.”

Creel sat there, swinging.

“You believe she’s dead?” Nolan asked.

“If she isn’t, I’d like to kill her.” He laughed. “Or fuck her.” Then he just sat there blankly. Swinging.

“We never had this conversation,” Nolan said.

“Right,” Creel said.

And Nolan and Jon went back to Iowa City and forgot about it.

Now, a year later, Jon was in the back seat of a car, handcuffed like that dumb asshole Creel, while Julie and some dyke named Ron talked about whether or not to kill him.

Right now Julie was still talking to that sandy-haired guy. If only they’d go into that warehouse for a while, maybe he could
do
something. . . .

The car he was in was an old souped-up Ford, with tuck ’n’ roll upholstery, four-on-the-floor, stereo speakers on the back ledge. He was locked in, of course, but maybe . . .

On the other side of the car, the one facing away from Julie and Ron and the Hulk, Jon bit the tip of the locking knob on the door. He pulled up his with teeth. It clicked.

He glanced over to see if the figures out in the parking lot had heard it. It had sounded incredibly loud to him. But they still stood there, Julie and the guy, talking, Ron doing her James Dean slouch.

With his back to the door, he used this cuffed hands to grasp the door handle. He pulled. The latch gave, but he didn’t open the door. He was still watching the people in the lot. To see if they’d heard the sound—which seemed to him to echo across the world like a shout in the Grand Canyon. But they didn’t seem to. Ron glanced over, but just momentarily.