Sleeping Policemen (12 page)

“Tuck!” Finney stood, striding across the room.

Nick started after him, but Sue's hand closed around his upper arm. He pried it loose and levered himself out of the couch. “Finney—”

The slap sounded like a thunderclap. Tucker stumbled back a step, his sobs dying. He lifted a hand to touch his cheek, the enflamed ghost of Finney's palm. Dumb wonder flooded his face.

“You hit me.”

“We've got to stay calm, Tuck, we can't let this get out of control—”

“It's already out of control, son. I don't think you have any idea how deep the shit you're in goes. This cop, he a big motherfucker, Tennessee state John Law named Evans? He the one you're talking about?”

As in a dream, Nick saw the cockroach skitter across the wall, that hand, lightning-fast.

“Yeah,” Tucker whispered.

Pomeroy shook his head. “Guy's a fucking lunatic, eats kids like you for breakfast. Thing ya'll don't understand is, you
need
me. You need me more than you can know. So it's time to lay your hand down, let me see your cards.” He turned to Tucker. “One way or another, I'm gonna find out.”

“You don't have to hurt him,” Nick said, reaching for the detective's shoulder. “We can work this out.”

“You don't wanna lay hands on me, son,” Pomeroy said, turning to stare at Nick. A perfect bubble of silence enclosed them, and in that pause a distant cry rose absurdly from outside, a primal cry of need, a dog's howl of desire.

Pomeroy lifted his eyebrows quizzically. “What the fuck is that?”

Finney hesitated, looked quickly at Nick. “The Torkelsons. They live down the street. They—uh—they party a lot.”

“Shit,” Pomeroy said. “Somebody needs to take a stick to the fuckin Torkelsons.” He held Nick's gaze a moment longer, and then he turned away, closing on Tucker. “I want to know about everything, son. The accident, the tape, the girl. All of it.”

Tucker backed away, his face pinched and frightened. His tongue slid between his lips. His gaze darted between Pomeroy and Finney. With one hand, he tugged at his jockey shorts.

“You're gonna tell me, one way or the other,” Pomeroy said. “One way or the other, you're gonna tell me.”

“No, Tuck—”

Pomeroy jabbed a finger at Finney without even looking at him. “You shut the fuck up, son.” He gathered double handfuls of Tucker's sweatshirt and thrust him backward. A rack of brass fireplace tools went over with a clatter. Nick caught a faint urine odor. Tucker had pissed himself, the sagging jockey shorts yellowing.

“Nick,” Sue said.

He glanced over at her, held her gaze. Then, swallowing hard, he stepped closer.

“Finney …” Tucker whimpered, but Finney only stood there, his hands dangling at his thighs, a faintly puzzled expression on his face, as though he wondered how everything had spun so suddenly and so completely out of control.

“I'm gonna have it out of you, son,” Pomeroy said quietly. “One way or the other, I'm gonna have it out of you. You can just fess up or I can beat it out of you. And you know what I'll do when I'm finished? I'll call the cops. How you gonna feel then, huh? How you gonna feel in jail, son, some buck nigger sodomizing your virgin ass? They love to get hold of a tight white sister like you. They'll pound on you till your asshole dangles to your knees.”

“Hey, now,” Nick said. “Is this necessary? I mean, can't we talk about it?”

He stepped forward, laid a hand across the detective's shoulder. Pomeroy spun, so suddenly and so swiftly, with such dangerous and predatory grace, that Nick fell back a pace. “I told you to lay off, son. I'm in control here. Now you just lay off while I—”

Maybe Pomeroy recognized something in Nick's face—a widening of the eyes, an impulsive twitch of surprise—or maybe he sensed movement behind him, for he broke off abruptly, starting to turn. Halfway through his revolution, the brass poker caught him square in the face, a whistling roundhouse swing that culminated with the sound of a grapefruit dropping on a sidewalk from six floors up. He toppled in a spray of blood and snot, his Stetson flying. He knotted himself into a ball, clutching his shattered nose with both hands. Long wisps of spray-stiffened gray hair peeled away to reveal the bald pate underneath, and something about that struck Nick: the vanity of this sad, little tough guy, more like a prematurely wizened child than a man.

“Oh Gawd,” Pomeroy moaned, and Tuck stepped up to deliver another shot with the poker, this one across the flat of his back. Pomeroy's breath burst out of him, and he went still, limp.

Nick lifted a hand to wipe moisture from his cheek. He glanced down at his finger—

—
blood
—

—and his heart shuddered inside him. For a moment he was once again in the back seat of Finney's Acura, a blur of light and darkness as the car hurtled across the form of a sleeping policeman.

Then he laughed out loud, an awkward blurt of sound. “Christ, Tuck, you're some kind of maniac.”

Tucker's mouth worked, but no words came out. The poker slipped from his fingers to clatter against the creamy tile apron of the fireplace. His face seemed to dissolve, his broad sullen features softening into the almost comically startled visage of a frightened child, gazing down in dismay at some irrevocable accident, the shattered vase, the shards of his mother's Fabergé egg. After a moment he blinked up at Nick, silent tears pouring down his face. Fear came off him in waves, almost visible.

“I don't want to go to jail,” he whispered, wide-eyed, imploring.

“Is he dead?”

Nick turned to find Sue looking over his shoulder, her face flushed.

“I hope to fuck not,” Finney said.

As though in response, Pomeroy moaned. Sue uttered a startled little shriek and clutched Nick's arm, dragging him back a step. They watched breathlessly, the four of them, as Pomeroy climbed laboriously to his hands and knees. He wavered unsteadily, his back heaving as he struggled to draw breath. Then he collapsed again, bit by bit, like a bridge giving way in chain reaction, piling by piling bearing its load into the waters below. His arms folded underneath him and he leaned forward on his elbows, his head hanging between his shoulders. One of those spidery strands of gray hair slipped down to dangle over his face, drifting back and forth as he breathed, and then his knees gave out, too. He lurched toward Nick, convulsing, and spewed a stream of yellow bile over Nick's Keds. Nick could smell it, a malodorous stew of whiskey and stomach acid and something else, something worse, as though Pomeroy had started to rot from the inside out.

He felt his own gorge rising and swallowed hard, blinking away tears. Tucker whined, a helpless, bleating sound, like a lamb in the slaughter-line. Hatred for the other boy, for his weakness, ignited inside Nick like a pilot light, a fierce, gaseous blue ember flickering way down inside his heart, so hot it burned.

“Christ,” Finney muttered.

Nick said nothing, just stood there in amazement as the detective struggled once more to his hands and knees, steadier now, as though he had expelled some poison when he threw up. He shook his head, levered himself to his knees, like he was praying. He looked like a man wearing a fright mask, his wispy hair in a spray-stiffened corona about the crown of his head, his nose a flat, gory mess. A pint-sized scarecrow of a man really, bleary eyes scanning them without recognition until they lit with dull fury on Tucker.

Pomeroy's lips moved, but when his voice emerged he sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of marbles. “
I'm gonna fuckin kill you
,” he said, and it took Nick a moment to untangle the words. Pomeroy reached into his jacket again, moving in stunned slow motion, and Nick knew what he had to do.

He'd felt this way in the woods sometimes, crouched motionless in a stand high over a game trail, the stillness so remote and impersonal and vast that after a while you seemed to lose yourself inside it. You didn't think then, you just
were
, no longer a man, but something more primitive and maybe superior, the brute sum of ten million years of hunting and being hunted, instinct bred to blood and breath, gristle and bone. He figured that was how animals felt all the time: utterly grounded in the now, patient and hyper-vigilant, unburdened by mere human morality, unafraid to do what they had to do to survive.

Necessity.

So that was what it had come to.

Even as these thoughts flashed through his mind he was moving. Sue screamed as Nick lunged past Finney, sending him spinning toward the center of the room. He came up brandishing the poker just as Pomeroy cleared his jacket with the gun. The first blow fell short, the poker smashing into the carpet with an impact that shivered all along his arms.

“No!” Tucker screamed. He stumbled toward the stairs, his feet tangling. He went down, and maybe that saved him.

The gun kicked with a muffled
whump
in Pomeroy's hand, reminding Nick absurdly of that night at the Torkelsons', beer can after beer can detonating into shrapnel as the firecrackers exploded inside them. A wind seemed to move through the blinds, and the sliding glass door blew out beyond them. A dozen conflicting impressions crashed in upon Nick—the stink of cordite, a glimpse of Finney scrambling toward the sofa, Sue wrapped in his arms, Pomeroy bringing the gun to bear again—and then somehow, without thought—

—
necessity
—

—he was swinging the poker down again.

It caught Pomeroy in the wrist. Nick saw the gun spin away. He stepped forward, swinging the poker around in a hissing arc. He felt the impact as it took the detective under the chin, spinning him up and around. Pomeroy staggered to his feet, backpedaling helplessly, and crashed through the coffee table.

He lay there in a bed of glass and twisted chrome, kind of twitching. Nick followed him. He stood over him for a moment, holding the poker like a Neanderthal with a bone club, thinking I
have to do this
, but knowing somehow that it was something else making him do this, something else throbbing there behind his eyes. He lifted the poker up and brought it crashing down once more, that green pulse pounding away inside his head, drowning everything else out. Then Sue was there. She had her arms around him, she was whispering into his ear.

He felt numb, his fingers nerveless. The poker slipped out of his hand and smashed to a floor somewhere far away. He looked down at Pomeroy, sprawled motionless there in the litter of glass and chrome, looking more than ever like a child, and he thought:
He is dead. No man who looks that bad can possibly be alive
. But he couldn't bring himself to kneel down and check. He closed his eyes and it seemed to him that he was flying, way up in the sky, far above everything, and down below him there was nothing, only green, the green and rolling grass from the picture, A. R. Barrett's sprawling house and the frank, blue eye-wink of the pool beyond, and then the hills of shaven green, rolling endlessly below him, blending one into the other until they became a gray heaving blur of swells, the Gulf, home, the salt tang of the air and the gray water rolling to a far horizon.

He could feel Sue embracing him, but he didn't lift his arms to her. He didn't say anything. He didn't do anything.

He didn't want to open his eyes.

No one said anything for a while. It was over. Somebody, a neighbor, must surely have called the cops. They just stood there, waiting for the sirens.

Tuesday, 5:48 to 6:44 AM

Somewhere a dog barked four quick yaps. Time stuttered and caught, plunging them back into the moment. Nick felt another runnel of Pomeroy's blood track down his cheek. As he lifted his hand to wipe it away, he thought of the Torkelsons: the gunshot, the shattering glass—it was all just another party.

No one would come.

For the moment, they were safe.

Sue still pressed against him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders. He looked over at Finney standing dazed and silent, his back pressed against the cream-colored wall. Across the room, Tucker lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs, his face contorted, his eyes crazed, Finney's handprint in sharp relief across his cheek. He slowly stood.

At Nick's feet, Pomeroy lay on a bed of glass, his arms and legs flung wide. His face was a soup of blood and bruise, deep creases running like fault lines across his nose and along his jaw line. One eye was half-lidded, the semicircle of smoky pupil cocked off into empty space. Nothing had ever looked deader. Something fluttered deep within Nick, something he associated with the thick wad of bills in his jacket, the verdant swell of the Barrett estate, the sheer heady rush of might. The fluttering grew and Nick swallowed it down—knowing it must not take him—and looked away from Pomeroy's body.

Finney looked at Nick, his eyes wide and uncomprehending. Lost. Then the Durant composure slowly reclaimed his features.

“Nice work, guys,” he said. He stepped over to Tucker and wrapped his arms around the other boy's shoulders, the gesture triggering a mirror image in Nick's mind: Finney dragging Sue to the floor, his arms tight around her as Pomeroy cleared his jacket with the gun. A tiny spark of hatred tumbled into the dry tinder of Nick's heart. For a moment, he burned.

“Tuck. Hey, man.” Finney slapped him twice quickly on the cheek, without force. Tucker jerked back, his mouth twisting, his eyes filling with panic.

“Tuck!” Finney shook him roughly. Tuck's head whipped wildly. “Tucker. Pull it together. Stay with us, man.” Tucker stilled and his eyes found Finney's, panic fading from them as through an unstoppered drain.

“Finney.”

“It's okay. We're here, we're—”

“Get out of my face.” Tucker pulled away from him and walked over to Pomeroy. He looked at the man, his eyes ablaze with hatred. “Fucker tried to shoot me.” He kicked him hard in the side. Tucker glared at Nick, daring him to say something. When Nick said nothing, Tucker said, “Would've killed you, too.” He turned and disappeared up the stairs.