Sleeping Policemen (16 page)

“Oh,” Sue said, a quick exhalation. “Let's go in,” she said, pulling him away from the cage.

He looked, but saw no trace of the promised monkeys. Stepping inside the store, Nick glanced back. The bear's snout still poked through the gap, hopelessly prodding the air.

The bell above the door tinkled as they came in, an absurdly cheerful sound in the gloom of the Smokin Mountain. The store seemed even smaller inside, the air dry and acrid. Dozens of wooden shelves lined the walls, crowded with a dusty mélange of moon pies and pouches of chewing tobacco, deviled ham and soda crackers, tampons and Tabasco. Cases of beer stood knee-high atop a splintering pallet. An antique soft drink case hummed by the register, beneath a 1972 calendar and a crude collage of black and white snapshots, mostly animals—dogs and pigs and raccoons. A small electric heater burped and hitched nearby.

Finney and Tucker sat at a card table in the back, each huddled over a large Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee.

“Mo'nin.”

Sitting on the other side of the doorway was what Nick thought at first was a manatee, all gray flesh and huge. Blinking, his eyes still adjusting to the gloom, he gleaned a person in the mountain of flesh, a woman grandiosely obese. She sat in a recliner, dressed in a flowing red muumuu, her flesh overflowing the chair in waves, her arms jiggling. Flesh hung like sacks from her face, her neck. A goiter the color of blood, the size of a grapefruit, peeked from between two folds beneath her chin. Pink rollers the size of orange juice cans had been cast about—apparently at random—in her iron gray hair.

“How you this mo'nin?” the woman said, her words coming in heavy gasps, as if speaking exhausted her.

Nick nodded and Sue murmured, “Fine.”

“We don't get many folk this time of mo'nin, more in the ev'nin. Hep yerself to what you need—Law knows I'm too big to get it. My Henry'll be in shortly.” She paused, craning her neck to see an ancient Coca-Cola clock nailed to the wall above her. It was 8:05. “In fact,” she said, struggling to resettle in the recliner, “he's usually in by eight, choring and whatnot. He'll be in any minute to hep.

“I reckon y'all with them two what's in the back there. They's coffee past the last shef.” She paused to catch her breath. “Pay when y'all done.” She nodded curtly and resumed reading the tabloid spread across her enormous legs.

“Thanks, okay,” Nick said, moving toward Finney and Tucker. Sue took his hand as they sat down in cane-back chairs, their backs to the door. If possible, it was even gloomier in the back.

“Coffee?” Finney said. When they both shook their heads, he said, “Just as well—tastes like shit.”

They sat in silence, the woman's labored breathing and Tucker's slurping the only sounds. Full light, Nick thought. Park rangers, highway patrol, even the FBI prowled the streets now, coming closer and closer to a dead man in a half-sunken Cadillac.
Everything is time
. In his head Nick could hear the
click-clack
of the analog's second hand sweeping through the minutes.

“What now?” Finney said. “What'll we do from here?”

“Go back, try to get the body?” Nick said, the idea filling him with dread.

“Too risky, someone would see us.”

“What about tonight?” Sue said.

“Someone'll find it way before then,” Nick said.

“Maybe not—no one uses the quarry, especially not in December. And I don't think too many people know about the back road—you could tell no one's been on it in weeks, probably months.”

“Maybe you're right,” Finney said.

Nick looked up, meeting Finney's eyes. “It's time to bring the Senator in, Finney.”

“No. We're way past that now.”

“I'm telling you, he can help—”

“You
idiots
,” Tucker hissed. “We shouldn't've come here. It places us in the area.” He slammed his fist down on the table, knocking over his cup and spilling the dregs of his coffee.

They all looked at Tucker; he was right. They were less than forty miles from the quarry and here sat Tuck soaking wet, wearing the brightest beach towel Nick had ever seen. Nick glanced at the matron. The tabloid hid her face, but he felt her eyes poring over every move they made.

“Let's leave,” Sue said, her hand tightening in Nick's.

“Not so fast,” Finney said. “Too suspicious. You two first. Then us. Tuck, you keep walking—I'll pay for the coffees. Once we're all out—”

The bell jangled its cheery welcome, and they all four looked down, suddenly interested in the stain patterns in the table cloth.

“Great,” Tucker muttered. “Someone else to ID us.”

“Well, now,” the woman said, “more visitors in the same mo'nin. A officer of the law at that.”

They all started at the word, Sue's fingers digging small moons into the heel of Nick's palm. Finney glanced up, blood and hope draining from his face. For Nick, time stalled, slipping into a slower, thicker plane.

Nick turned in his chair, already terrified, the split cane complaining under his weight, a tired whisper like the rustle of insect husks. His eyes climbed slowly, finding the man standing just inside the store, his mind flashing back—

—
the cockroach, that hand
—

—already certain who it was, a nightmare come horribly to life.

The patrolman looked back just as Nick's eyes focused. A pair of mirrored sunglasses, a Smokey Bear trooper's hat pulled low on his brow. He shifted with his tongue a sliver of wood from one corner of his mouth to the other.
Evans
, his mind screamed, had been screaming since he'd heard the bell. Evans. The trooper grinned at them, saluted with one finger.

Only then did Nick see the gun cradled in Evans's thick hand, the heavy .45 hidden from the woman, but already sliding up his side. Nick tried to scream, tried to move, to throw himself in front of Sue—but nothing worked. His body locked in a vice of fear.

Then Evans turned away—his bulk blocking the woman—and all Nick could think was
not me, not us, not yet
. Nick saw the gun level, heard Evans grunt a surly, “Sorry, ma'am.” The gunshot was enormous in the small room, shaking the building, rebounding again and again off the thin walls. A quart bottle fell to the floor and shattered.

A tendril of smoke curled from the .45's barrel. Evans looked back at them, bringing the gun to his lips, grinning—his face seemingly all teeth—and blew the smoke away. He holstered the gun and turned toward the door, moving away from the woman. When Nick saw her—his mind still booming with the echo of the gun—he thought at first nothing had happened. She lay sprawled in the chair as before, the tabloid clutched in one dropped arm, her muumuu flung above her knees, exposing even more pink, dimpled flesh. Then he saw the rose blossoming between her eyes, two small runnels of black blood tracking around the stump of her nose and into her mouth. Her head lolled to one side—the goiter bulging as if it might burst—and Nick saw that much of the back of her head had disappeared. A good chunk of the recliner had vanished as well. Directly behind her, an ocher-colored blossom patterned the wall. As he watched, it slid slowly to the floor, a bas-relief of pulp and gore and curler fragments.

Evans flipped the window sign to
CLOSED
and shut the door, locking it.

Time jolted back into itself. Tucker whimpered and someone said, “Aw, Jesus, no.”

Evans moved toward them, grinning.

“Well, now, what we got here?” Evans grabbed a nearby chair, reversed it, and sat down with a groan. He grinned wolfishly. Nick could see their warped reflections in his sunglasses, desperate figures trapped in a convex world. Sue shifted her chair closer to Nick, her eyes cold, glaring at Evans.

“Kids,” he said, shifting the toothpick thoughtfully, “Lemme tell you something. You get into this crime business, you got to learn some basics.” He paused, still grinning, and removed his glasses. The smile never touched his eyes. He looked like a pig, Nick thought; pointed ears, upturned nose, beady eyes. A chill crept across his shoulders as Evans carefully folded the glasses and placed them on the table. He laid the toothpick beside them.

“First, you don't stop for coffee forty miles from the crime scene.” He paused again. “And if you do, you kill the person you bought it from.”

Sue shuddered. Tucker went deadly pale; Finney looked ill, his lips ashen, his eyes moist. None of them moved.

Evans grunted, and looked back toward the front of the store. “My, what a mess,” he said, chuckling, a dry, dirty sound, his piggy gaze taking them all in. “But you know—killing before breakfast really concentrates the mind, makes you sharper, like the edge of a knife. You boys know what I mean, don't you?” Evans focused on Tucker. He leaned back in his chair and plucked a bag of Fritos off the nearest shelf. He ripped it open with his teeth and shoved a handful in his mouth; he offered the bag around the table, but no one accepted. Nick felt his stomach lurch.

He said, crunching around a mouthful of corn chips, “I been watchin you fell as for a couple days now. I knew you'd make a mistake somewheres along the way—and I knew it'd be sooner other than later. But bless my soul, I never dreamt you'd do something this stupid. Killing a private eye.” He brayed laughter, spraying flecks of chips across the table; he shook his head, the grin spreading thinly across his lips again. “My oh my.”

Sue leaned in closer to Nick. Finney looked as if he'd eaten something terribly wrong.

“No matter—you just saved me a little time and effort is all. I should be thankin you—cept you've made the past coupla days pretty hard on me.”

His eyes found Tucker again. Tucker acted as if it were hard to breathe; a bead of sweat ran down the side of his face. He shivered, holding the beach towel around him like an old woman's shawl.

“You know what it is when you got someone over you, breathin down your neck, tellin you the whole thing's your fault? You know how that is?”

“Fuck off,” Tucker said, his voice cracking.

Evans's jaw tightened. A muscle in his right cheek ticked, and his hand fisted around the bag of chips. “You watch your language, rich boy. Specially round the filly.”

Tucker started to say something and Evans held up a single sausage-thick finger. The nail was bitten to the quick, Nick noticed, and there was a slight crook at the second knuckle.

Tucker shut his mouth.

“Better.” Evans upended the bag into his mouth, drinking the last fragments. Smacking loudly, he said, “Now what we've got is a situation—” He grinned sheepishly, the look odd on his features. “Pert near forgot. Any of you gents packin any hardware, I'll take it now.” When none of them moved, he said, his voice as cold as the quarry waters, “It'll be a whole lot easier now than later.”

Finney shrugged and pulled Pomeroy's pistol out of his pants. His eyes never left the table. He placed the gun in front of Evans.

The patrolman cocked his hat back on his head and said, “Well, I'll be!” He dropped the empty Fritos bag on the floor and picked up the gun, turning it in his hands, inspecting it from all angles. He opened the cylinder, spun it, then flipped it back into place. “I'll be. You ever see a gun like that before?” he said, looking at Nick. “Me neither cept in the movies. You ever see those movies? The Duke, Jimmy Stewart? I reckon not. Now those were movies, not like this stuff they put on today.” His eyes had gone dreamy. Nick glanced over at Finney; he was still studying the table. Sue's face twisted in revulsion, her upper lip pulled taut against her teeth.

“No, I reckon not,” he said, tucking the pistol under the overhang of his stomach. He studied them all in turn. “Where was I? Oh yeah, we got us a little situation here. We got us a dead man with your bumper print embedded in his guts. We got a dead detective floatin round in a half-sunk Cadillac. We got a dead fat woman.” He paused and gave each of them a cold stare.

Finney jerked as though someone had slapped him and Tucker moaned in his throat, meeting the patrolman's eyes before looking away.

Evans leaned on the table, clasping his hands. He looked at Tucker. “I bet you think I'm all wind, don't you, rich boy? I bet you think I scare easy, that I'd tuck tail and skedaddle when the heat comes on. Well, lemme tell you, rich boy, I don't, not easy. But I'll let you in on a little secret, just between us, you know.” He lowered his voice, a stage whisper. “I'm a little scared right now. I'd have to admit I'm shakin in my boots.” He cleared his throat, replaced the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Wanna know why?” He shook his head. “I got that breather on my neck. He wants things like they were—and reckon who he's put in charge of makin sure they get that way?” He leaned forward, staring at Tucker, and tapped himself on the chest. “That's right—yours truly.”

Evans settled back in his chair, the cane groaning loudly. He picked up Finney's cup and took a long gulp. “You mind?” he said, putting the cup down and belching loudly. Finney didn't answer.

“You guys think I'm a ornery ol cuss, don't you?” He grinned his wolfish grin. “And I can't say I blame you right now. But you think I'm mean, you should see the Pachyderm. Now he's one mean—”

“You were there, weren't you?” Nick said, the scattered pieces falling suddenly into place. “You were after him, the Aryan, probably chasing him down. And you saw the whole thing, even Pomeroy. You knew—”

“That's enough.” Evans made a gun with his finger, the index finger thrusting into Nick's face, and mimed pulling a trigger. “Don't think so much, college boy—thinking can get you in a heap of trouble. Thinking can get you dead.”

The silence that followed Evans's pronouncement shattered with a loud trill that seemed to come from every direction at once. Tucker yelped and they all jumped, even Evans, who fumbled in his front shirt pocket and brought out a cell phone. He looked at it, dumbfounded, the cold sheen fading from his eyes. It rang again and he flipped it open and pressed it to his face.