Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (25 page)

Jeryline stood up. “I’m going to see what all the whoop-de-doo’s really about. Maybe Danny got up into the attic somehow.”

Brayker eyed her. “Do you really think so?”

She rubbed her face again. “Not really. But it’s better than sitting around while he’s out there all alone.”

Brayker stood up as well. “You’re right. As long as I’ve got the key, you and I should be safe enough.” He patted the pouch under his shirt. “Let the others check the attic. You and I can check other places. But there’s something you need to be ready for.”

She spread her hands. “Try me.”

“If we find Danny, he’s most likely going to be dead. Can you deal with that?”

She took a long breath. “I think I can. Tonight I’ve had to deal with all kinds of horrible things.”

“Okay, then,” he said and took her arm. “Let’s do it.”

18

“Y
ou sniveling, lying son of a bitch!” Irene Galvin shouted. “How long have you been staying up here behind my back? Six months? A whole year?”

Willie shot to his feet. He had only drunk about half the bottle of Thunderbird and here she was ready to ruin the rest of his night. The hammering rain that had sounded so pleasant as he sat among the mailbags now sounded like a hail of firing-squad bullets. “This is the first time I was ever up here,” he bleated.

Martel was clomping up the steps behind her, a shape in the dark. “What’s old Willie gone and done now?” he asked Irene. “And jeez—this ain’t no attic.”

She ignored him. “So I guess you just now shit that bottle of booze, eh? How the hell did you find out about this place?”

“ ’Twas Wally Enfield that told me,” he said.

“Nosy little pecker.” She took a step toward him, reaching out. He jerked the bottle closer to his chest, knowing that she would do as women have done all through the centuries: dump out his booze. In his mind that was alcohol abuse of the most sinister kind.

Instead she poked at the mailbags. “Holy hula hoops,” she breathed. “Bob, where the hell did that flashlight go?”

“Dunno,” Martel said.

“Well, go find it. I think there’s a side to Wally Enfield that none of us knew about.”

He failed to move, fidgeting instead. She turned. “Going deaf, Deputy?”

“Well,” he said, “I’m kind of in charge of this mission now, so I’ll be giving the orders. I am an officer of the law, you know.”

“Officer this,” she said, and Willie did not need a singing telegram to inform him which finger she was exercising. “Move it!”

He shuffled unhappily around and tromped downward, muttering things.

“I haven’t been up in this old belfry for years,” she said, turning to Willie. “Wally had all his posters covering the fold-down, and I figured he didn’t know it was here.” She poked at the bags some more. “The post office was right. He was stealing the mail.”

Willie kept silent, taking advantage of the moment to sneak a drink.

“Crazy little shit. Gimme that.”

She plucked the bottle out of his hands. Rather than dump it overboard, though, she plugged it in and sucked on it. Willie felt genuine pity for her, if this was her first experience with Thunderchicken. It wasn’t as deadly as Aqua-Net, but close.

She lowered the bottle. “That brings back some memories. My late husband used to mix this with root beer.” She smacked her lips and went for more.

Willie’s stomach jumped with fright. For the first time in months he felt ill.

Martel was back, this time preceded by a sharp white beam of light. “Had it stuck in my holster the whole time,” he said. “Must have put it there while we were running out of the basement. Funny, huh?”

“Funny.” Irene gave Willie his bottle back. “Okay, Beavis, let’s see what we’ve got.”

He fanned the light around. It showed several things: a small wooden floor white with pigeon shit, dirty canvas mailbags heaped all over each other, sparkling rain dripping off the steeple overhead, piles of empty envelopes, discarded letters and junk mail. “That son of a bitch,” Irene murmured. “The whole time he was reading the town’s mail.”

“More than just this town,” Martel said. The flashlight was shaking in his hand. “This is a federal offense, people. This is FBI material.”

Irene shoved some bags aside. “Wally’s dead, so don’t shit your pants. What the hell is this?”

She dragged an army-green canvas bag into the light. Things inside poked in odd directions. Things clanked. Stenciled on the sides were black letters:
GI Joe’s Army /Navy Surplus.

“More light,” she said, and untied the drawstring. Willie watched this, remembering again that clanking bag Wally had been dragging around. Irene took hold of the bottom and flapped the bag out.

Guns sluiced across the floor. Willie recognized an AK-47, an M-16 with a collapsible stock, a sawed-off shotgun, a huge and nasty-looking automatic pistol with a perforated black shroud around the barrel. Several smaller pistols, too. Best of all, an old army field jacket with half a dozen old-style pineapple hand grenades stuck to it with safety pins.

“Well, what do you suppose?” Irene said wonderingly.

“The post office,” Martel said. “He was gonna take out the post office in Junction City.”

Irene wagged her head. “Mad as a hatter, he was. Going to show Cordelia the depth of his love, maybe.”

Martel kicked at the bag. “No ammo? All these guns and no ammo?”

Irene nodded. “There’s Wally Enfield for you. A day late and a dollar short.”

“Shit.” Martel prodded the bags with the business end of his shotgun; nothing but mail. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, and went into a squat. “Wally’s better off dead.” He put the flashlight on the floor and scooped up the field jacket. Grunting and straining, he put it on.

Irene snorted. His arms stuck out six inches below the sleeves. Zipping it would be impossible. He tore one of the grenades off and handed it to Willie. “Know how to operate these?”

Willie shrugged. “I’ve seen a billion war movies.”

“Good enough. Let’s go.”

Irene grabbed his arm. “What about me, Roscoe? I get to walk around defenseless?”

He deliberated. “Irene, you’re a woman. Women can’t do these things.”

She took a handful of his hair and jerked him down to the level of her mouth. “When you were crawling around in shitty diapers I was working graveyard at an iron foundry in Pennsylvania, mister hot shot lawman.” She ripped a grenade from his new jacket and stuck a finger through the ring of the pin. “I pull this, throw it, and people-parts go flying. Right?”

He was grimacing. “Right.”

She released him. “Now we shall go. Don’t forget the flashlight.”

“Roger,” he said, and picked it up.

“Now march. Come on, Willie, we have to stick together.”

“Right behind you,” Willie said, but when they were out of sight he sank back down on the mailbags, wiped the nervous sweat from his brow, and went back to work on the bottle. The wind gusted coldly and the night was soggy with rain, but he was dry and off his feet, and most important, getting drunk all over again.

Despite the general view that Roach was dead, he was far from it. He was, in fact, feeling better right now than he had felt since this whole nasty night started. Doing the bumpo-grindo on Cordelia had been fun, except for the fact that she had been a flabby bitch who thought men adored her, and who in reality had been old enough to be his grandmother, by the way he reckoned it. He was feeling good because he was smarter than Brayker, and on top of being smarter he was slicker than Brayker, as evidenced by the fact that Roach now had the key, and Brayker had it not. During the push-and-shove confrontation in the room, during which that dumbfuck deputy Martel had performed like a trained seal, Roach had executed a quick presto-chango. As he careened into Brayker, he swapped him his key for a substitute item that Roach certainly would not need anymore. In the pouch there now resided, instead of Brayker’s dopey key, a surprise that would do no more damage to the Salesman or his revolting cronies than a powder puff. Too bad Roach wouldn’t be there to see the expression on his face.

At this moment he was standing at the front door with wind and traces of rain whipping through the doorway. He did not know how to get in touch with the Salesman, but figured it wouldn’t take long for the news to leak out that a pow-wow was in order. As he had come out of the room upstairs like a suicidal maniac, he had not been suicidal at all. He had seen what the key did to those stupid-looking, slow-moving rejects from a horror show. With it in his hand, he had pretty much stabbed his way through to the stairway. As they clawed his shirt and tore it from his body, he wondered if even the key was no match for these clowns; but they had suddenly begun to fall away like a flock of crows scared out of a cornfield. The Salesman knew which side of his toast to butter, and had somehow called them off, by means unknown. Telepathy? Mind control? Roach did not care if the message had come to them via Pony Express; all he knew was that they had vanished.

Now he stuck his head out the doorway. “Yo, Salesman?” he called out. “You out there?”

No response. Roach tried holding the key out like a beacon. “Salesman? I got what you want here.”

Still nothing. Roach ground his teeth. Lightning stitched the sky not far away, and he counted the seconds until the thunder arrived, a childhood habit. “Oh, perfect,” he grunted. “Eighteen miles away my ass. That was in the front goddamned yard.” He examined the night. “Salesman! Yo!”

Two demons lurched out of nowhere and stopped at the door. Roach used the key in vampire-slayer fashion, backing up a step. “No, I want the head honcho,” he said with his voice full of bravado. “Begone, dumbfucks.”

The Salesman materialized between them, the best special effect Roach had seen since his last movie, which had been Godzilla doing something or other. His finances did not let him get out much; not the way Homer had paid wages at the Eureka Cafe.

“You rang,” the Salesman intoned. He was wearing scruffy jeans and a western-style shirt with a baseball cap snugged backward on his head. He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his scuffed old Reeboks. “Mind if I smoke?”

Roach stared at him. “Smoke away, Buford.”

“Thankee.” He pulled a red pack of Chesterfields out of his shirt pocket and dug out a battered old Zippo from the tattered pocket of his jeans. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke Roach’s way. It hit the line of the blood seal and split outward as if blown against a pane of glass. “You see my problem,” he said. “Country club taste with Moose Lodge income.”

“Ain’t that just a heartbreaker,” Roach said. “Now let’s deal.”

He smiled. “Deal away, Roachie.”

Roach matched his smile. “I’m willing to give you this key. From what I hear, you’ve been trying to get your hands on it for about two thousand years.”

“Give or take,” the Salesman admitted with a nod. “Call it a hobby.”

“There’s certain things I want, then. Number one, I want out of here.”

“Could be done.”

“And I want Jeryline with me.”

The Salesman’s eyes widened. “Why, you Romeo son of a bitch, you! I had no idea.”

“That’s only half of it, Buckwheat. I want a car.”

“Sheriff Tupper’s is up for grabs, I hear.”

Roach tapped the key against his teeth. “Not a cop car, dimwit. I want a ’Vette.”

“Brayker’s a veteran,” the Salesman said immediately. “World War Two. Deserted his unit, went to trial for treason after he spilled his guts to the Koreans. North Vietnam found him guilty of espionage for the PLO. Sentenced in Albania for war crimes in absentia.”

“He can be a hero all he wants to be,” Roach said. “But what I mean is a Corvette. Chevy makes it. I want it brand-new, no miles. Can you do that?”

The Salesman seemed to waffle. “I don’t know, really. Do you have a trade-in?”

Roach scrubbed a hand over his face. “We could use Tupper’s car, now that he’s dead.”

“Done deal. Is that it?”

Roach shook his head and glanced over both shoulders. “Money,” he whispered. “One million dollars, unmarked bills.”

The Salesman lowered his voice. “I can do that. I can do it all. Deal?”

Roach’s eyes jerked this way and that as he chewed his lip. He extended the key. “Deal.”

The Salesman jerked backward. “Hold that thought,” he said. He tossed his cigarette into the wind and stepped out of Roach’s view. He reappeared with the wooden case in both hands. “Mind getting rid of that?” he asked, looking down at the base of the doorframe.

Roach looked down. “Hell, the blood’s all dried up anyway. You won’t get fried.”

“Just to be sure. Please.”

Roach shrugged, and scraped away the blot of dried blood with his foot. The Salesman probed the area with an elbow, then smiled and stepped inside. “Please insert the key,” he said. “The passport to all your dreams.”

Roach moved as if to put it inside, then snatched it back. He cocked his head and gave the Salesman a wink. “If you think I’m that stupid, think again,” he said. “You’ve got all kinds of powers, but I don’t think you can make a car out of thin air. Show me.”

The Salesman grinned. “You’ve reestablished my faith in common sense,” he said. “Step cut here and see all of my power.”

Roach chuckled. “I don’t think I’ll be doing that, Roscoe. You just show me from here.”

“Fine and dandy. Just step back a little and give me room to work.”

Roach backed away, still holding the key out. “Do it to it,” he said. “Show me my car.”

The Salesman smiled. “There. All done.”

Roach frowned. “I told you I ain’t going outside to look, man. I want to see it in here.”

“But it
is
in here, Roachie. Look up!”

Roach looked up. “Well I’ll be,” he said, staring at the underbelly of a Chevy Corvette so new that even the muffler was shiny as fresh steel. “What’s holding it up?”

“I am,” the Salesman said in a dead flat monotone.

The car dropped like the ton of metal and plastic it was. Roach barely had time to blink. The weight folded his spine in a hundred new directions, split his belly open and ejected most of his guts against the unused muffler. One arm still stuck out from under the right front fender, the Salesman walked over and held the key case under Roach’s hand. It spasmed once and the key dropped neatly into the groove that had been cut for it so many centuries ago.