The Barrens & Others (48 page)

"What is it, boy? What the hell you want?"

Gary raised the bat over his head. Pa screamed and raised his hands to protect himself, much like that last coon this morning. Gary swung the bat with everything he had and got Pa on the wrist and over the right ear as he tried to roll away. Pa grunted and stiffened, but Gary didn't wait to see what happened. He swung again. And again. And again, counting. His arms weren't tired at all. The pelts snuggling around them seemed to give him strength. Long before the fortieth swing, Pa's head and brains were little more than a huge smear of currant jelly across the pillows.

Then he turned and headed for the back door.

Back in the barn, he stood by the stretching boards and looked down at the gore-smeared bat, clutched tightly now in both of his fists. A small part of him screamed a warning but the rest of him knew that everything was all right. Everything was fine. Everything was –

He suddenly rotated his wrists and forearms and smashed the bat against his face. He staggered back and would have screamed if his throat had only let him. His nose and forehead were in agony! But everything was all right –

No! Everything was
not
all right! This was –

He hit himself again with the bat and felt his right cheek cave in. And again, and again. The next few blows smeared his nose and took out his eyes. He was blind now, but the damn bat wouldn't stop!

He fell backwards onto the floor but still he kept battering his own head. He heard his skull splinter. But still he couldn't stop that damn bat!

And the pain! He should have been knocked cold by the first whack but he was still conscious. He felt
everything!

He prayed he died before the bat hit him forty times.

2

No one answered his knocking at the house – house, shmouse, it was a hovel – so Jake Feldman headed for the barn. The cold early morning air chilled the inexorably widening bald spot that commanded the top of his scalp; he wrapped his unbuttoned overcoat around his ample girth and quickened his pace as much as he dared over the icy, rutted driveway.

Old man Jameson had said he'd come by some outstanding pelts. Pelts of such quality that Jake would be willing to pay ten times the going price to have them. Out of the goodness of Jameson's heart and because of their long-standing business relationship, he was going to give Jake first crack at them.

Right.

But the old Piney gonif's genuine enthusiasm had intrigued Jake. Jameson was no bullshitter. Maybe he really had something unique. And maybe not.

This better be worth it
, he thought as he pulled open the barn door. He didn't have time to traipse down to the Jersey Pine Barrens on a wild goose chase.

The familiar odor of dried blood hit him as he opened the barn door. Not unexpected. Buy fresh pelts at the source for a while and you soon got used to the smell. What was unexpected was how cold it was in the barn. The lights were on but the wood stove was cold. Pelts would freeze if they stayed in this temperature too long.

Then he saw them – all lined up, all neatly nailed out on the stretching boards. The fur shimmered, reflecting glints of opalescence from the incandescent bulbs above and cold fire from the morning light pouring through the open door behind him. They were exquisite.
Magnificent!

Jake Feldman knew fur. He'd spent almost forty of his fifty-five years in the business, starting as a cutter and working his way up till he found the
chutzpah
to start his own factory. In all those years he had never seen anything like these pelts.

My God, Jameson, where did you get them and are there any more where these came from?

Jake approached the stretching boards and touched the pelts. He had to. Something about them urged his fingers forward. So soft, so shimmery, so incredibly beautiful. Jake had seen, touched, and on occasion even cut the very finest Siberian sable pelts from Russia. But they were nothing compared to these. These were beyond quality. These were beautiful in a way that was almost scary, almost...supernatural.

Then he saw the boots. Big, gore-encrusted rubber boots sticking out from under one of the stretching boards. Nothing unusual about that except for their position. They lay on the dirt floor with their toes pointing toward the ceiling at different angles, like the hands of a clock reading five after ten. Boots simply didn't lie like that...unless there were feet in them.

Jake bent and saw denim-sheathed legs running up from the boots. He smiled. One of the Jamesons – either old Jeb or young Gary. Jake bet on the elder. A fairly safe bet seeing as how old Jeb loved his Jersey lightning.

"Hey, old man," he said as he squeezed between two of the stretching boards to get behind. "What're you doing back there? You'll catch your death of–"

The rest of the sentence clogged in Jake's throat as he looked down at the corpse. All he could see at first was the red. The entire torso was drenched in clotted blood – the chest, the arms, the shoulders the – dear Lord, the head! There was almost nothing left of the head! The face and the whole upper half of the skull had been smashed to a red, oozing pulp from which the remnant of an eye and some crazily angled teeth protruded. Only a patch of smooth, clean-shaven cheek identified the corpse as Gary, not Jeb.

But who could have done this? And why? More frightening than the sight of the corpse was Jake's sudden grasp of the ungovernable fury behind all the repeated blows it must have taken to cave in Gary's head like that. With what – that baseball bat? And after pounding him so mercilessly, had the killer wrapped Gary's dead fingers around the murder weapon? What sick –?

Jeb! Where was old Jeb? Surely he'd had nothing to do with this!

Calling the old man's name, Jake ran back up to the house. His cries went unanswered. The back door was open. He stood on the stoop, calling out again. Only silence greeted him. The shack had an
empty
feel to it. That was the only reason Jake stepped inside.

It didn't take him long to find the bedroom. And what was left of Jeb.

A moment later Jake stood panting and retching in the stretch between the house and the barn.

Dead! Both dead!

More than dead – battered, crushed,
smeared!

...but those pelts. Even with the horrors of what he'd just seen raging through his mind, he couldn't stop thinking about those pelts.

Exquisite!

Jake ran to his car, backed it up to the barn door, popped the trunk. It took him a while but eventually he got all the pelts off the stretching boards and into his trunk. He found a couple of loose ones on the floor near Gary's body and he grabbed those too.

And then he roared away down the twin ruts that passed for a road in these parts. He felt bad about leaving the two corpses like that, but there was nothing he could do to help the Jamesons. He'd call the State Police from the Parkway. Anonymously.

But he had the pelts. That was the important thing.

And he knew exactly what he was going to do with them.

*

After getting the pelts safely back to his factory in New York's garment district, Jake immediately went about turning them into a coat. He ran into only one minor snag and that was at the beginning: The Orientals among his cutters refused to work with them. A couple of them took one look at the pelts and made a wide-eyed, screaming dash from the factory.

That shook him up for a little while, but he recovered quickly enough. Once he got things organized, he personally supervised every step: the cleaning and softening, the removal of the guard hairs, the letting-out process in which he actually took a knife in hand and crosscut a few pelts himself, just as he'd done when he started in the business; he oversaw the sewing of the let-out strips and the placement of the thousands of nails used in tacking out the fur according to the pattern.

With the final stitching of the silk lining nearing completion, Jake allowed himself to relax. Even unfinished, the coat –
That Coat
, as he'd come to call it – was stunning, unutterably beautiful. In less than an hour he was going to be the owner of the world's most extraordinary raccoon coat. Extraordinary not simply because of its unique sheen and texture, but because you couldn't tell it was raccoon. Even the cutters and tackers in his factory had been fooled; they'd agreed that the length of the hair and size of the pelts were similar to raccoon, but none of them had ever seen raccoon like this, or
any
fur like this.

Jake wished to hell he knew where Jameson had trapped them. He'd be willing to pay almost anything for a regular supply of those pelts. What he could sell those coats for!

But he had only one coat now, and he wasn't going to sell it. No way. This baby was going to be an exhibition piece. It was going to put Fell Furs on the map. He'd bring it to the next international show and blow the crowd away. The whole industry would be buzzing about That Coat. And Fell Furs would be known at the company with That Coat.

And God knew the company needed a boost. Business was down all over the industry. Jake couldn't remember furs ever being discounted as deeply as they were now. The animal lovers were having a definite impact. Well, hell, he was an animal lover too. Didn't he have a black lab at home?

But animal love stopped at the bottom line, bubby.

If he played it right, That Coat would turn things around for Fell Furs. But he needed the right model to strut it.

And he knew just who to call.

He sat in his office and dialed Shanna's home number. Even though she'd just moved, he didn't have to look it up. He knew it by heart already. He should have. He'd dialed it enough times.

Shanna...a middle-level model he'd seen at a fur show two years ago. The shoulder length black hair with the long bangs, the white skin and knockout cheekbones, onyx eyes that promised everything. And her body – Shanna had a figure that set her far apart from the other bean-poles in the field. Jake hadn't been able to get her out of his mind since. He wanted her but it seemed like a lost cause. He always felt like some sort of warty frog next to her, and she treated him like one. He'd approached her countless times and each of those times he'd been rebuffed. He didn't want to own her, he just wanted to be near her, to touch her and once in a while. And who knew? Maybe he'd grow on her.

At least now he had a chance. That Coat would open the door. This time would be different. He could feel it.

Her voice, soft and inviting, came on the line after the third ring.

"Yes?"

"Shanna, it's me. Jake Feldman."

"Oh." The drop in temperature within that single syllable spoke volumes. "What do you want, Jake?"

"I have a business proposition for you, Shanna."

Her voice grew even cooler. "I've heard your propositions before. I'm not the least –"

"This is straight down the line business," he said quickly. "I've got a coat for you. I want you to wear it at the international show next week."

"I don't know." She seemed the tiniest bit hesitant now. "It's been a while since I've done a fur show."

"You'll want to do them again when you see this coat. Believe me."

Maybe some of his enthusiasm for the coat was coming over the phone. Jake sensed a barely detectable thaw in her voice.

"Well...call the agency."

"I will. But I want you to see this coat first. You've got to see it."

"Really, Jake –"

"You've
got
to see it. I'll bring it right down."

He hung up before she could tell him no and hurried out to the work room. As soon as the last knot was tied in the last stitch he boxed it and headed for the door.

"What kind of coat you buy, Mister?" someone said as soon as he stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Oh, shit. Animal lovers. A bunch of them holding signs, milling around outside his showroom.

Somebody shoved a placard in his face:

The only one who can wear a fur

coat gracefully and beautifully

is the animal to whom it belongs.

"How many harmless animals were trapped and beaten to death to make it?" said a guy with a beard.

"Fuck off!" Jake said. "You're wearing leather shoes, aren't you?"

The guy smiled, "Actually, I'm wearing sneakers, but even if they were leather it wouldn't be for pure vanity. Cows are in the human food chain. Beavers, minks, and baby seals are not."

"So what?"

"It's one thing for animals to die to provide food – that's the law of nature. It's something entirely different to kill animals so you can steal their beauty by draping yourself with their skins. Animals shouldn't suffer and die to feed human vanity."

A chant began.

"Vanity! Vanity! Vanity...!"

Jake flipped them all the bird and grabbed a cab downtown.