The Town (36 page)

“Knock if off,” she said. “We have to decide how we’re going to handle this before he comes out.”

“I’ve already decided.”

“Gregory—”

“I’m going to beat some sense into him. Like I should have done a long time ago.”

“You are not.” Her voice was deadly serious and filled with a conviction he had not really heard from her before. “You are not going to lay a hand on that boy.”

He had not been entirely serious about his stated course of action, had said it more to irritate her than because he had any intention of doing it, and he found himself backing down in the face of her determined opposition. “We’ll ground him,” he conceded. “And we’ll give him a lecture and make sure he understands what he’s done.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

Behind them, the woman’s crying grew louder as the desk sergeant talked to her, and another couple walked into the station, an Indian man and a white woman, obviously the third boy’s parents.

Before them, the metal door opened, and a uniformed officer ushered a sick-looking Adam out into the lobby. The boy stared at the floor and would not meet his father’s eyes. Something about his son’s cowed, guilty passivity irked Gregory. Next to him, Julia started crying again. Adam seemed to shrink even further into himself.

He grabbed his son’s arm, squeezing hard, but though Adam grimaced, he did not cry out or complain. That was one point in the boy’s favor.

He looked down at his son, tried to rein in his anger. “Come on,” he said evenly. “We’re going home.”

He’d actually sold something today, and Jesse Tallfeather was feeling pretty good. Two hundred and twenty bucks for a combination birdbath-fountain in which the water cascaded down a rocky hill from the top of a cement saguaro cactus. It wouldn’t stave off the inevitable, but it might buy him another week or so. And at this point, that was about the best he could hope for.

He locked up the yard fence, then walked back into the statuary office to close out the register. The sun had passed over the mountains, and though the sky above was still blue, it was dark down here, and he flipped on the light in the office as he walked through the door.

The statue was standing directly in front of the cash register counter.

He stopped, feeling a sickening lurch in his stomach that he recognized as fear.

It was the statue of a man. A small man. A dwarf or a midget. In addition to its mysterious appearance, there was something disturbing about it, some irregularity in the features of the face that made him feel uneasy, and he thought of that day in the yard when the statues had moved. He’d successfully concentrated on the here and now since then, had not allowed himself to dwell on what he thought he’d seen that day, and had almost succeeded in convincing himself that it had not happened.

The statue had not been here five minutes ago, the last time he’d walked through. He looked around the small room, glanced out the windows, hoping to see someone running away, some practical joker who had placed the statue here, but there was no one.

He knew that already, though, didn’t he? No
person
had brought that statue to the office.

His first instinct was to run, to get away from the statuary as quickly as possible. He could leave, lock the door behind him, taking a chance that no one would break in and steal from the register in the middle of the night. Hopefully, in the morning, the statue would be gone. But even if it wasn’t, it would be a lot easier to deal with in the new light of day. And he would have the night to try and formulate some plan.

But what if he awoke at 3 A.M. to see the statue standing at the foot of his bed?

He shivered, feeling cold. He would lock up, he decided, then go talk to the chief and the council, tell them what was happening, bring them over to see—

The statue moved.

He sucked in his breath, holding it. It was only a wobble, a slight rocking of the pedestal base, but the movement was visible and unaided, and in the silence of the office, the creak of weighted cement on wood sounded as loud as a shotgun blast.

Jesse was frozen in place. He wanted to run, but fear kept him from it, and in a quickflash image, he saw in his mind an army of statues moving through the yard toward the office, where their leader waited. A glance out the window told him that was not so, but the feeling lingered, and the sky was getting dark, and he decided that the best course of action would be to get the hell out.

Behind him, the office door slammed shut. He had not closed it after walking in, and he was near enough that it hit the pinky edge of his left hand, the force of the contact making him cry out.

The statue laughed.

It wobbled again.

Jesse fumbled behind him for the doorknob, unwilling to take his eyes off the statue for even a second. The doorknob would not turn, and the statue lurched forward. There was no movement in its legs or stubby arms, no change in the cast expression on its disturbingly peculiar face. The entire object pushed itself across the wooden floor toward him, almost as though there were a person encased inside who was attempting to maneuver despite the limitations of cement imprisonment.

He looked around for some sort of weapon.

Nothing.

He had a toolbox behind the counter, and there was a hammer in it that he could use to smash the shit out of this damn thing, but the statue was between here and there, and though its movements were slow and jerky, he was afraid to go around it.

Logically, there was not much the statue could do to him even if it did reach him. It stood slightly higher than his waist, so he was much bigger than it was, and it could not move its arms. He could knock it down and it would not be able to get up.

But there was nothing logical here, and that reasoning did not apply.

He tried the door again. Still locked, still closed. The lights went off.

In the darkness, he heard the squeak of movement and the subtle lilt of laughter.

He jumped out the window.

Or rather he tried to. In his mind, during the second in which he’d come up with the idea and acted upon it, he’d seen himself leaping heroically, jumping out amid the broken glass, rolling on the dirt outside, running away to safety. But it was a double window, divided into two by a metal frame that slid open and shut on the right side. Even in his skinniest days, he’d been larger than the space it afforded him, and he jumped headfirst, hands out, feeling the pain in his fisted knuckles as they broke through the glass and were sliced, followed a split second later by even more excruciating pain as the glass cut into his face.

And then he stopped, his midsection denting the metal of the sliding right window but not breaking it. He was halted in midleap by the too-small frame digging into his gut and forcing the air out of him. The remaining shards of glass cut into his sides, slicing open skin and muscle, as his head and upper torso flopped over and smacked the outside office wall beneath the window.

From the stomach down, he was still inside the office. And he felt the statue shove itself between his spread legs.

The wind had been knocked out of him and he could not scream, but the force of the cement smashing into his groin tripled both the pain and the need to express his agony verbally, and he gasped like a fish, feeling like he was suffocating as the contradictory impulses that made him need to both scream and breathe collided somewhere in his airless lungs and throat.

His survival instinct was strong, however, and though he was still gulping air and exhaling it too quickly, his chest feeling as though it was about to burst, he marshaled enough of his senses to move his arms and legs. He kicked out at the statue at the same time he tried to position his hands against the bottom of the windowsill.

At least the statue was limited in its movements and could only lurch forward or backward. At least it was not truly sentient.

He tried to wiggle out, using his hands as leverage against the outside wall of the office.

And then he felt cement hands grabbing his feet and pulling him back inside. He kicked, struggled, tried to grab hold of the windowsill, but it was no use.

His death was slow.

Very slow.

And bloody.

It was the first concert she’d attended in nearly a month, and Deanna picked a seat that was near the front so she could see the performers, but next to one of the wooden posts so she wouldn’t have to share a table with anyone. Paul was going to be working the soundboard—the kid he’d hired part-time had called in sick—and she didn’t want to sit with anyone else.

The concert tonight was by a singer from Benson, an older woman heavily into Patsy Cline. She’d never really been a big Patsy Cline fan, and she doubted that she would like this woman all that much, but Paul had been so loving, caring, and attentive the past few days that she wanted to reward him, and when he’d asked her to come and help fill out what was sure to be a less-than-sellout crowd, she had happily obliged.

Besides, she didn’t want to break this mood, and she figured the best way to keep it rolling was to spend as much time as possible with him.

They’d had a little makeout session in his office before the singer and her band showed up. Paul had wanted to do it on the floor, but she’d drawn the line at that. The floor was filthy, and despite their desire, they weren’t the hormone-enraged adolescents they had been in high school. They could wait until later to consummate their evening. It had been a hot and heavy petting zoo in the office, however, and they’d both come out feeling high. Even though they
were
adults, it still got the juices flowing to be doing something slightly forbidden, and she was already planning what would happen when they got home.

Around her, the seats began filling. Either the singer or Patsy had a bigger fan vase in McGuane than Paul had thought, and pretty soon nearly all of the chairs and tables were taken. Only two waitresses were working tonight, and they were earning their pay, taking and filling orders that would have kept four girls running.

Deanna sipped her coffee. She was glad things were back on an even keel. It had been a rough couple of weeks. She didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t know what had happened between them, but there’d been a chill, a kind of emotional estrangement, and they’d fought a lot, for no reason, though it never seemed to be the fault of either of them.

Julia had seemed somewhat distant lately, too, and it occurred to her that the problem lay with herself, not her husband or her friends. She was the nucleus around which this was occurring, and it was only logical to assume that she was somehow the cause.

But she knew that was not the case. She seldom listened to gossip or rumor, and almost never believed it, but she was not deaf, and she knew that there were a lot of problems in McGuane right now. Interpersonal problems as well as . . . other things.

And she was not the cause of that.

She didn’t know what was.

But it made her uneasy.

The lights dimmed, and Deanna looked over her shoulder, saw Paul at the soundboard. She gave a little wave, and he smiled and waved back.

The stage lights clicked on, and to the applause of the audience a slightly overweight woman with a lined but pretty face led a group of guys along the open aisle next to the wall and onto the stage.

“Howdy!” the woman announced. “I’m Linette Daniels, and this here’s my band, the Crazies!”

There was a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, a fiddler, and a pedal-steel player, and they immediately ripped into a typically turbocharged version of “Orange Blossom Special.” Linette did a little buck dance, to the delight of the crowd, and then the musicians downshifted into “She’s Got You” and she started singing.

The woman did a fair Patsy Cline impression, Deanna thought, but it was precisely because of that that her interest began to wander. The monotonous whining and yelping was as off-putting coming from this woman as it had been from Patsy herself, and Deanna found herself reverting to crowd-gazing. There were quite a few people here that she knew, but an equal number that she didn’t. She watched a grossly overweight man awkwardly attempt to dance with a lithe little teenager who looked like his daughter but was obviously his wife or girlfriend. A small section of the café had been cleared and set aside for dancing, but they were the only two on the floor. Her attention wandered to a skinny cowboy sitting alone next to the stage who had what was without a doubt the longest neck she’d ever seen on a human being. He made Audrey Hepburn look like Stubby Kaye, and his head was rocking back and forth in time to the music, flopping around on that huge neck like a plum on the end of a bendable straw.

It was a peculiar-looking crowd, and she was having fun just watching the offstage show when her gaze alighted on something that made her heart skip a beat.

A shadow.

It was short, squat, almost simian, and she watched it scuttle along the edge of the crowd toward the side of the stage. It was not flat, like an ordinary shadow, but seemed to be three-dimensional, as though it was a being in its own right, which was appropriate, because there seemed to be no original source to which it corresponded.

The shadow started to climb up the metal rigging to the right of the stage, and she saw that it
was
a self-contained entity. There were no ties to anything else. Its form ended at its feet.

The figure climbed hand over hand until it was at the top of the rigging near the ceiling, but no one else seemed to be looking at it. Even those audience members who weren’t intently watching the singer and her band had not noticed the shadow. Deanna looked quickly around, checked out the waitresses. They were busy running back and forth between the tables and the counter, and they had not spotted it either.