Ghouls (5 page)

“Who?”

“Morris, that
pencilneck
cop.”

Vicky frowned and reached for her cigarettes. “No.”

“Tell me the truth, girl.”

“I haven’t seen Kurt in weeks. What makes you think I ‘got something going’ with him?”

“I ran into him today, and he was
givin
’ me a hard time, as usual, the weed. He’s always
askin
’ shit about you.”

Vicky smiled within herself. “Well, I told you. I haven’t seen him.” She lit a cigarette, leaned back on the couch, and drew. “Where have you been all day?”

“
Huntin
’, with Jory and Mac.” This, of course, was a lie. He’d only been hunting for the last hour or so. Lenny did all his hunting at night.

“One day you’ll go too far, Lenny,” she said. “Deer season ended in December. And besides, there’s a difference between hunting and poaching.”

”Aw, it’s a dipshit law, anyway. This way, we save a bundle on food expenses.
Wait’ll
you see the ten-point buck I got. I’ll bet that sucker weighs close to two hundred. We just got done dressing it.”

Lenny smirked. It was obvious that Vicky didn’t share in his delight over bringing home a deer. He stood still, and was squinting at her again in the white, cold light from the kitchen. He noticed, finally, the dried tears that streaked her cheeks. “What you been
cryin
’ about?”

She looked away from him and swallowed. “Brutus died.”

She expected a fake response from him at least. Lenny had always been indifferent about the collie; he’d never gone out of his way to be nice to Brutus, but then he’d never been mean to the animal, either. He said nothing. He looked at the shape of the animal’s corpse at Vicky’s feet, then reached down to pick the dog up.

“What are you going to do?”

“Gotta get him outa here,” he said. “I’ll take him behind the bowling alley and leave him in the dumpster.”

“You will not.
That dog’s been with me for fifteen years, and if you think you’re going to toss him into some damn garbage dumpster, then you better think again.” More tears began to fill her eyes, and she felt a rare kind of rage that was dangerous in that house. “Sometimes I just can’t believe you, Lenny. You’re a miserable, insensitive bastard.”

“You better watch that mouth, girl,” he said, and pointed a finger at her. “I got a mind to clout you upside the head.”

“Well, do it then, I don’t give a shit!” she shouted at him, and the tears were flowing freely now, her words hollow and stilted. She knew he would hit her under any other circumstance but wouldn’t now because her defiance and grief had reduced the threat to something feeble. “I’ll get rid of him myself,” she heard herself say a few seconds later.

He remained there a while longer, perhaps puzzled that anyone could harbor such feelings for a dog. “Now I’m sorry your dog died, but you gotta be re-
listic
about all this. You take care of it soon; we don’t want the house full up with flies. You hear?”

Her head between her knees, Vicky nodded.

“Okay, then,” he said. He disappeared up the stairs.

Vicky continued to sob faintly. Her face was swollen and red around the eyes, and she realized she was crying not only for the loss of her pet, but also for the graceless plummet her life had taken. She picked the dog up heavily in her arms and pushed through the screen door to the backyard. The night air was cool and crisp, the darkness, again, comforting. The grass underfoot felt strangely moist, like cool oil. She took the animal to the limits of the yard and continued a few steps into the woods itself, where she laid the dog down on the forest ground. She took a moment to breathe in the night scents of the woods. Then she plodded back toward the toolshed to search for the shovel.

— | — | —

CHAPTER THREE

One good thing about the four-to-midnight shift was the luxury of sleeping late. Generally, Kurt turned in at one in the morning and got up at eight or nine, so the luxury was more or less false; but he enjoyed the principle. He simply got up when he’d had sufficient rest, eliminating any need for alarm clocks—things he’d been known to demolish back in his college days. Once he’d winged a Baby Ben out of his dorm window, a six-story trip onto cement. A week later his roommate had retrieved it, and it still worked.

Kurt got out of bed and stood up, stretching, wearing only briefs. At the height of his stretch, the door opened, and his twelve-year-old cousin, Melissa, leaned in, grinning like an evil kewpie doll. “Brad Pitt you ain’t,” she said.

“
Roachface
! Get out of here!” he yelled. “Can’t a guy even stand around in his underwear without being eyeballed by little stinkbugs like you? Next time knock…and then
don’t
come in. I could’ve been nude.”

“Too bad you weren’t. Then I could take pictures with Daddy’s camera and blackmail you.”

“Blackmail, hell. With my terrific body, you’d be able to sell them for a hundred bucks apiece.”

“Yeah, in Monopoly money.”

Kurt wished for a can of whipped cream. That would teach her. “Now that you’ve successfully invaded my privacy, what do you want?”

“I just came to tell you that breakfast is ready. Pardon me.”

Kurt brightened; never before had Melissa cooked him breakfast. “Oh, okay,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

After a shower and shave, he put on his traditional off-duty garb—bleach-spotted jeans, jogging shoes (though he never jogged), and a golf shirt from Crofton Country Club (though he’d quit golf years ago when it became apparent he’d never break 110; he broke a lot of clubs, at any rate).

He rented the north bedroom of his uncle Roy’s house, an old, big ramshackle place with gables and ivy trellises, situated down on the south end of the Route. Right now, Uncle Roy was away for two weeks, bear hunting in Canada. Uncle Roy went bear hunting in Canada every spring, for as long as Kurt could recall, and not once had he ever shot or even seen a bear. Kurt wondered if they even had bears in Canada, and was by now seriously doubting that they did.

The room cost him $350 a month, which he paid more out of charity than obligation. The floor creaked wherever he stepped, like a witch’s laugh; and the plumbing made very rude noises at night that reminded him of someone with gastrointestinal problems. It wasn’t exactly the London
Metropol
, but at least he didn’t have to listen to the orgies and baby wails of the south end apartments. He’d arranged the room with a stamp-metal desk (fifteen big ones at a garage sale in Bowie), an eternally unmade bed (why go to the trouble of making your bed just to mess it up again a few hours later? was Kurt’s philosophy), and a large exhaust-blue dresser Uncle Roy had given him after being turned away with it at Goodwill Industries. Kurt had no stereo; music today seemed chic, sexist
ripoffs
of older music that sounded better. Nor did he own a television set, which dumbfounded everyone he knew; but he was certain he could live quite nicely without
The World’s Biggest Losers
and
Cupcake Wars.

Goading aromas of fried eggs and bacon lured him downstairs. Melissa sat up at the kitchen counter, seemingly entranced by a picture of Brad Pitt in
People.
Melissa was Uncle Roy’s only offspring, a fact Kurt thanked God for on a regular basis. She’d been raised by Roy himself (her mother had run off with a tall, blond meter man from the gas company over a decade ago. This Uncle Roy had reacted to as no great loss. (“Some knockers,” he’d often commented to Kurt, “but less smarts than your average ten-pound bag of fertilizer.”) which caused a few to wonder. Roy was the kind of guy who put pine bark mulch in the coffeepot for laughs. Melissa was worse. She was a catty, tomboyish little horror with an infuriating sense of humor and who managed to keep out of mischief only when she was asleep. A genuine million laughs. Once she’d been sent home from school for putting frogs’ eggs on the homeroom teacher’s chair. The teacher had had the viscid misfortune of discovering this
after
he sat down. Another time she had actually been suspended for throwing a Dolly Madison blueberry pie clear across the cafeteria. Quite an arm for a little girl. The pie had splattered spectacularly over the vice principal’s right breast.

Kurt stopped halfway into the kitchen. Were his eyes deceiving him? It must be a joke. Melissa was smoking a cigarette as she read her magazine. Without looking up, she reached forward and tapped an ash. In a flash of rage, he snatched it from her and crushed it out.

“Hey, you
pud
!” she protested.

“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?”

“Reading about Brad,” she replied.

“I mean
this,
”
Kurt growled. He held the stubbed butt up to her face.

“It’s a cigarette. So what.”

This was too much. “So what? Did I hear you right? Did you say
so what?
Don’t you know that cigarettes
kill
people?” Unconsciously, Kurt lit a cigarette of his own and continued to scold her. “Only fools smoke, Melissa. Only people out of their minds.”

“That much I can believe.”

“Now, if you were an adult, that’d be different. Adults can smoke if they want; it’s their choice. Men and women can smoke. But not kids, not twelve-year-olds.”

“How old were you when you first started smoking?”

Kurt didn’t answer. He’d been twelve. Eventually he said, “Until you’re old enough, you’ll do as you’re told. That’s just the way it is. When I was a kid, I had to do as I was told, whether I liked it or not. The same goes for you. My God, Melissa Morris smoking… Uncle Roy would go through the roof. Young lady, if I ever catch you smoking again, I’ll push your face in a cow cake, a nice, big ripe one. Green inside.”

“Aw, go shove off,” she said, turning back to the magazine.

“I’ll shove
you
off, smart mouth. Right off the Eastport water tower.” He stopped again, tilting his head, suddenly aware of something not right. He leered at her suspiciously, his voice thick as clay. “Hey, wait a minute. Why aren’t you in school?”

“It’s spring break, Einstein. I’d look pretty stupid sitting in class all by myself.”

Oh, no. It couldn’t be. A solid week with this public threat, and Uncle Roy away, too. This was the worst news since the Redskins lost the Super Bowl.

Melissa smiled.

“Okay,” he said. He guessed he could live with it. Maybe. He stepped around the corner and for the third time was stopped in his tracks. Dirty dishes lay stacked in the sink, the frying pan full of suds. The stove was empty. “I thought you said breakfast was ready.”

“I do remember saying that, yes.”

Kurt looked around, temper raging. “Then where’s the goddamned food?”

Melissa calmly turned the page, a second shot of Stallone pretending not to be flexing his pectorals. “I didn’t say
your
breakfast was ready. I just said breakfast was ready, and it was. And it was very good. Happy trails, sucker.”

Kurt stormed out, awash in mental images of murder. He wondered how Uncle Roy had stayed sane this long, saddled for twelve years with that little Beelzebub incarnate. She should be locked in an outhouse for life.

As always before leaving the house off duty, he strapped on his De-
Santis
speed scabbard, one of the lesser known ”pancake’’-type holsters, stuffed full by a Smith & Wesson model 65. Over this he wore an old blue Peters jacket, which sufficiently concealed the Smith and De-
Santis
. In summertime, when jackets weren’t feasible, he sacrificed firepower for comfort and carried a small Beretta .22. He didn’t argue with what they all referred to as “The Nix”; he always carried off duty, knowing that he would never need to. He also knew that the day he
didn’t
carry would be the day they’d knock over Bank of America with him in it.