Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (17 page)

“Brad’s come back for me,” Diana said, getting into the car.

A Barry White–deep voice came on the line. “Hello, neighbor.” The gangster got a kick out of his recent move to a Haddonfield mansion from his old Camden row house. “Are we good for tomorrow? Or are we bad?”

The confidence in Stagg’s voice faltered. “The U.S. Attorney has nothing to link you and me and Salem Turnpike. This is a crock. Javers can’t—”

“Enough, neighbor,” Mister Man said. “I be checking, is all.”

“While you’re at it, check where my money is. My banker in Luxembourg says not one red cent has arrived this month from you.”

Like Brad, Mister Man was ruffled by nothing and no one. “Always with you and the money. Brad Acton never mentioned the money. He had class up the ass. Neighbor, you not just a freeholder. You a freeloader.”

“Well said. Brad the classy guy. What an original viewpoint. Now if that will be all, I need to take my wife…”

“I got me another reason to call. We got us a problem.”

“Where’s Brad?” Diana called from the passenger seat.

Stagg sagged. “Oh, no. Now what?”

“That crazy-mother white-trash boy of yours, the one with the no-show job on the county road crew.” The drug lord sounded angry. “That drunken hunk of human garbage named Joe Dogan. He be in one of my bars in H Town today, Skanky’s, pointing his piece at my peeps like he the Frito Bandito. Customers and bartender went running. Then he aimed the gun at two little kids. Can you believe that?”

“Oh, Lord. Not Dogan.” Stagg shook his head. “Fine. I’ll give him hell. Again.”

“I know Dogan took care of our problem with Brad Acton, neighbor. But I am sick of his presence on this earth. I’m not gonna give him hell, I’m gonna send him to hell. I mean, little kids?”

“Do what you want with him. I’m tired of Dogan, too.”

When Stagg settled his copious behind into the driver’s seat, he saw that Diana was smiling and humming.

“I’m glad you’re back in a good mood, Diana.”

“He said he’d come to the house tonight.” Diana’s strange grin widened. “He looks wonderful. Brad is back. I am very, very happy.”

The moon was a tight, white fist overhead. By nightfall, Joe Dogan was getting very frustrated, not to mention very drunk. He sat on a bench in a deserted park by the Cooper River. A full six-pack of beer was beside him, sweating, still cold. The other six-pack was almost gone. Only one can remained in its plastic yoke.

Cursing, he fished his phone out of his pocket, and for the umpteenth time, stabbed redial. He got Stagg’s cell-phone voice mail, as usual. “Call me back, you fat sack of crap,” Dogan snarled. He’d left the identical message the time before, and the time before that.

Stagg had told Dogan never to contact him unless there was
an emergency, like the cops asking about Brad Acton’s death, or if Dogan got into a jam that would interest the law. And Dogan was never to go to where Stagg lived. A year ago, that had been in a garden apartment in Cherry Hill. Now, Dogan knew from the scuttlebutt, Stagg lived in Acton’s palatial house and was married to the widow. What a babe like Diana Acton saw in a piglet like Robert Stagg was beyond Dogan.

“Must have a wart on the end of it,” Dogan muttered as he popped open the last brewski in his first six-pack.

Wait. In his wallet. He had a scrap of paper with Brad Acton’s home phone number. It was unlisted. Stagg had given him the number a year ago, so he could call and be sure Acton was home.

Dinner was a horror show. The latest cook refused to set a place for Brad. When Diana screamed at her—for not whipping up Brad’s favorite dessert, peach cobbler—the woman stormed out.

Stagg tried to settle Diana down in front of the TV in the cinema-large entertainment center. A Discovery Channel show on hunting was playing; a deer fled through the woods with baying hounds in pursuit. But she wouldn’t stop chattering about Brad’s miraculous return to life.

Stagg tried to watch the show. But her comments grew more and more irritating. “Brad was the loveliest man” and “you have no money, really.”

“I make plenty of money.”

“How? All you ever did was puppy-dog behind Brad.” She gave a brittle laugh. “Oh, I know. You are taking bribes. From that gangster who moved to Haddonfield. That’s why the mean man in the bow tie wants to put you in prison.”

Slumping even deeper into the huge, overstuffed chair, Stagg said, “Diana, maybe you should go to bed. Have you taken your meds?”

This behavior was new. She’d been mostly lethargic in recent months. The doctor said to be careful if she became delusional. The risk of suicide was small, but couldn’t be shrugged off. Stagg kept the kitchen knives locked up. Ditto the German Luger, which Brad’s father had brought back from World War II.

“Since Brad is back, we should get our marriage annulled. I can’t be married to you. You aren’t Brad. I only married you because I needed someone to take care of me. But you are nothing.”

“How thoughtful of you to say. I’m going outside.”

“Brad will take care of me again.”

Stagg fetched a large sweater and poured himself a modest measure of Chivas. It was a bit chilly on the patio, but better than listening to her insanity.

He sloshed scotch around in his tumbler, standing next to the empty pool with its dead-leaf-coated bottom. The plastic rope with the floats, which divided the deep end from the shallow, lay coiled on the greening lawn like a dead snake.

Stagg’s memory fell back to high school days. Brad always had a pool party here for the football team. Stagg, as team manager, was also invited. Senior year, to everyone’s delight, Brad and Denny swung little Stagg by his ankles and wrists, and tossed him into the pool. Stagg couldn’t swim. That was even funnier.

The night after that party, Stagg stayed hidden among the trees and spied on Brad and Diana, the virgin queen of Haddonfield High. It was the apex of his life up to then, seeing Brad deflower lovely, naked Diana, poolside.

Another big, world-beating memory: how, tending to the stunned Diana in the wake of Brad’s death, he brought her groceries in on a night as starkly moonlit as this one. How Diana rose from the swimming pool, water glistening on her bare skin, her forty-year-old body as taut as a teenager’s.

How under that hunters’ moon, she had smiled at him. Diana, naked for him. That night was the true apex.

Diana’s shrill cry broke the reverie. She stood in the French doors to the study. “You have a phone call.”

Stagg trundled inside. The landline phone display read Joe Dogan. Wonderful. That dirtbag must have kept the unlisted number from a year ago. “What do you want?”

Diana was climbing the stairs. “I’m tired. Wake me up when Brad comes.”

Dogan had ingested his usual royal portion of spirits. “You gotta help me out.”

Had Dogan heard that he was on Mister Man’s priority boarding list for evacuation from the planet? “I’m getting sick of this, you idiot.”

“You think you’re smarter than everyone,” Dogan slurred. “Well, I’m not the idiot. You’re the idiot.”

“Brilliant comeback,” Stagg said. “Repartee worthy of Dorothy Parker.”

“Never met the bitch,” Dogan said. “We got a problem,”

“
We
do, huh? Let me guess. You got another drunk-driving arrest on that stupid motorcycle, and I have to fix things with the cops. No, your supervisor on the county road crew called, and you told him you’d kill his children if he didn’t back off. No, you were drunk and groping women at T.G.I. Friday’s happy hour, and one called the cops. I’ve bailed you out so many times for so much asinine behavior that I’m losing track.”

With a moan, Dogan said, “Have you seen him?”

“Who?”

“Brad Acton came to me in a bar in H Town this afternoon. He said he wanted to see us. Both. Tonight.”

Stagg sighed. “My wife had the same hallucination. Her, high on meds. You, high on booze. Astute observers, the two of you.”

“He was real, man. I mean, not like a ghost. I couldn’t, like, see through him.”

“I can see through you. You are a serious alcoholic. Go get dried out.”

“He knew how much you paid me to do him. Plus, the no-show job on the county roads. How could he know that?”

“Because it is in your drink-addled head. Today is the anniversary. It brings back the trauma, makes you imagine things. You don’t have to be Freud to understand that.”

“He knew you are gonna get a barbed-wire enema from the feds. Mister Man pays you off, Stagg. Everybody knows it.”

“You know nothing,” Stagg snarled. “Brad was ten times as dirty as me. He came from family money, but wanted more. He introduced me to Mister Man. Then when Javers came sniffing around, Brad wanted me to be the fall guy. He wanted me to take Mister Man down, too.”

“I remember every minute from a year ago.”

“Meantime, King Brad stays simon-pure. Well, ha-ha, Brad. For the first time in your pampered life, you lost.”

Dogan didn’t seem to be listening anymore. “I tell you, he seemed like flesh and blood. Like you and me. I bet I could put another bullet in him, and that’d be that.”

“Check yourself into rehab, you cretin.”

“I don’t want to face him alone tonight, man.”

Stagg slammed the phone down.

A wind came up and blew about the budding branches of the ghostly trees. Winter and summer warred in the sudden draft off the river, and Dogan shivered. What was he doing sitting here like a frozen pond toad?

Dogan got on his bike and blasted away from the riverfront park. In a jiffy, his Harley’s loud engine was invading the smooth, quiet roads of Haddonfield, Brad Acton’s hometown. In Haddonfield, trees flower first, and their perfume seeped down from the elegant mosaic of branches that covered the old lanes.

The Harley brayed down King’s Highway, the town’s main street, where subtly lit colonial storefronts displayed chic clothing and leather goods. Tomorrow, the slender, blond women of the marvelous men of Haddonfield would float past those storefronts, browsing, blasé.

A year had gone by and beer had fuzzed his thinking, hence Dogan took a while to find Brad Acton’s house. He clattered through the lovely streets until he saw the right landmarks. Left at the three-century-old church, right at the giant white-board mansion, left onto Cypress Avenue.

Front yard carriage lamps shed soft glows on the brick and flagstone walkways flowing from the smooth road to the fine wood doors that guarded the aristocratic stone houses. Through the latticed windows of those handsome homes came the lamplight of the Haddonfield elite, who ran the world.

Acton’s house, though, lay in darkness. Girded by vigilant firs, watched over by towering oaks, it seemed almost uninhabited. Then Dogan saw the two cars parked to the side: Stagg’s Volvo and Diana Acton’s Jaguar. He killed the bike’s motor and dismounted.

It had been a year ago, around midnight. About now, his watch said.

He couldn’t stand there forever, hypnotized by the house, the night, the clock. Dogan walked cautiously up the sloping, well-barbered lawn, bathed in intense moonglow. The wind, a devilish mix of warm and cold, made small gasps among the trees’ flowers.

A shadow shimmered among the tree trunks. Dogan gave a start and yelped. He yanked his .45 out of his coat pocket, tearing more fabric. “Killed you once, I’ll kill you twice, bastard,” he said through bared teeth.

His gun moved in small semicircles, pointed at where the movement had been, as he marched up the lawn. With his at
tention fixed on the trees, he missed seeing the ankle-high miniwall bisecting the lawn in front of him. Dogan went down hard, swearing.

Hell, last year, making this same approach, he’d tripped on the miniwall. He had been drunker then, but this couldn’t be a coincidence.

The wind came again, colder now, and enveloped him with a harsh sense of dread. Was he reliving the same night from a year ago?

The castlelike front door loomed in front of him. Dogan punched the doorbell button, and heard sweet chimes inside. As he had a year ago.

He hit the button again. As he had a year ago.

Somehow, he smelled burnt gunpowder. As he had a year ago.

Stagg had clumped wearily up the stairs, left his clothes on the floor of his dressing room and climbed into his pajamas. He heaved into the broad bed, where Diana lay, asleep. Good. No more nonsense from her. He had barely slipped into sleep’s welcome oblivion when the doorbell chimes rang. Repeatedly.

Diana was screaming. “Don’t go down there, Brad. Don’t go.”

He was fully awake. “I’m Robert, dammit.”

Finally, Dogan heard footsteps beyond the door. A muffled voice asked him who he was and what he wanted. Just like a year ago.

He replied the same. “It’s me. Joe Dogan. Robert’s guy. It’s about Mister Man.”

An inside light went on. The bolt slid open. The door swung inward. A man was in the threshold.

Brad Acton stood there, in his nice suit, with his nice hair, smiling. No one could smile like Brad.

Dogan raised the gun and pulled the trigger. The first shot
splattered that handsome head. He pumped bullet after bullet into the body, as it lay on the Persian rug.

He stumbled down the lawn. He needed a drink. Was he out of beer?

A Mercedes slid to the curb, beside the parked Harley. A large black man, in a white suit and fedora, climbed out. He glanced at the motorcycle, then spotted Joe Dogan weaving toward him. Joe carried a gun. In the moonlight, Mister Man could see the slide was back and the weapon was empty.

“I’m on my way home and I see that this human garbage has blown into Haddonfield. They don’t allow your punk-ass kind here.”

“I killed Brad again,” Dogan said.

“Do tell. A lotta killing going around.”

Mister Man pulled his Glock out of its shoulder holster and blew a large hole in worthless Joe Dogan’s chest. The fool fell backward onto Brad Acton’s fine lawn and began to bleed on it.

Mister Man turned to his car, then stopped when he glimpsed the silhouette of a man up in the Acton house. A tall man standing in an upstairs window, taking in all that had happened on the moon-bright lawn. A witness.