When Jimbo saw the lights still on at the police station, he pulled over and killed the engine. Not much waited at home except an exhausted Margie and her endless grieving, a son too occupied with his computer to communicate with his parents, and a house that was one son shy of a home.
He saw those lights at the police station and hoped that it wasn’t Sheriff Withens in there burning the midnight oil. Jimbo and the sheriff got along just fine, but it wasn’t the older man’s company he wanted to keep. Jimbo thought that hefting a few beers might be a good thing to do, and he’d like to do it with Paulie Timmins. He hadn’t been out drinking with anybody, much less Paulie, in what seemed like years. Jimbo was ready for a boys’ night out.
Paulie had been a fullback on the White Pines Junction High School football team, and he hadn’t ever lost any of that size. Nor, at thirty-three years old, had he put on any fat. Jimbo didn’t know how Paulie did it, but then Jimbo sat behind the editor’s desk at the newspaper all day now that he had a reporter to do the running around, and he had definitely gained a few. But Paulie, in his tailored police uniform, still looked fit and trim.
“Jimbo!” Paulie looked up when he heard the door open, and the smile on his face was genuine. Jimbo’s heart immediately warmed. This was a good idea.
“Thought maybe you’d be up for a few beers, Paulie,” Jimbo said. “It’s been too long.”
“Bear with me a few minutes while I finish up this paperwork,” Paulie said, “and we’ll go do just that.”
Jimbo relaxed in Sheriff Withens’ big, loose desk chair, and swiveled back and forth while Paulie shuffled papers. He picked up the phone to let Margie know he’d be home late, and left a message on the answering machine. He suggested that she take Jason out for a burger or something so she wouldn’t have to cook. He was still mindlessly swiveling back and forth when Paulie spoke.
“You look bored and sad, my friend.”
Jimbo looked up and gave what felt like a wan smile.
“I know what you need, and it ain’t no beer.”
Jimbo raised an eyebrow. Paulie knew Jimbo would never fool around on Margie, so it had to be something legal as well as exciting.
“I’m going to change,” Paulie said, grabbed his gym bag and went into the men’s room. When he came out, he wore jeans and a gray T-shirt stretched tight over his muscled chest. He picked up his car keys from the desktop. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll drive.”
Paulie had a tricked-out muscle truck, a big Chev pickup with plenty of horsepower and an oversized bed. He popped in a CD of some new music Jimbo hadn’t ever heard, and they headed out into the night. Jimbo felt young again. He felt the years of responsibility, grief, and routine melt away. He didn’t envy Paulie’s single lifestyle, but he realized he needed to revisit those carefree days, if only for an hour or so now and then.
Paulie took a few familiar turns out on the county roads and then pulled inside the gate that never closed, the one to the county dump. He stopped about fifty feet from the edge of the debris, turned off the lights and engine, turned off the music, and they sat in the quiet, in the dark.
“The dump? That’s what you think I need?”
“Not the dump itself,” Paulie said, and pulled a gun case from behind his seat. “Target practice.”
Jimbo shook his head. It had been ten years, maybe fifteen since he’d been shooting rats at the dump for fun. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do it anymore. But he was along for the ride, and what did it hurt?
The Vargas County Landfill was a sight to behold in the daylight. It started out as an enormous pit, an acre or more in size, and had been filled over the years to a gigantic mound. The snow fences around it were covered with paper and plastic bags that had been blown off the top of the stack. In the daylight, it was full of crows and other raucous scavenger birds. In the night, the rats ruled. Big as pups, they had been moving targets for pubescent boys since probably long before Jimbo was born. But he didn’t know that grown men still took pot shots at them.
Jimbo watched Paulie load the clip with a single .22 round, talking easily the whole time. “The rats are smart,” he said. “You won’t have a second chance.” He handed the gun to Jimbo. “I’ll turn on the headlights, and you nail one. If you can.”
Jimbo opened his window and leaned out, feeling the heft of the gun in his hand. It was a lightweight thing, surely no kick at all. He’d been challenged. And he was up for a challenge. Hey, he thought, this might be fun.
Paulie hit the headlights, and a thousand pair of eyes turned to look at them. Jimbo took careful aim at the king of the heap, a big fat thing, but he missed. He kept clicking, wishing the clip was full. But it wasn’t. He had used up his chance.
The gun emptied, the headlights went out, Jimbo pulled back inside the cab and Paulie rolled up the window. “That was pitiful,” Paulie said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jimbo said, feeling a little adrenaline rush. “It was fun.”
Paulie nodded and reloaded one round. “How are things at home?” he asked.
“Okay, I guess. We’ll get past it.”
“It’s been, what, a year since Micah disappeared?”
“Seven months.”
“Takes a while,” Paulie said. “I guess.”
“Yeah.”
“Margie doing okay? You two getting along?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“And vice versa, I suppose.”
“I hope. Jason’s doing better, too. We’ve all got the guilt, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“What about you?” Jimbo asked. “Dating?”
“Nah. Think I’ll be single all my life. Don’t think a woman is what I need.”
“Really?” Jimbo was amazed. “You gay?”
“Nope. Just not much interested.”
“Wow,” Jimbo said. “Margie’s my best friend. My partner. I can’t imagine not having her. Or someone in that role. You know. Cook. Sex. Laugh at The Simpsons.”
“Maybe if I had it, I’d miss it,” Paulie said, “but I do all right on my own. Now watch.”
He opened his window and the dump smell came back in. He turned on the headlights and popped a big rat at the edge of the trash. Paulie smiled at Jimbo, turned off the headlights and rolled up the window.
Instead of reloading, Paulie fired up his big truck and slowly backed away from their target area.
“That’s it?” Jimbo asked, disappointed.
“That’s it.”
“I was just warming up.”
“Save it. We’ll do it again another time.”
Jimbo smiled. Paulie had been right. He felt a hundred percent better, and he was ready to go home to Margie and Jason.
The next night, Jimbo just happened to drive by the police station, and was disappointed when he didn’t see Paulie’s truck out front. The office was dark. Jimbo was surprised at how disappointed he was. He thought about going out to the dump himself. Maybe Paulie was out there.
Nah. He’d better go on home. They’d do that again some other time.
The next night he stopped in again, but Paulie didn’t seem interested. He was preoccupied, and Jimbo felt silly for even suggesting such a juvenile pastime with such earnestness.
That night, too, he went home, but when Margie reached for him in the dark, he had nothing of himself to give her. He was busy thinking about all those rats and how he wanted to nail just one. Just one.
The next day, he took a walking lunch break and wandered on down to Doc’s. Doc had the tackle shop, and in the back he sold a few weapons. A couple of handguns, a couple of hunting rifles, a couple of shotguns was all he had, but he could order anything.
“Thinking about a .22 pistol, Doc,” Jimbo said. “Been wanting to do a little target practice.”
Doc locked up the cash drawer and Jimbo followed him through the store, past the mounted Muskie in a glass case, past the rows of tackle, past the live wells full of bait fish, to the door marked “Office.” Inside, Doc dialed the combination on the big steel safe, opened it and brought out a blue plastic box with S&W embossed on its top.
“Semi-automatic, perfect for target practice. You going to be taking Jason out?”
“Yeah,” Jimbo said.
“Perfect gun for a kid to learn on.”
“Smith and Wesson, eh?”
Doc nodded.
Jimbo ran the action back and forth a few times, figuring how it all went together. “Great,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
Doc closed up the safe, and they went out in front to fill out the requisite paperwork. Jimbo bought a couple of boxes of rounds, and when he left the tackle shop, he had a very scary feeling of power in his gut.
Back in his office, he loaded the gun and put it in his desk drawer, just like in the movies. He had a loaded gun in his desk. It kind of scared him. All day long it pulled at his consciousness. He was never unaware that he had a loaded gun within reach. He liked the eerie feeling.
He called Margie and told her he’d be home late, and then fabricated work to do until the sun went down. Then he took his loaded gun out of his desk drawer, stuck it in his jacket pocket, got in his car and headed for the dump.
Paulie’s truck was parked where they had parked before.
Jimbo turned off his headlights a fair distance away, coasted to a stop and turned off the engine. He walked over to Paulie’s truck, but there was nobody in the cab.
It was creepy, being out there in the silent dark, the night obscuring the stench of the garbage. He heard the rustling of the vermin in the acre of trash, and didn’t know what to make of Paulie’s disappearance.
And then Jimbo saw him, by the light of the moon, just standing, bent like an old man, head down, a good hundred yards away, and a fair distance into the dump itself. He walked over, and Paulie didn’t twitch a muscle, not until Jimbo got right next to him and said, “Paulie? What’s up?”
A rat lay dead at Paulie’s feet, a small rat. Paulie nudged it with the toe of his tennis shoe.
“Got’cha one, eh? Good going,” Jimbo said, mystified at Paulie’s behavior.
“Yep,” Paulie said. “Got me my quota.”
They stood there for a long moment, then Paulie lifted his head. “Gotta go,” he said, “gotta go see my sister.” And head still down, he walked back toward his truck.
Jimbo watched him go, watched him fire up his truck, watched him drive slowly through the gate and on out to the road. Paulie was a strange duck, that was for certain. Enthusiasm dampened, Jimbo went home too, his new gun still pristine.
The next night, though, as the moon came up, Jimbo felt the urge and followed it all the way to the dump. He pulled up to where they had parked before, and took a deep breath. Then he rolled down the window, clicked off the safety, turned the headlights on and blasted away. He got three big damn rats with the first clip. He turned off the lights, rolled up the window, and reloaded.
One box of rounds later, he figured he’d nailed a bunch. What a feeling! He was high, his blood pressure was down, he felt as if he’d just had the best sex of his life.
And speaking of sex . . . it was time for Margie.
He drove home with a song in his heart.
But when he got there, what he found was a tearstained Margie and an emergency at the paper.
The Northern Aire Motel had caught fire while he was out at the dump, and the paper’s publisher wanted to know who was covering it.
“Mrs. Atkisson was my mother’s best friend,” Margie said. “She came into the diner all the time. What could have caused this?”
Jimbo was a little bit confused as to which metaphorical fire he should put out first. Console Margie, call his boss, call his reporter, or run out to the fire. He decided to sit down and tend to his wife first. “It was an old building, honey. These things happen. Wiring, propane, lightning, who knows? Did Mrs. Atkisson die? Do you know that for certain?”
“No,” she sniffed, then wiped her nose. “But even if she didn’t, that place was all she had.”
“I’m sure she had insurance. Are you all right? I’ve got to get somebody out there to cover the story.”
“I’m okay,” she said. “You can go.”
Jimbo got back in his truck and headed for the Northern Aire. He could see the glow in the sky from the blaze.
Paulie met him at the drive. “The firemen are just letting ’er go,” he said. “They’re watching the trees to make sure we don’t have a forest fire on our hands.”
“Mrs. Atkisson?” Jimbo asked.
“Don’t know yet. Probably inside, along with her guests. Seemed to come on real sudden like.”
“Jeez.”
“Where were you tonight?” Paulie asked.
Defensive fear grabbed hold of Jimbo’s chest. “Why? You ask that like I was a suspect.”
“Just asking,” Paulie said.
“Don’t treat me like I’m an arsonist.” Jimbo pulled a reporter’s pad from his glove box. The blue plastic of the Smith & Wesson box seemed to glow neon in the light. “Do you suspect arson?” he asked in his best reporter voice, hoping the switch of subject would bring Paulie back to the task at hand.
“Got yourself a new gun?” Paulie asked.
“Yeah, Jason and I are going to do some target shooting.”
“Let me see.”
“Let’s talk about the fire,” Jimbo said.
Paulie leaned down and put his official police face in Jimbo’s window. “Let me see the gun, Jim.”
Jimbo pulled it out of the glove compartment, opened the box and handed the gun to Paulie. Paulie opened it, slid open the chamber and sniffed. “Were you at the dump tonight?”
Jimbo felt strangely ashamed. “Yeah,” he said with what he thought was righteous why-shouldn’t-I-be-at-the-dump? calm.
“How many rats’d you kill?”
Jimbo shrugged. “A few.”
Paulie nodded, handed the gun back to him. “There’s not going to be a story here until the thing burns down, cools, and we can get inside to determine the casualties, if any, and the cause of the fire.”
Jimbo nodded. “I’ll grab a few hours of sleep and come back.”
Paulie rapped his knuckles twice on the roof of Jimbo’s car and walked off.
Jimbo drove away, feeling guilty as hell, and he didn’t know why.
By the time he’d driven five miles toward home, his guilt had turned to righteous indignation. What the hell, he thought. Why should Paulie be asking me what I was doing? What kind of a friend suspects the editor of the newspaper of arson, for cripes sake? His fingers gripped the steering wheel until they hurt. And then they automatically turned the wheel toward the dump, where Jimbo knocked off two more rats and felt vastly better afterward. Then he went home, showered, shaved, took Margie for a tumble in bed, set the alarm for two hours hence, and took a nap.
The full story didn’t come out until mid-day. Eight people killed in the fire itself, including Mrs. Atkisson. A blazing tree fell on two firemen trying to keep it from spreading, bringing the total to ten.
Jimbo printed a Special Edition.
For the next week, he was busy keeping the local folks apprised of the situation out at the Northern Aire, documenting the funerals, the human-interest stories of who had been killed, and dogging the ongoing investigation into the cause. By the time he could actually go home with a desk cleared of urgent work, he was exhausted.
All he wanted to do was go to the dump.
Odd, he thought, as he sat at his desk and loaded his .22. It used to be when he was this tired, he’d want to go home, have a beer and snuggle on the couch with Margie. Guess those days were gone. The years had given him enough of a security envelope in his marriage, and now what he wanted was a little adrenaline rush.
He drove slowly by the police station, but Paulie’s truck was gone. He was a little disappointed. He thought he could probably do a little bit better in competition with him now. So he drove on out.
But Paulie’s truck was blocking the drive. Just inside the gate, Paulie had pulled it up diagonally, and Jimbo couldn’t get past. So he parked in the ditch, got out, stuck his pistol in his pocket, and walked on in.
Paulie was walking back to his rig, nothing more than a sauntering shape in the thin moonlight. “Hey,” Jimbo said.
“Hey, yourself.”
“You blocked the gate.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the deal?”
“It’s either you or me, Jimbo,” Paulie said. “We can’t both do it. I don’t know why I ever brought you out here. It was stupid. Unless . . . unless maybe it’s time for me to quit. Maybe you ought to take over. My sister’s kid . . . drowned the other night.”
Paulie’s big, meaty, healthy face looked hollow and gaunt in the unfiltered light. Jimbo chalked it up to the fire and the ensuing investigation.
“Yeah, maybe. I took over for Lars Boynan, and maybe now it’s your turn. I’m pretty tired of it.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
Paulie clamped a big paw on Jimbo’s shoulder. “One a day, that’s all, Jimbo. You want to control the population, not eradicate it. One a day.” Then he climbed up into his big truck, blinded Jimbo with the headlights, turned around and drove off.
“Jerk,” Jimbo said. Paulie took all the fun out of coming out here and blasting away. He walked toward the moonlit mass of confusion, pulled his gun from his pocket and planned to kill his one for the day. He wanted a good shot, a steady aim, he wanted to blast its damn rat brains all over somebody’s discarded sofa. Nothing left for the crows to eat.
He was mildly surprised at himself for that attitude. He’d always been such a pacifist.
But look at that. Right there, standing on the top of what looked like the corner of some appliance protruding from a sea of busted black garbage bags. One big rat, staring right at him.
Jimbo kept walking toward it, and it didn’t twitch a whisker. He stopped, raised his pistol, took careful aim, and thought it was a little bit too easy. If he was only going to shoot one, why the easy one?
Yet it begged to be shot, the way it stared at him with its beady eyes shining like ball bearings. This rat had attitude. Jimbo motioned at it to go away, but it stood its ground.
The rat dared him to shoot it.
Jimbo felt his lip curl up in distaste, aimed again and fired.
Between squeezing the trigger and seeing the little body flip into the air, Jimbo had a terrible feeling in his gut, a recognition of sorts. It was a horrible, wrenching, sickening elevator-drop feeling. He turned and ran back to the car.
The next day when he heard that Paulie had dropped dead from a heart attack, he was barely surprised. That rat had reminded him of Paulie in its last nano-second of life. Jimbo just sat at his desk in the newspaper office, waiting for the kid to finish Paulie’s obituary, where it would go right next to Paulie’s nephew’s obituary in the weekly paper. Jimbo sat there with sudden wisdom and an ageless feeling of responsibility, cleaned his gun and resolved that one a day would be all he would kill. One a day. No more, no less. Until the day he saw Jason’s face or Margie’s face in the balance he was to keep. And then he’d get rid of the gun, walk straight away and damn the consequences.