It was still raining when we got to the Chandler house and Buck let me out.
“Save the galaxy,” I said before I closed the door.
“I’m waiting for the day where no one makes a Buck Rogers joke.”
“Today won’t be that day.”
“I suppose it won’t.”
As he drove off, I went up the steps with my ax handle, with which I was developing a close and loving relationship. I felt as if we had moved beyond the courting stage and perhaps a ring was in order.
I took off my shoes and socks and left them on the porch. When I went inside, Mrs. Chandler was sitting on the couch. She had a nice silver coffee service on the coffee table in front of her. She had her finger through a little hole in a coffee-cup handle and was raising the cup to her lips. She lowered it and gave me an expression that told me I looked as bad as I thought I did.
Good Lord, she looked to have worsened since I saw her last. She looked as if her spirit were slowly dissolving and her bones were collapsing. Hours before, she had pretty much seemed like herself.
“I wondered where you were this morning,” she said, “but from the looks of you, I’m going to say you’ve been out.”
“To put it mildly. Let me change, and I’ll tell you.”
“Please do, and when you finish, I’ll have a mop for you to use in the hallway.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
I went upstairs and took a couple of aspirin from my shaving kit, popped them in my mouth, and then ran water into my cupped hand and used that as a chaser.
I looked at myself in the mirror. My head was swollen and one ear had ballooned up at the bottom. My eyes made me look like an earnest raccoon. The expression on my face made me think of a man who’d decided to jump out of an airplane at ten thousand feet without a parachute and hope for the best on the way down.
I took a shower in water so hot I almost scalded myself. I combed my hair and clipped a few nose hairs, got dressed, and went downstairs in sock feet.
The mop and pail with soapy water were waiting on me. I nodded at Mrs. Chandler and mopped up my mess, hurting all over as I did. I took the water outside and dumped it on the lawn, left the mop and bucket on the concrete porch. I brought my socks and shoes inside and put them on the bottom step of the stairs.
I moseyed into the living room like I didn’t hurt anywhere near as bad as I felt and sat on the couch. I had to do that gingerly so my innards wouldn’t fall out. Mrs. Chandler poured me a cup of coffee.
“Same friends?” she said.
“Same ones. My, how they’ve grown. I also made a new friend. He’s six five, at least, and larger than the frontier. He can’t talk, because part of his tongue is gone, and he lives out there in the woods around the lake and underground with rats and rotting beer barrels, and he steals a lot of flashlights.”
I had already broken my word to Winston about not saying anything about our little visit, but truth was, after the night I’d had, I needed someone to talk to, and Mrs. Chandler was it.
“Do you mean poor Winston?” she said.
“He sided with me when my original friends decided to kick my head in.”
“I wasn’t even sure he was still alive. He’s young enough to be alive, but the way he lives, I’d have thought they would have found him dead in the old junkyard by now.”
“Why the old junkyard?” I said.
“His father worked there for the original owner. As a child, he used to hang out there all the time. He wasn’t too bright, bless his heart. Bert told me Winston liked to play in the cars up there. He’s actually rather mechanical-minded, or he was when he was a child. Now the only mechanical thing he might do is put batteries in a flashlight.”
“He has a lot of flashlights.”
“Steals them, batteries too, food from houses when he can. A few little colorful things that catch his fancy. He’s stealthy, seldom seen. He’s become a kind of legend. Some people think he’s made up, like Bigfoot. But he’s no legend. He can get into anywhere, like a rat, and out before anyone knows it.”
Winston certainly knew rats. Maybe they had given him a few breaking-and-entering tips. “Is he mechanical enough to repair old cars and put bones in the car trunks and drive them off into the lake?”
“That’s quite a question.”
“Well?”
“Cars up there now can’t be repaired without parts and money. Most of them probably can’t be repaired with money, they been there that long. But back in the day, yes. His father wouldn’t let him learn to drive. Feared he was too simpleminded, but he wasn’t, really. Just sort of strange and antisocial, subject to moods.”
“What happened to his tongue?”
“I don’t know when that happened, but I knew it happened. Some say his father did it to stop him from crying when he was young, but that could be an apocryphal story.
“Winston would fix up old cars in the junkyard and steal them. He’d go joyriding. And if they didn’t run, he’d push them down the hill and drive them into a tree or some such just for the hell of it.
“Poor boy wasn’t right in the head. Bert told me that Winston took a grown-man beating when his father caught up to him. Said he was there one time on council business, getting parts for a truck or some such, when the kid got a whipping. I think Bert thought seeing the kid getting held by the collar and taking a beating with a belt was funny. Bert was the kind of guy that would laugh at an autopsy of his own mother. Winston would take lickings, and then his father would lock him up in a car trunk as punishment. Leave him there overnight. It was like being in an oven in the summer, a refrigerator in the winter. Bert said the kid learned to like it. A metal womb.”
All of a sudden, Winston stealing clothes from graves, then putting the dead’s remains in car trunks and driving or pushing them off into the water made sense. I understood the source of his ritual. I also understood why Mrs. Chandler pushed Bert downstairs.
“How could the law let that happen?”
“They didn’t let it happen; it just happened. Winston’s old man didn’t care about the law. He was friends with the city council because he fixed their cars for free. They helped him out in return in a variety of ways. Back in Prohibition, he was a mechanic on their trucks. He got a free ride from the law. Law is where you buy it. That way then, that way now.”
“Chief Dudley in on all that too?”
“I think he tries to do right. But they can keep him from doing certain things if they decide to. They have tentacles in everything. He kind of has to go along to get along, I suppose. And then there’s that blackmail business. Poor Dudley. He and Duncan are just trying to be happy. In this town, rape would come second to merely being different in that kind of way.”
I thought then of the murders Shirley had discovered. I didn’t see Winston doing that, and I didn’t feel they were connected to him in any way. Winston was trying to survive. He was even a protector. He had damn sure saved my bacon.
“You look rough,” Mrs. Chandler said. “I’ll make some fresh coffee, some toast, because I’m not cooking anything serious. After you eat, I’ve something to tell you.”
* * *
By this time, I was sick from hunger and exertion on top of not sleeping all night and having had my body tenderized like hamburger steak. I drank the coffee she gave me and had four pieces of toast with butter and strawberry jam. My blood sugar settled, but the coffee didn’t stimulate me at all. Normally, as many cups as I drank would have wired me to the point of being able to enter a jitterbug contest and win.
“You look a bit more alive,” she said. “Maybe you should go to the doctor.”
“My bones aren’t moving in odd directions, so I think I’ll be all right. What I need is rest. And then I’m going to write this Sunday’s article. You said you had something to tell me.”
“Estelle, the cutie librarian. She called and said they want to see you. Want you to meet them at the library at three thirty.”
“I’m not sure I want to do that.”
“One way or another, you’ll have to deal with them. May I again suggest leaving town?”
“Estelle didn’t say something like ‘Come alone,’ did she?”
“No. She said come. Like it was an order to be obeyed. I can help you pack.”
“I’m going to see them, and I’m going to see if Ronnie will go with me.”
“They don’t respect the law in this town. They can get around it on most anything.”
“Yeah, but Ronnie has a gun.”
“One moment.”
Mrs. Chandler got up, went to a closet between the living room and the kitchen, opened it up, pulled out a cardboard box, brought it over. She placed it on the coffee table.
She opened the box. Inside was a cloth wrapped around something. She opened that and I could see a shiny snub-nosed revolver with a handful of shells. “You might want to have this for yourself.”
“I don’t like guns.”
“And the city council doesn’t like you. I doubt you’ll need it, but when the law isn’t the law, you might.”
“I don’t think I’ll be having a shoot-out in the library, but I’d like Ronnie there. She at least represents the law.”
“I keep telling you, Danny. There is no law.”
* * *
I called the station for Ronnie, said it was an emergency. They said they’d look for her. I had no more than hung up the phone and was halfway upstairs when it rang.
I skipped back down and answered. It was her.
“I know you’re on duty, but if you could see your way clear to come by and pick me up at three thirty, take me to the library, that would be a relief for me. I don’t have a car right now. I’ll tell you about it on the way there.”
“You called me, said it was an emergency, so you can go check out a book.”
“I have been asked—that’s the polite word—to meet with the city council there.”
“They only come out, like the groundhog, now and again, so that’s something, and maybe not a good something.”
“That’s why I want you there. You’re the law.”
There was brief silence before Ronnie said, “I’ll be by at three fifteen.”
Upstairs, I locked my door and put a chair under the knob for insurance, just in case the city council decided to send my buddies all freshly greased up in face paint to finish off what they had tried to do at the lake.
I went to the bathroom and found my aspirin and palmed some water from the faucet and swallowed a few of them. When I looked in the mirror this time, I didn’t so much look like a man about to jump out of an airplane without a chute anymore. I looked like a man who had already jumped.
I set my alarm clock, which until now I hadn’t even removed from my suitcase, for 2:00 p.m., closed the blinds, and then, naked, climbed under the sheets.
I felt a little feverish, like my skin had been stretched too tight and that something was inside the knots on my head trying to work its way out with a hammer and chisel.
Even in pain, I went to sleep. But I dreamed.
Dreamed about Winston and his tunnel full of rats. Dreamed about those cold, plastic-looking faces in the photographs on the wall of the country club. The nude paintings.
The council leaned forward from the frames and looked at me. They began to climb out of the photos and paintings, flop to the floor in my little room. There were multiples of them. On their bellies, they slithered toward me like serpents, leaving slimy snail trails behind them. Their mouths were open. They had dripping fangs.
I was too tired to give a damn.
Even when my father showed up on the edge of my bed and looked at them and they crawled away, I wasn’t particularly moved. I found him a confusing figure even in death.
I hadn’t met anyone in this town the right age to have known him or my mother or my aunt. My family seemed as if they were ghosts long before they were dead.