Black House

Jack raises the package to listen for ticking, fully aware that ticking bombs are as out-of-date as Betty Boop cartoons. He hears nothing, but he does see what’s wrong with the stamps, which aren’t stamps at all. Someone has carefully cut the front panels from a dozen or so cafeteria sugar packets and taped them to this wrapped shoe box. A grunt of humorless laughter escapes Jack. Some nut sent him this, all right. Some nut in a locked facility, with easier access to sugar packets than to stamps. But how has it gotten here? Who left it (with the fake stamps uncanceled) while he was dreaming his confused dreams? And who, in this part of the world, could possibly know him as Jacky? His Jacky days are long gone.

No they ain’t, Travelin’ Jack, a voice whispers. Not by half. Time to stop your sobbin’ and get bob-bob-bobbin’ along, boy. Start by seein’ what’s in that box.

Resolutely ignoring his own mental voice, which tells him he’s being dangerously stupid, Jack snaps the twine and uses his thumbnail to cut through the sloppy blobs of red wax. Who uses sealing wax in this day and age, anyway? He sets the wrapping paper aside. Something else for the forensics boys, maybe.

It isn’t a shoe box but a sneaker box. A New Balance sneaker box, to be exact. Size 5. A child’s size. And at that, Jack’s heart speeds up to triple-time. He feels beads of cold sweat springing up on his forehead. His gorge and sphincter are both tightening up. This is also familiar. It is how coppicemen get cocked and locked, ready to look at something awful. And this will be awful. Jack has no doubt about it, and no doubt about who the package is from.

This is my last chance to back out, he thinks. After this it’s all aboard and heigh-ho for the . . . the wherever.

But even that is a lie, he realizes. Dale will be looking for him at the police station on Sumner Street by noon. Fred Marshall is coming to Jack’s place at three o’clock and they are going to see the Mad Housewife of Robin Hood Lane. The backout point has already come and gone. Jack still isn’t sure how it happened, but it looks like he’s back in harness. And if Henry Leyden has the temerity to congratulate him on this, Jack thinks, he’ll probably kick Henry’s blind ass for him.

A voice from his dream whispers up from beneath the floorboards of Jack’s consciousness like a whiff of rotten air—I’ll strew your guts from Racine to La Riviere—but this bothers him less than the madness inherent in the sugar-pack stamps and the laboriously printed letters of his old nickname. He has dealt with crazies before. Not to mention his share of threats.

He sits down on the steps with the sneaker box on his thighs. Beyond him, in the north field, all is still and gray. Bunny Boettcher, son of Tom Tom, came and did the second cutting only a week ago, and now a fine mist hangs above the ankle-high stubble. Above it, the sky has just begun to brighten. Not a single cloud as yet marks its calm no-color. Somewhere a bird calls out. Jack breathes deeply and thinks, If this is where I go out, I could do worse. A lot worse.

Then, very carefully, he takes the lid off the box and sets it aside. Nothing explodes. But it looks as if someone has filled the New Balance sneaker box with night. Then he realizes that it’s been packed with shiny black crow feathers, and his arms roughen with goose bumps.

He reaches toward them, then hesitates. He wants to touch those feathers about as much as he’d want to touch the corpse of a half-decayed plague victim, but there’s something beneath them. He can see it. Should he get some gloves? There are gloves in the front hall closet—

“Fuck the gloves,” Jack says, and dumps the box onto the brown paper wrapping lying beside him on the porch. There’s a flood of feathers, which swirl a bit even in the perfectly still morning air. Then a thump as the object around which the feathers were packed lands on Jack’s porch. The smell hits Jack’s nose a moment later, an odor like rotting baloney.

Someone has delivered a child’s bloodstained sneaker chez Sawyer on Norway Valley Road. Something has gnawed at it pretty briskly, and even more briskly at what’s inside it. He sees a lining of bloody white cotton—that would be a sock. And inside the sock, tatters of skin. This is a child’s New Balance sneaker with a child’s foot inside it, one that has been badly used by some animal.

He sent it, Jack thinks. The Fisherman.

Taunting him. Telling him If you want in, come on in. The water’s fine, Jacky-boy, the water is fine.

Jack gets up. His heart is hammering, the beats now too close together to count. The beads of sweat on his forehead have swelled and broken and gone running down his face like tears, his lips and hands and feet are numb . . . yet he tells himself he is calm. That he has seen worse, much worse, piled up against bridge abutments and freeway underpasses in L.A. Nor is this his first severed body part. Once, in 1997, he and his partner Kirby Tessier found a single testicle sitting on top of a toilet tank in the Culver City public library like an ancient soft-boiled egg. So he tells himself he is calm.

He gets up and walks down the porch steps. He walks past the hood of his burgundy-colored Dodge Ram with the world-class sound system inside; he walks past the bird hotel he and Dale put up at the edge of the north field a month or two after Jack moved into this, the most perfect house in the universe. He tells himself he is calm. He tells himself that it’s evidence, that’s all. Just one more loop in the hangman’s noose that the Fisherman will eventually put around his own neck. He tells himself not to think of it as part of a kid, part of a little girl named Irma, but as Exhibit A. He can feel dew wetting his sockless ankles and the cuffs of his pants, knows that any sort of extended stroll through the hay stubble is going to ruin a five-hundred-dollar pair of Gucci loafers. And so what if it does? He’s rich well beyond the point of vulgarity; he can have as many shoes as Imelda Marcos, if he wants. The important thing is he’s calm. Someone brought him a shoe box with a human foot inside it, laid it on his porch in the dark of night, but he’s calm. It’s evidence, that’s all. And he? He is a coppiceman. Evidence is his meat and drink. He just needs to get a little air, needs to clear his nose of the rotted baloney smell that came puffing out of the box—

Jack makes a strangled gagging, urking sound and begins to hurry on a little faster. There is a sense of approaching climax growing in his mind (my calm mind, he tells himself). Something is getting ready to break . . . or change . . . or change back.

That last idea is particularly alarming and Jack begins to run across the field, knees lifting higher, arms pumping. His passage draws a dark line through the stubble, a diagonal that starts at the driveway and might end anywhere. Canada, maybe. Or the North Pole. White moths, startled out of their dew-heavy morning doze, flutter up in lacy swirls and then slump back into the cut stubble.