smelled like.
Not Kathy, Christ, not Kathy.
“Louis?” Michelle said. “I don’t know what’s going on but something happened over at the high school.”
Louis swallowed. “Like what? A shooting?” he said, making the quick assumption as most did after Columbine.
“I don’t know. But I guess there’s like ten cop cars out there…the townies, sheriff, state police. Whatever it is, it must be pretty bad. That’s what Carol said. She just drove by there.”
The heaviness wasn’t just in his belly now, it was laying over him, crushing him down in the recliner. He was now starting to wonder and as he wondered, he worried. Maybe you could write off one or two weird things happening, but when they occurred in bunches then you started thinking things. You started seeing the sort of connections that canceled out coincidence. The sort of connections that made paranoia leap into the back of your mind.
“What the hell is going on?” he said out loud, though he’d honestly meant only to think it.
“I don’t know,” Michelle said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”
“It gets weirder,” he said and then he started telling his own tale. The assault. The dying boy. The crazy cops. And as he told that story, realizing yet again that it sounded positively absurd in the telling, he began to turn it all over in his mind. What he’d seen. The stabbing at the bank. Whatever was going down at the high school. Sure, it could have been a series of grim coincidences, but he couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around that. For deep down, he was almost scared. Scared that something was happening to Greenlawn.
Something on a huge scale.
In the distance, he could hear sirens. Lots of them. And he wondered what else was going on out there, what other awful things were occurring behind locked doors in all those neighborhoods piled up end to end.
But he stopped himself right there.
It was not healthy thinking. Just because some very odd things were happening did not mean for one moment the town was going insane. That was just paranoia doing his thinking for him. He wasn’t about to go down that road. You started thinking crazy bullshit like that, next thing you knew you were afraid to leave the house. Louis had had an aunt like that. She became a shut-in, terrified of everything outside her own door. He wasn’t about to become like that.
Yet, the feeling that something was wrong, really wrong, persisted. Like a bad taste, he just couldn’t seem to wash it out of his mouth.
“Louis? Louis? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” he told his wife.
“Are you telling me that cop was really kicking that boy’s body? Stomping on it?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“That’s scary. That’s really scary.”
“Sure,” he said. “And goddamn Greenlawn, of all places.”
“ You better report this,” Michelle said. “Call down to the police station right now or go down there, tell them what those nuts were doing. Good God. It’s horrible.” She was breathing very fast on the other end. “Louis? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, I’m okay as I can be.” He paused, studying the whiskey in his glass. “I wish you could come home. I know it sounds stupid, but I’d just feel better if you could.”
“I’ll get there soon as I can. I have to finish up some things here first, though. I’ll be about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.”
That wasn’t good enough, but he didn’t tell her so. Every minute she was away from him made that hollow in his guts open wider. But how could he honestly explain any of it to her? How could he make her understand, make her feel what he was feeling himself?
“ Okay,” he said. “Get home as soon as you can.”
“Louis…are you sure you’re all right? You don’t sound good.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re positive?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll be home soon as I can.”
“Okay. I’ll be-” He paused.
“What? What is it?”
Louis wasn’t sure himself. He heard the creaking of the steps out on the porch. It didn’t mean anything really. Could have been the kid delivering the paper or the mailman. Yet, with what he’d been through and what Michelle had told him, he was expecting something bad.
“There’s…there’s someone on the porch,” he said in almost a whisper.
“Louis…you’re scaring me, okay? Just stop this now.”
“Hurry home, baby. Please just hurry home.”
Hurry…
9
Louis broke the connection, slid the phone back in his pocket.
Setting his drink aside, he started wondering what he had for a weapon in case he needed one. He wasn’t a hunter or a hobby shooter, so he didn’t have any guns. His trout rod and reel didn’t count for anything. There were knives in the kitchen, of course. He went to the closet by the front door and dug out a driver from his golf bag. Then the step out there creaked again. He pulled the sheer aside from the oval window set in the door.
Just the mailman.
Old Lem Karnigan.
Louis sighed. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he inflating this all into something bigger than it was, some crazy conspiracy?
Lem saw him out of the corner of his eye and waved absently.
Louis pulled the door open.
Lem was pushing seventy, but hadn’t retired and there was no talk of him doing so. They’d probably have to force him out. Lem’s wife had died two years ago this past winter and his kids were all moved away. He probably didn’t have anything but the job. And that was sad when you thought about it.
He was standing on the bottom step sorting letters and fliers. The mailbag strapped over his shoulder looked impossibly bulky and heavy. Almost too much for a skinny old guy like him.
“ One of these days, Louis,” he said without looking up, “I’m getting out. I’m going down to Florida with the rest of the old coots. I ran into Ronny Riggs last week, just up from Miami Beach. You know what he said? He said there’s beaches down there where the girls don’t wear no tops. How do you like that? he says. So I say, Bobby, I like that just fine.” Chuckling to himself, Lem looked up and his laughter stopped. He saw Louis’ disheveled appearance, the crusted bloodstains on his shirt. “Jesus. H Christ, Louis! What the hell happened? You get in a fight?”
Louis shook his head. “Some kid got in an accident…I had to help. It was a real mess.”
Lem just stood down at the bottom of the steps, staring at him.
And as Louis watched, it was almost as if a shadow passed over his face. Lem shuddered, his mouth pulled into a scowl. It looked as if something, something necessary had just drained out of him. And that quick.
Then he did the most amazing thing: he sniffed the air.
Sniffed it like he could smell the blood all over Louis. Like an animal.
“ You okay, Lem?”
“ So you helped that kid, did you?” Lem said. “Well, that was kind of you.”
Louis just swallowed. Gooseflesh had broken out on his arms. Look at his eyes. Look at his goddamn eyes.
