“Toiletries is just over there.”
Now this was curious, and I’ll tell you why. I had met Harry Something around ten years before, when I was doing a job for the Outfit boys in Chicago. I was never a mob guy, mind you, strictly a freelancer, but their money was as good as anybody’s. What that job was isn’t important, but Harry and his partner Louis were the locals who had fucked up, making my outsider’s presence necessary. Harry and Louis had not been friendly toward me. They had threatened me, in fact. They had beaten the hell out of me in my hotel room, when the job was over, for making them look bad.
I had never taken any sort of revenge out on them. I occasionally do take revenge, but at my convenience, and only when a score strikes me as worth settling. Harry and Louis had really just pushed me around a little, bloodied my nose, tried to earn back a little self-respect. So I didn’t hold a grudge. Not a major grudge. Fuck it.
As to why Harry Something purchasing Tampax in the middle of the night at some backwoods convenience store was curious, well, Harry and Louis were gay. Like my old man used to say, queer as a three-dollar bill. Mob muscle who worked as a pair, and played as a pair.
And I don’t mean to be critical. To each his own. I’d rather cut off my dick than insert it in any orifice of a repulsive fat slob like Harry Something. But, hey, that’s just me.
Now while I’m as naturally curious as the next guy, I’m sure as hell not nosy, not even inquisitive, really. But when a faggot buys Tampax, you have to wonder why.
“Excuse me,” Harry Something said, brushing by me.
He hadn’t seen my face (had he?)-and he might not recognize me, in any case. Ten years and a beard and twenty pounds later, I wasn’t as easy to peg as Harry was, who had changed goddamn little.
Harry, having stocked up on cookies and chips and Tampax, was now buying milk and packaged macaroni and cheese and provisions in general. He was shopping.
Stocking up.
And now I was starting to get a handle on what he might be up to…
I nodded to surly Cindy, who bid me goodbye by flickering her eyelids in casual contempt, and went out to my car, a steel-gray Jag I’d purchased recently. I wished I’d had the Lodge’s four-wheel drive, or anything less conspicuous, but I didn’t. I sat in the car, scooched down low; I did not turn on the engine. I just sat in the cold car in the cold night and waited.
Harry Something came out with two armloads of groceries-Tampax included, I presumed-and he put them in the front seat of a brown rental Ford Taurus. Louis was not waiting in the car for him.
Harry was alone.
Which further confirmed my suspicions…
I waited for him to pull out onto the road, hung back till he took the road’s curve, then started up my Jag and glided out after him. He had turned left, toward Brainerd. That made sense, only I figured he wouldn’t wind up there-he’d likely light out for the boonies somewhere.
I knew what Harry was up to, vaguely at least. He sure as shit wasn’t here to ski-that lardass couldn’t stand up on a pair of skis. And he wasn’t here to go ice-fishing, either. A city boy like Harry Something had no business in a touristy area like this, in the off-season…
…unless Harry was hiding out, holing up somewhere.
This would be the perfect area for that.
Only Harry didn’t use Tampax.
He turned off on a side road, into a heavily wooded area that wound back toward Sylvan Lake.
Good. That was very good.
I went on by. I drove a mile, turned into a farmhouse gravel drive and headed back without lights. I slowed as I reached the mouth of the side road, and could see Harry’s taillights wink off.
I knew the cabin at the end of that road. There was only one, and its owner only used it during the summer; Harry was either a renter, or a squatter.
I glided on by and went back home.
I left the Jag next to the deck and walked up the steps and into the A-frame. The nine millimeter Browning was in the nightstand drawer. The gun hadn’t been shot in months-Christ, maybe over a year. But I cleaned and oiled it regularly, because you never know.
It would do nicely.
So would my black turtleneck, black jeans, black leather bomber jacket, and this black moonless night. I slipped a spare. 38 revolver in the bomber jacket right side pocket, and clipped a hunting knife to my belt. The knife was razor sharp with a sword point; I sent for it out of the back of one of those dumb-ass mercenary magazines- which are worthless except for mail-ordering weapons.
I walked along the edge of the lake, my running shoes crunching the brittle ground, layered as it was with snow and ice and leaves. The only light came from a gentle scattering of stars, a handful of diamonds flung on black velvet; the frozen lake was a dark presence that you could sense but not really see, the surrounding trees even darker. The occasional cabin or cottage or house I passed was empty. I was one of only a handful of residents on this side of Sylvan Lake who were staying year-round.
But the lights were on in one cabin. Not many lights, but lights. And its chimney was trailing smoke.
The cabin was small, a traditional log cabin of the Abe Lincoln and syrup variety, only with a satellite dish. Probably two bedrooms, a living room, kitchenette and a can or two. Only one car-the brown rental Ford.
My footsteps were lighter now; I was staying on the balls of my feet and the crunching under them was faint. I approached with caution and gun in hand and peeked in a window on the right front side.
Harry Something was sitting on the couch, eating corn curls, giving himself an orange mustache in the process. His feet were up on a coffee table. More food and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun were on the couch next to him. He wore a colorful Hawaiian shirt; he looked like Don Ho puked on him, actually.
In the nearby kitchenette, which was open onto the living room, Louis was fussing as he put the food away-a small, skinny, bald ferret of man, who wore jeans and a black shirt and a white tie. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying for trendy or gangster, and frankly didn’t give a shit.
Physically, all the two men had in common was pockmarks and a desire for the other’s ugly body.
And neither one of them seemed to need a tampon, though a towelette would’ve come in handy for Harry Something. Jesus. Imagine having a Burberry topcoat like that and a Hawaiian shirt underneath; they can make gay marriage legit if they want to, but that should be fucking illegal.
I could hear them talking-muffled but audible through the window, the sound of the television, some old movie, underneath.
From the couch Harry said, “Chip me!”
From the kitchenette Louis said, “With your cholesterol? Isn’t a bag of cheese curls enough?”
“Don’t mama me!..I wanna Coke, too.”
“I thought you were off caffeine!”
“Not when you expect me to sit up all fuckin’ night.”
Louis was in the living room now. “ I’m the one dealing with her-what a spoiled little cunt she is!”
Harry laughed; the laugh was like Uncle Fester, too. “That’s why daddy’ll pay up, sweet cheeks!”
I peeked at them-Louis was delivering barbecue chips and Harry took them with a “Thank you,” and they interrupted their bickering to exchange fond expressions. Then Harry worked at adding a new shade of orange to his junk-food mustache.
Me, I huddled back down beneath the window, wondering what I was doing here.
Boredom, for sure.
Curiosity, maybe.
I shrugged. Time to look in another window or two.
Because Harry and Louis clearly had a captive, and a female one at that. That’s what they were doing in the boonies. That’s why they were stocking up on supplies at a convenience store in the middle of night and nowhere. That’s why there were in the market for Tampax.
And through a back window, I saw her.
She was on a single bed in the small rustic room, naked but for white panties-a wrist cuffed to a nearby bedpost, sitting on the edge of the bed, bending over in obvious discomfort, crying…a darkhaired, creamy-fleshed
