Ghouls

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CHAPTER THREE

One good thing about the four-to-midnight shift was the luxury of sleeping late. Generally, Kurt turned in at one in the morning and got up at eight or nine, so the luxury was more or less false; but he enjoyed the principle. He simply got up when he’d had sufficient rest, eliminating any need for alarm clocks—things he’d been known to demolish back in his college days. Once he’d winged a Baby Ben out of his dorm window, a six-story trip onto cement. A week later his roommate had retrieved it, and it still worked.

Kurt got out of bed and stood up, stretching, wearing only briefs. At the height of his stretch, the door opened, and his twelve-year-old cousin, Melissa, leaned in, grinning like an evil kewpie doll. “Brad Pitt you ain’t,” she said.

“Roachface! Get out of here!” he yelled. “Can’t a guy even stand around in his underwear without being eyeballed by little stinkbugs like you? Next time knock…and then don’t come in. I could’ve been nude.”

“Too bad you weren’t. Then I could take pictures with Daddy’s camera and blackmail you.”

“Blackmail, hell. With my terrific body, you’d be able to sell them for a hundred bucks apiece.”

“Yeah, in Monopoly money.”

Kurt wished for a can of whipped cream. That would teach her. “Now that you’ve successfully invaded my privacy, what do you want?”

“I just came to tell you that breakfast is ready. Pardon me.”

Kurt brightened; never before had Melissa cooked him breakfast. “Oh, okay,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

After a shower and shave, he put on his traditional off-duty garb—bleach-spotted jeans, jogging shoes (though he never jogged), and a golf shirt from Crofton Country Club (though he’d quit golf years ago when it became apparent he’d never break 110; he broke a lot of clubs, at any rate).

He rented the north bedroom of his uncle Roy’s house, an old, big ramshackle place with gables and ivy trellises, situated down on the south end of the Route. Right now, Uncle Roy was away for two weeks, bear hunting in Canada. Uncle Roy went bear hunting in Canada every spring, for as long as Kurt could recall, and not once had he ever shot or even seen a bear. Kurt wondered if they even had bears in Canada, and was by now seriously doubting that they did.

The room cost him $350 a month, which he paid more out of charity than obligation. The floor creaked wherever he stepped, like a witch’s laugh; and the plumbing made very rude noises at night that reminded him of someone with gastrointestinal problems. It wasn’t exactly the London Metropol, but at least he didn’t have to listen to the orgies and baby wails of the south end apartments. He’d arranged the room with a stamp-metal desk (fifteen big ones at a garage sale in Bowie), an eternally unmade bed (why go to the trouble of making your bed just to mess it up again a few hours later? was Kurt’s philosophy), and a large exhaust-blue dresser Uncle Roy had given him after being turned away with it at Goodwill Industries. Kurt had no stereo; music today seemed chic, sexist ripoffs of older music that sounded better. Nor did he own a television set, which dumbfounded everyone he knew; but he was certain he could live quite nicely without The World’s Biggest Losers and Cupcake Wars.

Goading aromas of fried eggs and bacon lured him downstairs. Melissa sat up at the kitchen counter, seemingly entranced by a picture of Brad Pitt in People. Melissa was Uncle Roy’s only offspring, a fact Kurt thanked God for on a regular basis. She’d been raised by Roy himself (her mother had run off with a tall, blond meter man from the gas company over a decade ago. This Uncle Roy had reacted to as no great loss. (“Some knockers,” he’d often commented to Kurt, “but less smarts than your average ten-pound bag of fertilizer.”) which caused a few to wonder. Roy was the kind of guy who put pine bark mulch in the coffeepot for laughs. Melissa was worse. She was a catty, tomboyish little horror with an infuriating sense of humor and who managed to keep out of mischief only when she was asleep. A genuine million laughs. Once she’d been sent home from school for putting frogs’ eggs on the homeroom teacher’s chair. The teacher had had the viscid misfortune of discovering this after he sat down. Another time she had actually been suspended for throwing a Dolly Madison blueberry pie clear across the cafeteria. Quite an arm for a little girl. The pie had splattered spectacularly over the vice principal’s right breast.

Kurt stopped halfway into the kitchen. Were his eyes deceiving him? It must be a joke. Melissa was smoking a cigarette as she read her magazine. Without looking up, she reached forward and tapped an ash. In a flash of rage, he snatched it from her and crushed it out.

“Hey, you pud!” she protested.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Reading about Brad,” she replied.

“I mean this,” Kurt growled. He held the stubbed butt up to her face.

“It’s a cigarette. So what.”

This was too much. “So what? Did I hear you right? Did you say so what? Don’t you know that cigarettes kill people?” Unconsciously, Kurt lit a cigarette of his own and continued to scold her. “Only fools smoke, Melissa. Only people out of their minds.”

“That much I can believe.”

“Now, if you were an adult, that’d be different. Adults can smoke if they want; it’s their choice. Men and women can smoke. But not kids, not twelve-year-olds.”

“How old were you when you first started smoking?”

Kurt didn’t answer. He’d been twelve. Eventually he said, “Until you’re old enough, you’ll do as you’re told. That’s just the way it is. When I was a kid, I had to do as I was told, whether I liked it or not. The same goes for you. My God, Melissa Morris smoking… Uncle Roy would go through the roof. Young lady, if I ever catch you smoking again, I’ll push your face in a cow cake, a nice, big ripe one. Green inside.”

“Aw, go shove off,” she said, turning back to the magazine.

“I’ll shove you off, smart mouth. Right off the Eastport water tower.” He stopped again, tilting his head, suddenly aware of something not right. He leered at her suspiciously, his voice thick as clay. “Hey, wait a minute. Why aren’t you in school?”

“It’s spring break, Einstein. I’d look pretty stupid sitting in class all by myself.”

Oh, no. It couldn’t be. A solid week with this public threat, and Uncle Roy away, too. This was the worst news since the Redskins lost the Super Bowl.

Melissa smiled.

“Okay,” he said. He guessed he could live with it. Maybe. He stepped around the corner and for the third time was stopped in his tracks. Dirty dishes lay stacked in the sink, the frying pan full of suds. The stove was empty. “I thought you said breakfast was ready.”

“I do remember saying that, yes.”

Kurt looked around, temper raging. “Then where’s the goddamned food?”

Melissa calmly turned the page, a second shot of Stallone pretending not to be flexing his pectorals. “I didn’t say your breakfast was ready. I just said breakfast was ready, and it was. And it was very good. Happy trails, sucker.”

Kurt stormed out, awash in mental images of murder. He wondered how Uncle Roy had stayed sane this long, saddled for twelve years with that little Beelzebub incarnate. She should be locked in an outhouse for life.

As always before leaving the house off duty, he strapped on his De-Santis speed scabbard, one of the lesser known ”pancake’’-type holsters, stuffed full by a Smith & Wesson model 65. Over this he wore an old blue Peters jacket, which sufficiently concealed the Smith and De-Santis. In summertime, when jackets weren’t feasible, he sacrificed firepower for comfort and carried a small Beretta .22. He didn’t argue with what they all referred to as “The Nix”; he always carried off duty, knowing that he would never need to. He also knew that the day he