Black House (32 page)

It is this threat that causes Wendell’s moment of panic. He glances into his rearview mirror and sees Beezer’s cohorts strung out across the road like an invading army of Goths. In his imagination, they are waving skulls on ropes made of human skin and yelling about what they are going to do to his neck after they rip his head off. Whatever he was about to dictate into the invaluable machine instantly evaporates, along with his daydreams of winning the Pulitzer Prize. His stomach clenches, and sweat bursts from every pore on his broad, ruddy face. His left hand trembles on the wheel, his right shakes the cassette recorder like a castanet. Wendell lifts his foot from the accelerator and slides down on the car seat, turning his head as far to the right as he dares. His basic desire is to curl up in the well beneath the dashboard and pretend to be a fetus. The huge roar of sound behind him grows louder, and his heart leaps in his chest like a fish. Wendell whimpers. A rank of kettledrums batters the air beyond the fragile skin of the car door.

Then the motorcycles swoop past him and race off up the highway. Wendell Green wipes his face. Slowly, he persuades his body to sit up straight. His heart ceases its attempt to escape his chest. The world on the other side of his windshield, which had contracted to the size of a housefly, expands back to its normal size. It occurs to Wendell that he was no more afraid than any normal human being would be, under the circumstances. Self-regard fills him like helium fills a balloon. Most guys he knows would have driven right off the road, he thinks; most guys would have crapped in their pants. What did Wendell Green do? He slowed down a little, that’s all. He acted like a gentleman and let the assholes of the Thunder Five drive past him. When it comes to Beezer and his apes, Wendell thinks, being a gentleman is the better part of valor. He picks up speed, watching the bikers race on ahead.

In his hand, the cassette recorder is still running. Wendell raises it to his mouth, licks his lips, and discovers that he has forgotten what he was going to say. Blank tape whirls from spool to spool. “Damn,” he says, and pushes the
OFF
button. An inspired phrase, a melodious cadence, has vanished into the ether, perhaps for good. But the situation is far more frustrating than that. It seems to Wendell that a whole series of logical connections has vanished with the lost phrase: he can remember seeing the shape of a vast outline for at least half a dozen penetrating articles that would go beyond the Fisherman to . . . do what? Win him the Pulitzer, for sure, but how? The area in his mind that had given him the immense outline still holds its shape, but the shape is empty. Beezer St. Pierre and his goons murdered what now seems the greatest idea Wendell Green ever had, and Wendell has no certainty that he can bring it back to life.

What are these biker freaks doing out here, anyhow?

The question answers itself: some creepy do-gooder thought Beezer ought to know about the Fisherman’s 911 call, and now the biker freaks are headed to the ruins of Ed’s, just like him. Fortunately, so many other people are going to the same place that Wendell figures he can steer clear of his nemesis. Taking no chances, he drops a couple of cars behind the bikers.

The traffic thickens and slows down; up ahead, the bikers form a single line and zoom up alongside the line crawling toward the dusty old lane to Ed’s place. From seventy or eighty yards back, Wendell can see two cops, a man and a woman, trying to wave the rubberneckers along. Every time a fresh car pulls up in front of them, they have to go through the same pantomine of turning its occupants away and pointing down the road. To reinforce the message, a police car is parked sideways across the lane, blocking anyone who should try to get fancy. This spectacle troubles Wendell not at all, for the press has automatic access to such scenes. Journalists are the medium, the aperture, through which otherwise prohibited places and events reach the general public. Wendell Green is the people’s representative here, and the most distinguished journalist in western Wisconsin besides.

After he has inched along another thirty feet, he sees that the cops riding herd on the traffic are Danny Tcheda and Pam Stevens, and his complacency wavers. A couple of days ago, both Tcheda and Stevens had responded to his request for information by telling him to go to hell. Pam Stevens is a know-it-all bitch anyhow, a professional ballbreaker. Why else would a reasonably okay-looking dame want to be a cop? Stevens would turn him away from the scene for the sheer hell of it—she’d
enjoy
it! Probably, Wendell realizes, he will have to sneak in somehow. He pictures himself crawling through the fields on his belly and shivers with distaste.

At least he can have the pleasure of watching the cops giving the finger to Beezer and crew. The bikers roar past another half-dozen cars without slowing down, so Wendell supposes they plan on going into a flashy, skidding turn, dodging right by those two dumbbells in blue, and zooming around the patrol car as if it didn’t exist. What will the cops do then, Wendell wonders—drag out their guns and try to look fierce? Fire warning shots and hit each other in the foot?

Astonishingly, Beezer and his train of fellow bikers pay no attention to the cars attempting to move into the lane, to Tcheda and Stevens, or to anything else up there. They do not even turn their heads to gape up at the ruined shack, the chief’s car, the pickup truck—which Wendell instantly recognizes—and the men standing on the beaten grass, two of whom are Dale Gilbertson and the pickup’s owner, Hollywood Jack Sawyer, that snooty L.A. prick. (The third guy, who is wearing an ice-cream hat, sunglasses, and a spiffy vest, makes no sense at all, at least not to Wendell. He looks like he dropped in from some old Humphrey Bogart movie.) No, they blast on by the whole messy scene with their helmets pointed straight ahead, as if all they have in mind is cruising into Centralia and busting up the fixtures in the Sand Bar. On they go, all five of the bastards, indifferent as a pack of wild dogs. As soon as they hit open road again, the other four move into parallel formation behind Beezer and fan out across the highway. Then, as one, they veer off to the left, send up five great plumes of dust and gravel, and spin into five U-turns. Without breaking stride—without even appearing to slow down—they separate into their one-two-two pattern and come streaking back westward toward the crime scene and French Landing.

I’ll be damned,
Wendell thinks.
Beezer turned tail and gave up. What a wimp.
The knot of bikers grows larger and larger as it swoops toward him, and soon the amazed Wendell Green makes out Beezer St. Pierre’s grim face, which beneath its helmet also gets larger and larger as it approaches. “I never figured you for a quitter,” Wendell says, watching Beezer loom ever nearer. The wind has parted his beard into two equal sections that flare out behind him on both sides of his head. Behind his goggles, Beezer’s eyes look as if he is aiming down the barrel of a rifle. The thought that Beezer might turn those hunter’s eyes on him makes Wendell’s bowels feel dangerously loose. “Loser,” he says, not very loudly. With an ear-pounding roar, Beezer flashes past the dented Toyota. The rest of the Thunder Five hammer the air, then streak down the road.

This evidence of Beezer’s cowardice brightens Wendell’s heart as he watches the bikers diminish in his rearview mirror, but a thought he cannot ignore begins to worm its way upward through the synapses of his brain. Wendell may not be the Edward R. Murrow of the present day, but he has been a reporter for nearly thirty years, and he has developed a few instincts. The thought winding through his mental channels sets off a series of wavelike alarms that at last push it into consciousness. Wendell
gets
it—he sees the hidden design; he understands what’s going down.

“Well, hot doggy,” he says, and with a wide grin blasts his horn, cranks his wheel to the left, and jolts into a turn with only minimal damage to his fender and that of the car in front of him. “You sneaky bastard,” he says, nearly chuckling with delight. The Toyota squeezes out of the line of vehicles pointed eastward and drifts over into the westbound lanes. Clanking and farting, it shoots away in pursuit of the crafty bikers.

There will be no crawling through cornfields for Wendell Green: that sneaky bastard Beezer St. Pierre knows a back way to Ed’s Eats! All our star reporter has to do is hang back far enough to stay out of sight and he gets a free pass into the scene. Beautiful. Ah, the irony: Beezer gives the press a helpful hand—many thanks, you arrogant thug. Wendell hardly supposes that Dale Gilbertson will give him the run of the place, but it will be harder to throw him out than to turn him away. In the time he has, he can ask a few probing questions, snap a few telling photos, and—above all!—soak up enough atmosphere to produce one of his legendary “color” pieces.

With a cheerful heart, Wendell poodles down the highway at fifty miles per hour, letting the bikers race far ahead of him without ever letting them pass out of sight. The number of cars coming toward him thins out to widely spaced groups of two and three, then to a few single cars, then to nothing. As if they have been waiting to be unobserved, Beezer and his friends swerve across the highway and go blasting up the driveway to Goltz’s space-age dome.

Wendell feels an unwelcome trickle of self-doubt, but he is not about to assume that Beezer and his louts have a sudden yearning for tractor hitches and riding lawn mowers. He speeds up, wondering if they have spotted him and are trying to throw him off their trail. As far as he knows, there is nothing up on that rise except the showroom, the maintenance garage, and the parking lot. Damn place looks like a wasteland. Beyond the parking lot . . . what? On one side, he remembers a scrubby field stretching away to the horizon, on the other a bunch of trees, like a forest, only not as thick. He can see the trees from where he is now, running downhill like a windbreak.

Without bothering to signal, he speeds across the oncoming lanes and into Goltz’s driveway. The sound of the motorcycles is still audible but growing softer, and Wendell experiences a jolt of fear that they have somehow tricked him and are getting away, jeering at him! At the top of the rise, he zooms around the front of the showroom and drives into the big lot. Two huge yellow tractors stand in front of the equipment garage, but his is the only car in sight. At the far end of the empty lot, a low concrete wall rises to bumper height between the asphalt and the meadow bordered by trees. On the other side of the tree line, the wall ends at the swoop of asphalt drive coming around from the back of the showroom.

Wendell cranks the wheel and speeds toward the far end of the wall. He can still hear the motorcycles, but they sound like a distant swarm of bees. They must be about a half mile away, Wendell thinks, and jumps out of the Toyota. He jams the cassette recorder in a jacket pocket, slings the Nikon on its strap around his neck, and runs around the low wall and into the meadow. Even before he reaches the tree line, he can see the remains of an old macadam road, broken and overgrown, cutting downhill between the trees.

Wendell imagines, overestimating, that Ed’s old place is about a mile distant, and he wonders if his car could go the distance on this rough, uneven surface. In some places, the macadam has fissured into tectonic plates; in others, it has crumbled away to black gravel. Sinkholes and weedy rills radiate out from the thick, snaking roots of the trees. A biker could jounce over this mess reasonably well, but Wendell sees that his legs will manage the journey better than his Toyota, so he sets off down the old track through the trees. From what he took in while he was on the highway, he still has plenty of time before the medical examiner and the evidence wagon show up. Even with the help of the famous Hollywood Sawyer, the local cops are mooning around in a daze.

The sound of motorcycles grows louder as Wendell picks his way along, as if the boys stopped moving in order to talk things over when they came to the far end of the old back road. That’s perfect. Wendell hopes they will keep jawing until he has nearly caught up with them; he hopes they are shouting at one another and waving their fists in the air. He wants to see them cranked to the gills on rage and adrenaline, plus God knows what else those savages might have in their saddlebags. Wendell would love to get a photograph of Beezer St. Pierre knocking out Dale Gilbertson’s front teeth with a well-aimed right, or putting the choke hold on his buddy Sawyer. The photograph Wendell wants most, however, and for the sake of which he is prepared to bribe every cop, county functionary, state official, or innocent bystander capable of holding out his hand, is a good, clean, dramatic picture of Irma Freneau’s naked corpse. Preferably one that leaves no doubt about the Fisherman’s depredations, whatever they were. Two would be ideal—one of her face for poignancy, the other a full-body shot for the perverts—but he will settle for the body shot if he has to. An image like that would go around the world, generating millions as it went. The
National Enquirer
alone would fork over, what—two hundred thousand, three?—for a photo of poor little Irma sprawled out in death, mutilations clearly visible. Talk about your gold mines, talk about your Big Kahunas!

When Wendell has covered about a tenth of a mile of the miserable old road, his concentration divided between gloating over all the money little Irma is going to siphon into his pockets and his fears of falling down and twisting his ankle, the uproar caused by the Thunder Five’s Harleys abruptly ceases. The resulting silence seems immense, then immediately fills with other, quieter sounds. Wendell can hear his breath struggling in and out, and also some other noise, a combined rattle and thud, from behind him. He whirls around and beholds, far up the ruined road, an ancient pickup lurching toward him.

It’s almost funny, the way the truck rocks from side to side as one tire, then another, sinks into an invisible depression or rolls up a tilting section of road surface. That is, it would be funny if these people were not horning in on his private access route to Irma Freneau’s body. Whenever the pickup climbs over a particularly muscular-looking length of tree root, the four dark heads in the cab bob like marionettes. Wendell takes a step forward, intending to send these yokels back where they came from. The truck’s suspension scrapes against a flat rock, and sparks leap from the undercarriage. That thing must be thirty years old, at least, Wendell thinks—it’s one of the few vehicles on the road that looks even worse than his car. When the truck jolts closer to him, he sees that it is an International Harvester. Weeds and twigs decorate the rusty bumper. Does I.H. even make pickups anymore? Wendell holds up his hand like a juror taking the oath, and the truck jounces and dips over another few rutted feet before coming to a halt. Its left side sits noticeably higher than the right. In the darkness cast by the trees, Wendell cannot quite make out the faces peering at him through the windshield, but he has the feeling that at least two of them are familiar.