GRAVEWORM (19 page)

She lit a cigarette, the glow from her lighter almost blinding in the gloom.

She listened to the water breaking on the sand, heard a far-off cry of some lake bird. It sounded sad, displaced. The wind blew, driving a chill up her spine.

Behind her, the road wound out, connecting the beach with Lyman Park. She could see it over there, a few stray streetlights casting spotty illumination in the cavernous, sullen darkness. Empty benches. An abandoned playground. The war memorial. All the picnic tables had been taken away. Nothing over there but the bandshell far in the distance, the big oaks and elms creaking in the wind, leaves rustling through the yellowing grasses. The hooks on the flagpole rope dinged out a hollow rhythm. A lonesome sound.

Tara pulled off her cigarette, beginning to feel the impatience like teeth inside her, gnawing.

The phone rang.

She reached out for it with an almost reflexive action… then stayed her hand.

Let him wait… let him get nervous.

A voice in her head demanded to know exactly what she thought she was doing, gambling with Lisa’s life, but she did not know. Only that this was more than predator and prey now, more than victimizer and victim… the lines were slowly being blurred. Maybe it was time the boogeyman learned that.

But Lisa… Jesus, he has your fucking sister!

Tara picked up the phone. The receiver was cold against the side of her face. “I’m here,” she said, not a hint of nerves in her voice.

“
Why didn’t you answer?” the boogeyman wanted to know and she could almost smell his hot and fetid breath over the line. “When I call, you answer. You better not even think of fucking with me, Tara. This is my game; not yours. I make the rules. You do as I say.”

“I will,” she said, exhaling smoke into the night.

“
See that you do.” He paused. There was a rubbery noise like he was chewing on his lip. “This is all about trust, Tara. About keeping promises… do you understand that?”

“
Yes. I understand. I always keep my promises.
Always.
And I expect others to keep them to me.”

Like before, his breathing spiked. An animal sensing danger. “Listen to me, cunt. Don’t you threaten me. You piss me off and I’ll kill your sister. I’ll cut her tits off and send them to you. Do you understand me?”

Tara bristled, but did not shake. “Yes. I only want you to understand
me.
You said if I played the game the way you wanted it played that you would give my sister back to me. I will play. Just the way you say. I will keep my promise. And you had better keep yours. I’ll do what you want, whatever it is, but I want my sister back, alive and unharmed. That’s the deal. I will not go back on my promise and you better not go back on yours.”

This shook him, his breathing was very hard, almost rasping now. He was making moist, blubbery sounds like there was too much spit in his mouth. “You don’t threaten me! You fucking silly cunt! I have your sister! I’m in charge! I call the shots! I’m the one with the power and you had better—”

“
Shut up,” she said and he did. Immediately.

Maybe it was her tone, but his buttons had surely been pressed and he acted accordingly. A fear rose up in her that he might hang up, but he didn’t. He was still on the other end, breathing.

“
I’m not threatening you. We have a game to play. Then I want my sister. You will give her to me. If you don’t…” Tara paused, feeling something hot and black bubbling up inside her. “… if you don’t, I’ll come for you. I’m very patient. I can wait years to find you, but I
will
find you. The law will not be involved. Just you and me. That’s my promise. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She was expecting him to rant and rave and several times in the ensuing silence, he started to breathe very hard, grinding his teeth and making something like a low growling sound in his throat… but he did not rant. “I understand,” he said in a voice that was almost wounded. “Now we understand each other.”

Tara knew without a doubt that it had been the very tone of her voice that had clipped his wings and de-nutted him. Here was a man who was used to being chastised by a woman. Maybe his mother. Maybe his wife or sister. There was something in that hard-edged, inflexible yet female tone of her voice that had stopped him. Tara made a note of it.

“You’re over at the bandshell, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not.”

Tara knew he was lying. There was a weak, almost childish undertone to his voice now like a little boy that had been caught playing with himself. She looked across the lake toward the park. The shadowy hulk of the bandshell. “Yes, you are. You’re over there. I can almost
feel
you.”

“
You keep this shit up, Tara,” he said, trying to reinsert his control, “your sister will be feeling something, too. She’ll be feeling my knife slitting her throat.”

“That’s enough.”

Ah, he’d found a weak spot and now he attacked it. “I can shut her fucking air off anytime I choose, Tara. I can make her suffocate down there. Do you have any idea what it’s like to suffocate in a box down in the ground? Do you know how she’ll suffer… gasping for air?”

Crude. Pedestrian, really. It was supposed to make her swoon with terror, make her beg his forgiveness. But she was not begging. She was intuiting, feeling, knowing what he was and what he wasn’t and understanding that like any puppet, there were certain strings you could pull and certain others you could not.

“Tell me about the game.”

“
On the stage at the bandshell you’ll find a box. Inside the box is something you’ll need to start playing the game. Come and get it. Wait by the phone. I’ll call you.”

“What’s in the box?”

He started giggling and hung up.

Tara leaned against the white clapboard wall of the beach house and tried to catch her breath. There was something inside her that was enjoying this too much, that was asserting its dominance a little more with each passing hour. But she was still a woman in mortal fear of her sister’s life and now and again, it was this that simply floored her. Floored her and made her feel like she had been stepped on.

“
Get it together,” she said. “We’ve got a game to play.”

And the scary thing was, it didn’t even sound like her own voice.

35

Frank Duvall came into the Jolly Roger in a bad mood.

It had been one of those days when you want to jump in the deepest hole you can find and then pull the dirt in after you.

Frank was a building contractor. The guy you called when you were putting up a house and you didn’t want to have to go through the bullshit of separately contracting carpenters and plumbers and electricians and the whole ball of wax. You called Frank and Frank jobbed it all out for you. You didn’t deal with twenty people, you dealt with one: Frank.

Thing was, the housing market had been in a slump for years now and lowering the interest rates and prime lending hadn’t done shit to revitalize it. It was so low that its belly was leaving drag marks on the ground which meant that every contractor and construction firm and tradesman out there was doing everything but selling off their sisters to get any work they could. Everyone was low-balling, bidding in the basement, and more than one contractor had gone toes-up trying to underbid his competitor. That was the reality of the slump. Nothing like the good, fat days when there were so many jobs you had to literally shut the phone off to stave the flow of offers.

Now it was bidding.

You put in secret, sealed bids and then chewed your fingernails to the nubs and hoped by God and the saints that yours was the low one because if you didn’t generate some income and pretty soon, not only would the banks be taking the farm from you but the very air you breathed.

He’d put in three bids this week. One was for a tract of low-income housing on the east side of Bitter Lake. The other was for an assisted-living complex out by the Mission Point Clinic. And the third was for an executive house on the far shore of the lake that some rich cat from Chicago wanted to put up. These were three nice deals, if you could land them. They would curl up in your lap like cozy, fat tabbies and purr their delight while you were purring yours. The low-income housing was federally-funded which meant a steady cash flow; the assisted living complex was strictly corporate, big bucks; and the executive house… well, sweet and sweet, guys like that rich fellah had money to burn.

So Frank had been excited.

He was seeing green. Problem was, it wasn’t just local outfits bidding on these, but contractors and firms from as far away as Green Bay and Milwaukee. Big, state-wide outfits that could afford to bid low because they could make it up in the sheer volume of business they were doing. So, there were an awful lot of thumbs in these pies. The low-income housing project went to a construction joint out of Racine. Strike one. Then the assisted-living complex went to a big-money contractor out of Appleton. Strike two. Frank wasn’t liking it much by this point and his fingers were a little sore from all the nail-chewing he’d been doing.

But he was still at bat.

The executive home could tide him over nice.

Bang. It went to a jobber outfit out of Calumet City that Frank heard through the grapevine was owned by the rich guy’s brother-in-law who may or may not have been connected to some very unpleasant people in Chicago. Of course, that was just a rumor. But if you were in the contracting business, you heard a lot of rumors like that and especially when you were nipping at the heels of the big firms around Chicago and Milwaukee.

Regardless, strike three.

So that’s the sort of day it was. It could have been raining tit and Frank would have caught a cock in his mouth. After he learned that he had struck out, he drove around for two hours in his pick-up, wondering if they needed a frycook over at the Dairy Queen, fully realizing that there really were two types of people in this world: those who had it going on and those who didn’t. In his mind, there was no doubt which bucket he was pissing in.

Since gas wasn’t real cheap and the feds hadn’t gotten around to taxing the shit out of booze the way they had with tobacco, at least not yet, he went into the Jolly Roger, grabbed a stool at the bar, ordered a long-neck Pabst and prepared to cry in his beer. As fate would have it, he looked down the bar and there was Steve Crews, apparently well into his cups. He was putting away shots of Wild Turkey like they were mother’s milk and carrying on a loud conversation with the Australian-rules football game on ESPN.

Well now, wasn’t this peachy?

Not only had Frank been screwed out of his livelihood today, but here was the guy who had screwed him out of his girl too. Mr. Fucking Whiteshoe Accountant. Frank figured he had been real patient with the guy. All he asked was that Steve and Tara stay well away from him because they both headed off his shit-list which was quite long and quite comprehensive.

Frank pulled off his beer, minded his own, and was seriously thinking of making for new environs like Pauly’s or the French House down the way.

That’s when he felt, rather than
saw,
Mr. Steve Crews’ eyes lock on him.

“Here we fucking go,” he said under his breath.

Steve kept staring at him, but Frank refused to acknowledge any of that because he just wanted to drink alone and be depressed in peace which was the God-given right of every American, he figured.

Finch came down. He poured a shot of Wild Turkey, set it down on the bar. “Guy down there,” Finch said. “Said it’s for you.”

Frank sipped his beer. “I don’t want it.”

“He paid for it.”

“Pour it out.”

Finch did as he was told. Didn’t much matter to him, one way or the other. What was paid for was paid for. He went down the bar, told Steve, went back to the game.

Frank felt himself tensing up inside because he could feel old Steve
really
watching him then. Guy didn’t have the sense to know when to quit. Some guys were like that. And here Frank thought he’d been real gracious about the whole thing. Steve taking Tara or Tara taking Steve, however it was, and him not getting hotheaded about it and slugging the guy or anything crude, rude, and high school like that.

Now Steve was figuring that wasn’t enough.

Frank took another pull, feeling the tension between them arcing up like somebody had just plugged it into the wall. He thought momentarily of seeing Steve on Cross Street that afternoon, that look in his eyes like something bad was going on.

Steve was coming down now.

Sure, he was an easy-going guy, mellow, but now the alcohol had changed all that. He’d grown a set and he wanted Frank to see how big those suckers were.

Frank lit a cigarette, blew smoke out through his nostrils. “Leave it alone, Steve,” he said. “I’m leaving you alone. Just leave me alone.”

“
I just bought you a shot, Frank. It wasn’t a goddamn insult.”