Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack (11 page)

“
Southeast New Jersey, on the edge of the Pine Barrens.”

Jack cursed under his breath. The Barrens. Swell. A million or so acres of unsettled land. If the rakosh was loose in there they’d never find it.

“
We’re not too far from Leeds Point, you know,” Oz said, pointing east across the road. “The birthplace of the Jersey Devil.”

“
Save the history lesson for later,” Jack said. “Are you sending out a search party?”

“
No. I can’t risk the men. Besides, we’ve got to be set up in Cape May for a show tonight. But maybe tomorrow–”

“
Tomorrow will be too late.” Jack said, turning away.

“
Well, you certainly can’t go after a rakosh in the dark.”

“
I know,” Jack said through his teeth.

He headed back toward his car, afraid that if he stayed a minute longer he’d break the man’s neck. The traffic was starting to move now, so he drove to Exit 44 and followed the winding back roads through the area. The Parkway seemed to act as a time warp down here. Traveling east he found a nuclear power plant and typically quaint but unquestionably twentieth century towns like Smithville and Leeds Point. West of the Parkway was wilderness – 2,000 square miles of pines, scrub brush, vanished towns, hills, bogs, creeks, all pretty much unchanged in population and level of civilization from the time the Indians had the Americas to themselves. From the Revolutionary days on, it had served as a haven for people who didn’t want to be found. Hessians, Tories, smugglers, Lenape Indians, heretical Amish, escaped cons – at one time or another, they’d all sought shelter in the Pine Barrens.

Now a rakosh was loose in the pines. And if Scar lip got too much of a head start, it would be lost forever.

Jack drove around until he found an all night 7 11. He bought half a dozen bottles of Snapple, drank one, then emptied the rest onto the side of the road. He put all the empties into a duffel bag in his trunk. When dawn began to lighten the low overhang of clouds that lidded the area, he took 9 north until it intersected the Parkway, then got back on southbound until he came to the site of the accident. He pulled off the shoulder onto the grass just past the truck tire ruts. He took one of the gallon cans of gas and placed it in the duffel bag along with some old rags in the trunk. The bottles clinked within as he headed for the trees. It seemed logical Scar lip would have traveled directly down the slope and into the trees rather than cross the highway.

Jack looked for a break in the brush – a deer path or the like – and found it. The sand was wet. He saw what looked like deer tracks, and more: the deep imprints of big, alien, three toed feet, and work boot prints coming after. Scar lip, with Hank following – obviously behind because the boot prints occasionally stepped on the rakosh tracks.

As soon as he was out of sight of the road Jack filled the Snapple bottles with gas and stuffed their mouths with pieces of rag. Then he began following the tracks.

The trail wound this way and that; the scrawny pines closed in around him as he followed the tracks. He’d gone maybe half a mile when the trail changed.

The otherwise smooth sand was kicked up ferociously for a space of about a dozen feet, ending with two large, oblong gouts of blood, drying thick and brown on the sand, with little droplets of the same speckled around them. A cloud of flies hovered over the spot. A twelve gauge Mossberg pump action lay in the sand. Jack lifted it and sniffed the barrel. Unfired. Not that firing it would have changed the outcome here.

Only one set of prints led away along the trail – the three toed kind.

Jack crouched, staring around, listening, looking for signs of movement. Nothing. He glanced at the flies partying on Hank’s blood, then started again down the trail. His foot slipped on something a few feet further on. The sharpened steel rod Bondy had used to torment the rakosh lay half buried in the sand. He switched the duffel bag to his left hand, picked up the rod, and carried it in his right like a spear. He had two weapons now. He felt like an Indian hunter, armed with an iron spear and a container of magic burning liquid.

Half an hour later, as he was stepping over a fallen log in the center of a small clearing, his foot handed on something soft and yielding. Jack glanced down and saw a very dead Hank staring up at him. He let out an involuntary yelp, then whirled and scanned the area for signs of the rakosh. Nothing stirred. He dropped the iron spear and pulled one of his Molatov cocktails from the bag. He held his butane lighter ready before he chanced a closer look at Hank. Dead blue eyes fixed on the overcast sky; the pallor of his bloodless face accentuated the dark rims of his shiners and blended almost perfectly with the sand under his head; his right arm was missing at the shoulder; flies taxied around the stump.

A noise behind him. Jack whirled. Scar lip stood at the edge of the clearing, Hank’s arm dangling from its three fingered right hand. The rakosh held it casually, like a lollipop. The upper half of the arm had been stripped of its flesh; pink bone dragged in the sand.

Jack lit the tail on the cocktail and moved to where he could straddle the duffel bag. He pulled out a second bottle and lit it from the first. His heart was turning in overdrive, his lungs pumping to keep up. He knew from past encounters how powerful these creatures were, how quick and agile in spite of their mass. But he also knew that all he had to do was hit it with one of these flaming babies and it would all be over.

With as little warning and as little wind up as he dared, he tossed the one in his right hand, saw the rakosh duck left, threw the other left handed to try to catch it on the run. Both missed. The first landed in an explosion of flame, but the second skidded on the sand and lay there intact, its fuse dead, smothered. As the rakosh shied away from the flames, Jack pulled out a third cocktail. He had just lit the fuse when he sensed something hurtling toward him through the air, close. Too close. He ducked but not soon enough. The twirling remnant of Hank’s arm hit him square in the face. As he sprawled back, he felt the third cocktail slip from his fingers. He turned and dove and rolled. He was clear when it exploded, but he kept rolling because it had landed on his duffel bag. He was back by Hank’s body when the other three went up.

As soon as the initial explosion of flame subsided, Scar lip charged across the clearing. Jack was still on his back in the sand. Instinct prompted his hand toward the Semmerling but he knew bullets were useless. Instead he reached for the iron spear, swung it around so the butt was in the dirt and the point aimed toward the onrushing rakosh. Jack’s mind flashed back to his apartment rooftop last summer when Scar lip’s mother was trying to kill him, when he had run her through. That had only slowed her then, but this was iron. Maybe this time....

He steadied the point and braced for the impact.

The impact came, but not the one he’d expected. In one fluid motion, Scar lip swerved and batted the spear aside, grabbed the shaft and tossed it into the pines. Jack was left flat on his back with a slavering, three hundred pound inhuman killing machine towering over him. He tried to roll to his feet but the rakosh caught him with its foot and pinned him to the sand. Jack struggled to slip free but Scar lip increased the pressure until Jack thought his ribs would cave in. He popped the Semmerling into is hand – useless, but all he had left. And no way was he going out with a fully loaded pistol. As he stopped struggling and readied to fire, the pressure from the foot eased. He lay still and it let up completely, although the foot remained on his chest.

Jack looked up at Scar lip and met the creature’s yellow eyes. It gave one more thrust against his chest with its foot, then backed off a couple of steps.

Slowly, hesitantly, Jack sat up. Was this some sort of game?

But rakoshi didn’t play games. They killed and ate and killed again.

Scar lip backed off another step and pointed down the trail Jack had come.

No. This couldn’t be. It was letting him go. Why? Because Jack had stopped Bondy from tormenting it? Not possible. Rakoshi knew nothing about fair play, about debts or gratitude. Those were human emotions and –

Then Jack remembered that Scar lip was part human. Kusum had been its father. It carried some of Kusum in it.

Jack got to his feet and edged toward the trail, always keeping his face toward the rakosh, unable to quite believe this, afraid that if he turned his back on the creature it would strike. Much as he hated to leave the rakosh alive and free here in the wild, he didn’t see that he had much choice. He’d been beaten. The foot on the chest had signaled that. He had no weapons left, and he was certainly no match one on one.

So it was time to go. He took to the trail. One last look over his shoulder before the pines and brush obscured the clearing showed the rakosh standing alone on the sand, surveying its new domain.

*

Jack got lost on the way out. The trail forked here and there and he couldn’t be sure of the sun’s position through the cloud cover. His release by Scar lip had left him bewildered and a little dazed, neither of which had helped his concentration. But the extra hour of walking gave him time to think about his next move. He felt an obligation to let people know that there was something very dangerous prowling the Pine Barrens. He couldn’t go public with the story, and who’d believe him anyway?

He heard voices up ahead and hurried toward them. The brush opened up and he found himself facing a worn two lane blacktop. A couple of Jeep Cherokees were parked on the shoulder. Four men, thirty to forty in age, were busily loading their shotguns, slipping into their day glo orange vests. Their equipment was expensive, top of the line. Their weapons were Remingtons and Berettas. Gentlemen sportsmen, out for the kill.

Jack asked which way to the Parkway and they pointed off to the left. A guy with a dainty goatee gave him a disdainful up and down.

“
You could get killed walking through the woods like that, my friend,” he said. “It’s deer season. Someone might pop you if you aren’t wearing colors.”

“
I’ll be sticking to the road from here on,” Jack said. He hesitated. He felt he owed these guys a warning. “Maybe you fellows ought to think twice about going in there today.”

“
Shit,” said a skinny one with glasses. “You’re not one of those animal rights creeps are you?”

The air suddenly bristled with hostility.

“
I’m not any kind of creep,
pal
,” Jack said through his teeth and took faint satisfaction in seeing the skinny guy step back and tighten his grip on his shotgun. “I’m just telling you that there’s something real mean in there.”

“
Like what?” said the goatee, grinning. “The Jersey Devil?”

“
No. But it’s not some defenseless herbivore that’s going to lay down and die when you empty a couple of shells at it. You’re not the top of the food chain in there, guys.”

“
We can handle it,” said the skinny one.

“
Really?” Jack said. “When did you ever hunt something that posed the slightest threat to you? I’m warning you, there’s something in there that fights back and I doubt any of your type can handle that.”

“
What’s this?” said the third hunter. “A new tactic? Scare us off with spook stories? It won’t work.”

The fourth hunter hefted a shiny new Remington over under.

“
The Jersey Devil! I want one! Wouldn’t that be some head to hang over the fireplace?”

As they laughed and slapped each other high fives, Jack shrugged and walked away. He’d tried.

Hunting season.
He had to smile. Scar lip’s presence in the Pine Barrens gave the term a new twist. He wondered how these mighty hunters would react when they learned that the season was open on
them
.

And he wondered if there was any truth to those old tales of the Jersey Devil. Probably hadn’t been a real Jersey Devil before. But there was now.

introduction to “Home Repairs”

Richard Chizmar had asked me for a crime story for an anthology he was editing called
Cold Blood
. So in May of 1990, a few weeks after finishing “The Last Rakosh,” I began work on a Jack story with the working title of "Domestic Problem." I ended up calling it…

Home Repairs

The developer didn’t look like Donald Trump.

He was older, for one thing – mid fifties, at least – and fat and balding to boot. And nowhere near as rich. One of the biggest land developers on Long Island, as he was overly fond of saying. Rich, but not Trump rich.

And he was sweating. Jack wondered if Donald Trump sweated. The Donald might perspire, but Jack couldn’t imagine him sweating.

This guy’s name was Oscar Schaffer and he was upset about the meeting place.

“
I expected we’d hold this conversation in a more private venue,” he said

Jack watched him pull a white handkerchief from his pocket and blot the moisture from a forehead that went on almost forever. Supposedly Schaffer had started out as a construction worker who’d got into contracting and then had gone on to make a mint in custom homes. Despite occasional words like venue, his speech still carried echoes of the streets. He carried a handkerchief too. Jack couldn’t think of anyone he knew who carried a handkerchief – who
owned
a handkerchief.