Sleeping Policemen (17 page)

“Hello?”

Evans jumped to his feet, knocking the chair over.

“Yessir,” he said. “Yessir, Mr. Gutman, right here, right in front of me.” His eyes floated over the table, but didn't seem to register them. “Yessir.” Evans turned and walked slowly toward the front of the store. “Nosir, I don't think they have it with them—I'm not dead sure they even know about it.” He paused, listening. Then: “Yessir, I can do that, no problem, yessir, Mr. Gutman.” He stopped before the recliner and prodded the fat woman's arm with one finger. He looked back at them and said something else, his voice lowered. He turned to the door and peered past the
CLOSED
sign, shaking his head.

“Aw, Jesus, what're we gonna do now?” Tucker said, staring at Evans's sunglasses, his voice lifeless.

“Finney,” Nick whispered, glancing back at Evans. “This guy's crazy—we need to move, we need—”

“Hey!” Evans shouted from the front. “I say you could talk?”

Finney looked up at Nick, his eyes dull. He didn't say anything, just shrugged his shoulders.

Sue said, “Someone needs to do something quick.” She glanced at Evans and then back at Nick. Her eyes were cold, dispassionate. The tick in her cheek had returned.

A gulf opened inside Nick, a feeling of utter helplessness. His head spun with the past forty-eight hours and there was nothing he could do, nothing.

Evans returned, the cell phone still pressed to his face. “Up around Townsend,” he said. “Yessir.” Another pause, Evans nodding. “Do it here?
Before
I bring them?” He listened. “Whatever you say, Mr. Gutman. It sure will get their attention, no doubt about that.”

Watching him speak into the small phone, the way his mouth twisted, his face flinched, Nick recognized the intricate network. Here was someone holding Evans's leash, someone bigger, at least as crazy—but in some different sense. Maybe he was someone to talk to, to bargain with. Evans was too dumb, too tunnel-visioned to deal. Their lifeline, Nick realized, was this maniacal voice in the void at the other end.

His mind kept running, fitting irregularly shaped pieces together. If the man on the other end of the phone held Evans's leash, did someone else hold his? Could two men run a snuff-film ring? He didn't think so. In his mind he saw an endless parade of corrupted officials—

—
dozens of sleeping policemen
—

—passing Casey's tape from dirty hand to dirty hand.

Evans snapped the phone shut with a final “Yessir.” His earlier advice boomed in Nick's head:
Thinking can get you dead
.

Evans strode to the table and picked up his sunglasses. “Boys,” he said, slipping the shades over his eyes, “I wouldn't wanna be in your shoes right now.” A slight smile cracked his face.

“We got ourselves another problem—just a small one.” He settled back into his chair. “The Pachyderm wants us in Knoxville, like right now. But we can use the blues if we need to.” He chuckled. “Problem is my cruiser fits only three comfortable in the backseat—and I sure want y'all to sit comfortable.”

Evans paused, letting his words sink in. Nick watched the realization bloom in Finney's eyes, then, a moment later, Tucker's. Sue's hand tightened painfully in his.

“Oh, fuck, please,” Tucker said. “Oh, please …” His voice fell away.

Evans lifted the .45 from its holster and laid it casually on the table. “Best gun on the market,” he said, gazing intently at the piece. It caught the dull light, gleaming demonically. He picked it up and worked it in his hand, searching for a grip; satisfied, he looked up. “All those gangbangers, all those movies, they're all hooked up on a nine. But
this
is a real man's gun. This'd stop an elephant in its tracks. And you've seen what it can do to a four-hundred pound woman.” He bounced the light off it so that it played over each face: Finney's, Tucker's, Sue's, finally Nick's. Nick tried not to look down, away from the mirrored glasses. Their reflections looked even more hunched, more trapped.

“Imagine,” Evans said, “what it'd do to one of you skinny fellows.”

Tucker moaned.

“We'll leave the lady out. The Pachyderm'll wanna see her for sure.” He leered at her. Then he pointed the gun at Nick's chest. Nick felt his heart falter.

“Eeny,” Evans said. The .45 swung gracefully past Sue and centered on Tucker. “Meeny.” On to Finney. “Miney.” Back to Nick. “Moe. Catch a tiger by his—no, wait—catch a
blind bear
by his toe.” The gun oscillated smoothly among them, Evans's arm ramrod straight, all motion coming from the subtle twists of his shoulder, an oiled play of sinew and tendon. The gun accelerated with the increasing tempo of the chant, a childhood rhyme Nick remembered singing with Alex St. Johns out in the woods, on the evening beach, all a game, only a game.

Tucker moaned louder, an eerie ghostly sound.

“If he hollers make him pay
fifty dollars every day
!” Evans almost shouted the words, the sounds piling on one another, flecks of spittle and corn chips sprayed across the table. “
My mama told me to pick this one but I picked this one and you are now IT
!”

Tucker screamed, a piercing wail that made Nick want to crawl off somewhere, made him want to find some place dark and cramped.

“Wait,” Nick said, “let's talk—”

“Noooooo!” Tucker wailed, half-standing, the chair falling over behind him, his hands twining in the beach towel, pulling it even tighter around him. He sobbed in heaving gasps. “You can't-uh-uh—do this you mother—uh—uh—fucker you can't just fucking-uh-uh—
kill
me you
can't
oh mama
pleeese
—”

“I told you to watch your fuckin mouth.”

Nick saw the recoil fling back Evans's arm—as if an invisible puppeteer had yanked it toward the ceiling—and then he heard the thunderous explosion, a concussion far louder than the one that had taken the matron.

Instinctively, Nick threw his arms up, cocking Sue on the chin; she fell into him and he went over in his chair, the back of his head slamming into the cement floor. Lights flashed inside his skull.

Darkness.

Pale, sickly light seeped under his eyelids, drew him back to a place he did not want to remember. His head throbbed. His hands felt swollen. Sue's voice: “Nicky, c'mon, baby, Nicky.” Her voice thick, as if she'd been crying. Then Finney, his voice far away: “Now, man, please.”

“Leave im be, I'll take care of it.” Sue: “
No! Please, another minute. Nicky
!”

Nick opened his eyes and the world flooded back into him. Sue and Finney leaned over him, their faces bleached and fuzzy, triggering a half-formed image—

—
Finney laboring between her white white thighs
—

—in his stunned mind.

Abruptly, the world snapped into clear focus, and the hulking shadow behind them materialized into Evans.

“Tuck?” Nick said, his voice a croak. The throbbing in his head intensified. A single tear drifted down Sue's cheek; Finney looked away, shaking his head. They helped him up, slowly.

“Outside,” Evans said gruffly. “Move.”

Finney and Sue placed his arms over their shoulders—his hands, he noticed, as big as catchers' mitts, still growing—and moved him toward the door. His legs felt swollen, his shoes full of cement. His head felt as if someone had slammed it in a car door, a Cadillac. “Tuck,” he said again.

He turned—pain like an explosion inside his skull—to look and Finney said, “No, man, don't.” He looked anyway. His cane-back chair and the table were overturned. Splattered across the back wall in a lunatic collage were bits and pieces of Reed Tucker. Nick looked down. Extruding from behind the table was Tucker's outstretched arm, his hand grasping, bloodless, still.

Finney whispered, “Oh, Reed, no.”

The sky was an infinite, cloudless blue, the air like something heartless, sending their breath smoking before them. Finney and Sue helped Nick out the door and over to Evans's unmarked blue sedan. Just the other side of it, a rust-eaten Chevy pickup nosed out into the gravel lot, its back windshield shattered. It looked, in the glare of the December sun, about a hundred years old.

“Don't you fret none about that pretty car of yours, Missy,” Evans said. “We'll have to leave it here awhile, but we'll pick it up shortly.”

Nick heard the lie. No way they were leaving this snare—they were as gone as Tuck.

Getting into the patrol car's back seat—his head settling into a dull throb—Nick caught sight of the bear cage. The cub's snout poked through the fence, snorting and wheezing, probing blindly at the air.

Tuesday, 8:42 to 10:30 AM

Nick scooted across the seat as Sue and Finney slid in, pressing him to the passenger side window. Wiping away a mist of breath, he gazed out past the rear end of the Chevy to the weedy verge of the gravel parking lot, littered with Styrofoam cups and sun-bleached beer cans. Woods fell away beyond, barren hardwood and pine shot through with shafts of anemic December sunlight, but they looked to be about a thousand miles away. The only thing Nick could really see—maybe the only thing he would ever see again—was that enormous pistol as it swung past him to rest on Tucker. He forced down the flat, metallic taste in his mouth. As from far away, he watched himself fumble at the door and slip into the enveloping trees, bright air needling his lungs, blowing the fog out of his head—

The opposite door slammed with a sound like doom.

The three of them were alone in the car. Glancing once again out the window—the woods inviting, achingly close—Nick felt his fever-swollen hand scrabble impotently at the featureless plastic cowling of the door.

“You're bleeding,” Sue whispered. He felt her probing at the back of his head. He lifted his hand, wincing when his fingers came away sticky.

“It's nothing,” he said, his voice hoarse, an old man's voice. He glanced at Finney, those bland, leading-man looks speckled with brown flecks. Nick's guts twisted as yet another nightmare image possessed him: Tucker stumbling up from the table, his arms flung out imploringly as his skull dissolved into red mist.

“Your face,” he whispered.

Finney swallowed and leaned his head back, a picture of utter despair. The car settled on its shocks when Evans lowered himself into the driver's seat, placing his Smokey Bear hat beside him. He slotted the key into the ignition and started the car, reaching down to adjust the police scanner as it squawked to life. Then he leaned back and worked Pomeroy's gun free. It caught the light when he held it up, chrome and ivory, a screenwriter's dream of the revolver Doc Holliday might have worn, strapped low against one lean thigh as he stalked the dusty streets of Tombstone. Evans shook his head, chuckling.

“That Pomeroy and his pea shooter,” he said without rancor, sighting down the barrel at some imaginary target in the woods. He mimed the recoil of a pistol shot, said “
Bang
!” loud enough to make Sue jump, and slid the pistol into the space between his seat and the door. “You could say you kids did us a favor—that little runt was way out of line, rootin around in our business—but I don't think the Pachyderm's gonna see it that way.”

He snagged a pair of leather driving gloves from the dash. Snapping the Velcro straps across the backs of his thick hands, he turned, grinning, all teeth and the convex mirrors of his aviators above his upturned nose. The black grid of the cage carved his face into little diamonds.

“Comfortable, kids?”

No one said anything. Nick hardly dared to breathe.

“Ya'll smile nice and answer when I talk to you, or I'll give you something to frown about. I'm feelin edgy this morning, it's hard to say what I might do. So let me ask you one more time: Everybody comfortable?”

“Fine,” Finney whispered. And louder: “We're fine.”

Evans worried a fresh toothpick from his breast pocket and slid it from its cellophane wrapper. He sucked at it thoughtfully. “How bout you, college boy?”

“I'll survive.”

Evans laughed. “Now that's good, we're gettin to be regular friends.” Without haste, he turned, put the car into reverse, and backed out. Sue gasped and took Nick's hand as they eased past the rust-stained hulk of the Chevy. His head throbbing, he turned to follow her gaze. The truck's driver's side door stood ajar. In the shadowy depths within, Nick could just make out a figure slumped across the seat.

A vision of the enormous woman filled his mind, her slack, gray face imperturbable as she announced that her Henry would be along right soon now. He shuddered, the throb in his head expanding, and for a moment, he thought the man inside the dilapidated Chevy had moved, that maybe he had survived—that maybe they could too. But then some truer, deeper self spoke up: The man was dead. The movement had been a trick of light and falling shadow, a mirage, like one of those glistening pools you saw sometimes across a stretch of baking pavement, a fool's promise beneath a boiling desert sky.

The tires flung gravel as Evans pulled away.

Nick turned to stare through the cage at whatever lay ahead.

Fifteen minutes later, when the road broadened into four lanes, Evans reached under the dash for a bubble light. He snapped it into place, touched a switch, and the car filled with wheeling, blue luminescence. Then he stood on the gas. For Nick, the trip was like a fever dream, the desolation of the mountains giving way to a sprawl of motels, hamburger joints, and billboards promising honky-tonk music and outlet shopping, the entire unscrolling panorama set to the maniac soundtrack of the siren and Evans's unhurried monologue as he narrated an anecdote about a man named Stark and his comeuppance at the hands of Vergil Gutman, the Pachyderm, the breather down his neck, the man whom they had inadvertently crossed and the last man they were likely to see in their sad and soon-to-be abbreviated lives.