Spider Lake (22 page)

Sunny thought for months about what he would do with his gold in the event of his inevitable demise. He finally had Dewey Cheat’em and Howe revise the document to leave only a stipend to McCann. He would be paid one half the sum of his current salary every two weeks for life. That would surely piss him off. His blushing dim-witted bride will have to go out and shake the trees for another invalid just to keep their meager income at half the same level. The rest of his newly on-the-books fortune in gold would be left to his saintly snot-nosed kid brother wherever he was. If his brother had a family, even better. Maybe the little piss-ant will have an entire brood of greedy little piss-ants all stabbing each other in the back to collect uncle Sunny’s gold.

The half that nobody knows about, the half that is still here, he would have to think about. The bankers would surely find a way to lose it if it was all in their greedy little hands. Uncle Sam would have a field day once he found out what was in all those safe deposit boxes. Their cash registers and adding machines will have to be water-cooled to keep from over-heating.

Sunny was wondering why he was even thinking about all this anyway. He was sure he would live to be a hundred. Hell, the last time he visited with his quack, the old man said that his ticker would keep on ticking forever by the sound of it. If his legs weren’t nearly useless he would be fit as a fiddle. His only problem was his damn legs. Every time he got up to walk, he could feel his bones rubbing together at his knees. Each time he did, they would swell up and hurt him for days.

Still, he had to get up and see his cache now and then. What was the use in having all that gold if you couldn’t hold it in your hands, run it through your fingers, feel its weight? It was a shame that he couldn’t buy a new set of legs with all his loot. It wasn’t the walking that gave him trouble, it was the ladder. Something had gone wrong with the ladder. Maybe it was rusted, or the cable holding the counter-weight had busted. He had to get it fixed before he could get back to the cache.

The problem with the ladder was in the forefront of his brain since it had stopped working a month ago. He considered hiring a man to fix it, but he knew that was absolutely out of the question. He would wait until after dark and he would take a good look at the apparatus. He had a flashlight equipped with a red lens to keep from being seen when he was outside, and he would be using it tonight to get a better look at the faulty mechanism. He would have to wait until it was very late— two-thirty in the morning at the very least.

He would set his alarm for one. That would give him enough time to go to the basement and get the oil can. Maybe the mechanism just needed a good oiling. If he was lucky enough, oiling the parts would get the ladder working. If not, he would at least get a closer look at it and order the necessary parts needed to fix it. The worst case scenario would be in a couple of weeks, McCann would need to be sent away again on another wild goose chase with a different safe-deposit key, allowing Sunny enough time to repair the ladder.

 
It was never easy when he had to send the staff away. He was used to having the help when he needed to get around. Only a year ago when his legs were still in working order, he could get around without a problem. If he sent them away back then, it was only an inconvenience. He was never a needy person.

Take food for instance— many men with his boodle would have a full kitchen staff complete with an over-priced, overbearing french chef preparing them fancy cuisine every night. He was just as happy with a fried baloney sandwich as he would be with any highfalutin Lobster Thermidor. Heck, during the depression he sometimes would eat nothing but onion and butter sandwiches for days on end, and they never did him any harm.

Sunny wheeled his chair over to the cabinet where he kept the brandy. The nurse always gave him the business when he asked for a second glass. One of the perks of sending the staff away was he could drink all he wanted without being heckled by a subordinate. He was always the early to bed, early to rise sort, but on nights when he needed to be up, such as tonight, he would take a drink or two extra to make him sleepy. One thing about booze, it brings a body way down; and then wakes it up in the middle of the night. He had learned that trick early on in his bootlegging days, when much of his business was transacted on the graveyard shift.

He poured himself a generous glass and rolled his chair over to the window. He liked looking out at the small lake. When other men of substance were building their fine homes on Green Lake or Lake Geneva, his daddy was building this place on a body of water that was not much bigger than a mud puddle. He always said he built it here because it would be quiet. His dad would say, “The other lakes are full of millionaire’s progeny roaring around all hours of the night in their daddy’s noise-making Chris-crafts, while their daddies are up all night hobnobbing at their parties getting the skinny on whose buying
 
‘em the biggest and fastest boats next year just to out-do their neighbors.”

In his younger days Sunny had rented out a house in Lake Geneva to throw a bash for some of his Chicago whiskey-buying customers. In two days time they were right in the middle of things, playing chicken in the rented yacht, and raising hell on the water with all those snot-nosed rich kids. They nearly rammed one of the Wrigley boys broadside until Wrigley turned at the last minute, and the fun never stopped until they destroyed half of the fuel dock which held the lake’s only gas pumps.

He remembered yelling at the loud-mouthed fool he allowed at the bridge to throw the boat into reverse to stop it, and what does the bone-head do? He leaves the controls and gets himself in-between the bow and the dock to show how to stop her. Sure, stop a thirty-thousand pound boat without hitting the reverse! What a bone-headed goof of a skipper that guy was. Sunny smiled at the thought of the dolt trying to stop a floating house by holding his hands out. And what did the guy grab hold of to stop the yacht? The fuel pump! It bent over at a ninety degree angle before the hull of the boat began disassembling the wooden dock board by board. No, he liked the quiet of the little lake he was on just fine.

He went and poured himself another tall glass of brandy. He was feeling warm with the last glass, and this one was putting him just right. Who needs a staff! He put the glass in his crotch and rolled back over to the window. He heard the far-away rumble of a thunderstorm. He always liked the sound of distant thunder. He watched as two boys in one of the rented yellow boats rowed towards the crowded raft at the girl scout camp. He decided to get a better look at them through his telescope. Oh to be young again. He would trade all his gold to be as young as the boys in that yellow boat. The new guard-dog decided to spoil the moment and make some noise of his own.

Damn he hated that dog. Sure, it kept the neighbors and over-eager solicitors from snooping around the place, but the last dog had the common sense to only bark at people. This good-for-nothing mutt barks at anything and everything. Who ever heard of a dog that barks at a thunderstorm thirty miles away? He took another pull on the brandy and made a mental note to put a bullet in the dog’s head at his earliest convenience. He would just send Butch out to another junk yard and this time, one of the questions will be, “Does Fido bark at storms? Because if it does we don’t want him. No thank you! The last animal we had barked at storms a hundred miles away. The damn thing barked when there was a change in barometric pressure. Hell, he barked at mosquito hawks when they buzzed too close to his head.”

Yep, he might even take the revolver with him tonight. It would cap off the festivities with an appropriate send off. “Here, Rover. Here, boy. Blam! Bye, Rover, hope you have a nice trip. Say hi to the great dog catcher in the sky.”
 
Sunny smiled again. The thought of a new improved guard dog made him smile. Three stories down the animal was still barking and yelping and growling, and the storm which was the cause of the God-forsaken racket was clearly passing many miles to the south. Yep, he might just introduce Rover to his friends, Smith and Wesson.

The fool dog finally stopped barking. Sunny had peace and quiet once again. He rolled sloppily back to the liquor cabinet. This time, he left the tumbler and brought the bottle back instead. He was going to have a party. A going away party for his four-legged friend Fido. Then he was going to fix the ladder and have a look at all his lovely gold party favors. He would carry some out to have them close at hand. Ten for him and ten more in the memory of poor old Spot, who barked a few too many times on this fine summer evening. He took a pull from the bottle. The brandy was tasting very fine indeed, better with each new sip. He would have liked to be partying with his good old buddy Butch; just like the good old days, when they would shoot the bull in the tavern where they met.

But Butch was having a party of his own with that dim bulb he calls a wife. Why did he marry her? He did it to keep her close. Yeah boy, keep your enemies close so you know what they are up to. Sunny was still thinking about Butch when he finally slipped away into never never land.

Sunny was right about Butch. Butch did indeed marry Rosa to keep her close. What else could he do? He needed her to be on board. She had to think he was in love with her so if she ever seen or heard something, she would tell him. He wasn’t going to be Rule’s right hand man all these years only to have a dim-witted nurse find the gold while he was away. His boss had sent him down on another errand to Chicago. He had to go so his boss wouldn’t be suspicious. The bank would document for Rule all the details, so he couldn’t send someone else in his place.

He had thought a long time about how he could make the next trip, and watch his boss at the same time. He carefully planned the details well in advance. He would be in Chicago or Minneapolis or wherever at the appointed time to open the safe-deposit box and to sell the precious metal. He would sign all the necessary documents. He would have all the receipts needed with his signature for the gold transactions, as well as the fuel, the parking, the hotel room, the room service, everything. As far as Sunny Rule is concerned, Butch McCann is being a loyal servant and taking care of his business just as he is being told.

He will arrive back at the expected time in the expected car with the expected mileage with all his ducks in a row. Old man Rule can look at every angle, every document, and he will see that his buddy Butch has done just as he was told. What old man Rule doesn’t know, is that his old buddy Butch will also be back at the ranch with both of his eyes wide-open, watching where the old cuss goes when he lurks around all alone in the middle of the night up at Spider Lake.

en rolled out from the resort driveway onto Spider Lake Road and headed his motorcycle east. In a mile and a half he would be where Spider Lake Road met Crystal Lake Road. As a boy growing up on a remote resort in northern Wisconsin, the tiny little business district was the doorway linking Ben to the outside world. The small subdivision of shacks and cabins which sprouted up along the northern shore of Crystal Lake had their start as lodging for the many lumberjacks who kept the Rule sawmill supplied with timber.

Later, when the primary industry transitioned from logging to tourism, the tiny homes were re-purposed as summer homes for the bourgeoisie middle class in the suburbs of Chicago and Milwaukee. The subdivision was as quiet as a ghost town during the winter months with most of the cabins being closed for the season. There were a small amount of year-round residents and some cabins housed the occasional deer hunting crowd, but the little community really sprang back to full life each late spring with the onset of summer weather.

As Ben was turning his motorcycle on to the small frontage road that was so familiar to him as a boy, he could sense the death of the place. He pulled his motorcycle into the tiny parking space that he had parked his bicycle or his wagon full of pop bottles so many times as a boy. The Nerroth’s Spot Light was boarded up just as it was in his dream.

He walked up to the front window of the tiny little store. He looked up and down the street to see if anyone was watching; feeling like he was trespassing by being so close to the old place, but the street was empty. He pressed his face into the front window, shading the ambient sunlight with his hands. There was a small separation where he could see inside where two boards were hastily nailed up. Sadly, the old place was being used as a warehouse filled to the ceiling with old dusty boxes and what looked to be junk.

Ben backed away from the glass. He looked again up one side of the street, and down the other. The street was still deserted. He didn’t want to linger there for too long. The old Spot Light was obviously being used by someone, and he didn’t feel like explaining why he was so interested in the place. He walked back to where his bike was parked. He sat side-saddle on the seat, thinking about the old days when he used to turn the bottles in with his friend Matt.