The Fort (3 page)

“Was it scary?”

The question fell out of Scott’s mouth accidentally. He had long wanted to talk to his stepdad about the conflict that still seemed visible in the national rearview mirror, but had never done so, and was terrified at the prospect of what the man might say. Now, with his mother gone and the Tigers tied 0–0 at the top of the second inning, the sound of a pin dropping would have been thermonuclear in the silence.

“Yeah,” said Carl. “And anybody that would tell you otherwise is an idiot. But there were good parts too. Knowing that if you did your job right your buddies would live, and if they did theirs, you might too.

“The worst part was all the traps Charlie would build. Not just land mines—those were scary as hell too, of course, but I mean other stuff. Like, they’d sharpen a bunch of sticks, rub shit all over them, and then dig a hole. You step in that and it goes through your boot, you’ll be lucky if you don’t lose the leg. It was scary, but it wasn’t all scary. I made some of my best friends in that war. Like Hooper. That was where we hooked up. You remember him?”

Scott was not a fan of Hooper. He’d been over a few times to help work on Scott’s mom’s troubled Oldsmobile, and had seemed to spend a lot more time fondling tools and ogling his mother than he had fixing the car. She had pretended not to notice, Scott could tell, and Carl either didn’t care or didn’t notice.

“Yeah, he helped you fix the car.”

“Right, when the tranny went. Jesus, you see that? One–nothing. Sheridan just came home, good start. Anyways, yeah, it was scary, real scary. But despite what all those fucking hippies said at the time, and all the antiwar people say now, it wasn’t all bad. They don’t know what it was like to be hunting other men, and let me tell you, it beats the shit out of sitting under a tree and shooting a buck. And I like shooting a buck a whole hell of a lot. That’s the thing none of your teachers are going to tell you, and none of the books you read, even the ones that tell the truth, are going to have printed in them. Some people are built for war, and for the ones who are, there is nothing more satisfying than being good at it. Like when you beat the snot out of that kid last fall—”

“Mike Haverford. He pushed a girl down.”

“Yeah, that asshole. You felt pretty damn good afterward, right?”

“Yeah.” Scott blushed at the memory. Alice Klein had kissed him after his suspension was up.

“Well, war can be like that. It can be scary, and awful when one of your buddies gets hurt, but it can be great too. When that napalm would roll in and we could feel those assholes roasting like pork chops, man. Look at that, Brookens just got two in, a double. Three–nothing, Tigs.” Carl stood. “Get these dishes cleaned up, and then come watch the game with me. They might be finally turning that losing streak around.”

5

Luke Hutchinson sat watching the Tigers while his mother sat smoking and talking on the phone to a friend. Unlike Scott and Tim, Luke didn’t live in the suburbs on the other side of the forest. He lived in a trailer park called the Cruise Inn, which was a fairly odd name, as most who came seemed to stay. Luke knew that he, his mom, and his younger twin sisters didn’t have as much money as a lot of the other kids that he hung around with, but it didn’t matter, at least not to him. The trailer park existed to allow lower-income people to still have their kids in the well-regarded Northview Public School system. The majority of kids who attended those schools were suburban children of baby boomers, but there were kids from two other trailer parks too, along with those from a pair of cheap apartment complexes.

The division between these less-well-off children and their better-heeled fellows in the suburbs was less marked than one would have expected in their quiet North Kent County school district. Luke had thought about that a few times, not that he’d ever mentioned it to Tim or Scott. His theory was that while there were some kids at Northview whose families had money,
real money
, there were very few of them. And because there were so few, it
was almost more awkward for those kids than for the poor kids. A couple years earlier, Luke had gone to an acquaintance’s to hang out, a boy named Jeff Baker. Luke didn’t realize just how well-off Jeff was until they arrived at his house. It was huge! Pool, indoor hot tub, all the kids had their own rooms and bathrooms—it was easily the nicest house Luke had ever been in. Even still, what he remembered most from the visit was Jeff asking him, almost begging him, not to tell anyone else about the house. After that, Luke just figured that different was different, and no kid wants to be the weird one, no matter what the reason is.

Lately, Luke had felt a bit like the weird kid, even if he wasn’t sharing that with his best friends. His mom, even though he loved her very much, seemed to be spiraling out of control. She was smoking more than ever, and drinking too, sometimes in the morning and at night. She had trouble keeping a job for more than a few months at a time, and the family they’d been before she kicked Luke’s dad out was a lot different than it was now. Back when he worked at Case, they were always one step from making it. Now they were always just a few feet from the gutter.

Luke never told anyone about his plans for the future, not his mom, not his friends, and certainly not that annoying guidance counselor at school. His friends loved all the cool war stuff he was always reading about and sharing with them, but what they didn’t know was why he read it in the first place. Luke planned to enlist on his eighteenth birthday, rain or shine. He figured it was as good a way out as any, and a hell of a lot more to count on than to hope for a scholarship. He wanted out of the park, out of his mother’s house, even away from his annoying little sisters. As for them, Luke felt that Ashley and Alisha were inevitably destined to appear on one of those trashy daytime talk shows his mom watched sometimes, where they showed kids and people who had made royal fuck-jobs of their lives. Granted, the twins were only eleven, but both already had a reputation, and those tended to grow as one got older, and usually were pretty accurate.

The Tigers game let him ignore his sisters bickering in their room, his mom blabbing on the phone with a Camel hanging out of her mouth, and all the other nonsense around him. Anyone looking at him would have thought that the kid he or she saw was entranced by the shellacking the Tigers were putting on the Milwaukee Brewers, 10–0 in the bottom of the fifth. He or she never would have known that, while Luke may have been there, in his mind he was crawling through a rice paddy, readying himself to make a thousand-yard shot on a female sniper known as Apache, who had been torturing captured US soldiers. The story played out in his mind as he finally dragged himself off of the couch, brushed his teeth, and went to his room. His mom was still on the phone and his sisters still arguing as Luke lay in bed, trying his best to ignore them all, and to make his one shot count.

6

Tim woke in his bed, sure that he was still dreaming. The hall lights were turned on, and there was shouting coming from the living room. He could hear Becca and both of his parents.
Home late
, thought Tim devilishly, and then he looked at his clock and saw that it was only 11:38. Still Monday night. Curious, and unable to help himself, he leapt from his bed and began plodding from his room toward the noise. He caught only snippets of conversation, and was able to understand none of it, until he made the hall. Then quite clearly, he heard his dad say, “I’m going to fucking kill him,” just as he walked in.

They stopped talking. Becca had makeup running down her face, way more than their mom ever would have approved of, and she was wearing clothing he didn’t recognize. The outfit didn’t look like it would have garnered a positive response either, but most troubling about it was the tear in the low collar of her shirt. Dad looked pissed, madder than Tim could remember ever seeing him, even more than that time Tim spilled all that paint in the driveway. Mom looked really sad—scary sad, just like Becca did.

“Stanley, you get Tim back to bed,” Tammy said. “This will still be waiting when you come back. And calm down. No more yelling, not from anybody, OK?” Dad didn’t say anything to her, just walked to Tim, pointed to the hallway, and walked behind him back to his room. Tim hopped back into bed, and his dad sat on the floor next to it. He didn’t look mad anymore. He looked worse, like maybe he wanted to hurt somebody, maybe even kill them. Tim was used to his dad with his nose in a book, grading papers, or lately, looking sadly at the hole in the backyard. This was very different.

“How much did you hear?” Stan asked, finally. His voice was flat, like the life had been sucked out of him.

“I don’t know. Mostly just a bunch of noise, and then you said the
F
word, and that you were going to kill someone. What happened to Becca?”

“I’m not sure yet,” said Stan. “Not exactly, in any case. If I had to guess, a boy, probably that Tyler kid, got a little fresh with your sister, and she told him to dial it back a notch. When he didn’t…well, I’m not sure what exactly happened. I suppose I’ll know soon enough.”

“So are you going to kill him?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. This is probably one of those things that can be handled a little differently than that.” He smiled. “I’m not sure I’d be much good at killing, after all. I’d likely bungle it all up, end up not killing anybody, and going to jail to boot. I don’t think it’s in my genes. I suppose that’s a good thing.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, buddy. I really don’t. But you don’t need to worry about any of this silly stuff, at least not for a few more years at least.”

“I’m not sure I want to get any older.”

“I don’t either,” said Stan, almost chuckling. “You get some winks, Tim, and don’t worry about Becca. She’ll be fine, all right?”

“If you say so.”

7

Detective Dick Van Endel woke to the twin sounds of his pager and the phone ringing. He checked the clock: 2:37 a.m.
Christ.
Ignoring the pager, he yawned, gave the mostly empty glass of whiskey on the nightstand an ugly look, and answered the phone. There was a pause, and then a click.

“Van Endel.”

“Jesus, Dick. Where are you?” It was his partner, Phil Nelson. His nickname had been Full Nelson until he’d lost thirty pounds and threatened to beat the shit out of the next man who used that term to describe anything besides a headlock.

“I’m at home,” Van Endel said. “I take it I need to answer that page on the double?”

“Yes, please do. They’re driving me nuts. Plus, I think Sarah is going to kill me if I leave her alone with all the fucking machines again. For fuck’s sake, they know I’m on leave. Why are they even calling me?”

Phil’s wife, Sarah, was pregnant, about six months along, and things weren’t going well. They had her on bed rest, and evidently had her hooked up to twenty-seven different machines to monitor her condition. Phil was on emergency leave until they successfully
got the kid out of her. Phil and Van Endel had joked just two days earlier that something terrible was going to happen while Phil was gone, perhaps another dead whore at Riverside, maybe something worse. As Van Endel listened to his pager wail, the joking was an ugly memory.

“Well, sorry they had to bug you, Phil. Give Sarah my love, all right? And don’t let this stress you out. We talked about that. I got shit under control, no matter how thick it may get.”

“Thanks, buddy. Make me proud.” Phil hung up, and Van Endel depressed the button to make his end click off, then released it again. He grabbed the pager, then punched in the number.

“This is Dispatch,” said the female operator on the other end.

“Van Endel, returning a page. Whaddya got?”

“Possible 207, sixteen-year-old girl. A couple of uniforms on the scene already. They requested you.”

Van Endel gritted his teeth. That wasn’t good. Usually, a possible 207 on a kid that old took a few days to process. There had to be a part of the story he wasn’t getting yet. Van Endel took a pen and a tattered Moleskine from his nightstand. “Got an address for me?”

She rattled it off quickly. Once he had all the details—apartment on the north end, single mother named Samantha Peterson, missing girl named Molly Peterson—he thanked her and hung up the phone.

Van Endel briefly considered a shower to remove his whiskey-sweat, but decided on cologne instead. He dressed in a black suit that was as comfortable as his favorite pair of pajamas but still looked reasonably sharp, then ran a comb through his hair. Given what he’d thrown down before he’d dozed off (he preferred that to “passed out”), he knew he had no right to look as good as he did. He hoisted a smile at the mirror to see if he could carry it off. He supposed he could. And then, just that quick, thoughts of her, of Lex, took the smile off of his face. He left the mirror behind, threw on his shoulder holster, tucked his wallet into the rear right pocket of his pants, and shrugged on his jacket. It was going to be a long
night, and probably a long day, but that was OK. This work was everything that he was.

There were two marked cars parked at the apartment complex, and Van Endel parked his Chevy Caprice behind them before getting out. He gave his notes a look for the address, then saw a uniform he recognized, Don Pratt, standing by a door across the lot. Van Endel opened the door and climbed from the car, then closed the door quietly, before rubbing his palms together and walking to the uni. Waking up was hard to do. “How’s it shaking, Donny?”

“Mrs. Peterson is inside losing her shit, Dick. Just so you know. And thanks for asking. I’ve been good. My kids are at summer camp all week, and I plan on fucking my wife every chance I get until they get back.”

“This must be throwing a monkey wrench in that plan,” said Van Endel, grinning. “We’ll get you back to it soon.”

“Hey, no sweat on my end,” said Don. “I had to work tonight either way, may as well be doing something. You talk to Phil?”