Black House (41 page)

“Jesus!” repeats the crow on the welcome mat. And then, chipper as a chickadee: “Gorg!”

If asked, Tansy would have said she was too stoned to be frightened, but this is apparently not so, because she gives out a disconcerted little cry and takes a step backward.

The crow hops briskly across the doorsill and strides onto the faded purple carpet, still looking up at her with its bright eyes. Its feathers glisten with condensed drops of mist. It bops on past her, then pauses to preen and fluff. It looks around as if to ask,
How’m I doin’, sweetheart?

“Go away,” Tansy says. “I don’t know what the fuck you are, or if you’re here at all, but—”

“Gorg!” the crow insists, then spreads its wings and fleets across the trailer’s living room, a charred fleck burnt off the back of the night. Tansy screams and cringes, instinctively shielding her face, but Gorg doesn’t come near her. It alights on the table beside her bottle, there not being any bust of Pallas handy.

Tansy thinks:
It got disoriented in the fog, that’s all. It could even be rabid, or have that Key Lime disease, whatever you call it. I ought to go in the kitchen and get the broom. Shoo it out before it shits around
.
.
.

But the kitchen is too far. In her current state, the kitchen seems hundreds of miles away, somewhere in the vicinity of Colorado Springs. And there’s probably no crow here at all. Thinking of that goddamn poem has caused her to hallucinate, that’s all . . . that, and losing her daughter.

For the first time the pain gets through the haze, and Tansy winces from its cruel and wiry heat. She remembers the little hands that sometimes pressed so tidily against the sides of her neck. The cries in the night, summoning her from sleep. The smell of her, fresh from the bath.

“Her name was Irma!” she suddenly shouts at the figment standing so boldly beside the brandy bottle. “
Irma,
not fucking Lenore, what kind of stupid name is Lenore? Let’s hear you say
Irma!
”

“Irma!” the visitor croaks obediently, stunning her to silence. And its eyes. Ah! Its glittering eyes draw her, like the eyes of the Ancient Mariner in that other poem she was supposed to learn but never did. “Irma-Irma-Irma-Irma—”

“Stop it!”
She doesn’t want to hear it after all. She was wrong. Her daughter’s name out of that alien throat is foul, insupportable. She wants to put her hands over her ears and can’t. They’re too heavy. Her hands have joined the stove and the refrigerator (miserable half-busted thing) in Colorado Springs. All she can do is look into those glittering black eyes.

It preens for her, ruffling its ebony sateen feathers. They make a loathsome little scuttering noise all up and down its back and she thinks,
“Prophet!”
said I,
“thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or devil!”

Certainty fills her heart like cold water. “What do you know?” she asks. “Why did you come?”

“Know!” croaks the Crow Gorg, nodding its beak briskly up and down. “Come!”

And does it wink? Good God,
does it wink at her?

“Who killed her?” Tansy Freneau whispers. “Who killed my pretty baby?”

The crow’s eyes fix her, turn her into a bug on a pin. Slowly, feeling more in a dream than ever (but this
is
happening, on some level she understands that perfectly), she crosses to the table. Still the crow watches her, still the crow draws her on.
Night’s Plutonian shore,
she thinks.
Night’s Plutonian fuckin’ shore.

“Who? Tell me what you know!”

The crow looks up at her with its bright black eyes. Its beak opens and closes, revealing a wet red interior in tiny peeks.

“Tansy!” it croaks. “Come!”

The strength runs out of her legs, and she drops to her knees, biting her tongue and making it bleed. Crimson drops splatter her U of W sweatshirt. Now her face is on a level with the bird’s face. She can see one of its wings brushing up and down, sensuously, on the glass side of the coffee-brandy bottle. The smell of Gorg is dust and heaped dead flies and ancient urns of buried spice. Its eyes are shining black portholes looking into some other world. Hell, perhaps. Or Sheol.

“Who?”
she whispers.

Gorg stretches its black and rustling neck until its black beak is actually in the cup of her ear. It begins to whisper, and eventually Tansy Freneau begins to nod. The light of sanity has left her eyes. And when will it return? Oh, I think we all know the answer to that one.

Can you say “Nevermore”?

16

6
:
45
P.M.
F
RENCH
L
ANDING
is fogged out, fagged out, and uneasy in its heart, but quiet. The quiet won’t last. Once it has started,
slippage
never stops for long.

At Maxton’s, Chipper has stayed late, and considering the leisurely (and really quite sensational) blow job being administered to him by Rebecca Vilas as he sits sprawled in his office chair, his decision to put in a little overtime isn’t that surprising.

In the common room, the old folks sit transfixed by Julie Andrews and
The Sound of Music.
Alice Weathers is actually crying with happiness
—Music
is her all-time favorite movie.
Singin’ in the Rain
comes close, but close never won the cigar. Among those MEC inmates who are ambulatory, only Burny is missing . . . except no one here misses him at all. Burny is deep in sleep. The spirit that now controls him—the demon, we might as well say—has its own agenda in French Landing, and it has used Burny roughly over these last few weeks (not that Burny’s complaining; he is a very willing accomplice).

On Norway Valley Road, Jack Sawyer is just pulling his Dodge Ram into Henry Leyden’s driveway. The fog out here is thinner, but it still turns the truck’s headlamps into soft coronas. Tonight he will recommence
Bleak House
at chapter 7 (“The Ghost’s Walk”) and hopefully reach the end of chapter 8 (“Covering a Multitude of Sins”). But before Dickens, he has promised to listen to the Wisconsin Rat’s latest candidate for hot rotation, a number called “Gimme Back My Dog” by Slobberbone.

“Every five years or so, another great rock-’n’-roll song comes break-dancing out of the woodwork,” Henry has told him over the phone, and Jack’s damned if he can’t hear the Rat screaming around the edges of his friend’s voice, popping wheelies out there on the edge of darkness. “This is a
great
rock-’n’-roll song.”

“If you say so,” Jack replies dubiously. His idea of a great rock-’n’-roll song is “Runaround Sue,” by Dion.

At 16 Robin Hood Lane (that sweet little Cape Cod honey of a home), Fred Marshall is down on his hands and knees, wearing a pair of green rubber gloves and washing the floor. He’s still got Tyler’s baseball cap balanced on his head, and he’s weeping.

Out at the Holiday Trailer Park, the Crow Gorg is dripping poison into the porches of Tansy Freneau’s ears.

In the sturdy brick house on Herman Street where he lives with the beautiful Sarah and the equally beautiful David, Dale Gilbertson is just getting ready to head back to the office, his movements slightly slowed by two helpings of chicken pot pie and a dish of bread pudding. When the telephone rings, he is not terribly surprised. He’s had that feeling, after all. His caller is Debbi Anderson, and from her first word he knows that something has popped.

He listens, nodding, asking an occasional question. His wife stands in the kitchen doorway, watching him with worried eyes. Dale bends and jots on the pad beside the phone. Sarah walks over and reads two names: Andy Railsback and M. Fine.

“You’ve still got Railsback on the line?” he asks.

“Yes, on hold—”

“Patch me in.”

“Dale, I don’t know if I know how to do that.” Debbi sounds uncharacteristically flustered. Dale closes his eyes a moment, reminds himself that this isn’t her usual job.

“Ernie’s not there yet?”

“No.”

“Who is?”

“Bobby Dulac . . . I think Dit might be in the shower . . .”

“Put Bobby on,” Dale says, and is relieved when Bobby is able to patch him quickly and painlessly through to Andy Railsback in Morty Fine’s office. The two men have been upstairs to room 314, and one look at the Polaroids scattered on the floor of George Potter’s closet has been enough for Morty. He’s now as pale as Andy himself. Maybe paler.

Outside the police station, Ernie Therriault and Reginald “Doc” Amberson meet in the parking lot. Doc has just arrived on his old (but perfectly maintained) Harley Fat Boy. They exchange amiable greetings in the fog. Ernie Therriault is another cop—sort of—but relax: he’s the last one we’ll have to meet (well, there
is
an FBI agent running around here someplace, but never mind him right now; he’s in Madison, and he’s a fool).

Ernie is a trim sixty-five, retired from full-time police duty for almost twelve years, and still four times the cop Arnold Hrabowski will ever be. He supplements his pension by doing night dispatch at the FLPD (he doesn’t sleep so well these days, thanks to a cranky prostate) and pulling private security time at First Bank of Wisconsin on Fridays, when the Wells Fargo people come at two and the Brinks people at four.

Doc looks every inch the Hells Angel, with his long black-and-gray beard (which he sometimes braids with ribbons in the style of the pirate Edward Teach), and he brews beer for a living, but the two men get along very well. For one thing, they recognize each other’s intelligence. Ernie doesn’t know if Doc really
is
a doctor, but he could be. Maybe at one point he was.

“Anything changed?” Doc asks.

“Not that I know of, my friend,” Ernie says. One of the Five comes by every night, in turn, to check. Tonight Doc’s got the duty.

“Mind if I walk in with you?”

“Nope,” Ernie said. “Just as long as you respect the rule.”

Doc nods. Some of the other Fives can be pissy about the rule (especially Sonny, who’s pissy about lots of stuff), but Doc abides by it: one cup of coffee or five minutes, whichever comes first, then down the road you go. Ernie, who saw plenty of
real
Hells Angels when he was a cop in Phoenix back in the seventies, appreciates how deeply patient Beezer St. Pierre and his crew have been. But of course, they are
not
Hells Angels, or Pagans, or Beasts on Bikes, or any of that nonsense. Ernie doesn’t know exactly
what
they are, but he knows that they listen to Beezer, and he suspects that Beezer’s patience is growing thin. Ernie knows his would be by now.

“Well, then, come on in,” Ernie says, clapping the big man on the shoulder. “Let’s see what’s shaking.”

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Dale finds he is able to think quickly and clearly. His earlier fear has left him, partly because the fuckup has already happened and the case—the
official
case, anyway—has been taken away from him. Mostly because he knows he can now call on Jack if he needs to, and Jack will answer. Jack’s his safety net.

He listens to Railsback’s description of the Polaroids—mostly letting the old fella vent and settle a bit—and then asks a single question about the two photos of the boy.

“Yellow,” Railsback replies with no hesitation. “The shirt was yellow. I could read the word
Kiwanis
on it. Nothing else. The . . . the blood . . .”

Dale says he understands, and tells Railsback an officer will join them shortly.

There is the sound of the phone shifting hands, and then Fine is in his ear—a fellow Dale knows and doesn’t much care for. “What if he comes back, Chief? What if Potter comes back here to the hotel?”

“Can you see the lobby from where you are?”

“No.” Petulant. “We’re in the office. I told you that.”

“Then go out front. Look busy. If he comes in—”

“I don’t want to do that. If you’d seen those pitchers, you wouldn’t want to do it, either.”

“You don’t have to say boo to him,” Dale says. “Just call if he goes by.”

“But—”

“Hang up the telephone, sir. I’ve got a lot to do.”

Sarah has put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. Dale puts his free one over hers. There is a click in his ear, loud enough to sound disgruntled.

“Bobby, are you on?”

“Right here, Chief. Debbi, too, and Dit. Oh, and Ernie just walked in.” He lowers his voice. “He’s got one of those motorcycle boys with him. The one who calls himself Doc.”

Dale thinks furiously. Ernie, Debbi, Dit, and Bobby: all in uniform. Not good for what he wants. He comes to a sudden decision and says, “Put the hogger on.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

A moment later he’s talking to Doc Amberson. “You want to help bust the fucker who killed Armand St. Pierre’s little girl?”

“Hell, yes.” No hesitation.

“All right: don’t ask questions and don’t make me repeat myself.”

“I’m listening,” Doc says crisply.

“Tell Officer Dulac to give you the blue cell phone in evidence storage, the one we took off the doper who skipped. He’ll know the one I mean.” If anyone tries to star-69 a call originating from that phone, Dale knows, they won’t be able to trace it back to his shop, and that’s just as well. He is, after all, supposed to be off the case.

“Blue cell phone.”

“Then walk down to Lucky’s Tavern, next to the Nelson Hotel.”

“I got my bike—”

“No.
Walk.
Go inside. Buy a lottery ticket. You’ll be looking for a tall man, skinny, salt-and-pepper hair, about seventy, khaki pants, maybe a khaki shirt, too. Most likely alone. His favorite roost is between the jukebox and the little hall that goes to the johns. If he’s there, call the station. Just hit 911. Got all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Go. Really shuck your buns, Doctor.”

Doc doesn’t even bother to say good-bye. A moment later, Bobby’s back on the phone. “What are we gonna do, Dale?”

“If he’s there, we’re gonna take the son of a bitch,” Dale says. He’s still under control, but he can feel his heartbeat accelerating, really starting to crank. The world stands out before him with a brilliance that hasn’t been there since the first murder. He can feel every finger of his wife’s hand on his shoulder. He can smell her makeup and her hairspray. “Get Tom Lund. And lay out three of the Kevlar vests.” He thinks that over, then says: “Make it four.”

“You’re going to call Hollywood?”

“Yeah,” he says, “but we’re not gonna wait for him.” On that he hangs up. Because he wants to bolt, he makes himself stand still for a moment. Takes a deep breath. Lets it out, then takes another.

Sarah grasps his hands. “Be careful.”

“Oh yeah,” Dale says. “You can take that to the bank.” He starts for the door.

“What about Jack?” she calls.

“I’ll get him from the car,” he says without slowing. “If God’s on our side, we’ll have the guy in lockup before he makes it halfway to the station.”

Five minutes later, Doc is standing at the bar in Lucky’s, listening to Trace Adkins sing “I Left Something Turned On at Home” and scratching a Wisconsin instant-winner ticket. It actually
is
a winner—ten bucks—but most of Doc’s attention is focused in the direction of the juke. He bops his shaggy head a little bit, as if he’s really getting off on this particular example of Shitkicker Deluxe.

Sitting at the table in the corner with a plate of spaghetti in front of him (the sauce as red as a nosebleed) and a pitcher of beer close at hand is the man he’s looking for: tall even sitting down, skinny, lines grooving his tanned hound dog’s face, salt-and-pepper hair neatly combed back. Doc can’t really see the shirt, because the guy’s got a napkin tucked into the collar, but the long leg sticking out from under the table is dressed in khaki.

If Doc was entirely sure this was the baby-killing puke who did Amy, he’d make a citizen’s arrest right now—an extremely rough one. Fuck the cops and their Miranda shit. But maybe the guy’s only a witness, or an accomplice, or something.

He takes his ten-spot from the bartender, turns down the suggestion that he stay for a beer, and strolls back out into the fog. Ten steps up the hill, he takes the blue cell phone from his pocket and dials 911. This time it’s Debbi who answers.

“He’s there,” Doc says. “What next?”

“Bring the phone back,” she says, and hangs up.

“Well, fuck you very much,” Doc says mildly. But he’ll be a good boy. He’ll play by their rules. Only first—

He dials another number on the blue phone (which has one more chore to do before it passes out of our tale forever) and Bear Girl answers. “Put him on, sweetness,” he says, hoping she won’t tell him that Beezer’s gone down to the Sand Bar. If the Beez ever goes down there alone, it’ll be because he’s after one thing. A bad thing.

But a moment later Beezer’s voice is in his ear—rough, as if he’s been crying. “Yeah? What?”

“Round ’em up and get your heavyset ass down to the police station parking lot,” Doc tells him. “I’m not a hunnert percent certain, but I think they might be getting ready to nail the motherfucker done it. I might even have seen—”

Beezer is gone before Doc can get the phone off his ear and push the
OFF
button. He stands in the fog, looking up at the bleary lights of the French Landing cop shop, wondering why he didn’t tell Beezer and the boys to meet him outside of Lucky’s. He supposes he knows the answer. If Beezer got to that old guy before the cops, spaghetti might turn out to be the old guy’s last meal.

Better to wait, maybe.

Wait and see.

There’s nothing but a fine mist on Herman Street, but the soup thickens almost as soon as Dale turns toward downtown. He turns on his parking lights, but they’re not enough. He goes to low beams, then calls Jack’s. He hears the recorded announcement start, kills the call, and dials Uncle Henry’s. And Uncle Henry answers. In the background, Dale can hear a howling fuzz-tone guitar and someone growling “Gimme back my
dog
!” over and over.

“Yes, he’s just arrived,” Henry allows. “We’re currently in the Musical Appreciation phase of our evening. Literature to follow. We’ve reached a critical juncture in
Bleak House—
Chesney Wold, the Ghost’s Walk, Mrs. Rouncewell, all of that—and so unless your need is actually
urgent—
”

“It is. Put him on
now,
Unc.”

Henry sighs.
“Oui, mon capitaine.”

A moment later he’s talking to Jack, who of course agrees to come at once. This is good, but French Landing’s police chief finds some of his friend’s reactions a trifle puzzling. No, Jack doesn’t want Dale to hold the arrest until he arrives. Very considerate of him to ask, also very considerate of Dale to have saved him a Kevlar vest (part of the law enforcement booty showered on the FLPD and thousands of other small police departments during the Reagan years), but Jack believes Dale and his men can nab George Potter without much trouble.