Cage of Night (7 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Summer came the following week.

That's a local joke, about how you can have summer and winter and summer again all within the same month. Sometimes within the same week.

But it really was sort of like summer, people walking around downtown in their shirtsleeves and dresses.

By noon, the temperature was in the seventies and the sunlight was very warm. Convertible tops went down and everywhere you went you heard loud rock and roll music. It was like the town was having this party.

On my lunch hour, I walked over to Taubman's Cigar Store. That's what it's always been called, but even though they sell cigarettes and cigars it's mostly a newsstand where I buy all my science fiction paperbacks.

The big thing at Taubman's is the skin magazines. Two or three times in the past few years, The Women Of Righteousness picketed the place, but Mr. Taubman didn't give in.

Mr. Taubman keeps the skin magazines in the back of his store, so that's where you usually find the crowd. It's always kind of fun to watch guys go back there. Some of them look kind of sneaky and furtive. Some kind of swagger, as if they're daring you to say anything about what they're doing. And some are just fast, shoot back there, thumb through a few pages, and then shoot back out into the street.

I spent twenty minutes going through the new paperbacks. I bought two of them, a Koontz and a King, them pretty much being my favorite writers.

I was just leaving when I saw Garrett coming

through the doorway.

Even though his shift didn't start for a couple of hours, he was already in uniform.

Any self-consciousness he'd had those first few days was already gone.

When he saw me, he paused in the doorway, nodded for me to follow, and then turned around and walked back outside.

He said hello to a couple of passing people, and then gave a long, hard look to a very pretty young mother pushing her baby in his stroller down the block. She had beautiful ankles.

He didn't say anything to me, just started walking, and I fell in next to him.

It was kind of strange, neither of us saying anything, just walking. We passed the Lutheran church with its towering spire; and the First Trust bank building where, according to legend, John Dillinger stopped one day while fleeing federal agents; and the Orpheum theater that closed down after the four-plex went up in the mall.

Then we reached the city park, and it was all pretty women, and little kids playing Frisbee with dogs, and old men on park benches, and motorboats out on the river.

"You eat yet?" Garrett said.

"Huh-uh."

"You want a hot dog?"

"Yeah, OK."

There was a small concrete block concession stand. We got two Pepsis and two chili dogs and went over and sat on a bench by the river.

I could tell he wanted to say something.

He said, "Guess what I read this weekend?"

"What?"

"Four of those old Roy Thomas Conan comic books."

"Wow, I haven't seen those since I was a kid."

"They were really good."

But that wasn't what he really wanted to say. That was just talk. Nervous talk.

He said, "Went on my first drug-bust last night."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I was scared shitless. The Captain said that these guys would be armed. You know, dealers."

"Were they?"

"Yeah, they were. One of them even had a sawed-off shotgun. Lucky for us, they were stoned out of their fucking minds. All we had to do was waltz in there and bust the bastards."

He was already a cop. With the attitude, I mean, and hard edge. He'd only been wearing the uniform about three weeks.

But the drug bust wasn't what he wanted to tell me about, either.

We sat in silence a little longer and the little kids laughing and toddling around on the grass was kind of fun to watch.

He said, "He's a big hero."

"Who is?"

"Myles."

"Oh."

"You didn't press charges so he could play that game and he goes and scores more points than he ever has and we win the conference championship so now he's king shit again instead of this creep who beat you up."

"Well, I got something good out of it." I looked over at him and smiled. "Cindy."

We watched each other for a moment and then looked back at the river. Sometimes it's easy to imagine the days when the big paddle-wheelers plied this river and unloaded supplies here on the shore. The old-timers say that Indians used to run for miles on the shore right along with the paddle-wheelers, waving and laughing the whole time.

He said, "I've got to tell you something."

Whatever he was about to say was the real thing he wanted to tell me. Not Conan, not drug busts. This.

"She's seeing him again."

"Cindy?"

"Uh-huh."

"Bullshit."

There was a sweet, soft breeze, but I couldn't enjoy it. I didn't believe what he'd told me, but somehow I didn't quite
dis
-believe him, either.

The last few days, Cindy had been acting odd. The nights we went out, she found a reason to go home early. And any plans I suggested, she always put off, saying she wasn't sure what her schedule would be like.

She wouldn't even kiss me right, either.

I guess that was the worst of it because that's where I could really feel her slipping away from me, her kisses too quick, too cold.

"She hates him," I said.

"Maybe."

"And since she hates him, it wouldn't make any sense that she was seeing him, would it?"

"I just thought you should know."

I was quiet for a time.

Then, "Somebody tell you this or you see it for yourself?"

"I saw it for myself."

"When?"

"Last few nights."

"Where?"

"Couple of different places. Out behind McDonald's where all the kids hang out?"

"Yeah?"

"He was kissing her."

I felt a lot of things just then, but mostly I felt sick. I saw a little kid tottering across the grass in search of his fallen Frisbee. It really would be good to be a kid again and not give a damn about a girl betraying you.

He said, "She tell you anything about him?"

"Like what?"

"Anything he might have done that was against the law."

I'd forgotten his suspicions about David Myles.

"She hinted at a couple of things, I guess."

"Like what?"

"Nothing specific."

"She ever mention the Franson woman?"

"The old lady who got murdered?"

"Yeah, murdered and robbed. Her."

"No, she never mentioned her. You don't think Myles had anything to do with the Franson woman, do you?"

He shot his sleeve and looked at his wristwatch. It was silver and new and impressive. I guessed his folks gave it to him as a gift.

"I'm not sure yet."

He stood up and I saw it in him, too, the way I'd seen it in my younger brother Josh. Garrett the cop here was becoming an adult. We were the same age and I was still a boy and he was becoming an adult.

Then I remembered the well and said, "She's got this weird thing about a well."

"What kind of well?"

I told him.

"You know she was in the mental hospital, don't you?"

"Yeah."

"Now I can see why."

I should have defended her, but I was too angry. I had no doubt that Garrett had told me the truth about Myles kissing her. I wanted somebody to dislike Myles as much as I did. Garrett seemed willing to take on the role.

He checked his wristwatch again. "I'd better get going."

His Sam Browne creaked; his Magnum was as imposing as ever.

"You headed back to work?" he said.

"Yeah. Different direction. If you're headed to the station, I mean."

He smiled. "Yeah, I'm at the stage where I hang around there even when I'm not on duty. The older cops tell me I'll get over that fast."

I nodded. "Thanks for telling me about Myles."

"It's a hell of thing to have to tell somebody."

"I'd rather know than not know."

"He's got some kind of hold on her, that's for sure." Then: "You see that new SF movie that opened last weekend?"

"I wanted to. But Cindy said it looked too scary. She hates scary stuff."

Except for a well that has an alien in it, I thought unkindly.

"I've got Sunday afternoon off. It you're free, give me a call."

I put out my hand and we shook. I needed a friend very badly at the moment.

"You'll get over it," he said. "I got dumped once."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. This little car hop out at the A&W on old 49?"

"Jeeze, I'd forgotten all about that place." Back in my high school days, that had been the sort of unofficial hangout of the dweebs and nerds. We were far enough out of town that nobody could hassle us. Plus they let us use the cigarette machine even though we were underage.

"Took me a year to get over her, but I did."

"How come she dumped you?"

He tapped his nose. "She got in this fucking car wreck."

"And that's why she dumped you?"

"Nah. She got in this car wreck and had to have all this plastic surgery on her face."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And the surgery turned her into a real beauty. God, she was beautiful. You should've seen her." He shrugged. "Well, anybody who looks like she did sure doesn't want to hang around somebody like me. So she dumped me. Started going out with this really handsome rich kid." He smiled. It was not without bitterness. "But she got paid back."

"How?"

"The handsome rich kid?"

"Uh-huh."

"He turned out to be a peeper."

"A peeper?"

"Yeah, you know, a guy who's always peeping into ladies' johns and places like that."

I laughed. "Man, I guess she got paid back."

He smiled and cuffed me on the arm. "Just hang in there. Maybe Myles'll turn out to be a transvestite or something."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

That night I followed her. That's not a nice thing to admit about yourself, that you're the kind of guy who'd sneak around after your girlfriend, like the kind of guy who would call people on the phone anonymously and hassle them.

But I did.

Dark came right after dinner, and when she left the house for the evening I was parked down the block.

She went to the pharmacy first, and then to the library, and then to the mall.

Then she went to the Arby's over on Foster Avenue, and that's where she found Myles.

He was there waiting for her.

I sat in the lot and watched them in the window.

When she saw him, she gave him a quick kiss on the mouth and then sat down in his booth, across from him.

I felt sick.

I had quick, frantic dreams of going in there and hauling her out here. I'd make a strong case for myself, how I was good and true and sensitive and didn't that count for something in this world? And if she needed reminding, I'd remind her of all the terrible things Myles had done to her.

I started feeling self-conscious, the way people checked me out as they went inside.

They seemed to sense that I was a pretty sleazy character, following some poor girl around, unable to take my banishment like a mature adult.

None of it made sense to me. For three or four nights there, we'd spent a lot of great hours together, her constantly telling me how happy she was to be with me instead of him... and then I felt her pulling back.

But why?

Sometimes I looked in the window where she sat and I hated her for what she'd done to me. I couldn't ever remember pain like this.

Tonight, for example, I'd gone into my room and slid out my
Penthouse
from underneath my mattress where my Mom couldn't find it. Sometimes, just to cut tension (and to have as good a time as you can have alone), I masturbated. But not tonight. I looked at all the naked girls who usually aroused me, and felt nothing. Nothing. Then I'd gone into the basement where I have four small bookcases packed with science fiction paperbacks and magazines from high school. Sometimes, when I'm down, I can go down there and look at them and touch them and feel the kind of solace I used to, that even if I was a dweeb and isolated and scared, I could always hide between the covers of those books and magazines, that there was escape and mercy after all, if only you knew where to find it.

They stayed in Arby's an hour.

Some of the time, they looked to be having a very serious discussion. Other times, they laughed.

When they came out into the warm mid-November night, her arm was around his middle and he was giving her a squeeze.

They left her car there. She got in his.

If he found out that I was following them, he'd beat me up even worse than he had before.

But I didn't care. I followed them.

She sat close to him in the front seat. A lot of people honked at them, and they honked back. King and queen. Royalty.

The night didn't help. It was one of those smoky autumn nights that make you melancholy and restless without you knowing quite why.

They stopped at a jock shop where he tried on a couple of letter jackets. Again, I saw them through the windows. My own little TV show.

Maybe it would be better if he saw me and caught me, I thought. Then we could at least get this over with.

When they came out of the jock shop, they stopped off at a convenience store where Myles bought a six-pack. He was underage but he was also Myles and they weren't going to refuse him, not in this town.

Myles had parked on the dark side of the store. When he came out, he set the beer in the back seat and then they started making out.

Right there.

We'd kind of done that, too, our last night together, wanted to kiss so badly that we couldn't control ourselves, and made out just about every place we went.

I felt sick again, wild with rage and embarrassment and self-pity.

I was so fascinated and repelled by what I saw that I didn't even hear him sneak up on me.

"You want to borrow my binoculars?" he said.

"Hey. How you doing?"

"Guess I should ask how
you're
doing?"

"Oh, pretty good."

"Right. That's why you're sitting here watching them make out."

He really was a cop, Garrett. He'd easily figured out what I was doing here.

"You must like punishment."

"Yeah, I must."

"Why don't you go have a beer?"

I could tell that this wasn't a suggestion, it was a subtle but definite order.

This was Garrett the cop talking, saying that it wasn't a real good situation when one citizen sat there spying on another.

"Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

He looked at me and smiled. "You'll get over it."

"Yeah, I suppose I will."

"You'll meet somebody else."

Once again, I had the sense that Garrett had become a real adult while I had remained a child. He wouldn't sit here watching her like this. He was too proud, too sensible, too much of an adult.

"I hope it's soon, Garrett."

He nodded, and then walked back to his car.

I did what he wanted me to. I fired up the beast, which was running again after smashing into Cindy's tree, and then I drove away from there—

—all the way around the block.

Garrett was gone.

Myles and Cindy were just pulling out.

I followed them.