Shallow Graves (28 page)

Ambler nodded. “I wanted you gone so badly. All she did was talk about you. Talk about movies. I was losing her. I was desperate.” He looked down at his hands, studied his long fingers. Ambler broke open the shotgun and put it on the counter. He picked up the bullet casings. “Winchester .300’s. But there’s something different about them.”

“Magnums,” Pellam said.

“I don’t have a gun that’ll take these.” He looked up. “You want to check?”

Pellam glanced at the shotgun. He said, “I believe you.”

Ambler handed the cartridges back. “Those’re unusual rounds.”

“Used for real long distance shooting.”

“What kind of weapon would that be?” Ambler asked.

“You can get a Beretta bolt-action chambered for them. SIG-Sauer has a .300 magnum and—”

“Beretta, you say?”

Pellam said, “You know somebody who’s got one?”

“I do, but I don’t think—”

“Who?”

“You don’t know them. A couple brothers.”

Something flashed through Pellam’s mind.

Pellam said, “They wouldn’t be twins, by any chance?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, they are.”

“
YOU AREN’T GONNA
like it,” the deputy said to the sheriff.

“I don’t like a lot of what’s been happening around here lately,” Tom said.

They were in the police station, Sunday night, though one thing about Cleary: the Sabbath wasn’t any quieter than any other day. The only difference now was that all three of them were working—two in the office, and the other deputy in the field—and they were expecting a visit from a detective and another deputy from the County Sheriff’s office, who were going to be assisting in the investigation of Ned’s murder.

“I was talking to people who had seen him in the past twenty-four hours. Who’d seen Ned, I mean.”

The sheriff knew this, since he’d sent the deputy to do just that. “And?”

“A coupla folks saw him with Sam Torrens. At the festival.”

“So?” Tom was exhausted. A blown-up car, drugs, arson, fights. And now a high school boy murdered. Life in small-town America. Crap.

“It was just before the kid got sick.”

“Kid?
Which
kid? Explain it to me, will you?”

The deputy said, “I’m saying that it looks like Ned was the one who gave the drugs to Sam Torrens. That heroin shit.”

“Oh.” The sheriff closed his eyes and rubbed them with his knuckles. “Is that what I’m not going to like? You said before I wasn’t going to like something.”

The deputy continued. “Keith Torrens got his boy a .22 for Christmas last year. I seen him buying shells.”

“When?”

“I don’t mean recent. I just mean I know he’s got a .22 in the house. And had some shells.”

“Come on, Randy. Everybody in town’s got a .22. They practically come with the house when you buy one.”

“I’m just saying.”

“And we don’t know for certain it was a .22 killed Ned. Could’ve been a .25 or a .222. Ballistics’ll tell us.”

“Maybe. But you’d think there’d’ve been more damage—”

“We. Don’t. Know.”

The deputy nodded. Finally he said, “Closest thing to justifiable I’ve ever seen.”

The sheriff wondered where the hell that was coming from. The deputy had worked on exactly one murder in his four years on the force and that had been when Barnie Slater’s wife used a deer slug in his sleep to keep him from taking the lamp cord to her anymore. She had fresh coffee for the deputies when they’d arrived. The sheriff said, “Justifiable’s the prosecutor’s decision, not ours.”

After a moment Tom asked, “When was the time of death?”

“About ten this morning.”

“Church time. Meg was here bailing out that movie guy—now
that’s
a fact I don’t want to think too much on. What about Keith? He do church?”

“I don’t know,” the deputy answered. “We can call. They’re in First Presbyterian.”

“Who’s that? The minister?”

“Jim Gitting. Good man. Gives a good sermon.”

Tom didn’t care whether he was the devil’s own brother. “Call him. Find out if Torrens was there today.”

The deputy picked up the phone. “Reverend Gitting please. . . . Hey, Reverend, how you doing? Look, I’m real sorry to be—”

Tom took the phone from his hand. “Reverend, this is the sheriff. Was Keith Torrens in church this morning?”

“Uhm, no, Sheriff.” The voice was whiny. Didn’t sound like he’d give a good sermon at all. “Can I ask why you’re asking?”

“Just looking into some things. He usually attend services?”

“Hardly ever. He was working this morning—like usual.”

“Wait. You said he wasn’t there. How’d you know where he was.”

“He wasn’t
in
church. He just dropped off Sam for Sunday school. Is this about that thing with Sam this morning? It wasn’t a big deal. Just gave the teachers a little fright is all.”

“What ‘thing’ with Sam?”

“Well, the boy disappearing. Is that what you’re calling about?”

“What happened?”

“The boys had a study group outside, the weather was so nice. About a half hour later the teachers noticed Sam was gone. We called Meg but she wasn’t home—”

Bailing out that asshole from the movie company.

“—and we called Keith.”

“At his office?”

“Right. He was about to leave but then Sam came back. He was upset about something but wouldn’t say what. Mrs. Ernhelt had a talk with him about going away without saying anything and he seemed okay. It really wasn’t anything.”

“What time was this, Reverend?”

“I don’t know for sure. About nine forty-five or ten.”

Brother. . . .

“All right, sir, thank you.”

“Can you tell me what this is all about?”

“Nothing important. ’Night.”

The deputy finally said what he’d apparently been eager to say for some time. “Tom, if somebody gave my kid drugs like that I’da done something to him too. Maybe not killed him. But I’da done something. You can’t hardly blame Keith.”

“The minister called Keith when Sam disappeared. He was in his office.” Before the deputy could nod in relief Tom said, “But his boy wasn’t accounted for.”

“Sam? Come on, you’re not thinking . . .” But the man’s voice faded fast, as if he couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence.

TRASH.

The mystery of what lay behind the stockade fence at R&W was solved: not surplus, not salvage. Forget about antiques. Not even good junk.

Robert and William owned a trashyard and nothing but.

Pellam had circled far around the back of R&W and was slowly moving through the woods. Unlike the pristine woods surrounding Ambler’s house,
the air here was raw, pungent, ripe. He smelled garbage and methane, which filled his throat and made him gag. Several times he had to swallow down nausea. Under the dim moonlight, halved by mist, he felt he was plodding through a dead animal’s viscera. The ground under his boots was slick and pasty.

He came to the foothills of the junkyard: a door-less refrigerator on its side then ten yards further along, amputated pieces of laminated furniture, plush toys, books, tangles of wire, hunks of iron losing shape to oxidation.

Twenty yards more and he came to the boundary of R&W. He’d brought a small bolt cutter, and although he saw now at one time there had been a cheap chain link enclosing a portion of the yard, it had long ago sagged or been pulled down by vandals or gravity. Pellam stuffed the cutter into his back pocket and hopped over an indented portion of the fence.

He paused and listened for dogs.

Nothing. No voices either. Just the sour smell and a tangle of vague moonlight reflecting off a thousand varied surfaces. Pellam walked forward slowly toward the shack that must have been the office of the place, looking for footholds through the maze of scabby, broken trash.

Pellam pressed his back against the shack. He looked quickly in the window then ducked below the sill. Empty. He looked again.

A filthy place. Fast-food cartons, empty beer cans, more magazines (he expected
Penthouse
s but all he could see were
National Geographic
s,
Cosmopolitan
s
and
Readers’ Digest
s), moldy and stained clothes. Books, dishes, newspapers, slips of paper, boxes.

He also saw two leather gun cases in the corner.

Slipping on cotton work gloves, he looked around, then tried the window. It was locked. Pellam took the bolt cutter and whacked out a pane of glass, reached up and undid the latch. He lifted the window and after a struggle to boost himself up, the pain shooting from his thigh to his ribs to his jaw, he half-fell and half-climbed over the windowsill.

He listened for a moment. And heard nothing but the rustle of a car moving by. He walked quickly to the corner, and hefted one of the gun cases. Inside was a Colt AR15, the civilian version of the Army M16.

The other case held the .300 magnum Beretta.

A simple-looking gun, a bolt-action. Walnut stock, dark blued metal, a black shoulder guard, a high-riding telescopic sight. There were no iron sights; it was a sniper’s gun. The shells Sam had found fit it perfectly.

Cinderella’s slipper.

Was it proof enough? Pellam didn’t know. His only bout with the law had been on the other side (and from there it looked pretty damn easy to get yourself arrested and convicted). Pellam replaced the gun then began looking through desk drawers, the closet, the battered olive-drab rucksacks stacked on the back wall.

Which is where they had the drugs hidden.

Thousands of little tubes like the kind crack came in. Must’ve been five, six thousand of them. And inside each one was a little crystal like the doctor
had showed them, the crystals someone had given Sam. A little piece of rock candy.

That solved the probable cause problem. If the gun didn’t do it then this ought to.

A car went by. It seemed to slow and he quickly shoved the bags back into place, drew his pistol. Then after a moment, when the car was past, Pellam knelt and opened the rucksack again.

“
NEKKID,” BOBBY SAID
.

His brother nodded.

They were in the Cleary Inn, eating prime rib. It was a pretty ritzy place for Dutchess County. Not as damn countryish as most places, the inn was filled with chrome and mirrors and plastic all shoved together and cemented down with plenty of money. The twins sat at a table with a red linen tablecloth; in their laps were thick napkins that left whitecaps of lint on their matching dark slacks.

They may have owned a junkyard but these boys loved to eat and didn’t mind pampering themselves. A goodly part of the money they made—from the drugs, of course, since they’d had a loss on the junkyard every year they’d operated it—a goodly part of that income went into their mouths. Disposable income. (“We own a junkyard—all our income’s disposable! Ha, ha, ha.”)

Tonight their fingernails were perfectly clean and under the aroma of coal tar shampoo they smelled sweet as the perfume aisle of a CVS pharmacy.

Bobby said, “So there I was, nekkid as a jaybird.” He paused, wondering what a jaybird was exactly.
“And the shades were up. She couldn’t’ve been more than fifteen feet away. In the backyard.”

“Fifteen feet.”

“In a white bra. Like torpedo tits.”

“This’s a dumb shit story.”

“No, no, no,” Bobby said. “It gets better.”

Billy said, “It ain’t got good yet. How can it get better?”

Bobby paused to eat his Yorkshire pudding, which was new on the menu. He’d never had it before. Well, pudding it wasn’t. It was like a pancake that got out of hand. Bobby thought he could show the cook here a thing or two about making pancakes.

Billy ate some more Caesar salad.

Bobby continued, “Then she kind of waves. Only it was, she didn’t want to come right out and wave. You know, that kind of wave.”

Billy chewed.

“And the next thing, I’m turning around to face her full and she was looking at my ding-dong, smiling.”

Billy said, “You talk more about that thang than you use it.”

“I sure did use it that night,” Bobby said. Then, after another triangle of Yorkshire pudding disappeared into his mouth: “How long is he going to be there?”

He didn’t explain that he was talking about Pellam being at the Torrens place (they’d seen the camper on their way to the Inn) but Billy knew that’s what his brother was talking about.

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

Bobby said, “So, we’re just going to do it? It’ll look kind of obvious, won’t it? First his friend in the car. Then him.”

“Uhm,” Billy muttered and didn’t say anything more. Not because he was chewing salad but because he was thinking.

Bobby looked at a twelve-point mounted above a smoky-glass fireplace. It was weird to have a trophy in a restaurant that looked like it ought to be on Fort Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn or someplace in Paramus, New Jersey. He studied the animal’s dead eyes and slick fur and he began salivating, imagining that he could smell fresh morning air and feel November stub grass under his boots, the heft of a good rifle in his hands.

He said, “I can’t picture that, you know. Traveling around the country. I’d get kind of, you know . . .”

“Disoriented,” Billy said. Billy often supplied the words that Bobby couldn’t think of.

“Yeah. I’d like to travel, though. There’s a lot of the world to see. I just mean I wouldn’t want to travel all the time.”

“Uhm.”

“You’re not talking a lot tonight.” He tapped a crispy part of the pudding with his fork. The thing that was odd was that you were supposed to put gravy on it. Bobby thought they ought to give you Log Cabin and was close to asking for some.

Pancake pudding with gravy on it. Brits were fucking crazy.

Billy said, “There’s one thing that still bothers me. The Torrens kid.”

“What about him?”

“Ned gave him the candy, right? So they must’ve spent some time together. What’s a like logical question for the kid to ask?”

Bobby couldn’t figure it out. “Tell me.”

“He’s going to ask where Ned got the stuff, and Ned is—was—just dumb enough to tell him.”