The Devil All the Time (20 page)

“The Democrats gonna be the ruination of this country,” the cowboy said. “What we need to do, Bus, is start our own little army. Kill a few of them and the rest will get the idea.”

“You mean the Democrats or the longhairs, J.R.?”

“Well, we’d start with the sissies first,” the cowboy said. “Remember that crazy sonofabitch had that chicken stuck to him out on the highway that time? Bus, I guarantee you these longhairs is going to be ten times worse than that.”

Carl took a sip of his coffee and listened while the two men fantasized about a private militia. It would be their final contribution to the country before they died. They would gladly sacrifice themselves if need be. It was their duty as citizens. Then Carl heard one of them say loudly, “What the hell you looking at?”

They were both staring at him. “Nothing,” Carl said. “Just drinking my coffee.”

The cowboy winked at the suit and asked, “What you think, boy? You like them longhairs?”

“I don’t know,” Carl said.

“Shit, J.R., he’s probably got one at home waiting on him,” the suit joked.

“Yeah, he don’t have the grit for what we need,” the cowboy said, turning back to his coffee. “Shit, probably never even served in the military. Soft as a doughnut, that boy.” He shook his head. “Whole damn country’s gettin’ like that.”

Carl didn’t say anything, but he wondered what it would be like to kill a couple of dried-up fuckers like them. For a moment, he thought
about following them when they left, have them screw each other just for starters. He bet he could have that cowboy shitting in the suit’s little hat by the time he got serious. Those two pricks could look at Carl Henderson and regard him as a nothing all they wanted, he didn’t care. They could blow off from now until doomsday about the killing they would like to do, but neither of them had the guts for it. In fifteen minutes he could have them both begging for a seat in hell. There were things he could do that would make them eat each other’s fingers for just two minutes of relief. All he had to do was make the decision. He took another sip of his coffee, looked out the window at the Cadillac, the foggy street. Sure, just an old fat boy, boss. Soft as a fucking doughnut.

The cowboy lit another cigarette and coughed up some brown gunk that he spit in the ashtray. “Turn one of them goddamn things into a pet, that’s what I’d like to do,” he said, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin the other handed him.

“Would you want it to be a man or a woman, J.R.?”

“Hell, they look the same, don’t they?”

The suit grinned. “What would you feed it?”

“You know damn well what I’d feed it, Bus,” the cowboy said, and they both laughed.

Carl turned back around. He had never thought of that before. A pet. Keeping such a thing wasn’t possible right now, but maybe someday. See, he thought to himself, there was always something new and exciting to look forward to, even in this life. Except for the weeks they were out on the hunt, he always had a hard time staying upbeat, but then something would happen that would remind him that it wasn’t all shit. Of course, to even consider turning a model into some sort of pet, they would have to move out of town, get a place out in the sticks. You’d need a basement or, at the very least, some sort of outbuilding close to the house, a toolshed or a barn. Maybe he could eventually train it to do his bidding, though he doubted, even at the same time he was considering it, that he’d have the patience. Just trying to keep Sandy in line was hard enough.

28

BODECKER WALKED INTO THE TECUMSEH
one afternoon near the end of February, right after Sandy started her shift, and ordered a Coke. Nobody else was in the bar. She poured it for him without saying a word, then turned back to the sink behind the bar where she was cleaning dirty beer mugs and shot glasses left over from last night. He noticed the dark circles around her eyes and the gray streaks in her hair. She didn’t look like she weighed ninety pounds, the loose way her jeans hung on her. He blamed Carl for the way she’d gone downhill. Bodecker hated the thought of that fat sonofabitch living off her like he did. Though he and Sandy hadn’t been what you’d call close in years, she was still his sister. She had just turned twenty-four her last birthday, five years younger than himself. The way she looked today she’d have a hard time passing for forty.

Lee moved to a stool down at the end of the bar so he could watch the door. Ever since that night he’d had to come in the bar and pick up that bag of money—the dumbest fucking thing that Tater Brown had pulled on him so far, and the bastard had heard about it, too—Sandy had hardly spoken to him. It bothered him, at least a little when he took the time to consider it, that she would think badly of him. He figured she was still pissed off because of all the hell he’d raised about her selling her ass out of the back of this dump. He turned to look at her. The place was dead, the only sound that of glasses clinking together in the water as she picked one up to wash it. Fuck it, he thought. He began talking, mentioned that Carl sure was spending a lot of time talking to a young waitress at the White Cow while she was stuck here serving drinks to pay the bills.

Sandy set the glass in the plastic drainer and dried off her hands while she thought of something to say. Carl had been driving her to
work an awful lot lately, but that was none of Lee’s business. What would he do with some girl anyway? The only time Carl got hard anymore was when he looked at his photographs. “So what?” she finally said. “He gets lonely.”

“Yeah, he lies a lot, too,” Bodecker said. Just the other evening, he had seen Sandy’s black station wagon sitting at the White Cow. He parked across the street and watched his brother-in-law flap his jaws with the skinny waitress. They looked like they were having a good time together, and he’d gotten curious. After Carl left, he went in and sat down at the counter, asked for a cup of coffee. “That guy that just left,” he said. “You happen to know his name?”

“You mean Bill?”

“Bill, huh?” Bodecker said, trying not to smile. “He a friend of yours?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We get along all right.”

Bodecker pulled a little notebook and a pencil out of his shirt pocket, pretended to write something down. “Quit the horse shit and tell me what you know about him.”

“Am I in some kind of trouble?” she asked. She stuck a strand of hair in her mouth, started shuffling nervously back and forth.

“Not if you talk, you ain’t.”

After listening to the girl repeat a few of Carl’s stories, Bodecker glanced at his watch and stood up. “That’s enough for now,” he said, putting the notebook back in his pocket. “It don’t sound like he’s the one we’re looking for.” He thought for a moment, looked at the girl. She was still nibbling on her hair. “How old are you?” he said.

“Sixteen.”

“This Bill ever ask you to pose for any pictures?”

The girl’s face turned red. “No,” she said.

“The first time he starts talkin’ that kind of stuff, you call me, okay?” If Carl hadn’t been the one trying to fuck the girl, he wouldn’t have even bothered. But the sonofabitch had ruined his sister, and Bodecker couldn’t forget about it, no matter how often he told himself it wasn’t any of his business. It just kept eating at him, like a cancer. The best he could do right now was let Sandy know about this little
waitress. But someday he still wanted to make Carl pay big-time. It wouldn’t be that hard, he thought, not much different from castrating a hog.

He had left the diner after questioning the girl and drove out to the state park by the prison and waited for Tater Brown to bring him some money. The dispatcher squawked something on the radio about a hit-and-run on the Huntington Pike, and Bodecker reached over and turned the volume down. A few days ago, he had done another job for Tater, used his badge to flush a man named Coonrod from an old shack where he was hiding out along the Paint Creek bottoms. Handcuffed in the backseat, he thought the sheriff was taking him to town for questioning until the cruiser stopped along the gravel road at the top of Reub Hill. Bodecker didn’t say a word, just yanked him out of the car by the metal bracelets and half dragged him into the woods a hundred yards or so. Just as Coonrod switched from yelling about his rights to pleading for mercy, Bodecker stepped behind him and shot him in the back of the head. Now Tater owed him five thousand dollars, a thousand more than the sheriff had charged him the first time. The sadist had beat up one of the better whores who worked upstairs in Tater’s strip club, tried to extract her womb with a toilet plunger. It had cost the gangster another three hundred at the hospital to have everything pushed back inside her. The only one who ended up making out on the deal was Bodecker.

Sandy sighed and said, “Okay, Lee, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Bodecker tipped his glass up, started chewing on some ice. “Well, according to this girl, your hubby’s name is Bill and he’s a big-shot photographer from California. Told her he’s good buddies with a bunch of movie stars.”

Sandy turned back to the sink, dipped a couple more dirty glasses in the lukewarm water. “He was probably just messing with her. Sometimes Carl likes to bullshit people for fun, just to see how they’ll react.”

“Well, from what I’ve seen, he’s getting a pretty good reaction. I gotta say, I never thought the fat bastard had it in him.”

Sandy threw down her drying rag and turned around. “What the hell you doing? Spying on him?”

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to tick you off,” Bodecker said. “I figured you’d want to know.”

“You never did like Carl,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, Sandy, he had you whorin’ for him.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you don’t do nothing wrong.”

Bodecker put his sunglasses on and forced a smile, showed Sandy his big white teeth. “But I’m the law around here, girl. You gonna find out that makes all the difference.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the bar and walked out the door and got into his cruiser. He sat there for a few minutes, staring through the windshield at the run-down trailers in Paradise Acres, the mobile-home court that sat next to the bar. Then he laid his head back against the seat. It had been a week and so far nobody had reported the plunger bastard missing. He thought maybe he’d buy Charlotte a new car with part of the money. He wanted so much to close his eyes for a few minutes, but falling asleep out in the open wasn’t a good idea these days. The shit was starting to get deep. He wondered how long it would be before he had to kill Tater or, for that matter, before some sonofabitch decided to kill him.

29

ON A SUNDAY MORNING
, Carl fixed some pancakes for Sandy, her favorite food. She’d come home drunk the night before in one of her sad-ass moods. Whenever she got tangled up in all those worthless feelings again, there was little he could say or do to make things better. She just had to work it out herself. A couple of nights of drinking and whining about it and she’d come back around. Carl knew Sandy better than she knew herself. Tomorrow night, or maybe the next, she would fuck one of her patrons after the bar closed, some crew-cut country boy with a wife and three or four snot-nosed kids at home. He’d tell Sandy that he wished he had met her before he ever married the old sow, that she was the sweetest piece he’d ever had, and then everything would be fine and dandy until the next time she got the blues.

Beside her plate he had laid a .22 pistol. He had bought it a few days ago for ten dollars from an elderly man he’d met at the White Cow. The poor sonofabitch was afraid that he would shoot himself if he kept the gun around. His wife had passed away last fall. He had treated her badly, he admitted, even when she was lying on her deathbed; but now he was so lonely, he couldn’t stand it. He told all this to Carl and the teenage waitress while icy snow pinged against the plate-glass windows of the diner and the wind shook the metal sign out by the street. The old man wore a long overcoat that smelled of wood smoke and Vicks VapoRub and a blue watch cap speckled with lint pulled down tight on his head. While he was confessing, it occurred to Carl that it might be good for Sandy to have her own weapon when they went out hunting, just as a backup in case something ever went haywire. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. Though he was always careful, even the best fucked up sometimes. He
had felt good about buying the gun, thought maybe it meant that he was getting wiser.

You’d have to shoot someone in the eye or stick it directly in their ear to ever kill anyone with a .22, but it would still be better than nothing. He’d done that once with a college boy, stuck a gun in his ear, some curly-haired Purdue prick who had snickered when Sandy told him that she’d once dreamed of going to beauty college, but then she ended up tending bar and everything had turned out just the way it was supposed to. Carl had found a book in the boy’s coat pocket after he tied him up,
The Poems of John Keats
. He tried asking the fucker nice what his favorite rhyme was, but by then the smart-aleck bastard had shit his pants and had a hard time concentrating. He opened the book to a poem and started reading it while the boy cried for his life, Carl’s voice getting louder and louder to drown out the other’s pleading until he came to the last line, which he has forgotten now, some bullshit about love and fame that he had to admit made the hair stand up on his arms at the time. Then he pulled the trigger and a wad of wet, gray brains shot out the other side of the college boy’s head. After he fell over, blood pooled in the sockets of his eyeballs like little lakes of fire, which made a hell of a picture, but that was with the .38, not some goddamn peashooter .22. Carl was sure that if he could show the smelly geezer the picture of the boy, the sad sack would think twice about ever doing himself in, at least not with a gun. The waitress had thought Carl was pretty slick the way he got the pistol away from the old man before he hurt himself. He could have fucked her that night in the backseat of the station wagon if he’d wanted to, the way she kept going on about how wonderful he was. There was a time a few years ago when he would have been all over that little bitch, but something like that just didn’t hold much appeal these days.