Thinner (21 page)

'Hello?'

That you're bad luck waiting for a place to happen? That you're sorry you lied, but all parents do it?

'Hello, is anyone there? Is that you, Bobby?'

Eyes still closed, he said: 'It's Dad, Linda.'

'Daddy?'

'Honey, I can't talk,' he said.
Because I'm almost crying.
'I'm still losing weight, but I think I've found Lemke's trail. Tell your mother that. I think I've found Lemke's trail, will you remember?'

'Daddy,
please
come home!' She was crying. Billy's hand whitened on the telephone. 'I miss you and I'm not going to let
her
send me away anymore.'

Dimly he could hear Heidi now: 'Lin? Is it Dad?'

'I love you, doll,' he said. 'And I love your mother.'

'Daddy -'

A confusion of small sounds. Then Heidi was on the phone. 'Billy? Billy, please stop this and come home to us.'

Billy gently hung the phone up and rolled over on the bed and put his face into his crossed arms. He checked out of the South Portland Sheraton the next morning and headed north on US 1, the long coastal highway which begins in Fort Kent, Maine, and ends in Key West, Florida. Rockland or maybe Boothbay Harbor, the old man in the Seven Seas had said, but Billy took no chances. He stopped at every second or third gas station on the northbound side of the road; he stopped at general stores where old men sat out front in lawn chairs, chewing toothpicks or wooden matches. He showed his pictures to everyone who would look; he swapped two one-hundred-dollar traveler's checks for two-dollar bills and passed them out like a man promoting a radio show with dubious ratings. The four photographs he showed most frequently were the girl, Gina, with her clear olive skin and her dark, promising eyes; the converted Cadillac hearse; the VW

microbus with the girl and the unicorn painted on the side; Taduz Lemke.

Like Lon Enders, people didn't want to handle that one, or even touch it.

But they were helpful, and Billy Halleck had no trouble at all following the Gypsies up the coast. It wasn't the out-ofstate plates; there were lots of out-of-state plates to be seen in Maine during the summer. It was the way the cars and vans traveled together, almost bumper to bumper; the colorful pictures on the sides; the Gypsies themselves. Most of the people Billy talked to claimed that the women or children had stolen things, but all seemed vague on just what had been stolen, and no one, so far as Billy could ascertain, had called the cops because of these supposed thefts. Mostly they remembered the old Gypsy with the rotting nose - if they had seen him, they remembered him most of all. Sitting in the Seven Seas with Lon Enders, he had been three weeks behind the Gypsies. The owner of Bob's SpeedyServ station wasn't able to remember the day he had filled up their cars and trucks and vans, one after another, only that 'they stunk like Injuns.' Billy thought that Bob smelled pretty ripe himself but decided that saying so might be rather imprudent. The college kid working at the Falmouth Beverage Barn across the road from the Speedy-Serv was able to peg the day exactly -it had been June 2, his birthday, and he had been unhappy about working. The day Billy spoke to them was June 20, and he was eighteen days behind. The Gypsies had tried to find a camping place a little farther north in the Brunswick area and had been moved along. On June 4 they had camped in Boothbay Harbor. Not on the seacoast itself, of course, but they had found a farmer willing to rent them a hayfield in the Kenniston Hill area for twenty dollars a night. They had stayed only three days in the area - the summer season was still only getting under way, and pickings had apparently been slim. The farmer's name was Washburn. When Billy showed him the picture of Taduz Lemke he nodded and blessed himself, quickly and (Billy was convinced of this) unconsciously.

'I never seen an old man move as fast as that one did, and I seen him luggin' more wood stacked up than my sons could carry.' Washburn hesitated and added, 'I didn't like him. It wasn't just his nose. Hell, my own gramps had skin cancer and before it carried him off it had rotted a hole in his cheek the size of an ashtray. You could look right in there and see him chewin' his food. Well, we didn't like that, but we still liked
Gramps,
if you see what I mean.' Billy nodded. 'But this guy ... I didn't like him. I thought he looked like a bugger.'

Billy thought to ask for a translation of that particular New Englandism, and then decided he didn't need one.
Bugger,
bugbear, bogeyman.
The translation was in Farmer Washburn's eyes.

'He is a bugger,' Billy said with great sincerity.

'I had made up my mind to sen' 'em down the road,' he told Billy. 'Twenty bucks a night just for cleaning up some litter is a good piece of wages, but the wife was scairt of them and I was a little bit scairt of them too. So I went out that morning to give that Lemke guy the news before I could lose m'nerve, and they was already on the roll. Relieved me quite a bit.'

'They headed north again.'

'Ayuh, they sure did. I stood right on top of the hill there' - he pointed -'and watched 'em turn onto US 1. I watched 'em until they was out of sight, and I was some glad to see 'em go.'

'Yes. I'll bet you were.'

Washburn cast a critical, rather worried eye on Billy. 'You want to come up to the house and have a glass of cold buttermilk, mister? You look peaked.'

'Thank you, but I want to get up around the Owl's Head area before sundown if I can.'

'Looking for him?'

'Yes.'

'Well, if you find him, I hope he don't eat you up, mister, because he looked hungry to me.'

Billy spoke to Washburn on the twenty-first - the first day of official summer, although the roads were already choked with tourists and he had to go all the way inland to Sheepscot before he was able to find a motel with a vacancy sign - and the Gypsies had rolled out of Boothbay Harbor on the morning of the eighth.

Thirteen days behind now.

He had a bad two days then when it seemed the Gypsies had fallen off the edge of the world. They had not been seen in Owl's Head, nor in Rockland, although both of them were prime summer tourist towns. Gas-station attendants and waitresses looked at his pictures and shook their heads. Grimly battling an urge to vomit precious calories over the rail - he had never been much of a sailor - Billy rode the inter-island ferry from Owl's Head to Vinalhaven, but the Gypsies had not been there either.

On the evening of the twenty-third he called Kirk Penschley, hoping for fresh information, and when Kirk came on the line there was a funny double click just at the moment Kirk asked: 'How are you, Billy-boy? And
where
are you?'

Billy hung up quickly, sweating. He had snagged the final unit in Rockland's Harborview Motel, he knew there probably wasn't another motel unit to be had between here and Bangor, but he suddenly decided he was going to move on even if it meant he ended up spending the night sleeping in the car on some pasture road. That double click. He hadn't cared for that double click at all. You sometimes heard that sound when the wire was being tapped, or when trace-back equipment was being used.

Heidi's signed the papers on you, Billy.

That's the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard.

She signed them and Houston co-signed them.

Give me a fucking break!

Get out of here, Billy.

He left. Heidi, Houston, and possible trace-back equipment aside, it turned out to be the best thing that he could have done. As he was checking into the Bangor Ramada Inn that morning at two o'clock, he showed the desk clerk the pictures -it had become a habit by now - and the clerk nodded at once.

'Yeah, I took my girl over and got her fortune read,' he said. He picked up the photograph of Gina Lemke and rolled his eyes. 'She could really work it on out with that slingshot of hers. And she looked like she would work it-on out in a few other ways, if you know what I mean.' He shook his hand as if flicking water from the tips of his fingers. 'My girl got one look at the way I was lookin' at her and she dragged me out of there fast.' He laughed. A moment before, Billy had been so tired that bed was all he could think about. Now he was wide - awake again, his stomach cramping with adrenaline.

'Where? Where were they? Or are they still -?'

'Nah, they're not there anymore. Parsons' is where they were, but they're gone, all right. I was by there the other day.'

'Is it a farmer's place?'

'No - it's where Parsons' Bargain Barn used to be until it burned down last year.' He cast an uneasy eye at the way Billy's sweatshirt bagged on his body, at the blades of Billy's cheekbones and the skull-like contours of Billy's face, in which the eyes burned like candleflames. 'Uh
...
you want to check in?'

Billy found Parsons' Bargain Barn the following morning - it was a scorched cinder-block shell in the middle of what seemed to be nine acres of deserted parking lot. He walked slowly across the crumbling macadam, heels clicking. Here were beer cans and soda cans. Here was a rind of cheese with beetles crawling in it. Here was a single shiny ball bearing. ('Hoy, Gina!' a ghostly voice called in his head). Here were the dead skins of popped balloons and here were the dead skins of two used Trojans, so similar to the balloons.

Yes, they had been here.

'I smell you, old man,' Billy whispered to the empty hull of the Bargain Barn, and the empty spaces that had been windows seemed to stare back at this scrawny scarecrowman with sallow distaste. The place looked haunted, but Billy felt no fear. The anger was back on him - he wore it like a coat. Anger at Heidi, anger at Taduz Lemke, anger at so-called friends like Kirk Penschley who were supposed to be on his side but who had turned against him. Had, or would. It didn't matter. Even on his own, even at a hundred and thirty pounds, there was enough of him left to catch up to the old Gypsy man.

And what would happen then?

Well, they would see, wouldn't they?

'I smell you, old man,' Billy said again, and walked up to the side of the building. There was a realtor's sign there. Billy took his notebook from his back pocket and jotted down the information on it.

The realtor's name was Frank Quigley, but he insisted that Billy call him Biff. There were framed pictures of a highschool-age Biff Quigley on the walls. In most of them Biff was wearing a football helmet. On Biff's desk was a pile of bronzed dog turds, FRENCHMAN'S DRIVER'S LICENSE, the little sign beneath read.

Yes, Biff said, he had rented the space to the old Gyp with Mr Parsons' approval. 'He figured it couldn't look any worse than it does right now,' Biff Quigley said, 'and I guess he was right, at that.'

He leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes crawling ceaselessly over Billy's face, measuring the gap between Billy's collar and Billy's neck, the way the front of Billy's shirt hung in folds like a flag on a still day. He laced his hands behind his head, rocked back in his office chair, and put his feet up on his desk beside the bronzed turds.

'Not that it isn't priced to sell, you understand. That's prime industrial land out there, and sooner or later someone with some vision is going to make himself one
hell
of a deal. Yessir, one
hell
of a -'

'When did the Gypsies leave, Biff?'

Biff Quigley removed his hands from behind his head and sat forward. His chair made a noise like a mechanical pig S
quoink!
'Mind telling me why you want to know?'

Billy Halleck's lips - they were thinner too now, and higher, so that they never quite met - drew back in a grin of frightening intensity and unearthly boniness. 'Yes, Biff, I mind.'

Biff recoiled for a moment, and then he nodded and leaned back in his chair again. His Quoddy mocs came down on his desk again. One crossed over the other and tapped thoughtfully at the turds.

'That's fine, Bill. A man's business ought to be his own. A man's
reasons
ought to be his own.'

'Good,' Billy said. He felt the rage coming back and was grappling with it. Getting mad at this disgusting man with his Quoddy mocs and his crude ethnic slurs and his blowdried Jay-Cees haircut wasn't going to do him any good. 'Then since we agree -'

'But it's still going to cost you two hundred bucks.'

'What?' Billy's mouth dropped open. For a moment his anger was so great he was simply unable to move at all or to say anything else. This was probably just as well for Biff Quigley, because if Billy could have moved, Billy would have leapt upon him. His self-control had also lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months.

'Not the information I give you,' Biff Quigley said. 'That's a freebie. The two hundred's for the information I
won't
give them.'

'Won't . . . give . . who?' Billy managed.

'Your wife,' Biff said, 'and your doctor, and a man who says he works for an outfit called Barton Detective Services.'

Billy saw everything in a flash. Things weren't as bad as his paranoid mind had imagined; they were even worse. Heidi and Mike Houston had gone to Kirk Penschley and had convinced him that Billy Halleck was mad. Penschley was still using the Barton agency to track the Gypsies, but now they were all like astronomers looking for Saturn only so they could study Titan - or bring Titan back to the Glassman Clinic.

He could also see the Barton operative who had sat in this chair a few days ago, talking to Biff Quigley, telling him that a very skinny man named Bill Halleck was going to show up soon, and when he did, this was the number to call. This was followed by an even clearer vision: he saw himself leaping across Biff Quigley's desk, seizing the bronzed pile of dog turds in mid-leap, and then bashing Biff Quigley's head in with them. He saw this in utter, savage clarity: the skin breaking, the blood flying up in a fine spray of droplets (some of them splashing on the framed pictures), the white glimmer of bone shattering to reveal the physical texture of the man's creepy mind; then he saw himself slamming the dog turds back where they belonged - where, in a manner of speaking, they had come from.