The black car crept up further. With a screech and a thud, it hit me again. Around the back door this time. The Dodge slid hard. I couldn’t fight it. I felt the tires lose their grip on the road, skid over the dirt. I hit the gas. The Dodge hung on for dear life, kicking rocks up behind it as it muscled its way back onto the road. For another moment it almost seemed like I would pull away from the black car. But once more it let out its angry roar. Once more it came after me.
Now it pulled right up next to me. For one, two, three harrowing seconds, we came swinging around a curve side by side. As the road lashed out straight for a moment, I glanced over at the black beast beside me. The moment I did, its interior light snapped on.
Death was at the wheel.
The grinning skull’s head peered at me through the window, through the swirling mist. Even as my mind shouted that it had to be a mask, my foot went out convulsively and hit the brake. The Dodge went into a skid. And Death moved in.
As my rear tires slipped out behind me, he slid his tail over to ram me in front. The Artful Dodge went spinning out of control. Two tires hit the shoulder. The two others lifted into the air. With a sick feeling in my belly, I realized I was going over. Desperately, I wrestled with the wheel. I lost. The roof of the car slammed into the earth. I was hurled toward the passenger side. My fingers were torn from the wheel. My head hit something—I don’t know what. Then even the dark went dark around me.
23 I was aware, at first, only of a period of silence. It seemed deep and long as an arctic night. I was thinking, but I did not know what I was thinking. I was seeing, but I did not know what I saw.
There was a thud. It was not far away. It took my mind a second to recognize the sound as that of a car door slamming.
He’s coming. Death is coming.
I heard his footsteps on the road.
I blinked. I shook my head. I was looking at the glove compartment. I was lying on my side. I hurt. These facts worked their way into my head as the footsteps moved closer.
I struggled to sit up. My head weighed a ton. My forehead felt damp and viscid. I did not want to know why.
Slowly, now, I remembered that the car had turned over onto the shoulder of the road. It was resting on its right side. The left tires were in the air. The engine had died and one headlight had been smashed. The other was swinging its beam off at a weird angle. That, as far as I could tell, was the only light there was.
I figured if I could reach up to the driver’s window, I could lower it and pull myself out. Vaguely, I understood I had to act fast, but for a moment I couldn’t think why.
The footsteps, I remembered then. He’s coming. I struggled to right myself and listened. The footsteps had stopped.
Where is he? Where the hell is he?
“Risk it,” I whispered aloud.
I reached up. I had to stretch a little. I worried that the car would topple over, but it seemed firmly planted where it was. My fingers caught the window handle and wrapped around it. I rolled the window down.
Now I had to get my legs underneath me. I had to brace them against the passenger door. Where are those bloody footsteps? Where are you Death, you wily guy? I moved my legs gingerly until my feet were resting against the door. I felt a pain in my shin, and I thought: I’m lucky. Nothing’s broken.
I stretched again, half standing. I reached the window ledge. I pulled. I pulled myself up. It wasn’t easy. The skewed car was filled with the sound of my grunting and with the unpleasant little sobbing noises I made. I shifted, quickly, to get my elbows outside. First one, then the other. My head was in the open air. Cool air. It felt good. I shuffled upward, trying to hoist my legs up after me. I dragged myself to the side. My right leg came through; then my left. I’d made it. I was poised on top of the car. I inhaled the piny chill of the November forest.
I slid down the underside of the car. I held on until the last minute, until my feet were only inches off the ground. Then I let myself go. I landed on soft earth, my knees bending. I stumbled a step, but recovered. I stood beneath the upturned car. The mist surrounded me. I could see nothing but the shadows of the trees, a few feet of pavement. The dangling headlight was flickering now and growing dim. It played and danced across the drifting gray.
Death shrieked and a tire iron whistled at me out of the night.
Later on I realized there was an instant when I had seen him. Out of the corner of my eye I had caught the black silhouette of him, and his grinning skull as he stole around the front of the car where the headlight flickered. If it hadn’t been that way, if it had been as sudden as it seemed, my brains would have ended up a pink crisscrossing design on the bottom of the Artful Dodge. But I had that instant, and in that instant I went down, squatting. The iron flashed over me. I felt the breeze of it in my hair. It slammed sickeningly into the car. I felt the shock of it in my spine. Death lifted the iron to strike again.
I had planned to spring back up and slug him when he was off balance. But my knees weren’t what they’d been when I was young. My knees, in fact, weren’t what they’d been half an hour ago. When I ducked, they gave out on me. I toppled over. I rolled. The tire iron thudded into the mud beside me. Death’s head loomed inches from my face. I reached up. My fingertips scraped the latex of his mask. I saw his living eyes through the peepholes. They looked like twin whirlpools of rage.
He pulled away. He raised the tire iron above his head. Once again I rolled. The tire iron struck the edge of the road. I saw sparks fly out from underneath it. I heard Death grunt with the pain of the reverberating blow. I seized the moment and clambered to my feet.
We faced each other in the road. I crouched, my hands up before me. He gripped the tire iron in both hands, waving it at me. He snarled.
“Come on, come on,” I hissed at him.
He came. He lunged at me. He jabbed the tire iron at my head. That was a mistake. If he’d gone for my body somewhere, he might have caught me. Instead, I only had to duck slightly to the side. The iron bar went by my ear. His arms were extended beside me. I jabbed upward with the stiffened fingers of my right hand. I hit him in the armpit.
“Aaaaaah!” he said. He stumbled to the side.
“Trick or treat, fuckhead,” I gasped. And I charged him.
He was quick. Quicker than I was. He recovered and had the tire iron in front of him. It hit me in the left breast. I coughed and wheeled away as he recovered. I danced back from the point of the thing. It followed after me.
Death advanced. But I could see in the eyes behind the mask that I had hurt him, I had made him think. He was not in such a hurry to come at me now.
For a few breaths we stood challenging each other. I watched his every move as he stood framed against my upturned car.
“Get out,” he said. He had a voice like a thumbnail on a blackboard. It was not his normal voice, but it wasn’t phony either. It was the sound of the hatred living inside him. It made my throat tighten just to hear it.
“Get out of my county,” he said. “Get out.”
“Shut up and come for me, you son of a bitch,” I said. I was bluffing. My wind was almost gone. My legs felt leaden. I thought I might buy it if he came again.
He didn’t, though. He kept the iron in front of him as a defense and he began to back away.
“Get out,” he screaked.
I did not follow him. When a few yards separated us, he turned his back on me and ran. He vanished in the mist instantly. I stood still, panting in the dark. I half expected him to come screaming out of the white haze again from another direction. But I heard his car door open now down the road: open and close. I heard his engine cough and roar. I heard the sound of his engine. I heard it click into gear.
I heard it fading away from me. He was gone.
24 “Hm, hm, hm,” drawled Tammany Bird. “Hm, hm, hm.”
“My sentiments exactly,” I said. I lowered myself slowly into the chair across from his desk. My knees were killing me. The cut on my head—cleaned and bandag
ed now—was throbbing. My chest felt like a flamenco dance floor. The rest of me ached. Even my lungs ached. All of me.
“Hm-dy hm,” said Tammany Bird. The giant police chief was stretched out in his reclining chair. His big feet were hoisted up onto his desk. His big hands rested on his big belly. His big chin rested on his big chest. Out of his long face, his transparent eyes studied me.
“Hm-dy hm,” I agreed. I avoided his gaze. I stared at the two flags flanking the window behind him: the state flag and the stars and stripes. I wanted a cigarette, but I didn’t feel I would survive one. So I just sat there. I waited for him to talk.
“So you have told your story to the officer on the scene,” he said.
“I have.”
“And you have told your story to B.C.I.”
“Yup.”
“And now you would like to brighten my evening by sharing it with me.”
“Don’t you ever go home?” I said.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of something.”
“Freedom.”
“Right. Here I be.”
I spread my hands. “What can I say after I say a man wearing a skull mask tried to kill me?”
He tilted his head. “That would about sum it up.”
“Story in a nutshell.”
“Admirably concise.” He heaved a big sigh. His big chest rose and fell bigly. “What if I asked you to surmise the identity of this man … it was a man, you’re certain of that.”
I considered. “No. Not really. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and black jeans. From what I remember of the shape of him, I’d guess a man. Not to mention his major league way with a tire iron. But not a hundred percent certain, no.”
He nodded, scratched his putty nose ham-handedly. “Care to see if you can narrow it down a bit further than that?” he drawled.
“Well … It was someone who wants me out of this county.”
Bird startled me with a large, rasping laugh. His feet came down off the desk, crashed to the floor. He leaned forward, his hands interlacing on the desktop.
“Mr. Wells,” he said, chuckling. “Everybody wants you out of this county. I want you out of this county.”
“I don’t think it was you.”
“Neither do 1, but I’m keeping an open mind. The point I’m trying to make is …” One of his ham-hock hands dropped down behind the desk. I heard a drawer slide open. His hand came up again, carrying a copy of the local daily. He threw it down on the desk before me. “Look there.”
I reached for the paper, and gasped as the pain in my chest shot up the back of my neck. I reached again, more slowly now. I opened the paper.
It was on the bottom of page one: STAR SUICIDE PIECE ON COUNTY AGENDA.
“They’re trying to figure out if they can sue,” said Tammany Bird.
I grimaced. “Oof,” I said. “Sue me?”
“No, sue your paper. They’re trying to figure out if they can lynch you.”
“Great.”
“Let me be the first to invite you to the meeting.”
“Thanks. I don’t suppose it would help if I told you I didn’t write the piece.”
“Nope. Folks around here are kind of simpleminded about these things. They figure if it says ‘By John Wells’ on it, why, it must be by John Wells.”
“Ha,” I said bitterly.
“Just like they figure if a fella comes up here to do a series of articles about the suicides of our children, he shouldn’t oughta turn it into some sensationalistic piece of bullsquat about she says murder and police cover up and I don’t know what else.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I forgot about the cover-up part. I really didn’t write it, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
I took another tack. “What if I told you I was beginning to think the article was true.” That made his eyebrows rise. “Not the cover-up part,” I said quickly. “But the murder part.”
He seemed less than amused. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, lookit, first someone leads me into the woods and tells me Death’s out there. And I find a dog hanging from a tree—just the way they found Michelle Thayer. Then, through no fault of my own, my article comes out leading with Janet Thayer’s accusation. And suddenly up pops Death himself and takes a hack at me. What do you make of all that.”
“Kids.”
“Come on, Chief, he was trying to kill me.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe.”
“Maybe. Anyway, whether you wrote it or not, that piece cut a lot of folks nice and deep. I’m not surprised if someone got out of hand.”
“What about the dog?” I said. “The story hadn’t even appeared then.”
Tammany Bird settled back in his chair again, mountainous. He bridged his fingers over his belly. “It struck me,” he said very slowly. “It struck me that you did not write about that in your story.”
I shrugged. “I had a feeling maybe Janet Thayer had arranged it. I didn’t want to cause her any more grief.”
“Decent of you. Do you still think that?”
“No,” I said, which was the truth.
“What do you think now?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, which was not the truth.
I could see him considering this behind his pale eyes. I could see the gears of the sharp mind in there working it over. I expected him to go on, but instead he stood up suddenly. He towered above me.
“Always a pleasure talking to you, Mr. Wells,” he said.
Painfully, I worked myself into a standing position.
“Rest assured,” said Tammany Bird, “that I will give this matter all the attention I think it deserves.”
Somehow, this made me feel neither restful nor assured.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, “may I ask if you have any plans to travel outside the county line in the near future.”
“No,” I said.
“Why not make some?” he suggested.
“Because,” I said quietly. I gestured at the paper lying on his desk. “I have a meeting to attend.”
25 The Artful Dodge had taken a beating, but it would live. The Triple A towed it to a gas station in town, and Bird had a patrol car take me up the mountain to my hotel. In the morning—late in the morning, when I heaved my stiffened corpse out of bed—I called a cab and returned to the diner for breakfast. Afterward I went to the station to hear the bad news. It was not too bad. There was no damage to the workings or the frame. The worst of it was a damaged brake drum. I also needed a new tire and some headlights.
“Should be running by this afternoon,” the mechanic said. “After that, though, it’s going to cost you in body work.”
I laughed. “I don’t even work on my body, son,” I told him.
There was a pay phone at the edge of the lot. I used it to call the office.
I asked for Lansing.
“Hi, killer, what’s up?” she said.
I told her.
“Oh God. How do you feel?” she said.
“Very old. Very sore.”
“I hate to think Cambridge is right about this. That it’s murder.”
“It could be. But that won’t make him right. It’ll just make him look right.”
“Which will prolong his tenure.”
“This too shall pass, my love.”
“It better. Ever since your private conference with him, he’s been taking it out on McKay something awful.”
“All right. Let me have it.”
“Yesterday he had him assigned to cover the unveiling of a new kind of chewy candy shaped like a mouse.”
I laughed. “No, really, Lansing. What’d he do?”
She was silent.
“You’re not joking,” I said.
“Today he’s got the intrepid reporter hot on the trail of a new phone book promotion where a bunch of women dress up as yellow pages and dance and sing in Times Square.”
“I knew I should have killed him. How’s McKay taking it???
?
“Not so good. He’s got a theory about it. Says Cambridge has decided to counteract your bad influence on the staff by breaking him—McKay—and making him the relatability poster boy. A sort of Judas goat.”
“Yeah. Or maybe he just likes breaking people.”
“I think McKay would quit—”
“… if he didn’t have a baby. Yeah, and Cambridge knows it.” There was another pause, and now I asked her: “What about you?”
I heard her let out a held breath. “He took a different tack with me,” she said.
“Go on.”
“Only if you promise not to play the white knight.”
“He went for you.”
“Last night. God damn, it was odious. He took me out to the Press Room.”
“Well, well. At least he’s not cheap.”
“Said he wanted to discuss some story ideas with me. Then he tried to get me drunk.”
I laughed. “I would like to’ve seen that.”
“He kept ordering and ordering. Only he couldn’t be too obvious about it, so he had to match me scotch for scotch.”
“Poor bastard.”
“At two this morning me and a bartender had to shovel him into a cab. He was singing sea chanties.” She sighed. “He hasn’t come in yet today.”
“Lay low, Lancer.”
“You’re a dangerous friend to have, Mr. Wells.”
“If it’ll make you feel better, the county legislature up here is holding a meeting tonight on whether or not they’ve got legal grounds to run me through a meat grinder.”
“You’re joking. You’re going, I suppose.”
“Have to. I’m supposed to bring the meat grinder.”
“And if I told you to be careful, you’d say, ‘Don’t talk to me like that, Lansing.’”
“How’s the Dellacroce trial?”
“Boring, unless you read the News.”
“That’s what I want to hear. See you, kid.”
“Seeya.”
I hung up. I called Janet Thayer. There was no answer. I now officially had nothing to do.
I spent some time wandering around town. Off the main road, past the houses with their neatly kept lawns, their swing sets, bicycles, basketball hoops. I thought about what Chandler Burke had said. People moving from the city. For their kids’ sake. Fighting to preserve their houses and their lawns, their good schools, their good neighbors. And then their kids despairing around them, dying by their own hands.