Ghouls (7 page)

“That’s what I keep telling him,” Kurt said. He guzzled down a third of his beer, belly shriveling. Nothing like a cold tall one first thing in the morning. “Chief Bard offered him the morning shift on the police department a couple of times. Told me he just didn’t want to be a cop. I guess that Willard guy pays him well.”

“Who?”

“Charles Willard, the guy who owns Belleau Wood. Glen tells me he’s really touchy about trespassers on his land. Why I don’t know. There’s nothing out there but woods and hills and a couple of wasted mines. Must be pretty boring for Glen to drive around there all night long.”

“Pretty spooky, too.”

They both lit cigarettes, partners in habituation. Kurt swigged more of his beer, ashamed to be drinking this early.
Next I’ll be carrying a flask,
he thought. Vicky’s eyes seemed to lose some of their shine. “To get on to more interesting things,” she said, “who was Lenny with?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you saw him yesterday. He told me he was hunting all day, but you and I both know he only hunts
beaver
before dark, if you get my meaning. I don’t even have to wonder if he’s cheating on me; the problem is guessing who. So, out with it. Who?”

“Joanne Sulley,” he confessed, because there was no way around it except to lie.

Vicky seemed nauseated at the name. “Of all the whores and tramps at the Anvil, she’s positively the worst. Some of the stuff I’ve heard about her—”

“I’m sure I’ve gotten all the same stories.”

“And it figures Lenny would go for her. The kinkier the better.”

Kurt could see that the conversation was turning rapidly sour. It would be better just to leave. He cringed for a polite way to suggest the most obvious solution to her marital problems—to divorce Stokes, or to just pack up and walk out. He couldn’t guess why she hadn’t done it months ago, and he didn’t dare bring up the other matter—the beatings. All he could hope for was that one day she would leave him.

“I better take off,” he said, and stood up. “Got some errands to run.”

She led him to the front door, looked at him in a way that might have been forlorn. “Thanks for stopping by, Kurt. Come by the Anvil some time for a beer.”

“Sure will,” and just as he had opened the door, Vicky’s face seemed to go flat with dread. Kurt turned. Lenny Stokes came through the doorway, looking Kurt straight in the eye.

“What the fuck are you
doin
’ here?” Stokes said.

“Just saying hello to your wife.”

“Yeah, well now you can say good-bye to my wife, ’cause I don’t want you
in
my house, I don’t want you
near
my house.” Stokes turned his poison glare to Vicky. “If I
evah
catch you
lettin
’ this puss in here again, I’ll—”

“I’m going, Stokes,” Kurt said. “You don’t have to make a federal case out of it.”

“No, I don’t guess I do, so get in your fuckin’ jalopy and get the fuck out. Hell of a thing to come home and find Porky Pig parked in my driveway.”

“Lenny!” Vicky snapped.

“Shut up,” Stokes said back to her. Then, to Kurt, “Instead of
sittin
’ here
makin
’ time with my wife and
drinkin
’ my beer, how come you ain’t up at Beall Cemetery with the rest of the pigs?”

“What’s going on at Beall?”

“Bunch of cops up there right now, your bunk buddy Higgins, and that fat no-balls walking feedbag Bard, county fuzz, too. So get your police ass out of here and go earn your pay.”

Kurt stepped out to the porch and turned to say good-bye to Vicky, but the door had already slammed shut. He got in the Ford and backed out, annoyed with himself for coming here in the first place, causing a scene.
Hillbilly
scroat
,
he thought. One hand on the wheel, he opened the already cold burrito and took a bite, which he promptly spat out. He let the burrito fall out the window and was delighted when he glanced in the rearview and saw the car behind him run over it. But what had Stokes been babbling about? He hadn’t heard of any other deaths in the area, and he couldn’t imagine what the county police would be doing at Beall.

Another mile north on the Route, and he saw what Stokes had meant. Parked on the left-hand shoulder, all in a line, were five police cruisers, four of them P.G. County cars, and the mud-sprayed town cruiser. There was another car there too, Chief Bard’s mahogany-brown Thunderbird. A cluster of uniforms stood round the spiked, black-iron fence which encompassed the small cemetery. Kurt parked the Ford behind the town squad car and got out just in time to see the four county officers part. Chief Bard and Mark Higgins, the morning-shift cop, stood facing each other at the gate. As the departing county men made their way back to their cruisers, Kurt was able to pick up random bits of talk. “What in blue blazes would anyone—” ”—weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” “No tire tracks, though, Frank, so without a vehicle, how—” ”—the hell do you expect out here in the goddamned boonies?” The car doors slammed in a barrage, engines started, and the four cruisers pulled off the shoulder one at a time and drove away.

Kurt didn’t bother trying to figure it out; he couldn’t even imagine. Chief Bard and Mark Higgins turned their heads quickly when Kurt’s own car door slammed. Their faces seemed pinched together, like calculative rodents, yet their eyes were wide and dull. Was it just fatigue? Or shock? Kurt had never seen the two men look so strange.

“So this is where you meet the county to pay them off,” Kurt said.

Bard didn’t laugh. Instead he hitched his belt up over a belly that made Kurt think unhesitatingly of beach balls. Sweat glistened on the chief’s balding head; his mustache twitched. “What do you know about Cody Drucker?” he spat out to Kurt.

“Not much besides the common fact that he was a cantankerous old prick.”

“You know anyone who didn’t like him?”

“Yeah, about half the town. What happened? Did someone take a dump on his stone?”

Bard looked abruptly back to Higgins. “But how the fucking damn… Where the fuck would they—”

“Hey, Chief,” Kurt interrupted. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or am I supposed to guess?”

“Show him,” Bard said.

Higgins led Kurt through the cemetery gate. There was no path, just a foot-trodden trail showing exposed roots. From grave vases rotting flowers drooped forward like heads before the blade.

Unease itched up Kurt’s back. What was wrong with Higgins? It was more than just the place. Higgins was thought of by most as simply the coolest guy in the world, easygoing, laid-back, quick to joke even on the worst days. He was the kind of guy who’d turn the dullest shifts into a breeze, just by being himself, just by being Higgins. He carried an aura of good humor and high spirits anywhere he went, and never a trace of the trade nihilism that eventually got to most cops. Today, though—now—he seemed as pallid as the air, robbed of his attractive vitality by some worldly grimness, his spirit crushed. He walked ahead like a man betrayed—by insight or self-concept, by faith in his fellow man? It scarcely mattered. He merely led on, saying nothing.

And for the first time then, Kurt felt afraid.

The cemetery lay back, sinking slightly: an odd divide amongst trees which stood deformed and immense. Nets of pale, sickly weeds grew riotous up through the rungs of the surrounding rusted fence. Gray, dead light shifted overhead through laden branches and boughs. Many of the tombstones stood tilted; some had fallen flat. Farther back a number of the inscriptions were too old to be read.

“Hey, Mark. What gives?”

“I wish I knew,” Higgins said. “Or at least I think I do. Sometimes…sometimes you just don’t want to know. It makes you wonder about people. It makes you stop and think. Know what I mean?”

“I’m not quite reading you.”

Higgins looked straight ahead as he guided on, his trimmed mustache a morose line. “All I can say is someone in this town has a lame sense of humor.”

Underfoot, the ground between the graves crackled and sank; Kurt wondered how many faces he was walking on. Beyond, the interior woods grayed further, to the point of appearing unreal.

Then Higgins stopped. He pointed to the plot. Kurt didn’t need an explanation.

The new granite stone reflected like a mirror, spelling DRUCKER in fine, crisp
chiselwork
. Before it stretched an oblong hole. Loose soil and clumps of sod lay scattered in a wide curve.

Kurt stared into the open grave. The liner was wrenched off, its top cracked, and the coffin, planted there only yesterday, was gone. It had been unearthed and carried away.

— | — | —

CHAPTER FOUR

“Go on,” Glen said. “You’re shitting me.”

“No lie. Someone dug up Cody Drucker and ran off with him, coffin and all. I swear, it’s the truth.”

It was ten o’clock at night now, a full twelve hours since the disturbing discovery at Beall Cemetery; but for some reason, it seemed much later. Through the woods came the hush of the dead, abandonment and fathomless silence like 4:00
a.m.
Glen’s head tilted curiously out the window of his truck, a white and blue-rocker Toyota pickup, diesel, with a yellow revolving light on the roof, and an off-brand shotgun displayed in the rear window. White adhesive letters on the rocker panels read SECURITY, but several of the letters had come off. This was the vehicle Glen used to make his security patrols of Belleau Wood. Glen himself wore a semblance of a uniform—dark brown summer-weight jacket, khaki pants and shirt, steel-shank
snakeproof
boots, and his reaction to what Kurt had just told him was one of chin-dropping astonishment. The town cruiser was parked outside the entrance chain, and Kurt leaned against the truck’s front fender as he reported the town’s latest, and weirdest, news.

Glen poked his head further out the window. “Who would steal a corpse out of a graveyard?”

“I don’t know, but I’d sure like to find out. Bard’s pulling his hair out over this, what little he has.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I’m thinking maybe Drucker had some valuables on him when they put him in the ground, jewelry or something.”

“Cody Drucker?”
Glen emphasized. “The only valuables he owned are in the pawn shop on West Street; that old sod would sell anything for a bottle. And even if he did have something on him, how come they didn’t just open the coffin right there instead of carrying the whole thing away?”

“Maybe they couldn’t open it right there,” Kurt said, hunting for a cigarette. “Coffins are built to last these days. Getting into one takes more than a screwdriver and a little elbow grease. I was just reading the other day, D.C. Police had to exhume a body for an old murder case and they needed a damn acetylene rig to get it open. Said the lid had
locking pins…
Anyway, who knows?
Any
possibility is ridiculous.”

Kurt lit his cigarette and shivered; spring fever had helped him forget that the nights would still be chilly for a while. Nipping air cut through the fabric of his shirt and made him break out in gooseflesh. The night was crisp and lavender. Stars winked keenly, as if vacillating, and the wind slipped like a whisper through the great shadow of the access road. Toward the north end of the property, atop the high hill, Belleau Wood mansion stood still and clear, the moon cutting its shape sharp as cracked glass against the sky.

Kurt stared at the far-off house. He could see a window lit. “Tell me about your boss,” he said, and even as he smoked and flicked ashes, he did not move his eyes away from the mansion’s black, cut-out shape.