Apricot brandy (13 page)

For six years Rodge mooned and squired her, sweated to look love-struck, and stoically endured the hoots and gibbers of his drinking buddies, while Marsha pursued her entrepreneurial passion to build Maitland Meats, a regional distributor, on the platform of Maitland’s Supermarket, whose success in town had rested on its excellent butcher’s section and old Cal’s connections with local beef ranchers.

After six years, though, Marsha told him that marriage was a step that still needed thinking on. She hired Rodge, at a derisory salary, as the market’s assistant manager. Four years after that— a period in which the embryonic Maitland Meats had built its first warehouse and then slid inexorably into bankruptcy, throttled by Marsha’s incessant feuding with her suppliers— Marsha married Rodge and made him manager of the market.

Marty parked behind it and strolled to the rear door of the big meat room. This was the part of the store its manager always gravitated to, mooning over steaks and roasts and his soured ambitions. There he was at one of the drain boards, trimming a roast. Rodge was pretty porked-out these days, looking tubular in a blue smock. He turned.

“Well, howdy,
Shurrf
!” Rodge always called him that, like Marty was a small-town tin-star and Rodge a famous outlaw.

“Hey, Rodge. You got a minute? I’ve got some good news.”

“No shit?”

“Well, good news for me. Wanna hear it?”

“You’re gonna tell me if I want to or not.”

“You got that right. First off, just stand there while I show you something.”

Marty went to the walk-in freezer. Stepped in, reached up, and gripped one of the beef sides. Gripped it by its fat-waxy edges and lifted it off the hook. Two-twenty-five, maybe two-fifty. His arms hefted it with the inexorable ease of a forklift.

He stepped out of the freezer with it and grinned at Rodge, whose jaw was hanging open, his eyes wide. “Watch this,” Marty winked and hurled it at him from fifteen feet away. It was a crowning moment of Marty’s life, watching that great parallelogram of raw meat sail into his brother, slam him back against the drain board, and drag him to the floor beneath its weight.

Marty knelt beside him, flipped the side one-handed off his body, and smiled down into Rodge’s dazed and bloody face. “Everything I’ve wanted to say to you over the years, Rodge? I think this just sums it up. You know what else I can do? I can tear off more pussy in two hours than you can in two months. I’m not making it up! See the thing is, I don’t really want to hurt you, because I don’t
need
to. I just want you to understand what’s happened to me. I’m someone else now. I’m a new thing, like you’ve never met before. And what it boils down to is that I run this town now— I mean really run it. Now you know some old boys that thought the world of Jack Fox, don’t you?”

Here he saw a new understanding begin to dawn within his brother’s terror. This too was sweet, seeing that Rodge at last had to grant that all Marty had hinted about Jack Fox over the years was true. “I want you to tell them what Mr. Fox just gave me— tell them from me. I wouldn’t tell anyone else though— they’d think you were crazy. Lemme help you up… looks like you hurt your back pretty good there. Here, I’ll hang this back up for you.”

Marty took the highway right back out of town, to call at the home of his superior officer, Chief Deputy Karl Rabble.

Twenty years ago Rabble had been a young star down at the Fair Valley Spring Rodeo. Mainly broncs in his first two years, but then, in his glorious last year, bulls. By the time the bulls were done with Karl, he got one of his legs so extravagantly broken, he still hitched around in a full leg brace, like some salty loveable old Deppity in a Western.

All the good old boys loved him. The man was born for a high post in the Sheriff’s Department. He was Chief Deputy within five years of entering the Department. The Chief Deputy ran things, because the County Sheriff himself spent ninety percent of his time in the State Capitol advancing his political career.

But even the best men have some weakness. Karl Rabble’s weakness was orgies. He liked an evening with a bunch of friends, a bunch of bought girls, a bunch of hootch, and a bunch of comfy furniture. Karl liked the kind of entertainment where everyone was guilty at once and more or less right out in front of each other. His band of chosen cronies, who included some powerful local men, had a special gleam of the eye for each other. Marty had known about it all for years.

Was it only three years ago that he had dared to
do
something with it? Marty had been born then, nothing less. Born. He had seized the envelope and torn it. He had dared to achieve heroic stature.

He owed it to Jack, of course. Had begun by going and whining to Jack. Jack’s wife was not long dead, but, worked up with his personal crisis, he barged right in on his mentor one late autumn afternoon. Found him down in his still shed and implored him to reveal what to do. “I’m stalled, Jack. I’m
forty
. My life is in a rut.” He wanted to be initiated, to move forward, to participate in the Mystery. Hadn’t he been loyal to Jack all these years? Hadn’t he had an unfaltering faith in him?

Jack still held the book he had looked up from when Marty entered, still wearing his gun and his Detective’s badge on its belt-clip. Jack had looked him tiredly up and down, stared at his badge, then glared up into his eyes. His seamed face seemed hewn from a gnarled trunk. Laughter lurked in his eyes, like something stirring deep in a tarn.

“Take control,” he said. “Come talk to me then.” And waved him imperially away.

He had fretted over Jack’s meaning for hours. And then, thinking of Jack’s look at his badge, saw it was obvious. As Detective, Marty was a high-level grunt, but still a grunt. He must take control of the organization that presently controlled him.

Once his mission had been shown him, the way to accomplish it came in one smooth rush of inspiration. As he sat down to work out the details, he discovered himself to be a master at the kind of planning that was called for.

Karl Rabble’s revelers never omitted their Halloween Party, always holding it in Karl’s rambling ranch house eight miles outside of town. Marty personally rigged seven cameras and recorders in the place over the course of two days while Karl was in the office. The artfulness of his placements and their angles was revealed in the tapes when he collected these afterwards, but before he did, he laid some further groundwork.

The orgiasts were at least half-smart. They always brought their females in from the distant metropolis and brought them back on the same night. This Halloween’s entertainment was no different. In the small hours, two vans of “poontang” rolled out of Chief Deputy Karl Rabble’s place.

Marty was waiting. He called for immediate back-up, put the flashers on them just at the edge of town, and pulled them over. The drivers were Warren Bibbs, who controlled twenty thousand acres of fruit in and around the county, and Harry Knacker, whose wife’s family had developed three of the new gated townhouse communities outside of town. Both Warren and Harry gave great Breathalyzer results and were sequestered in squadcars. The girls were taken to the station and booked for drunk and disorderly, their prints, pictures, and IDs computer-checked. Half of them were hookers and half of them enterprising drugged-out runaways. No less than five of them under sixteen. When it was all securely in the bag, Marty apologized to Bibbs and Knacker, realized the mistake he had made, gave them back the girls and sent them on their way.

Karl Rabble called him into his office next morning. Marty had come in late— he’d gone into Karl’s house the moment the Chief Deputy left it and retrieved and copied all the tapes. When he came in, the smoldering Rabble had limped over to lock the office door and commenced roasting Marty’s ass. Solemn and respectful, Marty apologized for his mistake. “But sir,” he said, “the reason I came in late was someone left these on my porch last night, with a note that said I better look at them. It appears someone’s taped your Halloween Party. I think you should run these right now, sir, because I think we have a problem.”

Karl watched it on his Sony, leaping forward to kill the volume when the party-roar leapt out with the images. While he sat there watching, Marty provided a voice-over. “The nasty thing is, we booked all these girls, they’re all in the database, and five of them are juveniles. In fact those two you’re with right there?
Both
of them are juveniles. Those photo matchups with these tapes would be perfect— shot the same night! If this is some kind of blackmail, whoever made these tapes could have you and at least four of your friends sent up for statutory rape, and
all
of them for aiding and abetting.”

Rabble was a fool, but not a retard. As Marty talked he could see, by the sagging of his shoulders, that the Chief Deputy realized what was coming.

“Well, Karl. We’re both on the same page I see, so I’ll just cut the shit. I could just blow you out of the water and maybe get your job. But it would be much better for both of us to do it this way. You will take a limited disability status— some developments with your bad leg, let’s say. You will get me a two-grade pay raise to occupy, in an acting capacity, the currently unfilled post of Assistant Chief Deputy. You’ll remain in charge and officially active; I will run the shop. Just say yes or no.”

“Yes.” Not turning around. Not even moving.

“Good choice! Get up. Get on over here and shake on it, Karl. Look me in the eyes.”

Rabble stood up. He had a broad, square brow, a big, broken, jovial potato of a nose. A tanned, intrinsically convivial face, but slumped now, sagging like an empty garment. Marty took a powerful grip on his hand. “Hell,” he smiled, “you never cared about running the shop anyway. Too much like work.” And, still gripping his hand, took a step back from him and delivered a powerful side-kick to the meat of Karl’s damaged thigh. The bone gave loudly and Karl collapsed to the floor. Marty pulled open the office door and shouted at a passing deputy, “Reg! Get the paramedics! Karl’s taken a fall on his bad leg!”

The whole floor mobilized for the well-liked Rabble. Still Marty found a private moment at his side. “You’re in, Karl. Obey me and you’ll have it all— your reputation and your job and your poontang, and no prison walls. You with me?”

The pain-filled eyes found his and acknowledged servitude. Marty nodded benignly. Re-breaking Karl’s leg had been an inspiration of the moment, but how right it had been. Only this crudest form of subjugation had staying power, to teach a slave his place. “Decide how you fell, Karl, and stick to that story.”

When Marty pulled into Karl’s drive, he had to smile. The poor old gimp sonofabitch. Rabble thought he’d been in slavery to Marty these last three years? He was about to meet his new, superhuman master.

The day was still warm, so he knew he’d find Karl out back by his trout pond. There was the rodeo-hero, in a chaise lounge. The pond was a pretty Dogpatch affair. The spoil from his sloppy bulldozing had been left heaped beyond the pond’s farther rim and now formed densely overgrown hillocks of shrubs and thorny berry vines. Along its western rim was an automotive graveyard— a pick-up and flat-bed chassis in various degrees of decay, bulky engine parts woven with weeds scattered around them. Other dingy furniture flanked Karl’s lounge. Flattened beer cans and cigarette butts mosaiced the trampled dirt. Karl had a whiskey-bottle on his lap.

The disabled Chief Deputy offered that careful pretense of amity he’d developed for dealing with Marty over the last three years. “Pull up a chair, Marty! Wanna shot? I’d rather sip beer, but I have to get up to piss too often.”

“No thanks. Getting around okay?”

“Pretty good. The new pins help. It’s tiring, though.”

Marty turned another lounge, so he could recline facing Rabble. “I stopped by to tell you, Karl, that you have to start paying your taxes.”

“My taxes. I guess you’re gonna tell me what that means.”

“You knew Jack Fox, didn’t you?”

Knew something. His eyes got uneasy. “Not much. People would talk about him… .”

“Jack and I were close, Karl. We
are
close. No, just listen. I’ll make it very simple. There are powers in the earth, Karl. Powers in the earth. And thanks to Jack Fox, I
have
those powers now. And the thing about these powers that I represent now, is that if you don’t pay them their taxes, they take
you
instead.”

“Marty, no disrespect, but I can’t believe you’re really— ”

“Hold up.” Karl cringed at his sudden movement, but Marty was just springing up and heading over to the automotive boneyard. “This old Chevy engine block. What do you think it weighs, Karl?”

“Three or four hundred? I dunno.”

Marty picked it up and hurled it fifty feet into the pond. A great columnar shaft of water sprouted from its impact, rose gracefully, and crumbled down onto the pond’s heaving surface.

It was like kicking Karl in the leg three years ago— worth ten thousand words. Rabble gaped up at him, awed. Marty scooted up his lounge so their faces were even closer together when he sat back down. “See? Do I
look
like the circus strongman to you? Something very, very serious is going on all around you, Karl— right now. And you have the choice between
feeding
its power, or becoming its food. Now. This is the piece you’re going to use.” And he produced a Glock which, along with other guns, he had taken from Jack Fox’s house, on the night he went there with the meat wagon that took Jack away.

Karen stood listening to Kyle’s chainsaw restart, recommence its gnawing at Jack Fox’s darlings… looked down at her own saw and her half-full mug of brandy. Tipped over the mug with her foot and watched Dad’s precious blood-additive melt— wrinkled gold— into the weeds. But the saw she took up again and refilled its tank. She’d begun this work in panic, and rage at her panic. She would focus on the rage. Do this coldly and well.