Night Relics (20 page)

The telephone rang at nine. It was him, calling from the pay phone in front of the general store. Klein listened impatiently
to the usual rundown on cabins, but he was distracted by last night. He had been half hoping that Pomeroy wouldn’t call at
all, that he would have pulled up stakes and moved.

“… the old man again this morning,” he heard Pomeroy say. “There was no action on the tank yet. I’ve got a couple of ideas
for leaning on him a little harder.”

“What?” Klein asked, listening now.

“I said I worked on Ackroyd again this morning. Only had a second, but you know me; I keep chipping away. I
hate to push a friend of your wife’s like that, but, hey, business is business. He’ll end up with a good dollar.”

Klein wanted to swear into the receiver, but he forced himself to stay calm. This
was
business, whether he liked it or not. “Maybe you better back off a little,” he said. “You don’t have to sell him or lose
him today. He’ll be there next week and the week after that. Maybe you ought to give it a rest for a little while, Barn. People
are going to start wondering how come you’re making so many strong offers and not buying anything.”

“There’s a time frame, Lance.”

“I
know
there’s a time frame. I set it up. It’s
my
time frame. And I say to hell with Ackroyd. We don’t want people asking questions we can’t answer.”

“I don’t think we can afford to take that attitude, Lance. As far as the old man goes, I’ll come up with something.”

Like a rabid dog, Klein thought. Maybe there was nothing left to do but shoot him. “Clear it with me first, will you?” he
said, forcing his voice to stay level.

“Sure,” Pomeroy said meaninglessly. “But I think he smells something. Probably that woman I met out there yesterday said something
to him.”

“
What?
” Klein asked. “What
woman
?”

“The one I was talking to at the steak house last night. Her boyfriend’s got a place out in the canyon. Number twelve, I think.”

“Why would
she
have said anything to anyone? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure, but she might have seen me fix up the old man’s tank. You know, with the mousies.” Pomeroy snickered.

“Jesus Christ!” Klein shouted into the phone. “What the hell kind of stupid—!”

“Whoa!” Pomeroy shouted back at him. “Relax. Don’t worry. I’ll chat her up a little bit. She’ll get the drift.” After a pause
he said, “Problem is, I don’t know where she lives.
I think it must be around here somewhere. She acts like a local.”

“That’s what you
think,
is it?” Klein said evenly.

“Makes sense,” Pomeroy said.

“Leave her alone,” Klein said hoarsely. “I’m only going to warn you once about that. Don’t say
anything
to her. Don’t go near her. Get the drift?”

“I don’t think
you’ve
got the drift yet,” Pomeroy said. “You know, now that I think about it, maybe it was your wife who talked to the old man,
since they know each other. What did you tell me, that they used to work together? You’ve got to watch what you say to her,
Lance, or you’ll turn your own wife into a liability.”

I should have shot him last night, Klein thought. I should have followed him out into the field and got it over with, told
the cops that the bastard jumped me. “My wife doesn’t understand the first damned thing about this deal,” Klein said evenly.
“And if she did, so what? She’s going to blow a hundred grand gabbing about it? Hell, she knows better than that. My advice, Barn … Are you listening?”

“All ears.”

“My advice is that you don’t talk to my wife, not even about the weather.”

“Then you better send her out after groceries, Lance, because I think it’s time you and I chewed a little fat face-to-face.”

The line went dead. After a moment there was a dial tone, and it was only then that Klein understood that Pomeroy was on his
way up to the house.

P
UTTING DOWN THE COFFEE MUG, BETH WENT BACK INTO
the living room, where there was a cartoon on about a dog who was trying to parboil a cat, which escaped mutilation by making
the dog step on a bear trap, momentarily crippling it. “This is awful,” Beth said.

“It’s a car
toon
,” Bobby told her. “It’s not real.”

“Remember that,” Beth said. And of course he would. He didn’t have any trouble distinguishing between make-believe and reality.
That was one of the main functions of a parent, though, to remind children about things they already knew.

“It’s nearly time to leave,” she said. “You about ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Where we going?”

“Over to the nursery. We’ve got to pick out a rosebush for Peter’s house.”

“Now?”

“In a few minutes. You were going to put your shoes on,” she said to him.

Bobby kept his eyes on the TV screen. “I can’t find them,” he said. “I found my hat, though.”

“They’re right there,” Beth said, “on the floor by the end of the couch.”

Bobby said, “Oh, yeah,” without looking up.

“Put them on. Now. You should eat something more, too.”

He looked around for a moment, and then focused on
the shoes. “I don’t want those shoes. I want my new Airwalks if I’m going over to Peter’s today.”

“Then get your Airwalks. Just put on some shoes.”

Bobby pushed his quilt around for a moment, finding a shoe underneath it. He held the shoe up in the air—eighty-dollar tennis
shoes, a gift from his father. “Other one’s gone,” Bobby said. “I think it’s lost.”

Slightly irritated, Beth started across to turn off the television. The show was over anyway. There was a commercial just
then coming on.

“Wait!” Bobby said. “This is great. Watch.”

Beth watched as an ad came on for some sort of newly invented breakfast cereal with flying saucer-shaped marsh-mallow pieces
in it.

“Can we get some?” Bobby asked.

“I told you about breakfast cereal with marshmallows in it.”

“I know,” Bobby said. “Marshmallows are just oil and sugar.”

“That’s right. No food value.”

“Oil is good for you,” Bobby said. “You’ve got to have oil. Just like a car.”

“Who told you
that
?” Beth asked.

“Peter. He said that there’s a part of your heart called a crankcase, and it needs oil once in a while.”

“Peter’s kidding.”

“You saying there’s no such thing as a crankcase?”

“Yes there’s a crankcase, but it’s not part of your heart. It’s part of a car engine. Peter’s just being crazy.”

“I knew that,” Bobby said. “I was seeing if you did.”

“I know everything,” Beth said. “I’m your mother.”

“Then find my other shoe, will you?” Bobby stood up from the couch and wandered into the kitchen. “And find my trucks and
my blue alien, too, okay?”

“If I can. There’s a bowl of cereal on the table,” Beth said. “Pour your own milk, but be careful.”

“You always say that,” Bobby said. “Like I’m going to
spill on purpose or something.”

“They pay me to say that,” Beth said, and then went off to find his shoe. Bobby’s bedroom looked like a wreck. He had too
much stuff, and somewhere in it, hidden, lay the other tennis shoe. She got down onto her hands and knees and looked under
the bed. Nearly every inch of space under there was clogged with stuffed animals. “Where did you find the shoe you’ve got?”
she hollered at him. Sometimes she got lucky, and Bobby had taken off both his shoes in the same room of the house, so that
if she found one of them she could find the other somewhere nearby.

“Under the quilt,” Bobby shouted back at her.

“I mean
before
that.”

“In the bedroom,” Bobby shouted. Then, not quite as loudly, he said, “What is this stuff?”

Hopeful, she went back into the kitchen again in order to avoid shouting. She had bought a new breakfast cereal, one that
had nothing to do with anyone’s crankcase.

“It looks like Fruit Loops,” Bobby said, “only they forgot to put enough color in them.”

The cereal had no added sugar or salt. It was full of oat bran, too, and sweetened with fruit juice, which also provided the
color. It was three-forty-nine a box, but what was money when your son’s health was concerned?

“Looks okay,” Bobby said, dousing it with milk.

“Yum,” Beth said. “Good for you, too. What do you think?”

Bobby chewed up a spoonful, then laid the spoon back into the bowl and made an awful face. “It’s
crap
,” he said, and for a moment Beth thought that he was going to spit it back into the bowl. He choked it down, though, then picked
up his milk and swallowed half a glass full.
“You
try it.”

“I bet it’s good,” Beth said, picking up the spoon. “And I don’t want you talking like that.”

“Like what? What did I say?”

“You know. Just watch your mouth.”

“All right. But you were the one who made me eat it.”

“This is the sort of thing the astronauts eat,” she said cheerfully, spooning some of it up. Bobby was in an outer-space phase
right now, and so was susceptible to the mention of astronauts. Beth crunched the cereal up in her mouth, anticipating something
that tasted at least a little bit like it looked. What she got was the flavor of sawdust mixed up with something like lemon
extract. Poker-faced, she swallowed it, then drank the rest of Bobby’s milk.

“Why would the astronauts eat something like that?” Bobby asked. “To lose weight? I mean, you wouldn’t eat very much of it.”

“That must be it,” Beth said. She carried the bowl of cereal to the sink and poured it down the disposer.

There was shouting from outside. She looked out the window into the Kleins’ backyard, where Lance Klein was striding back
and forth at the edge of the pool, obviously mad as hell. He suddenly stopped, looked at the telephone, and then threw it
hard into the bushes along the side of the house. She wondered whether it was the phone he had meant to loan her.

“What am I going to eat, then?” Bobby asked. “Can we go down to Emory’s and get a box of Pop-a-Toast? Peter’s never had Pop-a-Toast.
Maybe we could buy a box of it and surprise him.”

“Good idea,” Beth said. “We’ll bring him a box of Pop-a-Toast and a rosebush. Right now, though, try to remember where your
other shoe is.”

“It’s under the bed. I just remembered.”

She forced herself to ignore Klein, who was worked up into a frenzy and was kicking the hell out of a lawn chair. It was none
of her business, thank heaven.

“What’s it doing under the bed?” she asked, turning away from the window. “In fact, what are all those stuffed animals doing
under the bed?”

“That’s the zoo,” Bobby said, using both hands to pour another glass of milk. “It’s only the zoo animals under
there.” Without drinking the milk, he got up and led Beth back into the bedroom. He slid easily under the bed, hauling out
animals until he found the shoe. A plastic man in a hat sat in the shoe as if it were an automobile. Bobby pulled the man
out, pressed a lever on its back, and the man’s stomach flew open to reveal sausage strings of plastic guts.

“See,” Bobby said, “you can take his guts out too, and pretend to feed them to the lions or something.”

“Fascinating,” Beth said to him. “Put the shoe on and let’s get going. And brush your teeth and comb your hair.”

“I’ll brush my teeth,” Bobby said, pulling his shoe on, “but I don’t need to comb my hair. I’m wearing my hat. Did you find
the alien?”

“Not yet,” Beth said, walking back toward the kitchen.

“I think maybe it’s outside,” Bobby said. “But I’m not sure.” He disappeared down the hallway to the bathroom.

There was half a cup of cold coffee left, which Beth drank standing at the kitchen window again, staring out at the windblown
hillsides. She realized then that all morning long she had been avoiding looking into the service porch, and she wondered
if she would ever be able to look out through the back door window again without seeing that bandage-wrapped face in her mind.

A horn honked out front, and just then a blue Isuzu Trooper pulled into Klein’s driveway. A man got out, slamming the door
and carefully smoothing down his hair. It took a moment for Beth to recognize him.

“I’
LL HAVE TO KILL HIM,”
K
LEIN SAID OUT LOUD, SPEAKING
to the empty backyard. “There’s just no other way. Stupid damned …”

Then it occurred to him that Pomeroy’s talk about Beth put a new light on things. If it
was
him last night, looking through the windows, then there was the chance he wasn’t a pervert at all, that he was just trying
to put the fear into Beth because he thought she’d seen him loading up Ackroyd’s water tank with rats. That would be typical
Pomeroy method—instant excess.

Either way, clearly Pomeroy was over the top. He had gotten to Klein bad last night and then again over the phone just now.
Klein was running, and Pomeroy knew it. It was time to stop running.

There was the sound of a car pulling up, a door slamming. Klein ran along the side of the house and looked over the fence
toward the driveway. There was no white Cherokee out there. Pomeroy was driving a blue Isuzu Trooper this morning. He could
easily have ditched the other car.

A couple of moments later one of the french doors swung open and Pomeroy stepped out into the yard.

“Barney,” Klein said, holding out his hand as if nothing had gone wrong over the phone. Pomeroy shook it. “You had me going
for a second there, partner. What I want to know is that things are under
control
.”

“You never have to ask me that, Lance. That’s my middle name.”

“Good,” Klein said, gesturing at a lawn chair. “Then we’re on the same wavelength.” The two of them sat down near the fence
where they were sheltered from the wind. “Glass of juice?”

Pomeroy shook his head.

“So give me the good news,” Klein said, “if you’ve got any.”

“Well,” Pomeroy said. “All in all it was a good morning. I got out there real early. Lot of people working on their places.
I managed to get prices on three out in Holy Jim. Number two, number five, and number twenty-eight. They’ll all sell. Thirty-five
thousand on number two.”