Outer Banks (19 page)

She stood next to the counter by the sink, pouring him a cup of tea. Picking up the cup and saucer, carrying it across the room by pinching the saucer between thumb and forefinger, she walked past her son, tiny next to his enormous size, and suddenly, as she passed, she groaned, “Oh-h, Alvin!” With an expression on her face that joined disgust with self-pity, she placed the cup and saucer on the table in front of him, sat down opposite, and petulantly pushed the sugar and milk at him.

“What d'you mean, ‘Oh-h, Alvin'?”

“You
know
what I mean!” she exploded at him. “
You!
You're what I mean!
You're
what's the matter.
Look
at you!”

“You think I'm drunk?”

“Think!”
She kept stirring her spoon in the cup of tea, her hands shaking as she moved, her rage barely contained by the act. Her dark eyes glowered at him, her head twitching nervously from side to side, her feet tapping against the linoleum-covered floor. “You, you're nothing but a bum, a drunken bum! That's all! I don't know why I even bother to … to hope. You'll probably end up like your grandfather, the way you're going now.”

“Not that one again. Jesus. My grandfather. As if ending up like my father is an improvement. Anyhow, I'm stone sober, Ma,” he said quietly.

“You're a drunken bum! You smell like a brewery. You come in here smelling like a brewery, and then you have the gall to tell me how sober you are, and making cruel cracks about your father, too. You're a drunken bum, no good for anything. And now you're a liar, too.”

“Ma, I am not!” he cried, and he stood up, facing her.

She wouldn't even look at him then, talked into her teacup instead and made him overhear her. “I work and I slave year after year, for what? For
this
? A drunk who can't even speak kindly to me? A thankless bum who can't say anything kind about his
father?” She continued talking loudly at the teacup and about him, as if he were in an adjacent room, and he moved erratically away from the table, then back again, and finally grabbed her shoulder with one huge hand and shook her, which made her scream directly up at him, “Leave me alone! Don't you touch me! Get away from me! You're
drunk
!”

At that instant his father came crashing into the room from the bedroom. The man was dressed in a wildly billowing flannel nightgown, he was barefoot, and the gray hair on his narrow head stuck out like a spiky crown. His face was knotted in fury, and as he rushed for Alvin, he roared, “You son of a bitch, I'll
kill
you! Raising your hand against your mother! I'll
kill
you for that!”

Alvin turned, releasing his mother's shoulder, and caught the full force of his father's rush. Falling backward, he broke his fall with one hand and tried to ward off his father's punches with the other. The older man was swinging at him like a windmill gone berserk, hitting him on the head, face and shoulders, slamming him in the chest with his bony, naked knee, trying to keep him down on the floor while he beat him with his fists. Alvin reached behind him and knocked the cupboard door open, and with no conscious thought, or none that he would remember later, he reached into the cupboard, yanked out a large cast-iron skillet, and swung it at his father, hitting him squarely on the forehead. There was a thick, crunching sound, like that of an apple being broken in half by two strong hands, and the old man's body went limp and collapsed on the floor.

Alvin, dazed, dropped the skillet, stood up, heard as if from a great distance his mother screaming, “Alvin! You've killed your
father!
You've
killed
him!” and he ran from the house, grabbing up his coat as he ran.

Outside, it was dark and snowing hard. The wind had dropped, and the snow was falling straight down, like a gauze curtain. For a few moments he ran, then walked—down the road to the town, then through the darkened town to the highway,
where the first vehicle heading south, a truck, stopped and picked him up.

“Where you goin'?” the driver asked from behind the red glow of his cigarette. He was a fat man a few years older than Alvin.

“Boston. Tonight.”

“Okay by me. Your old lady kick you out or something?”

“Yeah,” Alvin said, instantly constructing a scene that would justify his words. “Yeah, I came home too late and too drunk once too often, I guess. And she flipped her fuckin' lid. She'll probably cool off in a few days if I leave her alone. You know.”

“Yeah, they always do,” the driver said cheerfully as the truck picked up speed, plowing heavily, powerfully, through the falling, drifting snow.

 

(Here ends the excerpt from the novel.)

A
N ANONYMOUS CALL
to the chief of the two-man Barnstead Police Department, the large, barrel-chested, crew-cut man named Chub Blount, who happened to be Hamilton Stark's brother-in-law, brought the chief, as he preferred to be called, out to Hamilton's house early one morning in February. The call had come in to the chief's home around one
A.M
., waking the burly man from his peaceful, nearly dreamless sleep. His wife Jody, Hamilton Stark's sister, punched her husband's side with one of her sharp elbows and woke him.

“Chub! Answer the phone!” she ordered crossly.

“Whut, whut, what?” His hand clumsily groped for the telephone in the darkness above his face. Then he realized that the instrument was beside him on the night table, and at last he stopped its shrill ringing by picking up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Barnstead Police?”
It was a man's voice, hurried, thin, slightly overarticulated.

“Yeah. This's the chief.”

“Good. There may have been a murder in your town. I thought you should know.”

“Whut the hell… Is this Howie? Who the hell is this?” The chief sat up in bed and looked into the mouthpiece in the dark, as if trying to see who was talking into it at the other end of the line.

“Who is it, Chub?” Jody impatiently snapped.

“Never mind who this is. I just thought you might like to know that Hamilton Stark may have been killed this afternoon. You ought to look into it, that's all.”

“What kinda crap you handin' me, pal? Hey, is this Howie? C'mon, Howie, is it you?”

“What on
earth
is going on, Chub? Is Howie drunk?”

“This is an anonymous phone call.”

“Yeah, well, I don't believe you, pal. It's Howie Leeke, I know your voice, Howie, and I don't think it's funny, I gotta get up in the fuckin' morning and I don't like getting pulled outa bed in the middle of the fuckin' night to play games with a drunk.”

“No, seriously, this is an anonymous phone call.”

“Hang up, Chub.”

“Howie, look, whaddaya doin', pullin' my chain like this in the middle of the fuckin' night?”

“You don't seem to understand. I'm anonymous. I'm not Howie Leeke or anybody else, either. I'm anonymous.”

“Chub, hang up on him.”

“Bullshit you're anonymous. It's Howie.”

“No, really. I'm dead serious. I think Hamilton Stark has been murdered.”

“Chub, will you hang that thing up!”

“Hey, Howie, ol' pal, where're you calling from? You calling me from a bar? You over the Bonnie Aire?”

“Why? Why do you want to know that? I'm anonymous.”

“Jesus, Chub, it's one in the morning!”

“Shaddup, Jody. Howie…”

“Seriously, why do you want to know where I am? Are you going to try to trace the call? Go ahead, I'm calling from a public booth. It's only a waste of your time, though, because I'm calling to give you an important message about Howie, I mean Hamilton Stark…”

“Yeah, sure. Now listen up, Howie, whyn't you tell me where's that booth you're callin' from, you know, so's I can come on over an' have a drink with ya.” Covering the mouthpiece with his hand, he said to his wife, “I'll get the bastard to tell me where he's calling from, see, and I'll send Calvin down there to pick him up for Drunk and Disorderly or Driving while Intoxicated. Teach that gabby bastard a lesson…”

“Listen here, now, this really is an important message. I think you ought to drive out to Hamilton Stark's place and look for him.”

“Yeah, sure, that's all I got to do is drive around lookin' for that silly asshole. Now, c'mon, Howie, where ya callin' from? I'll come on down an' having a drink with ya. How's that?”

“I'm not Howie Leeke. I'm trying to remain anonymous, and you're not making it very easy for me, Mr. Blount.”

“Okay, Howie, ol' pal, thanks for the tip about Ham,” he drawled, reluctantly giving up the attempt to entrap his friend. “But one of these fine nights I'm goin' to catch you drivin' drunk or D and D, ol' buddy, and when I do, I'm goin' to hang your fuckin' ass from a fuckin' tree.”

“No—”

The chief cut him off and hung up the phone. He flopped down into the warmth of his bed, bumping against his wife's bony knees and elbow as he squirmed back into the gully he had been sleeping in earlier, and quickly, with no further words, the two of them fell asleep.

But the next morning after breakfast the chief remembered the call, and saying to himself, What the hell, I haven't got anything better to do, he decided to drive out to his brother-in-law's house. He hadn't seen the man in several months, so they'd probably be able to think of things to say to each other, and what if the bastard
had
been murdered? It wouldn't be a shock to anyone—there were plenty of people in the world, hell, in the whole state of New Hampshire, who would be happy to see Hamilton Stark dead. Hung up on a tree with flies clotted around his mouth and eyes. Down a well, green in three feet of water, his body swollen like a jelly doughnut and held there with concrete blocks. Tied to a tree, with
KILL THE PIG
carved into his chest, his boots filled and overflowing with the blood from the carving job they'd done on him.

It wouldn't be any great loss, as they say, but even so, it would be murder, Murder One, right here in Barnstead, New Hampshire, where there hasn't been a genuine killing for several generations—not since the one over in Gilmanton, the one that woman wrote the filthy book about,
Peyton Place.
They should have burned that damned book. Maybe someone would write a book about this one, too. Killings up here are unusual. A few accidental shootings, hunting accidents, suicides, that sort of thing, sure, but no real live killings, he thought as he drove out of town, along the river, and turned left at the Congregational church, the only church in town, onto the dirt road that led to the narrow end of the Suncook Valley, where, in the shade of Blue Job Mountain, Hamilton Stark lived.

It was a cold, dark gray day, with the sour sky sagging down almost to the treetops. Along the sides of the narrow, winding road, the tin trailers and tarpaper-covered shacks seemed frozen into the several feet of old, leathery, late-winter snow that surrounded them, the vehicles outside and the leaning, dilapidated outbuildings scattered around them. Behind the dwellings and vehicles lay the woods, the dark, tangled third-growth pines
and spruce—twisted, erratically spaced trees and groves laced together by the ruins of ancient stone walls and low, scrubby brush, a forest for squirrels and porcupines, creatures that run close to the ground or high above it.

As he drove, the chief squared his Stetson on his head, checked himself in the rear-view mirror, and hated his brother-in-law. He had not forgiven him. Although of course he told everyone that he had forgiven him long ago, which usually made the listener shake his head with surprise and admiration, for many of the things that Hamilton had done to the chief—not so much to the chief himself as to his wife Jody and her mother Alma Stark—were generally thought to be unforgivable. The chief usually explained the generosity of his spirit by saying, “Look, hey, the bastard's just not right in the head. I mean, what the hell, you don't think the bastard's
happy
, do you?” And no, no one thought for a minute that Hamilton Stark was happy, which proved the chief's assertion that the bastard wasn't right in the head. The chief liked being right, especially when he could prove it logically.

Two miles beyond the church there was a large cleared field on the right and, at the far end of the field, a driveway that led from the road along the edge of the field to a white-painted metal gate and, a little ways farther, the house. The chief turned off the road onto the driveway and in a few seconds pulled up at the gate. Easing his bulk out of the car, he walked around to the gate and unlatched it, stopping for a few seconds to study the piles of trash, most of them half-buried in snow that lay in the field in front of the house. Shaking his heavy head with disbelieving disgust, he squeezed back into his car and drove through the gate, following the driveway to the front of the house, where he came to a stop behind Hamilton's pale green Chrysler limousine.

Shutting off the engine of his own car, a Plymouth station wagon with the standard blue bubble on the roof, the chief slid out, zipped up his storm coat, slowly approached Hamilton's car
from the driver's side, and immediately saw the three bulletholes in the window, which caused him to unzip his storm coat and draw his revolver from the holster on his left hip. It was a smoothly executed series of moves. For a large man the chief was fast and balanced, and he practiced all his moves diligently in his free time. Poised on the balls of his feet, his head laid back and slightly to one side, and holding his revolver with his left hand, he switched off the safety and reached for the door handle with his right hand, slowly, as if he were trying to catch a butterfly without damaging its wings. He whipped open the door, shoving the snout of his gun down into the space where the driver's head ordinarily would have been situated.

Nothing. Empty. No blood on the seat. Slugs probably in the upholstery someplace—send the lab boys out to look for them later. Course, the slugs might be buried inside Ham's body. Hit the bastard clean and fast, got the body out of the car right away so they could wipe it down, dumped the body in the trunk of the hit car, then took off to where they could drop it into some open water. The nearest open water would be the Atlantic Ocean, the chief figured. Kittery, Maine. This was going to be a tough case to crack alone, he thought grimly. He was going to need some help.

Jamming his gun into the holster, he walked back to his own car and sat down in the driver's seat. He slammed the door behind him and started the motor and the heater, after which he slid a few inches to the right of the steering wheel to a position on the seat from which he could operate the radio comfortably. He stretched out his legs, plucked the microphone from the hook, and barked into its face. “Hawk! Come in, Hawk! This's Eagle! Come in, Hawk. This is Eagle, come in, Hawk!”

After a few seconds of answering static, a high-pitched voice cried,
“Hawk here, Eagle! Come in, Eagle!”

“That you, Calvin?”

“Sure is, Eagle. What's up?”

The chief scratched at the nest of curly blond hairs where his throat met his chest. “I'm over to the Stark place, where Ham Stark lives? You know the place?”

“Sure. The place up on Blue Job Road, used t' be his mother's place—”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, listen,” the chief interrupted. “I think there's been some kinda trouble up here. Looks to me like there's been a little shooting.” Suddenly, as if the bank of clouds had parted and the sun had come out, the chief became frightened. Terrified. His head was located in his car precisely where he supposed Hamilton's head to have been when he had been shot. Whoever had shot Hamilton could as easily shoot his brother-in-law. The chief flopped down on the seat, his right cheek pressed flat against the cool upholstery, and went on talking into the microphone. “Look, Calvin, get over here right away, will you? Where the hell are you now, for God's sake?” he puffed. He was lying on his side, facing the glove compartment, and it was difficult for him to breathe.

“I'm over on Route Twenty-eight, on my way to that guy Yanoff's, you know the guy, takin' his goddamned dog home to him. Herb Kernisch says he seen it runnin' deer last night and he'll shoot it next time it's out loose, you know Herb…”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. How long will it take you to get here?” The chief was terrified. He'd walked into a trap. Shit, shit, shit. Those were rifle slugs for sure. Hit men from Boston. Probably Cosa Nostra. Mafia. Italian. They'd as soon kill him as pick a flower, and they could do it, too, the way he'd set himself up. They could pick him off from fifty yards, and all he had was his damned service revolver.

“Oh… I dunno, twenty minutes, I guess, if I come straight over an' don't take this mutt back to Yanoff's. I ain't there yet.”

“Well, for Christ's sake, hit your fuckin' siren an' get the hell over here!” he cried into the mike.

“You okay, Chief?”

“Yes. Yeah, sure. Just get the hell over here, will you, Calvin?” The chief was sweating, and his eyes were darting wildly back and forth across the narrow slab of leaden sky that he could see from his position on the seat. It was everything he could see—a rectangle of low, dark sky—but he expected that any second even that would go black on him, as three soft-nosed slugs penetrated his large, soft body.

“Ten-four, Eagle.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ten-four.” He looked for his hat, the white Stetson he'd bought last spring at the police chiefs' convention in Dallas. It was on the floor in front of him, getting dirty. He retrieved it and started brushing it clean with his hand. That goddamned Ham Stark, he fumed, as he brushed his hat with his thick fingertips. Getting me into this. Why does he always have to … whatever it is he does. I ought to just get the hell out of here, drive off and forget the whole thing. Not even mention it to anyone. Not even Jody. Except that Calvin's already on his way over here.
He
knows. Shit. Never should have called him. Jesus Christ, why don't things go right for me? Shit, shit, shit. Who the hell made that phone call last night, anyhow?
That's
who probably did it, got me into this in the first place. He studied his hat. It was white again, sparkling white, without even a bruise of dirt from the floor.