Raveled (25 page)

Chapter 35

Artie… sixteen years ago

The sun sliced into Artie’s eyes like a long, slow stab. He’d meant to fix that hole in the shutters for six months now. Question was, why the hell was he experiencing the sunrise in his office? He tried to swallow but the idea of saliva had long skipped town. His lips pulled apart slowly as he attempted to work the muscles of his face. The rough sound of his tongue unsticking from the roof of his mouth made him woozy.

His head felt like a rocky trail with horses stampeding over it. As he tried to sit up, a lightning bolt of agony shot from his
skull to his toes, both extremes flaring with a sharpness that grew worse when he tried to resist it. He fell back down on the small couch where his body had remained in a crumpled heap most of the night. Sweating profusely, he cast aside the worn-out blanket that clung to him like a wet washcloth against a shower wall.

“Goddammit,” he said through clenched teeth.

With his fingers pressed against his eyes like hot stones, he let himself remain motionless for a good five minutes, willing death to take him. What the hell could possibly have happened? Had he been mugged? It hurt to think, but his mind drifted to the night before. Busy night at the garage. Drinking from a tin can. Gunshots. He remembered it like a dream wrapped in gauze. Had it been just last night that Enzo served up that shit from his uncle? Or was that the night before? This was only the second time in his life he’d completely blacked out an evening’s entertainment, the first being the night he lost his virginity in high school. At least Louise-Anne Verner claimed they’d done it, but heck if he knew. She was psycho from day one, and Artie would have been shocked if he’d been able to get it up at all that night. To this day, he didn’t know what had happened and didn’t trust a thing his friends told him, especially that Reed Carlisle who’d likely spiked the grain alcohol with ground-up pills. Artie had sworn never to get like that again but now he’d gone and spent an entire godforsaken night in dirty clothes, passed out on this foul couch, probably half infected with whatever was crawlin’ around inside it.

He rose up, fighting every step of the way to stay upright and keep his anger in check. He failed on the latter when he kicked the bejeezus out o
f the empty water-cooler container on the floor. It rolled twenty feet into the waiting area and stopped when it butted up against the pump action shotgun leaning barrel-up against the wall.

“Real safe, Artie,” he mumbled to himself. “Real safe.”

With an exhausted sigh, he stumbled out, taking at least three minutes to do so, and grabbed the shotgun to put it away. As he started the trek back to the office, he caught sight of a huge-ass gopher through the back window. Much as he hated losing twelve hours of his life to an alcohol-induced mental void, he hated gophers more and killing one might relieve some of the vexation he was feeling. With his head throbbing to beat the band, he grabbed the silencer from his office. It wouldn’t do much, but it would spare his ears a few decibels. He staggered back through the waiting area and stopped at the open door leading to the garage bays. He pressed the button just inside to raise the first bay door. It pained him to face the burgeoning daylight, but that gopher looked so plump and lazy, Artie had to give it a shot. He caught sight of the fat bastard running up the hill, where it suddenly stopped, turned and stared right at the garage. Maybe the sound of the door had drawn its attention. Maybe the scent of a grown man sweating liberal amounts of moonshine had caught its interest. Hell, the damn things could smell a drop of rain a mile high in the sky. Why not some distant perspiration?

Leaning against the jamb between the waiting area and the garage, he pumped the gun and shot.

Goddammit if he didn’t miss by a day and a half. He was about to give up and return the gun to its locker when a rat scurried right in front of him and started chewing on something behind the rear bumper of the old Mercedes in the first bay.

“
Whatever you’re eating, Mister,” Artie mumbled, “must taste awful damn good for you to be coming out in front of a loaded gun.” He considered taking a shot at the rat, but thought better of it when he remembered all the flammable substances inside the garage. “Lucky you,” he said.

As if understanding he’d just been spared, the rat
—an eight-pounder at most—tried to drag his meal to a more private spot so he could eat in peace, but it was too heavy. He only succeeded in sinking his teeth into a shoelace. He hauled that, plus a bit of a sneaker, into Artie’s hazy view.

“What
in the hell?” Artie said.

A moment l
ater, Artie went a shade of pale that a mortician would have found disturbing.

“Holy fuckin’ shit.”

He dropped to his knees.

Chapter
36

Allison… present

On the way home from the reunion, I got an idea. Not a new idea. The same one I’d had earlier. But it hadn’t occurred to me to do it with Charlie.

“Charlie, you up for an adventure?”

“Why not? The night’s just getting started.”

“Drive to The Willows.”

“No thanks,” he said, as if I’d offered him a cocktail weenie.

“I’m serious. I need to get something and
the situation’s getting fairly desperate.”

“In the
putrid Willows?”

“Yes, behind Jasper’s trailer.”

After humorous negotiations with Charlie involving the words
meth-heads
,
tweakers
,
degenerates
, and
gangbangers
, he agreed to go, but only because he thought it might make a good party story.

I didn’t see headlights in any direction so the dogs must have been called off for the night. A few minutes later, we arrived at Jasper’s. The scent of charred wood and scorched rubber from the earlier fire burned our nostrils when we exited the car. Scarred remnants of the trailer looked like a sad and lonely skeleton, a sickly geriatric patient abandoned by all caretakers.

I asked Charlie if he had any tools since I had no idea how Jasper had concealed his message in the roof of the well.

“A good gay is always prepared,” he said. He popped his trunk and told me to help myself. I pulled out a heavy-duty flashlight,
a jack, and an entire Save-Yourself Toolbox Kit, labeled as such in bold pink letters. I gave him a look that said,
Really?

“Hey,
” he said, “when I came out, I barreled through the fucking door.”

“Good for you
, Penelope Pitstop. Let’s go.”

He held the flashlight and
jack while I took the toolbox. Walking behind me, he did a less than stellar job of lighting my path. My shoes would never recover.

“How can they stand the constant dampness
back here?” I said.

“
It’s the septic,” Charlie explained. “They did a horrible job installing it. The ladies at the salon used to say The Willows would forever smell like the shit of lepers and beggars.”

“They did not,” I
said.

“Well maybe they said fertilizer, but you get the idea
.”

“I thought
the odor was from the protected wetlands back here.”

“
That, too, I suppose,” Charlie said. “So what exactly are we getting from this mysterious well of yours?”

“Jasper left me
a message of some sort but I don’t want to say more than that.”

“So you did see him
! I knew it!”

“I didn’t
,” I said. “But the information about the message got through. Just in time, apparently.”

We reached the well. The arsonist who’d destroyed Jasper’s place
must have thought I was searching the trailer for evidence. Officer Ervin Johnston must have informed them that I was peeking in the windows. Thank goodness they didn’t extend their hot little fingers to the well. It looked intact—at least as intact as a crumbling, poorly built well could look. I wondered who was allowed to raise a structure back here on federal land, but then I wondered why more people didn’t do it. No federal agent would ever drag his ass into the dregs of The Willows to ensure everything was up to snuff and code-compliant.

A
tacked-down, black tarp draped the roof of the well. With any luck, something more substantial lay underneath that had kept Jasper’s message from getting wet. I had no idea what material people used to build the roof of a well, but I hoped the creator of this one took into account the damp, leper-shit-infused air surrounding it.

I p
laced the toolbox on the ground and opened it while Charlie illuminated the contents.

“Okay,” I said, “which tool
for banging through a roof?”

“Well that depends
if you’re going from the top or the bottom,” Charlie said.

“Thanks, Charlie, but I’m talking about the roof, not your sex life.
”

“Bummer,” he said. “’Cuz if you had been, I’d
have been partial to the Ball Peen hammer.”

I laughed, a little too loudly.

“I really don’t know tools,” he said. “Just slam it with the first thing you grab.”

I
chose a hammer with a sharp, weighted end. My dad would have been undoubtedly disappointed in a daughter who didn’t know her way around a toolbox but it wasn’t my fault he hadn’t taught me.

“Hey,” I said, “before I start waking up the neighbors, shine that light on the underside here.”

Charlie obeyed. The underside of the roof—the part that faced the water far below—looked like a layer of corrugated metal. It appeared newer and shinier than the rest of the structure. I ran my hand along it and felt an unexpected seam in the center that was visually undetectable. I followed it with my fingers and realized it wasn’t just a horizontal seam where two pieces of metal had been welded together. It actually formed a six-inch square. I pressed up against its center. Nothing. Then I jiggled it and felt the slightest give. I tried sliding it sideways to the right, left, front and back. Nothing. Charlie watched me in silence.

“Maybe it’s like a key,” he said. “Try twisting it.”

As I fought to get some sort of grip, my middle finger and thumb fell perfectly into two slight indentations that didn’t fit with the rest of the pattern. I pressed upward on them, then twisted the whole square. It slid smoothly, somehow meshing with the metal frame around it to allow about one inch of movement. When it stopped, I tried sliding it in all four directions again, and then pushed straight up one more time. It popped right off, leaving me with enough space to reach in and explore. I didn’t relish the idea of my hand blindly groping the hidden area. The dimensions seemed perfect for a dead snake or rodent, and Jasper hadn’t exactly been sane all his life.

I set the
square portion aside and felt like a kid in a haunted house told to reach behind a curtain and stick her hand into a container of spaghetti while some costumed teenager claimed it was a bowl of brains. I dared my fingers to venture forth and then... I felt it! Definitely not spaghetti. It was a metal box, about four inches wide.

“I got something,” I
whispered.

I gr
asped it with my thumb and fingers and eased it towards the opening.

“Don’t drop it!” Charlie said, louder than necessary.

“Thanks, Chuckie,” I said. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

I
slid it out, slowly, as if I were diffusing a bomb. With its base three quarters of the way over the opening, I waited before tilting it down. The thought of the box plummeting into oblivion, leaving the mysteries of that night in murky, wet obscurity, nearly paralyzed me. I took a deep breath and lowered it.

“
Found that time capsule, did ya?” It wasn’t Charlie’s voice. “Let’s see what you—”

I never got to hear the rest of
Officer Johnston’s request because when I turned around, the box securely in my hand, he was lying on the ground, the back of his head sunk deep in beggar shit, his forehead bleeding a thin trickle of red. His gun lay motionless at his side. I knew this because Charlie was shining the flashlight on Ervin’s supine, still-breathing body.

“Charlie, what the hell did you do?”

“I don’t know. Reflex, I guess. I bonked him with the flashlight.”

“What do we do
now?”

“Run?”
he said.

“
You think he’ll be all right?”

“We can call it in anonymously.”

“From where?” I said. “There’s no payphones around.”

“I always keep
a disposable, prepaid cell phone in my glove compartment.”

“Why?” I said.

Charlie actually took the time to look exasperated with me. “A good gay is always prepared, Allison. Learn it. Use it. Make it yours.” He shined the light down the path. “Ladies first,” he shouted, taking off before me.

I caught up to him in a few yards. “At least you got your cocktail party story,” I said.

“You know,” he replied through panting breaths, “that’s not the first time I’ve had a uniformed man sneak up on me from behind. But it is the first time I haven’t had to pay for it.”