Ultimate Thriller Box Set (117 page)

“You could say that.” I smiled and leaned over, plucked a pen from her apron pocket, and started scrawling a note on my napkin. “If he stops by, maybe you could give him this for me.”

I wrote: Jolene is really into her TV. She asked me to thank you. Your pal from the Sno-Inn.

I read it out-loud in case she lost it, and so everybody else got my message. I wrapped the napkin around a ten-dollar bill and put it, and the pen, back in her apron pocket.

“I appreciate it,” I said, flashing her another insincere smile.

She dropped my breakfast check on the counter and walked away without bothering to ask me first if maybe I wanted a slice of pie or something.

I took the hint, though I would have liked to try a slice. I gulped down the last of my shake, dropped another ten on the counter, and walked out.

I visited the barbershop, the beauty salon, and the drugstore, and left pretty much the same message at each place. In the post office, I asked the aged clerk behind the counter if he knew where the Pelz family lived.

“There isn’t any family left here except for little Billy,” the clerk said. “Still lives at their place on A street. Sixteen A Street.”

“What about Arlo,” I asked. “Seen him around?”

The old man narrowed his eyes at me. “Once, right after he got out of prison. You a friend of his?”

“Not really,” I said. “How about you?”

The clerk just turned and walked away, disappearing into the back of the post office.

I walked out and went next door to the tackle shop. They sold fishing poles, reels, lures, hooks, and all kinds of worms, crickets, and maggots. A man sat at the counter stringing a fly. As I got closer, I realized if you drew a line connecting the five moles on his cheek, you could make a lopsided star. I wondered if he knew that.

He looked up at me as I approached the counter. “Can I help you?”

“I’m up here doing some fishing,” I said.

“Whatcha interested in catching?” he asked. “Salmon, trout, perch, bass, mackinaw?”

“Arlo Pelz.”

I felt really cool saying that. I don’t think Mannix could have delivered it any better.

“I understand he’s a bottom-feeder native to these parts,” I said.

He stopped working on his lure, stood up, and gave me a hard look. “Are you a cop of some kind?”

I smiled thinly. “Of some kind.”

“I haven’t seen him.”

“Where do you suppose he’d be likely to go, if he came back for a visit?”

He thought for a minute. He wasn’t searching for the answer, he was trying to decide if the answer might get him hurt.

“You could check out his place on A Street,” the man replied. “Of course, you’d have to get past Little Billy first.”

I shrugged as if getting past anyone was easy for me. “Anyplace else?”

“Maybe the woods around the lake,” he said. “He used to hang out there a lot when he was a kid.”

“Why was that?”

“Same reason kids still do,” he replied. “To drink and fuck. He also liked to hide there.”

“What was he hiding from?”

“Everybody,” he replied. “He used to work in the marina, fixing outboards, before he gave that up to break into homes on the lake. Vacation places, empty most of the time. It’d be months before anyone realized they’d been robbed.”

“Where can I find the lake?” I asked.

“It’s about ten miles farther up the highway,” the man said. “Can’t miss it. Big Rock Lake.”

I got that chill of creepy realization up my back, only I was missing out on the realization part. I didn’t know why the name of the lake sounded strangely familiar to me.

“They got some place to stay the night up there besides the woods?” I asked.

“You can rent a cabin at the Big Rock Lake Resort.”

I got that chill again and it bugged me. I thanked the man for his help and left, thinking maybe the fresh air would clear my head.

It wasn’t until I’d crossed the street and was halfway to my car that I remembered where I’d heard the name of the lake before.

Actually, I didn’t remembering hearing it, I remembered seeing it. On the peeling, faded sign that hung above Cyril Parkus’ fireplace. The sign that said Big Rock Lake Resort.

I was so busy thinking, I didn’t see the guy sitting on the hood of my car until I was nearly standing in front of him.

And that’s when the guy, three hundred pounds of bad karma in a Grateful Dead tank-top and shorts, slid his huge ass off my car and stood up in front of me, resting a baseball bat on his shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-One

All the books and TV shows are very clear about what I was required to do in that situation: show no fear and come up with lots of smart ass remarks. I realized right away that acting on my instinct, which was to either run away or beg for mercy, wasn’t appropriate.

I tried to exude tough-guy calm which, at that moment, mainly consisted of suppressing my urge to whimper.

“I hear you’re looking for my brother,” the Neanderthal said, his voice full of menace.

“I was hoping word would get around,” I said, letting one hand slip behind my back. “You must be Little Billy.”

“You know why they call me Little Billy?”

“Because it’s supposed to be humorously ironic, given how big, fat, and stupid you are?”

Little Billy took a step toward me, but I held my ground, not so much because I’d mastered the tough-guy thing, but because I was petrified with fear.

“I got the name because a cop once snapped a billy club in half on my head and still couldn’t take me down.”

“It’s a shame about the brain damage, but at least you got a cute nickname,” I said, surprising myself. “Where’s Arlo?”

“I don’t know.” Little Billy grinned. “Then again, maybe I do.”

I grinned back. “Tell him I know how he found her and what he had on her. Tell him I want sixty percent of the action or I give everything I know to the cops.”

I didn’t know where the words and the grin were coming from. Maybe it was that big breakfast that did something to me. Or maybe it was my rest stop performance as Dirty Harvey. Whatever the reason, I was running on pure impulse. I hadn’t even stopped to think yet about how everything fit together, how Big Rock Lake connected to drugs, Lauren, Arlo, Cyril, and Seattle.

“What’s to stop me from shutting you up with this bat instead?” Little Billy asked.

“Why don’t you try and see for yourself?”

I said it with surprising self-confidence, which I really shouldn’t have had. In the bright light of day, I couldn’t be sure he’d be fooled by my BB gun or that I’d even be able to whip it out before he took off my head with his bat.

But like I said, I wasn’t thinking.

I walked past him, expecting to get whacked with that bat at any moment, but to my astonishment, he let me go unharmed. As I walked around to the driver’s side door of my car, I noticed the dent his ass had left on my hood and congratulated myself again for taking all the insurance that EconoCar had to offer.

I opened the door and glanced at Little Billy, who stood on the curb, tapping the end of his bat into his palm, staring at me with the flat, dead eyes of a shark.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said.

I got in and drove off before Little Billy could change his mind about taking that swing at me. My work in Deerlick was done. If Arlo was there, he knew by now that I was, too.

***

The Big Rock Lake Resort billboard, which stood along the highway a quarter mile ahead of the turn-off, promised “exciting water sports, great fishing, rustic cabins, and delicious home cooking” over a cartoon of a surprised fisherman getting yanked out of his boat by the gleeful trout on his hook.

I took the turn-off, a gravel road that ended at the Big Rock Lake Resort Store and Restaurant, a large, white, clapboard building that was mostly porch, and built onto its namesake, allowing it to loom a bit over the lake, the dock, and the beach below. On either side of the store, set back from the shore by a dry lawn, were ten identical white cabins, with small porches facing the water.

I parked my car behind a row of railroad ties and got out. The hot, heavy air smelled of outboard motors, lighter fluid, fish guts, and suntan lotion. Most of the cabins looked empty; a few had families camped out front, the kids running around, the sagging mothers basting on chaise lounges, while the pot-bellied fathers knocked back beers and looked for teenage girls to ogle. There were a few water skiers and fishing boats on the small lake, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of action. It was the kind of lake where people parked Winnebagos instead of building vacation homes, though there were a few of those, most not much more elaborate than the Big Rock cabins.

I strode up to the Big Rock Lake Resort Store and Restaurant, admiring the sign on the roof. Although it was weathered and peeling, I knew it was newer than the one in Cyril Parkus’ living room.

The porch was lined with wooden benches and surrounded the open counter that passed for the store. All the merchandise was on shelves behind the counter, which itself was a glass display case full of melting candy and fishing lures. The restaurant was a screened-in section of the porch that faced the lake, with a hand-painted menu above the counter and an electric fly trap in the corner that snapped every few seconds.

I took a stool at the restaurant counter beside a couple old men smoking cigarettes and nursing mugs of coffee. They looked liked they’d been installed with the stools fifty years ago. A couple kids sat on the bench, staring at the fly trap, letting their Popsicles melt all over their bathing suits as they waited in suspense for another insect to get zapped.

“What’ll it be?” asked the man behind the counter, who wore a big apron that had the same cartoon as the highway billboard. He was as jolly as a department store Santa, with a body to match.

I looked at the menu above the counter. The prices had been painted over and changed many times, but the menu remained the same. Burgers, hot dogs, bacon, and eggs, and a combination of them all called the Big Rock Burger.

I’d had a big breakfast, but acting tough gave me an appetite.

“Gimme a Big Rock Burger, please,” I said. “It’ll bring back memories.”

The man immediately repeated the order to someone in the kitchen, which was hidden somewhere in back.

“So you’ve been here before,” the man ventured jovially, as I’d hoped he would.

I nodded with a smile. “When I was a kid.” I offered him my hand across the counter. “The name’s Harvey Mapes.”

He shook my hand enthusiastically. “Tom Wade, pleasure to have you back.”

“The place hasn’t changed much,” I said.

“Just fresh coats of paint,” he replied. “Any of the pictures on that wall could’ve been taken yesterday.”

Wade motioned to a wall covered with about a hundred faded snapshots and Polaroids, some framed, some stuck to the paneling with thumbtacks or yellowed tape.

“The fish were a lot bigger then,” grumbled one of the old men.

“You can say that again,” another old timer agreed. “Coffee tasted better, too.”

Wade laughed and freshened up the old timer’s cup. “Maybe if I warm it up, you won’t notice.”

“The sign out front looks different,” I said, as if making a fresh observation.

“You’ve got a good memory and a sharp eye,” Wade said. “The only thing the family that sold me the place kept for themselves was the sign. Sentimental value, I suppose. Couldn’t really begrudge them that. I tried to copy the original sign as best I could, but I couldn’t get it quite right.”

A woman built just like Wade came out and set the Big Rock Burger down in front of me, then stood there expectantly to see if I was satisfied. I took a big bite out of it. It was wonderful.

“You certainly got the Big Rock down right,” I said through my mouthful of hamburger, hot dog, bacon, eggs, and cheese. “It’s perfection, even better than I remembered.”

Wade’s wife beamed with pride. “Thank you kindly,” she said, then disappeared into the back again.

“That’s my wife, Betty Lou,” Wade said, smiling after her. “The only thing she loves more than cooking is watching people eat what she makes.”

“Where can I find a wife like that?” I asked.

“You can look anyplace but right here!” Wade chuckled good-naturedly and so did I.

I took a few more bites of my Big Rock Burger, then said: “I vaguely remember the people who used to run the place. Their name was Parkus, wasn’t it?”

“Josiah Parkus,” Wade nodded. “This place was in their family since the early 1900s.”

“Then why did they sell it?”

“Too much tragedy, I suppose.” Wade took a cloth from his apron and started to absently wipe the countertop. “Josiah’s wife Esme killed herself in ‘74. He woke up one morning and Esme was gone. A few hours later, he found one of their boats floating in middle of the lake. The anchor was missing.”

“Fisherman out trolling for macks snagged Esme’s dress in ‘75,” the old man with the coffee said. “Maybe it was ‘76.”

“Their daughter Kelly never really got over it, drowned herself the same way a few years later,” Wade said. “That just left Josiah and his son.”

“Cyril, wasn’t it?” I asked.

Wade nodded. “Neither one of ‘em was much interested in running the resort after that, though Josiah stuck it out on his own after Cyril went off to California. When Josiah died, Cyril sold the place to me. We used to run an RV park up at Spirit Lake, but we always envied this outfit.”

I finished up my burger and tried to figure out how all of this tied together with what I already knew. After thinking about it for a few minutes, the pieces fit pretty good.

Cyril knew Arlo Pelz because they grew up together, with Arlo probably resenting the hell out of Cyril the whole time. Arlo worked for Cyril’s father at the resort marina, fixing outboard motors, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Cyril treated Arlo as his employee, too.

After Kelly Parkus killed herself, Cyril went off to California, and Arlo got into drugs, eventually ending up in Seattle, where he met Lauren, who was either a drug addict, a drug dealer, or a whore. Or maybe all three.

Somehow they split up, how or why I don’t know. A few years went by. Arlo married Jolene, went to prison for dealing drugs, and when he got out, he stumbled into the discovery that Cyril, wealthy and powerful, was married to a woman with a dark, shameful past her husband probably didn’t know about. Arlo guessed Lauren would pay dearly to keep it that way.