With (10 page)

Leo hung his head. It sure took a heap of sneakiness to get anything past Louisa. He had never been able to learn all the tricks and ruses that most fellers use in order just to have a little fun in this sorry life. “Louisa,” he announced solemnly, “in my old age I seem to be getting more and more absent-minded. I’ll be durned if I didn’t already drop off them reams of paper.”

She squinted her eyes at him. “Leo Spurlock!” she exclaimed. “You don’t mean to tell me you’ve already been out here by yourself? And that little girl all alone?”

He nodded, feebly.

She hauled off and slapped him. Hoo boy it stung like the dickens and knocked his glasses off. It wasn’t the first time she’d hit him, and he knew it wasn’t going to be the last. “I never did nothing,” he protested, truthfully.

“You get back in the car, and you just sit there,” she commanded him. “You just sit there and I’ll visit with Robin and come out when I’m good and ready.”

She went up to the door and knocked. After a while, she hollered, “It’s your grandma. Open up.”

Leo rolled down the window and hollered, “You forgot you’re supposed to knock the shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits.”

Louisa knocked proper, and Robin let her in.

Leo just sat there, for a long time. By and by Karen come home. She parked and come over to him. “Leo, what are you sitting out here for?” she asked.

Leo coughed. He coughed because he didn’t know what to say, but the act of coughing provided him with a excuse. “I been feelin porely. I jist might have something I don’t want Robin to catch.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Karen said. “Mother won’t be long. I’ve got to take Robin downtown to shop for a birthday present for a party she’s going to tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, Robin told me all about that party,” he said.

“So you have seen her?” she said and looked at him peculiar. “I thought you meant you didn’t want to see her so she wouldn’t catch anything from you.”

Leo come mighty close to smiting hisself on the brow on account of his stupidity in not knowing how to pass even the time of day without sticking his foot in his mouth. Was there ever a feller on earth who had more sawdust where his brains ort to be?

Chapter eight

O
kay, okay. Let’s us just clamp on the blinders and hold our horses. He was not just going too fast and reckless but he was doing it assbackwards, all on the edge and itchy to get the girl. He knew damn well that he’d have to hold that fucking yard sale
before
he took possession of her, and it wasn’t advertised until tomorrow morning. Probably nobody would show up for it, but he had to have it anyhow just for the look of things.

He’d meant this visit to Harrison, his next to last, to be only a sort of reconnaissance, to see whichaway the wind was blowing and get the lay of the land. He just wanted a good idea of the girl’s comings and goings, and if there was maybe any chance she ever went anyplace by herself. But coming into town he realized he was driving too fast at the same moment he heard the siren and saw in the rearview mirror the blue lights flashing atop the trooper’s cruiser.

It was old Hedge Larrabee, who he’d trained years before. “License and registration,” old Hedge said from behind his dark sunglasses, without even bothering to take a good look at him.

“Hedge, you dipshit,” Sog said. “It’s
me.
”

“Sarge?” old Hedge said, and for a second looked like he was about to salute. “Goshdawg, Sarge, I thought you’d gone to Californy. You were doing sixty-five in a forty mile zone, did you know?”

“Yeah, Hedge, I’m heading for Californy the day after tomorrow.”

“Well, good luck and God bless and all that crap,” Hedge said. “You take it easy now, you hear?” Hedge turned to go but then he turned back. “Sarge, if you’re going to Californy, you’d better have this heap looked at. You’ve got hardly any tread on the tires, and the whole damn muffler is about to come loose.”

“I’ll probably junk it and take the bus,” Sog declared, and drove on. He’d gone hardly half a mile before he discovered how heavy his foot on the gas was, and had to force himself to let up. Then he drove on out the road to the Kerr place and parked near it so he could sit there and watch for the school bus to let the girl out. He wished he knew her first name so he could think of her as something besides “the girl” or his truelove or whatever. After a while the school bus pulled up, and she got off and his heart swole mightily, once again amazed at how beautiful she was. He waited for the school bus to drive off, but the driver just sat there watching until she had checked the mailbox and then gone to the front door and let herself in. She had her key inside her lunchbox.

He hadn’t meant to try anything today, but the very thought of her being alone in that house was just too much for him. He and Jack Samples had known of several cases where the kid was so trusting or just plain gullible that they would open the door for anybody. He thought he might as well give it a try. He drove on a little and parked out front, and went up and knocked on the door.

But it wouldn’t work. He pretended to be her grandpa, but she wasn’t fooled. In the first of what he knew would be thousands of conversations in the years to come, he discovered right off the bat how smart and clever she was. He couldn’t get her to open the door, and finally he gave up, and drove down the road a ways and parked and sat there for a good bit thinking about the ways that he might possibly take her into his custody. He could just bust out a window in the house. There wasn’t no other neighbors within view, and even if she hollered probably nobody would hear her. But he didn’t want to scare her too bad, and he put on his thinking cap to see if he couldn’t come up with the words to keep her gentled down. He already told her that him and her was fated to spend the rest of their lifes together and that he was her lover-boy, but he doubted she’d believed him. Shit, when you got right down to it, he was old enough to be her grandpa, and she would probably prefer a much younger guy to spend the rest of her life with.

“Lord, lord,” Sog said aloud, “help me to find a way to get her to go with me to our new home.” Sog wasn’t hardly religious at all, and when he said this prayer he wasn’t even picturing the Lord Above, but he was sure earnest in his request.

And be damn if, at the very moment he said those words, she didn’t appear! Riding her bike! “Thank you, Lord!” he said. But when she caught sight of him she threw on her brakes or something and the bike crashed.

And then here came that feller who turned out to be her real granddaddy, or her step-granddaddy leastways, a guy some years older than Sog and kind of puny and Sog was prepared to fight him for the girl, but then he figured it was already bad enough that he was letting the man get a good look at him so that later on when Robin disappeared the man would be able to describe him and maybe even help ’em draw a picture of him. Up at
CID
they had a real sketch artist who could talk to you and get you to give him enough info about a suspect to get his likeness down exact on a piece of paper.

So Sog he figured he’d better get on out of there, and he drove off, hoping the feller hadn’t bothered to take down his license number or nothing. But come to think on it, the feller didn’t seem to be loaded with brains.

He went to the drive-in for a couple of cheeseburgers and a milkshake. He was going to miss cheeseburgers and milkshakes and maybe these was his last ones, because tomorrow evening, his last evening here in town before heading off home with his beloved, he intended to have his “last meal,” that is to say, his last restaurant meal, and he’d already decided on Western Sizzlin’, where he could get himself a nice big cut of steak, something he’d never be having again up there on the mountain. He’d considered but rejected the idea of keeping some beef cattle up there; it would be just too hard to get them up there unless he carried them when they were still calfs, and he might not be able to do that. Probably a calf weighed more than a davenport and was harder to manage and carry unless it was tranquilized.

Thinking of tranquilizers, he remembered that he’d already given some thought to the possibility of using some chloroform on the girl. But buying some of the stuff was out of the question. You can’t get it at the drugstore. He’d thought of trying to get some from a vet with the excuse of using it to put his old sick dog to sleep (his dog, if he still had her, was young and fit), but there again, when the news of the girl’s kidnapping was announced, the vet might remember him and put two and two together.

No, his best bet was just to make his own. A few years back he’d arrested this guy in Yellville who ran a meth lab and made a lot of other chemical stuff besides, and the feller had told him how to make chloroform real easy: you just take you some Chlorox bleach and mix in a little acetone with it and stir it up. Hell, he could get the fixings for that right over at Wal-Mart. What would have acetone in it? Why, any old nail polish remover would do.

So he went to Wal-Mart once again. He knew he probably wouldn’t run into that saleslady who had sold him all the clothes and toys and stuff for his girl, because that was a different department. First he went to the laundry soap aisle and picked up a jug of Chlorox bleach. He reflected that he was sure going to miss being able to take his dirty clothes to the coin-op laundry in Jasper. But they were going to live in the manner of the old-timers and wouldn’t need such as that. There was a big old black iron kettle or wash pot that the Madewells had left behind, and such had been good enough for his grandmother to boil up enough water for a wash of clothes, and it would be good enough for him, and maybe the girl too if she really wanted to help could learn how to do laundry.

Then he headed for the cosmetics aisle to get the nail polish remover. He was checking the back of the bottle to make sure it said acetone on it when he looked up, and here come that woman Karen Kerr with her daughter his darling! Sog ducked behind the aisle just in time and they didn’t see him. He spied on ’em from a distance, ready to duck if they looked his way, and saw that the girl was picking out a bright pink bottle of what looked like bubble bath mix. His head was filled with visions of her in a bubble bath. They wouldn’t have a bathtub as such up on the mountain but there was a big galvanized tub with handles that they could carry around and set up on the kitchen floor to fill with hot water from the stove and maybe even both of ’em get in it at the same time.

From a distance Sog followed when they went on to the greeting card aisle and the girl got a package of bright wrapping paper and then spent a while picking out a card from the rack that said “Birthdays.” Sog didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out: the girl was planning to give a friend a birthday present of bubble bath stuff and maybe even go to a birthday party. Maybe a party where they’d be playing in the yard or something and Sog could watch for a chance to grab her and chloroform her. But probably the party would be tomorrow, Saturday, when Sog had to be out at Stay More running the goddamn yard sale.

Sog kept himself hidden until they’d left the store, and then he went back to the cosmetic aisle and got a whole case of that bubble bath mix and put it in the cart with his Chlorox bleach and nail polish remover. Then just a couple more things: he needed some sponges, one good one for the chloroform, plus a little plastic bucket to mix the stuff in, and a wooden spoon to stir it. Then he was all set.

If he’d had the sense God gave to people to pound sand in a rat hole, he would have gone on home to Stay More and done a few things to get that yard sale ready and then got a good night’s sleep in preparation for the biggest day of his life tomorrow. But, idiot that he was, he had to drive once more down the road to the Kerr place, or near enough to it to park down the road and spy on it, just to see if anything was going on. There was always a chance the birthday party was being held there, and always a chance it was this evening instead of tomorrow. His burning eagerness to get it all over with had already cost him a bad moment or two and now here he was a-scheming to try something else. As he sat there, he even thought about the idea of asking Karen Kerr for a date sometime, and taking her out, and step by step making friends and then watching for a chance to make his move on the girl. But no, the girl would recognize him if he tried that. And besides it was just too damned slow. He had to act now, and get his business all settled so him and the girl could live happy ever after up on the blessed mountaintop. There was only two ways to abduct a kid, Jack Samples had once told him, one, by ruse, the other, by blitz. It was time to blitz.

The house was still, but the car was in the driveway, so they were home. By and by the lights went on as it come on to dark. As he sat there pondering, Sog finally made up his mind what he had to do: he had to get Karen to open the door and then he was going to chloroform her first, and then, after she was down, he would chloroform the girl.

He got out his stuff, and set the bucket on the seat beside him, and commenced to do his chemistry. He poured a pint or so of the Chlorox bleach into the bucket, then tossed in several dollops of the nail polish remover, then took the wooden spoon and began to stir ’em together. Whew, did those fumes stink. He figured he’d better protect himself against it, and was fishing in his pocket for his handkerchief to wrap around his nose when it suddenly got too black to be just plain dark.

When he came to, the black was being replaced by a sliver of light in the east. He looked at his watch, and although his watch said five-thirty, his mind was only thinking about his determination to get rid of the watch as soon as he was settled on the mountaintop. Next his mind became aware of how his whole damn head felt—like it was being pounded into a rat hole. Next it was not his head screaming for his awareness of its pain, but his stomach. He had just enough mind left to think to get the fucking door open, and then he puked out into the road. He went on puking until there wasn’t nothing left. Then he had sense enough to pour out what he’d already mixed in the bucket. He started up the truck and turned it around and headed for the highway, and at the first culvert he passed he slowed down just enough to toss the Chlorox and the acetone out into the ditch. He had to stop once more to puke, and then he headed for Stay More.