With (4 page)

Now this time he pulled into a discount supermarket up over on the east side of Harrison where he hadn’t been before, and, as usual, loaded up a couple of carts with all kinds of stuff he was buying by the case load or carton or gross.

The check-out clerk, a real pretty but saucy gal, rang up his stuff and said, “Twenty-four quart jars of pickled pigs’ feet? You must really hanker after this stuff.”

“I’m partial to it,” he admitted, and truly it was one of his concerns, that he might some day run out of them. He liked them on occasion, not every week or even every month but he liked them.

“Are you going into hibernation in the early spring?” she asked. “Or do you have a family of thirty-seven to feed?”

He smiled. “Something like that,” he said.

She studied him. “Say,” she said. “Aren’t you Sergeant Alan? I know who you are. You stopped me in Valley Springs and gave me a ticket that wiped out all my savings!”

“What was that name?” he asked.

“Karen Kerr,” she said.

“Yeah, I do believe I remember you, on account of that name that sounds phony. I reckoned as how it might just be a alias, but it’s sure-enough your real name, aint it?”

“It’s not my maiden name,” she said.

“I seem to recollect you was doing fifty or so in a thirty-five mile zone.”

“I was late for work, and I nearly got fired.”

“Well, I reckon you told the judge that, but the law is the law. Aint my fault you broke it.”

“I’ll get a boy to help you bag and load all this stuff.”

“I can do it.”

After driving away he reached for a cigarette and found the slip of paper with a list of a whole bunch of other stuff he’d meant to buy at that market, and he looked it over and swore at the items he’d have to go back for, or get somewheres else: Vienna sausages, canned orange juice, Pet milk, and
coffee
, for godsakes: he already had several cases of big-can coffee but it was something he couldn’t grow and he drank his share of it and was bound to run out by and by.

He stopped, turned around, and drove back to the big parking lot of the supermarket, where he parked inconspicuously and turned off the motor and just sat and waited patiently for a long, long time to see when Karen Kerr might leave work. Whenever she took off, he could go back in that store for the rest of the stuff on his list, including beef jerky: somebody had told him that beef jerky would keep forever. He wouldn’t take the chance of her seeing him load up a lot of other stuff.

For a while as he waited he entertained himself by watching an occasional youngster go by. School had let out and kids were either going grocery-shopping with their moms or in some cases by themselves or with their friends, and every now and again he’d see a pretty cute one, and imagine in his mind what it would be like if she was the one. But not one of those he saw really grabbed him. He knew that when he found the girl of his dreams he would know it on the instant.

He went around to the back of the truck to fish in one of the sacks for the new issue of
Police Gazette
he’d just bought. He reached to give Bitch a little pat on the head and found her missing and realized she wasn’t his dog anymore. Then he sat and read through
Police Gazette,
a lively tabloid which was his favorite reading-matter, shoot, practically his
only
reading matter, and he knew that he was going to miss it in the months and years ahead. It was always a real pleasure to come across the articles on the disappearance of kids, that had lots of photographs. He knew backward and forward what made up the profile of a so-called child molester, which he wasn’t, because he hadn’t never in his life
molested
nobody. Sure, he’d done a couple of naughty things with a couple of little bitty old gals, but not against their will, and he was hoping that the companion of his coming months and years would never once have any occasion to feel that what he was doing was against her will. He had for several years assisted his buddy Jack Samples in the
CID
’s pedo squad, helping Jack make collars and interrogations, and in their time they had nabbed dozens of fellers who were genuine pure-dee pervert
molesters
, old boys who raped and killed tykes and even tots. Jack had once said to him, “Sog, I be damned if you aint got a nose on you that can smell out pedos where I’d never of found ’em.” He hadn’t told Jack the reason he could find pedos so easy was because he really felt a kind of…not brotherhood or nothing but a real understanding of the way their minds worked and their hearts felt and their dicks stood. Your typical straight-up-and-down pedo generally had in his house a huge assortment of dirty pictures of kids, and unprintable printed matter that showed photos of ’em naked and even doing things to each other, and over the years him and Jack had confiscated such a heap of this stuff that Jack hadn’t even noticed that Sog had “borrowed” a good little bit of it. His favorite, which he’d looked at so often it was falling apart, was a book called
Nudist Moppets
, and he was planning on keeping that up there at the Madewell place, although he hoped he wouldn’t really need it because his truelove would want to romp and play without a stitch.

He decided that the next little gal who came along would get herself undressed by him in his mind, right then and there. And then here she came. Walking right in front of his truck, as he quickly stripped off her dress, was not just a girl but the girl of his dreams. He knew it so surely he put her dress right back on her, to be nice. The cutest thing you ever did see. Blonde and blue-eyed and full-lipped—oh, those lips were something else! And she turned her head and saw him and
smiled
at him with all kinds of eagerness and readiness. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen any child with a smile like that. And her skin! Her skin was so soft and fresh and touchable that Sog had to restrain himself from getting out right then and there and giving her a big squeeze. His heart swole within his shirt and his dick swole within his pants; it was the first spontaneous hard-on he’d had in God knows when. But he could only sit and watch as she went on walking by and strolled over to the part of the parking lot where the employees kept their cars, and she went up to this blue Camaro and tried the door and then just stood there beside it, for a long little while, as Sog wracked his brain for a sure-fire way to grab her and take her away right there in broad daylight. Eventually it dawned on him, maybe because he recognized that Camaro, that this lovely little lady, his intended, might be waiting on that selfsame Karen Kerr that he was waiting to see come out of the store.

A bright idea hit him. He could just start up the truck and drive right up beside her and say, “Your mother’s in the hospital, and I’ve been sent to take you there!” It wasn’t an original ruse, he’d heard variations of it used by other abductors that he and Jack Samples had caught, but it might just work. The problem was, he hadn’t finished all his shopping, and he didn’t intend to get the girl until everything was ready for her. While he was pondering this quandary, Karen Kerr came out of the supermarket and sure enough walked right over to that Camaro. He nearly perished with envy when the girl gave her mom a big hug, both of those soft arms reaching around her mother’s waist. And then the girl commenced a-talking, and never stopped. She got in the car with her mother and they drove off, and Sog waited just a bit and followed them, keeping at a distance but close enough that he could tell the girl just went on talking and a-talking.

They didn’t drive too awful far. He found out where they lived, on the east side of Harrison not far from the Fairgrounds, on just a old country road with no neighbors in view. It wasn’t much of a house.

And then he drove on back to that supermarket to finish his shopping. By the time he got the load up the mountain it would be too dark to tote any of it to the house but he might just sleep there in the truck and get a early start the next day transporting it on foot along the terrible mile of ravines and the rocky ledge along the bluff and a godforsaken forest trail. Who knows? Tonight or any time tomorrow he might even get a visit from old Bitch with her tail betwixt her legs and a shit-eating grin on her face.

Chapter three

S
he had made it clear to Robin that she should never come to the store except in an emergency. But Robin just couldn’t wait, she was so excited with the news that Kelly Brewer had invited her to a sleep-over birthday party. At least Robin hadn’t come inside the store, where Mr. Purvis would have seen her, but waited at the car, which wasn’t an awfully smart thing to do. In a sense that violated Karen’s rule that Robin should never be alone in public. Karen was going to have to have a talk with her about the fact that she seemed to be forgetting a lot of her rules, or else was deliberately flauting them. Robin seemed to be growing more willful and reckless, along with acquiring a reputation in school for being something of a bully. Possibly Robin was upset by the absence of her father. She seemed to have changed since the divorce last Thanksgiving. Robin’s second grade teacher, Miss Moore, had called Karen in for a conference, with the principal sitting in, to discuss Robin’s behavior problems, specifically, as Miss Moore put it, “her need to bombard others with her presence.” Their solution, surprisingly, was to promote Robin. They felt that Robin was too precocious and too intelligent, already reading at fourth-grade level, and promoting her would not only put her where she belonged but also would remove her from those classmates she had been bullying. “She’s just too smart for her friends,” Miss Moore had said. Of course Robin didn’t want to be promoted, and Karen had said she would have to think about it.

Karen’s mother, who fortunately didn’t live in Harrison but down the road twenty miles at Pindall, tried to tell Karen that there were two reasons Robin was becoming so headstrong; one was because Karen was needlessly over-protective and the other because Robin never saw her father any more. Or saw him rarely. Billy had returned to town only once since the divorce, and had tried to take Robin to the roller rink, but Karen had been afraid he might try to abduct her (such things often happened) and she had refused to let Robin leave the house with him. If that made Robin tough and rude, and caused her to pick on other kids, then it was more Billy’s fault than it was Karen’s. It had been Billy who had taught Robin some kind of rough sport called taekwondo, which probably had helped Billy over his frustration at not having the son he’d so desperately wanted, but it didn’t do anything for poor Robin other than leave her prancing around the house kicking out her feet and chopping the air with her hands in an extremely unfeminine manner.

Driving home, listening to Robin run on and on about that birthday party, not able to get a word of caution in edgewise, Karen was happy that Robin seemed so lively and animated in contrast to her usual self these days. It reminded Karen of what an incredibly sweet child Robin had once been. She had been, as they say, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of love and wonder and joy, singing her childish songs all the time. Robin had had a speech impediment that made her unable to sound her
r
’s and
l
’s properly, so that she said even her own name as “Wobbin,” a charming pronunciation, really. But the kids in the first grade had called her Wobbinhood and teased her with songs about The Wed Wed Wobbin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin Along…until Robin discovered that she could smack them a good one and get them to shut up. Although Karen couldn’t afford it, and Billy wouldn’t help, Karen had spent some money on a speech pathologist for Robin, and now at least she could say her own name correctly, except when she got too excited, as she was now:

“And Gwetchen Scott will be there! And Webecca McGraw! And so will Bevewwy Nichols!”

When Robin paused to catch her breath, Karen asked, “Have all their folks given them permission to spend the night?”

“You better believe it,” Robin said.

“How do you know? What if I called their mothers and asked them?”

Robin stopped bubbling and scowled. “Why would you have to do
that
?”

“Have any of those girls ever been to a slumber party before?”

“Sure. Gwetchen had one last month but she didn’t invite me.”

“That’s pretty young for sleeping over, don’t you think?”

“How would
I
know? I’ve never been invited.”

“You don’t have to get surly with me, Miss. I wasn’t invited to my first slumber party until I was eleven or twelve.”

“I’m not you,” Robin said, which was her second-most favorite expression, the first being the two words, “But, Mommy…”

“Let’s just talk about it later while we fix supper.”

Karen decided to stuff Robin with her favorite food, spaghetti (which she had early pronounced as “basketti” and still said that way for the fun of it) and then perhaps Robin would be less moody when Karen rejected her request to attend Kelly’s birthday slumber party.

Robin helped in the kitchen, as she’d been taught to do. Robin wasn’t allowed to use the stove, but she could time the boiling of the spaghetti noodles and tell Karen when they were done so Karen could strain them. It was also Robin’s job to stir the Kool-Aid and put the ice cubes into the glasses, as well as to set the table. While they worked, Robin broached the subject again. “It just surprised me so that Kelly would ask me. I didn’t think she liked me at all.”

“Because you usually make fun of her?”

“I don’t make fun of her. But everybody in Miss Moore’s class loves her to pieces, and they don’t know what a crybaby she is.”

Karen smiled wryly, trying to remember the last time that Robin had cried. “Maybe if she’s still a crybaby, she’s not old enough to be having a slumber party.”

“Becky said she’d give Kelly fifty cents if she could get through the whole party and sleep-over without ever crying,” Robin declared, “and I think Kelly has made up her mind to try and see if she can. Being eight is too old to cry.”