Big Bad, page 27
From upstairs came the rhythmic back-and-forth scribble of Molly sitting on the floor, coloring a new picture. Or perhaps the same one.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE PIG’S EAR
1
“I met a man from Harvard, right b’fore he died. I’m not sure whether or not he lied, or how a girl with a cunt s’wide could ever be so sadisfied.” Andrew Stayman, owner and operator of Rockcliffe Mini Storage, slurred his speech as he swayed back and forth on his barstool and began to recite his poem—well, he called it poetry, but it was really more of a filthy limerick—to a small group of Saturday-night locals down at The Pig’s Ear. Two of the men, Earl Dudek and Harland Esterbrook, looked on in rapt amusement, mouths cocked in laugh-ready positions. They knew this one but loved to hear it anyway. The rest were only pretending to listen. Or perhaps trying to ignore him.
“So”—Andrew cleared his throat—“so I fashioned me a prick of ten-inch steel, driv-driven roun and roun by a big cogwheel. Two balls of brass I filled with cream, the whole machine was powered by steam. So in and in went the cock of steel, and roun and roun went the big cogwheel.” Andrew paused to toss down the rest of his beer and belch. Jesus, he was going to have one hell of a hangover tomorrow. But he would worry about tomorrow when tomorrow came. As his father used to say, he was here for a good time not a long time, although a part of him had always wondered if the two things needed to be mutually exclusive.
He squinted and planted his hands on the thighs of his Polo khakis. “Where was I? Oh yeah. Until, at last, she finally cried: ‘My God! My God! I’m sadisfied!’ Alas, gendlemen, here comes the bitter bit, there was n’way of stopping it. The girl was split from cunt to tit, and the whole machine was covered in shit.”
Earl and Harland threw themselves back, slapped their knees, and howled gales of drunken laughter at the ceiling. Everyone else twitched a little grin and went back to whatever it was they had been doing before Andrew had started his little impromptu performance.
“Every time! It gets funnier every damn time! I swear it!” Earl shouted, and trailed off into his beer, head shaking gratefully.
“You gotta teach me that one of these days, Andy,” Harland said. “I mean it. Every last word of it.”
“It’s a Stayman original. Let’s keep it that way,” Andrew said.
“Horse shit.” Harland’s mouth bent into a bow of contempt. “You think I’m gonna steal it? That it?”
“I think you’ll crap it up and ruin it, and that’s worse.”
“Will not,” Harland said defensively.
Two stools down, Earl grinned and said, “Yes, he will. Harl, what’s the last four of your social?”
Harland looked over the shoulder of his faded denim coat. “The hell should I know? Who knows their own social security number by recollection?”
Earl clapped a hand to his forehead and laughed. “Everyone, Harl. Everyone but you.”
“Tell you what,” Andrew said, leaning forward on his elbows. “I’ll let er rip at your funeral, Harl. A tribute. You can commit it to memory then. Tell it to anyone you see fit to.”
Harland rotated his stool back toward the bar, arms crossed. “Asshole. You too, Earl. Both of you: assholes!”
“You’d know best. You’re the one with all the asshole experience. A month in Middleton jail for that third DUI, wasn’t it?” Andrew said, smirking, and signaled the bartender with his finger.
Harland scoffed.
Tonight, the person slinging suds was Teresa Schaeffer, a short, heavyset brunette woman with tattooed arms and a pear-shaped ass that kept Andrew’s eyes plenty busy, especially after three or four drinks. She was leaning on the counter, looking up at the television, clicker in hand, and flipping through the stations. After a few seconds, she caught sight of Andrew’s wagging finger. “Another?” she said, dropping the remote and making her way down the bar.
“Just my tab,” he said. “Gonna call it and head home before I end up a divorced man.”
“Early night, ain’t it?” Harland asked, ironing out the embarrassed look of anger stamped on his face. “It’s not even ten yet.”
“Going to the Celtics t’morrow. Courtside seats. A liddle birthday present to myself for the big Five-Oh,” Andrew said.
“No shit. The mini-storage business treatin you good, I see.”
“People got a lotta shit,” Andrew said. “Always have, always will. And always need a place to put it.”
“Seriously, where’d you get tickets like that?” Harland said. “You hit the lotto, you dirty dog? You holding out?”
“Hold out on you guys? Never,” Andrew said sarcastically.
“You’d hold out on your own wife if she was starvin in the street,” Earl said. He plucked a Keno ticket from the little plastic holder and began filling it out with one of those ridiculously small pencils that were stocked alongside the tickets. “Got my own courtside ticket right here. Today’s my lucky day, I know it.”
“I’d do it even if she wasn’t. Sherry could stand to starve a bit. Lose some of that baby weight she put on not having babies.”
They all laughed at that, but a little twinge of guilt spoke up inside Andrew for having bad-mouthed his wife. He wouldn’t normally do that—it was the beer talking. Sherry’d done nothing to deserve it. He caught sight of himself in the mirror behind the bar. The crow’s feet forking away from the corners of his close-set eyes were deep enough these days that he could see them clearly in the dim light of the bar, and the angles of his once-sharp jawline had begun to soften a little, rounding out the bottom half of his face and lending him a jowly look that made him appear years beyond his forty-nine trips around the sun. He cast his gaze down and turned away from the mirror, both in shame for what he had said about Sherry, and in disgust for the old stranger he saw staring back at him.
Teresa tore the tab off a little printer and set it in front of Andrew. “Charming,” she said, then turned to Earl and Harland. “You two good?”
Andrew looked up and forced a wan smile onto his face.
“I wouldn’t know about good, but I’ll do another Pabst,” Earl said.
“Me too,” Harland said, scratching at the side of his stubbled cheek. “Coors, though. None of that piss water he drinks. And put on Family Feud, if you don’t mind.”
“Got it: Family Feud, no piss water,” Teresa said as if humoring a child, and walked away in the direction of the beer taps.
Andrew slid the tab toward himself, eyed the damage—it was a few cents shy of thirty-five dollars—and pulled a wad of cash from his pocket. He flipped through the fold of twenties, fifties, and hundreds, settled on three of the crisp twenty-dollar bills, and dropped them on the bar beside his tab.
“Judas Priest, you are holding out,” Harland said, his face inching closer to Andrew’s wad of cash.
Andrew repocketed it, then grabbed his coat off the stool and put it on. “Didn’t make the bank today, Harl. Now quit eye-fucking my money.” He patted the counter with two slaps of his thin, manicured fingers. “You’re all set, Ter,” he said, trying his best to hide the thick tongue in his mouth. He supposed it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like anybody was going to take his keys. He didn’t have any tonight (except for his house keys). He lived just a quarter mile away and had hoofed it down earlier. Now he would hoof it back, and hopefully the fresh, cold air would thin that thick, liquored tongue of his enough to hide the fact that the one beer he’d promised Sherry he would have had turned into nearly half a dozen. Plus the shot of Jameson he’d taken to shake the cold when he’d first arrived.
“How ’bout a round on you before you head out?” Harland said, a greedy smile stretched across his moon-shaped face. “You can spare it.”
“How about I see you fellas another time? How’s that?” Andrew said, and zipped up his coat. “Take it easy.” And with that, he turned and walked out of The Pig’s Ear and into the cold January night.
Outside, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket. The screen said it was quarter to ten. If he hustled, he could make it back in time to catch the ten o’clock episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and if Sherry wasn’t already pissed off at him for taking so long, she might even let him watch it in bed. Hell, if she wasn’t mad, she might even let him roll over and kiss her neck and maybe even kiss a little more. He would take her temperature before walking in to see where he stood.
He pulled up his recent calls on his phone and called his wife to tell her he was on his way home. He would be able to gauge her mood, figure out what kind of a situation he was walking into, from the tone of her voice. But she didn’t answer, which meant she was either in the bath or pissed off at him. He suspected the latter but hoped for the former.
Andrew tucked his phone away, shrugged his shoulders up, and pulled his face down into the fleece neck of his coat like a half-retracted turtle. He could smell the booze on his breath, sharp and stale. Jesus, it was cold out. Crisp. It was the kind of night where it seemed like you could see forever, in any direction. He tilted his head up to the stars. They twinkled like diamonds strewn across a black sheet.
He dropped his gaze and started through the parking lot, walking along the wall of stacked winterized boats in dry-rack storage that separated The Pig’s Ear from the marina. A hundred feet or so ahead, a police cruiser slowed as it approached the fork in the road, then turned left on Chattanooga Road—a low curving hill that led up toward his house. In about two minutes, he would be climbing that same hill, walking beneath the orange sodium bulbs of the streetlights, legs burning a little, lower back throwing off a dull ache, heart hammering a little harder than he was comfortable with.
The last few weeks—decades, if he was being entirely honest with himself—he had begun to consider popping down to the YMCA and inquiring about a gym membership. With his fiftieth birthday right around the corner, he couldn’t help but think of how, when he was only eighteen, his father had dropped dead of a heart attack in the living room one week after turning fifty. Now he was approaching that same symbolic age in his life, and though his father’s death was more than thirty years in the rearview, it still worried him that he might suffer a similar fate. A seed had been planted back then, and it had germinated, sprouted, dug in roots, and slowly grown throughout his life, until it became that irrational brand of fear known as a phobia. And understanding this about himself did little to dispel the anxiety associated with it. He had no good reason—none that Dr. Lang could find, nor the cardiac specialists in Boston—to think that he would drop dead at the age of fifty, yet he did think that. He believed it with that convincing certainty phobias so often feed upon, that knowing feeling that is practically fact. It was the nature of the thing, he supposed. A person could approach their fear, break it down with logic and reason, and still come away unsatisfied and afraid, perhaps more so than before. Because phobias didn’t listen to logic or reason. Phobias, Andrew had come to accept, were rabid animals that stepped outside the normal order of the world and didn’t follow the rules.
“Hey, bud,” someone said behind him, breaking his concentration.
He stopped and began to turn around, but before he made it beyond forty-five degrees, something slipped over his head and blackened his vision. His arms were pulled behind his back by a set of powerful hands. Both his shoulders shrieked in pain.
“Hey! What the—” A hand clamped over his mouth. His wrists were bound together with what sounded like zip ties.
“Keep him quiet!” someone whispered angrily.
The hood was yanked back, his nose flattening against the tight cloth. Something was being wrapped around his head, over and over again. It sounded like a roll of tape. It covered his mouth, and he was left trying to pull labored breaths through his squashed nose. Then two more turns pulled tape tight across his eyes and the bridge of his nose. His mind threw off a bizarre vision of a mummy being wrapped from the head down.
Then someone with a gravelly voice whispered in his ear, “If you don’t shut your fuckin mouth, we’re gonna pay that pig wife of yours a visit when we’re through with you and turn her sloppy cunt inside out. Sound good? Nod if you understand.”
Andrew nodded.
“Grab his phone.”
Someone reached into his pocket and took his cell phone. Then hands were pushing him ahead. He started forward and made it five feet or so, and the side of his head slammed into what felt and sounded like the hull of a boat. He was being walked through the dry-rack storage to the other side of the parking lot.
“Watch it, dickhead!” someone snapped.
“I got it, I got,” the one guiding Andrew forward said. His voice was calmer, younger.
“No, you don’t got it. Don’t mark him up, remember?”
Andrew didn’t know exactly what that last part implied. Why aren’t they supposed to mark me up? Maybe that was a good thing. But the hope, he had to admit, felt a little too willfully optimistic—and a bit too much like he was grasping for any light he could find in the dark.
The person behind him walked him forward another twenty steps or so. A boat engine gurgled close by, and he could smell the oil-gas mix in the exhaust. He was helped over a ledge and lowered down, and then he was standing on a dock.
“C’mon. Put your foot out. You’re getting on a boat,” someone said.
Andrew complied, finding the gunnel with his foot and stepping onto the boat.
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder and pushed him down. “Lie down.”
He did as he was told, slowly lowering himself onto one knee, then both, then onto his side. Someone threw a blanket over him. It smelled like an old wet shoe. The boat rocked again as someone stepped on, their footsteps heavy in the heels.
“Get the lines and kick us out.”
A moment later, the lines gave a ropey splat as they were untied from the cleats on the dock and tossed aboard. The boat rocked from side to side again. Then the engine began to work harder, and the boat moved along, cutting through little harbor waves that slapped and sloshed against the bow. Off in the distance, the bell buoy tolled, and Andrew Stayman, owner and operator of Rockcliffe Mini Storage, lay still and waited.
2
When the boat’s throttle was finally dialed back to an idle, they had been going for at least an hour. In that short period of time, the hearty buzz Andrew had tied on at The Pig’s Ear had fallen away to a dry, sour mouth and a dull headache that had settled squarely between his eyes.
Someone pulled the blanket off of him and yanked him upright. He maneuvered his legs gracelessly until he was sitting cross-legged.
“Hold still.” Someone began cutting at the tape that had been wrapped around his head.
When the piece over his mouth was cut free, Andrew cleared his throat. “Guys, what’d I do?” he asked. But the truth was, he knew exactly what he had done and why he was there.
“Well, that’s what we’re gonna find out.” A hand landed on the top of his head and pulled off the hood.
Since he’d spent the last hour in the dark, his eyes were already adjusted. He looked around. They were on the back of a lobster boat, darkness in all directions, except to his right. Off in the distance were the yellow twinkling lights of Rockcliffe Island. They must’ve been at least ten miles out, probably more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the island from afar at night.
Two figures were standing in front of him, swaying from side to side with the motion of the boat. The handsome tall kid with the nervous eyes and the square chin was Kyle Pelkey, one of Clarence Pelkey’s nephews. The shorter, stockier of the two, the one with a face like a wild boar, was the guy who’d paid Andrew for the surveillance tapes from the night of the blizzard. His name was Sean Lanigan. He wasn’t a local, but he’d been on the island for the last five or six years, working for Clarence at the fishing company.
“What’s this about? We made a deal,” Andrew said hoarsely. He badly needed a drink of water. His mouth felt like he had been sucking on sand, his spit like little gelatinous flecks of putty.
“We did make a deal,” Sean said. “But you broke it, and so goes the trust. That’s the way these things happen.”
“Broke it? How?” Andrew said. “I erased the footage, fixed the records.”
Sean reached into his pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. “What’s this, dipshit? Just found it in that floor safe in your office you probably didn’t think anybody knew about. Your wife’s birthday? What kinda moron are you?”
Andrew’s heart sank. He was caught, and there was no worse feeling than the moment you realized you were definitively caught. He had suspected it before, but now he knew. He gave his wrists a hard jolt, testing the strength of the restraints. The zip ties dug in to his wrists. “It’s not what you think. I… I just—”
“The deal was you destroy the footage and don’t make any copies. So what’s this I found, then?” Sean squatted. “And what the hell would you want with it?” He smacked the little piece of plastic against Andrew’s forehead.
The gears of his mind began to wind up, thoughts racing a mile a minute. “Insurance, that’s all,” he said. If his hands had been free he would’ve raised them out in front of him in a let me explain manner. “I wasn’t gonna do anything with it, just hold on to it. I didn’t know what was gonna happen to me. It’s only human, isn’t it? I thought you might pay me then change your mind, maybe think I was better off dead once I did what you wanted.”
Sean made a lighthearted, agreeable face that didn’t match the tone of the situation and nodded. He stood, angling his small eyes down at Andrew. “Do you have other copies? Insurance on your insurance?”
“Swear to Christ, I don’t. Swear… I swear.” Andrew’s hands moved up and down behind his back in rhythm with his speech, as if they were out in front of him, pleading his case, the gestures trying so desperately to lend his words credibility.
“I guess we’ll see.” Sean turned to Kyle and gave a little nod.
Holding the tape-covered hood in his hand, Kyle came forward and slipped it back over Andrew’s head without saying a word.
