Black House Read online

  And what of George Potter? Is he stunned? Resigned? Both? It’s hard to tell. But when Beezer’s bloodshot blue eyes meet Potter’s brown ones, Potter does not drop his gaze. Behind him, the lookie-loos in the parking lot fall silent. Standing between Danny Tcheda and Dit Jesperson, Andy Railsback and Morty Fine are gawking. Wendell Green raises his camera and then holds his breath like a sniper who’s lucked into a shot—just one, mind you—at the commanding general.

  “Did you kill my daughter?” Beezer asks. The gentle inquiry is somehow more terrible than any raw yell could have been, and the world seems to hold its breath. Dale makes no move. In that moment he seems as frozen as the rest of them. The world waits, and the only sound is a low, mournful hoot from some fogbound boat on the river.

  “Sir, I never killed no one,” Potter says. He speaks softly and without emphasis. Although he has expected nothing else, the words still box Jack’s heart. There is an unexpected painful dignity in them. It’s as if George Potter is speaking for all the lost good men of the world.

  “Stand aside, Beezer,” Jack says gently. “You don’t want to hurt this guy.”

  And Beezer, looking suddenly not at all sure of himself, does stand aside.

  Before Dale can get his prisoner moving again, a raucously cheerful voice—it can only be Wendell’s—yells out: “Hey! Hey, Fisherman! Smile for the camera!”

  They all look around, not just Potter. They have to; that cry is as insistent as fingernails dragged slowly down a slate blackboard. White light strobes the foggy parking lot—one! two! three! four!—and Dale snarls. “Aw, fuck me till I cry! Come on, you guys! Jack! Jack, I want you!”

  From behind them, one of the other cops calls, “Dale! You want me to grab this creep?”

  “Leave him alone!” Dale shouts, and bulls his way inside. It’s not until the door is closed behind him and he’s in the lower hall with Jack, Tom, and Bobby that Dale realizes how certain he was that Beezer would simply snatch the old man away from him. And then crack his neck like a chicken bone.

  “Dale?” Debbi Anderson calls uncertainly from halfway down the stairs. “Is everything all right?”

  Dale looks at Jack, who still has his arms crossed over his chest and is still smiling his little smile. “I think it is,” Dale says. “For now.”

  Twenty minutes later, Jack and Henry (the latter gentleman retrieved from the truck and still reet-petite) sit in Dale’s office. Beyond the closed door, the ready room roars with conversation and laughter: almost every cop on the FLPD force is out there, and it sounds like a goddamn New Year’s Eve party. There are occasional shouts and smacking sounds that can only be relieved boys (and girls) in blue high-fiving each other. In a little while Dale will put a stop to that shit, but for now he’s content to let them go ahead. He understands how they feel, even though he no longer feels that way himself.

  George Potter has been printed and stuck in a cell upstairs to think things over. Brown and Black of the State Police are on their way. For now, that is enough. As for triumph … well, something about his friend’s smile and his faraway eyes have put triumph on hold.

  “I didn’t think you were going to give Beezer his moment,” Jack says. “It’s a good thing you did. There might have been trouble right here in River City if you’d tried to face him down.”

  “I suppose I have a better idea tonight of how he feels,” Dale replies. “I lost track of my own kid tonight, and it scared the living shit out of me.”

  “David?” Henry cries, leaning forward. “Is David okay?”

  “Yeah, Uncle Henry, Dave’s fine.”

  Dale returns his gaze to the man who now lives in his father’s house. He’s remembering the first time Jack ever laid eyes on Thornberg Kinderling. Dale had at that point known Jack only nine days—long enough to form some favorable opinions, but not long enough to realize how really extraordinary Jack Sawyer was. That was the day Janna Massengale at the Taproom told Jack about the trick Kinderling did when he was getting squiffy, that little trick of pinching his nostrils shut with his palm turned out to the world.

  They had just arrived back at the police station from interviewing Janna, Dale in his personal unit that day, and he’d touched Jack on the shoulder just as Jack was about to get out of the car. “Speak a name, see the face it belongs to before suppertime, that’s what my mother used to say.” He pointed down to Second Street, where a broad-shouldered bald fellow had just come out of News ’n Notions, a newspaper under his arm and a fresh deck of smokes in his hand. “That’s Thornberg Kinderling, his very own self.”

  Jack had bent forward without speaking, looking with the sharpest (and perhaps the most merciless) eyes Dale had ever seen in his life.

  “Do you want to approach him?” Dale had asked.

  “No. Hush.”

  And Jack simply sat with one leg in Dale’s car and one out of it, not moving, eyes narrowed. So far as Dale could tell, he didn’t even breathe. Jack watched Kinderling open his cigarettes, tap one out, put it in his mouth, and light it. He watched Kinderling glance at the headline of the Herald and then saunter to his own car, an all-wheel-drive Subaru. Watched him get in. Watched him drive away. And by that time, Dale realized he was holding his own breath.

  “Well?” he’d asked when the Kinderling-mobile was gone. “What do you think?”

  And Jack had said, “I think he’s the guy.”

  Only Dale had known better. Even then he had known better. Jack was saying I think only because he and Chief Dale Gilbertson of French Landing, Wisconsin, were still on short terms, getting-to-know-you, getting-to-work-with-you terms. What he had meant was I know. And although that was impossible, Dale had quite believed him.

  Now, sitting in his office with Jack directly across the desk from him—his reluctant but scarily gifted deputy—Dale asks, “What do you think? Did he do it?”

  “Come on, Dale, how can I—”

  “Don’t waste my time, Jack, because those assholes from WSP are going to be here any minute and they’ll take Potter heigh-ho over the hills. You knew it was Kinderling the second you looked at him, and you were halfway down the block. You were close enough to Potter when I brought him in to count the hairs in his nose. So what do you think?”

  Jack is quick, at least; spares him the suspense and just administers the chop. “No,” he says. “Not Potter. Potter’s not the Fisherman.”

  Dale has known that Jack believes this—knew it from his face outside—but hearing it is still an unhappy thump. He sits back, disappointed.

  “Deduction or intuition?” Henry asks.

  “Both,” Jack says. “And stop looking like I plugged your mother, Dale. You may still have the key to this thing.”

  “Railsback?”

  Jack makes a seesawing gesture with one hand—maybe, maybe not, it says. “Railsback probably saw what the Fisherman wanted him to see … although the single slipper is intriguing, and I want to ask Railsback about it. But if Mr. One-Slipper was the Fisherman, why would he lead Railsback—and us—to Potter?”

  “To get us off his trail,” Dale says.

  “Oh, have we been on it?” Jack asks politely, and when neither of them answers: “But say he thinks we’re on his trail. I can almost buy that, especially if he just remembered some goof he might have made.”

  “Nothing back yet on the 7-Eleven phone one way or the other, if that’s what you’re thinking of,” Dale tells him.

  Jack appears to ignore this. His eyes gaze off into the middle distance. That little smile is back on his face. Dale looks at Henry and sees Henry looking at Jack. Unc’s smile is easier to read: relief and delight. Look at that, Dale thinks. He’s doing what he was built to do. By God, even a blind man can see it.

  “Why Potter?” Jack finally repeats. “Why not one of the Thunder Five, or the Hindu at the 7-Eleven, or Ardis Walker down at the bait shop? Why not Reverend Hovdahl? What motive usually surfaces when you uncover a frame job?”

  Dale thinks it over. “Payback,
” he says at last. “Revenge.”

  In the ready room, a phone rings. “Shut up, shut up!” Ernie bellows to the others. “Let’s try to act professional here for thirty seconds or so!”

  Jack, meanwhile, is nodding at Dale. “I think I need to question Potter, and rather closely.”

  Dale looks alarmed. “Then you better get on it right away, before Brown and Black—” He comes to a halt, frowning, with his head cocked. A rumbling sound has impinged on his attention. It’s low, but rising. “Uncle Henry, what’s that?”

  “Motors,” Henry says promptly. “A lot of them. They’re east of here, but coming this way. Edge of town. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but it sounds like the party next door is like, over, dude.”

  As if this were a cue, Ernie Therriault’s distressed cry comes through the door. “Ohhhh, shit.”

  Dit Jesperson: “What’s—”

  Ernie: “Get the chief. Aw, never mind, I’ll—” There is a single perfunctory knock and then Ernie’s looking in at the brain trust. He’s as collected and soldierly as ever, but his cheeks have paled considerably beneath his summer tan, and a vein is pulsing in the middle of his forehead.

  “Chief, I just took a call on the 911, twenty was the Sand Bar?”

  “That hole,” Dale mutters.

  “Caller was the bartender. Says about fifty to seventy people are on their way.” By now the sound of approaching engines is very loud. It sounds to Henry like the Indy 500 just before the pace car runs for dear life and the checkered flag drops.

  “Don’t tell me,” Dale says. “What do I need to make my day complete? Let me think. They’re coming to take my prisoner.”

  “Umm, yes, sir, that’s what the caller said,” Ernie agrees. Behind him, the other cops are silent. In that moment they don’t look like cops at all to Dale. They look like nothing but dismayed faces crudely drawn on a dozen or so white balloons (also two black ones—can’t forget Pam Stevens and Bob Holtz). The sound of the engines continues to grow. “Also might want to know one other thing the caller said?”

  “Christ, what?”

  “Said the, um …” Ernie searches for a word that isn’t mob. “The protest group was being led by the Freneau girl’s mom?”

  “Oh … my … Christ,” Dale says. He gives Jack a look of sick panic and utter frustration—the look of a man who knows he is dreaming but can’t seem to wake up no matter how hard he tries. “If I lose Potter, Jack, French Landing is going to be the lead story on CNN tomorrow morning.”

  Jack opens his mouth to reply, and the cell phone in his pocket picks that moment to start up its annoying tweet.

  Henry Leyden immediately crosses his arms and tucks his hands into his armpits. “Don’t hand it to me,” he says. “Cell phones give you cancer. We agreed on that.”

  Dale, meanwhile, has left the room. As Jack digs for the cell phone (thinking someone has picked a cataclysmically shitty time to ask him about his network television preferences), Henry follows his nephew, walking briskly with his hands now held slightly out, fingers gently fluttering the air, seeming to read the currents for obstacles. Jack hears Dale saying that if he sees a single drawn weapon, the person who drew it will join Arnie Hrabowski on the suspension list. Jack is thinking exactly one thing: no one is taking Potter anywhere until Jack Sawyer has had time to put a few pointed questions. No way.

  He flicks the cell phone open and says, “Not now, whoever you are. We’ve got—”

  “Hidey-ho, Travelin’ Jack,” says the voice from the phone, and for Jack Sawyer the years once more roll away.

  “Speedy?”

  “The very one,” Speedy says. Then the drawl is gone. The voice becomes brisk and businesslike. “And as one coppiceman to another, son, I think you ought to visit Chief Gilbertson’s private bathroom. Right now.”

  Outside, there are enough vehicles arriving to shake the building. Jack has a bad feeling about this; has since he heard Ernie say who was leading the fools’ parade.

  “Speedy, I don’t exactly have the time to visit the facilities right n—”

  “You haven’t got time to visit anyplace else,” Speedy replies coldly. Only now he’s the other one. The hard boy named Parkus. “What you’re gonna find there you can use twice. But if you don’t use it almighty quick the first time, you won’t need it the second time. Because that man is gonna be up a lamppost.”

  And just like that, Speedy is gone.

  When Tansy leads the willing patrons into the Sand Bar’s parking lot, there is none of the carnival raucousness that was the keynote of the cluster fuck at Ed’s Eats & Dawgs. Although most of the folks we met at Ed’s have been spending the evening in the Bar, getting moderately to seriously tanked, they are quiet, even funereal, as they follow Tansy out and fire up their cars and pickups. But it’s a savage funereality. She has taken something in from Gorg—some stone powerful poison—and passed it along to them.

  In the belt of her slacks is a single crow feather.

  Doodles Sanger takes her arm and guides her sweetly to Teddy Runkleman’s International Harvester pickup. When Tansy heads for the truck bed (which already holds two men and one hefty female in a white rayon waitress’s uniform), Doodles steers her toward the cab. “No, honey,” Doodles says, “you sit up there. Be comfy.”

  Doodles wants that last place in the truck bed. She’s spotted something, and knows just what to do with it. Doodles is quick with her hands, always has been.

  The fog isn’t thick this far from the river, but after two dozen cars and trucks have spun out of the Bar’s dirt parking lot, following Teddy Runkleman’s dented, one-taillight I.H., you can barely see the tavern. Inside, only half a dozen people are left—these were somehow immune to Tansy’s eerily powerful voice. One of them is Stinky Cheese, the bartender. Stinky has a lot of liquid assets to protect out here and isn’t going anywhere. When he calls 911 and speaks to Ernie Therriault, it will be mostly in the spirit of petulance. If he can’t go along and enjoy the fun, by God, at least he can spoil it for the rest of those monkeys.

  Twenty vehicles leave the Sand Bar. By the time the caravan passes Ed’s Eats (the lane leading to it cordoned off by yellow tape) and the NO TRESPASSING sign alongside the overgrown lane to that queer forgotten house (not cordoned off; not even noticed, for that matter), the caravan has grown to thirty. There are fifty cars and trucks rolling down both lanes of Highway 35 by the time the mob reaches Goltz’s, and by the time it passes the 7-Eleven, there must be eighty vehicles or more, and maybe two hundred and fifty people. Credit this unnaturally rapid swelling to the ubiquitous cell phone.

  Teddy Runkleman, oddly silent (he is, in fact, afraid of the pallid woman sitting beside him—her snarling mouth and her wide, unblinking eyes), brings his old truck to a halt in front of the FLPD parking lot entrance. Sumner Street is steep here, and he sets the parking brake. The other vehicles halt behind him, filling the street from side to side, rumbling through rusty mufflers and blatting through broken exhaust pipes. Misaligned headlights stab the fog like searchlight beams at a movie premiere. The night’s dank wet-fish smell has been overlaid with odors of burning gas, boiling oil, and cooking clutch lining. After a moment, doors begin to open and then clap shut. But there is no conversation. No yelling. No indecorous yee-haw whooping. Not tonight. The newcomers stand in clusters around the vehicles that brought them, watching as the people in the back of Teddy’s truck either jump over the sides or slip off the end of the tailgate, watching as Teddy crosses to the passenger door, at this moment as attentive as a young man arriving with his date at the junior prom, watching as he helps down the slim young woman who has lost her daughter. The mist seems to outline her somehow, and give her a bizarre electric aura, the same blue of the sodium lights on Beezer’s upper arms. The crowd gives out a collective (and weirdly amorous) sigh when it sees her. She is what connects them. All her life, Tansy Freneau has been the forgotten one—even Cubby Freneau forgot her eventually, running off to Green Bay and l
eaving her here to work odd jobs and collect the ADC. Only Irma remembered her, only Irma cared, and now Irma is dead. Not here to see (unless she’s looking down from heaven, Tansy thinks in some distant and ever-receding part of her mind) her mother suddenly idolized. Tansy Freneau has tonight become the dearest subject of French Landing’s eye and heart. Not its mind, because its mind is temporarily gone (perhaps in search of its conscience), but certainly of its eye and heart, yes. And now, as delicately as the girl she once was, Doodles Sanger approaches this woman of the hour. What Doodles spotted lying on the floor of Teddy’s truck bed was an old length of rope, dirty and oily but thick enough to do the trick. Below Doodles’s petite fist hangs the noose that her clever hands have fashioned on the ride into town. She hands it to Tansy, who holds it up in the misty light.

  The crowd lets out another sigh.

  Noose raised, looking like a female Diogenes in search of an hon-est man rather than of a cannibal in need of lynching, Tansy walks—delicate herself in her jeans and bloodstained sweatshirt—into the parking lot. Teddy, Doodles, and Freddy Saknessum walk behind her, and behind them come the rest. They move toward the police station like the tide.

  The Thunder Five are still standing with their backs to the brick wall and their arms folded. “What the fuck do we do?” Mouse asks.

  “I don’t know about you,” Beezer says, “but I’m gonna stand here until they grab me, which they probably will.” He’s looking at the woman with the upraised noose. He’s a big boy and he’s been in a lot of hard corners, but this chick frightens him with her blank, wide eyes, like the eyes of a statue. And there’s something stuck in her belt. Something black. Is it a knife? Some kind of dagger? “And I’m not gonna fight, because it won’t work.”

  “They’ll lock the door, right?” Doc asks nervously. “I mean, the cops’ll lock the door.”

  “I imagine,” Beezer says, never taking his eyes from Tansy Freneau. “But if these folks want Potter, they’ll have him on the half shell. Look at ’em, for Christ’s sake. There’s a couple of hundred.”