Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [25]
But despite countless requests—at times he felt as if he were living A Christmas Story—Dad hadn’t even let him have a BB gun.
The man returned to the front.
“Nothing else here, son.” He nodded to Jack. “Be seeing you.”
The boy said, “See ya,” and the three of them left.
Jack pondered how to talk his father into letting him have a rifle—he’d pay for it himself—but he had more important matters to address. Like Operation Toliver.
He headed for the bin where Mr. Rosen kept all the toys—used toys, of course. He began emptying it item by item. He remembered some months ago when he had been cleaning it out he’d found—
Here it was: a small tin, the size of a beer can, labeled PEANUT BRITTLE.
But Jack knew it wasn’t peanut brittle.
He pulled off the cap, and even though he was ready for it, the four-foot green spring snake that launched itself from the can sparked a laugh.
It wobbled through the air and landed on the far side of the room. Jack retrieved it and inspected it. The snake’s polka-dot fabric was faded and worn in spots that let the metal coils of the internal spring show through, but it still worked. And that was all that counted.
He stuffed it back into its can and recapped it. Then he took it to the counter. As he began to write it in the sale book, he glanced out the window and recognized the Connells’ car. Mrs. Connell was behind the wheel, and slunk down in the rear, her head barely above the lower edge of the window, sat Weezy. Almost looked like she was hiding. Somehow she’d been pried out of her room. They were coming in from the highway. Jack wondered where they’d been. To that psychiatrist?
He sighed. Poor Weez. Sure, she wasn’t like everybody else, but did she need a shrink? She wasn’t crazy, just … different.
When they’d passed out of sight he returned to business, peeling the $1.50 price tag off the spring-snake can and sticking that next to his written entry. He fished two bucks from his wallet, placed them in the cash register, and removed a pair of quarters.
He was now the proud owner of a novelty spring snake. But not for long.
He’d heard it was better to give than receive and so he intended to make a gift of it to someone real soon.
6
“I can’t go anywhere, Jack,” Weezy said.
He’d got off early and had swung by Weezy’s instead of going straight home. They sat in her darkened bedroom.
“Sure you can. We can take a ride in the Pines. No one will see you there.”
“No. My folks won’t let me out. They say if I’m not going to go to school, then I can’t go anywhere else.”
Jack debated mentioning it, then decided why not?
“Um, then that wasn’t you I saw with your mother earlier?”
She reddened. “Oh, that. She dragged me somewhere. That was different.”
Jack didn’t press. He had an idea where.
“You can’t sneak out?”
“Kind of hard with my mom checking on me every two seconds asking how I feel.”
“I was thinking maybe checking out the pyramid and—”
Tears rimmed her lids. “I can’t go anywhere, Jack. Don’t you get it?”
Yeah, he got it.
And so he got going. Their talk had started him thinking about that pyramid in the Pines. He hadn’t been back since last month. Maybe he could find something else out there to interest her, something she couldn’t refuse to go see.
As he rode through the trees and neared the spong, he spotted a fairly new blue Ford F-150 pickup—maybe a 1982 or ’83—parked off the fire trail in the brush. The piney trapper’s? He doubted it. Then whose?
No sticks in the traps this trip. The piney must have reset them. He speeded up as he approached, planning a quickie spong flyby, and was halfway past when he glanced over and thought he saw something wriggling on the ground. He looked again and no doubt about it: something moving there.
He skidded to a halt and stared. Jack wasn’t sure what it was, but a furry little something appeared to have got itself caught in one of those nasty traps.
Jack’s stomach tightened as he had a sick flash of how much those steel