Off Season - Jack Ketchum [7]
She returned to the landing and picked up the comics. I hope I’m not robbing your secret stash, kid, she thought. She went downstairs and got herself a dustpan and broom. There was something she didn’t like about that pile. She’d pick up that much, anyway.
4:35 P.M.
Peters looked up at the old Pabst clock on the wall and ordered a second Bud. Aside from the Pincus boys down at the end of the bar, he was alone. The Caribou was nice and dark and quiet, just the way he liked it.
Hank drew him the beer and set it down beside a half-eaten turkey club. There were advantages to eating this late, he thought, even if he wouldn’t want to do it every day. For one thing you worked up an appetite—not that his own had ever failed him. But also you got to relax a bit. Around lunchtime the place was too busy to relax. That was the trouble with being a state cop; life was too damned public. Whenever there were people around they always had stories or complaints or just plain gab for you, or else they expected you to have a yarn or two for them.
You got no peace. In a small town everybody knew everybody else’s business and a cop was watchdog over all of it. That was his job; at least the way they saw it. Peters saw it differently. His job was to keep the peace—his own peace, first of all. So he tried to avoid the questions and comments, but what could you do? A small town got very short on public figures, and folks made shift with what they had.
Now that accident today. That had caused quite a stir. Mostly because it was the Boston people, but also because Dead River was short on accidents, too. Peters would have bet, way back in June when they’d first arrived, that the Landers woman was going to get into some sort of trouble sooner or later. She’d managed to hold off, though, until the day they were supposed to leave. Well, he thought, better late than never.
Quite a cookie, she was. The kind of woman that all these open spaces naturally made uncomfortable. He’d met them plenty of times before. Belonged in the city, where a woman would have all the conveniences, plenty to keep her busy and plenty of people to take her troubles to. Out here if the plumbing broke down—as hers had in July—you maybe had to wait a day or two. Folks got busy. Things moved slow. Back where she came from, all you had to do was call the maintenance crew in the basement of your big old high-rise and they were up there in an hour, and two hours later you had your hot water. That was what you were used to. But this was not the city.
So what had she done? Called the police. Called him up to complain that it had been a day and a half and the plumber still hadn’t shown. What was he supposed to do, ma’am, he asked her, drag John Fraser out there at gunpoint? If you have to, she’d said. Even knowing the tourists, he could hardly believe it. And now, secretly, he was glad the accident today had been her fault, that she had plowed into the Williams kid’s rear fender at Maine and Maple and not the other way around. Williams had a good boy there. And like most tourists, Mrs. Landers was trouble start to finish.
Well, not exactly to finish, he thought. She was responsible, after all, for this nice late lunch today.
He took a too-large bite out of the sandwich—as he usually did—and had some trouble chewing—also as usual. Teeth going, back going—I’m a mess, he thought. Too much weight on me and too many years. Give the job to Shearing, he wants it. It was an old, old song with him