The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [36]
He mashed the cigarette out in the ashtray and looked back down at the pillow. Six was the number of models they had worked with this trip; and six was what the old bitch had charged him for the room; and now here were six poisoned flies lying in his bed. The lingering stench of the bug spray began to burn his eyes and he dabbed at them with the end of the bedspread. “And what do these three sixes mean, Carl?” he asked himself out loud. Pulling out his knife, he fiddled with a hole in one of his molars while searching his mind for a suitable answer, one that avoided the most obvious implication of those three numbers, the biblical sign that his crazy old mother would have gleefully pointed out to him if she were still alive. “It means, Carl,” he finally said, snapping his penknife shut, “that it’s time to head home.” And with a sweep of his hand, he brushed the tiny winged corpses off onto the dirty carpet and flipped the pillows over.
11
EARLIER THAT SAME DAY, BACK IN MEADE, OHIO, Sheriff Lee Bodecker sat at his desk in an oak swivel chair eating a chocolate bar and looking through some paperwork. He hadn’t had a drink of alcohol, not even a lousy beer, in two months, and his wife’s doctor had told her that sweets would take the edge off. Florence had spread candy all over the house, even stuck hardtack under his pillow. Sometimes he woke himself up at night crunching on it, his throat sticky as flypaper. If it weren’t for the red sleeping capsules, he never would get any rest. The worry in her voice, the way she babied him now, it made him sick to think of how he’d let himself go. Although county elections were still over a year away, Hen Matthews was proving himself to be a sore loser. His former boss was already playing dirty, spreading shit about lawmen who can’t catch crooks any better than they can hold their liquor. But every candy bar Bodecker ate made him want ten more, and his belly was starting to hang over his belt like a peck sack of dead bullfrogs. If he kept it up, by the time he had to start campaigning again he’d be as sloppy fat as his pig-faced brother-in-law, Carl.
The telephone rang, and before he had a chance to say hello, an old woman’s reedy voice on the other end asked, “You the sheriff?”
“That’s me,” Bodecker said.
“You got a sister works at the Tecumseh?”
“Maybe,” Bodecker said. “I ain’t talked to her lately.” From the tone of the woman’s voice, he could tell that this wasn’t a friendly call. He set the rest of the candy bar down on top of the paperwork. These days, talk of his sister made Lee nervous. Back in 1958, when he had come home from the army, he would have busted a gut laughing if someone had suggested that shy, skinny Sandy was going to turn out wild, but that was before she met up with Carl. Now he hardly recognized her. Several years back, Carl had talked her into quitting her job at the Wooden Spoon and moving to California. Though they were gone only a couple of weeks, when she returned something about her was different. She took a job tending bar at the Tecumseh, the roughest joint in town. Now she walked around in short skirts that barely covered her ass, her face painted up like one of the whores he had run off Water Street when he first got elected. “Been too busy chasing bad guys,” he joked, trying to lighten the caller’s mood a little. He glanced down and noticed a scuff mark on the toe of one of his new brown boots. He spit on his thumb and leaned over and tried to wipe it out.
“Oh, I bet you have,” the woman said.
“You got some kind of problem?” Bodecker said.
“I sure do,” the woman said viciously. “That sister of yours, she’s been peddling her ass right out the back door of that filthy place for over a year now, but as far as I can see, Sheriff, you ain’t never