The Devil Next Door Read online

  And behind them, Billy Swanson grinned…

  8

  Louis Shears made it home and as he walked through the door, he swore to God he would never leave it again.

  The world had gone mad and he was content to leave it to its own devices. He shut the door behind him, locked it. And then on second thought, he threw the deadbolt. He walked into the living room and then the kitchen, feeling like some wind-up toy soldier going first in this direction and then that. He sat in his recliner, got up, sat on the couch, then he got up again. Went to the cupboard above the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal. He poured himself two fingers in a water glass, swallowed it down, then poured himself another.

  You better get a grip already, he told himself, and that sounded good in theory, but in practice…well, it was something else again.

  He sat back in the recliner.

  Pulling from his drink and peering out the picture window, the world seemed all right. Cars passed on the street and leaves fluttered gently in the trees. He could hear the sound of a lawn mower and some kid going up the sidewalk on a skateboard.

  These things were the normal sights and sounds of an August afternoon.

  But what about what happened on Tessler Avenue? Where did any of that fit in? How did he qualify what he had seen this day? Two guys beating a kid near to death with baseball bats and then the kid attacking him and those whacked-out cops showing up? Where did that fit in the annals of a late summer’s day? Where did you find the box that would hold such things or a label to slap on it?

  “You don’t,” Louis said. “You don’t even try. You just sit here and get drunk. Get shitfaced and forget about it.”

  Very nice, very nice, indeed.

  But hardly practical.

  He thought about the steaks and the wine out in the back of the Dodge. The meat needed to be gotten into the fridge before it started to turn. Those porterhouses were nearly two inches thick, custom cut, and had cost him nearly fifteen bucks a throw.

  He just couldn’t leave them out there.

  But that’s exactly what he was planning on doing.

  The cellphone in his shirt pocket jingled and he jumped, nearly spilling his drink. He put it to his ear, almost expecting one of those crazy cops to be on the other end. But it wasn’t them. It was Michelle.

  “The weekend stretches out before you,” she said. “I hope I didn’t interrupt your nap.”

  Louis started laughing. No, honey, I wasn’t taking a nap. I was sitting in my recliner sucking down whiskey. You ought to see me. Buttons popped off my shirt, bloodstains all over it, my throat bruised from some mortally wounded kid who decided to have one last hurrah and strangle me.

  “What’s the matter, Louis?” Michelle said. Even half way across town over at Farm Bureau Insurance, she could sense it on him. That something was most definitely wrong.

  “Where should I start?”

  “Oh no…you didn’t get the accounts, did you?”

  “Oh no, I got them. That part of my day was fine. It’s just that this town is going crazy. I’m just wondering if you can buy straightjackets in bulk, because I’m thinking we’re going to need a lot of them.”

  Michelle said, “Oh, you heard then?”

  “Heard what?”

  “About the bank.”

  Louis felt a heaviness in his chest. What now? “Tell me,” he said.

  “I only know what they’re saying,” she said. “I guess an hour ago some old lady came into the bank across the street, you know, First Federal, and wanted to close her account. The teller told her she needed a slip to do that and the old lady just went ballistic. Get this, she whipped out a knife, a big knife, from her purse and stabbed the teller. Stabbed her like five or six times. At least, that’s what they’re saying. We heard the sirens. It was awful.”

  “Shit.”

  “It gets worse. The old lady supposedly walked right out with her bloody knife, sat on the bench outside, and then…well, she just slit her wrists. Slit them, Louis, and then folded them in her lap and calmly bled to death.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. But they said she was smiling. Just sitting there, bleeding to death…and smiling.”

  Louis swallowed. “The teller survive?”

  Michelle said she didn’t know. “She lost a lot of blood, I guess. Louis, it was Kathy Ramsland.”

  “Kathy?” Louis said. “Oh, Jesus, Vic’s kid sister?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Calling Kathy a “kid” was maybe overdoing it in that she was nearly thirty. But, hell, Louis had grown up next to her, hung out tight with brother Vic right through high school.

  Sitting there, the booze bubbling and acidic in his belly, he was picturing Kathy as a kid. Pushing her around on her bike when she was learning to ride without the training wheels. Making her up as Bride of Frankenstein for Halloween. The awful stories Vic and he used to tell her to scare the shit out of her. The time her hamster died and she buried it in the backyard in a metal Band-Aid box and then he and Vic digging it up a week later to see what it smelled like.

  Not Kathy, Christ, not Kathy.

  “Louis?” Michelle said. “I don’t know what’s going on but something happened over at the high school.”

  Louis swallowed. “Like what? A shooting?” he said, making the quick assumption as most did after Columbine.

  “I don’t know. But I guess there’s like ten cop cars out there…the townies, sheriff, state police. Whatever it is, it must be pretty bad. That’s what Carol said. She just drove by there.”

  The heaviness wasn’t just in his belly now, it was laying over him, crushing him down in the recliner. He was now starting to wonder and as he wondered, he worried. Maybe you could write off one or two weird things happening, but when they occurred in bunches then you started thinking things. You started seeing the sort of connections that canceled out coincidence. The sort of connections that made paranoia leap into the back of your mind.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said out loud, though he’d honestly meant only to think it.

  “I don’t know,” Michelle said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”

  “It gets weirder,” he said and then he started telling his own tale. The assault. The dying boy. The crazy cops. And as he told that story, realizing yet again that it sounded positively absurd in the telling, he began to turn it all over in his mind. What he’d seen. The stabbing at the bank. Whatever was going down at the high school. Sure, it could have been a series of grim coincidences, but he couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around that. For deep down, he was almost scared. Scared that something was happening to Greenlawn.

  Something on a huge scale.

  In the distance, he could hear sirens. Lots of them. And he wondered what else was going on out there, what other awful things were occurring behind locked doors in all those neighborhoods piled up end to end.

  But he stopped himself right there.

  It was not healthy thinking. Just because some very odd things were happening did not mean for one moment the town was going insane. That was just paranoia doing his thinking for him. He wasn’t about to go down that road. You started thinking crazy bullshit like that, next thing you knew you were afraid to leave the house. Louis had had an aunt like that. She became a shut-in, terrified of everything outside her own door. He wasn’t about to become like that.

  Yet, the feeling that something was wrong, really wrong, persisted. Like a bad taste, he just couldn’t seem to wash it out of his mouth.

  “Louis? Louis? Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” he told his wife.

  “Are you telling me that cop was really kicking that boy’s body? Stomping on it?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “That’s scary. That’s really scary.”

  “Sure,” he said. “And goddamn Greenlawn, of all places.”

  “You better report this,” Michelle said. “Call down to t
he police station right now or go down there, tell them what those nuts were doing. Good God. It’s horrible.” She was breathing very fast on the other end. “Louis? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Well, I’m okay as I can be.” He paused, studying the whiskey in his glass. “I wish you could come home. I know it sounds stupid, but I’d just feel better if you could.”

  “I’ll get there soon as I can. I have to finish up some things here first, though. I’ll be about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.”

  That wasn’t good enough, but he didn’t tell her so. Every minute she was away from him made that hollow in his guts open wider. But how could he honestly explain any of it to her? How could he make her understand, make her feel what he was feeling himself?

  “Okay,” he said. “Get home as soon as you can.”

  “Louis…are you sure you’re all right? You don’t sound good.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I’ll be home soon as I can.”

  “Okay. I’ll be—” He paused.

  “What? What is it?”

  Louis wasn’t sure himself. He heard the creaking of the steps out on the porch. It didn’t mean anything really. Could have been the kid delivering the paper or the mailman. Yet, with what he’d been through and what Michelle had told him, he was expecting something bad.

  “There’s…there’s someone on the porch,” he said in almost a whisper.

  “Louis…you’re scaring me, okay? Just stop this now.”

  “Hurry home, baby. Please just hurry home.”

  Hurry…

  9

  Louis broke the connection, slid the phone back in his pocket.

  Setting his drink aside, he started wondering what he had for a weapon in case he needed one. He wasn’t a hunter or a hobby shooter, so he didn’t have any guns. His trout rod and reel didn’t count for anything. There were knives in the kitchen, of course. He went to the closet by the front door and dug out a driver from his golf bag. Then the step out there creaked again. He pulled the sheer aside from the oval window set in the door.

  Just the mailman.

  Old Lem Karnigan.

  Louis sighed. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he inflating this all into something bigger than it was, some crazy conspiracy?

  Lem saw him out of the corner of his eye and waved absently.

  Louis pulled the door open.

  Lem was pushing seventy, but hadn’t retired and there was no talk of him doing so. They’d probably have to force him out. Lem’s wife had died two years ago this past winter and his kids were all moved away. He probably didn’t have anything but the job. And that was sad when you thought about it.

  He was standing on the bottom step sorting letters and fliers. The mailbag strapped over his shoulder looked impossibly bulky and heavy. Almost too much for a skinny old guy like him.

  “One of these days, Louis,” he said without looking up, “I’m getting out. I’m going down to Florida with the rest of the old coots. I ran into Ronny Riggs last week, just up from Miami Beach. You know what he said? He said there’s beaches down there where the girls don’t wear no tops. How do you like that? he says. So I say, Bobby, I like that just fine.” Chuckling to himself, Lem looked up and his laughter stopped. He saw Louis’ disheveled appearance, the crusted bloodstains on his shirt. “Jesus. H Christ, Louis! What the hell happened? You get in a fight?”

  Louis shook his head. “Some kid got in an accident…I had to help. It was a real mess.”

  Lem just stood down at the bottom of the steps, staring at him.

  And as Louis watched, it was almost as if a shadow passed over his face. Lem shuddered, his mouth pulled into a scowl. It looked as if something, something necessary had just drained out of him. And that quick.

  Then he did the most amazing thing: he sniffed the air.

  Sniffed it like he could smell the blood all over Louis. Like an animal.

  “You okay, Lem?”

  “So you helped that kid, did you?” Lem said. “Well, that was kind of you.”

  Louis just swallowed. Gooseflesh had broken out on his arms. Look at his eyes. Look at his goddamn eyes. What Louis saw made him wish that he’d brought the golf club with him. Because Lem’s eyes were flat and black and shiny like those of a rattlesnake right before it strikes. Just like the kid’s eyes…nothing in them.

  “You okay, Lem?” he said again.

  Lem squinted, his lips pulled back from his teeth. “No…no I ain’t all right, Louis Shears. I ain’t all right at all. I was thinking…I was thinking about last Christmas…you never left me a tip like you used to do. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s my job to deliver your fucking mail, but a tip tells me you appreciate the job I do. That I bust my ass six days a week in good weather and bad, bringing you you’re fucking mail.”

  Louis made ready to spring back inside. “Well, Lem, I’m sorry about that. Last Christmas was a bad time for us. Michelle’s mom got sick and all. Everything was crazy.”

  Lem ran his tongue along the fronts of his teeth. “Sure, Louis, sure. Guys like you, they always got an answer for everything, don’t they? Well, don’t you worry, Mr. Louis Shears, I know my job. I do my job. Ain’t nobody that has to tell me how to do my job, least of all you. Here’s your goddamn mail.” He crunched it up in his fist, letters and magazines and fliers, threw at Louis. “There you go, you sonofabitch.”

  And then he ambled away, glancing over his shoulder from time to time at Louis like he hated the sight of him. He moved up the sidewalk, talking to himself. The real frightening thing was that he was moving with a rolling, loping gait like that of an ape.

  And worse: he was digging in his mailbag and tossing letters in the air.

  Tossing them in bunches.

  Then he stopped at row of rose bushes at the Merchant’s house next door, unzipped himself and took a piss. Right there in plain view.

  Louis just stood there.

  There was something in the water, something in the air. He didn’t know what, but they were all starting to lose it. What in the hell was happening? He’d seen it come over Lem, that emptying of all he was or ever had been, leaving something behind that was primal and uncivilized, raging.

  He wondered if it was the blood on his shirt.

  Lem had been all right until he’d seen the blood. Didn’t they say that the sight and smell of blood could create a sort of aggressive response in animals? In dogs? Was that true for people, too? No, that was ridiculous. There had been a sudden inexplicable aggression in Lem, but it had been more than that. He was like the kid or the cops. Suddenly, somehow, things like ethics and self-control had suddenly vanished, leaving a predatory anger in its void.

  Louis shut the door.

  Then he locked it.

  He peered out the window.

  At the Merchant’s house next door, Lem left mail scattered on the lawn. Two houses down at the Loveman’s, he dug into his bag, scratching around in there like an animal rooting in soil for grubs. Then he put a hand to his face and shook. He tossed the bag aside and just wandered away up the walk like he was sunstruck.

  It was happening and Louis knew it.

  Something horrifying and unknown was taking the town one by one…

  10

  An easy three blocks away from where Louis Shears was being introduced to the new postal system in Greenlawn, Tessler Avenue crossed Ash Street and right there, right at the bottom of the grassy hill where all the houses were whitewashed and the flowerbeds bloomed lushly with black-eyed susan and rose-pink spider lily, there was a store called Cal’s One-Stop. It was named after Bobby Calhoun, who had run it since just after World War II until his death six months ago. Cal’s was the sort of place to grab a six-pack or a gallon of milk or a pack of smokes, but not much else since everything was vastly overpriced.

  When Angie Preen set ou
t for Cal’s, tucking little Danny in the buggy, she did so not because she needed beer or milk or cigarettes or even paper plates or a bottle of ketchup. She had other reasons. None of which were altruistic.

  She was going there to turn the screw, as she liked to call it.

  And said screw just happened to be firmly lodged in Brandi Welch’s back.

  And I’ll twist it in that little witch, God yes, I’ll make her squirm.

  “We’re going to the store, Danny,” she announced. “We need some things.”

  “We always need things, don’t we, Mommy?” said little Danny and for one uneasy moment there, Angie was almost certain that there was a deep salty rut of sarcasm behind his words. But that was silly. He was barely two-years old.

  Paranoia, that’s what.

  Besides, it was that time of the month and her flow was heavy. She was moody, quick to anger, ready to scratch out eyes for the least infraction. Some women, she knew, did not get crazy like she did when they were menstruating. Lucky them.

  She looked down at Danny, struck, as always, at how much he looked like his father and how little he looked like her. He had his father’s smooth flawless Mediterranean skin and moody, chocolate-dark Sicilian eyes. As such, he was beautiful. Just like his father. Pleasing to behold. One could only hope that he was nothing like his father in every other way.

  “I want a candy bar,” Danny said.

  “Okay. We’ll get you a Mounds or a Three Musketeers or something.”

  Danny seemed satisfied with that, then he furrowed his brow, said, “I want a gun.”

  “Stop that!” Angie chided him, a bead of sweat popping at her temple.

  “I want a gun so I can shoot people dead!”

  Angie stopped the buggy right there, right on Tessler where the streets are handsomely lined with oak and yellow poplar. “Stop it, Danny. Don’t you let me hear you talk like that again. Only bad men shoot people. And bad men get thrown in cages for the rest of their lives. You don’t want that, do you?”

  A tear in the corner of his eye, he shook his head.

  God, she wondered if he was already becoming his father.