Tom Willis, sitting in his cruiser, watched the dog in the yard across the street run to the end of its chain until it was jerked on its back -- seventeen times, Tom counted. Thick saliva edged the dog's jowls; Tom imagined, though the distance was too great to see, that the eyes were turned white with craziness. The radio sputtered around him. It was near dusk, though late, around nine-thirty -- time for him to start his rounds. Just as he reached for the ignition the dog squatted on its haunches, lifted its head, and stared at Tom. For a moment both of them fastened eyes; for that moment Tom lost hold of the familiar background babble from the radio. Then the dog glanced away, tilted back its head, and loosed a long wailing howl. Tom turned away and started the motor quickly, grateful for the prosaic sound of the growling engine. He slipped into gear, called to the dispatcher that he was off to make his rounds, and eased the car into the main street of Tremainsville.
He watched people come out into the cool evening. The old men, playing backgammon, congregated on the small triangle of grass where the highway split off from the old main street. The juveniles clung to the bank wall, their careless hands holding cigarettes; he checked to see if there were any brown bags among them. Farmers dressed in pastel short-sleeve shirts and suit pants sat with their wives, decked out in floral summer dresses, in the air-conditioned front window of the Glen Hollow, pale glasses of beer collaged with the remains of a steak dinner. He pulled his car to a stop at Greg's Deli, across from the Embassy, like a stagecoach driver whoaing his horses. The small man was giving another one of his readings. Tom rested his arms on the sill of his door and propped his chin on his arms, his eyes counting the house.
People, sitting on the sidewalk, curled around the small man; others stood. To get around them a person had to walk into the street. Several people had already complained to him that he should do something, and he listened to them politely, as he was paid to do, but the hippies had never given him any trouble, or anybody any trouble for that matter, so he logged the complaints but let the hippies abide where they were comfortable. Some people in the town told him that it was his business to bleach out every stain, but that was not true, unless he aimed to fill his jail every night, which he could easily do, including sometimes their sons and daughters and relatives, which most people did not care to hear about. He just had to keep the peace. The small man was keeping the peace. The people who wanted to erase the hippies were not keeping the peace, though they might be keeping the law. The radio crackled behind him.
The poetry meeting broke up. Some of the sodium lights snapped on. The farmers, walking full-bellied next to their full-bellied wives, got in their pickups and took off for home. The old men snapped their backgammon gamecase shut and shuffled off to take the place of the farmers at the Glen Hollow bar. Tom keyed the engine to life and turned delicately away from the curb. He raised his fingers off the steering wheel in greeting to several people, automatically checked the speed of each car on the radar as it ran through town.
He turned up Washington Street and glided past MacNelly and Seneca and Strowbridge, casting a tight gaze into the deepening shadows of the lawns, secretly pleased by the supple squares of yellow light falling from lighted windows. He turned onto Townline Road, away from the family houses and out into the country. The weakening sunlight glowed like foxfire off the dark line of trees. He turned into the parking lot of Joe's Fuel Company, made sure no one was hiding behind the concrete supports for the tanks, where he had found someone just last week after they had tripped the alarm trying to steal the receipts. He took his long flashlight and poked around the coal bins, licking the long tongue of light over the dark mounds. Some rats scuttled away; a barn swallow nest stirred. He walked back to his car, the crunch of gravel underfoot mixing with the faraway trill of peepers and the light growl of the engine. He finished this part of the circuit with a tour around the Agway grounds, then headed out to the Redwood, a restaurant that marked the edge of the village where the speed change downshifted from fifty-five to thirty-five.
He parked his car in the lot and walked inside for a cup of coffee, which he took with two sugars and no milk. He shot a few words back and forth with Sam Tate, the owner, paid for his coffee, though Sam said, every night that Tom stopped in, that he really didn't have to, and slipped carefully back into the car. One-handed, gingerly sipping the hot coffee, he eased the car behind some bushes which allowed him to see the road but not the road to see him. He shut off the motor; the red lights of the digital readout on the radar mirrored in his eyes.
Everyone abided by the law that night. Around eleven o'clock, the caffeine long ago absorbed into his eyelids, just as he prepared to complete his tour, a car came bombing through at forty-five. For only a moment did he hesitate, more from fatigue than anything else, then flipped on the overhead light, the headlights, and the car engine. The other car, seeing the glowing apparition in its rear-view mirror, meekly braked to a halt. Tom slid in behind it, got out of the car, and as he walked over to meet the driver, who had gotten out of the car, loosened the gun in his holster. "License and registration," he said. While the driver, flustered, searched for the paper, Tom peeked through the rear window and saw a young girl in the passenger side, her hair speckled by the white and red revolving lights. He didn't recognize her profile as she turned angrily to the young man and thrust the needed papers into his hand. The young man sheepishly handed the registration card to Tom, then fished in his back pocket for the license. Tom waited patiently, his eyes occasionally flicking at the girl in the car. The driver seemed flustered all out of proportion; Tom figured he was more afraid of her bad opinion than the traffic fine. Probably trying to impress her, he thought, bringing her up to the Embassy to show her what a strange place it was, how he knew all the places to go. Or maybe it wasn't like that at all. He didn't care. He took the license, which the man finally found, checked it over the radio, got a negative, and cursed softly as he filled out the tedious summons. Occasionally he glanced at the man, who fidgeted while he waited. Like he had hot coals in his pockets. Hot rocks, he thought, a little smile escaping across his face. Finally, he was done.
He anxiously took the piece of paper from Tom. When Tom bent down to look at the girl, she fixed a cold stare on him that, coming from such a young and pretty face, snapped him across the jaw like a good right hook. He still puzzled over the sensation as he got into the car. He glanced at the radar. It said twenty-five. He pulled onto the main street and slowly, professionally, drove the mile back to the station.
When he had stashed his car in the garage, filled out his report, and changed his clothes in the humid locker room, when he had torn down the hundredth pin-up from Penthouse that he had told Mithousen not to put up on his locker, he nodded good-night to the dispatcher, and drove the two miles to his house. He lived in a small house on an acre of land bordered by two large farms so that he was surrounded by black open space. The shot-gun sound of his car door slamming bounced off the stars and over the whispering corn, and he stood there for a moment absorbed in the silence. He could barely see the house, a fist of darker black surrounded by large swaying shadows of maples.
He fumbled with his keyring, knowing exactly where the housekey was by feel, and entered the house. It was musty with the trapped hot air of the day and he went around slamming up windows. He wasn't hungry but, as he took off his jacket, he opened the refrigerator door to see what was available, though he knew exactly what was there, having done the same thing for breakfast, and made a mental note, again, to get out and do a decent shopping. He closed the door, reached overhead to pull the string for the kitchen light. The dishes in the sink, the unwrapped bread on the counter, the crumbs and half-opened cabinet door, leaped up to greet him like a dog on a chain. He filled one of the sinks with hot water, slopped some soap into it, swiped at the dishes, cleaned the crumbs off, threw the bread away, closed the cabinet. It was one-thirty by the time he finished.
He reached into the refrigerator for a beer, turned the kitchen light off, and, in almost the same gesture, turned the living room lamp on. The wet snap of the beer can sounded dully on the early-morning quiet. He shoved two books off the easy chair, promising himself to read that article on counseling in Police Magazine, lowered himself slowly into the chair, and sipped his beer, listening to a cricket somewhere outside his window. Before he was half done with the beer he was asleep; the wilted yellow light from the lamp dropped carelessly over the stubble on his cheek, the frayed cuff of his shirt, the mound of patient magazines at his feet, the threadfine carpet, the dark walls empty of pictures. He dreamed uneasily of the girl's face before he slipped off into the cool darkness of corn and stars.
"But Tom, you're the police chief! You have to do something about it!"
Tom looked over the rim of his coffee cup at Sam Tate, who not only owned the Redwood but also one of the two laundromats, and watched the man's belt buckle bounce as he talked. "What do you want me to do?" he asked the belt buckle.
"Clean them out of the area so that people can get into my laundromat!"
"Are they actually blocking the entrance?"
"Well, no, you know they're not. You told them not to."
"Have the proceeds gone down from the machines?" He switched his gaze to Sam's shirt pocket with the plastic penholder.
"No, no more than usual during summertime." Sam ran his fingers through his sparse hair in exasperation. "But dammit that ain't the point, and you know it!"
"Then what exactly is the point?" Tom brought his eyes to bear on Sam's, and Sam, still spouting, shifted his gaze away.
"The point is, Tom, you are paid to do what the people of this town -- "
"No, Sam." Tom put his empty cup on the desk. "I've said this before. I'm not anybody's mercenary. I protect everybody. Everybody."
"Yes, we all know what a fine upstanding man you are." Sam couldn't quite make the sarcasm cover the respect in his voice. "And my profits haven't sunk, and they're not denying access to my customers, but...but...well, dammit, they're dirty and don't use my laundromat!"
Tom's eyes rested for just a second on the look of frustration and small-boy peevishness on Sam's face before he let out a low diplomatic chuckle to cool Sam down. "I can't arrest a person for not using your laundromat, can I? They've done everything I've told them to do -- they've quieted down, they're not sitting on anyone's doorway, there's no prohibition against them sitting and listening to someone read poetry, no more than there's a ban on old men sitting on a bench playing backgammon. It keeps peace, Sam, that's all I'm interested in, just keeping the peace."
Sam grabbed his hat and jammed it on his head. "You're just a goddam hippy yourself, all that stuff about peace."
Tom laughed. "If I didn't know you better I'd take a swing at you. But then I'd have to arrest myself for assault and battery, lock myself in the jail, and let myself out at night so I could make my rounds. I wouldn't know if I was coming or going."
"You don't anyway." Sam stuck out his hand and Tom shook it firmly. "Just a goddam hippy, you know."
"I know. But if it keeps the peace -- " Tom shrugged.
Sam was halfway out the door when he shot back over his shoulder, "I'll bet you he sells drugs to get his money."
"Who?"
"The hippy. The one who reads poetry."
"I doubt it."
"I don't. I bet he even washes his clothes by hand." Tom's smile bounced harmlessly off Sam's back. Reid, the dispatcher, gave Tom a thumbs-up as Sam let the screen door bang shut. "Quite a radical, isn't he? Wants everyone to wash their clothes." Tom filed Sam's last comment away.
That afternoon, Tom, dressed in gym shorts, sneakers, and a tee-shirt, followed a good hundred yards behind the poet as the poet wended his way through the woods just outside the village. The woods, even though they were right on the edge of the village, were fairly secluded, being ten acres given in trust to the village for recreation. Even part of the lake trail went through them. Tom cursed himself for doing this, especially since he was as quiet as a jackhammer, but Sam's last comment itched him. The poet, dressed in his usual array, bobbed along, either ignorant of Tom's presence or just plain ignoring it.
The air was stifling and a dark grey streak of sweat lined Tom's spine and halfmoons appeared under his arms. He was about to give up the chase when the poet reached a large clearing. Tom stopped, still fifty yards away. In the clearing the sunlight poured over everything; dust and moths played in its glare. The poet shook the canvas bag from his shoulder and untied his thick shock of hair, twisting his head to loosen it. Carefully he removed his clothes, folding each piece neatly on the ground, until he was completely naked. Then, to Tom, he did a very curious thing. He raised his arms to the sky and very slowly turned in a circle, his face pointed at the unremitting white light, and did this for what Tom estimated was five minutes. Then, without any other preliminary, the poet began a series of slow movements; they resembled karate to Tom but very slowed down, as if he were doing them underwater. He'd never seen anything like it before. He noticed that the movements repeated themselves, but each time the poet did that he faced a different direction. Finally, the poet, the sweat shimmering on him, put his clothes back on and marched off along the path that led to the creek, leaving Tom sitting there, completely free of the idea that he should arrest the man for public indecency. He sat there until the sun left the clearing in shade, then ran the two miles back to his house as fast as his legs could stand it, collapsing at least into the tub with the cold water running down the shower curtain he'd forgotten to put inside.
That night, on his rounds, Tom sat at Greg's Deli and watched the small man read to his audience. His eyes ran over the motley collage that stuck to the small man like a blind man feeling a horse's face. He thought back to his conversation with Sam Tate, the strange dog chase that came out of it, the lung-numbing run from the woods back to his house hounded by something that he didn't like to admit was fear but was fear. Sam Tate rolled out of the Glen Hollow, saw Tom sitting in the car but ignored him, and made an exaggerated route around the crowd to get to his laundromat. Tom grinned, threw him a greeting, and started his car.
Tonight he went down Bradley Street, checking some of the small off-roads where the trailers were. Everything was quiet. The heavy summer air pulsed, sometimes with the wheezing of insects, sometimes with the thrum of the big tractor-trailers on the state highway. Tom plowed his furrows, leaving behind sillions of quiet calmness, his eyes harrowing the darkness for trouble, his hands sifting the road. He stopped for his usual cup of coffee, and Sam did not encourage him to take it for free. Even if you do what is right, he thought as he sat inside the net of his radar, no one gets what they want, and that's because everybody either wants too much of the wrong thing or too little of the right thing. And they don't know the difference, that was the problem. People only care about what they don't have. The coffee grated on his tongue, and he impatiently flipped it out the window. There was scarcely any traffic, only a few hay trucks shaking off dust in the light of the streetlamps. The monitor buzzed like a neon sign. Gradually the insects stopped, the stray dogs went to sleep, houselights snapped off. He was glad the night was lazy, but he still felt uncomfortable in the back of his mind. Images of the small man dropped into his boredom like stones into water and in each ripple he saw the face of the girl in the car and a dog howling.
At eleven thirty he was ready to call in. Before he could reach the transmitter, Reid's voice splashed all over the silence in the car. "Tom?" he called urgently. For a moment Tom listened to the voice, and he didn't like what he heard -- something bad had happened. Reid sounded scared. Tom flipped the switch on the microphone and answered.
"Tom, we got a call here." He heard Reid turn in his seat and the words "Please try to calm down. I'm talking to Tom right now." Then Reid's voice shifted back to him. "Tom, I've got Lois Dodge on the phone here, and I'm having trouble making out what she's saying."
"Tell me as best you can," Tom said, his voice turned businesslike.
There was a pause, a dead space. "Tom, she said someone's killed the twins."
Tom shot back, even before Reid's words were done, "Repeat that."
"Tom, she said someone'd broken into the house and killed the twins."
"Is anybody over there? Have you sent anyone?"
"I called you first."
"I'll be right there. Get the ambulance. And tell Joe and Dick to meet me. Keep her on the phone, talk about the weather, but don't let her be by herself. If this be true -- "
"Gotcha, Tom."
Tom eased the car onto the road, his hands precisely at ten and two o'clock on the wheel. Lois Dodge's house was five miles out of town; Tom stuck to the back roads so that he could speed without raising anyone's interest. In three minutes he was there. He checked his watch: 11:45.
All the lights in the house were on. The front door was open, the screen door shut. Tom eased out of the car, loosening the pistol in its holster. He surveyed the front lawn, then the garage, especially the small path between it and the house, but saw nothing out of sorts. At the first touch of his boot on the front walkway Lois Dodge appeared at the front door. Tom could only see her silhouette but the image of her frayed hair and claw hands on the screen ate itself into his memory. He hurried cautiously along the path, his boots chocking evenly on the gravel.
By the time he reached the front door Lois had disappeared. He opened the screen door and edged into the front hallway. Lois was nowhere. He called her name; no answer. He moved along the hallway, one hand on the right wall. She wasn't in the living room or dining room but she was in the kitchen, and when Tom saw her, he felt his face, usually under his say-so, wrinkle in fear. Lois sat at the kitchen table, her hair frazzled, her hands, thickly red, laying on the table like two dead doves. She had a housecoat on that was unbuttoned and she had nothing on underneath. Tom searched her eyes, tried to intercept them. They stared empty as glass at the two hands in front of her. He leaned Lois back in her chair and with gentle hands buttoned up her housecoat. "Lois, speak to me. Look at me."
She swiveled her head instead of her eyes, as if it were all one rusted piece, and stared at him, through him. "Lois, what happened? Where are the kids? Where's Chuck?" She stared at the brass button on his shirt pocket. "Lois, I'm going to look around. Don't move from here. Do you understand me?" She pivoted her head back to her hands.
He knew where the kids' room was. He leaped up the stairs. Their room was at the top, on the right. The door was closed. He faced the door, his gun in his right hand and, with his left, he eased the door inward. There was no light in the room. He reached and snapped it on. For a second he stared, then slid the gun into its holster.
Two single beds held two single bodies. Blood was soaked into the sheets, the blankets, the carpet, even spattered the wall over their headboards. Tom edged in, his eyes ferreting details while he tried to keep his mind and the crime scene clear. He stepped down the aisle between the beds, not stepping in the blood. Both boys had had their throats slit from ear to ear and their heads, still nestled in their pillows, were cocked at an odd angle. Both boys had their pajama bottoms pulled down to their ankles and their testicles were neatly laid at the foot of each bed. For a moment time hung suspended like a sword over his head, and he was acutely aware of a lone dog somewhere baying at the sky; then the sword broke free and a narrow pain crawled from the back of his head down his spine into his feet. He felt pinned to the spot, unable to move. With a violent wrench he tore himself out of the room and back into the kitchen. Lois had not moved and her breathing came shallow and rasping.
Joe and Dick arrived just as the ambulance careened into the driveway. He told Joe to call Reid and have Reid get Chuck home. He quickly sketched the situation to everyone. He told the paramedics to get to Lois first -- she was in shock. He told Joe and Dick to see the scene for themselves, then fan around the house to see if they could find anything. He walked them all to the house, then marched out to this car and got his flashlight.
There was nothing tell-tale on the small pathway between the garage and the house. He looked up the side of the house to position where the boys' room was. He edged noiselessly into the backyard. He drew the beam of light along the house foundation but saw nothing. He glanced up at the bedroom window and noticed a drainpipe along the corner of the house that ran by the window. Next to it was a ladder. Obviously Chuck had been working on the pipe and had left the ladder up. He caught several sets of prints in the dirt at the foot of the ladder, but they might have been Chuck's. He slid the beam of light up the ladder until he saw what he was looking for -- a large splotch of color about halfway down on the right side. He moved over to the left side and saw several more splotches, some as large as a hand. On the rungs were more stains, one about seven inches long where the climber must have slipped sideways. Tom peered at the lowest rung and the stain, a dull crimson, glistened up at him. He stabbed the flashlight along the ground and saw places where the grass had been mashed down, as if someone had tried to clean their shoes of mud. The indentations stopped at the back fence. Two bloody handprints stared back at him from the topmost fenceboard. At the front of the house he heard Joe and Dick conversing with the ambulance attendants, then their heavy boots along the gravel path across the front of the house.
Tom emptied his pockets of all his change and anything that might make a noise, slipped his handcuffs into his back pocket where they wouldn't clink, and slid over the fence into the next yard.
The next house over sat about a hundred feet from the Dodge house. The handprints had pointed at the house like an arrow and Tom, his shadow like a raven, ran bent-kneed to the back door. The house had been empty for years; the owner had never bothered to renovate. His shirt clung to him, and the palms of his hands were greasy with sweat. He knew the odds of the killer being in the house were almost non-existent. He also knew he was violating common sense and procedure by not telling Joe and Dick what he was up to. And he knew that if the killer were in there, there would be no middle ground. Only one person would walk away. He dried his hands raw on his pants, then reached up to unfasten the eyehook that held the back door closed. The eyehook was already unlatched. The door sighed inward against the nudge of his shoulder.
He was in the kitchen. On his hand and knees he crawled until he could touch the counter, then used the counter to help him stand up. Some light from the Dodge house spilled into the vacant window but only enough to lengthen shadows and distort the darkness. His eyes adjusted themselves to the dimness. There was no one else in the kitchen.
A long hallway led out of the kitchen into the living room. Here it was dark as tar and he ran his right hand along the wall praying he would not stumble into anything. Sweat slid down his back and sides, and he had trouble breathing quietly through his nose. At the end of the hallway, at the entrance to the living room, he stopped. Outside he could hear the ambulance pull away. The county coroner must have showed up by now. That meant that very shortly they would come looking for him and would remember seeing him go toward the backyard and they would find the same things he found and take the same route he took and if the killer were in the house there might be one unholy mess. He pulled his gun from its holster, curling his right hand around its grip, and, with his left hand, set the flashlight on the floor. Then, taking a deep breath, he pushed the flashlight on and swung to his right out of the light's way. Nothing.
He checked the dining room and several closets but nothing leaped out at him. That left the upstairs. He paused on the bottom step, his toes gripping the edge of the stair nearest the wall. He raised his weight on his foot, felt the board give, but not a sound. The second stair gave downward but didn't groan. Lead seemed to collect around his ankles and each time he touched, gripped, lifted, he wanted to collapse. When he reached the top he leaned his forehead against the damp wallpaper, the husky smell of his own sweat and the house's mildew thick in his nostrils.
Against the thrumming of his heart and the muffled air in his mouth he heard a low moaning, like a dog's whimper, intersected with snarly chuckles, like someone laughing at a dirty joke. He perked his head up, cocking his ear in the direction he thought it came from. There were only three rooms on the top floor, two that faced the creek edge and were shaded by an old lumpy willow and one that faced the Dodge house. That one was just ahead, on his left. Straining to rock each step from the heel to the toe without a sound, he stalked the entrance to the room. The gun butt bit into his palm and the flashlight hung like an ancient weapon from his hand. The dim light thrown off by the Dodge house framed the doorway to the room. The moaning had gotten louder. When he reached the doorway, he edged across the hall to the opposite wall and sat so that he was facing the room.
He saw a thin profile against a jagged slice of broken glass in the window frame. The profile rocked back and forth, occasionally glancing at the Dodge house and laughing. Tom ran his tongue across his lips, put the flashlight on the floor, raised his gun to eye level with both hands, and spoke slowly in the deepest voice he could muster, "Don't you move one inch."
The profile ceased rocking and the air went deadly silent. Tom kept speaking, trying not to let the tightness of his throat choke him off. "I have a gun on you, I can see you clearly against the window. If you have a gun, put it down. Now." The head jerked to face him and in the dim backlight from the window Tom saw the figure's arm rise and point something at him and in the instantaneous light of his gun's explosion Tom saw the face of fourteen-year old Freddie Jimson dissolve into blood and the gun he had held on Tom fall uselessly to the floor. Without pausing for a breath, the flashlight beam lancing, Tom stood over the crumpled body. He peered at the gun. It was plastic.
Before the crash of the shot had melted into the summer air, Joe and Dick were at the house, their guns drawn. They clambered up the stairs, skidding to a halt, like cartoon characters, outside the room. They didn't say a thing, just slumped against the door jamb. Tom wept.
The routine paperwork got done, the story eventually came out, or at least something close enough to satisfy people, and life eventually climbed back into its complacency. Some friends of the two Dodge boys told Tom they remembered Freddie and the two boys having a fight one day over some money that Freddie demanded they give to him. They refused to give him anything, and Freddie supposedly said that he'd get them back. No one paid it any mind -- Freddie always talked that way. He had to because he'd learned it at home from his old man who beat him like clockwork. There was no doubt Freddie had done it -- his hands had been covered in blood (it matched the boys' type), and he'd had the knife, a ten-inch shiv, tucked in his belt. Tom resigned that fall, though he came back in December to do desk work. Reid spread the rumor that Tom kept Freddie's plastic gun in his locker, but Tom said nothing to confirm or deny it. He kept his own lock on the locker and never let anyone see the key.