CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Another Halloween.

The day dawned gray and bloodshot. Grant woke up in his lounge chair in the basement with a sour taste in his mouth. A finger of scotch lay pooled in the bottom of the Dewar’s bottle on the table next to the chair. The glass next to it was empty. The television volume was low, the movie on Turner Classic Movies a film noir with too much talking.

Grant got up, walked to the casement window and pushed the partially open short curtain all the way open. A mist of rainwater covered the storm window, and the sky through it was battleship gray–colored and low.

He could just make out a row of pumpkins, already carved into faces, frowns on one end slowly turning into smiles by the other, on the rail of his back neighbor’s deck. It was a yearly tradition.

He turned off the television, oddly missing the sound after it was off, and trudged up the stairs to the kitchen. He checked the back door, which was locked and bolted, and then the front.

Back in the kitchen, he made eggs and toast and a pot of coffee, then dialed into work from his cell phone.

“Chip? This is Grant. Captain Farrow knows I’m not coming in today, right? You told him, like I asked?”

The desk sergeant said something, and Grant snapped, “Then tell him now, you dimwit. I won’t be in.”

Grant pushed the off button on the phone and tossed it onto the kitchen table.

From upstairs there came a sound, and Grant froze in place, listening. Then it came again, bedsprings creaking. The detective relaxed, turning back to his eggs, which were bubbling and snapping in the frying pan now.

After breakfast he cleaned up the kitchen, poured a second cup of coffee and went back down to the basement. A sour rising sun was trying to fight its way through the scudding clouds.

Maybe it would clear after all.

Grant settled himself back in his chair, turned the television back on and watched two westerns back-to-back, muting the sound every once in a while to listen for sounds upstairs.

At eleven A.M. he went back upstairs and pulled a fresh bottle of Dewar’s from its bag, which he had placed on the dining room hutch the day before. He brought the bottle downstairs. He emptied the last finger of scotch from the old bottle into the glass, twisted open the new bottle and added another finger.

A sound from upstairs, a moan, and Grant set the bottle of scotch on the TV table, took his glass, and went up to the kitchen.

“Shit.”

Another moan followed, and Grant slowly trudged up the stairs to the second floor of the house. There was a short hallway with two bedrooms and a bath off it. He passed the bath and his own bedroom and stood in the doorway of the other, sipping scotch.

Marianne Carlin lay on her back on the guest bed, the covers kicked aside, half-asleep.

Her belly under her nightgown was huge.

As Grant watched, she moved her head from side to side, eyes closed, and moaned again. Grant thought he saw something move in her belly, like a snake under a sheet.

Grant went to the bed, put his glass down on the bedside table and picked up the washcloth that lay folded on the edge of the water bowl there and dipped it into the water. He wrung it out and patted the young woman’s forehead with the cloth.

Marianne mumbled something in her sleep, the name, “Jack,” then wrenched herself over onto her side away from him and began to softly snore.

Grant rearranged the covers over her, folded the washcloth back on the edge of the bowl, retrieved his alcohol and left.

Another movie brought him to lunchtime—a grilled cheese sandwich—and then two more short old westerns got him to four o’clock in the afternoon. The schools were out by now, and the younger trick-or-treaters would start soon. He went upstairs to check his candy bowl by the front door, and for good measure added another bag to it, which made it overflow. He picked up the fallen Snickers bars and put them in his pocket.

He glanced outside and saw that the sun had lost its all-day fight with the gray clouds and was dropping, a pallid orange ball, toward the western horizon.

A porch light flicked on at the house across the street, which seemed to trigger a relay—two more houses lit up, one of them with tiny pumpkin lights strung across its gutter from end to end, the other with a huge spotlight next to the drive illuminating a motor-driven, wriggling spider in a rope web arranged in the lower branches of a white birch.

Back in the basement, Grant noted that the pumpkins on his back neighbor’s deck railing were now lit, flickering frowns to smiles.

He tried to watch another movie, but his palms had begun to sweat.

Upstairs, the doorbell rang. He went up to answer it. Two diminutive sailors, one with a pirate’s eye patch, looked up at him and shouted, “Trick or treat!” They thrust their near-empty bags up in a no-nonsense manner, glaring balefully at him.

He gave them each two candy bars, and they turned immediately and fled sideways across his lawn to the next house. Grant was closing the door as a mother, parked watchfully in a Dodge Caravan at the curb, began to shout, “Use the sidewalk, Douglas . . . !”

The van crept up the street, following Douglas and his fellow pirate.

As Grant was stepping back downstairs the doorbell rang again, and soon he was sitting in the living room with the lights out, smoking his second cigarette, waiting for the bell to ring.

It did, again and again: hobos, men from Mars, ballerinas followed by more hobos.

There was a lull, and Grant went into the kitchen, made another grilled cheese sandwich for dinner.

The doorbell rang again.

Abandoning the grilled cheese sandwich, Grant grabbed a handful of candy bars, yanked open the door—

Petee Wilkins was standing there, snuffling, looking at the ground. There was something in his right hand, which he jerked up—

Instinctively, Grant twisted aside as Petee’s eyes briefly met his and the gun went off. It sounded very far away and not very loud. But it must have been a better handgun than Grant assumed, because the slug hit him in the side like a hard punch. As Grant kept twisting, falling into the candy basket and to the ground, he heard Petee hitch a sob and cry, “I’m sorry!”

Then Petee was gone.

Grant lay stunned, and waited for pain to follow the burning sensation of the bullet.

It came, but it wasn’t as bad as he feared.

As he sat up, a lone trick-or-treater, dressed in some indeterminate costume that may have represented Mr. Moneybags from the board game Monopoly, complete with miniature top hat, stood in the doorway looking down at him. He said the required words and Grant fumbled on the ground around him and threw a handful of candy bars his way.

“Gee, thanks, mister!” Mr. Moneybags said, and ran off.

Grant scooped as much of the candy around him as possible out through the doorway, then stood up with an “Oooof” and, holding his side, kicked the door closed.

He limped into the kitchen and had a look.

There was blood on his hand, which was not a good sign, but there wasn’t a lot soaked into his shirt, which was. He pulled his shirt out of his pants, took a deep breath, and studied the wound.

Just under the skin, left side, in and out, looking clean. He knew he would find the slug somewhere in the front hallway.

“Thank you, Petee, you incompetent asshole,” he whispered, and cleaned the wound at the kitchen sink as best he could. He tied three clean dish towels together and girded his middle.

The blood flow had nearly stopped already.

The front doorbell rang, but he ignored it.

He called the police dispatcher, whose name was Maggie Pheifer, identified himself, told her to have a patrol car visit Petee Wilkins’ father’s house, where they would probably find Petee Wilkins hiding under his own bed. “Consider him armed and dangerous, just in case. I’ll call back in later.”

From upstairs came a moan, louder than the others.

“Shit,” Grant said and, taking a deep, painful breath, hobbled to the stairs and limped his way up.