He wasn’t halfway to the door before I jumped off my stool and started after him. He glanced back, saw me coming after him, spun around and punched me in the face.
The blow sent me reeling to the floor. The pain exploded from a dot beneath my eye to cover the whole of my face. I turned over onto my back, sprawled backward, and watched as the door slammed shut.
“Damn it,” I said out loud. As fast as I could scramble to my feet, I followed him out the door. It had grown dark while I was inside, and the artificial light in the lot was feeble, but I could still see the front door slamming on the black pickup truck and Grady Pritchett’s silhouette in the front seat.
I ran straight at it.
Grady was leaning forward, fighting to jab his key into the slot beneath the steering wheel.
I dashed at the truck, grabbed the handle, pulled. The door flew open and threw me off balance.
The engine turned over and shook to life.
I lunged at the open door, grabbed Grady Pritchett’s collar, pulled him right out of the front seat until his face slammed into the gravel.
“That’ll teach you to use your damn seat belt, you bastard,” I yelled as I stood over him like Ali over Liston.
He rolled over slowly and looked up at me, fear smeared across his soft features like a stain, arms raised in defense. “Don’t,” he said softly.”Don’t.”
Don’t what? What was I going to do to him? Hit him, kick him, beat him bloody until he confessed? What the hell had I just done, rushing out at him like that? I’d been pushing him inside the roadhouse, hoping for something to come loose, and instead he had acted perfectly reasonably. But still I had chased after him like a deranged avenger. What had come over me? I had lost my head, absolutely, and not for the first time since I found Hailey Prouix dead. Who was I so damn angry at? Him, for what he might have done to Hailey, or Hailey herself, for dragging me into this whole rotten story? I had lost myself in the anger of the moment and had no idea of what was supposed to come next.
I stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t… All I wanted was to ask some questions.”
He looked so helpless, so pathetic, his arms raised defensively like a battered child’s, that I backed off some more. But this time I backed into a wall where there shouldn’t have been a wall. I twisted my head around to see what I had backed into. It wasn’t a wall, it was Jimmy, the bartender with the boxer’s nose.
He grabbed my arms and pulled them back so that he could hold them both with one of his thick arms, jerking my shoulders until they screamed with pain. The other arm he now wrapped around my neck and squeezed, only lightly, I could tell, but I grew suddenly woozy.
Grady Pritchett was still on the ground, but sitting now, hand to his forehead, legs outstretched like a young boy in a sandbox.
“I didn’t mean to-” was all I could get out in a raspy gasp before Jimmy choked me into silence.
Grady pushed himself to standing and staggered at me, slowly, as if drunk, but he wasn’t drunk, and maybe his stagger was an attempt at a swagger, because the next thing he did was rear back and slam his fist into my stomach.
The air flew out of my lungs so fast I could hear the whoosh. My body tried to bend over from the blow, but the granite grip of the bartender kept me standing straight even as my knees buckled from the shot of pain. Nausea flooded through me as Grady Pritchett gripped my hair with his left hand and cocked his right hand to finish the job he had started on my face.
I closed my eyes and heard the smack of something hard against something not so hard and felt my arms wrench and my body hurtle to the ground. I must have been unconscious already, I figured, because I couldn’t feel the pain I knew had to be writhing through my face, the pain of ripping flesh and tearing muscle and collapsing bone. I thought I was unconscious until I opened my eyes and saw Grady Pritchett flying backward toward his black pickup truck as if propelled by some strange magnetic force.
Seeing him fly like that was right out of a comic book. I looked around dazedly for my comic-book hero. And there he was, brown jacket still buttoned, brown fedora still in place, white teeth glowing in the dim parking lot as if lit by black light, standing insouciantly with a large wooden oar in his hands.
Skink.
“How you doing there, mate?” he said, looking down at me.
I spun my head around to take in the scene. Grady was sitting on the ground, dazed. Jimmy the bartender was out cold on the ground, his arms still loose around me.
I squirmed from his grip and to my feet. “Am I bleeding? Did he hit me?”
“Nah, I nailed the bastard holding you afore our friend Pritchett had himself a chance to improve your face.”
“You took your time.”
“Well, I didn’t know I’d be dealing with two, did I? I needed to find something to even up them odds.” As he spoke, he tossed the oar onto the gravel. “But maybe we ought to make our getaway afore someone else charges out of that front door. Can you drive?”
I pressed my stomach, felt my ribs, my face. My eye was swelling from the first blow, my ribs were tender, my stomach was filled with an unpleasant cocktail of pain and nausea, but I could drive.
“I’ll take Pritchett in his truck,” said Skink. “You follow me.”
“What are we doing?”
Skink walked to Grady Pritchett, on the ground by the black truck with its engine still running, and lifted Grady gently by the arm. Grady gave no fight. Skink helped him onto the bench seat of the truck and scooted him over so that Skink himself could get into the driver’s seat. He leaned over solicitously and hitched up Grady’s seat belt before quietly closing the truck’s door.
“This is kidnapping,” I said.
“Nah, that would be a federal crime,” said Skink through the open window of the truck’s front door. “Do we look like the type to commit a federal crime?”
I scanned his gangster outfit and battered features.
“We’re just taking a ride through the countryside,” he said. “We’re going to find someplace nice and private where you and me and our good friend Grady Pritchett can have ourselves a friendly little talk.”
35
“YOU KNOW that guy at every high school,” said Grady Pritchett, “the guy with the rich father and fast car and best-looking girlfriend, the guy with the pack of followers that hang on his every last word and laugh at his every last joke? The guy that seems to have the whole school beat to hell?” Pritchett took a pull from his can of Coors. “That was me. Leastways, that was me before I got all messed up with Hailey Prouix.”
We were surrounded by trees, not far from a stream whose gurgling we could just hear above the cacophonous calls of the insects all around us searching for love. Skink had stopped at a bar farther down the road and gestured me in to buy a couple six-packs, and now we were in the flatbed of Grady’s truck, drinking. Grady had pulled a small electric lantern from the toolbox and we set that down between us like a campfire. We sprawled around its ghostly light and we talked. Or I should say it was Grady who talked. And the funny thing was, it didn’t take much yanking to get the story out. Any hard feelings about the fight at the Log Cabin took wing as he started talking. It was as if the story had been festering inside him for all those long years, like the rotting core of a rotten tooth, and he was glad now, finally, to let it tumble out.
“I knew her and her sister before anything happened between us,” he said. “Pierce ain’t no New York City – everyone in Pierce knows everybody’s damn business – and everyone knew them Prouix sisters. Their father died when they was just girls and the uncle moved in to take care of them all. It was a touching story, and we all were a little sorry for them. But as they got older, they got cuter, and the sorry turned to something else, if you know what I mean. Now, Roylynn, she wasn’t much interesting, she was like this porcelain thing you were so afraid was gonna break if you as much as breathed on it, but Hailey, well, Hailey grew up nice, with a flash of fire in her eyes. She was a couple years younger than us, but she had something, oh, yes. And when this girl Cheryl I was having some fun with decided she wanted to get all serious, talking about getting married and having kids, well, that was the end of Cheryl. So I was looking around for someone new, because when you’re that guy at the high school you need to always have someone, and something about Hailey lit my fancy.”