“I expect he’ll be glad you found gainful employment.”
Corrie shook her head. “You don’t know much, do you?”
“That lack of knowledge is what I hope to rectify. Leave me to deal with the sheriff. Now, do we have a deal, Miss Swanson?”
“A hundred bucks a day? Of course we have a deal. And please, do I look like a ‘Miss Swanson’ to you? Call me Corrie.”
“I shall call you Miss Swanson and you shall call me Special Agent Pendergast.”
She rolled her eyes and swept purple hair out of her face. “Okay, Special AgentPendergast.”
“Thank you, Miss Swanson.”
The man slid a wallet out of his suit coat and removed five hundred-dollar bills. She could hardly take her eyes off the money as he casually unwired her broken glove compartment, placed the bills inside, and wired it back up. “Keep a written record of your mileage. Any overtime beyond eight hours daily will be paid at twenty dollars an hour. The five hundred dollars is your first week’s pay in advance.”
He pulled something else out of his suit coat. “And here is your cell phone. Keep it turned on at all times, even when charging at night. Do not make or receive personal calls.”
“Who am I gonna call in Shit Creek?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. And now, if you’d be so kind as to turn the car around and give me a tour of the town?”
“Here goes.” Corrie glanced in her rearview mirror to make sure the coast was clear. Then she swung the wheel around violently, braking and accelerating at the same time. The Gremlin slewed around in a one-eighty, tires squealing, and ended up pointed back in the direction of town. She turned to Pendergast and grinned. “I learned thatplaying Grand Theft Autoon the computers at school.”
“Very impressive. However, I must insist on one thing, Miss Swanson.”
“What’s that?” she said, accelerating back toward town.
“You must not break the law in my employ. All traffic rules must be strictly obeyed.”
“Okay, okay.”
“The speed limit on this road is forty-five, I believe. And you have not buckled your seatbelt.”
Corrie glanced down and saw she was going fifty. She eased down to the correct speed, then slowed even further as they entered the outskirts of town. She tried to fish the seatbelt out from behind the seat, the car swerving back and forth as she drove with her knee.
“Perhaps it would be more convenient if you pulled off to the side of the road to do that?”
Corrie gave an irritated sigh and pulled off, retrieved the belt, and buckled herself in. She started up again with another screech of rubber.
Pendergast settled back. The passenger seat was broken, and he reclined into a semi-supine position, his head just barely at the level of the window. “The tour, Miss Swanson?” he murmured, eyes half closed.
“Tour? I thought you were kidding.”
“I am anxious to see the sights.”
“You must be on drugs. The only sights around here are fat people, ugly buildings, and corn.”
“Tell me about them.”
Corrie grinned. “Okay, sure. We’re now approaching the lovely hamlet of Medicine Creek, Kansas, population three hundred and twenty-five and dropping like a stone.”
“Why is that?”
“Are you kidding? Only a dipshit would stay in a town like this.”
There was a pause.
“Miss Swanson?”
“What?”
“I can see that an insufficient, or perhaps even defective, socialization process has led you to believe that four-letter words add power to language.”
It took Corrie a moment to parse what Pendergast had said. “ ‘Dipshit’ isn’t a four-letter word.”
“That depends on whether you hyphenate it or not.”
“Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Joyce all used four-letter words.”
“I see I am dealing with a quasi-literate. It is also true that Shakespeare wrote:
In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls,
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay.”
Corrie looked at the man reclining in the seat beside her, his eyes still half closed. He was seriously weird.
“Now, may we continue with the tour?”
Corrie glanced around. The cornfields were reappearing on both sides of the road. “Tour’s over. We’ve already passed through town.”
There was no immediate response from Pendergast, and for a moment Corrie worried that his offer would be rescinded and all that money in the glove compartment would vanish back into the black suit. “I could always show you the Mounds,” she added.
“The Mounds?”
“The Indian Mounds down by the creek. They’re the only thing of interest in the whole county. Somebody must’ve told you about them, the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives’ and all that bullshit.”
Pendergast seemed to think about this for a moment. “Perhaps later we will see the Mounds. For the present, please turn around and pass through town once again, as slowly as possible. I wouldn’t want to miss a thing.”
“I don’t think I’d better do that.”
“Why not?”
“The sheriff won’t like it. He doesn’t like cruising.”
Pendergast closed his eyes completely. “Didn’t I say I would concern myself with the sheriff?”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
She pulled to the side of the road, made a nice three-point turn, and headed back through town at a crawl. “On your left,” she said, “is the Wagon Wheel Tavern, run by Swede Cahill. He’s a decent guy, not too smart. His daughter is in my class, a real Barbie. It’s mostly a drinking establishment, not much food to speak of except Slim Jims, peanuts, the Giant Pickle Barrel—and, oh, yeah, chocolate eclairs. Believe it or not, they’re famous for their chocolate eclairs.”
Pendergast lay motionless.
“See that lady, walking down the sidewalk with the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo? That’s Klick Rasmussen, wife of Melton Rasmussen, who owns our local dry goods store. She’s coming back from lunch at the Castle Club, and in that bag are the remains of a roast beef sandwich for her dog, Peach. She won’t eat at Maisie’s on account of Maisie being her husband’s girlfriend before they got married about three hundred years ago. If only she knew what Melton gets up to with the gym teacher’s wife.”
Pendergast said nothing.
“And that dried-up old bag coming out of the Coast to Coast with a rolling pin is Mrs. Bender Lang, whose father died when their house was burned down by an arsonist thirty years ago. They never found out who did it, or why.” Corrie shook her head. “Some think old Gregory Flatt did it. He was the town drunk and kind of nuts, and one day he just sort of wandered off into the corn and disappeared. Never found his body. He used to talk about UFOs all the time. Personally, I think he finally got his wish and was abducted. The night he disappeared there were some strange lights in the north.” She laughed derisively. “Medicine Creek is an all-American town, and everybody’s got a skeleton in his closet. Or hercloset.”
This, at least, roused Pendergast, who half opened his eyes to look at her.
“Oh, yes. Even that dippy old lady whose house you’re staying in, Winifred Kraus. She may act pious, but it’s all a crock. Her father was a rum-runner and moonshiner. Bible-thumper, too, on top of that. But that isn’t all. I heard that when old Winifred was a teenager, she was known as the town vamp.”
Pendergast blinked.
Corrie snickered, rolled her eyes. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going on in Medicine Creek. Like Vera Estrem, who’s doing the wild thing with the Deeper butcher. If her husband ever finds out, there’s going to be blood. Dale Estrem’s the head of the Farmer’s Co-op and he’s the meanest man in Medicine Creek. His grandfather was a German immigrant and during World War II he went back to fight for the Nazis. You can imagine what the town thought of that. The grandfather never returned. Screwed the whole family, basically.”