“Excuse me,” I said, stifling a burp. “Have you seen Arlo around?”
She looked like I’d slapped her, but she recovered quickly. I guess she was used to being slapped.
“Who?” she asked unconvincingly.
“Arlo Pelz,” I replied, and took a big slurp of the shake to drown out another burp. “You know Arlo, don’t you Georgette?”
I was aware that everybody in the restaurant had stopped talking. They were all listening, which was fine with me. The more people who heard, the better. I wasn’t all that great at detecting, so I figured it would be a lot easier to let him find me.
“I haven’t seen him,” she said. “You a friend of his?”
“You could say that.” I smiled and leaned over, plucked a pen from her apron pocket, and started scrawling a note on my napkin. “If he stops by, maybe you could give him this for me.”
I wrote: Jolene is really into her TV. She asked me to thank you. Your pal from the Sno-Inn.
I read it out-loud in case she lost it, and so everybody else got my message. I wrapped the napkin around a ten-dollar bill and put it, and the pen, back in her apron pocket.
“I appreciate it,” I said, flashing her another insincere smile.
She dropped my breakfast check on the counter and walked away without bothering to ask me first if maybe I wanted a slice of pie or something.
I took the hint, though I would have liked to try a slice. I gulped down the last of my shake, dropped another ten on the counter, and walked out.
I visited the barbershop, the beauty salon, and the drugstore, and left pretty much the same message at each place. In the post office, I asked the aged clerk behind the counter if he knew where the Pelz family lived.
“There isn’t any family left here except for little Billy,” the clerk said. “Still lives at their place on A street. Sixteen A Street.”
“What about Arlo,” I asked. “Seen him around?”
The old man narrowed his eyes at me. “Once, right after he got out of prison. You a friend of his?”
“Not really,” I said. “How about you?”
The clerk just turned and walked away, disappearing into the back of the post office.
I walked out and went next door to the tackle shop. They sold fishing poles, reels, lures, hooks, and all kinds of worms, crickets, and maggots. A man sat at the counter stringing a fly. As I got closer, I realized if you drew a line connecting the five moles on his cheek, you could make a lopsided star. I wondered if he knew that.
He looked up at me as I approached the counter. “Can I help you?”
“I’m up here doing some fishing,” I said.
“Whatcha interested in catching?” he asked. “Salmon, trout, perch, bass, mackinaw?”
“Arlo Pelz.”
I felt really cool saying that. I don’t think Mannix could have delivered it any better.
“I understand he’s a bottom-feeder native to these parts,” I said.
He stopped working on his lure, stood up, and gave me a hard look. “Are you a cop of some kind?”
I smiled thinly. “Of some kind.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“Where do you suppose he’d be likely to go, if he came back for a visit?”
He thought for a minute. He wasn’t searching for the answer, he was trying to decide if the answer might get him hurt.
“You could check out his place on A Street,” the man replied. “Of course, you’d have to get past Little Billy first.”
I shrugged as if getting past anyone was easy for me. “Anyplace else?”
“Maybe the woods around the lake,” he said. “He used to hang out there a lot when he was a kid.”
“Why was that?”
“Same reason kids still do,” he replied. “To drink and fuck. He also liked to hide there.”
“What was he hiding from?”
“Everybody,” he replied. “He used to work in the marina, fixing outboards, before he gave that up to break into homes on the lake. Vacation places, empty most of the time. It’d be months before anyone realized they’d been robbed.”
“Where can I find the lake?” I asked.
“It’s about ten miles farther up the highway,” the man said. “Can’t miss it. Big Rock Lake.”
I got that chill of creepy realization up my back, only I was missing out on the realization part. I didn’t know why the name of the lake sounded strangely familiar to me.
“They got some place to stay the night up there besides the woods?” I asked.
“You can rent a cabin at the Big Rock Lake Resort.”
I got that chill again and it bugged me. I thanked the man for his help and left, thinking maybe the fresh air would clear my head.
It wasn’t until I’d crossed the street and was halfway to my car that I remembered where I’d heard the name of the lake before.
Actually, I didn’t remembering hearing it, I remembered seeing it. On the peeling, faded sign that hung above Cyril Parkus’ fireplace. The sign that said Big Rock Lake Resort.
I was so busy thinking, I didn’t see the guy sitting on the hood of my car until I was nearly standing in front of him.
And that’s when the guy, three hundred pounds of bad karma in a Grateful Dead tank-top and shorts, slid his huge ass off my car and stood up in front of me, resting a baseball bat on his shoulder.
Chapter Twenty-One
All the books and TV shows are very clear about what I was required to do in that situation: show no fear and come up with lots of smart ass remarks. I realized right away that acting on my instinct, which was to either run away or beg for mercy, wasn’t appropriate.
I tried to exude tough-guy calm which, at that moment, mainly consisted of suppressing my urge to whimper.
“I hear you’re looking for my brother,” the Neanderthal said, his voice full of menace.
“I was hoping word would get around,” I said, letting one hand slip behind my back. “You must be Little Billy.”
“You know why they call me Little Billy?”
“Because it’s supposed to be humorously ironic, given how big, fat, and stupid you are?”
Little Billy took a step toward me, but I held my ground, not so much because I’d mastered the tough-guy thing, but because I was petrified with fear.
“I got the name because a cop once snapped a billy club in half on my head and still couldn’t take me down.”
“It’s a shame about the brain damage, but at least you got a cute nickname,” I said, surprising myself. “Where’s Arlo?”
“I don’t know.” Little Billy grinned. “Then again, maybe I do.”
I grinned back. “Tell him I know how he found her and what he had on her. Tell him I want sixty percent of the action or I give everything I know to the cops.”
I didn’t know where the words and the grin were coming from. Maybe it was that big breakfast that did something to me. Or maybe it was my rest stop performance as Dirty Harvey. Whatever the reason, I was running on pure impulse. I hadn’t even stopped to think yet about how everything fit together, how Big Rock Lake connected to drugs, Lauren, Arlo, Cyril, and Seattle.
“What’s to stop me from shutting you up with this bat instead?” Little Billy asked.
“Why don’t you try and see for yourself?”
I said it with surprising self-confidence, which I really shouldn’t have had. In the bright light of day, I couldn’t be sure he’d be fooled by my BB gun or that I’d even be able to whip it out before he took off my head with his bat.
But like I said, I wasn’t thinking.
I walked past him, expecting to get whacked with that bat at any moment, but to my astonishment, he let me go unharmed. As I walked around to the driver’s side door of my car, I noticed the dent his ass had left on my hood and congratulated myself again for taking all the insurance that EconoCar had to offer.
I opened the door and glanced at Little Billy, who stood on the curb, tapping the end of his bat into his palm, staring at me with the flat, dead eyes of a shark.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.