Richard Stark - The Jugger

He went on searching the place, for whatever he might find. The living room had nothing more beyond the thermostat and the telephone of interest to him. He poked and pried and found nothing. Nothing under the chairs, nothing under the sofa cushions or behind the small watercolor landscapes on the walls, nothing written or hidden in any of the few books on the shelf behind the sofa, nothing anywhere of interest.

Parker limited himself to looking in places he could get at without taking anything apart, so there still could be a million dollars in jewels hidden inside the sofa back or ten pounds of uncut heroin in the speaker cavity of the television set or several notes in invisible ink written on the lamp shades, but he doubted any of it. He finished the living room, found nothing, and went on.

Next was the bathroom, where the medicine cabinet told him Joe Sheer had been having physical trouble of all kinds in recent years, though maybe not heart disease. But, according to the junk in the medicine cabinet, he’d had piles and he’d been constipated and he’d had trouble sleeping and he’d had various troubles for which he’d been taking prescription medicines. Parker looked at the prescription bottles and they were all from the Five Corner Drug Store in Omaha, all with the name Dr. Quilley on them. According to the evidence of the medicine cabinet, Dr. Rayborn had never prescribed anything for Joe.

Before leaving the bathroom, Parker took the top off the water tank, because that was such a favorite place for people to hide things, either down in the water tank itself, wrapped in something waterproof, or taped to the inside of the top. This time there was nothing in either place.

The next room he went into was the spare bedroom, the smaller of the two. It had a bed, a dresser, a throw rug, and a kitchen chair in it, because Joe did, every once in a great while, have company that stayed over, somebody like Parker. He preferred most of the time to meet with his friends from his old life down in the apartment in Omaha, but every once in a while — particularly when the weather was good — he brought a house guest out to see him living the good life in the little town of Sagamore.

Now, the bed was made, the dresser was empty, and the closet was emptier. There was nothing in this room at all, no messages for Parker about anything. Except maybe that Joe hadn’t had any company that stayed over for some time.

Joe’s own bedroom was a different proposition. It wasn’t as neat as the rest of the house. From the looks of it, it could have been searched two or three times already, and every time by impatient slobs. But Parker knew this was normal, the way Joe had always kept his bedroom. The rest of the house could be neat and clean, and usually was, but his bedroom had to be a mess. Maybe it was because he’d taken one fall, back when he was young, and had spent four years sleeping in the barren metallic neatness of a jail cell.

It took a long time to go through Joe’s bedroom, and when he was done Parker had learned nothing. Throughout the whole house, nothing he knew of was missing except the thousand bucks from the flour canister. The telephone and utilities were still on, there was additional proof that Dr. Rayborn had been lying, and there was no sign at all that anyone else had made a search through here. He knew a few facts and no reasons.

There were still two places to look, the attic and the cellar. He stood in the central hall and considered, looking up at the trap-door in the ceiling but finally deciding to let the attic wait till last. He turned and opened the cellar door, and something with a sack over its head came lunging up out of the darkness, swinging something that whistled like the wind as it came around and smashed into the side of Parker’s head. Parker had time to feel his hand scrape along burlap, time to see the cellar stairs rushing in on a long curve towards him, getting bigger and bigger, and then he went out like a burned-out bulb.

The voice was a centipede, a long twisty bug with needle-sharp feet running back and forth on the left side of his face, driving its needle feet into the bone beside his eye and into his cheekbone and into the bone above his ear. His face hurt like fury; it hurt every time the voice sounded, and the voice sounded all the time. He thrashed a little in impotent rage, wanting the voice to stop hurting the side of his face.

Moving like that brought him up out of it a bit more, far enough out so he could begin to separate sensations, differentiate between hearing the voice in his ears and feeling the pains on the side of his face, begin to know they weren’t connected, not two parts of the same thing after all but just two separate sensations that had both helped to drag him back to consciousness.

From there, it was practically no step at all to come up far enough to begin to wonder what the voice was saying, and almost immediately to begin to separate the words and discover what they meant:

“... out of it. Come on, Willis, snap out of it. I don’t have all day. Get with it, fella, get with it.”

Now there was something else added to it all; somebody poking and pushing at his left shoulder. He complained, and moved around again, twisting on the concrete floor, and all at once he was out of it completely, eyes open, brain working. He sat up and stared into the face of Captain Younger.

They were in a basement, garishly lit by bare bulbs in fixtures along the central beam. The concrete floor was painted a greyish blue. Captain Younger was sitting on the next-to-the-bottom step of the stairs leading up to the main floor, and Parker had been lying on his back right in front of the stairs.

Captain Younger said, “You conscious now?”

Parker said, “I was slugged.”

“You sure you didn’t fall downstairs?”

Parker shrugged. He was still woozy, having trouble thinking, having trouble making things connect so they made sense. The best thing for now was to say not much of anything; otherwise he might say something stupid and make trouble for himself.

Captain Younger pointed and said, “You chopped up the side of your face there pretty good.”

Parker said nothing. He closed his eyes and tried to make his brain come into focus.

Captain Younger said, “Don’t pass out again. I got questions for you.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Like for instance,” Captain Younger said, “what were you digging for?”

Parker opened his eyes. “What?”

Captain Younger pointed off to the right. “What were you digging for, Willis? What were you trying to find?”

Parker turned his head, slowly, and looked over where the captain was pointing. There was a coal-bin over there, with wooden slat sides. There wasn’t any coal in the coal-bin, because the furnace had long since been converted to oil, and the concrete floor didn’t extend into the coal-bin. The coal-bin had a dirt floor, most of which had been dug into. A big mound of dirt was out on the concrete.

Captain Younger said, “Well?”

“I didn’t do that.”

“Come on, Willis, you think I’m stupid?”

Parker squinted up at him, trying to think. Younger wasn’t kidding around; he really did think Parker had done that digging. So Parker’s first thought, that Younger or somebody working for Younger had been down in the cellar and had slugged him, was probably wrong. There was somebody else in this, too, somebody Younger didn’t know anything about.

Tiftus? Could it possibly be Tiftus? Could that little bastard have been the one down here?

Captain Younger leaned forward, his round face inches from Parker’s. A thin sheen of perspiration covered his face, glinting like wet varnish. In a hoarser and quieter tone, he said, “I know what you’re looking for, Willis. I knew what you were up to the second you came to town. You found out the old bastard was dead and you figured to just come in here and have everything your own way.”