Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Ricky loaded the back of his truck with poles and nets and beer and secured everything with rope and canvas straps. He had three tackle boxes, with the spoons and minnows and flies segregated according to time of day and type of fish. He even had a spear, which he always brought but never used. The idea of spearing a fish thrilled him, but fishing the regular way could be frustrating enough. He imagined himself knee-deep in a stream, poking fruitlessly at the water as trout and salmon detoured around him. It made him angry just thinking about it.

Peg was in a good mood. Three days – almost four – with Ricky out of the house would give her some much-needed time away from his chattering, his dreaming, his needling, his pressuring. Since the day that private detective showed up at their trailer and Ricky did, well, did what he had to do to protect their future, he had hardly let her out of his sight. It was a trying time for their marriage, and Peg asked him many times if he trusted her. Ricky always said that he did, but he kept close to the house and needed to know every detail of her schedule and called the store where Peg worked every evening at 5:05 to make sure she’d left for home. Lately he’d relaxed some, but this trip would be as much a vacation for Peg as it would be for Ricky. She’d already made plans with the girls for Friday night, with drinks and then maybe a trip to the place off the highway where they bring in the male strippers twice a month.

For the first time in almost a year, Peg felt like everything was going to be okay.

The “thing with the guy” (that was what they called it on the rare occasions when it had to be referred to out loud) had upped the stakes on their latest scheme. Someone was dead (accidentally, of course), and if they didn’t see some results from the Jimmy Spears plan, their killing him, all the risks they’d taken, would have been in vain.

Ricky never told Peg what he had done with the body (she had asked only once), but she knew Herman Tweedy had come and picked up the rental car. She assumed he was going to strip it down and sell off the parts. Through the kitchen window, she saw the two of them crawling in and out of it, with Ricky chattering on and on and the two of them laughing like they usually did when they got together. She didn’t figure Ricky had told Herman the truth. It would sadden her to find out he trusted Herman as much as he trusted his own wife. Besides, if they had been talking about the thing with the guy, it wouldn’t have been right for them to laugh so much.

Every morning, Ricky picked up the newspaper and turned to the sports pages. He wanted to be the first to know if anything happened to Jimmy Spears. Every day he expected to read that Jimmy had been killed in a car accident, or maimed in a botched mugging, or that he had mysteriously taken ill, possibly the result of poisoning. Every day he read through the sports news, and even scanned the listings of football injuries. For the editors of Sports Illustrated, he was certain that he could spin an on-the-field injury into some sort of conspiracy or revenge plot hatched by Judge Forak/Dr. Moore. Every day he was disappointed by the relative health of his famous classmate.

Peg suggested they look further into the history of this Dr. Moore, but Ricky was against it. Moore had already sent Phil Canella to silence them, he reasoned. There’s no use getting closer than necessary to such a dangerous man. The detective’s disappearance had sent a clear message. Ricky didn’t trust the sonofabitch and he didn’t want to deal with him anymore.

Ricky had instituted some home-crafted security measures around the trailer. He hung bells on all the doors and lined up flowerpots and tchotchkes along all the windowsills. He bought another gun, giving them four total, including the one he took off Canella, and placed them in evenly dispersed hiding places throughout their home.

Over Ricky’s objections Peg decided to learn as much as she could about their adversary, and found some old articles on Anna Kat’s murder on the computer at the Brixton Public Library. Reading them, she tried to imagine the horror of losing a daughter that way and tried to imagine Jimmy Spears in the act of such a savage crime. She couldn’t. But if he did it, she supposed he deserved to be dead, and said so to Ricky.

“No man gets to be judge, jury, and executioner,” Ricky said, ignoring for the moment that he was the one who put Davis Moore on the trail of Jimmy Spears in the first place. “What I did here, what we did – you know, the thing with the guy? – that there was self-defense. This Dr. Moore is hunting a man down in cold blood, and that’s another thing altogether. If he succeeds, it’s our duty to tell the world what we know.” Peg made copies of the articles and kept them in an envelope under her socks.

A few weeks ago, Peg had revisited the idea of blackmailing Jimmy Spears. “We’ll send him a letter saying we know what he did. Maybe we can get the money even if Jimmy doesn’t get killed.” They wrote the letter, but decided not to send it. “If they trace it back to us and then something really does happen to Jimmy, the whole deal will be blown,” Ricky said. “They’ll come after us and we’ll go to prison instead of Moore.” He didn’t rule it out as a plan B, however.

On the morning of the fishing trip, Peg stood at the door to the trailer and watched Ricky and Tim Pokorny climb into the cab of the truck. She waved good-bye, and Ricky smiled and pointed to her through the open window. As they turned out of the trailer park, Peg studied the door frame. For weeks after the thing with the guy, she had noticed dry brown specks inside the door, which she then cleaned with a paper towel and a bottle of spray bleach. Today she looked hard and even squatted on her knees to look in the least obvious places, but couldn’t find a single one.

Alone, she was almost giddy.

Joan’s examining room was not the spare, antiseptic cell most physicians maintain in deference to their patients’ germ phobias. Kids, Joan reasoned, are more afraid of doctors than they are of germs, and so her room, though no less clean, was painted in bright colors and had laminated (that is, washable) pictures of Disney characters on the wall. The examining table was bright purple, and the sanitary paper she pulled across it had cartoon balloons and Snoopys. The floor was literally dotted with appliques, the purple-polka-dot kind.

“What are you doing here?” Joan said to Davis when she walked in, a leather portfolio held flat against her stomach. Davis was lying on the Snoopy paper, reading a journal article, which he suspended above his face with his left hand. He hopped to his feet and pulled a new sheet of paper off its roll, tearing off the length he had just wrinkled and stuffing it in the garbage.

“Was wondering if I could sit in,” Davis said.

“On Justin’s physical?” Joan’s frown declared it a bad idea. “Why?”

“Just to observe. I read the report from his shrink. I guess the divorce has been tough on him.”

“Tough on any kid,” Joan said.

“Yeah, but especially tough on a kid like that.”

“Like what?” Joan baited.

“You know. Smart. Genetically predisposed to… whatever.”

“Wow,” Joan said with a dry lilt. “Is Davis Moore actually expressing concern for this child, instead of pawning that responsibility off on me?”

“Come on, Joan. You know I care about Justin.”

“Maybe,” she said, closing a drawer she noticed was ajar. “But that’s the first time I’ve heard you admit that Justin might have a genetic disposition to anything. Are you finally admitting to some second thoughts about this?”