Jeffery Deaver - Shallow Graves

"What 'thing' with Sam?"

"Well, the boy disappearing. Is that what you're calling about?"

"What happened?"

"The boys had a study group outside, the weather was so nice. About a half hour later the teachers noticed Sam was gone. We called Meg but she wasn't home-"

Bailing out that asshole from the movie company.

"-and we called Keith."

"At his office?"

"Right. He was about to leave but then Sam came back. He was upset about something but wouldn't say what. Mrs Ernhelt had a talk with him about going away without saying anything and he seemed okay. It really wasn't anything."

"What time was this, Reverend?"

"I don't know for sure. About nine forty-five or ten."

Brother…

"All right, sir, thank you."

"Can you tell me what this is all about?"

"Nothing important. 'Night."

The deputy finally said what he'd apparently been eager to say for some time. "Tom, if somebody gave my kid drugs like that I'da done something to him too. Maybe not killed him. But I'da done something. You can't hardly blame Keith."

"The minister called Keith when Sam disappeared. He was in his office." Before the deputy could nod in relief Tom said, "But his boy wasn't accounted for."

"Sam? Come on, you're not thinking…" But the man's voice faded.

Trash.

The mystery of what lay behind the stockade fence at R &W was solved: not surplus, not salvage. Forget about antiques. Not even good junk.

Robert and William owned a trashyard and nothing but.

Pellam had circled far around the back of R &W and was slowly moving through the woods. Unlike the pristine woods surrounding Ambler's house, the air here was raw, pungent, ripe. He smelled garbage and methane, which filled his throat and made him gag. Several times he had to swallow down nausea. Under the dim moonlight, halved by mist, he felt he was plodding through a dead animal's viscera. The ground under his boots was slick and pasty.

He came to the foothills of the junkyard: A doorless refrigerator on its side then ten yards further along, amputated pieces of laminated furniture, plush toys, books, tangles of wire, hunks of iron losing shape to oxidation.

Twenty yards more and he came to the boundary of R &W. He'd brought a small bolt cutter and though he saw now at one time there had been a cheap chain link enclosing a portion of the yard it had long ago sagged or been pulled down by vandals or gravity. Pellam stuffed the cutter into his back pocket and hopped over an indented portion of the fence.

He paused and listened for dogs.

Nothing. No voices either. Just the sour smell and a tangle of vague moonlight reflecting off a thousand varied surfaces. Pellam walked forward slowly toward the shack that must have been the office of the place, looking for footholds through the maze of scabby, broken trash.

Pellam pressed his back against the shack. He looked quickly in the window then ducked below the sill. Empty. He looked again.

A filthy place. Fast food cartons, empty beer cans, more magazines (he expected Penthouses but all he could see were National Geographics, Cosmopolitans and Readers' Digests), moldy and stained clothes. Books, dishes, newspapers, slips of paper, boxes.

He also saw two leather guncases in the corner.

He looked around, then tried the window. It was locked. Pellam took the bolt cutter and whacked out a pane of glass, reached up and undid the latch. He lifted the window and after a struggle to boost himself up, the pain shooting from his thigh to his ribs to his jaw, he half-fell and half-climbed over the windowsill.

He listened for a moment. And heard nothing but the rustle of a car moving by. He walked quickly to the corner, and hefted one of the gun cases. Inside was a Colt AR15, the civilian version of the Army M-l6.

The other case held the.300 magnum Beretta.

A simple-looking gun, a bolt-action. Walnut stock, dark blued metal, a black shoulder guard, a high-riding telescopic sight. There were no iron sights; it was a sniper's gun. The shells Sam had found fit it perfectly.

Cinderella's slipper.

Was it proof enough? Pellam didn't know. His only bout with the law had been on the other side (and from there it looked pretty damn easy to get yourself arrested and convicted). Pellam replaced the gun then began looking through desk drawers, the closet, the battered olive-drab rucksacks stacked on the back wall.

Which is where they had the drugs hidden.

Thousands of little tubes like the kind crack came in. Must've been five, six thousand of them. And inside each one was a little crystal like the doctor had showed them, the crystals someone had given Sam. A little piece of rock candy.

That solved the probable cause problem. If the gun didn't do it then this ought to.

A car went by. It seemed to slow and he quickly shoved the bags back into place, drew his pistol. Then after a moment, when the car was past, Pellam knelt and opened the rucksack again.

"Nekkid," Bobby said. His brother nodded.

They were in the Cleary Inn, eating prime rib. It was a pretty ritzy place for Dutchess County. Not as damn countryish as most places, the inn was filled with chrome and mirrors and plastic all shoved together and cemented down with plenty of money. The twins sat at a table with red linen tablecloths; in their laps were thick napkins that left whitecaps of lint on their matching dark slacks.

They may have owned a junkyard but these boys loved to eat and didn't mind pampering themselves. A goodly part of the money they made-from the drugs, of course, since they'd had a loss on the junkyard every year they'd operated it-a goodly part of that income went into their mouths. Disposable income. ("We own a junkyard-all our income's disposable! Ha, ha, ha.")

Tonight their fingernails were perfectly clean and under the aroma of coal tar shampoo they smelled sweet as the perfume aisle of a CVS Pharmacy.

Bobby said, "So there I was, nekkid as a jaybird." He paused, wondering what a jaybird was exactly. "And the shades were up. She couldn't've been more than fifteen feet away. In the backyard."

"Fifteen feet."

"In a white bra. Like torpedo tits."

"This's a dumb shit story."

"No, no, no," Bobby said. "It gets better."

Billy said, "It ain't got good yet. How can it get better?"

Bobby paused to eat his Yorkshire pudding, which was new on the menu. He'd never had it before. Well, pudding it wasn't. It was like a pancake that got out of hand. Bobby thought he could show the cook here a thing or two about making pancakes.

Billy ate some more Caesar salad.

Bobby continued, "Then she kind of waves. Only it was, she didn't want to come right out and wave. You know, that kind of wave."

Billy chewed.

"And the next thing, I'm turning around to face her full and she was looking at my ding-dong, smiling."

Billy said, "You talk more about that thang than you use it."

"I sure did use it that night," Bobby said. Then, after another triangle of Yorkshire pudding disappeared into his mouth: "How long is he going to be there?"

He didn't explain that he was talking about Pellam being at the Torrens place (they'd seen the camper on their way to the Inn) but Billy knew that's what his brother was talking about.

"I don't know. How would I know?"

Bobby said, "So, we're just going to do it? It'll look kind of obvious, won't it? First his friend in the car. Then him."

"Uhm," Billy muttered and didn't say anything more. Not because he was chewing salad but because he was thinking.

Bobby looked at a twelve-point mounted above a smoky-glass fireplace. It was weird to have a trophy in a restaurant that looked like it ought to be on Fort Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn or someplace in Paramus, New Jersey. He studied the animal's dead eyes and slick fur and he began salivating, imagining that he could smell fresh morning air and feel November stub grass under his boots, the heft of a good rifle in his hands.