Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

When he was gone, I knocked on the peeling paint of the front door.

“Jesus Christ!” said Bobby Gentle when he saw me, and jumped back into his shabby living room, then darted out of sight. That was the kind of reaction I was used to. I felt better already.

“Don’t bother getting out a gun,” I called after him. “I don’t mean you any harm, but I am armed and I’m probably a better shot than you are. I just want to talk.” I looked around the living room. The place was a mess, cigarette butts and beer bottles everywhere, along with greasy fast-food wrappers, month’s worth. A couple of not-very-good seascapes hung on the nicotine-stained walls. If they were Gentle’s, I knew why he wasn’t selling much.

He came out of the back room slowly, his hands open wide. He hadn’t been able to find the gun, anyway.

“Swear you ain’t gonna hurt me?”

“I promise. Sit down.”

He squinted. “What the hell are you? Some kinda lobster-man? You ain’t gonna pinch me with that claw, are you?”

Gentle Senior was a piece of work, no doubt about it. He stank of booze and it wasn’t even noon yet, so I figured he must be sweating it out of every pore. He was as pale as his son, but without the excuse of having had all the blood pumped out of him. I kind of doubted he’d been outside more than a couple of times in the last six months. His hair was long in the back, thin on the top, and stringy and greasy all over and he hadn’t killed himself keeping up with his shaving, either. Still, the last week couldn’t have been easy on anyone. “Sorry about your son,” I said. “Rufino, that was his name, right?”

“Yeah. His mama named him after some famous spick painter. Before she took off and left me. But I got the boy back off her. Went to court for it.” For a moment his angry little red eyes lost what focus they’d had. “Bitch wasn’t taking my boy to live in some commune full of tofu-eating losers.”

Tempting as it was, I didn’t really want to spend the whole day with this charmer. “I’ll cut to the chase, Mr. Gentle. You’ve just had a visit from Grayson Thursday. I suspect it has something to do with your son’s death. Would you mind telling me what he saw you about?”

He looked at me in surprise and confusion, then his pale skin turned almost as red as mine. Before I could react, he bolted out of the living room and down the hall. He pulled a door shut behind him and locked it. I was patting my pockets for a lockpick when I looked again at the state of the rest of the place, then I just broke off the knob.

The bathroom was empty except for a stack of Hustler magazines beside the toilet and an ancient no-pest strip dangling from the lightbulb. The window was open, the screen kicked out.

I caught him in the woods a hundred yards away. He was pretty fast for a rummy, but for some reason he was carrying a suitcase, and I can get this bulk of mine moving pretty quick when I want to.

“No!” he screamed when he saw me, and threw the suitcase end over end into the deep undergrowth. “You can’t have it! I never got anything else for him! All that boy ever did was cost me! You can’t take it away!”

I picked him up by one arm and let him sway in the wind a little bit until he stopped yelling and started whimpering. “What are you talking about? Why did you run away? What did you throw?”

He stared at me, or did his best to focus in my direction, anyway. “You don’t want to take it away from me? You’re not going to steal it?” He grimaced. “Damn! I shoulda kept my big mouth shut!”

“I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve said those words — and I’ll bet it won’t be the last.” I put my face really close to his, doing my best not to breathe in. “Now, if you don’t want me to swing you around in a circle until this arm of yours comes off, you’d better tell me what you’re babbling about.”

“The money Mr. Thursday gave me. It was ‘cause my boy died! He said so! There’s no crime in me having it!”

I shook my head. “He gave you money? How much?”

Now his eyes got shifty. “I don’t know. A couple of thousand…”

I lifted him higher. I heard something pop in his shoulder and he shrieked. “Don’t lie to me, Gentle.”

“A hundred thousand! He said it was a hundred thousand!”

I set him down. A hundred thousand? That was crazy. “Go get it.”

He came back with the suitcase cradled in his arms. I swear he was tearing up at the thought I was going to take it off him. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever expressed that much care and concern for his own son. “Open it,” I told him. He did. If it wasn’t a hundred thousand dollars, you could have fooled me. Stacks of new bills, side by side. I made a face and turned around, heading back toward the road. This whole thing was pissing me off.

“So…I can keep it?” he called.

“Far as I’m concerned. But you’d better keep your mouth shut about it or someone less genteel than me will come out here and take it away from you.”

Last I saw of him he was scurrying back toward his falling-down house, suitcase once more gripped tight against his chest.

It was well into the afternoon by the time I had hiked back to Albie’s mobile home. He met me at the front door.

“Guess what I found out,” he said. “Oh, and do you want some chili? I was just going to heat some up.”

“Later,” I said. “And you can tell me what you found out while you’re driving me back into town. We’re going to talk with that lying son of a gun Thursday before he takes off again.”

“Why’s he a liar?” Albie asked as he maneuvered his car out onto the main road.

“You remember him saying the murder was nothing to do with him, right? Well, he was just over at Bobby Gentle’s place and gave the guy a hundred thousand dollars. Does that sound like nothing-to-do-with-me money? Or like some kind of payoff instead?”

Albie whistled. “I never knew my little town was so exciting.”

I scowled. “In my business, there’s a thin line between ‘exciting’ and ‘multiple fatalities,’ and I hope we stay on one side of it.”

Nobody was in at the office, so I sent Albie into the coffee shop to buy me a couple of burgers and we sat in the car and ate while we kept a watch on the place. “So what did you find?” I asked him.

He handed me a stack of green print-out pages about the width of my thumb. My bigger thumb. “I pulled every story I could on weird stuff happening near that house, going back to the monastery days. There are lots of Indian legends, but they didn’t have what we’re looking for, of course…”

“And?”

“And guess what I found. Almost every single murder, UFO sighting, public panic, you name it, for the last hundred and forty years, happened on…”

“Thursday,” I said.

“Well, no. But you were half-right.”

I was stunned — my theory had just been shot to hell. I squinted at the print-out. “What do you mean?”

“Look. A few did happen on Thursday, or at least that’s when they were reported. And a few seemed to have happened on Tuesdays. But almost every other freaky thing — dozens of them — happened on a Wednesday, between midnight and midnight. Which, if you remember, was also when the Gentle kid must have died.”

So it wasn’t back to square one, after all. I felt mighty relieved. But it probably meant I was going to be spending at least another week on this one, so I was a bit disappointed, too. “Wednesday, huh?”

“Thursday.”

Now I was losing my temper. “But you just said…!”

“No, I mean that’s Thursday — over there.” He pointed to where a silky black Mercedes was just pulling into the reserved parking space in front of the office. “He’s back.”