Norman Partridge - Dark Harvest

In the distance, Jarrett’s shotgun thunders again. God knows who’s got the damn thing now, because the butcher’s screaming like a guy who’s been skinned alive, and the sound of laughing boys does the same job on the night.

Twenty feet away… maybe thirty… Jerry Ricks cusses a blue streak.

“You just got lucky, McCormick!” he yells. “That’s right! I saw you, asshole… and I saw your little girlfriend, too! Right now I’ve got other fish to fry, but I’ll settle up with the both of you before this night’s over!”

The cop’s footsteps set a brittle rhythm as he runs to the prowl car.

The door slams. The big Dodge peels out.

Pete jams the.45 under his belt and helps Kelly to her feet.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

They follow the tracks about a quarter mile.

Pete can’t help looking over his shoulder, but no one’s behind them now.

Before long, a half dozen hard pops of pistol fire sound in the distance. Instantly, Pete pictures those last three kids going face down in the parking lot outside the market, and Jerry Ricks standing over them with a smoking pistol in his hand.

“That’s it for those guys,” Kelly says, as if she’s reading his mind.

She moves away from the tracks, cutting between a machine shop and a storage building owned by the railroad. Pete follows her into an alley that runs east-west. Without a word, they cut back toward Oak Street. The buildings are two-story here — square, brick and stone. Heavy cornices cut off the moonlight, but there are a few lights set above solid rear doors. Not one of those doors has a window, and most of them are marked with two stenciled words: DELIVERY ENTRANCE.

The alley runs parallel to Main Street, so Pete knows he’s looking at the rear entrances of the town’s largest businesses. He eyeballs each door as they pass, looking for a weak spot, but every one looks as solid as the last. Not that he’d trade the.45 for a million bucks with Jerry Ricks gunning for him, but right now he wishes he had a crowbar, something he could use to jimmy one of those doors.

It turns out Kelly’s got something a lot better than that.

She stops at a door marked THEATER EXIT ONLY.

She takes a key from her pocket and slips it into the lock.

In all the excitement, Pete forgot that Kelly’s uncle owns the movie theater. That’s where he first noticed her — working behind the concession stand during the summer. He even bought popcorn from her a couple of times, though he was too shy to say anything.

Pete’s pretty sure it won’t work that way tonight. They’re sitting in a couple of plush seats. Front row, balcony. The house lights are on, but awfully dim. Kelly’s already filled a plastic bag with ice from the snack bar, and she’s holding it against her ribs. She’s fixed up Pete pretty well, too. Brought him a couple candy bars that he gobbled like a hungry timber wolf. Now he’s working on a large Coke and a bucket of day-old popcorn. It’s taking the edge off that five-day hunger, but to tell the truth Pete’s thoughts aren’t focused on his belly anymore.

There’s only one thing he’s thinking about, really.

“That son of a bitch tried to kill us,” Pete says.

“Why do you seem surprised?” Kelly smiles. “After all, you broke into his house tonight and stole one of his guns.”

“He couldn’t know that yet.”

“Well, a guy like Ricks just has one gear. Maybe it doesn’t matter what you did.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Pete says, remembering the beating Ricks gave him with that nightstick. “I know all about Jerry Ricks.”

“Uh-uh. You might think you do, but you don’t.”

Pete’s brow wrinkles. As comments go, that one’s a blind-sider, and he remembers what the two football players said about the girl not making much sense. While Pete doesn’t want to put himself in the same IQ ballpark as Riley Blake and Marty Weston, he’s got to wonder if tonight’s events have his brain rattling around in his head a little more than usual.

“Maybe I’m a little thick,” he says. “If you’re trying to tell me something, I think you’ll have to spell it out.”

“Okay. Let’s try this — what do you know about me, Pete?”

“Well, I heard about your parents getting killed in a car accident — ”

“Uh-uh. That’s a lie.”

“What?”

“My parents were killed, all right, but not in any accident. One night last summer, three men showed up at our house. One of them was your buddy Jerry Ricks. The other two were Ralph Jarrett and some guy named Kirby… I think he works down at the grain elevator.

“They all had guns — they broke in on us right in the middle of Ed Sullivan. Kirby shot my mom, killed her before she even knew what was happening. Dad went after him, but he never even got close. Ricks got in his way. They fought, and my dad ended up on the ground, and then all three of them started in on him — ”

“Jesus.”

“I tried to run, but Jarrett caught me. I think I went a little crazy… I know he hit me with his pistol, and I passed out for a while.”

Kelly stops for a moment, swallowing hard. “When I came to, my dad was sitting in a chair. His face was a mess. Bruised, bloody… I could hardly make out what he was saying. Ricks and the other two were asking him questions about things I didn’t understand. I remember Jarrett asking my father if he really thought he’d get away with jumping the Line. My dad said, ‘Hell, I got away with it for nearly twenty years.’ They all just laughed at that, and Ricks told him that he’d have to pay the price now that they’d finally caught up with him.

“My dad asked them if they were from the Harvester’s Guild. I remember that. Ricks said, ‘Well, we’re not exactly from the 4-H.’ Then he said they were taking me with them to pay my father’s debt to the town. I remember what he said: ‘Blood will square the deal.’

“I was looking at my mom, there on the floor in a pool of her own blood, when Ricks said those words. And then he shot my father. Just like that. That bastard stuck a pistol in my father’s face, and he pulled the trigger, and — ”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Pete says.

“I can’t talk about it. In the end, they got what they wanted. They brought me back to town and left me at my uncle’s house. No one in the family told me anything. They wouldn’t even talk about what happened. I was terrified. It wasn’t the way you’d think it would be, even on days I managed to fight against it. It was like a sickness, the kind of feeling you’d never want inside you. And it kept crawling around in there. I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t think straight during the day. If I wasn’t thinking about things that already happened, I’d be worrying about things that hadn’t happened yet. It was awful.

“I didn’t start thinking straight until school started. That’s when I heard about the Run for the first time. I figured that maybe I could get away. While everyone was hunting the October Boy, I could sneak out of town. It seemed like a really good idea… until tonight. Those two idiots cornered me, and it seemed like my whole plan was over before I even managed to make three blocks. And that’s when I understood that nothing had changed — things were exactly the same as they’d been in our living room last summer when Ricks and those other two men broke through the door. All I could think about was how funny the whole thing was.”

“Funny?”

“Yeah. First me, thinking I’d figured everything out. And then everyone else…”

Kelly stops, shaking her head.