Norman Partridge - Dark Harvest

He steps around the counter separating the dining room from the kitchen. Man, it’s rank in there. A garbage can’s jammed in the corner by the back door. A couple of empty TV-dinner trays that have done double-duty as ashtrays stick up over the rim, and shoved to one side is a nest of hamburger wrappers occupied by greasy fries that look like they’re ready to start crawling.

The sight doesn’t exactly whet the appetite, but Pete’s so hungry it doesn’t much matter. He sets the machete on the sidebar, opens the fridge, and takes a quick inventory. There’s a carton of eggs, a jar of pickles, and a couple of apples that are on the far side of withered.

“Oh, man,” he whispers, but he keeps looking. A couple of sixes of Burgie, bottles of mustard and mayo and ketchup, and — here comes the clincher — a quart bottle of orange juice.

That’s it.

“Just my goddamn luck,” Pete whispers, because OJ’s the only thing he’s had in the last five days. Still, he grabs the bottle and twists off the top, taking a long swallow as he steps over to the cupboards above the sink. Gotta be something better in there. Pete opens the door, but all he sees is a box of oatmeal, some pancake mix, and —

Behind him, the doorbell rings.

Pete freezes. Standing right there in Jerry Ricks’s kitchen, with a bottle of OJ in his hand. He glances over the counter. He’s got a straight view from the kitchen, through the dining room, to the attached living room. The drapes are wide open in there, and the front window is only a couple of feet from the door. All the doorbell ringer has to do is take a couple steps to the left and they’ll be sure to spot Pete standing in front of the moonlit kitchen window.

So Pete moves quickly, trading the OJ for the machete as he steps into the dining room. The hallway that leads to the other side of the house lies just beyond. At least he’ll be out of sight if he heads down there….

The doorbell rings a second time. A floorboard creaks underfoot. Pete pauses. There’s a little smoked-glass window set at head level in the front door — the kind of glass you can’t see through clearly, but Pete can see well enough to tell that there’s a shadow on it. By the height, his guess is that the shadow belongs to a man… maybe a friend of Ricks’s… maybe another cop —

And Pete knows what the guy’s thinking, because there are only so many things you can think when you’re standing on the other side of someone’s door. Either the guy will leave in another second or two, or maybe — just maybe — he might try the doorknob to see if the door is unlocked.

Just when Pete’s sure that’s going to happen, the shadow disappears from the dimpled glass. Footsteps click against the concrete steps leading down to the walk. In a second Pete’s over at the living room window, just in time to spot a dark figure walking around to the driver’s side of a sleek black Cadillac parked at the curb.

The man climbs inside and starts the engine. The car pulls away. Pete hurries down the hall. Forget food. Even if Jerry Ricks had something worth eating, Pete couldn’t put anything in his stomach right now. He needs to find the thing he came for and get the hell out of here.

The first room Pete enters stinks just as bad as the kitchen. It’s Ricks’s bedroom. Cigarette butts are heaped in an ashtray by the bed. Dirty clothes lie on the floor, along with a couple of unfurled bandages that look like they were shed by a mummy — boxer’s hand wraps.

No sheets or blankets, just a tangled sleeping bag and a pillow without a pillowcase on the mattress. There’s a dresser on one wall, a nightstand in the corner. A bunch of junk in the dresser, and the only thing in the nightstand is a big stack of Playboy s. That’s not what Pete’s looking for, either, so he tries the closet. On one side, several police uniforms hang in dry-cleaner bags. On the other side, there’s a brand new vacuum cleaner, still in the box, with dust all over the top of it.

Jesus. Pete turns his back on Ricks’s disaster area of a bedroom. There’s another room at the end of the hall. That’s gotta be the place he’s looking for. He starts toward it, and he notices for the first time that the hallway walls are empty… so were the bedroom walls… so were the walls in the living room.

Every wall in this house is empty. There aren’t any pictures here at all.

But Pete doesn’t have time to wonder about that. He’s thinking about the room at the end of the hall instead. The door is closed… locked. Now he’s really rattled. Because he’s thinking about that guy in the black Cadillac, wondering if he might come back. And he’s wondering if maybe the guy was supposed to meet Ricks here, thinking that maybe Ricks might be a little late, maybe the lawman himself might be coming back any minute now —

Pete hauls back and kicks the door just below the knob. The molding splinters and the door flies open, banging against the wall with a thunderclap Pete’s certain they’ll hear at the police station a mile away.

No pictures in this room, either. Just a desk that looks like somebody’s castoff… a chair with torn upholstery that looks the same… another heaped ashtray… and over there, in the corner, the thing that Pete came looking for.

A locked cabinet.

Yeah. The cabinet’s the one piece of furniture in Jerry Ricks’s house that looks like it cost some money. It’s blond pine, polished to a heavy sheen, with a couple of grizzly bears painted on the locked doors. Those bears are reared up on their hind legs, teeth bared, claws slashing through forest green.

The grizzlies stop Pete cold, just for a second. He’s not sure exactly why. Because now he’s absolutely sure that the thing he needs is penned up in that cabinet, the same way he’d been penned up in his goddamn bedroom for five days and nights.

That thing is quiet.

It doesn’t say a word.

But it can talk, all right.

It can talk in a way nothing alive can ignore.

Pete clenches his teeth and works fast. The machete flashes out, scoring polished wood. Pine slivers fly through the air like needles. A door panel shatters, and Pete tears it loose. A couple seconds later, the lock and its hasp clatter to the hardwood floor, and he’s inside the cabinet.

A couple minutes after that, Pete backtracks through the kitchen, through the back door, across that dead lawn….

His father’s machete is buried in one of Jerry Ricks’s empty walls.

A stolen.45 semiautomatic is gripped in Pete McCormick’s hand.

Pete hops the back fence. His Chucks crunch over gravel as he runs up the alley. That gun feels solid in his hand, but it’s not the.45 that’s driving him. Pete’s doing that job all by himself now. The way he sees it, tonight’s his only chance at a fresh start, and he’s going to grab it.

You want to put a tiger in your tank, that’ll do the job. Our buddy Pete’s all gassed up and ready to go. You remember how that feels. It’s been a long time for you, but you can’t forget, not once you’ve made the Run on Halloween night. So you’ve got a pretty solid idea of the tracks Pete’s laying down as we follow him up a dark street that heads out of Jerry Ricks’s neighborhood. That boy’s motoring, all right, but he can’t keep our pace.

Not now, not where we’re going. Which is straight out of town, like a witch riding a broomstick. We leave our buddy Pete in the dust, whipsawing through the poor side of town and across the tracks, flying so low that the painted line on that black asphalt smears into a yellow streak that marks the whole town for a coward. We pass that movie theater with the Vincent Price double-bill. We blow by that old brick church in the town square. Like a wild stitch of midnight we weave through a crowd of teens prowling Main Street, and they look straight at us but don’t see more than a ripple of shadow and the swirling twist of a dust devil it leaves behind.