Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Sully nodded. “Say you’ve got your girlfriend’s.”

Gert snorted. “I don’t run anywhere in a half-purple, half-yellow piece of shit that’s held together with duct tape. I just don’t.”

“Then?”

Gert’s eyes glazed over and crossed slightly as he dove deeper into his role as violent moron. “I’m scared and they gave me painkillers at the hospital, so I’m not thinking straight. I fall back on what I know.”

“You actually know something?”

“Home invasion. Among my few skills is an ability to put my elbow through a pane of glass without cutting myself too bad. Over time I’ve become something of an expert at reaching inside and unlocking doors by feel.”

“It’s broad daylight, though. Somebody might see you.”

“Point taken. Someplace out of town, then. A house with no neighbors.”

“Aren’t you worried the owners might return unexpectedly?”

“ They’re the ones should be worried. Because me? At this point, I really don’t have much to lose.”

Freddy, apparently feeling neglected, called from down the bar. “Gert! You hear they found Joe?”

Gert swam, blinking, back to the surface. Reality, Sully could tell, wasn’t nearly as compelling as the adventure he’d just been yanked from. “Where?”

“Lyin’ out in the woods. Somebody ran over the poor bastard, then dragged his body out there and left him to die.”

Gert shook his head. “I could’ve told him that straying so far from downtown Bath was a mistake.”

“They don’t think he’ll live,” Freddy said. “Who’d do something like that?”

“Some Spinmatic, probably,” Sully ventured.

Freddy chuckled appreciatively. “He never could fucking say ‘Hispanic.’ ”

“Unless…,” Gert said, lowering his voice and slipping back into character.

“Yeah?” Sully said.

“It’s just possible that under duress I remember my very first criminal endeavor, which even now, adjusted for inflation, is one of my biggest paydays. The old Sans Souci. I think to myself, Why not? It’s sitting out there in the woods, vacant, nobody to hear the glass shatter when I put my elbow through it.” Gert was smiling now, nodding. “The more I think about it, the better I like it. If I’m lucky, I buy myself a couple days. Maybe a week? After things die down, who knows? Maybe I make a clean getaway. Okay, probably not, but stranger things have happened.”

“You aren’t worried about the caretaker? A stray groundskeeper?”

“Not really. I’ve heard somewhere that security’s provided by a private firm out of Schuyler that swings by a couple times a day. Probably don’t go inside at all, and even if they do, so what? They’re going to check all two-hundred-plus rooms on the chance some dimwit like me might be hiding in one of them?”

Gert was regarding Sully seriously now, his eyes focused again. He shrugged. “Best I can do. Idiots can be hard to predict.”

“Thanks,” Sully said, meaning it. “If this pans out, I owe you.”

The kitchen window opened, and Sully’s breakfast rattled onto the sill. Gert set it down in front of him, along with cutlery wrapped in a paper napkin. “If it pans out,” he said, “that’s where they’ll find your body.”

With the food in front of him Sully found that he had something like an appetite, so he dug in. He’d eaten most of it when the phone on the backbar rang. Gert answered it, closing his eyes as if in pain. “Nah, he hasn’t been in,” he said. “I know…right…sure thing, Mrs. Gaghan. I’ll do that.”

Sully pushed his plate away, the linguica suddenly a hot poker under his breastbone. Or maybe it was the thought that if he hadn’t taunted Spinmatics Joe at the Horse last night, he would’ve remained on his stool and avoided the speeding motorist, and his wretched mother would still have a son.

“Here,” Gert said, and handed him a towel, having noticed that he’d broken into a sweat. “Spicy, that linguica.”

THE WEATHERED, off-white cargo van caught her attention when she arrived to open the store. Since Kreuner’s Country Market — a combination gas station / convenience store / car wash — had been held up twice in the past eighteen months, she was always alert for suspicious vehicles, though more so at night, around closing time, when the register was full. She might not have noticed the van at all if it hadn’t sat cockeyed beyond the car-wash bays where nobody ever parked. As always she pulled up beside the Dumpster out back, leaving the more convenient spaces in front for customers. Letting herself in through the rear entrance, she turned on just one bank of lights, enough to see by without announcing to every Tom, Dick and Harry that Kreuner’s was open for business. It took fifteen minutes or so to ready the register, reboot the gas pumps and start coffee brewing for the self-serve canisters. It was still percolating when people started lining up outside, anxious to get a cup for the short drive into Schuyler or the longer commute down the interstate to Albany. Inevitably one of them would peer inside, see her going about her business, rap on the door and point at his wristwatch. When this happened, even if it was a couple minutes early, she’d flip the switch that turned on the rotating sign and the overhead fluorescents, unlock the door and begin another day.

She described the driver of the cargo van as disheveled and sleepy eyed, as if he’d spent the night in there and was having a hard time coming fully awake. He claimed to have pulled in just a few minutes before her, then to have drifted off, waiting for her to open, but Karen — the attendant — doubted this was true, though she couldn’t say why anyone would lie about something so inconsequential. Nor could she explain why she felt wary about someone so determined to act friendly and harmless. Except for those sleepy eyes, she told Raymer, there was nothing special about how he looked or talked, though she thought maybe he was from somewhere down south. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt that was yellow and stretched at the collar and a baseball cap with some sort of circular logo she didn’t recognize. He’d bought coffee, orange juice, a crumb cake and a pack of cigarettes, then said something like Hey, you know what, as long as I’m here I might as well wash my van. Again she got the distinct impression he was deliberately trying to mislead her, but to what earthly purpose? It was as if the guy was biding his time, waiting for the other customers to leave, so it’d just be the two of them in the store. She wasn’t too worried, though, she said. She kept a can of Mace under the counter. Anyway, she must’ve been wrong about him, because they’d been alone at one point, and he hadn’t tried anything. He just paid up and washed his van and left.

Raymer asked if he paid with a credit card, and she said no, that he’d given her cash, which maybe was a little strange. These days most people paid for purchases of more than ten dollars with credit or debit cards. But even more odd, now that she thought about it, was how he’d backed his rig into the wash bay. She couldn’t remember a customer ever doing that before. It was almost like…

“Right,” Raymer said. It was almost like he didn’t want anybody to see the front of the van. “Which bay did he use?”

“The far one,” she said, which Raymer might’ve guessed.

Caught in that bay’s drain he found a sliver of thick brown glass that was a perfect match for the shards already in his evidence Baggie, and there were other, larger shards in the bottom of the trash bin.

“The mayor still wants to see you,” Charice informed him when he returned to the SUV.

“Tell him later. I’m busy.”