Bentley Little - The Association

"I'm the best candidate, huh?" She snorted. "I don't know the real reason you're asking me to join, the real motive behind this farce, but I know you, Jasper Calhoun. I know all of you. Now get off my property and don't come back."

The smile had returned. "You're making a mistake, Elizabeth."

"It's mine to make."

They stared at each other.

Had she made the right decision? Her heart said yes but her head said no, and she closed the door on the president, hooking the chain lock and turning the deadbolt with trembling fingers, not daring to look through the peephole until she heard the old man's engine start up in the driveway, heard the clatter of gravel from underneath tires, heard the sound of Calhoun's Lexus fade away and disappear.

Barry finished the new novel in a weeklong frenzy of activity.

He sent off the manuscript via the post office's Overnight Express, and they celebrated the way they always did by getting ice cream sundaes, a ritual left over from their earlier, poorer days. The teenaged waitress who worked at Dairy King, the local Dairy Queen knockoff, either didn't know or didn't care that they were from Bonita Vista, and when Barry asked for extra nuts, the girl heaped them on. They ate outside on rickety metal tables under un adjustable umbrellas that completely failed to block out the mid afternoon sun, but the ice cream tasted all the better for the rough and uncomfortable surroundings.

On the way back, the Suburban's left rear tire blew out, and Barry crouched by the side of the highway for the better part of an hour, sweating and swearing, trying to loosen the undersized spare from the bottom of the vehicle and unscrew the seemingly cemented lug nuts from the blown tire's rim.

He finally finished putting on the spare, and he stood up, getting ready to toss the flat in the back of the vehicle, when a beer can tossed from a speeding El Camino nearly hit his head, missing by inches and splattering against the side of the Suburban. His clothes and hair were soaked with warm sticky liquid, and he heard a joyfully honked horn as the El Camino sped around a curve.

"Goddamn it!" he yelled. He angrily tossed the tire into the back and tried to wipe off his face, hands, and clothes with leftover napkins from Dairy King.

At home, the upstairs toilet had overflowed, although neither of them had been in that bathroom today. He used the plunger, and when he flushed everything was fine, but he worried that this might be the harbinger of septic tank difficulties, the first sign that they had a plumbing problem.

"Maybe you should call Mike or someone," Maureen suggested. "See if they know anything about this."

"Yeah," he said absently, but he wasn't really in the mood. He spent the rest of the afternoon mopping up the bathroom floor and washing the throw rug, leaving it on the upper deck to dry out.

It was a hot day and it segued into a hot night, and when they went to bed they left the windows open and turned on a fan.

They were undressing on their respective sides of the bed when, from the road outside, there came the sound of screeching brakes.

And a muffled thump.

"Jesus shit! Is this day ever going to end?" Barry pulled his pants back up, threw on his shirt, and stormed up the stairs.

He assumed that someone had hit a deer or javelina , and he expected to find a worried driver out of his car and checking the grill and front bumper for dents while an animal corpse lay on the asphalt illuminated by headlights, but that was not the sight that greeted him when he stepped outside.

It was a hit and run. The vehicle--whatever it was--was speeding away, down the hill, already lost in the pines, but in the last faint vestiges of red taillight glow, Barry saw a small crumpled form on the road. His first thought was that a child had been hit, and he ran down the driveway, legs j pumping as fast as they could. But halfway there, he knew it wasn't a child.

It was Stumpy.

Barry reached the street. The deformed man lay unmoving in the center of the roadway, his limbless body twisted into a shape that caused Barry's breath to catch in his throat.

He looked back toward the house and was grateful to see Maureen standing on the porch. "Call 911!" he screamed. "Stumpy's been run over!"

He felt for a pulse, placing his fingers on the clammy and heavily corded neck, but that was something he'd written about and seen in movies, not something he actually knew how to do, and though he felt nothing he was not sure if that was because Stumpy was dead or if it was due to his own medical ineptitude. He leaned down, placed his ear next to the open mouth, listening for the sound of breathing, but could not hear anything.

He knew enough not to move the body, but he didn't know CPR or any resuscitative techniques, and it wasn't until Maureen came out with her flashlight that he was certain Stumpy had been killed.

"He's dead," she told him. "There's no way he could've survived being run over like that. You can see where the tires went over him."

Indeed, now that he looked more closely, Barry saw blood seeping from beneath the body, saw pieces of intestine poking through rips and tears in the side of the callused torso. The eyes were staring glassily at nothing.

Just in case, Maureen bent down and felt the neck, touched the lips, pressed an ear to the chest, but in answer to Barry's quizzical look, she shook her head.

They were expecting a platoon of people: sheriff, deputies, firemen, ambulance drivers, medics, the whole gamut of emergency workers that such an incident would have brought out in a civilized area of the country. But ten minutes later a single ambulance pulled up, lights and siren off, and Sheriff Hitman emerged from the vehicle alone.Hitman walked toward them with a not particularly hurried gait, a notebook in his hand.

Barry pointed an accusing finger at Stumpy's body. "He's dead!"

The sheriff nodded curtly. "Yeah."

"You took your goddamn time getting here! And why aren't there any paramedics? How did you expect to revive him or treat him or ... or stabilize him?"

"I knew he was dead," Hitman said simply.

Barry wanted to punch the sheriff's reptilian face. He was filled with anger, but he knew that anger was only partially directed at the sheriff's dereliction of duty.

"I didn't say that he was dead when I called 911," Maureen pointed out.

"Yours wasn't the only call."

Barry looked over at Maureen, and they shared the same thought without saying a word. No one else was out this late, there were no other homes on this immediate section of the street, no crowd had gathered or onlookers had come by. The only other person who could have called it in was the driver who had hit him.

They told this to the sheriff and he dutifully took the information down, promising to trace the call and find out where it came from, but Barry had the feeling that Hitman would do no such thing. After describing how they'd heard the accident from inside the house and rushed out to find the body, the two of them stood next to each other and watched the sheriff lift Stumpy and deposit him into the rear of the ambulance. There was no stretcher, no body bag, just the naked battered corpse crumpled on the metal floor of the vehicle.

Hitman shut the double doors. "Thanks for all your help," he said without looking at them. He strode to the front of the ambulance, got in, and drove away.

"That was weird," Maureen said, stunned.

"No shit."

"He didn't even take photos of the crime scene or anything. Don't you think that stuff is pretty standard in any kind of investigation?"

"I don't know what to think," Barry admitted.

"What kind of sheriff is he?"

They walked back into the house, shutting and locking the door behind them. Once again, they undressed and got into bed, but as much as he tried to divert his mind to other subjects, Barry kept seeing Stumpy's broken body and dead staring eyes, kept feeling the clamminess of the man's rough skin, and it was a long, long time before he fell asleep.