NOS4A2 A Novel

Sam’s Gas & Sundries


VIC COULDN’T CRY OUT, COULDN’T SPEAK, BUT SHE DIDN’T NEED TO. The soldier saw her face and where she was looking and turned his head to see what had stopped at the pumps.

The driver climbed from the front seat and walked around the car to gas up.

“That guy?” the soldier asked. “The limo driver?”

Vic nodded.

“I don’t see a kid with him,” Lou said, craning his neck to look out the front picture window.

This was met by a moment of sickened silence, everyone in the store taking stock of what it might mean.

“Does he have a gun?” the soldier said.

“I don’t know,” Vic said. “I didn’t see one.”

The soldier turned and started toward the door.

His wife gave him a sharp look. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The soldier said, “What do you think?”

“You let the police handle it, Tom Priest.”

“I will. When they get here. But he’s not driving away before they do.”

“I’ll come with you, Tommy,” said the hefty man in the red-and-white-checked shirt. “I ought to be with you anyway. I’m the only man in this room got a badge in his pocket.”

Popeye lowered the mouthpiece of the phone, covered it with one hand, and said, “Alan, your badge says ‘Game Warden,’ and it looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack box.”

“It did not come out of a Cracker Jack box,” said Alan Warner, adjusting an invisible tie and raising his bushy silver eyebrows in an expression of mock rage. “I had to send away to a very respectable establishment for it. Got myself a squirt gun and a real pirate eye patch from the same place.”

“If you insist on going out there,” said Popeye, reaching under the counter, “take this with you.” And he set a big black .45 automatic next to the register, pushed it with one hand toward the game warden.

Alan Warner frowned at it and gave his head a little shake. “I better not. I don’t know how many deer I’ve put down, but I wouldn’t like to point a gun at no man. Tommy?”

The soldier named Tom Priest hesitated, then crossed the floor and hefted the .45. He turned it to check the safety.

“Thomas,” said the soldier’s wife. She jiggled their baby in her arms. “You have an eighteen-month-old child here. What are you going to do if that man pulls a pistol of his own?”

“Shoot him,” Tom said.

“Goddamn it,” she said, in a voice just louder than a whisper. “Goddamn it.”

He smiled . . . and when he did, he looked like a ten-year-old boy about to blow out his birthday candles.

“Cady. I have to go do this. I’m on active duty with the U.S. Army, and I’m authorized to enforce federal law. We just heard that this guy transported a minor across state lines, against her will. That’s kidnapping. I am obligated to put his ass on the ground and hold him for the civilian authorities. Now, that’s enough talk about it.”

“Why don’t we just wait for him to walk on in here and pay for his gas?” asked Popeye.

But Tom and the game warden, Alan, were moving together toward the door.

Alan glanced back. “We don’t know he won’t just drive away without paying. Stop your fretting. This is going to be fun. I haven’t had to tackle nobody since senior year.”

Lou Carmody swallowed thickly and said, “I’ll back your play,” and started after the two men.

The pretty blonde, Cady, caught his arm before he could make three steps. She probably saved Louis Carmody’s life.

“You’ve done enough. I want you to stay right here. You might have to get on the phone in a minute and tell your side of the story to the police,” she told him, in a voice that brooked no argument.

Lou sighed, in a shaky sort of way, and his shoulders went slack. He looked relieved, looked like he wanted to lie down. Vic thought she understood—heroism was exhausting business.

“Ladies,” Alan Warner said, nodding to Cady and Vic as he went by.

Tom Priest led the other man out the door and pulled it shut behind them, the little brass bell tinkling. Vic watched the whole thing from the front windows. They all did.

She saw Priest and Warner cross the asphalt, the soldier in the lead, carrying the .45 down by his right leg. The Rolls was on the far side of the pumps, and the driver had his back to the two men. He didn’t look around as they approached, continued filling the tank.

Tom Priest didn’t wait or attempt to explain himself. He put his hand in the center of Manx’s back and shoved him into the side of the car. He planted the barrel of the .45 against his back. Alan stood a safe distance away, behind Tom, between the two pumps, letting the soldier do the talking.

Charlie Manx tried to straighten up, but Priest shoved him into the car again, slamming him into the Wraith. The Rolls, built in Bristol in 1938 by a company that would soon be engineering tanks for the Royal Marines, did not so much as rock on its springs. Tom Priest’s sunburned face was a rigid, unfriendly mask. There was no hint of the child’s smile now; he looked like a vicious son of a bitch in jackboots and dog tags. He gave an order in a low voice, and slowly, slowly, Manx lifted his hands and set them on the roof of the Rolls-Royce.

Tom dipped his free left hand into the pocket of Manx’s black coat and removed some coins, a brass lighter, and a silver wallet. He set them on the roof of the car.

At that point there was a bang, or a thump, at the back end of the Rolls. It was forceful enough to shake the whole vehicle on its frame. Tom Priest glanced at Alan Warner.

“Alan,” Tom said—his voice was loud enough now that they could hear him inside. “Go around and get the keys out of the ignition. Let’s see what’s in the trunk.”

Alan nodded and started around the front of the car, pulling his hankie out to squeeze his nose. He made it to the driver’s-side door, where the window was open about eight inches, and reached in for the keys, and that was when things began to go wrong.

The window went up. No one was sitting in the car; there was no one to turn the crank. But the glass rose smoothly, all at once, slicing into Alan Warner’s arm, trapping it in place. Alan screamed, throwing his head back and shutting his eyes, rising up on his toes in pain.

Tom Priest glanced away from Charlie Manx for a moment—only one—and the passenger door flew open. It caught the soldier in the right side, knocked him into the pump, and turned him halfway around. The gun clattered across the blacktop. The car door seemed to have opened itself. From where Vic stood, it appeared no one had laid a hand on it. She thought, automatically, of Knight Rider, a show she had not watched in ten years, and the way Michael Knight’s slick Trans Am could drive itself, think for itself, eject people it didn’t like, open its doors for people it did.

Manx dropped his left hand and came up holding the gas hose. He cracked the metal nozzle into Tom’s head, banging him across the bridge of the nose and squeezing the trigger at the same time, so gasoline gushed into the soldier’s face, down the front of his fatigues.

Tom Priest issued a strangled cry and put his hands over his eyes. Manx hit him again, slamming the nozzle of the hose into the center of his head, as if trying to trepan him with it. Bright, clear gasoline flew, bubbled over Priest’s head.

Alan screamed and screamed again. The car began to creep forward, dragging him by the arm.

Priest tried to throw himself at Manx, but the tall man was already stepping back and out of the way, and Tom fell to all fours on the blacktop. Manx poured gasoline all down his back, soaking him as a man might water his lawn with a garden hose.

The objects on top of the car—the coins, the lighter—slid off as the car continued to roll gently forward. Manx reached and caught the bright brass lighter as effortlessly as a first baseman reaching for a lazy infield fly.

Someone shoved Vic from the left—Lou Carmody—and she staggered into the blonde named Cady. Cady was screaming her husband’s name, bent over almost double from the force of her own yells. The toddler in her arms was yelling too: Waddy, Waddy! The door flew open. Men spilled onto the porch. Vic’s view was momentarily obscured by people rushing past her.

When she could see the blacktop again, Manx had stepped back and flicked his lighter. He dropped it onto the soldier’s back, and Tom Priest ignited in a great blast of blue fire, which threw a burst of heat with enough force to rattle the windows of the store.

The Wraith was rolling steadily now, dragging the game warden named Alan Warner helplessly along with it. The fat man bellowed, punching his free hand against the door, as if he could pound it into letting him go. Some gasoline had splashed up the side of the car. The rear passenger-side tire was a churning hoop of flame.

Charlie Manx took another step back from the burning, writhing soldier and was hit from behind by one of the other customers, a skinny old man in suspenders. The two of them went down together. Lou Carmody leaped over them both, pulling off his jacket to throw it on Tom Priest’s flaming body.

The driver’s-side window abruptly went down, releasing Alan Warner, who dropped to the blacktop, half under the car. The Rolls thumped as it passed over him.

Sam Cleary, the store owner who looked like Popeye, rushed past Vic, holding a fire extinguisher.

Lou Carmody was hollering something, swinging his jacket into Tom Priest, beating at him. It was like he was swatting a stack of burning newspaper; big black flakes of ash drifted through the air. It was only later that Vic understood those were flakes of charbroiled skin.

The toddler in Cady’s arms slapped a chubby hand against the storefront window. “Hot! Hot Waddy!” Cady seemed to suddenly realize that her child could see everything and turned on her heel and carried him across the room, away from the window, sobbing as she fled.

The Rolls trundled another twenty feet before coming to a stop with the bumper against a telephone pole. Flames painted the whole back end, and if there was a child in the trunk, he would’ve been suffocated or burned to death, but there was no child in the trunk. There was a purse belonging to a woman named Cynthia McCauley, who had disappeared three days before from JFK Airport, along with her son Brad, but neither Brad nor Cynthia was ever seen again. No one could explain the thumping noise that had seemed to come from the rear of the car—like the window rolling up or the door flying open and smashing into Tom Priest, it seemed almost that the car had acted with a mind of its own.

Sam Cleary reached the two old men fighting on the ground and used the fire extinguisher for the first time, bringing it down two-handed to hit Charlie Manx in the face. He would use it for the second time on Tom Priest, not thirty seconds later, by which time Tom was well dead.

Not to mention well done.