“Do you know if there’s a supermarket in this mall?”
The voice is young. And white. Morris discovers he can breathe again. “Safeway,” he says, without turning. He has no idea if there’s a supermarket in the mall or not.
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
Morris gets into the truck and starts the engine. I can do this, he thinks.
I can and I will.
26
Morris cruises slowly through the Northfield tree streets that were his old stomping grounds—not that he ever did much stomping; usually he had his nose in a book. It’s still too early, so he parks on Elm for awhile. There’s a dusty old map in the glove compartment, and he pretends to read it. After twenty minutes or so, he drives over to Maple and does the same thing. Then down to the local Zoney’s Go-Mart, where he bought snacks as a kid. Also cigarettes for his father. That was back in the day when a pack cost forty cents and kids buying smokes for their parents was taken for granted. He gets a Slushie and makes it last. Then he moves onto Palm Street and goes back to pretend map reading. The shadows are lengthening, but oh so slowly.
Should have brought a book, he thinks, then thinks No—a man with a map looks okay, somehow, but a man reading a book in an old truck would probably look like a potential child molester.
Is that paranoid or smart? He can no longer tell. All he knows for sure is that the notebooks are close now. They’re pinging like a sonar blip.
Little by little, the long light of this June evening mellows to dusk. The kids who’ve been playing on sidewalks and front lawns go inside to watch TV or play video games or spend an educational evening texting various misspelled messages and dumbass emoticons to their friends.
Confident that McFarland is nowhere near (although not completely confident), Morris keys the panel truck’s engine and drives slowly to his final destination: the Birch Street Rec, where he used to go when the Garner Street branch of the library was closed. Skinny, bookish, with a regrettable tendency to run his mouth, he rarely got picked for the outdoor games, and almost always got yelled at on the few occasions when he did: hey butterfingers, hey dumbo, hey fumblebutt. Because of his red lips, he earned the nickname Revlon. When he went to the Rec, he mostly stayed indoors, reading or maybe putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Now the city has shut the old brick building down and put it up for sale in the wake of municipal budget cuts.
A few boys toss up a few final baskets on the weedy courts out back, but there are no longer outside lights and they beat feet when it’s too dark to see, yelling and dribbling and shooting passes back and forth. When they’re gone, Morris starts the truck and pulls into the driveway running alongside the building. He does it without turning on his headlights, and the little black truck is exactly the right color for this kind of work. He snuggles it up to the rear of the building, where a faded sign still reads RESERVED FOR REC DEPT. VEHICLES. He kills the engine, gets out, and smells the June air, redolent of grass and clover. He can hear crickets, and the drone of traffic on the city bypass, but otherwise the newly fallen night is his.
Fuck you, Mr. McFarland, he thinks. Fuck you very much.
He gets his tools and Tuff Totes from the back of the truck and starts toward the tangle of unimproved ground beyond the baseball field where he dropped so many easy pop flies. Then an idea strikes him and he turns back. He braces a palm on the old brick, still warm from the heat of the day, slides down to a crouch, and pulls some weeds so he can peer through one of the basement windows. These haven’t been boarded up. The moon has just risen, orange and full. It lends enough light for him to see folding chairs, card tables, and heaps of boxes.
Morris has planned on bringing the notebooks back to his room in Bugshit Manor, but that’s risky; Mr. McFarland can search his room anytime he pleases, it’s part of the deal. The Rec is a lot closer to where the notebooks are buried, and the basement, where all sorts of useless bric-a-brac has already been stored, would be the perfect hiding place. It might be possible to rathole most of them here, only taking a few at a time back to his room, where he could read them. Morris is skinny enough to fit through this window, although he might have to wriggle a bit, and how hard could it be to bust the thumb-lock he sees on the inside of the window and pry it up? A screwdriver would probably do the trick. He doesn’t have one, but there are plenty at Home Depot. He even saw a small display of tools when he was in Zoney’s.
He leans closer to the dirty window, studying it. He knows to look for alarm tapes (the state penitentiary is a very educational place when it comes to breaking and entering), but he doesn’t see any. Only suppose the alarm uses contact points, instead? He wouldn’t see those, and he might not hear the alarm, either. Some of them are silent.
Morris looks a little longer, then reluctantly gets to his feet. It doesn’t seem likely to him that an old building like this one is alarmed—the valuable stuff has no doubt been moved elsewhere long ago—but he doesn’t dare take the chance.
Better to stick with the original plan.
He grabs his tools and his duffel bags and once more starts for the overgrown waste ground, careful to skirt the ballfield. He’s not going there, uh-uh, no way. The moon will help him once he’s in the undergrowth, but out in the open, the world looks like a brightly lighted stage.
The potato chip bag that helped him last time is gone, and it takes awhile to find the path again. Morris beats back and forth through the undergrowth beyond right field (the site of several childhood humiliations), finally rediscovers it, and sets off. When he hears the faint chuckle of the stream, he has to restrain himself from breaking into a run.
Times have been hard, he thinks. There could be people sleeping in here, homeless people. If one of them sees me—
If one of them sees him, he’ll use the hatchet. No hesitation. Mr. McFarland may think he’s too old to be a wolf, but what his parole officer doesn’t know is that Morris has already killed three people, and driving a car isn’t the only thing that’s like riding a bike.
27