Harper nods in the direction of his ex-wife, headed their way. “Trouble.”
He turns around, with Karen in his face within seconds. She shoves him in the chest, knocking his butt against the desk.
“What the fuck, Karen?”
Harper starts to move in on her, grab her in a headlock, and slam her down on the desk, but Stu gets in the way. “Stu—”
“I’ll handle this.”
Harper glances about—it’s no surprise everyone has stopped what they’re doing to watch the drama unfold. In her peripheral vision she can see Dudley hovering nervously, unsure what to do.
“You cheating bastard. What, you thought I wouldn’t find out, you son of a bitch?” Karen looks around him, eyes lighting on Harper. “This your new girlfriend?”
Harper comes around the desk, hands open in front of her in the most disarming gesture she can muster. “Karen, please calm down. There’s a time and place—”
Karen lunges for her. Stu is able to hold Karen back, but not before she reaches Harper’s hair. She pulls hard. Harper stumbles forward, regains her footing, holds her hair to prevent Karen from ripping it clean out. “Get her off!”
“I’m trying!” Stu yells. He’s grappling her around the waist, pulling her back, but Karen isn’t letting go. What’s more, she’s started to kick. Harper leans back, snarling at the pain, barely avoiding Karen’s shoe.
“Fuckin’ whore!”
Harper reaches up for Karen’s face, the side of her head, and then her hair. She grabs a big handful of it and tries to pull it from her head. Karen cries out in pain, which only makes her harden her grip. Stu inserts himself between them, and officers pile in, pulling the two women back from one another.
“I don’t know what you’ve been told,” Harper gasps, “but it’s bullshit.”
“You slept with my man, then he left me. It’s pretty simple!” Karen starts forward again, straining against the arms and hands holding her in place.
Captain Morelli’s voice booms across the office.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE!?”
Lester is eating cold spaghetti rings from the can with a fork.
He sits in his shorts, flicking his hand at the flies buzzing around his dinner. The TV booms out—an old black-and-white western he’s seen a dozen times before. He digs into the can, watching the screen, and almost shovels the spaghetti rings in without looking. But he stops, noticing that a big black fly has settled on the fork. It sits staring back at him, as if trying to determine what he is.
You gotta eat it all lester or no puddin’ . . .
Lester opens his mouth, rams the fork in, then clamps his tortured lips around it as he pulls it out. He has a mouthful of cold, slimy spaghetti rings and a juicy black fly trying desperately to get out. It buzzes against his cheek, rolls around his teeth, filling his mouth with its panic. Lester bites down hard, mushing the spaghetti rings together, missing the fly. He chews, misses it again.
He waits, clamps his jaws down. His teeth crunch on the fly, and he can taste it with the chemical-tainted tomato sauce the spaghetti is canned in. A few chews and he swallows the whole concoction, amused with himself, secretly hoping it’ll happen again someday.
See i knew you could do it what a big boy you are . . .
He grins stupidly to himself. “Thankf, Mama,” he says to the empty house.
The phone rings. Lester growls, throws the can down on the table, and storms over to the phone.
“Yeah?” he spits into the receiver.
“Lester . . . it’s Ceeli.”
“Feeli?” he asks, frowning.
She’s crying. “He’s coming for you, Lester. Mack knows. He’s coming up there. He knows everythin’. You’ve gotta—”
Lester slams the phone back in its cradle and heads for his bedroom.
Mack stops the car, looks up at the house on the hill. It reminds him of the summer night back when he was a teen, taking Christine Fogelhorn to the Hope’s Peak Cinema to see a midnight screening of Psycho. She worked at the diner and he’d been chatting her up for weeks, working his way toward asking her out. To his surprise she agreed.
They made out during the film, and he only caught glimpses of the movie in between getting his hand up her shirt, but he remembers the house. The weird, twisted way it seemed to jut from the landscape. As if the earth had spewed it out as something unwholesome.
Lester Simmons’s place is like that.
Mack goes to the trunk and retrieves the metal baseball bat he keeps there in case he finds himself in an unfavorable situation. He locks the car, wipes his nose on the back of his hand, and catches a glimpse of his knuckles as he does—the skin broken, fresh blood in the cracks. He wonders how Ceeli’s face looks. He wonders how he’ll explain it away if she calls the cops, and realizes he doesn’t give a shit.
There’s only one thing on his mind. Getting to Lester and giving him a good beating. Maybe smashing his balls so hard with the bat they swell and the doctors have to take them off.
Lester’s old truck is parked out front. He has all sorts of junk covering the backseat, but the front is clear. Mack goes to the house and is about to ring the doorbell when a thought occurs to him: Why announce yourself? Go in the back. Surprise the bastard.
Mack unlatches a gate and edges around the side of the house, holding the bat away from himself so that he can swing it at a moment’s notice. The backyard is a wild, overgrown tangle. There are rusted trash cans to his right, a similarly rusted set of swings to his left.
Must be from when the ugly little freak was a kid.
Ahead of him, the long, dry grass grows haphazardly. Crickets chirp all around him. The back of the yard is uneven; there is an old shed there, half rotten, its door open. Mack approaches it, wondering if Lester is in there. He holds the bat at the ready and peers around the open doorway. The dusty sunlight falls on one side of the shed. The wall in front of him is covered in newspaper clippings pasted to the wood. It has peeled, faded, and rotted away in places. Polaroids tacked to the wood among the clippings show black girls asleep. Mack cocks his head to one side, walking into the shed to get a better look. He pulls one of the Polaroids free. It’s pretty sun faded, but he can make out the girl’s face.
She isn’t asleep. She’s dead.
“What the—”
A creak behind him. Mack spins around. A tall, gangly man stands in the doorway wearing only his shorts. His head is covered in a white sheet. There is a brown leather belt around his neck, holding the sheet tight. The man looks out through two warped eyeholes, every breath sucking the material in and out, in and out.
Mack hesitates.
That’s all it takes.
Why do I feel like a little kid who’s been sent to the principal’s office?