One pissed-off wolverine...
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jeff snored softly in his chair…
Jeff snored softly in a chair dragged out to the shed from Harry’s basement.
The rifle lay across his lap. The prisoner was quiet. He slumped there in some indeterminate state, for quite some time. It was the middle of the night. The only clue to the late hour was the paucity of traffic on the two-lane blacktop highway out in front of the farmhouses that lined this section of concession or side-road, whichever it was.
Jean Gagnon had withdrawn into a dreamlike state where he didn’t feel anything but numb. His mind flexed, and focused, and visualized, and then he went up into the sky to survey the scene as best he could without actual visual feedback. The impression he got, all five or even six senses tuned into one common goal, was an impression of cold, wet wind, a dark, low sky, and a humming, roaring, widely-spread group of noises off to his right. It was probably the town, and he imagined a deep amber glare on the bottoms of the clouds over there. In the morning, the school buses went one way first, then back the other. At night, they came along from the exact same direction.
They were all simple deductions. How far could it be? How long in the truck had it taken to get here? The boys had quickly blindfolded him, but even so. Sometimes you didn’t need eyes to see with. It was all laid out for you.
Earlier today, the snow-plow came from over there, and went over there. Add it to the database. Build an accurate picture of the immediate area by sound and thought alone.
There would be forest out back, and then some broken hills, creeks, and gullies.
There was no time like the present. Considering what his head felt like, there was no time to be wasted in analysis. Sooner or later they would be back. He estimated the whole damn bunch of them would be back with fucking coffees, about seven in the morning. They would feed him then, but he didn’t intend to wait. They were always more alert and wide-awake after eating. They would be back, one way or another. Just to look at their handiwork, and to congratulate themselves on finding the nerve, and convincing themselves that this was real.
He had to make a decision, not an easy one, but vital under the circumstances. He sure would hate to see anything bad happen to these fellows, but he would have to take the risk implied by escape. To attempt and fail would be to accept another beating, or worse.
The choice was a tough one. You had to be careful what you wished for sometimes.
He withdrew deep into the recesses of his very being and got in touch with his actual, living soul, as he had learned, quite by accident, so many years ago. He withdrew from conscious thought and into the core of self, where the ego and the subconscious mind peacefully co-exist, at least when they are not at war. His mind became a warm black pit, swirling with stars, galaxies, and everything in the cosmos, and he subsided into it, floating on a blood-red sea, where he contemplated the three most abstract objects, the red box, the blue sphere and the four-sided yellow-golden pyramid. His mind focused on the most universal of all abstract forms until he could pick them up and feel the weight of them, touching the hardness, the smooth-polished surfaces…
As Jeff snored in his chair across the room, Jean Gagnon’s breathing slowed, his chest stopped rising and falling in any discernable way. He slumped, jaw slack, with drool coming out and down his chin. A shudder wracked his frame, and then his clothing began to move, and mobilize, and shift around on the lumpen sack that was the body of Gagnon, tied in his hard wooden chair with furlongs of wet, stout ropes, stinking of booze and blood and sweat and piss.
His head started to cave into his body. Proceeding slowly at first, the transformation accelerated. His feet withdrew and retracted up and out of his boots and into his pant legs. His hands disappeared, up into his sleeves. His grimy clothes were seemingly half-empty now, writhing and twisting in and on and of themselves as if taking on a life of their own.
A sock fell to the cold, wet floor beside his boots.
A thin wisp of blue vapour rose up in curlicues and arabesque shapes in the dim light of the single forty-watt bulb. The clothing squirmed into a new shape on the chair, as the ropes fell limp and slack all around what remained of Jean Gagnon.
The being that emerged bore no resemblance to the human male whose body it had once inhabited. While his mass was roughly similar, simply changing shape had made the loops and toils of manila rope ineffectual and redundant. He was out, now all he needed was luck, and a thin slice of time. Jean Gagnon climbed silently down from the chair, and in his new manifestation as an angry wolverine, he briefly considered cleaving the stupid bastard while he slept. A single slash of his three-inch claws would kill the man silently if not cleanly.
One would wake up long enough to know he had been freshly-killed. But Jean still couldn’t bring himself to do it. The best thing to do was to change back, and get the clothes on, as he carefully sniffed at the latch. With his paws, it would be touch and go to open it silently. A double change would take a lot out of him. This had better be good. But if the guy woke up and pointed the gun at him, he’d kill him quicker than quick and deader than dead. That was only rational. He owed himself that much, for Christ’s sakes.
Then came a thud and a thump from the house, which was always a prelude to the click and snap of the shed’s door handle. He was out of time. Jean Gagnon’s front paws reached for the door latch of the shed, hoping against hope that he could get out of there quickly. The limp figure of Jeff McCabe snored on, sanguine in his deeply-rooted self-esteem. His subconscious mind ignored the small noises Jean made as he escaped.
***
Journalism is only the first draft of history.
Polly and Nathan were chatting on the phone.
“Well, it says in the paper that Jean is seriously disturbed, and I’m a little worried about you if he comes home,” Nathan said.
He had phoned to confirm that they were going dancing Saturday night, but the pair fell into a wider conversation, encompassing a lot of local gossip. Their own personal stories had not unnaturally come up.
“Journalism is only the first draft of history.” Polly reminded Nathan. “They can do a lot of harm before the real truth comes out. The human brain is a judgment machine.”
“Flight is evidence of guilt.” Nathan had his concerns. “But I don’t want to ruin our date before it even gets started. Let’s not talk about this anymore. Just promise that if he does come home, you’ll call the police straight away.”
“I pretty much have to. The constable that was here earlier, practically threatened to throw me in jail if I didn’t.” Polly said it in pure disgust.
She knew Jean hadn’t done anything, but the townspeople weren’t waiting for a trial or evidence, or even a body to turn up.
“Jean didn’t have anything to do with it. I think he’s at his girlfriend’s house, and maybe she doesn’t get the paper.”
“Surely they would have seen something about it on TV.” Nathan didn’t want to be too crude. “Surely they can’t be busy screwing, every single minute of every day.”
“But if he’s totally unconnected with it, why would he pay any attention to that?” She asked reasonably enough.
It had never occurred to Polly before, just what weight an accusation totally unsupported by any facts might carry with the ignorant mob mindset. So far, it seemed to carry quite a lot of weight, and yet the odds, calculated purely and objectively, pointed in almost any other direction than Jean.
“I wouldn’t put it past the mother.” Nathan, in unconscious agreement, a not-un-coincidental turning away from a subject he knew to be painful.
“Then there’s this deadbeat dad, somewhere out west.” Polly had a point. “They haven’t been having any luck finding him, either. You’d think he would have seen his daughter on television, too.”
Nathan's worried about Polly.
If so, would anger and resentment be enough to prevent him from calling? The pair of them digested this datum along with the other wild theories. The whole town was rife with speculation. There wasn’t much to talk about otherwise in a place like this, in the dead of winter. A horrible thought. What if Caitlynn’s body turned up in a snowdrift when spring rolled around, and they couldn’t determine the cause of death?
One thing she knew about Jean, he absolutely reviled the police and their tame psychologists. Jean said that once they label you mentally ill, they can shoot you dead by the side of the road and it’s just legalized murder. He said, they don’t need a reason, you have no rights, you’re guilty of everything and anything someone wants to accuse you of, and Jean was totally serious, or at least totally convinced. If flight was evidence of guilt, was there some point when an innocent man might reasonably run away? In self defense? Nathan finally rang off. Secure in the knowledge that Polly was looking forward to their date Saturday night, all the time he was wondering if she would enjoy it, with all the gossip going around. She was as close to Jean Gagnon as pretty much anyone else. No doubt her special knowledge would be much in demand Saturday night.
But that’s okay, if things got too hard on her, he could step in like a proper gentleman and steer folks in the right direction. Polly had been through an ordeal, mostly created by overheated imaginations. The important thing was that she needed him.
***
Teddy has a solution.
The boys were freaking out on their fearless leader, Jeff McCabe.
“You stupid fucking bastard. What in the hell were you thinking?” Teddy was livid.
Never had he wanted to hit McCabe so badly. If he had caught the man using a pin, poking holes in a case of his own personal condoms, he couldn’t have been any angrier. Eyes white-rimmed in fear, fists clenched, Harry Morden cussed and cussed incoherently, stomping around inside the shed and staring at the ropes coiled up loosely around the chair in disbelief. The clothes, heaped up and twisted among them, were incomprehensible. The blindfold and a sock lay on the floor.
His boots lay where they were tossed upon Gagnon’s capture.
“Fuckin’ Jesus Christ.” Slick abruptly pushed them out of the way as he sat down heavily on Jeff’s chair.
“Fuck.” Slick said it over and over again. “What the hell happened here, Jeff?”
Considering that he was supposed to be the brains of the outfit, Jeff had let them all down in the worst possible way.
“I can’t help remembering that you gave me shit for being sleepy the other day.” Slick ground this out from between tightly-clenched jaws.
“I don’t know what happened. Who tied him up last?”
All eyes turned to Slick.
“Fuck you.” He bellowed. “You bastards should have checked them knots when you took over.”
He stopped abruptly. Pointing wordlessly, they saw that the ropes were empty but the knots were still tied.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Teddy had a grip on his emotions now. “All this is useless.”
It was an unhappy group of conspirators.
“We need to find this guy and damned quick. He hasn’t been gone more than ten or fifteen minutes.” All of Ted’s natural-born leadership skills came rushing to the fore. “We just brought your coffee.”
He reached down and grabbed the cup. It still had a faint trace of heat in it. It wasn’t completely cold. Jeff had barely touched it.
“Tracks.” Morden blurted it out, and he bolted for the door, followed by the others.
There were no tracks that they could see, this perhaps in spite of, or maybe because of, the light flurries that were falling from the blackness above. It had been snowing off and on all day, but this light fluffy type of snowflake would both hold and obscure tracks in it, depending when they were made and within a certain time frame.
“There.” Slick pointed. “Over there.”
On the ground lay another sock, and some faint marks.
“Those aren’t human.” Teddy shone the light. “They’re too fucking small.”
Whatever made these tracks had been through there in the last half-hour, at least that much was clear.
“What the hell kind of critter made that?” Morden gasped.
He’d never seen anything like it. They were about half the size he would expect a human being to make, in spite of all the wind, the drifting nature of the snow, and the time elapsed. It just didn’t make any sense. Had Gagnon just casually walked down the driveway? Naked?
Why no trace of human footprints? There weren’t enough guys here to obscure all of the possible tracks. It’s not like they were all running around in circles, they were all inside.
With all the noise and voices coming from the shed area, it was no wonder the dogs were barking their throats hoarse. They stumbled back indoors, out of the wind.
“The dogs.” Harry had only one thought. “Get the dogs.”
“I don’t know.” Jeff was torn by indecision. “What if he’s going down the road? Just walking down the road?”
“Argh.” Morden groaned, confused, and unable to deal with a situation that hadn’t been foreseen.
Total frustration and confusion reigned.
“Run him over.” Hiltz looked at them.
This was met by groans and curses from the others.
“I’m serious. I’m not going to fuckin’ jail for this guy. Look. Harry and Slick take the dogs and follow them tracks just in case. Me and Jeff will take the two trucks. If we see Frenchie by the side of the road, and if he don’t see sense, we either got to shoot him or run him down.”
It was the only way, couldn’t they see that?
“What about our fucking money?” Jeff was in a panic.
“Then point a pistol at him and tell him to get in.” Slick was pretty disgusted by this point.
“Fuck, he won’t get in.” Morden had nothing but objections. “He’ll just bolt for the hills.”
“Naked? Buck naked?” Slick couldn’t make hide nor hair of it all, but one thing was for sure, their whole plan had unraveled in an instant, and it meant nothing but trouble for all of them.
It suddenly struck him that Houdini always wore a minimum of clothing. With a snap of his voice, Jeff’s unspoken authority reasserted itself.
"Go, go, go."
“Go, go, go.” Jeff’s voice rose to cut through the discussion.
He shoved Harry, then Slick, and his eyes found Teddy’s as the pair exited the shed. It was as cold as hell in there now that the bird had flown, and with the door wide open to the elements.
“Harry.” He yelled. “I need your keys.”
Harry scampered back.
They had some kind of a plan. With a bit of luck, they might be back in business.
Jeff and Teddy sort of intuitively communicated their thoughts. One way or another, they needed to find Frenchie. For Frenchie’s sake, they hoped he would cooperate. But if not, they had a solution for that, too. At this point, it was no longer about the money. It was about winning, and being beaten. It was about covering up, and staying out of jail.
Somehow or other, they had to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
“We need to catch him before he gets home—or to the cop-shop.” Jeff agreed totally with Ted.
Even now, it might not be too late.
END
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