Stinking Rich Page 4

  “And deprive you of this once in a lifetime opportunity to see a real live dead guy?”

  Terry sunk his chin into his chest. “A kilo of pot, did ya say?”

  “Half a pound, Terry. And mostly tops.”

  “Make it a pound.”

  “Half a pound now. Half when he’s buried.”

  “Alright. I’m in. I knew today was gonna get weird soon as I saw you drive up.”

  An hour later, Danny and Terry pulled up in front of Lester Freeden’s trailer. The door to Lester’s car hung open just as he had left it the day before and his body lay on its back halfway to the trailer. Hunched over his head and shoulders was Shooter, his mouth bloody and frothing. He snarled and crouched as if getting ready to spring at the new arrivals.

  Without speaking, the two men got out of the car. Danny popped the trunk and took out two long-handled spades, handing one to Terry. Danny smacked his on the hard packed gravel as the two men crept toward Shooter. The dog drew his ears down, snuffled a bit, and looked from Danny to Terry to the shovels they both carried. When the two men were slightly more than a shovel’s length away, the dog stood up and slunk over to the trailer, dragging a bloody arm along with him. The arm had been gnawed clean out of its socket. When Danny and Terry looked down at what was left of Lester’s body, they saw the right side of his face was chewed off as well.

  “Look dead enough to you, Terry?” Danny croaked, a lump the size of a grapefruit forming in his chest.

  Terry stumbled backward and collided with the front of the dead man’s car. He leaned onto it with both arms spread wide and upchucked all over the hood. Wiping his face on his sleeve, Terry said, “Mother of Hell. You’re gonna owe me a fuck of a lot more than a bag of dope for this. What the hell went down here?”

  “Looks like Lester’s wacko dog has got hungry is what’s went down. C’mon. You gotta help me drag the body into the woods so I can bury it.” Danny grabbed Lester’s right leg and started to pull. He gagged at the stink, tasting the bile rise in his throat, and swatted his hand at the flies that rose up around him. From where he lay under the trailer, Shooter growled. It came out more like a moan as he gnawed on Lester’s humerus.

  When Danny had dragged the body to the edge of the clearing, Shooter leapt out from under the trailer, thundered across the thirty feet of gravel, and lunged at him, jaws open. Danny barely managed to jump out of the dog’s way. The Rottweiler’s head snapped back at the end of his lead. He yelped as the collar bit into his neck. He collapsed to the ground beside Lester’s remains, licked his snout, and took a bite out of the fleshy underside of Lester’s thigh.

  “Damn you, Terry, get over here and give me a hand!” Danny slammed his shovel into the ground less than two feet from where Shooter crouched. The dog looked up at him without turning his head, snorted dismissively, and went right on chewing.

  “What about we dig the hole first eh, Danny?” Terry cut a wide berth around the dog, and walked about fifty feet into the bush. “How about over here?”

  Danny shrugged his shoulders and followed him to a spot between the tree trunks where there was enough room for a grave. They both began digging. Under its decomposing blanket of leaves, the top soil was light and spongy. Stones started appearing immediately, spread as liberally through the pungent loam as chocolate chips in a two-dollar cookie.

  “Pile the rocks on the side, Dan, and we can make a cross or something after we’re done.”

  “We won’t be making no cross, Terry. The idea is to hide the damn thing, not advertise it.”

  “Oh yeah. Got it.”

  They scraped and shoveled and pried rocks out of the earth for what seemed like an hour. Apart from the occasional curse, the two men worked in silence. The hole was barely a foot deep, and they had piled up at least sixty rocks, when Terry said, “Looks deep enough to me. Whaddya say?”

  “Another couple of inches. I want to make sure he doesn’t get dug right back up by Shooter or some bear or something.”

  “Alright, another few minutes then, but I’m getting tired. And I really don’t see the difference between one foot and six when it comes to burying. Dead is dead and a hole is a hole. He ain’t coming back out regardless, is all I’m saying.”

  Seven rocks later, Danny set down his shovel. He took his cigarettes from his pocket, offering one to Terry, who took it and pulled out a pack of matches to light them both. “So what are we going to do with these rocks?” Terry asked.

  “I been thinking maybe we should bury the dog with them. Kind of like a decoy. If anyone comes looking for Lester, they’ll find the mutt’s grave mounded with rocks and figure Lester buried him and went off to mourn or something.”

  “Uh huh. Just one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Danny asked.

  “The dog ain’t dead.”

  “He will be, soon enough. We can’t leave him here alive.”

  “Kill the dog? Man, you are one heartless bastard.”

  “Way I figure,” Danny answered, “we’ll be doing him a favor. He’ll starve here alone. Either that or he’ll chew right through that lead of his and come over here and dig Lester back up after we’re gone.”

  “He can’t chew that. It’s a clothes line, for Christ’s sake. Vinyl-covered steel cable.”

  “He bit the mirror off my car yesterday.”

  “Huh?” Terry looked over at where Shooter lay guarding his master’s carcass. Shooter seemed to grin back. Terry coughed, his breath ripe with vomit.

  Danny waved a hand in front of his face. “And besides, dead dogs don’t bark. We don’t need him drawing attention over here.”

  “So how we gonna kill the pooch?”

  “Lester’s got rat poison in his trailer. Had problems with squirrels getting in. If you can keep Shooter busy, I’ll bust in and get it.”

  “Then what? You want me to go buy some hamburger?”

  Danny looked at Terry, then over at Lester’s body. Shooter growled. “I don’t think we need to go shopping for meat.”

  Six

  Perko threw himself backwards onto the bed and tugged at a pair of black leather chaps, left leg first, then the right, then the left again. Grunting, he heaved himself into a sitting position and rubbed his exposed belly where it billowed out between his T-shirt and the top of his jeans. No one had told him being a badass outlaw would mean wearing a uniform. To make matters worse, Shelley was home, and Perko knew his old lady would have something to say about his leather leggings. She was sexy as hell in a tough, curvy kind of way, well out his league in the looks department, and she constantly reminded Perko he was lucky to have her.

  As often as she let him, he slept at her apartment. It beat couch-surfing at the clubhouse. He kept the chaps and a small assortment of clothes here, along with the few possessions that mattered to him: a couple of knives with carved wooden handles, a silver goblet he had stolen during a teen-aged robbery, and a book of quotations by Mahatma Gandhi. Perko didn’t get much of what Gandhi was about, but he liked the way he talked. He’d even cut a picture of him out of Life magazine and stuck it on the wall next to Shelley’s full-length dressing mirror. On it, he had inked: “Hate the sin, love the sinner.”

  He read the quote again now as he stood in front of that mirror and checked out his full-on gang regalia. He was proudest of his patch: a black leather jacket with the gang’s insignia emblazoned on the back. The honor was closely held and only bestowed on members who had proven themselves loyal to the core. Legend had it no one got their patch without at least one murder to their name. The gang kept that legend alive to boost the intimidation factor critical to their enterprise. In reality, members got patched for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes, they simply needed to beef up numbers after an aggressive round of busts. Then there were more sinister deals like the one Mongoose struck. He’d threatened to make one of the gang’s leaders eat a pool cue if he didn’t support his candidacy. The pool cue in question was halfway up the guy’s ass when the two men reached
their agreement.

  Hate the sin, love the sinner. Gandhi would have made a good dad. The kind of dad who showed up at baseball games and helped with science projects. Not like Perko’s father, a bitter man who spent half his life regretting he’d sired three kids and the other half pretending he hadn’t. During his rare appearances at home, he griped incessantly about how hard he worked to keep food on the table. Nothing Perko did ever pleased the man and long before he reached high school, he had learned it was best to avoid him whenever possible.

  If Perko’s old man had been more than semi-literate, his motto might have been “Hate the sin, belt the sinner.”

  Perko Ratwick hadn’t set out to be a biker. No more than he’d considered being a doctor, an engineer, or a carpenter. If anything, as a teenager, he’d thought of himself as an entrepreneur. While most of the kids went to parties to get drunk and smoke dope, Perko sold the dope and charged ten bucks to drive people to the beer store.

  At the end of his Junior year, his old man gave him a particularly bad pounding for bringing home a report card with five F’s and only one C. Perko left home, dropped out of school, and started running errands for the Libidos for food money. He was a quick learner. In no time, they taught him how to strut, how to intimidate the weak, and how to grab more than his share. For their part, the cops who rousted him ingrained disrespect for authority and convinced him that, compared to his father, he had nothing whatsoever to fear from the law. Soon enough, he got invited to sleep on the floor at the Libidos clubhouse. He never looked back.

  Apart from the obvious attraction of a lifestyle committed to partying, Perko glommed onto the incredibly useful tips and tricks of the trade. Like when an old-timer named Hawk told him how to deal with Taser-wielding police. “Soon as you see the little snake come out, run at the nearest cop. Doesn’t matter which one. Just as long as you sink your teeth into him before you get zapped. That way, he’ll get the charge, same as you.”

  On his nineteenth birthday, Perko Ratwick got patched: the youngest ever Libido. A real up and comer. “You’ll never amount to nothing,” his father had always told him. Perko wondered what the old man would think if he could see him now, a dozen years later, standing in front of Shelley’s mirror, dressed to kill, and about to do a deal worth nearly a million bucks. “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” he murmured.

  He studied his thick thighs and the way they made the fringes stand out, almost erect, at the sides. He considered taking them off, but he would be riding the three-wheeler through the woods tonight and he really didn’t want to shred his jeans on stray branches along the dark trail.

  The finishing touch was his favorite pair of Centiagues, Central American cowboy boots with slope-backed heels designed to be useful when the wearer wanted to take a siesta on a city sidewalk. You could squat down against a building, kick back on your heels and snore contentedly. Perko liked the boots for the clicking sound they made when we walked on polished tile floors. He had added the metal heel covers himself.

  Ready to go, Perko swaggered into the living room, swung his arms wide, impresario-style, and asked Shelley, “What do you think?”

  Busy on the phone, she put her hand over the receiver mouthpiece. “You look like a jellyfish,” she said. “What are those stringy things growing on your pants?”

  “Fringes,” said Perko, “and for your information, these are chaps, not pants.”

  “Chaps? Are you hanging out with those Nasty Nancies again?”

  Perko ignored the jab. “Don’t wait up,” he said. He gave her a kiss and clicked his way out of the apartment. As the door closed behind him, he could hear Shelley giggling into the phone: “And he’s wearing those funny boots with the slanted silver heels, too. I tell you, gang fashion has come a long way, baby...”

  Sitting in his rent-free trailer at Rice Lake, Terry Miner popped a Coors Light and poured it onto a bowl of Cheerios. The door squeaked open and banged shut behind a squat man decked out in a dirty undershirt and red sweatpants.

  “C’mon in, why don’t ya? Grab a seat,” Terry said pushing a folding chair toward his visitor with his bare foot.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast. Want me to come back?” Chest hair spilled out of every opening of the man’s undershirt.

  “Naw, not a problem, pal. What can I do you for?”

  “I hear you got some wicked weed for sale. Figured I’d check it out. No need to head into town if my neighbor’s in the biz, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure. What do you need? A quarter?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  Terry stuck his hand between the cushions of the bench beside him and pulled out a twist of plastic wrap no bigger than his little finger. He flipped it across the table. His guest fished a handful of fives and tens from somewhere inside the sweatpants and laid the crumpled bills in front of Terry’s bowl of cereal. “Thanks, man,” the guy said, and shuffled out.

  Terry drew a deep breath, puffed out his chest, and grinned as the door banged shut behind his latest customer. Word had gotten around the trailer park pretty quick that he had amazing skunk weed for sale. For two days now, there had been a steady stream of familiar-looking total strangers at his door. He had the cash to buy beer and smokes and had even gotten laid by the lady down the lane who’d sent her husband packing for being “a good-for-nothing sponge.”

  Not since his aborted college ball career had he enjoyed this much fame, but his sense of entitlement was deeply engrained. As a football star, his grades had been fixed, chicks were all over him (usually just to make other boys jealous), and he really only had to perform on the field for about ten weeks each year. When he didn’t make the third-year cut, Terry had spent one winter and the following spring working in a warehouse earning two dollars above minimum wage before deciding petty thievery would be a better vocation. Thing was, even B & E’s took too much effort. He was much better cut out for this drug dealing thing.

  Based on his rough calculations, he figured he could easily make two, maybe three thousand dollars and still have enough smoke to last him clear through to New Year’s.

  Munching his Cheerios and beer, he got to thinking: if he was able to make that much in the trailer park, he could probably sell the dope for even more money at a couple of taverns he knew in Toronto. Getting there posed a bit of a problem, though. He couldn’t very well ask Danny—he’d be pissed if he knew Terry was doing anything other than smoking his brains out with the stolen dope—and he didn’t know anyone in the park well enough to borrow their wheels.

  His thoughts kept drifting back to Lester’s car, recalling the set of keys he’d spotted hanging on a hook by the door inside the dead man’s trailer. It would be more like borrowing than stealing, he figured, since Lester was dead and had no further use for the thing. When it had served its purpose, he could sell the car to a chop shop. The car was hardly new, but it was bound to fetch a few hundred dollars for parts. It was kind of like recycling. A good deed all round.

  His mind made up, he threw half a pound of pot into a small gym bag and begged a ride back toward Peterborough from a neighbor who was headed that way. Walking the last three miles to Lester’s impromptu cemetery, he thought about the last thing Danny had said to him when they’d buried Lester two days before. “The Boss man left me another one of his notes,” Danny had explained. “‘Make like the invisible man’, he says. ‘Beat it. Get lost.’ Just who the hell does he think he is?”

  “Uh, a gangster?” Terry had cracked.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. If the guy’s so tough, he wouldn’t be afraid to show his face at the farm. Sounds like a wiener over the phone, too. Here I am, growing him a million bucks worth of weed...more than that, I’m sure...and he treats me like some kind of yokel he can just order around like the hired help. I deserve better.”

  “Better than a thousand bucks a week, Danny? I’ll take it, if you’re fed up. My damn job anyway.”

  The more he thought about it, the more
his blood boiled. It was Danny who really had it easy. Sure, the guy had a way of making it sound like back-breaking work, what with the watering, the trimming, the harvesting, and all, but he was growing pot, for Chrissakes. Terry couldn’t help feeling he’d been ripped off somehow. Danny sure as hell owed him more than just one pound of green.

  The sun was lighting the top of the trees by the time Terry stepped into the clearing where they had done the deed. The air was thick with sparkling summer dust. His knees trembled at the sight of the creamy white maggots writhing on the darkened patch of driveway where Lester had lain. His eyes traced the drag marks they had forgotten to sweep away and when his gaze reached the tell-tale hump of freshly-turned leaves, the Cheerios did a somersault in his stomach. He was glad there was no one around to see him vomit one more time, leaning on Lester’s car. Sweating heavily, he steered clear of the pile of stones that marked Shooter’s grave and made his way to the trailer. He reached in, grabbed the keys off the hook inside, and stumbled back to the car.

  The blood had drained from his head and when he flopped into the driver’s seat, he thought his heart was going to pound its way right out of his chest. He threw his bag of pot into the back and drove away as fast as he could without even stopping to see what else he could steal.

  Seven

  Danny snapped into a sitting position, his brain sloshing loose in his head. No question: the screen door slam had not been part of his dream; someone was downstairs in the kitchen.

  “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK.”

  It was still light outside, but he couldn’t be sure what day it was. The note he had found after burying Lester said to get lost, spend Tuesday night away. Clear enough, but was it already the day after tomorrow? He was sure at least one day had gone by, but was less certain tomorrow was yesterday. Danny had done his best to stay stoned out of his gourd since Lester’s burial. Maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea.