Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,38
satisfaction. His eyes drifted closed, and when he realized this, they snapped back open. He slapped himself across the face to wake himself up, got the car going, and reversed, bumping off a particularly high part of curb. The Skylark’s back bumper kissed the road loudly.
Lonnie mumbled something incomprehensible, shoved the column shifter into drive, and accelerated. He didn’t drive too fast because clouds of fog hung low over the streets, turning the largely residential neighborhood into something out of a monster movie. At the corner he turned left onto Westside Lane. Some of the houses he passed had jack-o-lanterns sitting in their front windows or out on their front stoops, though only two were lit from within with candles.
Halfway down the block Lonnie spotted his first trick-or-treaters: a little girl dressed as a princess with fairy wings sprouting from her back and a little boy dressed in a full-body tiger suit with a limp tail that dragged on the sidewalk. The mother walked a few feet behind them. She was on the chubby side, but not a bad looker. Lonnie had seen her around town before. You saw everyone around town now and then in a township of nine hundred souls. He thought she might work at the art gallery on Edgeview Street, but he couldn’t be sure because he’d never gone in, only glanced through the window when walking past on random occasions.
Seeing the woman and her kids made Lonnie think about Scottie again. He’d promised to take the boy trick-or-treating tonight. Scottie had even made a mask to wear. Lonnie frowned. How had he forgotten? Well, he hadn’t, had he? Not really. It was more a case of time getting away from him. He went to Randy’s for a couple beers, and those couple beers turned into eight. What was he supposed to do about that? He couldn’t control time, let alone turn back the clock. He wasn’t fucking God, was he?
Maybe he’d buy Scottie a chocolate bar tomorrow, surprise him with it at dinner? Sure, that was a good idea. He’d get him one of those Twix bars he liked, because there were two cookies in the package, which made him think he was getting more bang for his buck.
Lonnie made a right onto Mayapple Drive, then a left on Colony Drive, passing six more trick-or-treaters. Then he was on Stanford Road, leaving Boston Hills behind him.
Trees closed in around him, their canopy blotting out the silvered light from the full moon. He flicked on the high beams and kept the speedometer needle at sixty miles an hour. The fog was just as bad as it had been in town, and although there might no longer be kids to worry about, there were plenty of deer in these parts, and some of them were plain suicidal. Last summer he’d been driving back from Randy’s in the early hours of the morning, nicely licked and minding nobody’s business but his own, when a whitetail bounded right in front of him, like it got its wires crossed or something. It took out the car’s left headlight, crunched the bumper, but at least had the courtesy to die in the process. Lonnie tossed it in the trunk, happy to feast on choice cuts of venison for the next while. The following day he noticed the damage to the car, of course, the blood and fur glued to the broken headlight, but he had no memory of the accident. By the time he discovered the carcass in the trunk a week later it was covered in a squiggling film of maggots, and he had to scoop the goopy remains out with a shovel.
Anyway, a run-in with a suicidal deer wasn’t the only reason Lonnie was driving cautiously. He needed time to react, slow down, block the road, if those out-of-towners came his way. Lonnie didn’t know why Cleavon couldn’t tell him whether they were lookers or not, but Cleavon was like that, a rancorous old crabapple who’d bitch if you hung him with a new rope. Still, if any of the does were half as pretty as the last one—Betty Wilfried, according to her driver’s license—he’d be a happy man. It was a shame pretty Betty had gotten so beat up in the crash. Weasel had been too aggressive, scared her a bit too much, because she’d smashed her car bad enough to break half the bones in her body and face. Still, Lonnie hadn’t complained. A fuck was a