Gateways. Part 28

Friday

1.

Jack jogged along the asphalt walking/bicycle path that wound through the pines lining the eastern limits of Gateways South. A thin morning mist wound between the trunks; brown needles, shedding early due to the drought, littered the path. The scent of pine lay thick in the air.

He'd awakened to silence for a change. Carl must have been tr.i.m.m.i.n.g someone else's hedges this morning. His father was just starting to stir, so Jack had come out for a run. He'd been too sedentary the past few days. Needed to get the blood flowing. He'd thought about checking on Anya but it was too early. He'd swing by on the way back.

He chugged along in a Boneless T-s.h.i.+rt and gym shorts, building a sweat; he wore his leather belt under the loose s.h.i.+rt to hold the small-of the-back holster for his Glock 19; the way it bounced against the base of his spine as he ran was annoying, but no way he was going unarmed around this place.

An eight-foot chain-link fence ran along the Gateways border to his right. The links of the par-3 golf course lay to his left. He noticed a lone, vaguely familiar figure hunched over a putter on a rise ahead. As he neared he recognized him: Carl.

Jack veered to his left and found Carl on a putting green, working with a club that protruded from his right sleeve. Jack had thought he was a righty, but he was using a lefty stance.

He waited until Carl had hit the ball-he just missed, r.i.m.m.i.n.g the cup-before speaking.

"When did you join the community?"

Carl jumped and spun. "Oh, it's you! You scared me again! You gotta learn to make more noise when you come up on people."

"Sorry," Jack said. "I'll work on it. Say, did your video camera catch any signs of Ms. Mundy watering her lawn?"

"Zilch again." He grinned. "And I hope it don't. Wouldn't mind keepin' this up the rest of the year, long as old Doc Dengrove keeps payin' me."

Jack glanced down at the b.a.l.l.s Carl had arranged on the gra.s.s before him, sitting in a line, waiting for the putter. "Is a golfing members.h.i.+p one of the perks of your job?"

He shook his head. "Only on weekdays, and only on my day off, and only if I stay out of everbody's way. I ain't much with the drivers-I mean, my scores for eighteen holes are pretty pan-o-ramic-but I like to putt. I ain't a bad miniature golf player."

"No kidding." This was fascinating, simply fascinating. Jack waved and turned away. "Got to keep moving. Good luck. Sink those putts. Make those birdies."

But he never got restarted. The sight of a beat-up red pickup cruising the dirt road on the far side of the fence stopped him cold. It slowed as a pair of mismatched eyes peered at him from under the brim of a dirty John Deere cap, then picked up speed again.

A thought struck Jack. He turned back to Carl, intending to ask him if he knew them, but the half-sick look on his face as he watched the pickup bounce away into the trees said it all.

"You know those guys, don't you."

Carl swallowed. His left eye was already looking away; the right followed. "Why you say something like that?"

"Because I think you do. Who are they?"

"n.o.body to mess with. You don't want to know 'em."

"Yeah, I do." Especially after what his father had told him last night about the accident. Jack gave him a hard stare. "Who are they, Carl?"

Carl looked like he was going to try to float some bulls.h.i.+t, then his shoulders sagged and he shook his head.

"They live out in the Glades. On a lagoon in one of the hardwood hummocks."

"I thought no one was supposed to live out there except maybe some local Indians."

"Well, I think you know that what's upposed to be and what is ain't necessarily the same thing."

Yeah. Jack knew that.

"You know where this lagoon is?"

Carl nodded. "I guess so."

"How do I get there?"

"You don't, not unless you know the way."

"Can you show me on a map?"

Another shake of his head. "It ain't marked on no maps. It's pretty well hid."

"Then how come you know where it is?"

Carl looked away. "I was born there."

This didn't surprise Jack. He'd seen what the folks connected to the red pickup looked like, and figured there had to be something wicked strange about Carl's right arm. Add that to what Anya had said about the mutating effects of the Otherness leak at the nexus point in the Glades, and the connection looked obvious.

He remembered other misshapen people he'd met earlier in the year...Melanie Ehler and Frayne Canfield...both had attributed their deformities to "a burst of Otherness" during their gestations. Carl's story was most likely the same.

"All right then," Jack said, "take me there."

Carl backed away a step, holding up his hand. "Nuh-uh. No way. I left there years ago and I ain't goin' back."

"Well, if it's not on a map, and you can't tell me how to get there, and you won't take me there, how am I supposed to find it?"

"You ain't. That's the whole point."

As if to say he was through talking, Carl bent over his putter and lined up a shot. He tapped the ball and it went wide.

"I've good reason to believe they caused my father's accident and were setting him up to be eaten by an alligator when the police interrupted them."

Carl straightened and looked at him. "Alligator? That woulda meant your daddy'd go the same way as the others, killed by a swamp critter."

"Well, this wasn't no ordinary swamp critter." Jeez, Jack thought. A couple of conversations with this guy and I'm starting to talk like him. "This gator was huge, with what looked like horns sticking out of its head."

Carl visibly shuddered. "Devil. That could only be Devil."

"Who's Devil?"

"Big freaky bull gator that hangs around the lagoon. But how on earth did they get him out of the swamp?"

"Couldn't say. But it seems Devil gets around. He visited Gateways last night."

"No way!"

"Way."

Jack gave him a Reader's Digest version of the attack, leaving out Oyv's amazing feat and the gator's inability to cross into Anya's yard. He remembered what his father had said about Carl being the community gossip.

"I want to get a look at this lagoon, Carl. I've already met the people, now I want to see where they live."

"You met them?"

"In town yesterday. Met that woman, too. The one with the white hair."

"Semelee."

"Right. What do you know about her? Is she as spooky as she looks?"

"Can't rightly say. I left the clan about-"

"Whoa! Are we talking Kluxers here?"

"Naw. That's just what we call ourselfs. We're all kinda related in a way."

"Yeah? How?"

Carl's good eye s.h.i.+fted away again. "Not by blood or anything like that. More like we was all in the same situation. Anyway, it was just us guys, maybe twenty of us, when she showed up a couple years ago. I'd been kinda plannin' on leavin' anyway, but when she showed up I took it as a sign and skeedaddled outta there."

"A sign of what?"

"That things in the clan was gonna head south real soon. I mean, you got eighteen-twenty guys and one woman, that's trouble."

"They seemed pretty tight when I saw them in town yesterday."

"Yeah, well, maybe. I seen 'em from a distance a couple times. We always done some panhandlin', but now they's become like professionals. I stay away from 'em cause we ain't exactly on good terms."

"Why not?"

"They was kinda p.i.s.sed I left. Luke-he was sorta kinda like the leader-he called me a traitor and all sortsa stuff like that. But that don't matter to me. I'm glad I got out. I didn't wanta live like them no more. Y'know, like gypsies. They live on the boats or in what's left of a bunch of old Indian huts on the sh.o.r.e. No runnin' water, no lectricity, no TV." He shook his head. "Man, I sure do love TV. Anyways, I wanted my own place where I didn't have to sleep next to n.o.body cept myself."

"A room of one's own," Jack murmured. He knew the feeling.

Carl grinned. "h.e.l.l, I got more than just a room, I got me a whole trailer."

"But do you have any money in the bank?" Jack said as an idea hit him.

"Naw. Pretty much everthing gets spent just for livin'."

"Okay, then. What say I pay you a thousand bucks to take me to this lagoon?"

"A thousand?" Carl laughed. "You're s.h.i.+ttin' me, right?"

"Nope. Five hundred when we leave, and another five when we get back. That sound fair to you?"

Carl licked his lips. "Yeah, but..."

"But what?"

"But they's gonna be awful mad if they find I brung an outsider to the lagoon."

"Don't worry about that." Jack flipped up the back of his s.h.i.+rt to show Carl the Glock. "I'll get you back home. I promise. And anyway, if we go in the afternoon, won't they all be in town, begging?"

"Come to think of it, yeah. Specially this bein' Friday."

"What's so special about Friday?"

He shrugged. "Lotsa people round here get paid on Thursdays, and on Fridays they're happy the work week's over, so they're looser with their change. Sat.u.r.day's pretty much the same. But Sunday's usually a bust."

"Spent too much on Sat.u.r.day night, right?"

"Yeah. Or they just come from church and did some givin' there. Monday's even worse." He scratched his jaw. "So yeah. We should have the lagoon pretty much to ourselfs this afternoon."

"Then that's when we'll go. A quick trip for a quick look-see. In and out. Easiest thousand you ever made."

Carl took a breath. "Okay. But since my car ain't workin', you gotta drive me down to the waterside." He began picking up his golf b.a.l.l.s. "Guess I better get movin'. Gotta get home, gotta find us a boat."

"How'd you get here without a car?"

"Bike. How else?"

More power to you, pal, Jack thought. Maybe the thousand would let Carl repair his junker Honda.

He got directions to Carl's trailer park-it was the one Jack had seen between the auto body place and the limestone quarry-and continued his jog.

2.

Semelee stood with Luke a couple dozen feet from Devil's gator hole and watched. The big gator lay half sunk in the water at the shady end, his eyes closed. The water around his left flank wound was tinged red. At first she thought he was dead, but then she saw his sides pull in a little as he took a breath.