Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

I was so busy thinking, I didn’t see the guy sitting on the hood of my car until I was nearly standing in front of him.

And that’s when the guy, three hundred pounds of bad karma in a Grateful Dead tank-top and shorts, slid his huge ass off my car and stood up in front of me, resting a baseball bat on his shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-One

All the books and TV shows are very clear about what I was required to do in that situation: show no fear and come up with lots of smart ass remarks. I realized right away that acting on my instinct, which was to either run away or beg for mercy, wasn’t appropriate.

I tried to exude tough-guy calm which, at that moment, mainly consisted of suppressing my urge to whimper.

“I hear you’re looking for my brother,” the Neanderthal said, his voice full of menace.

“I was hoping word would get around,” I said, letting one hand slip behind my back. “You must be Little Billy.”

“You know why they call me Little Billy?”

“Because it’s supposed to be humorously ironic, given how big, fat, and stupid you are?”

Little Billy took a step toward me, but I held my ground, not so much because I’d mastered the tough-guy thing, but because I was petrified with fear.

“I got the name because a cop once snapped a billy club in half on my head and still couldn’t take me down.”

“It’s a shame about the brain damage, but at least you got a cute nickname,” I said, surprising myself. “Where’s Arlo?”

“I don’t know.” Little Billy grinned. “Then again, maybe I do.”

I grinned back. “Tell him I know how he found her and what he had on her. Tell him I want sixty percent of the action or I give everything I know to the cops.”

I didn’t know where the words and the grin were coming from. Maybe it was that big breakfast that did something to me. Or maybe it was my rest stop performance as Dirty Harvey. Whatever the reason, I was running on pure impulse. I hadn’t even stopped to think yet about how everything fit together, how Big Rock Lake connected to drugs, Lauren, Arlo, Cyril, and Seattle.

“What’s to stop me from shutting you up with this bat instead?” Little Billy asked.

“Why don’t you try and see for yourself?”

I said it with surprising self-confidence, which I really shouldn’t have had. In the bright light of day, I couldn’t be sure he’d be fooled by my BB gun or that I’d even be able to whip it out before he took off my head with his bat.

But like I said, I wasn’t thinking.

I walked past him, expecting to get whacked with that bat at any moment, but to my astonishment, he let me go unharmed. As I walked around to the driver’s side door of my car, I noticed the dent his ass had left on my hood and congratulated myself again for taking all the insurance that EconoCar had to offer.

I opened the door and glanced at Little Billy, who stood on the curb, tapping the end of his bat into his palm, staring at me with the flat, dead eyes of a shark.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said.

I got in and drove off before Little Billy could change his mind about taking that swing at me. My work in Deerlick was done. If Arlo was there, he knew by now that I was, too.

***

The Big Rock Lake Resort billboard, which stood along the highway a quarter mile ahead of the turn-off, promised “exciting water sports, great fishing, rustic cabins, and delicious home cooking” over a cartoon of a surprised fisherman getting yanked out of his boat by the gleeful trout on his hook.

I took the turn-off, a gravel road that ended at the Big Rock Lake Resort Store and Restaurant, a large, white, clapboard building that was mostly porch, and built onto its namesake, allowing it to loom a bit over the lake, the dock, and the beach below. On either side of the store, set back from the shore by a dry lawn, were ten identical white cabins, with small porches facing the water.

I parked my car behind a row of railroad ties and got out. The hot, heavy air smelled of outboard motors, lighter fluid, fish guts, and suntan lotion. Most of the cabins looked empty; a few had families camped out front, the kids running around, the sagging mothers basting on chaise lounges, while the pot-bellied fathers knocked back beers and looked for teenage girls to ogle. There were a few water skiers and fishing boats on the small lake, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of action. It was the kind of lake where people parked Winnebagos instead of building vacation homes, though there were a few of those, most not much more elaborate than the Big Rock cabins.

I strode up to the Big Rock Lake Resort Store and Restaurant, admiring the sign on the roof. Although it was weathered and peeling, I knew it was newer than the one in Cyril Parkus’ living room.

The porch was lined with wooden benches and surrounded the open counter that passed for the store. All the merchandise was on shelves behind the counter, which itself was a glass display case full of melting candy and fishing lures. The restaurant was a screened-in section of the porch that faced the lake, with a hand-painted menu above the counter and an electric fly trap in the corner that snapped every few seconds.

I took a stool at the restaurant counter beside a couple old men smoking cigarettes and nursing mugs of coffee. They looked liked they’d been installed with the stools fifty years ago. A couple kids sat on the bench, staring at the fly trap, letting their Popsicles melt all over their bathing suits as they waited in suspense for another insect to get zapped.

“What’ll it be?” asked the man behind the counter, who wore a big apron that had the same cartoon as the highway billboard. He was as jolly as a department store Santa, with a body to match.

I looked at the menu above the counter. The prices had been painted over and changed many times, but the menu remained the same. Burgers, hot dogs, bacon, and eggs, and a combination of them all called the Big Rock Burger.

I’d had a big breakfast, but acting tough gave me an appetite.

“Gimme a Big Rock Burger, please,” I said. “It’ll bring back memories.”

The man immediately repeated the order to someone in the kitchen, which was hidden somewhere in back.

“So you’ve been here before,” the man ventured jovially, as I’d hoped he would.

I nodded with a smile. “When I was a kid.” I offered him my hand across the counter. “The name’s Harvey Mapes.”

He shook my hand enthusiastically. “Tom Wade, pleasure to have you back.”

“The place hasn’t changed much,” I said.

“Just fresh coats of paint,” he replied. “Any of the pictures on that wall could’ve been taken yesterday.”

Wade motioned to a wall covered with about a hundred faded snapshots and Polaroids, some framed, some stuck to the paneling with thumbtacks or yellowed tape.

“The fish were a lot bigger then,” grumbled one of the old men.

“You can say that again,” another old timer agreed. “Coffee tasted better, too.”

Wade laughed and freshened up the old timer’s cup. “Maybe if I warm it up, you won’t notice.”

“The sign out front looks different,” I said, as if making a fresh observation.

“You’ve got a good memory and a sharp eye,” Wade said. “The only thing the family that sold me the place kept for themselves was the sign. Sentimental value, I suppose. Couldn’t really begrudge them that. I tried to copy the original sign as best I could, but I couldn’t get it quite right.”

A woman built just like Wade came out and set the Big Rock Burger down in front of me, then stood there expectantly to see if I was satisfied. I took a big bite out of it. It was wonderful.

“You certainly got the Big Rock down right,” I said through my mouthful of hamburger, hot dog, bacon, eggs, and cheese. “It’s perfection, even better than I remembered.”

Wade’s wife beamed with pride. “Thank you kindly,” she said, then disappeared into the back again.