The Narrows(75)
Somehow, she had arrived at the side door of the garage, one hand extended to grip the doorknob. Directly above her, the bats were so close she could hear their commingled respiration, a sound like air wheezing out of an old accordion. A vague medicinal odor pricked the hairs in her nose, but the smell itself was too fleeting to be properly identified.
She gripped the doorknob.
Turned it.
There arose a shriek no different than the wail of a passing ambulance, though this sound came from inside the garage, followed by a scrabbling of sounds. Her hand frozen to the doorknob, Brandy couldn’t move. The sound that followed was of breaking glass, as whatever had been inside the garage had broken out of the window at the opposite side. She heard it—whatever it was—strike the ground outside. It emitted a piggish grunt that seemed to coincide with all the bats’ wings opening around the perimeter of the garage.
Brandy shoved the door open to an empty garage. Items from her father’s work shelf were strewn about and the floor was covered in countless screws, nuts, bolts, washers, carpentry nails. Opposite her, the small window high on the garage wall had been shattered and triangular bits of glass glittered on the floor beneath it. As she stared at the busted window, she heard the thing directly on the other side of it breathing its labored respiration. Then there came a shock wave rattle as the thing leapt the chain-link fence at the back of property and, on the heels of that, the rustling of the tall grass as it ran.
Brandy ran back out into the yard just as the bats lifted off the eaves and darted up into the night. Moving quickly around the other side of the garage, she found the chain-link fence still shaking and the field of tall grass parting as something unseen carved its way through it toward the wooded foothills.
Bats spiraled up into the sky, briefly blotting out the scythe-shaped moon. They seemed to vanish as the darkness claimed them.
And a moment later, all was silent in the Crawlys’ backyard, save for the wind that still troubled the hollow trees and whistled flutelike through the nearby reeds.
There were bits of broken glass out here too, scattered in the dirt in an almost decipherable pattern.
Among them were the undeniable footprints of a boy roughly Matthew’s age.
2
No stranger to trouble, nineteen-year-old Ricky Codger pushed out the back door of Crossroads and stumbled across the darkened parking lot. There were lampposts here but the lights had been busted out some time ago. Ricky knew it was the perfect place to hide and wait for the son of a bitch. He got in his Camaro and drove it around to the side of the parking lot, never turning the headlights on, so that the front door was framed perfectly in the windshield.
See? This is smart. This is using the old melon. The last thing I need is to rip the f*cker’s face open in front of a bunch of witnesses and wind my ass up in Jessup again.
No. He most certainly did not need that.
The f*cker in question was Donald Larrabee, a sponge-faced lush in his midtwenties who lived out on Susquehanna and worked days over in Cumberland at Allegheny Power. Had Ricky not been pacing himself all evening and thinking rationally, the f*cker in question would have already been picking his teeth up off the sticky floor of the tavern. But as it was, Ricky was skating on thin ice. Some folks might argue he was a lunatic, but Ricky would be damned if they would think he was a careless lunatic.
Ricky Codger lived with his grandmother on a sterile plot of land off Full Hill Road. It had once been the Codger family farm, back when Ricky’s grandfather had been strong enough (and alive enough) to keep it up. But that was several years ago now. Currently, the Codger family consisted of just Ricky and his grandmother (and given her rapid deterioration into the muddy swamp of dementia, Ricky questioned how much longer she’d stick around). They survived off his grandmother’s Social Security checks, bought food with her food stamps, and collected a monthly pittance from the state as a farm subsidy, despite the fact that the Codger farm hadn’t produced a single crop in just under a decade. On occasion, Ricky would pick up some hourly work at Tom Schuler’s garage, but other than that, it was slim pickings in Stillwater as far as the job market went. And the places that could hire him, didn’t, due to his stint up in Jessup for armed robbery back when he was sixteen. (Armed robbery? Okay, sure, he’d gone into a feed store in Garrett with a handgun and asked for the money out of the register, but, son of a bitch, he knew the * behind the register and was only joking. Well, half-joking. What did him in was that he took the money and that the sorry son of a bitch had called the cops.) He supposed he could leave town, head out for the East Coast and start fresh in a place where people were strangers and didn’t already know your business before you shook their hands and introduced yourself. Stillwater was a secret cracked down the middle, bleeding its guts all over the sidewalk. Every * stepped in the puddle and tracked your business down the f*cking street.
No matter. As long as his grandmother was still hanging on, those checks rolled in like clockwork. He would deal with the repercussions of her death when the time came and no sooner.
There was a part of Ricky Codger that often wondered how anyone would actually know when his grandmother died. The woman had no friends and no other family. She never left the house. With the exception of her biannual doctor visit in Westlake, no one else on the planet ever saw the woman. So he wondered…with the part of his mind that was darker than even he liked to acknowledge…just how plausible it would be to keep the old woman alive even after her death. That same dark part of his brain had, on more than one occasion, imagined himself digging a deep grave at the far end of the farm’s southern field. And maybe, just maybe, that would work.