David placated him with silence.
“The footsteps seem to stop in front of me. Like some guy’s right in my face, but I can’t see him. Then the bent hallway snaps back like it should be, and I get my balance. But it’s suddenly as cold as a witch’s tit, so cold I can see my breath all frosty. I want outta there. So I’m down the stairs to the front door, unlock it. But the damn door is stuck, swollen in the frame or something. So I go back through the damn house, you know, but it’s the same with the kitchen door. There’s this second like dining room off the kitchen, littler than the real dining room. You hoity types maybe call it a breakfast room. It’s where the window was broke, except all the furniture is gone, table and chairs and all the other shit, even the pictures on the walls. No way someone could move all that outta there so fast and me hear nothing, but it’s gone. And the broke window isn’t broke no more. I’m freaked out, dude. So I hold my piece by the barrel, smash the window, and I’m gone.”
The beetle had proceeded along the barrel of the revolver to the muzzle, where it perched on the rim, flexing its wings.
David had no way of determining the value of the story he’d just been told. He wanted to ask if Mathers dropped acid from time to time or had a relationship with exotic mushrooms, but any such question was certain to trigger the man’s trip-wire temper.
As if privy to David’s thoughts, Mathers said, “I’m totally native organic. I don’t put chemicals in my body. I don’t do nothing but California weed, and I hadn’t even done no weed before I went in that house.”
“According to Lew Ross, what happened at Rock Point Lane wasn’t the end of it.”
Mathers’s face clenched again. He looked as if he wanted to spit at someone, and then he turned his head and did spit toward the door of his trailer. “It’s like the next day. Kendra she’s at work, and I come back from a thing I had going. Trailer’s locked, but this sick piece of shit is waiting inside. He jumps me before I know what the hell’s happening. I could’ve busted him up good in a fair fight, but he clubs me down before I know he’s there, and then he’s kicking me. He’s wearing these steel-toed construction boots and doing this gestapo number on me, you know, he’s got fists like concrete blocks. He’s old, but he’s solid, and he keeps shouting at me to stay out of his house, never go back there. He racked me up real good.”
“This was Patrick Corley.”
“You want to say it wasn’t?”
“I’m just asking.”
“When I was seventeen, the first job I did was construction-site tear out, cleanup. I worked for that prick, he thought his shit didn’t stink.”
“This Rock Point Lane business happened a year and a half ago.”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“You know Patrick Corley’s been dead seven years.”
For the first time, Mathers looked pleased about something. “He croaked in the fruit aisle at the market, pulled a shitload of kiwis down on himself when he fell. Kiwis. I heard about it, I laughed my ass off.”
The beetle began to explore the bore of the revolver, peering into it as if it seemed like a suitable place to construct a nest.
David said, “So the Patrick Corley who beat on you—he was a ghost or what?”
Mathers watched the beetle squirm into the bore of the gun. “Ghost, demon, zombie—I don’t know what the hell he was, dude. He just was. He came down on me like an avalanche. I wasn’t right for two weeks.”
“When Kendra came home, found you half-conscious, you told her he was a ghost.”
Mathers closed his eyes and summoned a long-suffering look. “I told her not to tell no one, ’cause then people would start asking did I see Bigfoot in a flying saucer with Elvis. But Kendra she just can’t keep her damn mouth shut no more than she can keep her legs together. I don’t know why I still hang with that bitch. There are some mega-hot pumps out there who got an eye for me. I got choices. Plenty of options. I don’t know why I don’t kick Kendra’s ass out of here.”
David said, “Maybe it’s love.”
Mathers laughed and opened his eyes and shook his head. “You’re one crazy dude. You should like record yourself, listen to yourself sometime. You’d be amazed, all the shit you talk.”
His laugh was like that of a snarky, arrogant adolescent.
He plucked the revolver off the table, aimed well over David’s head, and squeezed the trigger, launching pulverized beetle far into the vista of scrubland.