Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) by Miller Jason

Author:Miller, Jason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

I had a couple hours left in the day. I dialed Jeep Mabry and learned that Peggy and Anci had left school on time and without fuss. Since then he’d gotten the stink-eye from a crow a couple of times, but that was the extent of the day’s activity. I thanked him for the hundredth time and received only an irritated grunt in reply. He was off to his shift at the King Coal. I dialed Peggy next but ended up leaving a message saying I’d come to the hotel as soon as my errands permitted. Then I dialed Tony Pelzer’s number again. Nothing. That nothing was getting a bit nettlesome, I confess.

Then I drove back out to the Crab Orchard preserve. There are three manmade lakes out there, and Devil’s Kitchen is one of them. It covers almost eight hundred acres, is ninety feet deep at its deepest point, and has earned the fealty of local fisherman for some of the best bluegill and trout fishing in the state. Pelzer’s place was just outside the park near Devil’s Kitchen, north a bit of the preserve, in a tiny nothing of a place called Bluegill Point. I stopped in at a shade-tree bait store for a pack of smokes and some snacks, just in case it turned out I was in for a wait.

And wait I did, but nothing came of it. I knocked on the door but no one answered, and I hung around for a while but no one ever showed up. A sign in the yard said Pelzer Security. A beat-up red and black GMC van sat in the driveway, its crumpled hood secured with bright yellow bungee cord and a concrete block, but it didn’t go anywhere, either. It didn’t look like it could go anywhere if you hitched it to a team of elephants. When I finally grew bored of listening to the honking of the local geese, I fired up the truck and headed home, or whatever was passing for home that night.

When I got back to the Park Avenue and went upstairs to the room, I found Anci and Peggy arguing over one of Anci’s video games. Scary thing, set on a zombie island. I didn’t like her playing it, but this was one of those battles I ended up giving ground on. You do that sometimes to keep the peace, and you do it sometimes because it’s okay for a kid to win every now and again, but mostly you do it out of sheer exhaustion. Anyway, the two of them had attached the console to the hotel room TV, and I was in the bathroom over the sink with the water running and a brush in my mouth when I figured out what that meant.

I swung back into the bedroom and said to Peggy, “You went to the Vale.”

She glanced up at me briefly over her remote control and then looked back at the set.

“You’ll have to take that thing out

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