Asbury Park

by Rob Scott

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

A thrilling police procedural with supernatural elements, for fans of Patricia Cornwell, John Connelly and Stephen King Ten weeks ago, Homicide Detective Sailor Doyle worked his first solo case, a gruesome double murder in a remote farmhouse in Virginia. And things turned very nasty for him ... Now Sailor is recuperating with his family at a beach house in Belmar, on the New Jersey shore. He's struggling with prescription drug withdrawal while trying to build up his shattered shoulder and leg, and he's also trying to rebuild his shattered relationship with his wife. Jenny, while pleased he's alive, is less enamoured with the idea of reconciliation. Seeking refuge in a century-old beachfront resort hotel, Sailor meets an elderly man, Mark "Moses" Stillman, a former minor league baseball player whose wife and daughter drowned in the ocean off Belmar years earlier. Sailor's having nightmares about his previous case, and when he starts seeing things again, he realises that once again he's being guided to the truth ... even if it's not what he wants to hear. And it's not long before he finds himself investigating those deaths.

Release date: March 29, 2012

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 509

Sample

INTRODUCTION

Masked Monsters

There’s a barber shop on the corner of Steiner Avenue and Cameron Drive, near a back gate where middle-school kids jaywalk in the few minutes before the morning bell. A rail-thin teacher, spooky-thin, with wiry arms and a polyester blouse, stands distracted at the gate, separating the street riff-raff from the adolescents. I peg her for a maths teacher, sixth grade. She’s got least common denominator written all over her.

The barber shop has one of those candy cane poles outside, spinning for ever, bloody bandages hung out to dry. I know it’s just an optical illusion, but it’s a good one. The kid in the hooded sweatshirt passes beneath it before crossing Cameron. His clothes are threadbare, but he carries a hundred-dollar hockey bag. Who’s playing hockey in Neptune, New Jersey, in September?

I wonder where they’ve built a rink.

He smokes a cigarette, the dumbass. He’s maybe thirteen and I want to stop him, grab him by the throat and squeeze until he promises never to buy another pack. Then I’ll steal his smokes. Why not?

It’s humid, in a recipe that only New Jersey and maybe Mexico City can cook up: thick, sliceable air, infused with an amalgam of grimy pollutants, each taking its daily bite out of the ozone layer. It sticks to my skin, makes me want to shower, but I don’t care: I’m a couple of of miles from home and working up a good sweat. The air clings like warm paste and finds its way into every wrinkle, every cranny in the cracked sidewalk. There’s no place to hide from it.

The ocean is behind me, too far away to hear. I worry that it might not be there when I get home.

My desire for Dan’s Doughnuts has brought me here this morning, away from the ocean and the predictable security of my morning walk along the beach. Neptune is another planet, literally and figuratively. I regret not bringing a gun. Gotta have those doughnuts, though. What the hell; I’m a trooper. Troopers are supposed to eat doughnuts. Especially Dan’s, without question the greatest doughnuts in Neptune; in fact I’m confident they’d be the greatest doughnuts on Neptune. They’re well worth the walk along Cameron and across Steiner. Ben wants a Boston cream. Anna wants sour cream glazed – not that she said as much, but I can read her mind. Sour cream glazed … sounds nasty, but they’re magic.

Jenny wasn’t talking to me this morning. I’ll get her a cruller.

Crullers are outstanding peace offerings, any cop will tell you that.

The smoking hockey player is wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Why? Is it going to rain later? Feels like it. Maybe the rink’s cold – that’s probably why. Or he checked the weather; he’s some gifted freak watching Channel 12 over his Rice Krispies.

Greasepaint tattoos would wipe off: greasepaint, like the old theatre actors used to wear, some fatass opera star got up in black-face to play Othello. That’s the kind of tattoo to have, one you can change later if you decide you’d made a mistake, or maybe the dove or the heart or the Asian character didn’t quite capture the desultory nature of your mood. That’s the kind of tattoo I’d have: greasepaint – but not on my face. I don’t have biceps to speak of, so my biceps would be out of the question. Maybe on my shoulder or my leg.

Gang tattoos, prison tattoos: those don’t wipe off. The shit thugs will carve into their skin makes me want to puke. And prison tattoos never look like they do in the movies; Christ, Hollywood couldn’t have it more wrong. Up close, prison tattoos are a nightmare, poorly drawn, sloppily inked, blurry – and painful as hell. And some of those lunatics get them on their face, because nothing quite says I’m rehabilitated and ready for a desk job in polite society than permanent teardrops and a six-inch KA-BAR knife inked across your forehead by Vincent van Six-to-Ten from Cell Block B.

Tattoos on your face are like a mask – no, not like: they are a mask.

And who wears masks? Fat-ass opera stars playing Othello and kids out trick-or-treating for Mars Bars. The two assholes I deal with this morning wear masks, one greasepaint, one tattoo. I’m wearing a sling and Jenny’s old Rutgers University sweatshirt, but no tattoos, not even a shamrock or a Claddagh.

The teacher, the thin one in polyester, she has a tattoo on her ankle. I don’t get a good look at it from where I end up sprawled on the basketball court but it looks like a unicorn, or maybe a puppy. The gang thug has shit scribbled on his face that could eat her tattoo on a cracker. It almost makes me laugh, but my shoulder hurts too much.

Cameron Drive has cars parked on both sides, and what remains of the road is almost too narrow for drivers to pass each other. Massive elms, planted forty feet apart, easily embrace above my head, over the faded yellow line. Smoking hoodie boy crosses in front of me, head down, hiding his cigarette, probably from the skeletal-thin maths teacher on gate duty.

An older guy with a tubby belly, bandy arms and flyaway hair leans down to talk to someone in the passenger seat of a beat-to-hell Ford parked at the corner, beneath the streetlights that look too much like hanged men in a Clint Eastwood movie as they dangle twenty feet above the intersection. Tubby forgot to put a shirt on this morning; he shows off his beer-belly for a gaggle of giggling schoolgirls hustling inside the gate and across the cracked basketball court behind the school. Tubby’s wearing an old pair of knee-length shorts with a Hawaiian pattern, like exploding pineapples. His feet are bare. He pockets something and hurries north on Steiner Avenue.

The Ford idles. Drug dealers.

Lovely.

They’re not fifty feet from an oblivious teacher ushering her charges in for another day of borrowing from the hundreds. I wonder what gangs have this street, elm-lined Cameron Drive in Neptune, and silently promise myself I’ll walk on the boardwalk again tomorrow, out where there’s a breeze.

Hoodie hockey player leans against one of the elms that’s even more oblivious than polyester maths teacher. He’s hiding his face, though he’s not got a cigarette now, but still he won’t look up.

Something glints above the intersection: the hanged-man streetlight, flashing yellow. A Monmouth County school bus roars north, beating the red, making a break for freedom.

Polyester pulls the gate shut, but she doesn’t lock it. She shouts, ‘First period; don’t be late!’ to a group of older kids shooting baskets, wearing hand-me-down clothes, cheap jeans and torn canvas sneakers. They’re bigger, probably eighth graders. They groan and beg and mutter what I figure are pretty disparaging things under their breath. After a barrage of failed three-pointers, they head inside, chins high, clearly on their own terms.

The teacher checks the pockets in her skirt. She’s looking for something. I’m betting it’s the key to the gate. She ought to check the pockets in the hockey player’s hooded sweatshirt – but that’s just me.

Hoodie smoker kid turns away, facing north across Cameron. I figure he’s ditching class in a whole body legerdemain. The elm, not giving a shit either way, grants him a hiding place behind its back.

The hanged man flashes green; everything clicks into place.

No doughnuts today.

I run as fast as I can with my gimpy shot-to-shit leg and my cane. I swing it like a bat, low, and it breaks. ‘Lock down the building! Lock down the motherfucking building!’ I scream.

Polyester stares. She cries out and runs inside.

Then I’m grabbing, pulling, wrestling, shoving, tearing, and eventually falling – hard – on my shoulder. God, curse that shoulder! One-armed, I roll to my right, throw as much weight on my outstretched legs as I can, and scream.

For one thudding heartbeat I am face to face with death, but it’s painted on, like cadaverous make-up on a hanged man in a Clint Eastwood movie. I hope I’ve broken his leg and wonder if leg is stronger than cane. Walking cane – candy cane, like a barber pole, just bloody bandages hung out to dry—

Greasepaint tattoos wipe off, some wipes off on my shoulder, a miniature tattoo I might save for Hallowe’en.

Hoodie smoker kid has two arms to my one. One reaches for a cord, a fuse, a string, some goddamned thing he’s got wrapped around his waist, beneath the sweatshirt. I don’t know what it is, but I know he can’t be allowed to reach it. I grab both his wrists in my hand, then one and we roll, me grabbing for his other wrist. We’re two idiots shaking hands in Hell.

Then green, blue and red tattoos – ugly face tattoos. And gunshots: two pops that hang in the thick morning, then waft out near half-court, redolent of cordite, and dissipate for ever. I scream again, this time just No!

My chest hurts, and my shoulder. I am curled up somewhere between the free throw line and the top of the key on a basketball court old enough to have happy yellow dandelions growing in tenacious clumps between its cracks, cracks where polluted humidity goes to rest at the end of the day.

The barber pole climbs to Heaven.

The hanged men flash red.

The beat-to-hell Ford screams north on Steiner Avenue.

I hang on, fighting a one-sided battle I can win with one arm.

And the world slows long enough for monsters to alight along the Jersey coast, monsters in masks …

SATURDAY

Down the Shore

Lust and regret.

At 9:30 on a Saturday morning in September I hadn’t smoked a cigarette since 10:00 the previous night. Compensating with as much caffeine as my body could absorb seemed like the only way I would be able to make it through the day without either getting a divorce or committing murder. Two hours earlier, my head had cracked open and spilled my brains onto the linoleum floor in my mother’s kitchen. I refused to look in the mirror for fear of seeing inside my own skull, like one of Jason Voorhees’ teenage victims. If I could make it to 10:00 a.m. without firing up I’d smoke one an hour until 8:00 p.m. Then I’d eat a huge bowl of fudge-a-licious chocolate-chunk ice cream, chase it with three or four Nytol and with any luck pass out before the nicotine cravings came looking for me again.

I’d been off prescription pain medication since Labor Day – doctor’s orders – but I hit the Advil and Aleve as if they’d been invented last month. Advil were my favourites – the cinnamon coating made them taste more like candy than the others – but they didn’t actually work. Nytol remained the big boy on the over-the-counter block. Since I wasn’t allowed alcohol to wash them down I’d sneak an extra couple in the interests of sleeping through the night, or most of the night, at least. Jenny hadn’t started keeping track of how many were left in the bottle. Not yet.

But she would.

I could see it in her face as she climbed into bed beside me. No, I don’t trust you, Sailor, you prick was just about scribbled across her furrowed forehead. The fact that I was off the OxyContin – for now – off the booze – for now – and trying to cut back on the smokes – for motherfucking now – made Jenny about as happy as one enraged wife could be. There was no question she would hold my hand as tightly as I needed through the puking, the shakes and the unbearable cravings that had me chewing pencil erasers and gnawing on aluminium foil. But she was also first in line to barbecue me for Sarah Danvers and the six months of naked Olympics I’d enjoyed in her apartment on West Grace Street in Richmond. I didn’t know how long it was going to take for Jenny to get past that one. Maybe never.

They’d taken the cast off my leg about a week earlier, revealing pallid, shrivelled skin. For the few seconds before I touched it, actually felt the creased, itchy flesh, I wasn’t entirely certain it was mine. It looked more like a mannequin’s leg that someone had sneaked into my cast while I was flying over Stafford County on Demerol. But it was mine, and the unpleasant smell confirmed that it was badly in need of a scrubbing.

I also had my first gunshot scars – not that I was bent on starting a collection. The one on my shoulder had healed nicely into a pink pucker the size of a half-dollar, but it hurt when I raised my arm above my head, and the physiotherapy left me in tears most days. The Amazonian assigned to bend, stretch and Pilates me into shape suggested I learn to see sweat as pain leaving my body. I don’t know where people like her learn such inane platitudes but I duly tried it. Most days it failed to ease my suffering one little bit. Instead, I thought of Marie, my sister the cross-country runner, who had learned to master pain before she’d finished middle school. I’d wince, and recall her lithe form gliding by in a blur of Freehold Catholic green and gold while I stood on the sidelines simultaneously cheering and craving a cigarette. That sometimes helped.

The shot through my thigh looked like a hickey from a boa constrictor. When I looked at it I’d have to fight down whatever I’d eaten, and then concentrate on the flesh around the stitches – I’d have given a year off my life for five minutes of unbridled scratch time. Jenny and I had read about dissolving surgical stitches – the shit they can do these days is amazing – but what the articles all left out is that the thread – rope – tends to irritate as it dissolves, especially when it’s also encased in fibreglass for two months.

But a couple of weeks later I was pretty well mobile – shaky and stumbly, but mobile. I could get around with the help of a cane, but when I played with Ben and Anna I put it to one side; something about being on Dad Duty made me want to manage without a crutch. That was a feeling I hadn’t experienced before, one of several I’d been grappling with in the weeks since Doc Lefkowitz had discharged me from MCV Hospital.

I’d had only a few sessions with Amanda the Amazon before Jenny and I decided to head home to New Jersey for a month – but those appointments were plenty for me to learn a veritable cordon bleu menu of painful exercises, most of which could be exacerbated by the inclusion of a coloured resistance band: yellow for Okay, I can almost do this, green for Hey, that hurts, blue for Jesus Christ, are you trying to kill me? and red for Just harpoon me and finish me off, why don’t you!

Before I left for Jersey, Amanda the Amazon very kindly printed off a six-page exercise regimen, bagged up my own personal set of coloured bands, and encouraged me to ‘swim as much as you can, Detective Doyle, and remember to walk every day’.

Swim. That’s what she’d said: swim, in the waters off Belmar, New Jersey, swim with my gimpy shoulder and my pallid mannequin leg. That’s great, Amanda, you crazy bitch: in that surf, I’ll be dead in twenty minutes, but at least then I won’t have to endure any more of your medieval torture.

I didn’t say that, though. Instead, I lay on the purple floor mat and gasped, ‘Swim, okay. And walk. Got it.’

‘Stick with the Aleve.’

‘Okay.’

‘And do your resistance exercises every other day – all the way through – until you come back.’

‘I will,’ I panted. She could have suggested that I sack Troy on a stolen moped and I would have agreed; right then, swimming in the washing-machine waters off Belmar was the least of my worries. Getting up off the floor, that was the first order of business on my agenda. After all the pulling and pushing and twisting and bending my leg – the agony cleverly enhanced by her Amazonian death bands – I wasn’t certain I’d be able to drive myself home, let alone go walking in sand or swimming through heavy surf.

Then we were off, away from Virginia and the confused memories of the past year. Thoughts of my father, my sister, of Sarah Danvers and Huck, of OxyContin, coral snakes and copperheads, all flurried through my mind like wind-blown leaves. I needed a break, a clean separation from the things that made me Sailor Doyle. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a state trooper, a homicide investigator, a doctor, a lawyer, even an opera singer in greasepaint tattoos. I needed time away, time to cut the threads that bound me to who I had become; I couldn’t achieve that on the all-too-familiar streets of Fredericksburg.

One of the nice things about Nytol, especially my sleight-of-hand double doses, was that I didn’t dream, not the full-on Technicolor nightmares I used to have, of bridges, icy rivers, and shitty Saturn sedans tumbling ass-over-handlebars into the water. Clubbing my brain senseless with over-the-counter medication while my wife changed Anna’s last diaper of the day resulted in nights of misty black-and-grey images of things abominable: plague victims tattooed with purplish buboes, dismembered housecats, their fur in tatters, and knuckled knobs of hastily sewn flesh on the scarred end of Carl Bruckner’s severed knee. But none of it made sense; none of these dreams had a plot. There were no paths leading from my nightmares to the cathartic bars of Shockoe Bottom.

So I held fast: no pills and no booze. I’d smoke ten cigarettes a day, I’d take my handful of drugstore happiness, and I’d wait for the hazy images to leave on their own. I’d give it a month. I’d swim. Walk. And wait.

I had one month to erase the board.

I’d been suspended pending the outcome of a hush-hush investigation into my drug abuse: the Virginia State Police needed to know if I was high on OxyCodone when I shot Burgess Aiken. It didn’t appear to matter that he had injected me without my consent, stolen my gun and attacked me with dozens of dangerous snakes. No, the question VASP desperately needed to know was whether or not I had taken illegal prescription drugs when I defended myself by shooting him in the shoulder. Jesus Christ. No one seemed to care that I had stolen drugs from crime scenes – from sealed evidence bags, no less – or that I’d beaten a few handfuls of Percocet out of teenage street thugs. Nope; the Brass suspended me while they determined if I had been shitfaced when I shot a lunatic Bible thumper with a snake fetish.

Jenny’s boss gave her a month off. Hell, I was a national hero, after all: President Baird had said so on CNN, and that had to count for something. Jenny’s co-workers encouraged her to take all the time she needed to help get me back in the saddle. Between us, we figured a month away from home, a month at the beach, would either reconnect us for ever, or show us that we were doomed.

I couldn’t recall ever wanting to work so hard at anything in my life, and that I counted as one stumbly step in the right direction. I wasn’t embarrassed by the suspension – VASP had kept it quiet because the national news media was busy heralding me as the Saviour of the mid-Atlantic states and the last thing Captain Fezzamo needed was for the world to find out that I had been three sheets to the wind on hillbilly heroin when I found Molly Bruckner. The captain pulled a cover over the whole works. My best friend Huck Greeley hung around Division Headquarters with his ear to the ground, and I trundled off to the Jersey coast with my family and a month’s worth of diapers and plastic beach toys jammed in the back of Jenny’s minivan.

After two days at my mother’s place, we started for Belmar and the old beach house. I survived two miles of Route 9 traffic before I needed a third cup of coffee and a cigarette.

The 7-Eleven at the corner of Manalapan Road and Route 9 has one of those automatic push-button café machines that vomits out foamy mochaccino/cappuccino/vodkaccino drinks on demand. Huck had tried a few of them as we hit the 7-Elevens and Quick Marts around Richmond. He’s actually not much of a frothy-milk guy; he drank the muddy-water concoctions more for the novelty than anything else. To me they all tasted like ersatz Kahlua-and-Krispy-Kreme. I guess they were about perfect for the suburbs, where, thanks to the Starbucks baristas working every other street corner, we had essentially forgotten the taste of real coffee.

The woman speaking too loudly into her Bluetooth while she queued up a twenty-four-ounce coffee frappé this morning smelled good, like wildflowers that don’t grow in New Jersey. I caught a whiff of her when she rudely elbowed past me to grab the biggest of the Styrofoam cups 7-Eleven had stacked on the counter. She had cut me off on Manalapan Road, too, pulling her behemoth Yukon in a hard right across my lane and nearly tearing the front bumper off the minivan. She had been towing a trailer loaded with four matching Jet Skis – Kawasakis, nice ones – and a colourful selection of custom surfboards. No one else had been in the SUV, though, which looked as though it could comfortably accommodate the Brady Bunch, with a couple of extra seats for Lori and Keith Partridge.

I selected a twenty-ounce cup of my own and poured it full of generic high-test as I watched her multitask in front of the colourful plastic display. She wore an expensive-looking sheer wrap over a skirty bathing suit, one of those mini-loincloth deals designed to camouflage Mom Hips in a forty-three-year-old desperately clinging to the hazy recollection of her twenty-seven-year-old body. Above the waterline, she had hoisted her ample – if fraudulent – boobs in a string bikini that screamed: These babies were expensive, so go ahead and look.

It was excessive for 7-Eleven on a Saturday morning, but like every other guy in the place, I couldn’t help but stare. Her make-up had been tastefully done, no blue eye shadow or flashy pink rouge. Big pearl studs in her ears complemented the string around her neck, and I was genuinely surprised that she could lift her hand for the size of the stone in her wedding ring. Hubby must be a New York lawyer or some corporate raider screwing the Third World for a handsome holiday bonus. Boobs’ hair was dirty-blonde, highlighted with sunny happiness and looking as though it had taken an hour to primp for a day in the sand. Even her flip-flops – sandals, I suppose – were crisscrossed with tiny rows of glittery yellow stones, plastic tourmalines or something.

Fortune 500 beachwear. Obviously.

Apart from smelling nice and retaining a talented cosmetic surgeon, however, I couldn’t find much else about Boobs Manalapan to admire. It was impossible not to eavesdrop on her conversation, since she was near as dammit shouting into her Bluetooth, just another self-important, gated-community pussy wanting the world to know she had expensive plans for the weekend.

She prattled on in a faux, finishing-school accent, ‘—have the Jet Skis and the surfboards on the trailer outside … uh huh … hmm? … Oh, that’s funny … did he—? … Right, we’ll meet the guys there … Jim has the kids in the Beemer; they like riding with the top down—’

The Froth Master gurgled and spat her mocha, dribbling the last drops off its plastic chin with a mechanical cough. ‘—I don’t care what it costs, we’ve just got to have one … have you seen it? Me too … Oh, I don’t even want to talk about that idiot maths teacher he’s got this year … I’ll call the principal and have him moved to a new class next week … I mean, the man’s a bleeding idiot; I swear. Jim says they’re spending too much time in cooperative groups … right, not really teaching them anything. Who hires these fools?’

Christ, I can’t imagine being her kid’s algebra teacher.

She sidled towards the registers, cutting me off a third time. I didn’t care, because I was too busy gazing longingly at the ranks of cigarette boxes lined up inside their emergency-access, quick-draw dispensers behind the counter.

I checked the pack in my shirt: nine left. Apparently I’d smoked eleven yesterday, one over my limit.

Shit, that’ll only get me to 7:00 tonight.

I wasn’t supposed to buy a new pack until tomorrow … I tried to comfort myself with the notion that tomorrow actually started at midnight. I might sneak one past the goalie – Jenny – on a technicality and run out for a pack at 12:01.

Boobs Manalapan made her impatient way to the cash register where a Sikh with sandpaper complexion sporting a neatly wrapped turban scanned items, punched keys and counted change with the alacrity of an Atlantic City pit boss.

Boobs said, too loudly, ‘—just have to come with us to Saint Bart’s next month … pull the kids out of school … I just love the chef at the Imperial; the man’s a genius … Wait, hold on, Harriet. I’m almost at the register … 7-Eleven – no, just for coffee and gum, I have to deal with, you know … right, always working. I guess it gets them into Valhalla or Nirvana or wherever they go for their twenty-nine virgins.’

Turban behind the counter heard that bit. He didn’t look pleased.

Boobs Manalapan didn’t care; she placed her twenty-four-ounce coffee beside the register, grabbed two packs of minty gum, a yellow bag of peanut M&Ms and a Glamour magazine from the rack, then she mined around in her handbag for cash.

‘You shouldn’t say such things,’ Turban whispered, just loudly enough for her to hear.

‘Right, sorry, whatever.’ Boobs waved a nonchalant, exquisitely manicured hand. ‘I don’t know anything about – whatever, Islam or the Taliban—’

Sweat beaded on my forehead: I wanted a pack of cigarettes badly enough to kill a close relative. I sipped my coffee, tucked two Louis L’Amour novels under my arm – New Jersey 7-Elevens carry the greatest selection of Louis L’Amour outside the Library of Congress – and reached for a pack of Swedish Fish for Ben. He could eat his own weight in Swedish Fish.

‘I am a Sikh,’ Turban said, ‘not Islam.’ He had one of those Indian-Oxford British accents that always reminded me of that skinny guy who played Ghandi, whatshisname.

‘Right.’ Boobs sighed rudely. ‘Right, whatever, Al-Qaeda, whatever.’

‘Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda!’ Turban was pissed off now. He puffed up, clearly ready for a fight.

Ah, shit. Here we go. I wished I had my gun and could shoot both of them, or myself. A cracking good headache came thundering in, and my leg started to throb like a satanic metronome. I should have brought my cane. It wasn’t the walking as much as the standing in line behind Boobs that was getting to me. I started shifting my weight back and forth. I needed exercise, but I dreaded the thought of uncoiling Amanda the Amazon’s coloured bands. I closed my eyes and waited for it to end.

But of course it didn’t. Instead, Boobs Manalapan turned indignantly, as if to rally me into some kind of suburbanite alliance, and her handbag, another costly accoutrement, toppled her big-ass mocha, spilling it over a stack of New York Times, a rack of Hershey bars and a cardboard container filled with cigarette lighters just waiting for some desperate smoker to grab one in a hurried run-by.

‘Ah, shit, lady,’ I murmured, ‘not today—’

‘Al-Qaeda!’ Turban shouted. ‘How dare you, you ignorant woman! Stupid, ignorant woman!’

‘Listen, Osama, or whatever, I’m going to need to see the manager. Your boss.’ Boobs glanced at the mess, but she made no move to clean it up. She was smart enough to know she had fucked up, but bitch enough not to give a shit.

‘I am the manager!’ Turban poked himself in the chest with a hairy finger. ‘I am—’

‘You couldn’t possibly—’

‘And why not?’ Turban’s beard glistened here and there with flecks of spittle. If he’d had a flamethrower, he’d have fried her, then and there. ‘Why can I not possibly be the manager? This is my store – my store! And you: you are going to pay for this … all of this you’ve ruined.’ He gestured at the wreckage across the counter.

Cigarettes – cigarettes. Just give me some motherhumping cigarettes.

‘Then bring me the owner,’ Boobs interrupted him. ‘Who’s the owner? I need to talk with him. Get him here, or get him on the phone – I can wait. You have been rude and insulting, and that’s not how—’

‘Shut up!’ Turban screamed. ‘Shut up your mouth right now! I am the owner. I am the manager. This is my store, and you’re—’

Behind me in line, a grease monkey mechanic, a high school kid and a guy dressed to coach Little League all gave up simultaneously. With a shared groan, they either politely returned their items to the racks or simply abandoned packs of gum, newspapers, Pepsi bottles and cups of coffee on the back counter. As one, they walked out; the grease monkey mechanic mumbled something off-colour.

I pulled a twenty from my wallet and placed it on the counter, outside the steaming puddle of mud-brown mocha. ‘Keep the change,’ I said, and limped for the door.

Neither Turban nor Boobs Manalapan appeared to notice me. Boobs pressed speed dial numbers on her Droid while Turban shouted towards a back office, looking for reinforcements, or someone to call the police.

I took a last look at the wall of cigarettes and pushed through the glass door into the parking lot. I’d left Jenny’s minivan in a space behind the gas pumps on Manalapan Drive and had to shuffle past Boobs’ Yukon to get there. She had filled it with eight-hundred gallons of Premium before coming inside to push me out of the way of the coffee machine. I hesitated for a moment, admiring the brightly polished Jet Skis and the Technicolour surfboards.

It’s just not goddamned fair.

I set my coffee and my Louis L’Amour novels on the concrete island, lifted the Premium gas pump and hooked the metal handle over the raised locking device on the Yukon’s trailer hitch.