The Big Bang Theory

Prologue

A shovel can be a versatile weapon.  You can kill someone with it, and then use it to dig their grave.  And that’s what he’d done.  

He’d come quietly out of the trees into the grassy open space next to the stream, just a few feet from where the man sat on the red and green plaid blanket, his back to him, reading a slim, palm-sized book.  Another book lay on the blanket, and a small mirror, and the leavings of a picnic lunch; a peach, a half-eaten hard roll, a chicken leg, a can of cola, paper wrappers.  The sun glinted off the water that burbled and eddied around rocks and fallen logs, and there were sharp calls from the red-winged blackbirds perched in the trees or flitting among the branches high above.  The man on the blanket turned when he heard the snap of a twig underfoot, just as the other was swinging the shovel in a wide arc, but there was nothing he could do but start to lift a hand in defense.  The shovel struck the side of his face, fracturing the zygoma and the parietal bone, and he toppled over on his side.  He lifted both hands, but they were no protection against the shovel, which was coming from above now, and it came down with force on the top of his head, cracking the frontal bone, and sending a rush of blood over his face.  He fell to his back.  Then the man with the shovel stepped forward onto the blanket, jammed the sharpened point of the shovel’s blade into the other man’s throat, and pushed with his foot, as if he were digging a hole in the ground for a rosebush or a Hydrangea, ripping open the throat and the right carotid artery. 

            “You should have left her alone,” the man with the shovel said.  His shoes and the bottoms of his pants were stippled with blood.

            He dug a grave in the woods nearby, a deep grave that could be uncovered by neither animals nor weather. Into the hole with the body he threw the plaid blanket, the leftover food, and a book of poems by Emily Dickenson, sticky with blood.  He kept two of the dead man’s possessions, although he could not have explained why.

            “Justice has been done,” he said as he tamped down the earth with the back of the shovel’s blade.

Chapter 1

Lucky Lesinski glanced into his rearview mirror, and Goddammit! there was a cop car behind him. Sonofabitch!  The cop’s siren gave a quick werp-werp, and the rooftop strobe kicked on.  What now, for Christ sake?

It had been a perfect day for Lucky until then, although for Lucky the day was less than two hours old. It had taken him forty-five minutes to shower, dress, pack his suitcase, and vacate Room 26 at the Cherokee Motel. About five minutes to drive up the road to the Kopper Kettle, and another forty-five minutes to order and consume a small orange juice, two eggs over-easy with sausage links, hash browns and homemade toast, and linger over a second cup of coffee, one cream and two sugars, just the way he liked it.  Then ten minutes to gas up the Taurus at the mini-mart and be on his way. He was clean. He was full. He was optimistic. That wonderfully musty taste of an All-American breakfast lingered in his mouth, that salty, meaty, fatty, eggy, buttery taste, and Lucky even had a coffee-to-go cooling off in the built-in cup holder thoughtfully provided by the folks at Ford, coffee that would allow the leftover breakfast taste to mellow and soften naturally, and now he was headed south on Highway 43 out of Thompsonburg with the early morning summer sun, pretty as the pink inside of a clam shell, rising in a lake-blue sky.

            And the money.

            Tucked away in Lucky’s suitcase was a check for $300,000.  Made out to him, Lawrence Lesinski, Jr., payee.  A real cashier’s check, good as gold, payment guaranteed.  And another ten thousand in cash secreted in various nooks and crannies of his clothing, his suitcase, and his Taurus. All his, too. 

            The night before, his final night in Thompsonburg, Lucky had a pizza delivered to his room at the Cherokee Motel, and he’d talked the delivery guy into going across the highway to Cap’n Pete’s Party Store and bringing back a six-pack of Bud Light, and here’s five bucks for your trouble, why the hell not, Lucky was flush.  He finished two cans with his medium pepperoni, mushrooms and anchovies, sipping at a third can as he lay in bed, the lights out, the air conditioner on against the night’s heat, watching a movie about an evil doctor who did gruesome medical experiments on homeless indigents.  “I do it so others, maybe even your own wife, or your lovely daughter, might live,” was how the doctor defended his sinister activities when the cops closed in.

            Now Lucky was on his way out of town, without a home but not homeless, carefree, but not without dreams.  Perfect so far.

            Highway 43 out of Thompsonburg looked far different from the way it had when he’d left the first time, over thirty years before. Back when he was growing up here the road out this far had been a quiet two-laner with open fields and lots of trees.  Now it was a busy four-laner with fast food joints and muffler shops and supermarkets and discount stores and motels with swimming pools.  He’d barely recognized the town when he’d pulled in two days ago.  And he’d almost got away again. Almost gone. Past the Chop Suey joint that looked like some local business genius’s idea of a Chinese pagoda, painted red with a weird gold roof and a pair of stone Fu Manchu dogs standing guard at the front door. Past the dry cleaner that looked like a Swiss chalet and the bank that looked like a plantation house. Maybe it should have occurred to Lucky that some things weren’t what they seemed, and that his perfect-day-so-far might be an illusion, too. 

            Because then the cop, the siren’s werp-werp, and the red, white and blue strobes flashing.

            He pulled to the curb, killed the engine and watched in his rearview mirror as Deputy Perry Fiusko, for that was the cop’s full name as Lucky would discover the next day when he saw it in the newspaper, fussed with something inside his car, taking his time, fooling around, making Lucky wait. Then, looking bored, he finally stirred himself, showing a little energy, pushing the cruiser’s door open, Lucky noticing the Dixon County Sheriff’s seal on the door, a gold circle with a star in the middle of it.

            Lucky buzzed down the window, then watched in the mirror as the deputy approached.  A big one, at least burly on top, wide shoulders and a chest like an old-fashioned safe and upper-arms bulging against the polyester of his brown uniform shirt, the god-awful brown you only see on Sheriff’s uniforms.  Sheriff shit-brown. But from the waist down skinny, the whole effect being like a moose, Lucky thought, the big bulky top and the skinny, fragile-looking legs. 

But hold on.

There was something unsettling about the guy’s face, something Lucky could not quite figure out. That face, Lucky thought.  What’s wrong with that face?

And when the deputy reached the car and leaned over, lowering that face to the Taurus’s open window, level with Lucky’s face, Lucky realized with a jolt what the problem was. It was the nose.  The smallest nose on an adult male face that he had ever seen in his whole life, several decades of seeing noses, this one so small Lucky could only stare at it, slack-jawed, until he realized he was staring and tore his eyes away and snapped his mouth shut. The nose was that small. As small as the end of a thumb, the nostrils like the ends of soda straws.  And the proportions were all wrong. His face was broader than most, and flat, his cheekbones flat and high, his eyes wide-apart, his eyebrows pale gold, making his thumbtip nose look even more absurd, stuck there in the middle of that wide, flat field of pale pink flesh. The nose was so small Lucky could not understand how the deputy’s aviator-style mirror shades stayed in place, balanced so precariously on that tiny bridge, and God, Lucky was staring again, stop it!

“Your license, registration, and proof of insurance please,” the deputy said.  His voice was high and soft, a little rough at the edge.

“Not speeding, was I, officer Fiusko?” Lucky asked, reading off the deputy’s name tag.

Lucky was pretty sure this didn’t have anything to do with his driving. He’d been going maybe 35, dinking along in the right lane. Cars had been passing him. He’d been in no hurry.  He’d been feeling relaxed and leisurely in his new wealth and freedom.

“Your license, registration, and proof of insurance please,” Deputy Fiusko repeated in precisely the same tone of voice, the same inflection, like a recording. 

Lucky fished his wallet out of his back pocket, angling it so the deputy wouldn’t see the neat stack of bills it held, then pried his driver’s license loose from its little pocket and handed it through the open window.

“Didn’t run a red light, did I?” 

Deputy Fiusko took the license without looking at it and waited. Lucky gestured with his head towards the glove box, the deputy nodded, and Lucky leaned over, opened it, and took out the envelope that held his registration and insurance card.  The back of his hand brushed another envelope, a standard No. 10 white business envelope from the Lumberman’s Bank, sealed, that held twenty one-hundred-dollar bills. He passed the documents through the open window.

“Broken taillight or something, officer?” he asked.

Cars rumbled by, then a semi belching blue smoke, and a long flatbed truck with a load of bricks, kicking up dust. The sun was a little higher in the sky now, and bright yellow, preparing to do serious work.  The dreamy, perfect dawn had passed.

“Wait here, Lawrence.” the deputy said, and the face and the nose were gone.

Lucky hated it when cops called you by your first name, like they were talking to a child. Their own first name was never on their name tag... You had to call them officer, or deputy, something respectful. They got to call you Lawrence, or Larry. Well, Lawrence, you’ve been a bad boy.

As these thoughts nagged at Lucky, another thought, even more important than this casual first-name business peeked out from behind his annoyance, but before he could discern it clearly the thought ducked back, out of sight. He glanced into the rearview mirror and watched the deputy fiddling with something, writing something down, looking through some papers, whatever, and then the hidden thought jumped out, front and center, making Lucky’s breath catch.  This cop had known Lucky’s name.  He hadn’t looked at his license, hadn’t looked at his registration or his insurance card, took them without even glancing at them, and yet this stranger had known his name. He’d called him Lawrence.

Deputy Moose was clicking back up the pavement towards Lucky’s car.  His face appeared in the open window.

“What’s this about, officer?” Lucky asked.

“Take this, Lawrence,” he said, and handed a piece of paper through the open window, plain white paper folded twice.  Lucky took it. “Go there, now,” Deputy Fiusko said.

“Go where?” Lucky asked.

Deputy Fiusko held out the license, and the envelope that held the registration and insurance card, but when Lucky tried to take them, he pulled them back, out of reach.

“Go now,” he said.  “Understand?”

“I hear you.”

The deputy handed over the license and envelope, then moose-clicked back to his car, made a careful U-turn, and drove away towards the center of town.  Lucky unfolded the paper. At the top were the words RIGHT NOW!  Below that was a map, a few roads, a small square, probably a house, marked with an “X”, and an address.

Lucky should have ignored the piece of paper, just driven away, left Thompsonburg like he’d intended, this time forever.  He didn’t have to do what this Fiusko character ordered him to do.  This was still a free country, for Christ sake. The sun was a little higher, a little hotter.  He glanced at the map again, took a sip of his now tepid coffee-to-go, started the Taurus, waited for another truck with a load of bricks to pass, then pulled away from the curb.