Free The Lost by Jack Ketchum

get him on that either. Drug busts were few in Sparta and none of the dope they did confiscate had been traced to him. They shook him down personally on two occasions in the high-school parking lot and both times he wasn’t carrying. That didn’t mean it wasn’t why he was hanging out there. The fact that he held down a job at his parents’ motel didn’t mean a damn thing. The motel was a nothing situation. A bone his parents were throwing him to keep him off the streets that was only halfway effective.
    Schilling had wondered at the time why the kid hadn’t been drafted. So he called up the local draft board. Pye was too short, they said. Pye was five feet three inches tall. Which explained the high-heeled cowboy boots.
    The kid was nothing if he wasn’t vain.
    It occurred to him that they had a new chief these days. Tom Court had retired a month ago and the new man, Jackowitz, was an import from Newark PD and wouldn’t know a whole lot about the case except that it was an unsolved murder, fairly rare in these parts. But there were plenty of other things more urgently demanding his attention. He wouldn’t know much about Pye either. Probably that left him free to take another crack at the kid if he wanted to just for old times’ sake.
    He decided he did want to.
    He kept visiting Elise’s drunken mother in his head.
    He wondered if Ray had a .22 rifle lying around these days. Maybe the kid had relaxed his guard.
    At five Schilling filed the Attention Shoppers paperwork in his drawer, got in his car and drove the four blocks over to Teddy Panik’s.
    As he pulled into the parking lot Lenny Bess was just getting out of his pickup. Lenny was a carpenter and restorer who rented a shop in the back of Center Hardware from Gene Huff. Lila had used him once to repair the legs on the pie safe they’d inherited from her mother, and he’d done a good job. Lenny saw Schilling’s car pull in and waved and waited for him at the door.
    Schilling greeted him and they shook hands and together they went inside. For a Monday evening the bar was crowded. He saw Ed down at his usual spot at the end. He knew Lenny would hang around up front with his buddies Walter Ursul and Fred Humbolt so he stopped a moment just to be polite.
    “How’d you get the stitches, Len?”
    It looked like four of them, beginning at the widow’s peak and then up into the thin gray hair. Bess smiled.
    “Two-by-four fell on me off the goddamn stacks at the yard. You’d think I’d know how to juggle ’em better by now, huh? How’s the pie safe holding up?”
    “Holding up just fine.”
    It had gone to Arizona with Lila and the kids. He had no idea how it was doing.
    “Do me a favor, will you? If you’ve got any more work for me or if you hear of any, I’d appreciate your giving me a call. Money-wise the whole damn winter was a bitch and I’m still behind.”
    “Sure. Be happy to. Tim working?”
    Bess shrugged.
    “I got him something at the hardware store. He works a couple of weeks, doesn’t show up for a couple of weeks. Gene’s a prince to put up with him. Kids, y’know? What can you do.”
    “I know. Listen, Lenny, you have a good one.”
    “You too, Charlie.”
    You couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. Lenny was a hard worker just trying to get by. Not many folks around here had reason to hire a restorer. Most of the year-round locals could do their own light carpentry. So jobs were always scarce until the summer owners arrived needing this or that repair and Lenny had plenty of competition from younger men even then. His wife held down a checkout job at the market. They needed the cash. The kid did nothing.
    The kid hung around with Ray Pye.
    He walked down to the end and shook hands with Ed and Teddy across the bar. There wasn’t a seat vacant so he stood beside Ed and ordered a Dewar’s rocks and Teddy poured one. Ed didn’t look real happy. He didn’t look drunk—Ed was never drunk—but he didn’t look