dispatcher: Ma’am? Hello? Are you all right?
Mr. Gash was exhilarated by the sound of fear in human voices. Fury, panic, despair—it was all there on the 911 calls, the full cycle of primal desperation.
Daddy’s on a rampage.
Baby’s in the swimming pool.
Momma took some pills.
There’s a stranger at the bedroom window.
And yet, somehow, somebody makes it to a telephone and phones for help.
To Mr. Gash, this was better than theater, better than literature, better than music. True life is what it was; true life unspooling. He never tired of the 911 tapes. He even redubbed his favorites and set them to classical music—Mahler for domestic disputes, Tchaikovsky for cardiac arrests, and so on.
The emergency tapes kept his mind off the grinding traffic, and he listened to them all the way to Toad Island, the morning after he’d roughed up Palmer Stoat. For the long drive north, Mr. Gash had selected the Best-of-House-Fire Calls, with background accompaniment by Shostakovich.
dispatcher: Is there an emergency?
caller: Hurry! My house is on fire! It’s on fire!
dispatcher: Where are you, sir?
caller: Inside! Inside the house!
dispatcher: Where inside the house?
caller: The bedroom, I’m pretty sure! Hurry, man, it’s all on fire! Everything!
dispatcher: The trucks are on the way—
caller: I was basing under the Christmas tree, see—
dispatcher: Sir, you need to exit the dwelling immediately.
caller: Freebasing, see? And somehow, man, I don’t know what happened but all of a sudden there’s a flash and the tree’s lit up, I mean big-time. Next thing, all the Christmas presents, they’re on fire, too, and before long the whole scene is smoke…
dispatcher: Sir, you need to get out of the house immediately. Right now.
caller: You hurry, that’s the main thing. Hurry! ‘Cause I don’t have a goddamn clue where “out” is. You understand what I’m saying. I am one lost mother[bleeper], OK?
The tapes were aural tapestry to Mr. Gash. From a lone scream he could fully visualize the interior of a house, its bare halls and cluttered bedrooms; the faded carpets and the functional furniture, the oversized paintings and tense-looking family photographs. And of course he could see the orange flames licking at the walls.
“Ouch,” he said aloud as he drove.
Toad Island was the logical place to start hunting for the man he was supposed to murder. Possibly the fellow lived there, or at least must have visited the place. Why else would he give two shits about Robert Clapley’s bridge?
Mr. Gash’s first stop was the home of Nils Fishback, the island’s self-crowned “mayor” and Clapley’s onetime political adversary. Clapley had told Mr. Gash it was Fishback who’d know the inside dope on any malcontents among the residents.
“Get off my damn property!” was Nils Fishback’s intemperate greeting to Mr. Gash.
“Mr. Clapley sent me.”
“What for?” Fishback demanded. “What’s with the hair, jocko—you from England or somethin’?”
The old man was stationed on the front lawn. He was shoeless and shirtless, a bandanna knotted around his neck. The bandanna was milky yellow, as was Fishback’s long beard and also his toenails. He appeared not to have bathed for some time.
“Can’t you tell I’m busy?” Fishback pointed at a moving van in the driveway. Two beefy men were lugging a long plaid sofa up the ramp to the truck.
Mr. Gash said: “This’ll only take a minute.”
“I don’t have a minute.”
“What you don’t have,” said Mr. Gash, “is manners.”
He intercepted the two movers and advised them to take a thirty-minute break. Then he grabbed Nils Fishback by one of his bony elbows and dragged him into the house and tied his ankles and wrists with a Dacron curtain sash and pushed him into a bathtub. After a short search Mr. Gash found a bar of Dial antiperspirant soap, untouched, which he forcefully inserted into Fishback’s mouth.
“You probably feel like puking,” Mr. Gash said, “but of course you can’t.”
From the tub Fishback stared up with wild, horsey eyes.
“Here’s what I need from you,” said Mr. Gash. He was hovering, a gun held loosely in one hand.
“There’s a man causing Mr. Clapley lots of grief over the new bridge. What I need to know, ‘Mr. Mayor,’ is who would do something like this? Somebody out here on the island is my guess. Some creep trying to squeeze more money from my good friend Mr. Clapley.”