Just After Sunset by Stephen King

“Johnson Curtis,” Grunwald said in his plodding voice. His recorded voice paused longer, as if debating the use of Curtis’s given name, then moved on in the same dead and lightless way. “I can’t fight a war on two fronts. Let’s end this. I’ve lost my taste for it. If I ever had a taste for it. I’m in a very tight place, neighbor.”

He sighed.

“I’m prepared to give up the lot, and for no financial consideration. I’ll also compensate you for your for Betsy. If you’re interested, you can find me at Durkin Grove Village. I’ll be there most of the day.” A long pause. “I go out there a lot now. In a way I still can’t believe the financing fell apart, and in a way I’m not surprised at all.” Another long pause. “Maybe you know what I mean.”

Curtis thought he did. He seemed to have lost his nose for the market. More to the point, he didn’t seem to care. He caught himself feeling something suspiciously like sympathy for The Motherfucker. That plodding voice.

“We used to be friends,” Grunwald went on. “Do you remember that? I do. I don’t think we can be friends again—things went too far for that, I guess—but maybe we could be neighbors again. Neighbor.” Another of those pauses. “If I don’t see you out at Grunwald’s Folly, I’ll just instruct my lawyer to settle. On your terms. But ”

Silence, except for the sound of The Motherfucker breathing. Curtis waited. He was sitting at the kitchen table now. He didn’t know what he felt. In a little while he might, but for the time being, no.

“But I’d like to shake your hand and tell you I’m sorry about your damn dog.” There was a choked sound that might have been—incredible!—the sound of a sob, and then a click, followed by the phone-robot telling him there were no more messages.

Curtis sat where he was for a moment longer, in a bright bar of Florida sun that the air conditioner couldn’t quite cool out, not even at this hour. Then he went into his study. The market was open; on his computer screen, the numbers had begun their endless crawl. He realized they meant nothing to him. He left it running but wrote a brief note for Mrs. Wilson—Had to go out—before leaving the house.

There was a motor scooter parked in the garage beside his BMW, and on the spur of the moment he decided to take it. He would have to nip across the main highway on the other side of the bridge, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

He felt a pang of hurt and grief as he took the scooter’s key from the peg and the other attachment on the ring jingled. He supposed that feeling would pass in time, but now it was almost welcome. Almost like welcoming a friend.

The troubles between Curtis and Tim Grunwald had started with Ricky Vinton, who had once been old and rich and then progressed to old and senile. Before progressing to dead, he’d sold his undeveloped lot at the end of Turtle Island to Curtis Johnson for one-point-five million dollars, taking Curtis’s personal check for a hundred and fifty thousand as earnest money and in return writing Curtis a bill of sale on the back of an advertising circular.

Curtis felt a little like a hound for taking advantage of the old fellow, but it wasn’t as if Vinton—owner of Vinton Wire and Cable—was going away to starve. And while a million-five might be considered ridiculously low for such a prime piece of Gulfside real estate, it wasn’t insanely low, given current market conditions.

Well yes it was, but he and the old man had liked one another, and Curtis was one of those who believed all was fair in love and war, and that business was a subsidiary of the latter. The man’s housekeeper—the same Mrs. Wilson who kept house for Curtis—witnessed the signatures. In retrospect Curtis realized he should have known better than that, but he was excited.

A month or so after selling the undeveloped lot to Curtis Johnson, Vinton sold it to Tim Grunwald, alias The Motherfucker. This time the price was a more lucid five-point-six million, and this time Vin ton—perhaps not such a fool after all, perhaps actually sort of a con man, even if he was dying—got half a million in earnest money.

Grunwald’s bill of sale had been witnessed by The Motherfucker’s yardman (who also happened to be Vinton’s yardman). Also pretty shaky, but Curtis supposed Grunwald had been as excited as he, Curtis, had been. Only Curtis’s excitement proceeded from the idea that he would be able to keep the end of Turtle Island clean, pristine, and quiet. Exactly the way he liked it.

Grunwald, on the other hand, saw it as the perfect site for development: one condominium or perhaps even two (when Curtis thought of two, he thought of them as The Motherfucker Twin Towers). Curtis had seen such developments before—in Florida they popped up like dandelions on an indifferently maintained lawn—and he knew what The Motherfucker would be inviting in: idiots who mistook retirement funds for the keys to the kingdom of heaven. There would be four years of construction, followed by decades of old men on bicycles with pee bags strapped to their scrawny thighs. And old women who wore sun visors, smoked Parliaments, and didn’t pick up the droppings after their designer dogs shat on the beach. Plus, of course, ice cream–slathered grandbrats with names like Lindsay and Jayson. If he let it happen, Curtis knew, he would die with their howls of discontent—“You said we’d go to Disney World today!”—in his ears.

He would not let it happen. And it turned out to be easy. Not pleasant, and the lot didn’t belong to him, might never belong to him, but at least it wasn’t Grunwald’s. It didn’t even belong to the relatives who had appeared (like roaches in a Dumpster when a bright light is suddenly turned on), disputing the signatures of the witnesses on both agreements. It belonged to the lawyers and the courts.

Which was like saying it belonged to nobody.

Curtis could work with nobody.

The wrangling had gone on for two years now, and Curtis’s legal fees were approaching a quarter of a million dollars. He tried to think of the money as a contribution to some particularly nice environmental group—Johnsonpeace instead of Greenpeace—but of course he couldn’t deduct these contributions on his income tax. And Grunwald pissed him off. Grunwald made it personal, partly because he hated to lose (Curtis hated it, too, in those days; not so much now), and partly because he had personal problems.

Grunwald’s wife had divorced him; that was Personal Problem Number One. She was Mrs. Motherfucker no more. Then, Personal Problem Number Two, Grunwald had needed some sort of operation. Curtis didn’t know for sure it was cancer, he only knew that The Motherfucker came out of Sarasota Memorial twenty or thirty pounds lighter, and in a wheelchair. He had eventually discarded the wheelchair, but hadn’t been able to put the weight back on. Wattles hung from his formerly firm neck.

There were also problems with his once fearsomely healthy company. Curtis had seen that for himself at the site of The Motherfucker’s current scorched-earth campaign. That would be Durkin Grove Village, located on the mainland twenty miles east of Turtle Island. The place was a half-constructed ghost town. Curtis had parked on a knoll overlooking the silent suspension, feeling like a general surveying the ruins of an enemy encampment. Feeling that life was, all in all, his very own shiny red apple.

Betsy had changed everything. She was—had been—a Lowchen, elderly but still spry. When Curtis walked her on the beach, she always carried her little red rubber bone in her mouth. When Curtis wanted the TV remote, he only had to say “Fetch the idiot stick, Betsy,” and she would pluck it from the coffee table and bring it to him in her mouth. It was her pride. And his, of course. She had been his best friend for seventeen years. The French lion-dogs usually lived to no more than fifteen.

Then Grunwald had put in an electric fence between his property and Curtis’s.

That Motherfucker.

It wasn’t especially high voltage, Grunwald said he could prove that and Curtis believed him, but it had been of a voltage high enough to do for a slightly overweight old dog with a bad heart. And why an electric fence in the first place? The Motherfucker had spouted a lot of bullshit having to do with discouraging potential home-breakers—presumably creeping from Curtis’s property to that upon which La Maison Motherfuckair reared its purple stucco head—but Curtis didn’t believe it. Dedicated home-breakers would come in a boat, from the Gulf side. What he believed was that Grunwald, disgruntled about the Vinton Lot, had put in the electric fence for the express purpose of annoying Curtis Johnson. And perhaps hurting his beloved dog. As for actually killing his beloved dog? Curtis believed that had been a bonus.