AROUND STEBBINS COUNTY
“What scares you?”
The waitress working the counter at Murphy’s Diner looked up from the coffee she was pouring. This wasn’t the first odd question this customer had asked. He was a thriller writer and he had been round annoying other customers with questions for the last couple of days. Today he was the only one crazy enough to brave the storm.
“Slow days and bad tippers,” she said.
The writer smiled. He was a blocky man with white hair and a gray mustache that was at odds with a youthful face. He wore an expensive leather jacket over a sweatshirt that had the emblem for the Northern Illinois Huskies college football team.
“Serious question,” persisted the writer. He fished in his pocket and laid a business card on the counter and pushed it toward the waitress. The card read SHANE GERICKE. The waitress,
who wore a white plastic name tag with SHIRL on it, picked up the card and flipped it over. On the back was a full-color picture of his latest novel.
“Torn Apart,” she read, then set the card down. “I don’t read horror novels. ”
“It’s not a horror novel,” said Gericke as he poured cream into his coffee. “I write thrillers. ”
“What’s the difference?”
“No monsters. ”
“Then who’s tearing who apart?”
“Serial killers, mass murderers. No vampires, no werewolves, nothing like that. ”
The waitress made one of those faces that suggested that she wasn’t likely to be interested in anything this guy wrote about. At least, not until she saw how well he tipped. If he dropped twenty percent or better, then she’d be a lot more interested next time. She knew a couple of writers. They were always broke. Only people who tipped worse were college students.
“You ready to order?” she asked, setting the pot down and pulling her order pad from her apron.
“If I do, will you answer the question?”
“You taking a poll?”
“I’m researching a book. The lead character in my novels is out here from Illinois to participate in a multistate manhunt for a killer. I’m trying to get a sense of what people are like here. Moods, politics, relationships, personalities. ”
“Why not just make it up?”
He shrugged, blew across his coffee cup, sipped, and set it down. “Better to draw on real life. ”
“Small-town color,” she said, “is that it? Make sure the hicks are properly redneck and uneducated?”
Gericke laughed. “I grew up in the burbs outside of Chicago. Not exactly ‘big town. ’ And, no, I’m not profiling everyone as a redneck. It takes all kinds of people to make a town. There’s no one ‘type. ’” He ticked his head toward the street outside. “I’ve met some interesting people so far. Chief Goss, a reporter named Trout, and—”
“Billy Trout? You met him?” Shirl managed a smile for that. Without the smile she looked north of fifty and off the radar for personality vitality, but the smile dropped fifteen years from her and chipped away a lot of the gray clay that seemed to have been built around her.
“You know him?”
Shirl gave him the kind of laugh that said that she not only “knew” Billy Trout, but could tell you stories.
“He comes in here every now and then,” she said with a wonderfully coquettish slant of her eyes that made Gericke smile. He’d already planned to base a character on Trout, but he was starting to sniff a juicy subplot about the seedy newsman with a soul and the lonely but still sexy diner waitress. Maybe she pines for the guy, or maybe she’s the one that got away. Something like that. Gericke knew he could take that and run with it. Put some desperate sweat-in-the-dark sex into the book.
“I’m planning on writing him into the novel,” said Gericke. “Not under his name, of course, but a character based on him. ”
Shirl laughed. “Well, that wouldn’t be a stretch, mister, ’cause Billy is a character. ”
At the other end of the diner the door opened and a man in a rain-soaked hoodie stepped inside.
“Damn, Sonny, close the door!” yelled Shirl, then she dropped her voice and in a confidential tone said to Gericke, “Speaking of characters. This one never did have enough brain cells to know when to come in out of the rain. ”