Rainy nights. Yeah, that and a clap or two of thunder after a bolt of lightning tracks across a cold, black sky. Primal fears they call it. I used to work out of Camden County, chased a lot of cheating husbands down to Atlantic City, sometimes across the Delaware into Philly. Snapped a few pictures, too. Wives love that! Proof! So proof I provide. I only followed a woman once. The guy was an accountant for some tomato squeezers in Camden. Yeah, I followed her for two months, could have been done in a week. But she would meet this other chick--at a hotel in Philly, some casino in A. C.--sometimes the other chick’s place. Those were some of the best pictures I ever took. I gave a few of them to the accountant. He cried.
I guess he figured he didn’t have the equipment to compete. That’s the deal when you call on the services of a guy like me, though. You better be ready for your worst fears. There it is again. Fears. You know I never had a case where a woman came to me and asked me to find out if her husband was cheating that he wasn’t! Men are dogs! That’s what the nuns used to say down to Saint Michael’s. But I ain’t complaining--it's paid my freight for years.
I was in my office and got this call--usual thing, woman says she’s worried and has to know for certain. I told her I would let her know and then took down the particulars of the case. Fellow’s name was Danny Duncan, he made window stickers. You know, the ones that are stuck in the back left window of a car when you buy it. He’d drive all over Hell’s half-acre to these small used car dealers and get all the info on their cars and transfer it onto his computer disc and then get it all printed up nice and neat and then deliver it to the car lots; where for an additional fee, he’d even affix the stickers to the appropriate car.
He got six bucks a sticker, a little more if he came and installed them. That doesn’t sound like shit, but think about it!--all these little crappy car lots with maybe twenty cars sitting there collecting rust, dotting the highways along every town from here to eternity. And he’d do all the footwork. Wife said that he had some large customers too. She said he’d make two grand on a good week and rarely less than twelve-hundred.
Her problem was the travel. He’d often stay overnight, even when he was only fifty-sixty miles away! He claimed the work was exhausting. And after I thought about it, I thought it probably was: Imagine driving down the highway into South Jersey, stopping six or seven times at all these used car joints and getting all that paperwork crap set up. And then making sure you had the right one for each car, having to open up the rear door of each of those cars and sticking that paper to the glass.
Yeah. Sure, that seems exhausting to me.
Well, anyway, she wanted me to follow and make sure the sticker-king wasn’t sticking it into some broad out there. Seemed simple enough. I met her at a diner on the Red Lion Circle, a place she said no one she knew would see her and me together. We ordered coffee and sat and talked like old friends. She told me other things about Danny, how he'd never watch the TV anymore, wouldn't touch the toaster!-- and avoided working in his shop in the garage, seemed to have developed some morbid fear of all things electrical. She said that when Danny was a eleven-years-old he'd been down the shore and hit by a strike of lightening while fishing on a jetty—said he was terrified of thunderstorms even now. But all these silly fears he'd displayed over this summer were new.
We left the diner and I walked her to her car. She wore a tired, betrayed expression, as if I'd already told her her belief in Danny's infidelity were true. She hopped in her two-seater Mercedes without another word and peeled off back towards the west. Her retainer of two-hundred bucks sat neatly in my wallet. On the way home I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels, and slept the sleep of the innocent that night. The following morning, quite early, I drove over near to where the Duncan’s lived in Cherry Hill.
August is a funny month around here. You get a lot of muggy weather--the thunderstorms usually hit sometime before the rush hour. But that day--it was a Tuesday--started out cool and dry. Danny-boy drove a green Chevy with a left brake light that was out, (and I won't say that I caused it) which made the following all the simpler. He pulled out of the quiet, suburban neighborhood and started south on I-295. Down at the north-south freeway he exited and headed for the A C Expressway. Luckily, I had remembered to bring some change for the tolls. New Jersey is notorious for a myriad of toll booths that demand a quarter or two.
After a few miles, Danny surprised me by exiting onto Route 55, which heads south toward Vineland. I backed off a bit so as to not get noticed. The Double-Nickel is much less traveled than the Expressway and as we rounded a wide bend in the highway, I could see few other cars except for his.
Following was simple now and we continued south past Vineland and on towards Millville. Route 55 ends at Route 47, a much lesser two-lane road that winds along the Delaware Bay all the way to Cape May! But soon after we made it south of Millville, Danny Duncan pulled into a used car lot. I drifted on by and found a WaWa just down the road. I ran into the store and used their men’s room because my bladder was close to bursting. I stepped back out into the store and got a cup of joe, thought about food, but decided to wait until later when I saw the overdone dogs rolling on the hot dog machine.
Back in the car, I splashed a bit of the Jack into the coffee and watched the used car lot that was called: Jones’ Car World, just up the street. And since I could see it from where I was, I just sat in the car and pretended to rest awhile, sipping my doctored caffeine. Danny was running from car to car putting stickers on and taking old ones out. I counted fourteen cars in all. At six bucks a shot that was eighty-four bucks plus whatever he gets to affix them--probably a dollar--so that’s a hundred bucks! All that by eleven in the morning, not bad.
He wheeled out of Jones’ and continued south. I followed. About six--seven miles further on he pulled into Walter’s Wheel World. Luckily there was a shopping center right next door. I pulled into the large lot and stayed close to Walter’s. This was a much larger used car dump with over fifty cars. But, of course, not all of them needed a sticker like at Jones’. I sat and watched Danny do almost thirty stickers by 12:30. That was a couple hundred dollars in the bank easy! Danny left Walter’s and pulled straight into the shopping center lot, hopped out of his Chevy, and darted for a Deli by the grocery store. If he hit two more places on the way home, it would be like a six-hundred dollar day! And here I was making forty an hour plus expenses. I was beginning to think about a new line of work.
That’s when I heard the first clap of thunder. The afternoon storms came early that cool summer day. I followed Danny out of the lot, heading back toward the north. But after a few miles he turned right onto some county road where a sign indicated a town named Woodbine lay somewhere that way. The sign had been riddled by a shot gun blast.
As the sun was eclipsed by a large thunderhead, the rain began to fall; slowly at first, in large drops that splattered down on my dirty windshield. I popped on the headlights and engaged my squeaky wipers and trailed Danny’s Chevy through the somewhat depressing town of Woodbine. We turned north again and into the Pinelands. Six or seven miles further on, Danny turned off onto a dirt road. I figured the girlfriend must be close by now.
The Chevy pulled to the side of the dirt road; which was a mud road now, and stopped short by a mobile home, single wide. I drove right on by and some hundred yards beyond pulled onto the verge and stopped.