Bonegrinder by John Lutz

the outside. There were no booths, only a small counter and two tables surrounded by too many chairs. Behind the counter was a grotesquely fat woman wearing a stained yellow waitress’s uniform with the name Billie stitched over one straining breast. She looked to be in her fifties, and there was no trace of hair around the blue scarf she had wrapped about her head.
    “You’re the third one in today,” she said.
    “Am I?” Holt smiled at her and sat at the counter. “Coffee, black.”
    From a glass pot on a burner she poured him a mug of steaming coffee and carried it over to the counter. Despite an old window fan that kept the air circulating, the inside of Weller’s was hot, and Holt immediately regretted ordering the coffee. He sipped at it and regarded the woman, who lowered her bulk onto a stool near the cold grill on the other side of the counter.
    “Been at this job long?” he asked.
    She nodded, dabbing at her perspiring face with a wrinkled handkerchief. “Some twenty years.”
    “You’ve lived in these parts some time, then.”
    The woman grinned, a grin strangely undersized on her broad face. “All my twenty-one years.” She wadded the handkerchief and reached around with surprising ease to pat the back of her neck.
    “What do you make of this Bonegrinder?”
    “This what?” She raised thin eyebrows in puzzlement, touched her ear to indicate that she hadn’t heard plainly.
    “Bonegrinder. You know, in the papers …”
    “Heard tell of it. Ain’t read a paper in a while. Killin’ folks, is it?”
    Holt nodded, took a sip of his coffee, which was very good. “Any idea what it could be?”
    “Not a whit.”
    “In the years you’ve been here, ever heard of anything like it?”
    She squinted at him, perspiration glistening on the folds of her neck. “How come you’re so interested?”
    “I’m here to investigate, for the government. And I do research on folklore.”
    “Folk what?”
    “Folklore. Stories, beliefs, legends passed on from generation to generation.” He smiled at her again and raised his half-empty but still-steaming coffee mug to her. “Craig Holt.”
    “Billie Weller,” she said. “Don’t know nothin’ about this Bonegrinder. My grampa used to tell me stories when I was young. Can’t recollect any of ’em, though. That’s my memory—good, but it’s short.”
    Holt finished his coffee and stood. “By the way, I owe you for ten dollars’ worth of gas as well as for the coffee.”
    Billie nodded, raised herself up from the stool and moved down the counter toward him.
    “That pump’s a long way from here,” Holt told her. “Anybody ever take advantage and underpay you?”
    Billie accepted his money, and as she gave him his change she crooked a thick finger, then pointed down at the other side of the counter. Holt leaned forward and saw a gas-pump meter mounted on a wood shelf. It read ten dollars.
    “I trust most everybody,” Billie said with a grin, “but not entirely.”
    Holt returned her grin and pocketed his change. “Incidentally,” he said, “I needed oil, too, but I didn’t see any near the pump. Could I buy a quart here?”
    “Dale Hollis, ’round in back, will sell you some,” Billie said. “Can’t miss him. We don’t keep oil by the pump ’cause it’s had a way of disappearin’, what with all the traffic through here of late.”
    Holt thanked her and went outside. He walked around to the back of the building to find three overall-clad men seated in rusted metal lawn chairs near a corrugated aluminum storage shed. As Holt approached, they stared at him with that blank hostility that often can be shattered with a friendly word.
    “Dale Hollis here?” Holt asked.
    “Nope,” one of the men said, concentrating on the hard ground.
    Holt squatted down on his haunches to show that he wasn’t going to leave without gaining some information. “Where’s he at?”
    “Went out to shit an’ the hogs et him.”
    The three men laughed as