Gibbs sighed and pulled his hand down his face like he was taking off a “Mission: Impossible” mask. “I’ve got a handle on this, Holland, if you want to check on thing over at Chandler General.”
Oates’ shoulders relaxed slightly, and he looked like he might shoot me. “Thought you could use a hand, that’s all, Sheriff.” He sneered in the general direction of Woody and me. “Dave never has had good taste in the company he keeps.”
“You mind answering me something, Holland?” Dave said. He took a few steps forward, getting closer to Oates. “This thing I’ve been wondering.”
Oates’s expression never changed from a smug sense of satisfaction. Body language, though, that snapped taut as an electrical line. Those hands stopped being relaxed, and they balled up into loose fists and pushed back. His right hand moved closer to his gun. “Ask away.”
Dave walked even closer to the deputy. There couldn’t have been five feet between them.
“Take a breath over there, Dave,” Gibbs said.
“I’m breathing fine, Sheriff,” Dave said. He stayed loose and casual. “Just got a question for the deputy here.”
Woody and I stepped in toward Dave. Dave paid us no attention. He had his focus on Oates. Gibbs didn’t move to stop Dave, and he didn’t move away, either. He was a patient man, waiting this one out. Or maybe he just wanted to be close enough to see Dave clock his deputy; that seemed like a possibility.
Oates sucked in some air and puffed his chest out. It didn’t help much; he still looked too lean and hung out on the line too long. “Dave, you should—”
“When Jimmy tells you to get ready to take it up the ass, do you just bend over at the waist or grab your ankles and give it a real ‘give it to me good, Daddy’ thing?” Dave said. He turned around and shook his ass at the cops. “Like this here. I’m betting it’s just like this, isn’t it?”
That laid-back attitude Holland Oates wanted to have, that went bye-bye, and fury filled his eyes. He sprung quickly, diving toward Dave. Dave still bobbed and weaved his ass in the air like he was in a rap video. He sang as he did it, something that sounded like, “Give it to me, Daddy, uh-huh, uh-huh. Give it to me, Daddy, uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Woody grabbed hold of Dave and pulled him behind him, and I moved toward the deputy. Gibbs reached out and blocked Oates before he got very far.
“Cool your jets, Holland,” Gibbs said. “You’re getting played, and we both know that.” He turned at Dave. Dave had a thin smile on his face. He wasn’t as drunk as he let on; it just gave him a good excuse to be an asshole.
Oates shook off the sheriff’s grasp and adjusted his hat. “Man’s intoxicated and a goddamn public nuisance,” he said. He seethed with an overflow of bottled up rage and no release for it. His hand sat on top of his gun now. All he wanted was the excuse.
To the sheriff, I said, “Why don’t we get Dave home now?”
“I think that’s the best goddamn idea I’ve heard all night,” Gibbs said.
“He’s a suspect in at least one assault, Sheriff,” Holland said. “We’ve got it all on video.”
“Which means it’s all going to still be there in the morning, when cooler heads will prevail and hash it all out then.” His voice was even and practiced, like your dad when he tried to calm you down after an experience. And I definitely mean your dad; my old man, Billy Malone, would have busted my head and called it good.
Oates eyeballed the three of us. If he pushed his teeth any tighter together, they’d crumble into dust.
“Whatever you think is best, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll head on over to the hospital.”
“You do that, Holland,” Gibbs said without looking back at him.
Oates gave us all one last glare. “I’ll be seeing you gentlemen again, I bet.”
“Hey, Deputy,” I said.
His hand was on his cruiser’s door handle. “What?”
I threw him a nod. “We’ll be watching you.” Then, quieter, “Watching you, watching you, watching you . . .” The words trailed out into a whisper.
He spit on the ground before he got into the cruiser and pulled away.
Gibbs crossed his arms. “Jesus, Dave, was that necessary?”
Dave kept his shit-eating, aw-shucks smile on his face. “No, but it was fun as fuck, and the mustached nutsack has it coming. You ought to take him out into a field somewhere, have him put down. Man’s a goddamn menace to society.”
“Whatever it is, you’ve got this hard-on against Deputy Oates, and it needs to stop,” Gibbs said.
“He’s a shit excuse for a deputy, and you know it. He’s so far up the Saints’ ass, he could carry the camera for a colonoscopy.”
Woody placed a hand on Dave’s shoulder. Dave pulled away, the smile gone and now just pissed at the world.
“Sheriff,” Woody said, “we’ll get Dave home, if that’s all right with you.”
“There’s still the matter of him starting a fight at the Dew Drop. Though it’s not like the Saints would show up to press charges.” He gave Dave a look. It wasn’t a good look. It was a look that said he was fed up with dealing with Dave’s shit, with his attitude, with having to look at his face. “Go home, Dave. Tell Sheila I send my love. Stop being an asshole. You do two out of three, and we’ll call it night.”
He got back into his cruiser and left us standing in the high school parking lot.
Dave’s house was a modular off one of the main roads in Chandler County. There was a Honda SUV in the driveway and lights on inside the house. Dave didn’t have much to say to us that didn’t involve directions to the house.
Woody climbed out of the truck and Dave followed behind him. I had my hand on my door to get out when Woody said, “Don’t.”
I stopped and saw the expression in his eyes. This wasn’t an order; this was a request he was asking, almost a favor.
“Sure,” I said, drawing my hand back.
Through the windshield, I saw the front door open, and a brunette came out. She had the hips of someone who had pushed out a kid or two, but it only added to a curviness that worked well for her. She wore sweatpants and a flannel shirt and glasses and a lot of dark hair piled up on top of her head and held there by an oversized clip. She smiled when she saw Dave climbing up the steps onto the porch, hugged him, and he hugged her back with the same amount of enthusiasm reserved for POWs embracing the camp commandant. He pressed himself into her long enough for the sensation to register, released, and walked inside.
Woody stayed at the bottom of the porch steps. She saw Woody and mouthed something that was most likely “Thank you.” I couldn’t hear what they said. Woody’s expression was as plaintive as it ever was. Hers was . . . I don’t know. Happy. Thankful. Embarrassed. There was a whisper of confusion. Something held her back from going down the stairs and hugging Woody.
They said their final pieces, and she headed back inside and closed the door. Woody got back into the Jeep and we drove away.
We didn’t talk to one another as we drove back to the Dew Drop Inn. The police were gone by then, and the bar was closed, and it was dark and silent and seemed a different place from a few hours ago. Most of the cars were gone from the parking lot.
Woody pulled up beside my Aztek. I opened the door to get out, and he said, “Thank you.”
“I wasn’t doing anything else tonight, anyway.”
“Was this your first Saturday night bar fight?”
“It was. Let’s not make a habit of it, huh?”
“Good plan. Have a good one, Henry.”
“I’ve got a good one,” I said. “What I need is a big one.”
5
The sun crept up onto Sunday morning a few hours later, and as per my tradition, I did not get up and go to church. Bells rang from various houses of worship in the distance, the wind carrying the noise to me. Perhaps divine providence wanting to make a point. It was not successful.
Izzy stretched out on the bed beside me. She didn’t stir at the noise. She would
n’t have stirred if you fired a goddamn shotgun over her head. I had worried about her sleeping so much, took her to the vet and they ran a bunch of tests and, three hundred dollars later, the vet informed me she was in perfect health, and lazy as fuck.
My old trailer had burned down a few months earlier, and I had replaced it with another, less shitty one, dropping it in the same spot, within walking distance of Billy’s place. The previous trailer had dated back to the Nixon administration, whereas this one only went back to Bush 1.0. I didn’t have to stuff newspaper in the cracks at the windows now, but the lights flickered when I plugged in my toothbrush. I decked the joint out in the best furniture and appliances Goodwill and two trips to the flea market offered, including a futon for the living room. I even bought myself a new mattress for the damn thing, because I wanted to live above my raising.
I got up and showered while the coffee maker popped and bubbled the elixir of my existence to life. I was between jobs, which I didn’t like because it made paying the bills a tighter fit. I had a disability check from the state police, courtesy of me getting shotgunned in the knee by a meth-head several years ago, and since I was a simple man of simple needs—plus I lived in a dump—it covered my needs, if not my wants. My wants, though, tended toward those things cash would not buy me.
Which Woody said made it logical that I apply for a private investigator’s license. I told him I didn’t see myself opening an office, and he told me to shut up and apply for it regardless; he presented a convincing argument. Jackie Hall, a state police lieutenant I knew, did the fingerprint card for me, having to pause every other finger to laugh because he thought me being a private eye was the funniest thing ever. Jackie has kids, though, and doesn’t get out much.
The worst part had been trying to find character references. I’d pulled together the five after some work, including an FBI agent I knew, the former Parker County sheriff, Jackie, and some old state trooper contacts, and sent everything in, and now I was waiting. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting on, though. I didn’t have a clue what I’d do with the damned thing once I had it. Parker County, West Virginia, wasn’t quite New York, L.A., or even Rockford, Illinois. I couldn’t foresee me having anything that would resemble steady business.
Once I got clothes on me and coffee in me, I woke Izzy up and let her outside to piss on anything that didn’t move. I was positive that dog was 90 percent bladder. She squeezed out urine on anything she could find. She dashed from here to there in excited bursts, sniffing and pissing and repeating until I was exhausted. There came a point it turned into an act of futility and she tried to show off, so I whistled at her and she followed me up to Billy’s house. It was almost noon, so it was about time for my dad to be making late breakfast or early lunch. It was definitely not brunch. Billy Malone would have smacked someone for suggesting he made brunch.
The air inside his house was warm and thick with the smell of sausage frying and biscuits baking. Billy set everything on the table as I walked into the kitchen. He had already put a plate out for me with two fried eggs on it. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the ancient Mr. Coffee on the counter.
Billy looked the way he had for as long as I could remember, still trim and solid, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, his white hair slicked back and his mustache trimmed. He wore his hearing aid today, so he’d be able to hear me, which wouldn’t be the same as him listening to me.
An old plastic bowl with a fried egg in it rested next to the stove. He added in a piece of sausage and smashed the two together before carrying the mush to the table. Izzy watched this with an unmatchable intensity. Unblinking bullmastiff eyes followed every movement the old man made. Outside of pissing, anything involving food was the most energy Izzy expended.
“How was your night?” Billy asked me.
“It was fine.”
“You get into anything? You left out late.”
“Stuff with Woody. You keeping tabs on me now?”
Billy set the bowl on the floor. Izzy pushed her face in it and two seconds later drew back a muzzle covered in tiny clumps of egg. He smiled at her, and she looked at him as if she felt more should have been on its way.
“That’s enough for you now, you goddamn horse,” he said as he sat down and filled his plate. Izzy followed Billy to the table and sat down and stared at him. He dutifully ignored her.
I split open a couple of biscuits and slathered grape jelly and butter on the insides. I ignored the sausage even though Billy had cooked enough to feed the infantry he imagined marching by any second now. I maintained a standing objection to pork after a documentary showed that pigs were smarter than dogs, and I didn’t see a point where I’d be eating Izzy anytime soon, so I couldn’t justify something smarter than her. Though I was sure there were cow prodigies out there that could outthink my dog.
Billy ate his breakfast. I tapped my fingers on the table. He ignored it until he didn’t, and said, “What the hell?”
“You,” I said. “Worrying about me.”
“Don’t get weird about it. You seem to have an inclination toward trouble, that’s all.” He took a long sip of coffee. “I worried less about you when you were a state trooper.”
“I had no idea you ever worried about me.”
“I did. I know it’s not like things are always smooth with you and me, but last time I looked, you were my son, so yeah, I worried about you when you were out there dealing with all the crazy sons-of-bitches out there. Then you came back here, and the sons-of-bitches only got crazier.”
The old coot had a point. Since returning to Parker County, I had been shot, shot a few people, had a finger cut off, watched a man be burned alive, been dragged into a handful of federal investigations, and gotten a divorce. Listing it all out that way, the divorce fell into the minor realm of things.
Billy turned his focus back to his food. I ate my eggs and biscuits, drank my coffee, and we did this in the silence that usually accompanied us whenever I had a meal with Billy. Izzy kept a vigil on my father, her tail thwacking against the linoleum so hard I expected it to crack.
I washed the dishes, put the extra sausage in the refrigerator, and divvied up the biscuits, some going into the refrigerator and the rest wrapped in aluminum foil for me to take back.
I poured myself another cup of coffee, got Billy one also, and sat back at the table. Billy was reading the Sunday paper, the big one, from Charleston. He had dissected it like a frog in biology class, the sections scattered across the table. Izzy laid at his feet, her eyes turned upward to him.
From behind the sports section, Billy said, “You should go to church.”
I laughed. “Why’s that?”
“Religion might do you some good. Your soul’s gotta be more tattered than a battlefield flag.”
“I appreciate your concern over my eternal well-being, but I don’t see you getting up and heading out to the local house of worship.”
“Bah. They’re all crooks.” He pulled out the editorial section and opened it up with a flourish. “Glad you came up. We’ll do this again.”
That was my hint. Subtle as a firecracker in a bag of flour. Time to go.
I finished my coffee. “Thanks for feeding me and my horse.” I whistled for Izzy. Her ears perked up, but she didn’t move otherwise. As I headed toward the door, she realized what was happening, and she didn’t seem pleased about it. I clapped my hands a few times, gave her the “we’re not fucking around here, dog” look, and she rose and lumbered toward me.
Billy stayed at the table, reading the paper as I walked out the door.
6
I hit that night’s 8 p.m. meeting at St. Anthony’s. It was a night where everyone seemed to talk about loss. Losing jobs. Losing spouses. Losing family members. Losing touch with reality. Sit through enough AA meetings, you realize the stories people tell are almost always about what they lost.
I’d lost a mother. A spouse. A finger. Only the spouse was directly related to the drinking, though,
and that was more about me being a raging asshole when I drank, and while I had stopped drinking, still being a raging asshole.
I had spent an absurd amount of time avoiding signing the divorce papers. Woody had convinced me Maggie had a right to move on with her own life, and I had the right to do so with my own. That was most likely true, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
My life was better than I deserved, to tell you the truth. No, I wasn’t rich, but I was surviving. I was sober. I was dating Dr. Lillian Wilder, and that was moving along well. I loved that she was “Dr. Wilder”; never underestimate how hot it is to have sex with a Ph.D. But she was out of town for work and would be another week, and that left me lonely and feeling sorry for myself, which are shitty places to be if you’re an alcoholic, sober or not.
Woody and I went over to the Riverside for coffee and pie after the meeting. I had coconut cream, and he had cherry pie with ice cream. The Riverside was open twenty-four hours, all of them in a row, and they got a fair share of AA business after meetings. The same faces we had seen fifteen minutes earlier were all there, and we gave each other perfunctory waves and kept to ourselves.
I said, “Heard from your buddy Dave since last night?”
“I have not.” He stared at the top of his coffee when he spoke. “I imagine I’ll live the rest of my life and not hear from either of them again.”
“There a reason why you’d jump into a situation like that for people you don’t seem connected to?”
“The program says we make our amends with the people we’ve wronged. When I got sober, some of those amends were going back and saying I’m sorry to someone. They took the apology, or they didn’t. You don’t get to control the accepting part; you only get to control the offering.” He ate a bite of pie. “Some of those amends, they take more than that. You’ve got your amends still to make, I imagine.”
“I do.”
“And sometimes it’s just the willingness to make the amends.”
Friend of the Devil Page 3
