Friend of the Devil

by James D F Hannah

  “Obviously.”

  “One night, Larry was coming home from church, having gotten right with God and everything, and he got jumped getting into his car. He tells the police later that he can’t identify who it was, or even how many there were. All he can say is that they beat the fuck out of him. He’s laid up in a hospital bed for two weeks, and he’s gotta wear a catheter.”

  Toad shook his head. “Larry’s not old, either. He ain’t even fifty, and he’s got a piss sack attached to his leg now, rest of his life. No way to live.”

  “I’ll guess everyone paid up then,” I said.

  “They did,” Big Country said. “No one had quibble one after that.”

  “The sheriff a part of this, you think?”

  “Not likely. Gibbs is honest people, but he’s old and he’s got grandkids and I’m sure he wants to live long enough to spend those golden years with them.”

  “That deputy of his is a dick, though,” Toad said.

  “Oates?”

  “That’s the one,” he said. “You met him?”

  “I did. What’s his issue?”

  “He’s a spoiled little rich boy who’s got himself a badge,” Big Country said. “Sitting on two big piles of entitlement right there.”

  “He rich?”

  “Holland ain’t, but his daddy is. His father is the ‘Oates’ in Graham & Oates Guns and Pawn.”

  “Those places are all over the state.”

  Big County nodded. “It’s where everyone goes to get rid of the little gold band that reminds them of that one terrible idea they once had.”

  “You have a clue why Dave’s got a hard-on against Oates, because it’s pretty clear there’s no love there for the deputy.”

  “Oates is nothing but the rich kid from school who never let you forget he was rich. An attitude like that gets even worse when you attach a crappy little mustache to it. To be fair, I doubt Oates’ old man likes him much either. Holland’s a toadie—no offense, Toad—and he’s doing nothing but waiting for Gibbs to retire or die so he can move up in power.”

  “Why sweat becoming sheriff when he can become rich when his dad kicks the bucket?”

  “Because Daddy’s money won’t buy the respect a gun and a badge get you. Plus, the Oates are already neck deep in with the Saints, so it’ll be consolidation of power.”

  “How so?”

  “The pawnshop franchise mothership sits across the street from the Saints’ garage. Word is, G&O is the only place in Raineyville and Chandler County not paying the Saints for the pleasure of getting to pursue the American dream.”

  “What do you suppose it is that makes them so damn special?”

  Big Country smiled. “You’re the fancy detective. I’d think it’s your job to find out.”

  13

  I felt the end of the day dragging itself across the finish line and my ass dragging right behind it. Woody called me as I got in my car.

  “Find out anything interesting?” he said.

  “That we’re in the middle of a hot mess that’s more than we can handle.”

  “So, the norm.”

  “Par for the course, if you want to use golf analogies.”

  Woody was on his way home, and he told me to swing by his place to talk over what we knew. Which wasn’t much. Hell, it seemed like something we could cover by telegram.

  “I’ve got to check on Izzy,” I said.

  “Bring her. She can deal with my legion.” Woody did dog rescue, and he always had a small pack of mongrels and strays lying around like drunks on a Friday night.

  “Why not?” I said. “She needs new places to pee and sleep.”

  Izzy loved to piss more than any creature I’d ever seen. Not that I’d paid attention to the joy level of creatures pissing. But Izzy particularly seemed pleased to get to spread her urine everywhere, which she did as soon as I unleashed her into my yard.

  I checked through my mail. There was the usual assortment of bills, flyers for stuff I didn’t want to buy or events I didn’t want to attend, credit card offers that claimed I was already approved but obviously didn’t understand who they were dealing with, and a package from the state licensing division. I ripped it open and dumped the contents across the kitchen table. It was my private investigator’s license.

  I hadn’t even wanted the damn thing, but Woody had talked me into it, and now that it was here, it made me weirdly happy and left me with a goofy smile on my face, like Ralphie got his “Little Orphan Annie” decoder ring.

  Woody’s horde of hounds went on alert as soon as Izzy and I pulled into the driveway, and Izzy mounted her front paws on the dashboard and turned her ears up, the hair along her neck and back raised. From somewhere in her rumbled a low, deep growl I couldn’t remember ever hearing before. Izzy was the laziest dog I’d ever seen, and she had little concern for any human being who wasn’t interested in either petting her or giving her food. But she hadn’t been around other dogs since I’d gotten her, so this was a new thing, the little burst of energy and aggression.

  I clicked her leash onto her collar and the dogs rushed toward us as soon as we got out. The tension on Izzy’s leash went taut, and I strained to hold her back. She didn’t bark or bare her teeth, but she was ready to kick canine ass.

  From his stance in the back door, Woody called out something in German and the pack froze about ten feet from us. Izzy did also, staring at the dogs, so focused on them that cheeseburgers could have been dancing in front of her and she wouldn’t have cared.

  Woody whistled and gave another command and the pack circled around the house and trotted up onto the front porch.

  “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll keep them out and let Izzy have reign of the inside.”

  Even once the dogs had disappeared from view, Izzy remained as tense as a colorblind bomb squad tech. She still had the low growl going, this little grumble of noise like her engine was revving.

  Woody walked up to her and rubbed the top of her head. She almost sighed and relaxed at his touch.

  “Come on,” he said. “Food’s getting cold.”

  Izzy followed Woody around the kitchen as he finished the chicken fried steaks, flipping them in the pan. The oil popped and crackled like bad radio reception.

  Woody patted my beast of a dog on top of her head again and smiled.

  “You ever considered training her?” he said.

  “That would involve her staying awake long enough to get trained.”

  “She does seem to enjoy naps, doesn’t she?”

  “On a level I never thought imaginable. More than me.”

  “Once we’re done in Chandler County, I could take her, see what I could do with her.”

  “You planning to teach her German?”

  “I’ll teach her commands in German.”

  “I see a problem with this since I don’t speak German?”

  “If she can learn German, I have hope you can also.”

  “She’s arguably smarter than I am.”

  “I doubt that’s much of an argument. Maybe I should take her back with me tomorrow.”

  “You two would do nothing but fight over the radio.”

  “She’s a smart dog. I bet she likes NPR.”

  “If that doesn’t put her to sleep, nothing will.”

  As we ate, I told Woody about meeting Richie Brock and the guys from Dave’s HVAC business.

  “Dipshits like the Saints should be nothing but small-scale assholes, but they’ve got more going on than you’d expect,” he said.

  “Adjust for scale,” I said. “In Raineyville, they’re the biggest bullies on the playground. Anywhere else, and they’re a bunch of assholes on noisy bicycles.”

  “Which would be fine except that we are on their playground, and they’ve established the rules.”

  “You think the protection business is connected to Dave and to Jimmy Omaha?”

  “If it is, I’m not sure how. Someone killing Jimmy Omaha doesn’t get rid of the Saints.
All it does is stir the hornet’s nest and blow back on Dave.”

  “What if it’s an internal thing? A power play within the group.”

  Woody gave it thought and nodded. “Someone within the Saints decides after the fight, this was a chance to push against Jimmy Omaha.”

  “Shooting a brother in the head is a hell of a push.”

  “It’s an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed.”

  “Dave’s the perfect frame for this. His van was available. Someone could have stolen it at almost any point after Dave went to the bar.”

  “Makes sense, too, because whoever shot Jimmy would have needed to have known about the security cameras.”

  Woody ate a little more. He did so with thoughtfulness and contemplation. I was nowhere as thoughtful, and I looked down and realized my plate was empty. He gestured toward the stove. “Help yourself.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice.

  Neither one of us said much the rest of the meal. Woody rinsed off the plates and set a percolator to brew.

  “Where’d you learn to cook?” I said.

  “All over the place,” he said. “My earlier life took me places. Sometimes, your time got sucked up by waiting for shit to happen, so you filled the hours how you could.” He shrugged. “I learned how to cook.”

  “That earlier life how you knew Sheila’s first husband?”

  Woody nodded. “We were the only two West Virginia boys in our Marines squad, so we got the most grief over accents and got called hillbillies. Somewhere in that, Jay and I realized the Marines wasn’t for us, but the real world wasn’t a great choice, other. The government spent lots of time and money to turn us into something, and when we were done, we didn’t know how to be anything but what we got turned us into. Didn’t have anything to do but get paid to do things people don’t want to think about needing done.”

  “What happened to Jay in that?”

  “He was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, doing something he shouldn’t have done, and he ended up one of the guys who didn’t get to come home.”

  Woody poured us coffee once it finished, and he got out cream and sugar for me. I doctored my batch until it didn’t resemble road tar, and watched the steam swirl upward from the cup.

  “What we’re doing, this your payback to Sheila?” I said. “Your moral code telling you that you’re responsible for Jay somehow, so now you’ve got to fix this thing?”

  Woody shook his head. “The way Jay died was on him. No one’s fault but his own. But someone calls you, asks you to do something you can do, you should try to do that.”

  “Again with your code of honor.”

  “Seen too much, done too much where honor wasn’t nothing but that gets left by the garbage, Henry. Enough time goes by and you see how little anyone else cares about the idea that you have to decide to either keep going down a road you don’t like traveling to get somewhere you don’t want to be, or you choose to find another path and another destination. That’s all.”

  I sipped at my coffee. “What about the lady who slapped you. Iris her name?”

  “It is. Jay’s mother.”

  “She had to bury her son. Except what they put barely qualified as Jay. Not much left of him, and Iris knew that. That will do things to you, you never want to imagine. She’s still hurting, and I guess she will be for a while.”

  I sipped my coffee. “We need to talk to Dave and get his side of the story. And we may have to confront the Saints.”

  “I’m almost counting on that.”

  “They will not be happy to see us.”

  “I wouldn’t expect so. They didn’t like us much last time we met.” Woody finished his coffee. “I know you’re out of pocket on this. I can cover your costs, for gas and whatnot.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I’m hoping I can bill the ever-youthful Richie Brock for investigative services.” I told him my license had come in the mail.

  “Mazes,” he said. “We should get it laminated.”

  “I was thinking of getting it framed.”

  “That would make it difficult to carry in your wallet.”

  “You are about nothing more than squashing my dreams, aren’t you, Woody?”

  “That’s me. Woodrow Arbogast: killer of dreams.”

  14

  Woody picked me up early the next morning, and we drove to Raineyville. He drove through Tudor’s and picked up coffee and egg-and-cheese biscuits. I consumed both with a feverish desire I hoped communicated appreciation. I said something that sounded like “Thank you” between bites with a mouthful of biscuit.

  I dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs rolled up to the elbow and the tail pulled out to cover up the .38 in a holster clipped to my belt. It was too warm to pull off a jacket and a shoulder holster, and Woody had recommended we may need to roll into Raineyville armed, especially if we ticked off the Saints.

  We let ourselves into Sheila’s house through the kitchen door and walked in to her at the stove making pancakes, bacon frying. She smiled at us as we came in.

  “Hope you boys are hungry,” she said. Woody and I exchanged looks with one another, then we smiled back at her. It almost seemed a sin to say no.

  Sheila looked more pulled together than she had the day before. Her hair was in a fresh and tight ponytail, her makeup was better, and she wore a different Chandler County Warriors shirt.

  “How you feeling?” Woody said to her.

  “Better. Better than yesterday. Hoping to head out to Greenwood and see Dave.”

  Greenwood was synonymous with the North Central Regional Jail. The state legislature had set up a jail system back in the eighties to ease stress off counties struggling to maintain their own facilities.

  “Talked to him?” I said.

  “A little last night. He called. Collect.” She managed a wan little smile. “I barely knew they did that anymore.”

  “Take a nickel’s worth of free advice and get him one of those prepaid calling cards. The phone companies charge extra on calls coming from prisons and jails.”

  She set pancakes and bacon on plates and told us to find seats at the table where butter and syrup waited. I was carbed up already, but I was a sucker for both pancakes and food not cooked by me.

  “How’d he sound?” I said as Sheila put the plate in front of me and I slathered butter across the pancakes.

  “Like a guy in jail,” she said. “Not happy with life.” She cast a look at Woody. “I didn’t tell him you and Henry are involved. I don’t know how to explain that.”

  “He knows about how I worked with Jay?” Woody said.

  “He does. We talked about it that night you brought him home. We’d never had that conversation before. Never needed to.” She laughed. “Dave drove an 18-wheeler, and he fixes people’s air conditioners and ductwork, and you and Jay—”

  “We fixed problems,” Woody said. “And Henry and I, we’ll work on fixing this problem.”

  “Thank you,” Sheila said. She leaned toward the entranceway into the rest of the house and said, in a voice larger than I expected, “Jonah! Haul it down here now! Breakfast’s done.”

  What came around the corner next looked like an imperfect combination of Brooklyn hipster and Oregon lumberjack. Jonah looked like his picture, but at life-size, there was even more of him. His sleeveless T-shirt had arm holes cut big enough to reveal most of his chest, and shorts so long they may have been pants. He had a beard you’d need lawn equipment to trim, and a small hoop through his left earlobe. He walked out with the bullshit stride of youth, like we know what we’re doing before we realize we don’t have a goddamn clue.

  He gave his mother a quick kiss on the cheek and grabbed the plate of pancakes and bacon she had set aside for him. There were a half-dozen pancakes, and as much bacon. I remembered when I could eat that and be hungry an hour later. Now it would just mean a lifetime of sweatpants and rolling through Walmart in a motorized scooter, asking people to get me bags of chi
ps off of the high shelf.

  She gestured toward us. “Jonah, this is Woody Arbogast and Henry Malone. They’re here to help Dave.”

  He gave us a nod that seemed to denote approval. “Cool.” He doused the pancakes in enough syrup to cause diabetes by proxy, then sliced into the stack and forked a slab the size of a toddler into his mouth. “You guys something like private eyes?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Squint real hard and you’d almost think we are.”

  Jonah carved himself another slab of pancake. “Dave didn’t do it,” he said. “Shoot that biker. That’s not how Dave is.”

  “How is Dave?”

  Jonah laid into the pancakes with the intensity of an army going into battle. The pancakes didn’t stand a chance. “He’s chill. He does the shit that needs done.”

  Sheila patted him lightly upside the back of his head. “Language.”

  Jonah smiled and drank some milk. “Sorry. Anyway, yeah, he’s a good guy. He takes care of my mom, and the two of us, we’ve always gotten along good. He sponsored my Little League team, bought us jerseys, and used to take us all out for hot dogs and ice cream after games. Didn’t matter if we won or not.”

  Jonah decimated the remains of his breakfast like it was an indigenous people. As he cleared the last puddles of syrup from his plate with a final chunk of pancake, a car horn honked outside. Jonah was on his feet so fast, Pavlov would have applauded. “That’s Dillon. Gotta go.” He gave his mother another kiss, grabbed a backpack beside the door, and was out in a blur of movement the human eye could barely perceive.

  Sheila picked up his plate and rinsed it off in the sink, not that he’d left much in its wake.