Friend of the Devil

by James D F Hannah

  “Please, Iris. Five minutes.”

  Iris crushed her cigarette out in an ashtray and stood up. “I suppose I could knit or crochet or go pet a cat, or some other old lady bullshit,” she said as she winded her way out of the room.

  Woody popped a match and cupped his hand around the flame before touching it to the cigarette hanging from his lips. “What did the Saints want with Dave? That they were putting extra weight on him.”

  “Money. That’s what they always want.”

  “There was something else, Sheila. There had to be. You said the Saints were leaning on Dave harder than they had been. There had to be a reason.”

  “Do not ask me to make sense of grown-ass men who spend all their lives riding around on motorcycles and acting like every day is a nonstop keg party. Besides, Dave never would tell me anything. You might not have noticed, but he’s not that guy most in touch with his feelings.”

  “He made his feelings known at the Dew Drop Inn,” I said. “He was at least in touch with being angry that night.”

  “That’s not Dave on a normal day. I’m not sure who he would have been if he had stayed with the Saints. Dave likes being left alone. He takes care of me and Jonah, but who he is doesn’t mean he’s gonna share big emotions with us unless he has to.”

  “Even if it’s something that puts you and Jonah at risk?”

  “You thinking Dave did this to keep Mickey from coming after us?”

  “There’s no shortage of motives for Dave to pop a cap into Jimmy. What I want are the reasons they’re doing a deal with Russian mobsters. What about the guys from the shop? Any chance Dave might have talked to them?”

  “He may talk to Big Country. Frog and Toad, those two make Dave seem like a motormouth.” She finished off the dregs of her coffee. “Gentlemen, I am too old for this shit. Fuck, Dave might have killed the one dating option I had in this whole town.”

  Woody took up a seat at the table. “We need to see Dave.”

  “I’m supposed to see him today. I’ll make a pitch for it then, but I won’t make promises. He’s got a reason for what he’s doing.”

  “What do you think that reason is?” I said.

  Sheila’s gaze drifted away, out the window behind me. “No clue. Maybe he did shoot the motherfucker.”

  20

  Big Country was the only one in the HVAC shop when Woody and I walked in. The radio played an old George Jones song, and some days, that’s all you can ask out of life. Big Country stood behind the counter and let out a low whistle as I walked closer.

  “Goddamn, son, but you look terrible,” he said.

  “Bad haircut,” I said. “Give it two weeks and I’ll be fine.”

  “Funny. I thought it was because your face got shifted around and someone forgot where to put stuff back, so they shoved everything wherever.” He looked over at Woody. “You’re that friend of Sheila’s first husband?”

  “Name’s Woody.” He and Big Country shook hands. “Good to meet you.”

  “Same.” Big Country gestured toward the back of the shop. “Just made a pot of coffee. Not sure if I could interest you gentlemen in a cup.”

  “You don’t have to ask twice,” I said.

  In back, Woody filled Styrofoam cups from an urn-style coffeepot. He took his black. I opted to go with what the cool kids were doing. It wasn’t bad. Wasn’t good, either, but there’s that thing about beggars and choosers.

  Big Country planted himself behind the desk, leaning the chair back and propping his feet up. Woody and I sat in the visitors’ chairs.

  “Where’s the rest of the motley crew?” I said.

  “Frog and Toad are out fixing a heat pump.”

  “Business is still coming, then.”

  Big Country sipped at his coffee. “First call in days. Out of the county. When the news got around about Dave, all these calls started, people canceling appointments, telling us the stuff that didn’t work the day before was working fine now.”

  “Miraculous how that shit works, isn’t it?”

  “Goddamn divine providence is what it is. Can’t say I blame people, not wanting a business in their house when the boss man just got accused of killing a biker. Some of it, though, is the Saints laying the squeeze on us, running business to other HVAC places, and someone finally called us because everyone else was busy. Otherwise, the coffers are damn nigh empty. We’re not too far from putting up a lemonade stand outside.”

  “Considered a car wash?” Woody said.

  “I have, but no one wants to see Frog or Toad in bikinis. Hell, I can hardly stand to see them dressed.” He gave me a nod intended as an acknowledgment of the misshapen lump that was my face. “You get this because of poking around on the shooting?”

  “Related issues. I’m toying with a rampage of bloody vengeance and I thought I’d see if you wanted in.”

  Big Country nodded, looked as if he was giving it a lot of consideration. He glanced at the big calendar that covered the top of his desk and ran his finger across the page. “I will admit my social agenda is rather empty. Are there guns involved in this rampage?”

  “Lots.”

  “To tell you the truth, you had me at ‘rampage of bloody vengeance.’ Adding in lots of guns, that’s just the cherry on top.”

  “I think it’ll be a good time.”

  Woody cleared his throat. “Another path we’re willing to travel is still trying to find out if Dave killed Jimmy.”

  I sighed. The spoilsport.

  “Dave ever talk to you about what happened with the Saints?” I said. “Sheila said they had gotten heavy-handed of late.”

  Big Country swung his feet down and pulled himself closer to the desk. “To speak truth to you fine gentlemen, business fell off before Jimmy Omaha died and flew off to Hillbilly Hog Heaven. The Saints were showing up three, four times a week, making a general nuisance of themselves here or at a work site, that just made it all worse.”

  “How much was the Saints trying to raise the rent?”

  “Wasn’t it. I thought it was, but then I heard them in a convo a few weeks back. Came in off a job and I saw the bikes outside, so I cracked the door enough the bell wouldn’t jingle, and I slipped in. Dave was talking with Jimmy and Mickey back here. Jimmy did most of the talking, saying what they were offering was a business opportunity, that Dave should look at it.”

  “What was the business opportunity?” Woody said.

  Big Country winked and pointed a finger at Woody. “That, my pony-tailed friend, I can’t tell you. I can tell you that whatever it was, it wasn’t good, because it’s the Saints we’re talking about here, and they ain’t one of those clubs doing toy runs for orphans. Not like they’re trying to get you interested in real estate, flipping houses and shit.”

  “They weren’t asking for money?”

  “They were not. The implication I picked up on was they wanted Dave to get his CDL renewed.”

  “Sheila told us the other day that Dave had driven 18-wheelers in the day, before they were married,” Woody said.

  “Right. Not a thing a man running an HVAC shop needs now. Best I know, he’s not driven in years, and he’s never showed a burning desire to hit the road again.”

  “Why would the Saints be working so hard to get him to drive for them?”

  “Another question for a pair of highly qualified private investigators.” Big Country finished his coffee and chucked the empty cup halfway across the room, dropping it straight down into a trash can. I covered my mouth with my hand and made a mock crowd sound.

  “If you think that’s impressive, you should see me without pants on,” Big Country said.

  I stopped making the noise. “Way to kill the mood, Big Country.”

  He shrugged. “So you highly qualified private investigators know about Colonel Oates, right?”

  “You mentioned him when we spoke the other day.”

  “Did I mention about Oates and the Saints?”

  “No, you left that out,
and I will say I bet it might be important.”

  “So the colonel, he was supposed to be down in South America, I guess, and he was either trying to get someone out of power or put someone in power—the story gets switched a lot depending on what lever they pull on Election Day—and there was a gunfight and some crossfire and next thing being next, Old Man Oates got put in a wheelchair. He’s got money from all of this off-the-books shit he does, so he comes back here and sets up the pawnshops.”

  “With whoever Graham is?”

  “There is no Graham. Not now, at least. It was his wife’s maiden name. No, Old Man Oates wasn’t about to share with anyone else, on account he’s got all of those connections still from doing jobs the government wants done, but doesn’t want anyone to know it’s our government, because we need to always be the good guys.”

  I glanced over at Woody. He lifted a shoulder and sipped his coffee. “I’ve heard Oates’s name, but we never crossed paths or clashed swords. We may have killed people in the same geographic vicinity.”

  Big Country’s eyebrows rose, and his mouth moved to form words. I cut him off.

  “You can ask, but you won’t get an answer,” I said. “Not an answer that feels like an answer. It’ll be an answer that will force more questions than anything, and they’ll be nothing but answers like the first one, so it’s all nothing but a snake swallowing his own tail.”

  Big Country nodded. “Fair enough. Anyway, Old Man Oates has those pawnshops, but that’s not where his money comes from.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  Big Country leaned back in the chair again. “Oates runs guns. Hauls them up to Chicago and Detroit and sells ’em to the folks who need to kill a lot of people very fast with a gun that won’t show up on a database. He uses the Saints as the couriers.”

  “Colonel Oates get the guns through the shops?”

  “Some. Some come from old connections, what I understand. These paramilitary assholes. The kind of people willing to do anything for a dollar then tend to be the kind of people who’ll be willing to do anything for a dollar today.”

  Woody tapped his hands against the arms of his chair. There are different stages of Woody’s silence, with your standard-issue Buddhist monastery-level silence the norm. If he was moving around this way—active silence, I guess you could call it—that was a bubbling anger, a seething frustration that simmered along like a pot on the stove. The tapping indicated anger he had to direct in another way because he couldn’t throw a table across the room or hit somebody.

  “How do you know this shit?” I said. “Can’t imagine it’s the thing the old man wants as public knowledge.”

  “I’m sure the coot doesn’t care, since he’s got most of the town underneath his thumb. But Dave talked about it a few times when we were drinking and his tongue got a little looser than normal.”

  “I’ll guess Dave knows about it from his time as a probie with the Saints.”

  “That’d be my guess, too. Besides, everyone knows you can roll into that pawnshop and they’ll show you the stuff they’ve got in back”—Big Country put air quotes around “in back,” so we got the gist of what he was talking about—“and you can walk out with a gun, no paperwork needed.”

  “Convenient,” I said.

  “Particularly if you’re looking to kill someone you decide needs killing.”

  “That can tend to be a large number of people.”

  “Yes it can.” Big Country nodded again as if in confirmation of his thoughts on killing. “Yes it can.”

  21

  Woody told me he was going to “make some calls.” It didn’t seem a good idea to push the matter further, and I let him stroll off solo, his hands shoved into his pockets and a tail of smoke trailing off the cigarette hanging from his lips.

  The conversation with Big Country put Woody on edge, and my sense was he needed to blow off steam. If we had been closer to his farm, he would have gone off and unleashed on his firing range until the air stank of gunpowder and spent frustrations.

  Woody wasn’t a man prone to rehashing his past with me, but he had shared bits and pieces, and I knew there were things that burned inside him in a manner impossible to describe, and even more impossible to let go totally. Woody was maybe the Platonic ideal for an alcoholic in recovery, knowing the mistakes he made in his past, the rolling disasters inflicted in his life and the lives of others, and working to never repeat them. I don’t know what chunks of Woody’s history were a mistake—that was his call to make, not mine—but I sensed his list of regrets was a long one, and what we were doing with Dave became his form of penance, his effort to level out karmic scales that would always be off balance.

  With that heady reflection pulling my shoulders down, I went to annoy Richie Brock. There wasn’t a long list of Raineyville faces overjoyed to get to spend time with Henry Malone, and Brock at least seemed to be someone not likely to try to punch me. Sometimes life is just about the low-hanging fruit.

  Brock was reared back in his chair, reading the Raineyville newspaper as I walked in. As soon as he saw me, he said, “My client doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “And a fine fucking good day to you also,” I said as I sat down. That fruit was goddamn near scraping the ground.

  The biggest headline on the front page proclaimed about a county commission meeting and a new stoplight.

  “The Pulitzer committee will want that copy of the paper for its archives,” I said.

  Brock folded the paper and set it aside. He wore a chocolate brown pinstriped suit and patent leather shoes with a high shine. I wondered if he owned any clothes that didn’t make him look like someone set to get busted in the chops by George Raft.

  “Dave won’t talk to you,” he said. “He’s made it crystal clear his lack of desire in having you anywhere near him, or any of this particular situation.”

  “A common affliction among those with good sense. What’s with Dave wanting to plea out already? The gross stuff hasn’t even started happening to Jimmy Omaha’s body yet.”

  Brock’s fingers flicked across the track pad of his laptop. A few clicks, and he twisted the computer around so I had a view of the monitor.

  The video on the screen was low-res, fuzzy and dark, but it was obvious it was from a camera monitoring the parking lot for the Saints’ tow service. A figure came out of a side door to the building. Squint enough, and you’d know it was Jimmy Omaha. He made his way to his motorcycle, the only one parked in the lot, as a van pulled up beside him. Even as shitty as the video was, the words “Dave’s Heating and Cooling” were legible across the back doors.

  The van squealed to a stop, and Jimmy Omaha approached the van. A hand reached out of the driver’s side window, holding a gun. There were muzzle flashes, and Jimmy flew backward. Two shots seemed to catch him square in the chest, and he fell face-first onto the ground. The angle of the arm from the van changed, and there were two more shots into Jimmy once he was down. The arm and the gun disappeared back into the van and the van moved out of the frame of the video.

  Brock turned the computer back in his direction.

  I slouched so far down into the chair, I was hardly still in the chair. “That’s just damning as fuck, isn’t it?”

  “It is as far from good as the east is from the west.”

  “Poetic. When did you get the video?”

  “This morning, when the county attorney dropped it off. He was all but gleeful when he handed me the DVD.” Brock pointed at the computer. “That’s the theoretical slam dunk that prosecutors dream about.”

  “What kind of deal can you work out for him?”

  “That’s more in the prosecutor’s hands than mine. Ideal situation is twenty years—he’d get out in ten.”

  “Does it matter he may not have done it?”

  “The check from Public Defender Services cashes regardless, Mr. Malone.”

  I liked Richie Brock the more I talked to him. Despite looking like a Mormon in the 1930s,
he seemed to have already earned an edge of cynicism. He could let it grow and develop, hone it to a fine, razor-sharp thing, prime for not giving a shit until it was forced upon him. Yeah, someday he could grow up and be me.

  Poor fucker.

  I pulled myself upright. “I expected a little more fight from someone wanting to right wrongs and be the noble white knight and all that other bullshit.”

  “Nobility’s wonderful when you can afford it. What I have is a desire to do good work, and a closet full of Goodwill suits, neither of which pays the rent. Besides, guilt and innocence don’t matter in a system where your primary job is to sell a story to twelve people not smart enough to get out of jury duty.”

  “Cynical but well dressed.”

  “I don’t want to see Mr. Miller go to prison, but this case isn’t a winner. There’s no secret about how dirty the Saints are, and Dave’s got a business, he’s got friends and connections, he’s part of the community. The chamber of commerce didn’t shed a tear when a biker named Jimmy Omaha bought the farm, and the court doesn’t care. It’s only concern is the evidence proving one man killed another.”

  “And while that’s true all the goddamn day, I would still appreciate five minutes with your client.”

  “You’re relentless, aren’t you, Mr. Malone? A dog that won’t let go of a bone.”

  “It gets worse the more I get beaten up. A few more punches to the face and I might burn the whole damn town down.”

  “One might attribute that to traumatic brain injury. I could work up a legal defense for you on it.”

  “What did Dave say about talking to me?”

  “‘Keep those motherfuckers away from me.’” Brock leaned forward across the desk. “You look terrible, as if no one’s felt the need to tell you the obvious.”

  “Everyone seems to feel the need to tell me this. Like I’ll forget it somehow.”

  “That looks like an amount of hurt you’ll wear awhile.”