Friend of the Devil

by James D F Hannah

  “I’m an only child, Colonel. Most of my life has been one long, lonely cry for attention.”

  “You’re lucky that your emotional neediness is heavily insured.”

  The colonel took a breath. Not a deep one, but rather a shallow stirring where his lungs rattled like pots and pans underneath the sink. It was little more than but a short, saddened sigh.

  “What would be wonderful is if you let everything be, Mr. Malone,” the colonel said. “Allow time to pass and the world to return to normal.”

  “That normal sounds like letting a man go to prison for something he may not have done. I may not sleep well, knowing I let an innocent man go to prison.”

  “You’re a fool if you think anyone’s ever innocent of anything. All life is is running from crimes we’ve committed that no one knows about.”

  “I can’t accept that, Colonel. Another factor is I’ve gotten dragged into your gun running with the Saints, and because of that, goons came and knocked my dad around. I let that slide and no one will let me sit with the grown-ups at the next family reunion.”

  “Are you saying this has become personal for you?”

  “Pride is a factor. Mix that in with my general bad attitude and it’s a shitty combo for all involved.”

  “Bad attitudes get you on the wrong side of people like me, Mr. Malone.”

  “You’re an old man in a wheelchair. You’re not the most looming threat I’m likely to face.”

  “I’m a rich old man in a wheelchair, son. I’ve accumulated a long list of both friends and enemies who owe me favors, so if I chose to put harm in your life, it wouldn’t take more than a phone call.”

  “No offense, though, Colonel, but you’re not the first rich asshole who’s goaded me with wealth or threatened me with violence. I’m both stubborn enough and stupid enough to keep on doing this because I don’t think Dave Miller killed Jimmy Omaha. Plus, an asskicking by Russian mobsters soured my disposition even more.”

  “These Russians said my business was involved?”

  “They said the Saints owe them merchandise, and they’ve got three days to deliver it.” I glanced at my watch. “Which is two days now.”

  “Did they say what the merchandise was?”

  “They did not. They chose to message their intent through beatings and urine, which is why I’m fresh out of caring if you want to threaten me or not. Your side business with the guns and the Saints is the worst-kept secret since the identity of Luke Skywalker’s father. But I’ll wager the change in my pocket that all of this ties back to your guns and the Saints, and that’s why you want me to let Dave Miller go to prison.”

  The colonel’s eyes narrowed, and in them you could see the flintiness, the grit that must have served him throughout his life. His fragile frame was a mask concealing a steeliness, still eager to go forth and conquer lands and wage wars for the sake of the smell of gunpowder.

  “The Saints are a necessary evil in my existence, Mr. Malone, tolerated because they are a mechanism, no more or less,” he said. “My affection for them is the same a carpenter has for his hammer, or a painter for his brush. But until his needs change, a carpenter needs his hammer, and a painter his brush. You can’t take the tools of a man’s livelihood and expect him to stand idly by.” He sighed. “You and your father are close?”

  “Close enough. He stopped holding my hand in amusement parks last year, but we get along fine otherwise.”

  “We reach a point as men where we separate from our parents, and our fathers in particular, but we never escape them. I’m still the son of Brigadier General Malcolm Oates, and my son, he’ll always be tethered to me in one form or another.”

  “Are you and your son close?”

  “My son is a constant reminder of the losses in my life. My wife, my career, even the use of my legs. He is a reminder we are never defined solely in the terms of who our fathers were, because if we were, Holland would come up very short.”

  “You don’t seem to think much of your son, Colonel.”

  “My father was a two-star general in World War II and Korea. When he realized I had topped out as a colonel, the disappointment in his eyes was almost too much to bear. He never spoke the words directly, but it was a thing understood in almost every conversation we had for the final years of his life.”

  He glanced back toward the house. Through the window, Holland Oates stared at us.

  “Holland failed out of three separate military academies. He did three years in the army and left and came back here, where he’s a deputy in a piss-ant sheriff’s department.” He shook his head and returned his gaze to the pool, and to the things not there that hung in the air. “Sons seem to do nothing more than break the hearts of their fathers with each and every goddamn breath they take, Mr. Malone. You should go now.”

  “So what then? What the hell do you want here, Colonel.”

  “When I say you should go, I mean you should go. Crawl back into whatever hole you came from. Let Dave Miller be where he is. He might not have killed Jimmy Omaha, but most of us have sins we never paid for at the first opportunity, so think of it as him paying an overdue bill with interest. Every debt gets collected eventually.” He waved his hand in my direction. “Get the hell out of here. Now.”

  I left Colonel Oates stewing in a sea of memory and personal regrets. His misbegotten spawn greeted me as I walked back toward the door. His fists were at his waist, in a pose like a muscle builder ad from a comic book. He had that cocksure smile on his face, a smug knowingness, the superiority innate in those too stupid to know how stupid they are.

  “You set right with your place in the world, asshole?” he said.

  I looked at him with the same bored exasperation reserved for people selling Jesus door-to-door. “You should have bought your old man better Father’s Day cards. You are nothing but a sack of disappointment in polyester.”

  The smile dropped from his face, and he took a swing at me with a haymaker right. I ducked to the side and watched as he dropped his left, just the way his old man said he would; Holland Oates had learned little over the years. I drove a punch into his gut and hit him with an uppercut that clattered his teeth together. He dropped to his knees and then hit the concrete with his face. It was likely worse for his face than the concrete.

  The colonel kept his back to us. I didn’t know if he saw anything, if he had and wanted to pretend it was nothing, if this was just the latest in the series of shames that Holland Oates had delivered to the his father’s feet. I stepped over the deputy, pausing long enough to get his car keys, and walked through the gate toward the driveway.

  I was already headed down the road in the county cruiser when I saw Oates coming down the driveway toward me, yelling something I couldn’t hear and shaking his fists at me. I laughed a little and turned the radio up loud enough I couldn’t hear him.

  25

  Woody was back at Sheila’s when I called him. He didn’t sound happy.

  “Where the hell are you?” he said.

  “Someone waylaid me.”

  “Kudos for you. Is this a thing I want to know about?”

  “It’s a matter of do you or should you.”

  “When it’s phrased that way, I’m almost positive I don’t, but I should. You can tell me on the way over to the regional jail. Dave’s said he’d talk to us.”

  “Should we bring a gift? Flowers, perhaps?”

  “Just get over to Sheila’s, please.”

  Woody waited for me on the back stoop, smoking a cigarette. His face didn’t register much when I pulled up into the driveway in Oates’s county cruiser. He ground the cigarette out across the steps and got into the passenger side. He pushed the pistol and baseball bat into the floorboard.

  We were on the interstate when Woody said, “Nice ride. You mind telling me where it came from?”

  “Deputy Oates loaned it to me.”

  “Henry, Deputy Holland Oates wouldn’t loan you shit if he could charge you interest. And I me
an literal shit, not metaphorical.”

  I told Woody about my incident at the pawnshop, my encounter with Deputy Oates, and my conversation with the colonel. He rolled the window down and smoked as I drove.

  When I finished, he said, “Busting up that pawnshop was a laundry list of felonies, and stealing this cruiser, that’s another lengthy list. Stupid as hell, Henry.”

  “Totally.”

  “Feel better for doing it?”

  “Like you wouldn’t fucking believe.”

  We drove a little further before I said, “What made Dave decide to talk to us?”

  “Sheila nagged him. Sounds like young Richard Brock nagged him, too. And maybe he decided going down for shit he didn’t do wasn’t the way he wants to spend the next ten to twenty.”

  “It would be a shame to miss what’s happening with the new superhero movies.”

  Woody ran his hand across the dashboard. He glanced through the metal grate, into the empty back seat, and lit himself a fresh cigarette. “There may be an issue or two when we pull back into town. In fact, I will say I’m shocked we’re not being pursued by the state police right now.”

  “That would mean Oates would have to admit what happened, which means he tells the state police he brought me to his old man’s house rather than properly arrest me, and also that I knocked his lights out.”

  Woody nodded. “It would be best for him to keep this off the books. He’ll look like an even bigger horse’s ass than he does on a day-to-day.”

  “May be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Gibbs. Finally makes him give Oates the boot.”

  “You believe Gibbs is that unbothered by Colonel Oates?”

  “Gibbs doesn’t want to deal with any of this any more than anyone else would. He’s an old man gunning for retirement, and dealing with the dumb rich kid deputy is likely one more thing he’d rather not have to deal with.”

  “You might inspire new hiring practices for the department. Gladiatorial combat. To the winner goes the badges.”

  I smiled. “I like it. They could sell tickets, even. Something to do between high school football seasons.”

  26

  Dave bore a dead-eyed stare on us from the other side of the plexiglass at the regional jail visitors’ area. It was an expression that implied that between jail and dealing with us, incarceration was the preferred choice. It stung a little, I won’t lie.

  “I never wanted you assholes involved, and I’ve told anyone who would listen that,” he said. “But you guys, you’re like stalkers and shit.”

  Woody and I cradled the phone receiver between the two of us. It was equal measures awkward and uncomfortable, with the top part of the phone pressing into one of the forty-seven fresh bruises on my face from Teddy Oklahoma.

  “Sorry but not sorry, Dave,” I said. “Because I’m confused why you’re so goddamn hellbent on being here. By my last count, you’ve got a wife and a kid who’d like to see you back home, plus two total strangers running all over God and creation trying to prove you didn’t kill somebody.”

  Dave glowered and shook his head. He wore the orange jail jumpsuit like a suit of clothes from a previous lifetime, not uncomfortable in them, but not Sunday casual, either. We were midway down in a row of booths divided up like bank teller windows. The phones were intended to give a semblance of privacy in conversations—ignoring the jail recorded everything, because nothing’s private when you’re in jail—but the conversations still squatted down and piled onto one another. We were between a woman describing her mother’s latest surgery, and an old man talking about Vietnam. Guards stood at the entrances, eyes scanning, checking for anything suspicious, sudden, or stupid.

  Woody said, “We know you didn’t kill Jimmy Omaha, Dave. All we want to figure out is who did, and why you’re taking the fall for it.”

  Dave sighed through the phone. “I got a lot of past with the Saints. Sheila, she tell you?”

  “She told us everything,” I said.

  He laughed. “I doubt that very much. No way in hell she’d do that because she don’t know everything. But me leaving the Saints, taking Sheila with me, that wasn’t nothing they just let go. It’s been more than a decade now, and Jimmy, he never forgot, and he made sure the rest of that bunch never forgot either.”

  “Sheila said you had your head down and paid the same bill to the Saints everyone else pays,” Woody said.

  Dave shrugged. “Nothing else I could do. They showed up, I gave ’em money. I didn’t want that life no more. Just wanted to work my job and be done with the rest.”

  “Big Country said the Saints raised your rent, but were pushing you to get your CDL again,” I said. “That sounds like wanting something more than simple money.”

  Dave ran his hand across his face, dragging his features out, elongating them like a rubber man in a circus. “Don’t matter now.”

  “The fuck it doesn’t. You think whatever this is stops with you? You go to prison and shit ends? Whatever the Saints have going on, it’s a living, breathing goddamn thing now. If you fucking buck up and be a man, you might manage to help out a few people, not the least of which would be your own goddamn wife.”

  “Fuck you. You got no right coming here and talking shit.”

  “I got Russian gangsters breathing down the crack of my ass, fogging up my asshole because they think I’m connected to you and those assholes, and all of it comes back to your doorway. That gives me the right to talk shit.”

  Dave seemed to consider his options. He could hang up the phone and motion for a guard and go back to his cell. There wasn’t any reason for him to talk to us outside of self-preservation. I was clueless about what was keeping him here. If he thought he was safe from the Saints. If he told himself he owed them silence. If he wanted to give up. And I didn’t give a flying fuck about any of those reasons. I wanted some goddamn answers.

  “Jimmy came up a few months ago,” Dave said. “Asked me if I still had my CDL. I told him I didn’t, that I let it go years ago. He asked me how hard it’d be to get it again.”

  “He say why?”

  “Wouldn’t. Told me the Saints were cooking up something, and they needed a driver. Someone to handle an 18-wheeler.”

  “What kind of money were they offering you?”

  “A split in whatever the take was.”

  “But not telling you what the take was.”

  “No. So I said no. I’m too old to dive into a pool, no idea how deep the water is.”

  “If you had to gamble a guess, what would you bet on it being?” Woody said.

  “Hell if I know. The Saints had been running guns for Colonel Oates before I ever started riding with them. My guess was another extension of that.”

  “What about something else, behind the colonel’s back?” I said.

  “Maybe. But that old man, he’s got them all under his thumb like you wouldn’t believe. If it weren’t for working for him, they’d dry up and blow away like a turd in the summer sun.”

  “I’m sure fine, enterprising men such as the Highway Saints could make ends meet. What about their rent collection?”

  “That’s money, sure, but to pay for the partying they do, what they pull from businesses in Raineyville won’t cut it. Plus a lot of ’em are getting old and they ain’t gonna be able to do this shit forever.”

  “You opt in with the Highway Saints, you forego your retirement plans, huh? No 401(k)?”

  Woody said, “Did Jimmy say when this big deal was happening?”

  “Soon,” Dave said. “All he told me.”

  Next to us, a woman had sat down with a toddler on her lap, talking to a guy with a handlebar mustache and some elaborate script tattooed on his face. The toddler squirmed on the woman’s knee, wanting nothing more than to be set down and let to run free. It was undoubtedly the most common emotion in the room.

  Through the glass I stared at Dave. He looked tired. Not from being in jail, but from the grind of life. It was the same tired you see
in small towns, where everyone’s working twice as hard to get half as much life as what you’d get somewhere else. It showed in the spiderweb of lines in his face and the calluses on his hands and knuckles.

  “If you didn’t kill Jimmy, why are you saying you did?” I said.

  He interlaced his fingers and ground his hands against one another. He winced in the action.

  “Arthritis?” I said.

  He sighed. “Yeah.”

  “How bad?”

  “It’s getting there.”

  “Sheila knows?”

  “She knows there’s always half-empty bottles of Tylenol rolling around in the back of my van. Nothing really to talk about with it.”

  “Because it’ll never change you have to keep on working.”

  He nodded.

  “Then why sit in here? Why admit to something you didn’t do?”

  “Where you from?”

  “Parker County. Serenity.”

  “There all your life?”

  “Most of it. Got out for a while, came back.”

  “Then you get it, how towns like Raineyville, like Serenity, the choices you have, they’re not choices. Choices mean there’s options. What you get here are decisions. Choices mean there’s something good, there’s something bad. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King. Decisions, those are finalities. Burial or cremation. Decision I had was, do I die out there or do I die in here? Either way, Sheila’s gonna be a widow again. Out there, it was gonna go down, she’d have to figure out burial or cremation. I go in here, she might divorce my ass and move on with her life again. She’s young enough, still got a body to her, she can do that.” He shrugged. “Decisions.”

  He hung up and raised two fingers into the air. A guard walked over and took him by the shoulder and escorted him out of the room.

  27

  A police siren wailed close behind us as Woody and I pulled back into Raineyville. The siren belonged to another sheriff’s department cruiser. It came around the corner all but popping up on two wheels like it was chasing down the Duke boys. It followed us into the pawnshop parking lot, slamming on the brakes and doing a spin that tossed up clouds of dust. Slung gravel rained across the cars, pinging against glass and chipping paint.