Someone had covered the shop’s broken windows with plywood. Woody scanned the area and shook his head. “Damn, son, but you raged hard, didn’t you?”
“I was not having the best of days,” I said as we got out of the cruiser.
The passenger’s side door on the other cruiser was open before the vehicle had come to a complete stop, and Deputy Oates rushed out, pulling his hat onto his head as soon as his feet hit the ground. He charged toward us like an outraged bull, his face a contemptuous twist of fury and embarrassment. At least, that’s what it looked like outside of the swelling and the black eye. After having had the fuck beaten out of me regularly, it was nice to mess someone else up, especially when it was someone like Deputy Holland Oates.
Oates slashed his finger through the air like a Musketeer. “You son of a bitch, you are spending a long fucking time in jail. You understand that?” He pressed his face into mine until I could count the blocked pores on his nose. “You think you can assault an officer and steal a police vehicle and there’re no repercussions. Motherfucker, you’re going down so fast your—”
I planted the tips of the fingers I have remaining on my left hand on his chest and gave him a gentle push back. His mouth dropped open like he was preparing for words to tumble out, but instead it hung there, a gaping maw of teeth accentuated with a Smokey and the Bandit mustache overhead.
He pulled air into his nose. “Don’t you ever fucking lay hands on a goddamn police officer.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Deputy, I was a state trooper when you were still popping zits and using dial-up to jerk off to porn, so whatever threats you got, save ‘em for someone else. I didn’t punch a police officer; I punched a spoiled, loud-mouthed brat who’s got no business with a badge unless it includes plastic handcuffs and a cap gun. Who also took me to see his father in some lame-ass attempt to intimidate me into going away. You think that’ll sound good when I explain that to a judge? And you want your cruiser?” I took the keys from my pocket and chucked them hard with everything I had. They soared over his shoulder and landed in the dirt about fifteen feet behind him. “There you go. But you and your old man both need to know whatever is going on in this shithole, I’ll find out about it. I’m not going anywhere.”
The deputy who had driven him to the pawnshop got out of his cruiser and leaned over the car’s roof. He looked like a thumb with a brush cut.
“Holland, you need me to stick around?” he said.
Oates turned his gaze back to me. He expected me to break, to give an inch, to budge a little. Fuck that. I was tired of Holland Oates and Raineyville and Chandler County as a whole. I didn’t foresee myself recommending it as a getaway to friends.
“I’m good, Wally,” Oates said. “Head on back to base.”
I smirked. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help myself. “Back to base? You dipshits have a moonshot planned, you’re not telling anyone else?”
Oates’s face alternated through shades of red. His hand drifted to his service weapon.
From where I stood, I saw the considerations flash across his eyes. Weighing the scenarios where he could shoot me and get away with it. I pondered how good of a shot he was. How good his family attorney was. If Woody would draw from behind me and shoot Oates. These were all possibilities to consider in the heartbeat of a moment, in the dusty parking lot of a shitty pawnshop with an angry deputy who didn’t care to have his petty power challenged.
Oates walked over to where the keys lay on the ground. He picked them up and walked back to the cruiser. He paused and looked at me for a long time.
“You need to get the fuck out of Chandler County,” he said. “Nothing here for you, and nobody wants you here.”
“You sound like my ex-wife, Deputy.”
Oates smirked a little, adjusted his hat, got into the car, and drove away.
28
Lily was back from her California conference, and we met down at O’Dell’s for dinner. She didn’t seem happy about my latest collection of cuts, bruises, and contusions. I wasn’t thrilled about them, either.
“Were you the winner or the loser of this fight?” she said. “Because it’s tough to tell sometimes.”
We were splitting a plate of nachos. I was drinking Diet Coke, and she sipped on a Blue Moon and had dropped the orange slice into the glass. It floated at the top of the beer like a life preserver.
“I was losing on points, but I came back strong in the later rounds,” I said.
She maneuvered a chip around to scoop up a clump of melted cheese and some jalapeños and ate it. Cheese clung to her bottom lip, and she wiped it away with one deft motion, licking it off her finger.
“Do that one more time,” I said, “and I’ll ask to meet you in the ladies’ bathroom and to lock the door behind us.”
She shot me a sassy, thin-eyed look with a hint of a smile. “Pervert.”
“Guilty as charged.”
The waitress came by and we ordered our meals. Lily had a Cobb salad, and I got the Philly cheesesteak.
Lily drank more of her beer. “Do you ever worry about what all of this abuse does to you?”
“Sometimes. I don’t walk away feeling like I’m a young man anymore.”
“How many serious head injuries have you taken in the last few years?”
“More than I could count even before the serious head injuries.”
“Please don’t joke, Henry. I worry.”
I reached my hand across the table and laid it across hers. “I know you do, and I appreciate it. If it was just me, I would have walked away from this already. But they dragged Billy into it.”
“How is he?”
“Sore still. The bruises look worse now than they did the first day.”
“Is he scared?”
“No. Billy’s past the point in his life where things like this are going to make him lose sleep at night. He’s got a gun. And I’m confident that if Woody and I don’t figure this out, and those goons show up again, Billy will make any victory they score a costly one.”
When the waitress returned, Lily ordered another beer. She repeated her thing with the orange slice, letting it fall into the beer glass before it rose to the top, resting on the foam.
I sipped at my Diet Coke. “You never said how Berkeley was.”
“Gorgeous. Perfect. Overpriced. You talk to someone and they hear your accent and you remember where you’re from, and it becomes their job to never let you forget it.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It’s like everywhere else in the world, only more so.”
“You ever think about going somewhere like that?”
“To teach, you mean?”
I shrugged. “Teach. School. Make clay pottery. Whatever you want to do with your life.”
“The bigger question in that feels like if I ever think about leaving Parker County.”
“I suppose it does.”
The waitress brought our food. A small plastic container of dressing rested on the edge of the salad. Lily speared several items onto her fork and dipped it into the dressing before taking a bite.
“I used to,” she said. “Not so long ago. It seemed ridiculous to be overeducated in a place like Parker County, where that education isn’t always valued. It seemed like all we were doing was pushing kids through so they could join whatever world their parents chose for them.”
“That doesn’t offer much in the way of hope.”
“It doesn’t. I wasn’t overwhelmed with hope for a while.”
“What changed?”
“My perception. Cynics will tell you schools are indoctrination centers, that what we do is shovel out the next generation of workers. But I decided that wasn’t what we needed here. We needed to create adults who might want to move beyond the expectations of a previous generation.”
“Offer them choices rather than just decisions.”
Lily nodded. “That’s well put.”
“Thank you. Heard someone say it to
day.”
“Someone from Chandler County, I presume.”
“Yes.”
“Chandler County is a lot like Parker County. It can seem hopeless. Once the mining jobs dried up, the other jobs those jobs paid for vanished also. But no one wants to leave. Everyone thinks if their parents and grandparents could do it here, so can they.”
“Even though the circumstances aren’t the same.”
“Right.” She ate another bite of salad. “You left Parker County and came back.”
“Toughest decision of my goddamn life.”
“Leaving or coming back?”
“Both, in different ways. I was ready to get out of here. I was a kid, had something to prove, wanted to prove I was something.”
“Wanted to go forth and right the wrongs of the world.”
“More than I thought.”
“You understand this—the beatings, the poking around and being a tough guy private eye—won’t bring your mom back, don’t you? No matter how young you were when she was murdered, and the crap that’s happened in the years since, none of what happened then was your fault, and you can’t do anything that balances cosmic scales. The universe doesn’t work like that.”
“I know this. Intellectually. Emotionally. Whatever else.”
“But you won’t stop doing this thing.”
“Billy’s involved, though.”
Lily pulled her mouth to a tight bow. “Because you and Woody opened the door. This is how this works with you, Henry, and I see this same thing play out, time and time again with you. You act like you don’t want to get involved, and then you do, and something becomes the excuse for you to remain involved. But if you didn’t want a piece of whatever this pie was, you wouldn’t have sat down at the table to begin with. You act like you’re nothing but a leaf blown around by the winds of fate, and that’s bullshit. You need to accept that and be honest with yourself about it. And with me.”
A drop of condensation raced down the side of my Coke glass. That drip became the most important thing in the world, and my line of sight went to it. The world faded around me, nothing but buzzing and background noise, as the condensation moved along.
Lily’s voice reached out from somewhere in the distance. “I love you, Henry. I’ll be here for you. I need you to be real with me about who you are, and what you are. Because those are the things about you I love.”
I raised my eyes at her. She smiled from the other side of the table. “Finish your sandwich,” she said. “I’ve been gone a week, and I plan to take you home and we’re going to do the devil’s work in the dark.”
I ate quickly after that.
29
I picked up coffee and biscuits at Tudor’s on the way to Woody’s the next morning. We ate at his kitchen table with the dogs circled around us.
“Lily back in town?” Woody said.
“Yeah.”
“You see her last night?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“You look different when you stay at her place. She buys better soap than you, and you use hair product when you’re there, so instead of smelling like Irish Spring and your hair looking like you combed it with a pitchfork, you come over here smelling like coconut and your hair is in place.”
“Damn, but that’s judgmental as fuck. And maybe a little weird you notice those things. I’ve never once noticed how you smell.”
“Statements like that make me wonder if you even care.”
Once we were full of carbs and coffee, we headed toward Raineyville. We were on Route 331 when we saw a cadre of police cars circled around an 18-wheeler sitting on its side off the road. The doors on the trailer were open, and boxes spewed from that direction for thirty feet behind it.
We parked off the edge of the road and walked toward where the action was.
It was a good mix of local and state boys, with plenty of flat-brimmed hats pulled down even and straight over their eyes. Sheriff’s department uniforms were all the same shade of black, and the deputies were a mixture of skinny, awkward kids and older guys who hadn’t missed meals and whose shirts stretched across expansive stomachs. The state troopers dressed in the standard green uniforms, with short sleeves that showed an abundance of muscle. They were younger, bigger guys who looked like they spent their extra time using the gym equipment they got for Christmas. They had the build of low-end linebackers, guys running plays for a 6-5 team.
Traffic was blocked to one lane, with a deputy standing post to wave cars past. This time of day, there wasn’t much traffic, and he stood there looking bored, stopping to chew on a cuticle and spit out the results.
Oates was talking to a state trooper as we walked up, and he didn’t seem pleased by our arrival. He stormed toward us with the fury of a mom with a strip mall salon hair cut, demanding to speak to a manager. I took a moment to appreciate the swelling around the left side of his face, the gloriousness of its purple glow, and how off-balance it made his features. It was some of my better work.
“You got more balls than the NBA showing up here,” he said. “This your way of begging to spend the night in lockup?”
“No one says lockup,” I said. “They stopped saying it when T. J. Hooker stopped doing power slides over the hood of his car.” I looked past him. “Where’s Gibbs?”
“What makes you think it’s my goddamn job to tell you shit about shit?”
I pointed at the tractor. “I’ll bet you real American money he’s in all of that. Go be a good lad and tell him we’re here.”
“Fuck you. I don’t have to do shit for either of you cocksuckers. I haven’t seen a thing yet that—”
Gibbs stepped underneath the yellow police tape marking off the scene and came up behind Oates. “Deputy, I can handle these gentlemen. Go on in there, make yourself useful.”
Oates turned to Gibbs. “What you need me to do, Sheriff?”
“I need you not to be standing here.” Gibbs waved his hand toward the tractor. “Move along now.”
I touched a finger to my face. “Hell of a thing there, Deputy? You walking into doors or what?”
Oates took one more chance to snarl at us, straightened his hat, and walked off. Gibbs moved closer to Woody and me and gave me an offhand glance. “Looks like someone had something to say to you their own selves, and they emphasized their points.”
“You’ll laugh when I tell you this isn’t even the worst beating I’ve taken this year,” I said.
“You ought to consider new hobbies, then. Get out of the investigation business.”
“Oh, this isn’t a business; we’re strictly hobbyists.”
“Perhaps you should think over starting a new hobby.”
“We tried, but those stamp collectors get mighty pissy with you about postmarks.”
Gibbs smiled. “I would love to chat with you both, but I’ve got a dead body I need to deal with, so if you don’t mind—”
“About that,” Woody said. “The Saints did it.”
Gibbs met us with a mild, sleepy-eyed countenance. He crossed his arms over his chest and rocked a little on the balls of his feet. He whistled in the direction of a cluster of deputies, and one of them broke away to walk over to us.
“You want something, Sheriff?” he said.
“I do indeed, Walter,” the sheriff said. “Need you to go over and tell those troopers they can pack up their toys and go home. And you and the rest of the guys head back to base yourselves.” He cast a rueful eye toward Woody and me. “These two have solved this whole thing here, and we’re gonna just let them finish things up.”
The deputy’s head twisted around like a confused puppy. “Are ... you ... sure you want me to do that, Sheriff?”
Gibson rolled his eyes. “No, Walter, that’s not what I want you to do at all. I want you to go back there and keep on with your hands buried in your pants, keeping the ground held down. Now get out of here before I ask you to do something useful with yourself.”
The deputy gave Woody and m
e both some long looks of assessment, wondering what we had to do with any of this, and he had a second where it seemed he may have something to say, but the second passed like a fart in a grocery store, and went back to the rest of the deputies.
Gibson shifted his weight back in our direction. “What else you got to say today?”
I pointed to the road. Loops of single fresh tire tracks interlocked up and down the pavement, stretched out for around a hundred feet of road. They resembled illustrations of the DNA double helix from high school biology. “Those tracks, Sheriff. Those are all from motorcycles, and they’re new. One hell of a coincidence if there were a bunch of motorcycles and an overturned semi, and somehow they’re not related to one another. As for why I’m so pretty right now, Sheriff, it’s because two Chicago mob goons came after me thinking I’ve got something to do with the Saints, saying they were owed a shipment of merchandise. Wouldn’t be the biggest of leaps to think maybe this truck here had the merchandise.”
Gibbs stopped looking obtuse and started looking interested. “Any of that got to do with all that noise yesterday at Graham & Oates?”
“Heard about all that?”
“I’m the goddamn sheriff, son. You can’t destroy a place of business and shoot someone and not expect I’d have an inkling about it. Plus it seems Oates’s cruiser vanished for a few hours, and today he’s wearing a beauty of a shiner. That goose egg, I’m not worried about, but destruction of property and the stolen police vehicle, those are bothersome.”
“You say ‘stolen.’ I say ‘borrowed.’”
“Say whatever you want, but I’m struggling with why no one wants you charged with anything. If for nothing else than shooting that one dumbass in the foot. That’s discharging a firearm within city lines, but the Saints, they won’t talk, and someone accidentally erased the pawnshop security video.”
Friend of the Devil Page 15
