She Talks to Angels

by James D F Hannah

  Knowles’s eyes shifted back and forth in his skull for a few seconds, and he brought his hands out of his pockets, ready to take a swing. I held my own hands up.

  “I’m not looking for a fight, Jimmy,” I said. “I’m here to tell you that Cyrus knows you’re banging his wife.”

  Knowles spit another black mass onto the ground. “Bullshit.”

  “Then a question: you owe Cyrus money?”

  His expression read the concept of debt as a personal insult. “The fuck no, I don’t owe that asshole money.”

  “Yeah, that didn’t seem right to me, either. Cyrus wanted me and my friend to bounce you around a little, said you owed him money. I said no, but because I’m a curious sort, I followed you around, and buddy, you’re nowhere in the neighborhood of discreet for nailing a married woman.”

  Which he wasn’t. Because anytime Cyrus left home, Jimmy Knowles crept his way through the back door, into the arms of an eager and waiting Mrs. Thompson, who made noise during sex like cattle being strangled. That Jimmy Knowles could keep it up, and seemingly maintain a rhythm, in the midst of something that sounded like a wholesale livestock slaughter practically earned him kudos. It was bad enough the neighbors brought their kids inside when it happened. This was the worst-kept secret since whatever it was Victoria thought she was hiding.

  Cyrus shrugged his shoulders and said, “Should I be scared?”

  “Not of me. I’d keep an eye on Cyrus, though.”

  Knowles laughed. “Of the shit in the world that worries me, Cyrus ain’t one of ’em.”

  “That’s fine, but I’ll bet Cyrus suspects you’re laying pipe to his old lady like she’s a housing development, and he bought an AR-15 about a week ago. Ever known Cyrus to go hunting?”

  Knowles rubbed at his chin. “No, I haven’t. Never heard of him owning a gun, for that matter.” He looked at me with confusion. “Why are you telling me all of this shit?”

  “Because I’ve seen enough people get killed, and I ain’t in the mood to see anyone else die that doesn’t need to. I told you what I know; now do something useful with it.”

  I left Jimmy Knowles standing there, likely contemplating his future and whether it was worth the likelihood of dying so he could continue knocking boots with a woman who needed a mobility assistance scooter in Walmart.

  Meanwhile, I found myself thinking about tattoos.

  49

  I pulled the Aztek up and got out in front of a bay at the garage where Wallace Maynard was doing blowtorch work underneath a pickup truck. The welder’s mask over Maynard’s face made him look like a robot from a ’50s sci-fi flick, and sparks flew from the acetylene torch. Another guy tapped Maynard on the shoulder. Maynard pushed the mask to the top of his head.

  “How you doing?” Maynard said. He yelled over the mechanical racket and the stereo blasting Led Zeppelin.

  “I’m good,” I said. “Get an oil change?”

  “Sure thing.” He set the torch down and walked out toward me, pulling the heavy gloves off before shaking my hand. “Goddamn but if you didn’t blow up shit all over town.”

  “It got more complicated than expected.”

  “The fuck you say. Can’t say anyone ever figured Deacon for anything like that. His old man always covered his ass, but the stuff with Meadow . . .” He pulled the mask off. “I liked Deke. He’d always been a fuckup, but hell, we’re all fuckups.”

  “Did you call him ‘Deke’?”

  “Yeah. He worked hard to make it something. It seemed stupid, but a guy wants called something, I guess it’s his right to get called that.” His gaze moved to the Aztek. “You’ve got yourself almost an antique with this thing.”

  “I’ll take her to car shows if the transmission doesn’t fall out someday. About that oil change—”

  “We’re blocked up, rest of the afternoon. You want to come back first thing in the morning, we’ll get to it then. You could take her to one of the quick-change places.”

  “She’ll hold one more day.”

  “Thought she might.” Maynard’s face got serious. “Meadow, she deserved better than what she got. And the retard, if he didn’t do it, then he didn’t need to do Deacon’s time.”

  “It’s a shame whenever shit like that happens. Everyone’s got their own responsibilities to carry.”

  “Guess so.” His tone and expression lightened. “See you in the morning? Get here eight or so, before the repairs roll in.”

  “Sounds good.” I took a few steps toward the Aztek, stopped, and turned around. “Wallace?”

  Maynard had already headed back into the garage bay. I called his name out again.

  “Wallace!”

  He froze, but he kept his back to me.

  “Meadow’s tattoo?” I said. His hand reached into his coveralls, and he pivoted and faced me and aimed a pistol at me.

  Inside the work bays, the racket did a slow downward drop, fading into nothing as the other mechanics stopped their work and stared in surprise.

  I tried to ignore the gun. It’s not easy to do when there’s one pointed at you—I don’t care how often it happens. My pistol was at the small of my back underneath my shirt. My first instinct was to draw it, but nothing causes someone to pull a trigger faster than seeing you’ve got a gun also, and I wasn’t in a hurry to find out Wallace Maynard was a better shot than me.

  “You mentioned her tattoo, and that stuck with me. I couldn’t put it together, though. At least, not until I realized you shouldn’t have known about the tattoo. I checked the police report. I looked at the magazine article. Researched everything I could, and that never got mentioned. The only reason anyone would ever have known, it was because they’d seen her naked since she had it done. But she got the tattoo well after you and her ended things. After the last time you and she spoke.”

  Maynard’s face tightened. He looked decades older, like a man carrying a lifetime of secrets. His hand trembled as he raised the pistol higher in the air.

  In the bay, the noise quieted until the only sound was the stereo and the crackling sound of a Black Crowes song. The mechanics gathered at the bay entrance, watching with that awed fascination of the possibility of real violence. You can watch a million people be murdered on TV, and you can be the person who believes he’s tough and he’ll be “the good guy with a gun,” but shit becomes painfully real when you’re helpless at the chance that someone might be shot and you’ll see what a bullet really does to the human body.

  “Here’s what I think happened,” I said. “You realized what a disaster your life was, that you weren’t going to be the all-star after all. But in that diseased skull of yours, you convinced yourself if you and Meadow got back together, you’d find it again. Meadow became the key, didn’t she, to unlock the glory. How long did you stalk her?”

  He swallowed hard. “Don’t call it that. That wasn’t it. I wanted to keep her safe. She was out of control.”

  “That’s a lie, Wallace. You followed her. You saw she was clean. She didn’t need you. She didn’t even want you.”

  Maynard smacked his lips like he was dying of thirst. “She needed me. You don’t understand. She didn’t understand. Meadow, she was weak. She needed somebody.” His voice got quieter, and he seemed smaller. “She needed me.”

  “No, she didn’t.” I took a small step forward. His gun hand trembled, and sweat beaded across his face. “You already felt the cracks in your life showing. You knew you were the weak one, and you needed her more than she needed you. All you knew was the last time that you were the big man, that you were important, was with Meadow. So you thought you could corner her and . . . what? Convince her to love you?”

  “Fuck you!” he said. “You don’t get it. Me and her, we were the best together. That was all we needed was to get back together. I kept trying to talk to her, to tell her, to make her see what was right there in front of our faces. But . . . but she didn’t understand it.”

  “Because she had already been through more shit
than you knew and came out stronger than you’d ever be. She’d already moved past you and small-town plans and your shitty little future. When you showed up at the dump, what happened next?” Another step. My right hand dropped to my side. Kept it loose and ready. “Did she say, ‘No, Wallace’? Did she get angry?”

  So much rage and barely contained anger bubbled across Maynard’s face, he seemed on the verge of explosion. “She . . . she said I wasn’t what she wanted anymore. She said it like it’d meant nothing to her. Like I was just . . .”

  “Like the girls you’d used in the past? You didn’t like the feeling, did you? Of not being needed anymore. You wanted her, so you should get to have her, right? What happened next, Maynard?” Anger rose in my voice. “What the fuck happened next?”

  “I . . . I . . . I . . .”

  “You picked up the pipe because it was the closest thing handy, and you hit her.”

  Maynard nodded. I walked closer to him.

  “How many times? Five? Ten? Until she stopped moving? Until you couldn’t recognize her anymore?”

  Nothing.

  “And when you raped her,” I said, “was she already dead?”

  This time, a nod. Smaller, more pained.

  Jesus Christ.

  The police sirens sounded from a half-dozen blocks away. Someone must have called 911. Coming from the courthouse, here in ninety seconds. Maybe less.

  Maynard heard them as well. His eyes got alert—the look of a frightened animal—and he twisted the pistol around, bringing the muzzle up underneath his head.

  I whipped my hand to my back, drew the pistol, took the shot. Maynard screamed as a spurt of blood erupted from his lower chest. He dropped the gun and grabbed the wound and fell to the pavement.

  Maynard cried in earnest now, shaking his head and rocking back and forth. He coughed and gagged and a little blood came up. I hoped it hadn’t pierced a lung. As the sheriff’s cars pulled up, I thought about how much I didn’t want Wallace Maynard to die, lying on the oil-stained concrete.

  There needed to be a trial, a show as public as what Eddie Dolan had faced. Maynard deserved a long prison sentence for the pain he’d inflicted on two families. Meadow, who had never had the chances money was supposed to buy you, deserved Maynard facing the truth.

  Too many people were getting away with their sins. In all this mess, someone needed to pay for what they had done. It might as well be Wallace Maynard.

  # # END # #

  A Note from the Author

  I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you did, I would greatly appreciate a short review on Amazon or your favorite book website. Reviews are crucial for any author, and even just a line or two can make a huge difference.

  Also by James D.F. Hannah

  THE HENRY MALONE NOVELS

  MIDNIGHT LULLABY

  COMPLICATED SHADOWS

  SHE TALKS TO ANGELS

  Acknowledgments

  No book is written in a vacuum. I’m lucky to have had friends and encouragement and sounding boards all the way through this process.

  Thank you to the best beta readers out there: Emily, Krista, and Emily (not a typo; just two of them). Giant thanks to my amazing editor, Cayce Berryman, for finding the stuff I thought I’d found four edits prior.

  And thanks to Alice, Alice (still not a typo), Brett, Cathy, Christina, Christina (so many Christinas), Lana, Lanny, the ever-lovin’ Lunch Bunch, Robyn, and so many more who poked and prodded and kept me going in ways they will never know. I can never thank you enough.

  About the Author

  James D.F. Hannah is an award-winning former journalist and public relations professional who turned to writing after he discovered bleach doesn't work on exploding dye packs. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

  This is his third novel.