by Jason Miller
“You’re tough,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. You never know what to say in situations like that, and when you settle on something, whatever it is, you come out sounding like a dummy.
“I’m tough enough,” Eun Hee said. “But something gets everybody eventually, Slim. At least I know what mine’s going to be.”
“Does it bother you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess. But listen, when whatever happens happens, and I spend my last days here or in hospice or wherever Lew and I decide is best, at least I’ll have stared down my death. It hasn’t blinked but I haven’t, either, and one day we’ll meet head-on in the middle of the tracks like a pair of trains. I’m not afraid, Slim. Never have been before and I’m not now.”
“Maybe I will have that drink.”
She poured me a short one and gave it to me and smiled and patted my hand.
She said, “I’ve worried you.”
“It’s not that, exactly. It’s just I’ve seen maybe more than my fair share of death, and I’ll tell you, I don’t like it.”
“Me, neither. But I’m not gone yet.”
We toasted not being gone yet and drank our drinks. Afterward Eun Hee offered to put on a pot of coffee, maybe scratch together some late supper, but I was exhausted from my stay in Jackson County and my parley with Wesley Tremble, so I offered up some more thanks and a little money for Anci’s food and lodging, but was refused.
“I think you might be taking a baby fox home, though,” she said.
“God, I hope you’re kidding.”
She was kidding about the fox but not about Anci being steamed. The ride home, she read me the riot act up one side and down the other. Man, she was mad. After a while, though, she ran out of gas and sat quietly, watching out her window, remembering maybe that it’d been her idea to the take the Cleaveses’ business in the first place.
Finally, she said, “At least you didn’t get shot.”
“Just shot at. So there’s that.”
“But the guy who took the dog did.”
“That’s right.”
“Dead.”
“As leg warmers,” I said.
“What?”
“It was a fashion thing. Leg warmers. A long time ago.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Thirty years or more.”
“Yeah, maybe update that one.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll update that one. Meantime, this thing with Reach, I don’t like it, and I’m going to keep not liking it until I do something about it.”
“Oh, monkey hell.”
At last, we arrived home. Indian Vale. The house my father had built that had become mine and that one day would be my daughter’s, if she chose to stay in the area. She wouldn’t, though. Why should she? The young people here moved somewhere else as fast as they could, and the old folks withered away and died. The factories vanished and the mines and mills sank into the ground, and in their places were erected fast food joints and furniture rental places and pawnshops. Sometimes I hear places like where I live called “Real America,” and I know it rankles some folks—city folks, mostly—something awful, and I wish I could tell them it’s only done out of politeness. That it’s only people saying nice things about the dying.
It was dark that night, and the moon was off doing other stuff, I guess. Even with the stars out, it’s hard to find your way around our little valley, so I nearly tripped over the porch steps getting to the front door. I have a penlight on the end of my keychain, and I used it to try to find the keyhole but even with that it was like looking for spilled ink inside a coal scuttle.
“No hurry,” Anci said behind me. “We can sleep standing up, like horses.”
“Keep your spurs on, will you?”
Finally, I got it. Unlocking was achieved. I put the key in the lock and turned the knob and heard Anci suck a breath all at once. My heart jumped.
“Motherfucker,” she said.
I wheeled around. And there, leaning casually against a porch post in the country dark, was A. Evan Cleaves, still in that stupid black suit, his face aglow in the sudden spark of a cigarette lighter.
He said, “Didn’t know when you’d come home.”
“I didn’t, either,” I said. I put down my fighting hands. “You waited long?”
“Not long. A day or two.”
Oh, shit-fire.
He said, “Thanks for finding the dog. They called us from the sheriff’s office. Let us come collect her. Dad teared up pretty good over it.”
“It wasn’t anything,” I said. “I heard you’d been to get her.”
“And we heard you spent some time in the slammer.”
I said, “Three days, but that goes along with the job. You don’t happen to know anyone name of Carol Ray, do you?”
The boy stared at me with his needlepoint eyes.
“No. Thanks again.” He stepped forward, stuffed an envelope in my hand. A big manila envelope that had been folded over and taped into a smaller shape. He showed his weird smile to Anci. Then he loped off the side of the porch, into the lawn, and out of sight. I looked around, but couldn’t see the flatbed truck or the yurt or anything. Not so much as a skateboard. For all I knew, he’d walked the twenty miles from Union City.
I turned to Anci. “You okay?”
“I think I peed myself.”
“I think I did, too. We better check the place out.”
And so we did, but the locks were intact and there weren’t any scrapes on the doors to show they’d been forced. The windows were in place and the latches latched. Anci inspected her room while I peeked in at my office and the rest of the house. Nothing seemed out of place. No one had riled the cats. The plants needed watered but it was hard to blame A. Evan for that. I blamed him for it anyway. When we’d finished our reconnoiter, the two of us regrouped in the kitchen.
Anci said, “Hopefully that’s the last time we’ll see him.”
“Hopefully. It nearly was anyway. I almost beat the shit out of him.”
“Might’ve ended up in jail again.”
“That’d be a record.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’d hold up, too. What’s in the envelope?”
I’d almost forgot the envelope. It was in the back of my trousers, where I’d stuffed it, but my mind was elsewhere. I opened it and looked inside. I showed the inside to Anci: thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
5.
I FINISHED COUNTING. I PUT THE LAST CRISP BILL DOWN ON the kitchen table and neatened the stack and patted it with my hand. I said, “Goddamn. A hundred thousand bucks.”
Anci whistled and said, “I want to say goddamn, too. Can I say goddamn?”
“You already did. Twice. Also, you’re punished.”
Anci whistled again and picked up some of the bills. “What do you think it means?”
“Truck farm business must have picked up some. Either that or sorghum prices are doing better than I thought possible.”
“Probably it’s that. The sorghum thing.”
“Probably.”
“Say, what is sorghum, anyway?”
“It’s a crop. Like a kind of grass. They make molasses out of it, some other stuff. Beer sometimes. Why?”
“Just hard to imagine them growing anything. The Cleaveses. Burying stuff, I can imagine. Cutting it down. Burning it. Growing it, not so much.”
“I guess I have trouble believing it, too.”
“Upshot is, we can finally get the air-conditioning fixed. Maybe even get a brand-new one. And none too soon, either. Can’t fit no more box fans in my bedroom.”
I nodded. “I know it ain’t exactly been a hayride around here lately, and I appreciate your patience . . .”
“But?”
“How do you know there’s a ‘but’ coming?”
“You’re smooth-talking me up for one. A person can tell. That bit about the patience and how you’re proud of me and my maturity and how I’m turning into a grown lady a
nd all.”
“I actually didn’t say a lot of that stuff. The maturity stuff and the grown lady stuff. You tossed those on the pile yourself.”
Anci wanted to ignore this. She said, “Think you’re being slick, but—guess what?—you ain’t. Might as well have it painted on your face. I know you, you rascal.”
“Okay, but maybe we ought to hold off for a just bit longer, make sure this money isn’t tied up in anything nefarious.”
“It came from that Cleaves boy, didn’t it?”
“Handed it to me himself.”
“It’s tied up in something nefarious,” she said.
I dropped the envelope into the safe in my office back of the house and then Anci and I watched a movie for a while—something happy, Singin’ in the Rain—until we were laughing hard at Donald O’Connor and the unsettling memory of A. Evan Cleaves began to fade and we felt ready for our beds.
IT RAINED A LITTLE THE NEXT MORNING, THIN PELTS OF RAIN. That should have been a relief, but in the end it was one of those summer showers only seems to make things worse. The paved roads smoldered and the air grew thick with a suffocating humidity. The rainwater pooled in black mirrors on the baked earth, and as soon as the clouds pushed off the sun came out again and drank it all greedily back down.
“It’s like we’re being punished,” Anci said.
I said, “We’re being punished,” and went inside to scratch together some breakfast: chunks of fresh apple and melon and some berries so we wouldn’t have to use the stove. Anci found some cold biscuits in the fridge. We filled our coffee with fistfuls of ice.
We were cleaning up our plates and mugs and things when my cell rang. It was Susan, a cranky woman but a fairly decent business manager (Anci says assistant manager) and occasional operative. Susan had been on the periphery of that mess with Galligan and Luster and the Becketts a while back—my first official case—and when it was all over and put back in the hatbox she’d agreed to do a little work for me and my fledgling agency. Mostly she kept our books and prevented me being arrested by the IRS, but she was good at other kinds of work, too, computer work and using the Google and that kind of thing.
She said, “I found her, Slim.”
“Reach’s ex? Carol Ray?”
“No. Vivien Leigh. I found Vivien Leigh.”
“There’s no reason to be cross about it,” I said. “Carol Ray then. Where is she?”
“Freeman Spur. Like your drug dealer boy told you.” She gave me the address and even described the house, which she’d seen on Google Street View. She said, “Kid wasn’t kidding about the tough part, either. She’s got priors.”
“Oh?”
“Citation for disorderly conduct. Five years ago.”
“Doesn’t sound like much.”
“I didn’t think so, either, at first, anyway,” she said. “Dug a little deeper. Turns out the disorderly conduct involved setting Dennis Reach’s car on fire.”
“Oh.”
“With Dennis Reach inside,” she said.
“I want to say ‘oh’ again but it’d be the third time.”
“I noticed that. Before you ask, nothing much came of it, besides that disorderly. Reach must have been real popular with law enforcement over there in Jackson County because they basically let Carol Ray walk with a slap on the fanny and a promise to be a good girl. She had a gun, too. A pistola in the glove box of her car but no carry permit, so they took the gun, but again, no charges.”
“If there’s one gun around, there are probably others.”
“That’s usually how it works. Maybe even an AR-15.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and paused, thinking. Then she said, “Maybe go ahead and mail my check this morning, though.”
GUNS AND CARRY PERMITS AND CAR FIRES ASIDE, I DIDN’T have any reason to think Carol Ray was a danger to anyone outside her late ex-husband. There were more guns in southern Illinois glove boxes than gloves or ice scrapers or haphazardly refolded road maps, and if you were going to start worrying about folks carrying firearms without the proper permits you were probably going to stop going outdoors altogether.
Late morning, Anci and I rode my motorcycle north and east to the village of Freeman Spur. We found the address Susan had given us in a little neighborhood on Mount Moriah Avenue, a Craftsman new-build surrounded by some pleasant-looking Amur maples and juniper bushes. We parked next to an ivory Porsche 911 and climbed off and pulled off our helmets. Anci looked at the car and hummed approvingly.
“Will you look at that lovely thing,” she said. “Maybe that’s what we should do with our new dognapping money.”
“Yesterday you said you wanted an air conditioner. Said your bedroom is full of box fans. Remember that?”
“That was yesterday. As of this morning, this is today.”
I said, “Tomorrow you’ll see a spotted horse and want that.”
“Now that you mention it.”
We went up to the house and knocked and waited and waited, but nobody answered.
Anci wrinkled her nose. “Car’s here, so she must have another. Maybe even something nicer.”
“Maybe it’s that spotted horse.”
“Another foolproof deduction,” she said. “Why not run into town for another cup of coffee, swing back in a bit?”
We were about to ride away when a sandy-haired boy appeared from next door and ran over to us, waving sunburned arms.
He said, “That’s a cool bike.”
“Thanks.”
“Pretty sad lope, though. I’ve heard louder thoughts.”
“Not-so thanks,” I said. “You think you know something about bikes, do you?”
“I know a thing or three,” he said. “Example, I know you unscrew that baffling, you’ll get a better lope.”
“I like my lope just fine.”
“Whatever. I get a ride on that?”
“No.”
He looked at me regretfully a moment. Finally, he decided he didn’t want a ride on the bike with the pitiful exhaust note anyway and shrugged and said, “You after Carol Ray?”
“I might be. You her boy?”
“I’m a boy,” he said. Unnecessarily, I thought. He looked at Anci and smiled with every tooth in his head and then looked back at me. “But not hers. I take messages for her sometimes.”
“Okay.”
“Service for which I get five dollars.”
Reluctantly, I took out my wallet. The boy licked his lips and craned his neck to look inside the billfold. I had a ten but no fives.
“You got change?”
“Sure don’t.”
He took the ten.
He said, “Carol Ray ain’t here.”
“I think I want my money back.”
“She’s over to Shotguns & Shakes.”
“That a place?”
“Last I looked. Got a parking lot and a sign. Carol Ray works there.”
“Do you know the address?”
He said, “Do you know how to Google?” and smiled again at Anci before slipping away to await the appearance of his next mark.
Behind me, Anci said, “What a wonderful boy.”
In fact, I thought he was a bad boy, a terrible boy, but I refrained from saying so. I was still in that time of life where I wasn’t sure how to react when she said such things. Boy-related things, I guess I mean. Other parents had cautioned me that, to some extent, anyway, I’d have to let Anci make her own choices and—yea, verily—even her own mistakes. Mainly, they said, it was important that I not overreact, but I confess that part of me wanted to walk quietly into the sea whenever the subject came up.
Anyway, we rode into town and grabbed that coffee. Anci had more ice in hers. Mine was straight up. I wanted a pastry, too, but I’d given most of my cash to that little con artist, so I settled for frowns. Then the two of us looked up Shotguns & Shakes on Google and discovered where and what it was.
Anci said, “You got to be kidding me.
”
“It’s the world we’ve made for ourselves,” I replied.
Shotguns & Shakes—a combination burger joint/shooting range with an emphasis on getting firearms into the hands of little ones—was south and east of us a little in the abandoned strip fields and farmland near Moake Crossing and the retail sprawl that had built up around the I-57 exchange. There was a restaurant with some picnic tables and playground-type equipment outside and in the field beyond a hot zone of funnel traps and an impact berm maybe thirteen or fourteen feet high situated just north of the complex and facing the old Tombstone Lakes. The restaurant was busy with an early lunch crowd kitted out in Realtree and Mossy Oak and Carhartt, but we managed to snag a harried-looking food server and some directions.
“Range B,” he said, and pointed. “Grab some cans before you go out.”
We grabbed the aforementioned ear protection and walked around outside in the booming air. Everywhere was the crack of gunfire: small arms, long guns, something that sounded like a bazooka. A five-year-old ran past us carrying what appeared to be an Uzi, laughing manically.
“Where do you think her parents are?” Anci asked.
“In Kevlar, if they’ve got any sense.”
After a while, we found four men and one woman firing shotguns on a trap range near the edge of the complex. The men were regulation upper-middle-class rural sportsmen—jowl-cheeked and gutty—but the woman was a surprise. Carol Ray was twenty years younger than I imagined she’d be. She was tall and willow-thin, with expensively cut blond hair and an adorably crooked mouth. She had pale blue eyes and a nose turned up just slightly at the end. She looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine, and I wanted to buy that magazine and sleep with it under my pillow. She was dressed in a light hunting vest and amber eye shields and was holding a Super Black Eagle shotgun with the camo finish and pistol grip. When she saw us standing there, she waved a hand and left the group of men and came over.
She said, “We’re almost finished here, in case y’all want to bring your kits up.”
“We don’t mean to interrupt your shooting class.”
“Not a class,” she replied with a bright laugh. “Just fun. We shoot at these traps and swap dollars. Mostly the boys there do the swapping, if I can take the risk of bragging. Please don’t tell my accountant, though.”
