by Jason Miller
“He doesn’t mind,” Anci said. “Fact of the matter is, I’m kinda the brains of the outfit.”
“Well, now, I can see that.”
“Don’t take much imagination, does it, way he carries on?”
“Not really, no.”
“I’m literally standing right here,” I said.
Carol Ray turned her attention back to me.
“I talked to old man Black like you asked,” she said. “He’s heard of you, sugar. And let me tell you, your name did not exactly make him gladsome. Says you were tangled up with Roy Galligan a couple of years back.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh’s right. He wants to meet you. Says he wants to meet the person who brought down Matt Luster.”
“That’s not what happened,” I pointed out. “It’s not even the same time zone as what happened.”
“Maybe you can tell him that, you meet him this afternoon. Four o’clock. Whatever you do, don’t bring a gun, and for God’s sake, Slim, don’t wear a wire. You’re not planning on wearing a wire, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
She nodded, said, “Good. That is good. The on-site security is . . . meaty.”
“Meaty?”
“Imagine a fleet of bulldozers in leather ties.”
“I’ll wear a hardhat,” I said. “One more thing. Any chance you’ve seen J.T. around?”
“J.T.? Nope. Why?”
“No reason,” I said. “Except the local law told me he’s missing.”
“Missing?” she asked. “This something I need to worry about?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “Maybe keep the Redhawk handy.”
“Believe me, I will.”
I tapped Black’s address into my phone. Anci did the same. Then I told Anci it was time to hit the highway. She stuffed the rest of the cookie in her mouth and chugged her milk.
“Stay out of trouble, Slim,” said Carol Ray.
“Too late,” Anci and I said at the same time.
Anci looked up at me.
“Jinx. You owe me a Coke.”
ANCI DRANK HER JINX COKE—CHOCOLATE COKE, TO BE exact—and ate some French fries. They were the good kind, crinkle-cut and fried in grease that’d had time to mellow in the trap. Probably since the states were arguing about nullification. Jeep had come out to meet us. He ordered a barbecue and some coleslaw. I was too anxious to eat anything much, except I stole some of Anci’s fries, so my lunch was fries and the stink eye.
“Four o’clock at Leonard Black’s and an hour later at the sheriff’s?” Jeep said. “You’ll never make it.”
“I have to,” I said. “My squirrel’s in a bag as it is. I can’t stand another bust. Besides, I have to be on the outside come tonight.”
Jeep pondered this for a moment this and then said, “Maybe I should give him a call.”
“Who?”
“Wince.”
Anci snorted. I snorted. I threw up my hands.
“Oh, merciful hell,” I said. “Please don’t. You’re not exactly his favorite person, you know? He’s still not convinced you didn’t disappear that meth dealer last year.”
Jeep growled, “Fine. I’d recommend you call your lawyer, but that’d probably just make things worse. Wish I knew what it was all about, though.”
“We’ll find out at five o’clock.”
“Righteous.”
I looked at Anci.
“This is the part where you’re supposed to pester me about coming along. Then I tell you no, it’s too dangerous, and you make a wisecrack and say a dirty word like a kid on TV.”
“Kids on TV don’t get to say dirty words, stupid. You go on along to whatever caper it is you’ve set up,” she said. “I’m on to something and I mean to follow it through.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Jeep smiled at me and shook his head—kids—but Anci was serious. She munched her fries and stared bullets through the big plate window and out into the world of mystery.
ONE MORE TIME, WE PARTED COMPANY. JEEP AND ANCI struck out on some mission or other. Anci wouldn’t say what, except to promise it wouldn’t be dangerous. I figured whatever it was, if Jeep was with her, she’d be safe enough. Hell, she’d be safe if there were Nazi werewolf bikers involved. Jeep tried to argue that he was too busy to play chauffeur, but in the end she corralled him into it, and off they went. It wasn’t ever very hard to talk Jeep into troublemaking.
Meantime, I headed for Leonard Black.
All my years underground, I’d stayed clear of Black coal mines and their sorrowful repute. Underground work is dangerous by nature, but some of these local strings were less like jobs than advanced forms of suicide. That’s how I thought of the Black mines. Things just seemed to go wrong inside of them—too many injuries, too much misadventure—like they were broken or sick. One miner I knew up in Colton, Billy Goat McElroy, thought they were haunted. He got to worrying about it so much he hatched a scheme to bring his pastor down for some kind of Church of Christ sortilege, but the bosses caught wind of it first and got him fired. Not much later, Billy Goat died under what you’d call less-than-ideal circumstances, hanged from the bottom of a back-road bridge, and the locals whispered that the ghosts had got him after all. I always thought he was just depressed about his lung and heart problems, but folks tend to prefer their superstitions.
Haunted or not, these days there wasn’t much of it left, the Black strand. The old-style gopher holes had long bled out their seams, and the bigger drops had mostly been bought up. Black remained a name in the downstate, though. He was a character. The story went that he’d won the land lease to his first coal mine by shooting the balls of the former owner’s prize bull with an Eagle Arms Company Front Loader, but I suspect that was just the hoax-craft of local legend. Still, Black had a local reputation as a recluse and a bit of a nut: at nearly eighty, he affected both an enthusiasm for vintage motorcycles and a version of the paranoid-style of American politics that made even the local militia head cases keep their distance. That is, the stories swirling around him tended to be whoppers, but they also tended to ring true.
His spread was west, near Cape Girardeau between Commerce and Thebes, and boy, was this a dreary slice. You think you know ugly land, I’ll show you ugly land. It was like the Lord had paused in the work of His creation to take a shit, and He took it right on Cape Girardeau. The rock-spotted hillsides were clotted with gray mud and touched with scrub and saw grass. The Ohio was pretty, I guess, but Leonard’s view of it was spoiled by smoke stacks, power stations, and the slow drifting hulks of coal barges. Even the old farmhouse had sucked in enough smoke and fumes that the shingles had turned black. It sat there on its plot like a funeral cake.
Black looked funereal, too, though more like the guest of honor than just a guest. He met me at the door in an open robe like a coal-mine Hefner and grinning a skeletal grin. His skin was pink as faded rose petals, and the eyes behind his misaligned antique spectacles were gray and lifeless. J.T. was a pretty big guy, but Leonard surprised me with his smallness. If I’d wanted to, I could have put him in my pocket and run away.
The two boys he kept as hired help weren’t pocket-sized, though, and if there was anything especially floral about them I couldn’t make it out. Maybe their matching purple and gold sweats. I was ushered into a living room as big as a hunting lodge and garnished with all manner of murdered animal parts. I admit, I’ve never understood it. I’m not a vegetarian, and I wear leather boots and such, but killing an animal just to hang its face over your fire pit seems more an act of meanness than decorative ingenuity. For an instant, I pondered what Eun Hee Mandamus would have made of it, but the violence of the resulting thoughts made me put my pondering away.
“Is that a bat?” I asked, pointing to a place just below the I beam.
Leonard grinned.
“Ozark big-ear. You have any sense of what it takes to hit one of those little fuckers on the wing and leave enou
gh to put on a plaque?”
“Fancy killing.”
Leonard did not grin.
“You disapprove?”
“Well, bats are pretty. Also useful. For example, they eat bugs.”
“That one don’t.”
The muscle had left us for a moment, but now they came back. They were so big they made the room hotter. One of them stuffed a cold drink I didn’t want into my hand. The other one slipped a cigar I wanted even less between my fingers. Both of them shoved me into a chair. The chair was okay, I guess. Leonard sat opposite.
“We don’t stand much on ceremony around here,” he explained. “You are lucky they didn’t sit you in your drink and set your thumb on fire. Or make you smoke your chair and stick that Habano up your ass.” One of the tanks filled Leonard’s highball with something as green as a newborn cicada. He sipped it and frowned. He looked at me and frowned some more. He was good at frowns. Almost as good as Paul Bruzetti. A master. “You’re here about my boy.”
“You get right to business.”
“I prefer to keep my business dealings straightforward and to the point.”
“And this is business?”
“My boy is. His future is,” Black said. “So yes.”
“It’s about your boy,” I said. “I think Carol Ray mentioned it maybe.”
“She did. You mixed up with her?”
“Mixed up?”
“Intimately?”
“No, sir. I’ve got a woman. A good woman. And by the way, I’m not sure any of this is your business.”
“And I’m not sure I like you deciding what’s my business. Everyone in my line knows you, Slim. Everyone knows what you did to Roy Galligan.”
He rose suddenly. He set his drink down and crossed to an ornately carved cabinet at the back of the room. He opened the cabinet and drew out a rifle, a Parker & Snow musket, I think. Maybe 1861. He came back across the room and pointed it at me. I almost felt honored.
“Tell me,” he said, “I was to shoot you now, Slim, would it save my boy some trouble?”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t mind having a gun pointed at you?”
“I mind it plenty,” I said. “But it keeps happening to me, and maybe I’m starting to get used to it. I don’t like it, though.”
“I wanted, I could put a ball in your brain—and with my eyes shut, too—then we’d cut you open, fill you full of hand weights, and sink your carcass in the Ohio.”
“Hand weights?”
“They work better than rocks, and the boys here have a few to spare.” He shrugged. “It’s convenient.”
“And what should murder be if not convenient.”
I thought he might go ahead and do it, shoot me with the Parker & Snow, but just then one of the tanks approached. He used his hand to lower the barrel of the Parker & Snow and whispered something in the old man’s ear. Then he walked away again. Leonard looked at me. He rested the gun against the arm of his chair and sat.
“I’ve elected not to shoot you.”
“I’d hoped you might.”
“For now, anyway.”
“Fair enough.”
He sipped some more of his drink. His hands shook around the glass.
“So this is about J.T.?”
“It’s really about Sheldon and A. Evan Cleaves.”
“The Cleaveses? Shit.”
“I’ve had that same reaction.”
“I don’t doubt,” he said. “They have that kind of reputation. Like wildfire. People have made the mistake before of bringing them in on something. Work-type things. Wet work. They’re impressive. They’re frightening to those who can be frightened, and they talk a good game without saying much. I don’t know that makes much sense.”
“I follow it, though,” I said.
Leonard nodded his appreciation at my following it and said, “My opinion is that A. Evan might actually be crazy. Sheldon acts crazy, but he’s more an old fox than a loon.” Here he paused to take another sip of his drink. “Usually, though, it don’t work out. Or it gets out of hand. Wildfire can’t be controlled, nor crazy. Folks usually end up regretting ever hearing their names.”
“I know I do.”
“And you think my J.T. is tangled up with them somehow?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My guess is, the lot of them are tangled up in something. I don’t know whether J.T. brought them in or whether they all got brought in on it together by someone else. I’m sure as hell confused why they dragged me into it. It’s not like there weren’t enough men with guns lying around. But they did drag me into it, and now the only way for me to get out of it is to talk to the right people and convince them to leave me alone.”
“And you’ve decided that person is my boy?”
“Well, he did run away for a reason.”
“J.T. didn’t run away,” Leonard said. “A Black don’t do that. He’s just being strategic.”
“Any idea where this strategery is taking place?”
He thought about it. Thought for five full minutes. I reckoned he’d eventually have to answer, but he didn’t. He just sat there like lichen on a gravestone. I didn’t know what to think. It was like he just went away. At last, I got alarmed and started to rise, but one of the tanks came over and put me back in my seat. He shook Black by the shoulder—gently at first but then more roughly—until the old man popped to life again like an out-of-tune television.
“I need to talk to him first, deliver your message,” he said, like nothing had happened.
“Okay.”
“Then I’ll reach out to you.”
“Through Carol Ray?”
“Through her.” He paused thoughtfully. “Probably I should have shot you.”
“Oh, probably.”
That got him in a huff, some reason. Likely he’d had his fill of my flip attitude. He reached back from his sitting position for the rifle. I’d had enough rifles pointed at me for a day. I stood quickly and took it from him, snatching it from his hand. I stepped past his chair and gently hit him with the butt of the rifle in the back of his head. He dropped forward into his own lap. After a moment, I could hear him snoring loudly. The lumps of steroid muscle just stood there, watching. I showed them the gun, and they raised their hands.
“No need for fireworks, Dad,” the one with the big forehead said. “He gets like that. You didn’t hurt him. You avoided getting shot. It’s win-win.”
I agreed that is was. Forehead showed me out. I held onto the musket on the way out, though. Mama didn’t raise no dummies.
“You know, he’ll probably forget you were ever here,” he said before I was able to escape. He tapped his forehead with two thick fingers. “Memory goes in and out.”
His forehead wasn’t the only thing being tapped, but I know when I’ve been out-maneuvered so I handed over my last ten bucks without too many hard feelings.
“Remind him, would you?”
“Maybe,” forehead said, “but a sawbuck hasn’t bought much around here for a long time.”
“It’s all I’ve got,” I said. “It’s gas money. I’ll probably have to walk back part of the way.”
“Cry me a river.”
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Ron Spike. And I ain’t your boy.”
“Have it your way. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure, big spender. Ask away.”
“Does the old man ever forget J.T.’s visits?”
“Every now and again,” he said. “Not often. Tell you the truth, the kid and him don’t exactly see eye to eye on much these days. You ever meet J.T.?”
“Ran into him once. That’s about it.”
“Once is usually enough.”
“Okay. Thanks. Don’t forget to have him call me, will you?”
“Sure. What the hell? I feel generous today.” He pocketed the ten. “You really a private eye, hayseed?”
“Sometimes.” I took his outstretched hand. It was like grabbing a ring of dro
p-forged iron. “Sometimes I’m just a guy who runs around visiting sick old men. What ails him, anyway?”
“Oh, he’s a sweet old guy. Fucking Santa Claus with a dime bag in both pockets and a sweet spot for bitches young enough to be his granddaughters. Except the syph is eating his brain. Few more years, we may have to lock him away.”
No skin off his balls one way or another. He’d probably end up with the house and the land, and maybe one or two of Leonard’s antique cycles, but saying so was just asking for a fight, and much as I might have enjoyed testing my manly skills against a walking laboratory, I had other appointments to keep.
Sheriff Wince was waiting. And maybe a holding cell.
13.
AS THESE THINGS USUALLY GO, I BUSTED MY ASS TO GET TO the Randolph Country sheriff’s station, barely made it in under the wire, and then sat there for an hour reading a copy of Modern Maturity I found outside Wince’s office. I’d just flipped to an article about your sex drive after sixty when the door opened and the sheriff appeared.
“’Bout time.”
“Complications have arisen,” he said, then paused. “What in the hell are you reading?”
“AARP magazine. Somebody must have left it.”
“One of our master criminals, probably. Learning anything?”
“Yeah. I haven’t saved enough to retire, but if I start now I might be able to quit when . . .” I paused to do the math. “Never mind. It’s too depressing.”
“That’s not the half of it. You know those jokes you like to tell?”
“I do. For example . . .”
“That is, if you can call them jokes.”
“That hurts. I lie away nights working on this stuff, you know.”
“You ever think of quitting this business, giving clown college a try?”
“Lots of effort, little difference.”
“Final question: are those orange sodas?”
I nodded.
“I stopped and got Anci some sodas. Didn’t want to leave them outside in the heat.”
Wince licked his lips.
“I have one of those?”
“You still on your diet?”
“Supposedly.”
“Then no.”
“Fair enough. As I was saying, you might want to keep a lid on it in there,” he said. “Consider yourself warned.”
