Tear It Down

by Nick Petrie

  When the bricks were gone, he attacked the packed dirt with the claw hammer.

  He went down six inches, then a foot.

  There was nothing beneath the bricks.

  No bones, no silver spoons or coins.

  Just ordinary soil.

  Then he stopped.

  “Lewis,” he called out. “Take one of those bricks and wash it under the hose. Use a scrub brush if you have to.”

  “Hang on,” Romeo said. “My water bottle’s right here.”

  “Let me see.” Dupree squirmed backward out of the crawl space.

  Peter lay on his belly in the dark for a moment as the static sparked up around him. Feeling the measureless weight of that ancient, damaged house pressing down from above. Then he turned himself around and scrambled toward the light.

  Lewis knelt in the dirt, the tipped water bottle in one hand, a small, misshapen brick in the other.

  With his calloused thumb, he rubbed mud from the surface, then dropped it abruptly in the dirt.

  The brick wasn’t made of clay.

  Under the work lights, the exposed surface glowed a soft, buttery yellow.

  Gold.

  Forty bricks of it.

  Evil, down in the dirt.

  Dupree’s eyes were round as saucers. Romeo looked a little queasy.

  Lewis wasn’t smiling. “I guess now we know what the bad guys are after.”

  42

  They didn’t wash any more bricks.

  Better that they looked like ordinary rubble.

  Lewis backed his Yukon behind the Dumpster to get it closer. When Peter began to drop the bricks into the wheelbarrow, Dupree picked up a long crowbar, his biceps swelling his shirtsleeve. “Where are you taking these?”

  “Someplace away from here,” said Peter. “Someplace secure.” He looked at Lewis. “Safety deposit box?”

  Lewis leaned his shotgun against the dump truck, then picked up a dirty brick and weighed it in his hand. “Ten pounds, more or less,” he said. “Forty bricks would be four hundred pounds. I don’t know the weight limit on a deposit box, even a big one. Forty pounds? So ten boxes, ten different banks? That’ll take all damn day.”

  “This stuff is Wanda’s,” said Dupree, the crowbar easy in his hand. Behind him, Romeo had picked up a shovel. “We clear on that?”

  “Absolutely.” Peter raised his hands. “It’s Wanda’s. And I’m not married to the safety deposit box, either. If you’ve got a better idea, let’s hear it.”

  “They ain’t that big,” Lewis said. “But they’re heavy. Can’t just go under your mattress.”

  “I got a safe in my shop,” Dupree said. “For long guns. It’s a good strong safe, and it’s bolted to the floor.”

  Peter looked at Lewis. “What do you think?”

  “Fine by me. The faster we get this shit out of here, the better.” Then Lewis had the shotgun back in his hands. He stared hard at Dupree, then Romeo. “Long as we still clear. This is Wanda’s.”

  Peter had felt the weight of that stare before. It was almost physical in its force, like a hot desert wind. Romeo nodded quickly, eyes wide, lowering his shovel.

  Dupree still held the crowbar in one capable hand. He met Lewis’s stare with his own. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ve known Wanda most of her life. But I don’t know why you’re in this. You ever even met her?”

  “Don’t need to,” Lewis said. “Friend of Peter is a friend of mine.”

  Whatever passed between them, Peter couldn’t see it. Dupree just nodded and turned to hang the crowbar on the scaffold again.

  Lewis shouldered the shotgun and reached for his keys. “I’ll move my ride. Let’s get your old hooptie back here for a shorter carry.”

  “Hooptie?” Dupree followed Lewis out. “Boy, you got no idea what you’re talking about. She may be old but she gets the job done.”

  “Just like your mama,” said Lewis. “That’s the word at the barbershop.”

  Dupree’s voice drifted around the corner. “Boy, I ain’t too old to whup your ass.”

  “Keep talking, old man.”

  Romeo looked at Peter. “Would he have pulled the trigger?”

  Peter took out Wanda’s phone. “You don’t want to know.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Detective Gantry answered on the fourth ring.

  “I want to ask a favor.” Peter heard a clamor in the background, a crowded room full of people. “You in the middle of something?”

  “Aside from the mayor’s press conference, and the armed robbery at the jewelry store? No, I have nothing better to do.”

  But he’d answered Peter’s call.

  “You making any progress on the jewelry store?”

  “No comment,” said Gantry. “What’s the favor?”

  Peter said, “I couldn’t get in to see Vinny Charles, but I did talk with his public defender. She showed me the footage from the hospital bed, where Vinny talked about seeing the Devil, remember? Running him off the road? He seemed pretty convinced.”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Well, the Devil he described was a blue face with sharp teeth.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “When I went after that station wagon, before the driver peeled out, I got a glimpse of the machine gunner’s face. Not much, just a glimpse. There was something blue there, too. What if it’s the same guy? And what if the blue is a tattoo?”

  “You didn’t tell me about the blue on the shooter’s face.” Gantry sounded annoyed.

  “To be honest, it was fairly weird. I didn’t know if I was seeing things or not. But maybe you could run a search. Isn’t there a national database?”

  “Yeah, the FBI runs the NCIC and the Triple-I, that’s the National Crime Information Center and the Interstate Identification Index. The information mostly comes from self-reporting by a zillion different jurisdictions. It’s not always accurate, but it’s the best we’ve got.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “I can’t search by identifying marks, I need names or aliases. But the records returned will have physical characteristics, and I can narrow from there. Get me some names and I’ll run them. Now it’s my turn for a favor. We finally got results back on that station wagon you shot up. The plate you gave us didn’t go anywhere, it was from a Toyota was supposedly totaled in an accident six months ago. But the car itself, you thought it was a yellow 1960s Ford Country Squire, right?”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Peter. “My grandfather had one just like it.”

  “Well, there aren’t many left. Only a couple in Tennessee, and they’re show cars with antique plates. Rebuilt or restored, and worth tens of thousands of dollars. Same goes for Missouri and Arkansas and Mississippi. All accounted for except for one located in rural Mississippi. Canary yellow. Its registration expired four years ago, and there’s no record of a sale.”

  “It could be parts for collectors. Or just in the crusher.”

  “Well, it was last registered to one Archibald Carruthers, now incarcerated at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm.”

  “Like the Mose Allison song?” asked Peter.

  “That’s the one. Carruthers is sixty-eight years old. I looked him up. He’s been at Parchman for fifteen years, and he’ll be there the rest of his natural life. He’s not your guy, but the man’s record reads like he ain’t no friend of mine. He set fire to a black church after nailing the doors shut. Ten people burned to death inside.”

  “Jesus.” Someone had sent Wanda a video of a burning cross. “Sounds like there’s something there. What’s the favor?”

  “I asked the locals to go ask Carruthers’s wife about the car, but they can’t be bothered. I could ask harder, but I’d have to get someone involved at the state level. That
juice just ain’t worth the squeeze.” Gantry’s voice was sour. “And my boss won’t spare me from this jewelry robbery for half a day to run to another state.”

  “You want me to go.”

  “Oh, no,” said Gantry. “I’d never ask that. It would be entirely inappropriate. For one thing, you’re not a sworn peace officer. For another, Bird Hill, Mississippi is way outside my jurisdiction.”

  “Of course,” said Peter. “You better tell me where she lives, so I don’t end up there by accident.”

  “See, that’s the favor I wanted to ask,” said Gantry. “I want you to write it down somewhere safe. If I lose my notebook, I wouldn’t want to forget.”

  Peter didn’t need to write it down.

  He wasn’t going to forget.

  43

  They tossed the small, dirt-crusted bricks from man to man and stacked them in the toolboxes on the sides of Dupree’s truck.

  The heavy bricks didn’t look like much.

  They didn’t even take up much room, for all that they weighed.

  Lewis and Peter followed Dupree back to his workshop on the other side of Chelsea, less than a mile away. It was an unpainted cinder-block building that might have been a service station long ago. Now it had a new roof and a heavy-duty roll-up door in front and tall green pecan trees all around.

  The door went up and Dupree drove inside. Lewis parked the Yukon out front and they walked past the wide array of woodworking and metalworking tools to look at the safe in the back corner.

  It was big and black and almost certainly older than Dupree, a combination model that looked like it belonged in Al Capone’s office. It came up to Peter’s shoulder, with walls thick enough to be lined with cement.

  “Came with the building thirty years ago,” said Dupree. “Works like new. Guy told me it was fireproof, so I use it to store flammables, varnish and paint thinner and such. Plus my deer rifle.”

  “How many people know the combination?” Peter asked.

  “Just me,” Dupree said. “But I never lock it.”

  “You’re locking it today,” Lewis said.

  Dupree shook his head. “I’m starting to wish we’d taken all this to a bank.”

  Peter put a hand on his shoulder. “It won’t be here long. Once we deal with these assholes, we’ll find a better home for it.”

  They passed the bricks from hand to hand and stacked them neatly in the bottom of the safe. When the door was closed and the long lever thrown and the combination dial spun, Peter said, “Maybe you guys shouldn’t go back to work. Take the rest of the day off. Go fishing or something.”

  Then he looked at a five-gallon bucket loaded with cylindrical cast-iron sash weights, used to counterbalance windows in old houses. “Actually, I have a better idea.”

  He explained.

  Dupree nodded. “We can do that. What are you going to do?”

  “We’re heading to Mississippi to see a woman about a car.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Peter’s phone map app had the address about a hundred and ten miles from Dupree’s shop. They took I-55 south past Graceland and the Memphis airport, past Southaven and Hernando and Coldwater toward the Batesville turnoff for Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi. Bird Hill was some distance past that.

  Lewis was going ninety, the Yukon solid as he moved from lane to lane, smoothly passing other cars, tires humming on the road. The radar detector on the windshield didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  Outside, past the drainage ditches, there were few buildings. The landscape was lush and flat, trees and fields in a hundred shades of green. Peter could feel the afternoon heat through the window glass, and he was grateful for the air-conditioning. In the distance, a high wall of black clouds dropped curtains of rain that never touched the ground.

  “I know you’ve done the math,” said Peter.

  “What math?” Lewis gave Peter his tilted smile.

  “You know what math.”

  “Forty-two gold bricks at ten pounds apiece multiplied by today’s spot price in troy ounces? That math?”

  “Did you even have to look up the price of gold? Or the conversion from pounds to troy ounces?”

  “Well, the spot price comes up on my phone every morning. And there are approximately 14.58 troy ounces per pound. So, round number? About eight million bucks.”

  Peter whistled. “I guess Wanda can afford to rebuild. Or move anywhere she wants.”

  Lewis looked at Peter for a long moment. The Yukon didn’t waver from its lane. Then he said, “You feel anything when you touched those bricks?”

  “Like when Nadine touched my hand? No. You?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Hard to say.”

  “What was it like?”

  Lewis shook his head. Either he didn’t know or he wasn’t saying.

  Peter said, “Where would that gold have come from?”

  “Depends when it got put there,” said Lewis. “Did you take a look at those little bricks? They’re lumpy and uneven, each one a little different. Definitely not uniform weight. They weren’t made in any kind of modern smelting plant. They were probably made in a hurry, using basic sand molds. A long time ago.”

  Peter didn’t ask how Lewis knew about the various methods for making gold bars. Lewis read the way everyone else breathed, and he remembered everything.

  “The engineer who looked at the house,” said Peter. “He thought it was built around the time of the Civil War.”

  “That war ruined the Southern economy,” Lewis said. “In some places for decades. Parts of it, like rural Mississippi, have never really recovered. I’m guessing those bricks probably don’t date from after the war. But before the war? This area was wealthy, with only two ways to make that money. King cotton and the slave trade.”

  “And cotton was farmed with slaves,” Peter said. “Almost entirely. So it was slavery all the way down.”

  Lewis nodded. A few miles passed.

  “You know I ain’t one of those touchy-feely guys,” he finally said.

  Peter kept silent.

  “But I sure as hell felt something when I got the dirt off that chunk of gold.”

  The Mississippi countryside flew by. Green and hot and seemingly endless.

  “Something cold and heavy and tight around my neck.” Lewis looked sideways at Peter again. “Kinda freaky, right?”

  Peter thought about Nadine, how she’d traced the lines on his palm, and a shiver passed through him.

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  Then pointed at the sign for the exit. “This is our turn.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Down 278 through Oxford and beyond. The fields got smaller and the trees got larger. They turned onto a two-lane state highway, then another. Lewis had the Yukon down to seventy.

  The 10-gauge lay in the rear footwell, out of sight but within easy reach. Mad Chester’s 1911 sat in the passenger-side door pocket, easy to grab.

  When they stopped for gas, Peter had bought a DeLorme atlas for Mississippi, and he held it open on his lap now. The large-format maps showed everything from major cities and interstate highways to gravel roads and trailheads and boat ramps. In the back of Peter’s truck was a box with similar atlases for nineteen states. He wondered if he’d see them again.

  The countryside became more rugged, with still more trees and fewer signs of people. The highway twisted through low hills. Lewis slowed to sixty, then fifty.

  Past Tula they were on county roads, the blacktop sunken and cracked in places, or humped with roots. Oaks and elms and maples growing tall and crooked alongside. The only sign of modernity was a single thick power line on plain wooden poles gone dry and cracked from the heat. Narrow gravel trails diverged, seemingly at random, into the dense, impenetrable wo
ods.

  On the map, Peter followed the curves of the road with his finger. “Coming up on the right,” he said.

  Lewis turned onto a thin unnamed gravel road, barely wide enough for the car. Weeds between the wheel ruts thumped on the Yukon’s underbody. The road curved around rising hills covered by ancient unidentifiable trees strangled by kudzu vines grown wild.

  “We’re looking for a driveway on the left,” Peter said. “Five or six miles up.”

  “You got an address?”

  “More like directions. There’s probably not even a mailbox. Gantry said look for the cars.”

  “And listen for banjos.” Lewis shook his head. “Good thing we’re heavily armed.”

  * * *

  • • •

  They crested a low rise, and on the far side they saw an ancient round-fendered car cracked open like an egg by some prior cataclysm. The ragged-edged metal had turned to flaking rust, and a forty-foot box elder grew through the hole where the windshield had been.

  Past the car was a faint dirt track. On the far side of the track was a seventies-era luxury sedan that stood vertically on its front bumper, its undercarriage leaning only slightly against an enormous elm, like a toy left behind by a giant child. Someone had cut the kudzu back so the scene remained relatively untouched.

  “Oh, look,” said Lewis. “Cars.”

  “Maybe we should stop here,” Peter said. “Check out your inventory.”

  “I didn’t bring a bazooka,” Lewis said. “Mighta been a mistake.”

  They got out of the Yukon and walked around to the back.

  The heat was thick and stifling. Peter felt himself begin to sweat almost instantly.

  Lewis popped the rear cargo hatch, where a pair of leather duffels sat on a striped wool blanket. “Nothing to see here.” Then he slung the duffels over the seatback and threw the blanket after them, revealing the top of a low, carpeted compartment contoured to fit the space.

  The carpet matched the nap and color of the rest of the interior, and the contour was seamless. The compartment was less than five inches tall. Even without the striped blanket, most people would have to look at the carpet three or four times to realize it wasn’t the actual floor of the cargo area.