A Living Grave

by Robert E. Dunn

  I realized slowly that I was looking for the dust of another place and waiting for the burning sense of loss that went with it. I was waiting to bleed and expecting the clatter of AK-47s.

  “You should come back in,” Uncle Orson said from behind me. I hadn’t heard him come up. “He’s not looking too good.”

  Nelson.

  I led Orson back into the shop. Nelson was doing his best to look wide awake and strong, but he was failing miserably. He had gone pale. Sweat had beaded on his brow and over the crown of his head, making the pale skin look like a fish’s underbelly.

  “I’m sorry,” Nelson said. “I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass.”

  Before I could say anything Uncle Orson moved around me and put a huge hand on Nelson’s shoulder and told him, “None of that crap. What do you need?”

  “I’m sorry,” Nelson said again. “I think I just need to get home and rest.”

  He appeared to be as weak as a kitten with polio and he wouldn’t look at me.

  Shame.

  Nelson didn’t want me to see this. He didn’t want to be like this in front of me. I understood the feeling; at least part of me did. Another part wanted to shout at him for being foolish. None of that changed the fact that I didn’t know how to deal with the situation. I was afraid he would have to be carried to the truck. If nothing else, he would need help getting in and what then? How would I get him from the truck into his house? I had already realized that I would carry him if I had to. It didn’t bother me—in fact, I wanted to help him—but I wanted to do it without making him feel like less of a man.

  Again, Orson came to the rescue.

  He asked, “Would you stay here with me? I was wanting to see if you’d go fishing with me in the morning. We’d need to get up pretty early.”

  Just like that, I knew that Nelson had been adopted. Nelson himself was looking pretty skeptical. I could tell he was ready to put up a fight when the case was helped by my phone ringing. It was Billy. There was another problem at Moonshines.

  It was quickly decided that Nelson would stay with Uncle Orson. I would retrieve anything he needed from home once things were settled at the restaurant. That way the guys could be guys and Nelson wouldn’t have to let me see him at his worst.

  * * *

  Johnny Middleton had returned to Moonshines and had gotten into a fight with a biker wearing an Ozarks Nightriders cut. It had started in the bar and moved as Middleton had retreated out onto the patio. Billy had come off the bandstand when things got too noisy but Middleton refused to make an issue of it, even to the point of allowing the biker to remain at the restaurant. That was when things got weird. Witnesses said, a little later, Middleton and another biker were in the parking lot when someone fired a shot. They said that it was the biker that pushed Middleton out of the way.

  This time I was on duty. I changed out of the skirt and into pants and jacket in the houseboat. Once at the restaurant, I put on and adjusted my kit: cuffs, telescoping baton, tac light, pepper spray, and my service weapon. When I got inside, Billy was on break, drinking a soda at the bar with a couple of young women telling him how talented he was. He had about the biggest grin I’d ever seen.

  “Pardon us, ladies,” I said, taking the troubadour by the arm. “Sheriff’s department business.” I walked him out to the patio railing over the water. Standing right in front of him, I saw what was different. He had gotten a haircut. It wasn’t the usual, cheap hack job, either.

  “Really, Hurricane?” he said. “You show up now?” There was something in his tone too. Probably it was showing up then because it was the first time we were alone. Why it was showing up at all was eluding me.

  “Hey, you called me,” I told him.

  “Yeah. Things have settled down a bit, though. City cops were the first to respond for all the good it did. No one can find Middleton or the biker. Since it involved one of the Nightriders, the sheriff said to let you know when I called it in.” He wasn’t looking at me. I followed his gaze and caught sight of one of the girls who had been with him. She was smiling and waving at him like bait happy to be on the hook. The attitude made more sense. He was mad because I had pulled him away from the skank buffet.

  “Catch you at a bad time?” I asked.

  He looked at me then. It was an odd look. It made me feel like I had forgotten a promise and Billy was waiting for me to say something about it. Then he let it drop and said, “A couple of songs and I get more attention than I ever got for being a cop.”

  “Is that the kind of attention you want?”

  “Do you want to know about the bikers or not?” He shot his question right back at me as if I had stuck my finger in a wound.

  I could have asked him what the problem was. Instead I asked, “Bikers? More than one?”

  He nodded. A little bit of the light went out of his eyes. “The one that argued with Johnny Middleton, the mean one; he acts like a boss and he smells like a run-out horse. After they fought, another guy came in. He was wearing the same colors and the boss guy gave him a hard time. He was the one who was outside with Middleton.”

  “Did you get a good look at them?” I asked.

  He nodded and I pulled out the printed sheets I’d collected on the Nightriders membership. He identified Cotton Lambert as the second biker. He couldn’t ID the greasy “boss” guy. I didn’t have a picture of him, but there was no doubt in my mind it was Leech.

  “There’s something else, though,” he said. “I’ve been hearing talk about someone dealing meth here.”

  “Here? As in within this establishment?”

  “That’s what I’ve been hearing,” he said. “And that does seem to fit the biker lifestyle.”

  Billy looked eager to get back to the musician’s life so I let him go. That seemed to annoy him even further. I didn’t have time to worry about what was going on with him.

  Johnny Middleton needed to answer some questions, but he was still missing. I stuck around and pressed the staff for a while, but Middleton never showed and no one admitted to knowing where he was. A few of them did say they had seen the bikers around but didn’t want to talk about it. They acted vaguely scared, although if it was of their boss or his friends I couldn’t sort out.

  After half an hour I left, making a pass through the parking lot to look for white sedans before getting onto the road.

  * * *

  Nelson’s cabin was dark when I got there. So dark it was almost a negative, like a house-shaped black hole on a cliff. The headlights of my truck swept over the garage doors and surrounding trees showing nothing as I pulled in to park. Once outside the truck, though, I had the feeling that something was wrong. Some people claim to feel danger like a sixth sense. I don’t: With me, it’s more of a mental registering in the lizard brain that the monkey brain missed something.

  It was there at the corner of the house, a slight glint of chrome. Then the cherry of a cigarette glowed with an inhalation. As I reached for my weapon I caught a smell on the breeze. It was old sweat and beer, an unwashed animal smell that managed to mix threat and testosterone.

  I responded with both fight and flight, stepping away from the scent coming from behind me and turning to raise my weapon at the same time. The blow that was aimed at the center of my skull whipped through my hair, grazing the back of my head. It was a graze like a freight train sideswiping a car. Stars exploded behind my eyes. By the time I had gotten turned, bringing my automatic up, the blunt object had reached the limit of its swing and returned. The strike on my weapon jolted up my hand and arm like a hot spark of Tesla’s best. I dropped the automatic, but had the sense to get my arms up as soon as it fell from my fingers.

  Another blow hit my left forearm close to the elbow and went off to my side. That gave me a moment. I brought my left arm around and down, following the club and trapping the attacking arm under it. At the same time I pulled and extended my baton. As I raised it, I put my left foot forward between the assailant’s legs, forcing his le
ft knee into the open. I brought the baton down as hard as I could on the outside of the exposed knee.

  “Motherfu—” He couldn’t even finish the expletive as he rolled to the asphalt in pain.

  I would have had him. I did have him, until the other man—the smoker hiding by the bikes—hit me with a body block in the ribs. That hurt, but it was the impact of my temple with the rocker panel of my truck that put me down. At that point I’m not sure which of us was luckier that the bikers ran for the motorcycles and roared away. I was hurting but pissed off enough to put up a lot more fight.

  I knew who they were, though not enough for a jury. Smells and being sure are not as well accepted as a good look at a face. But I knew well enough for me. They just had to be tracked down.

  And I will track them down.

  * * *

  The smart thing would have been to get up and call in. I stayed down and didn’t call anyone. It had already been a wild night. The last thing I wanted was to fill out a report and department protocol would have required me to be checked over at the hospital. My one concession to smart thinking was to secure my weapon.

  After lingering on the driveway, leaning against the tire of my truck for a while—I had no idea how long—I managed to get myself up and to the house. There was a broken pane of glass in a door that led into a back mudroom. In there was the circuit-breaker box standing open with the main breaker pulled. That was much more ominous than I had thought. It was an ambush.

  Why?

  I went to the garage and got a couple of boards that I wedged between the wall and the washing machine and across the base of the door. It would hold the mudroom door until the glass could be repaired.

  Upstairs I tried not to snoop as I grabbed a few bits of clothing and shoved meds into a shopping bag.

  There are so many.

  In the bathroom, I took Nelson’s razor and toothbrush but only after I looked at myself in the mirror. I was a mess—in more ways than showed in my reflection. The bruises were starting to show up, burning in from angry red to purple and green. The worst was just below the left elbow where I had been hit by the pipe or whatever it had been. That could be hidden, though. The one turning into a shiner around my right eye may as well have been a neon sign. It hurt too, right up on my temple and around the orbital bone where I had gotten to know my truck, face-first. If it was a contest, the blue ribbon for pain would go to the knot throbbing higher by the minute on the back of my skull.

  I chewed up a handful of aspirin and washed them down with water from my cupped hand at the bathroom sink. Then I looked at myself again. That time I didn’t see the bruises or the rat’s nest of hair on my head. There were two women staring back at me from the mirror. One was the same angry woman who had to face a squad that refused to obey her orders while under fire. They believed that I had abused the system to harm the careers of the men I accused of rape. Individually, they were almost reasonable. Collectively, they believed a woman in the military was a dyke or a whore and either way deserved anything that happened to her. That woman had chambered a round in her .9-millimeter automatic and aimed it into the eye of the loudest-talking noncom. She was very, very angry. The other woman in the mirror was the one who had not undressed for a man in more than ten years. She was so very afraid.

  Both women were there, but it was the scared woman who I felt was in the most danger. There was a lot to like about Nelson Solomon and a lot of risk.

  “Don’t be a pussy,” I told the reflection. Then I went downstairs.

  On a whim I stopped by the easel and painting supplies in the main room. There was a smaller version of the painting kit that had been impounded along with Solomon’s truck. I took it with me.

  It might make him feel better.

  Chapter 10

  Uncle Orson was waiting for me when I got back to the dock. It made me feel a bit like a kid sneaking home after curfew. At least it did until he offered me a beer. Dad had never offered me a beer when I came home late.

  I took the bottle and sat beside him at the table. “What do you want to talk about?” I asked as I twisted the cap off.

  “Who says I want to talk?”

  I gave him a who’re-you-kidding look that he ignored, instead taking a long drink. After a long drink of my own I settled into the chair and allowed the day to fall away.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Uncle Orson asked.

  “Nope,” I answered.

  “Just checking.”

  I nodded and we both took drinks.

  “He seems like a good guy.”

  “I think so,” I agreed.

  “Just be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  Uncle Orson looked from me to his beer. He pursed his lips a little and took a stab at peeling the label. When the paper wouldn’t come up he looked back at me and said, “Everything.”

  “Yeah,” was all I had in me to say. There were some questions rattling around my brain as well that I wasn’t sure how to approach. When Uncle Orson tilted up his bottle and sucked it dry it made me wonder if this was the best time. When he grabbed another one I wondered how long I might have to wait for a better time. “I want to ask you a question,” I told him as soon as the bottle left his lips.

  “Ask away,” he said.

  I didn’t. I still had to think about it and wonder if it was wise to question such things. While I was thinking, Uncle Orson was drinking with one eye on me. Once his bottle was half empty he set it down, then slid it aside. He reached across the table and took my bottle from my hands and slid it to the side as well. There was nothing between us then. It was his way of saying I had his full attention.

  I still didn’t say anything.

  Uncle Orson nodded knowingly, then said, “Okay, maybe I understand. You see, when a man likes a woman in a special way he wants to do things with her—”

  “Uncle Orson.” I couldn’t help myself. I laughed and pulled my beer over and took a drink. Then I said, “It’s nothing about that.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he said, pulling over his own beer. “Because that was a bluff. I had no follow-up. You know I beat the ladies off with a stick, but I try not to talk to them.”

  “I know. It shows.”

  He was grinning as he brought the beer to his lips. After a big drink he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned again. “So, spit it out,” he said.

  That time I did. I asked him, “Did you arrange to have a man killed?”

  His grin faded and his eyes focused like two cameras on my face. It wasn’t a hard look, just attentive. The surprising thing was that he didn’t look surprised.

  “One of the men that I had—the problem with—in Iraq.”

  “He’s dead?”

  I nodded and looked at my beer.

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard about it a long time ago. I had been kind of keeping tabs on him. The other one left the Army and I don’t know anything about him.”

  “That’s all?”

  I told him about Reach and how he had popped up and accused me of killing Rice. I told him about the night Reach had followed me. It told him everything I knew while staring at a beer bottle.

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “You’re the only one I know that could . . .”

  He kind of laughed. It was a little tired-sounding snort. “But I probably couldn’t, you know. I’ve been a killer and I’ll stand up and fight anyone that needs it. What you’re asking about is something else.” His beer found its way to his mouth and he swallowed the last of it in a gulp. When the bottle was finished Uncle Orson looked back at me and said, “Your father’s the bad one in this family.”

  “What?”

  “He’s the one you should be asking, but I wouldn’t, because you probably won’t like the answer and some questions are best left unasked.”

  “But—he couldn’t.”

  Uncle Orson looked over at the cooler and seemed to consider another beer. I could see
him wanting it, then I could see him corralling the need. “You’re probably right,” he said and the pronouncement sounded half sad and half prideful. “When we were younger men . . . Well, there was a time I would have put nothing past him. Now, we’re the old guys. Hell, I run a bait shop.” He gestured around like I might have somehow missed the fact we were in a bait shop. “And your dad . . .”

  “He’s a consultant.”

  Uncle Orson smiled carefully and nodded, touching a finger to his nose. Then he stood and went upstairs to bed without another word.

  I sat there for a few minutes longer while I finished my beer. The more I thought about it the sillier it seemed. My father was the spit-and-polish soldier who loved parades and visited the wall in D.C. The talk had lifted a weight from my heart, though. I believed Uncle Orson when he said that he hadn’t had anything to do with killing Rice. Daddy obviously knew something, but I believed that he didn’t know the whole story. Even if he was the kind of man who could make a killing happen in another country, he didn’t know about Rice until recently.

  I need to go to bed.

  For a second there I thought about—wished that—Nelson was in my bed waiting. But the houseboat was empty. Uncle Orson had put Nelson up in the apartment, probably making sure that I didn’t disturb him. Or making sure that my night was as frustrating as possible.