“George Beck called me and said my sister Penny was in trouble.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“How come you didn’t call me? Or write?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t my place to do that, George said he was taking care of it. It only came about the other day.”
Carl shook his head. “Don’t do that again,” he said. “If my sister comes to you for something, let me know right away.”
“Okay,” I said. “From now on I will.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I didn’t even know you had a sister.”
“No offense taken,” he said. “Now I’m going down to Lewiston to visit her and see if I can straighten this out.”
“Okay.”
“I should be back in a couple days and we’ll work out some sort of arrangement when I get back.”
“The garage is fine for me,” I said. “As long as I can cut my rent in half.”
“Go ahead,” Carl said. “While I’m here sleeping in the house, just pay half. That should give you about a month at half rent.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll pay it now, cash.” I pulled a roll of bills out of my front pocket and counted two hundred fifty dollars in front of him and handed it to him.
“See you in a couple days.”
As soon as he was gone down the road, I went out to patch my tires. It was no use. They’d never hold air again. Someone had taken a jagged blade and ripped each tire completely around the sidewall. Whoever it was had to have been a very big, strong man.
~ * ~
The next day the phone rang and I let the machine answer and it was Carl from Lewiston.
“Pick up,” he said. “It’s Carl.”
I picked up the phone and he went on. “Is my sister there?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you fuck her?” he said.
“No,” I said. It sounded wrong.
“George Beck says you did. We’ll talk about that when I get back. Go check the mail for me.”
Sure enough, there was a letter from Penny. The postmark showed Portland, Oregon, and I told him that. He asked me to read it to him over the phone. And I did. It was a story about Tim Shipman, but completely different than the one she had told me. She’d been telling everyone that Tim Shipman might have murdered someone. She was doing that, she said in the letter, because George Beck had given her that watch and she knew damn well what was going on. George Beck was killing people in some rival gang, George Beck was moving speed. George Beck killed some old man Cooley in the woods near the Columbia River. George Beck had better pay her for keeping his name out of it, but if the cops caught Ships, he’d spill the whole thing. Ships knew about the watch and George Beck and Elmer Cooley.
“That’s it?” Carl asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ll be back in a while,” he said. “Sit tight.” He hung up.
~ * ~
An hour later, George Beck showed up. Two other guys pulled in, too. My truck just sat there, completely useless to me on flat tires. Mac, one of the gas customers, also pulled in with his rig. He eyed George Beck.
‘Just come back tomorrow.” I said. “I’ll take care of you then, if you can wait.”
He lowered his voice. “Never certain if tomorrow’s going to show, with people like that around,” he said. “You take care and I’ll see you when you don’t have company.” He pulled back onto the toad.
“Why don’t you close up now?” George Beck said. “You’re going with us.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Carl didn’t say anything about this.”
“You can go with us,” he said, “or never go anywhere again.”
“Fine,” I said.
~ * ~
We drove to a truck stop in Montana, seven miles over the Idaho border. George Beck and his two buddies sat in a booth drinking coffee and ordered food and Carl showed up and we sat there eating.
George waved to a trucker at the counter. “That’s Speedy,” he said. “You ride in his rig and we’ll be behind you.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We’re going to talk to Tim Shipman and straighten this out. He’s hiding in a motel over here, but we found him.”
“What’s Speedy got to do with it?”
George Beck got bigger in the booth. “I don’t know, you see, because I’m dumb,” he said. “People expect me to do dumb things. For instance, you fucked Penny and I’m so dumb I just found out about it, just now, this instant. So we can all drag you out in the parking lot and in the middle of things, a gun goes off and dumb local boy George Beck shot the man who was fucking his woman behind his back and the jury comes in, local folks, and they see me, and they know what I’m about and who I’m friends with, and I go do two years. You think two years is going to bother me? I’ll come out of prison with more friends than I’ve got now.” He pulled his coat back a little to show me a shoulder holster with a stainless steel pistol. “It makes little holes going in, big holes coming out, and all I asked you to do was ride with Speedy.”
I was trapped. We got up and I walked outside with the trucker who was hauling logs. I got in the passenger’s side of the sleeper King Cab. It was an older rig. Speedy cranked it through the gears and we headed out of the parking lot.
“That George, he’s a son-of-a-bitch, ain’t he?” Speedy said.
I didn’t say anything.
We curved through the mountain roads and in the side mirror I could see Beck and Carl and the others behind us. Speedy pulled over at a small cabin-unit motel. The big engine kept rolling as he put the brakes on.
“Lucky number seven,” Speedy said. “Give Shipman a good talking-to.”
I got out of the rig. George Beck and Carl Larson were sitting on the road in their trucks. I decided to try one last attempt at getting the hell out.
“I don’t even have a gun,” I said.
Speedy shrugged. “There’s a pistol under the seat, take it if you need it,” he said.
I reached under the seat and came out with a nine-millimeter and snapped the trigger twice at Speedy before the weight of the gun told my hand it wasn’t loaded. He blinked hard, then relaxed. He smiled. It was the gun Beck had tried to hand me that night at Carl’s house. I had screwed myself even tighter.
I got down out of the rig and I knew the security cameras were catching me doing it, walking with a pistol into room number seven. The door was open — I pushed it with my foot — and saw Shipman on the bed, the side of his head gone from gunshot wounds. He’d been shot less than an hour earlier. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, trying to draw them into the room, or within camera range. Don’t throw up, I told myself, you always throw up. But nobody came, and eventually I just walked out. Speedy was gone. George Beck and Carl Larson had pulled down the road a ways. I walked and got in the back of Carl’s truck and we rode all the way to Potlatch. This time I kept the gun.
~ * ~
After that George moved in with Penny and they were considered married by everybody. Shipman’s body was found in a Dumpster ten miles from the motel, but the paper said the cops knew the body had been moved. Then I heard George Beck was being held in Boise on a federal warrant and was also wanted by the Mounties in Lethbridge on a gun charge and possible murder of a witness in a homicide case in Washington State. This just made me anxious. Penny had the baby, a girl, late the following spring. Soon there was another man living there with her, and I tried not to think about it.
Carl went back to Alaska and nobody really came to the shop after that, except the gas customers. I was in Moscow picking up a case of oil one day and saw Mac, the old logger, in the parking lot. He was talking to some men. He nodded at me.
“I could use some work,” I said. “Maybe you could get me a job as a fire spotter. With the park service or private. Like you talked about that one time, that private association of landowners in Montana.”
“No,” he answered. “No
thanks. The woods are all full. It’ll burn with or without you. You should ask George Beck for work, he probably needs somebody to clean his cell or something.”
~ * ~
I came back to the garage and Dan must have seen me pull in, because he came out of his trailer and over to the garage.
“Some men stopped by here looking for you. Knocked on my door. Frightened Rose.” He handed me a business card. It was from an attorney in Spokane.
“What’s this?”
“What is it?” he said. “It’s fucking yours, that’s what it is, but it ended up on my doorstep, how is that?” He didn’t raise his voice, but he was clear. “Just because I don’t believe in heaven and angels doesn’t mean I don’t believe in hell and demons. You need to get that shit straight in your head. Realize what you’re involved in. Separate the concepts.” He pointed at his trailer. “I’ve got a purpose here on Earth, which is to provide for and protect Rose. You seem to be about to sign on as a short-order man in the devil’s butcher shop. You’re on a bad path, with bad men. Those two things put us at odds. There might be a time when someone with a badge comes around asking questions about you and George Beck and Carl.”
“And you’d rat?”
He shook his head. “Never. It’s not the law that concerns me, not a single bit. I want to make sure you and I have an understanding. The law doesn’t stop a thing. Consequences only come after and after is too late, far as I’m concerned.” He pointed at the pen behind his house. “My brother’s bringing me up a good dog from his farm and everything in my place is loaded with the safety off. Whoever buys the ticket will get an express trip if I can help it and I’m here to tell you, although she was a lot of trouble different times, I love my Rose and I love my job of protecting her. Knock on my door and I’ll let Remington answer it. Both barrels.”
“I understand,” I said.
“See that you do,” Dan said. “Or there will be pieces of you they’ll never find.” He started to walk back to his trailer. “We’re not all hicks and cousin-fuckers up here,” he said over his shoulder. “Do your business somewhere else. You mistook kind for simple,” he finished. He shut the trailer door.
~ * ~
I called the Spokane lawyer from a pay phone and once I got past the secretary the first thing he asked me was did I still have that gun. Sure, I said, and it’s keeping me alive. Because that’s the gun that killed Elmer Cooley. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, he said, and if I wanted to rely on that, put my whole life on the line for one ballistics test, then I could go right ahead. And I knew he was right, although I hoped otherwise.
The Feds were leaning on George Beck hard and he was going to inform on me, said the lawyer. His buddy at the motel had a videotape of me walking into Tim Shipman’s room with a pistol and coming out and a Polaroid shot of Shipman lying dead on the bed. My name was going to be tied to all this, unless I could get Beck’s lawyer some good information on the remaining members of the Cooley family who still lived in the Panhandle. The Cooleys ranked high on the Feds’ most wanted list and usable information about them would loosen pressure on George Beck, would reduce his charges.
What Beck and his lawyer didn’t know was that if the Feds got hold of my prints, my days as Ed Snider were over.
~ * ~
I wasn’t going to take the rap Beck was ready to hand me. I’d get the information and be gone. I hid George Beck’s nine-millimeter up underneath the dashboard of my truck, held by electrical tape to the fire wall. The truck stayed locked. That gun was the only thing that connected Beck to the murder of Elmer Cooley and I kept it for no reason other than desperation. I drove north into the Panhandle, past Priest Lake and further, headed to the Cooleys’ house to do the best rat work I could.
~ * ~
I liked the Cooleys right off, which was tough on my brain. Over those first two winter months, I tried to adjust. It was them or me. They bought my cover without a question, just a guy up to log some adjacent land. No big deal. Pop Cooley and I ate dinner together a couple of times. One working man talking to another in the mountains. Talking about making a living in a place where that was real tough work. I liked him and I liked the kid. After sixty days, I had them on a talking basis.
~ * ~
The kid sat in a green plastic lawn chair in the snow behind my three-room cabin. Light was just corning. The kid propped his feet on an empty propane cylinder. He wore a dark bluejacket against the cold. Under his watch cap he had a home haircut. He was whittling a stick with the new pocketknife his father gave him for Christmas. I knew he was whittling weird little smiley faces, even though I couldn’t see that far. I found the sticks everywhere; the kid did it to every piece of wood he came across. Small, crooked smiley faces and the word Peeler, his nickname. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. As soon as he heard me awake, banging and emptying ash from under the woodstove, he was at the back kitchen door. He was skinny, but tall with a man-size head.
“Well if it isn’t Kid Cooley,” I said, “bantamweight champion of the Pacific Northwest. How do you feel before the big fight, Kid, say something for the fans? Are you still single, the girls have been asking.”
The kid half-smiled and then got serious. “No power, right, you got no power, no juice?”
I snapped the light switch back and forth. The kitchen ceiling light stayed off. “No juice,” I said. I had rented the cabin from the Cooleys for two months now and the power was always steady, which is rare in the mountains and deep woods. It tends to flicker. A single light came from the Cooleys’ house, further above me on the hill. “You got lights, though.”
‘Jap generator,” the kid said. “Pop put it in a year ago, hard-wired it from out in back, so they couldn’t cut power on us.”
I sat on a folding chair at the card table in the kitchen. “How am I going to have coffee, Kid?”
The kid pointed at the rusted set of blue, white, and black camp pots hung behind the stove on what used to be the fireplace. “Pop says you got to give us a ride today. Pop says we’re the soldiers and he’s the general.”
His father was standing right outside the kitchen door and raised his voice from there. “I did not say that, I most certainly did not, nobody has to give us a ride anywhere. I said catch him before he left for work if he was working today and see what he said. That’s what I said.” He cleared his throat as he came into the kitchen. “Seems we were vandalized in the night, somebody cut the tires on the Jeep and the power’s out.” The Cooleys used an old Jeep with its stick on the column to get around. The back fender was rusted except for a bumper sticker, marine sniper: you can run, but you’ll just die tired. Pop had been in the Corps, with Vietnam action under his belt. He mentioned it when I first moved in and saw the sticker. Pop’s father, Elmer Cooley, had been involved in the white gangs that live in the Pacific Northwest. Elmer had been murdered, he said, in the woods of Eastern Washington, near the Columbia River. Elmer was buried up the hill, in the family plot near the house. Elmer had lived in the cabin I was renting and I knew Pop kept alert.
“Did you hear anything in the night?” I asked. “Did the dog go after anything?”
“I had the dog inside with me because of those big bears coming around lately, too close to the house,” Pop said. “I didn’t want Cannon getting mauled.”
“Sure,” I said. “Where do you need to go today?”
“Spokane,” he said. “To the train station.”
“What’s going on there?” I asked.
“My younger brother’s coming home,” he said. “He just got done doing ten years of federal time. He maxed out.”
“That’s a long time,” I said.
“I don’t think they could give Jack enough time to beat him,” he said. “When he was a kid, eighteen really, he did five years here state time for some shit. Now he’s done ten more and he won’t be forty until August. You’ll see when we pick him up. Jack’s a stone house, inside and out. Always has been, always will be.”
“Hey, Snider,” the kid said. “Let me wear your bulletproof, since we’re going into the big city.”
He had tried on my vest before and loved it. “Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t want anybody to mess with you. Big city of Spokane, tough town.” I tightened it on him, made sure he was comfortable.
We climbed in my truck, heading south through the woods and mountains, under the eyes of hawks and eagles, two hours to Spokane.
~ * ~
The lines were down because I’d dropped a limb on them. The tires were flat because I’d cut them. I wondered if Pop, somewhere in his mind, didn’t suspect this. He wasn’t a stupid man, when it came to hunting and fishing and fields of fire and decoy interest. All manner of blinds, lures, and smoke to fool the enemy. He talked hunting to Peeler as we drove. If he suspected, he never let on. He needed to get to Spokane and I was the only man available for the job, I had made myself that way, cut myself to fit. Purposefully become a piece of the puzzle. Cold sweat ran down over my ribs and bled into my T-shirt all the way to the train station. Jack Cooley wasn’t a Girl Scout, He’d started out with the Hammerskins and moved up to the elite Eighty-eight Dragoons. Federal law enforcement blamed the Dragoons for a host of crimes, but most recently tied them to a shoot-out in Wyoming where five officers died raiding a meth lab and supposed Dragoon safe house. I knew any information I got out of Jack Cooley would be all George Beck needed to loosen his own state-held noose. George Beck had been in the woods of Eastern Washington the day Elmer Cooley died, and although they couldn’t prove he pulled the trigger, they were applying pressure. When it comes to law enforcement, they prosecute deaths of their own kind hardest. Everybody else is just a scumbag to them anyway, or was involved in stuff that they deserved to die for. We didn’t catch you at it, but you’ve got to be guilty of something, something you did before or something we don’t know about.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 43
