Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “I don’t have it,” you say to Jimmy Bones. “Them, whatever.”

  He laughs about this, then laughs some more, quieter. “Maybe I need to come out there, yeah? Get some storage, y’know. I have all kinds of…items I should probably be keeping in another county anyway…”

  “Jimmy,” you say. “Please.”

  “Nicky,” he says back, his upper lip probably curled into a sneer.

  Aarmadillo, you think, and say you have to go, a customer, your boss, the weather, a funeral, then hang up, pick the receiver up before it can ring again, balance it on top of the box.

  From the water station window, Sherilita waves once to you. You nod to her, pretend to study the phonebook then really do.

  There’s no Jim Martindale, no Martindale at all.

  But you’re not on the case anymore either, so it doesn’t matter.

  For twenty minutes, you do some real and actual work: dig up a new lock for the one your lawyer cut; close the inner and outer gates of Betsy Simm’s horse trailer, and fill out a standard 12-month contract for her; walk up and down the A and B units, slinging beer bottles up onto the roof, cupping cigarette butts in your hand, making sure all the locks are in place. They are. The silver ones are the ones the renters brought; the ones spray-painted green are the ones you’ve rented out over the last eight weeks, when the policy suddenly changed. If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have a television in the office now, or the bench seat in your living room.

  What you tell yourself about the television is that it needs to be kept limber, needs to be started every day. But, it’s not like you’re really stealing the stuff, right? More like borrowing. Because the rightful owners can have it back whenever they want—the knob on the office unlocks without a key if you just lift up and to the left, jerk it a bit, and the storage unit that’s your living room, it doesn’t even have a lock. In fact…you stop by it, studying it, don’t even know why you closed it. To make sure the smell from the bench seat will soak into the walls too? That sounds about right. You shake your head in disgust, lift the cap off the up-and-down steel pipe the lawnmower’s chained to and drain the cigarette butts down the concrete-splattered hole. In its other life, the ten-inch pipe was probably oilfield. As for length, it could be six feet long or sixty. Maybe Aardvark Custom Economy Storage was built around it. Maybe all of Stanton, even. The best hitching post around. It doesn’t shake when you hit it with the heel of your hand, anyway. And even though it’s tilted instead of standing straight up you’re pretty sure that’s not so much because a renter backed into it with a moving truck but because the ground half a mile down has shifted.

  You picture covered wagons and Comanche Indians standing around the pipe, waiting for a pebble to hit bottom, and waiting, and waiting. You only know because you’ve tried. Looking back on the last week, too, you know you should have used the film canister instead of a rock. You’d be free and clear of Harkness, of Fin, of Felson. Until the mole people came up to blackmail you.

  You settle the cap back on the pipe, try to blow the ash off your hands, then sling the garage door of your living room up with your head already turned against the smell, and that’s the only reason you see Sheriff Felson standing at the chain link gate. Down the cinderblock wall, she’s right in line with you. Has been watching.

  “Mr. Bruiseman,” she says, stepping forward. “Up early, I see. For you, anyway.”

  You nod, your eyes still narrowed from the smell, and look inside for a flash. Not so much to see the bench seat, wooden spool, and calendar, but to collect your thoughts.

  It doesn’t happen.

  Parked smackdab in the middle of your living room is Arnot King’s yellow Mustang.

  You back away, breathe in sharp, then do your best to cover: narrow your eyes at the number by the door, pretend to laugh at yourself—not this one—and pull the door back down fast, run the post home and twist it as best you can, trying to get the holes lined up for the padlock.

  Felson gets to you just as the Mustang disappears, and, instead of cueing on that bright yellow bumper housing, keys on the blue flare of your ear. Your cracked lip. “Missed a place,” she says, touching her own eye, to mean yours.

  You step to the next unit, a silver lock, and start cycling through all your green keys, your fingers shaking too much to settle on any one yet.

  “Come by for a storage unit, Sheriff?” you manage.

  She’s not looking at you like you want, but at the latch for your living room. She touches the post with the toe of her boot. “Not if this is all you use to close them up, I’m not.”

  “It’s empty,” you tell her.

  She pulls one side of her face into a slow smile, slides the post back about halfway. “In case you’re wondering, Mr. Bruiseman. If your attorney ever finds the vehicle he was driving, we’re going to have to write him up for no insurance.”

  “He said it was in the glove compartment,” you say, every rod and cone in your eyes fixed on the post she’s sliding with the toe of her boot. If she pulls it all the way out of the cinderblock, the springs on the door will jerk the door up about two feet.

  “I think he probably says a lot of things,” Felson says back, then does it, slides the post all the way out.

  You fall back, ready to run, to fly, to explode into the sky somehow, but the door just stays there.

  Sheriff Felson settles her eyes on you. “No, Mr. Bruiseman, unlike the rest of Stanton, I’m not in need of your services. Storage or…unlicensed. In fact, I don’t have any use for you at all, really. That’s kind of specifically why I’m here.”

  “To apologize?” you say, forcing a green key up into the silver lock, both your eyes fixed on the garage door of your living room, trying to keep it in place with the weight of your stare.

  Felson smiles with her whole face now, not so much in appreciation as in tolerance, in restraint. She adjusts her wirerim shades. “I can’t imagine you’d go anyway, Mr. Bruiseman. But with you I guess that means I should expect it.”

  “Go where?” you say, trying to get your key back out now.

  “The service,” she says. “Your presence is not requested.”

  You stand, look past her to the carwash.

  “This you talking?” you ask, “or Gwen?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s me saying it. Here. Now.”

  “But he was my friend,” you say, your voice lilting, mocking.

  “Go later then.”

  You tap your own left cheekbone to show how solid it is. “Not like it’s going to be open casket anyway, right?”

  It pulls Felson in close enough that you can taste the coffee on her breath.

  “And you wonder why you’re not wanted there,” she says. “I’ll be sure to pass your respects on to the widow. It’s not enough that she had to ID him from his wedding ring—or do you want to ask her about that too?”

  You push your lower lip up with your thumb.

  “So we have an understanding?” Felson says.

  You swallow and your ears fill with the rushed sound of saliva. You nod, say it out loud for her: “You don’t want me there, I won’t be there.”

  She angles her head over, watches you, then looks all around at the storage units, says it like a bad joke: “‘Custom.’”

  “‘Economy,’” you add.

  She pushes her shades deeper into her face. Passing the lawnmower, she hits the handle of her nightstick lightly. It swings the butt around her hip some, into the steel post, just enough of a tap that the garage door of your living room slings up all at once.

  She doesn’t look back.

  When you can breathe again, you lock the gate with the new lock, come back ten seconds later to make sure the key you think fits, fits. It does. One catastrophe avoided.

  Next, it’s Arnot King’s Mustang, the gift Fin’s left you.

  Like Rory, he knew you were going to need transportation, maybe. Or, probably, he just didn’t want to draw attention to himself—didn’t want Arnot King
found until he woke up on his own, walked out onto 137.

  The first thing about the car is that there’s no front plates. This is bad news in Texas, especially if you’re driving a sports car. And if you’ve got dark skin, like Arnot King? Not that anybody’d be able to tell: the windows have limousine tint, are impenetrable, a solid two shades past illegal.

  “Might as well paint her red,” you say, running your hand over the hood, to the windshield.

  Which isn’t to say you don’t like it.

  At least now you have something to pay him with, if you need his services again. Because Felson was right: there’s not going to be any insurance card in the glove compartment. A bag of something illegal, maybe, or a flask, a snub-nosed pistol, but no insurance.

  You look anyway.

  A scattering of business cards. New ones, apparently. No more “Snake Charmer” for Arnot King. Now, bigger and bolder, dead center, he’s your “Allegator.”

  You slide one of the cards into your pocket, set the keys in the ignition swinging, and walk around back.

  Dealer plates. This is what Felson meant by “the vehicle he was driving.” She already ran whatever info he gave her, matched it to a VIN, and, from there, to a used car lot. The roundabout way of getting the Carlotta’s stamped at the top of the plate. Which, obviously, Arnot King could have just told them if he wanted.

  At the phonebook again, you look Carlotta’s up. It’s down on Florida Street, in Midland. Where you got shot, practically. One of those places always folding, rising again with a different name, repainted inventory, doctored titles.

  You drop a quarter, dial the number, and a girl answers on the first ring.

  “Um,” you say, studying the dial pad of the phone for something to say, “just interested in a car. What do you have?”

  “On the lot, you mean, or in back?”

  You nod to yourself: this is Arnot King’s kind of place, all right.

  “Like the one I took over to Stanton, yeah?” you try.

  Impersonating a scam lawyer’s got to be less of a crime than impersonating a homicide detective, you tell yourself. You’re getting better.

  Now just to get a handle on the whole private-investigating without a ticket thing.

  “Oh, Mr. King,” the girl says, and she tells you to hold on, calls out over the phone, loud in your ear, “Mr. Jimmy?”

  In what you know is the swamp-cooled office she’s in, you see Jimmy Bones looking over to her from a filing cabinet, his eyes as black as his skin.

  He doesn’t even answer properly, just chuckles long and deep. Leans back far enough in his chair that you think you can hear the springs creak.

  “Um, Mr. King?” the girl comes back, “he’s—”

  You hang up, cover your hand with your mouth.

  Last night, because of Thomas swooping in, saving you from yourself, you’d decided to gamble, decided not to break into Fin’s AirStream, grub around for the film canister.

  Now things are different.

  One way or another, Jimmy Bones is coming to see you. It might be best to have what he wants when he gets here.

  11.

  BECAUSE EVERY COP in Stanton—all three of them, you suppose—is going to be at Rory’s funeral, and everybody else too, you ease the Mustang out of your living room, gun the engine, feel the power coursing up through the shifter, straight into the seat of your jaw.

  You would just walk down to the body shop—were going to, even, had already locked the gate—but then you realized that in this copless window the funeral was providing, you could do two things at once: get the film and ditch the car. Because the body shop’s where Felson expects the Mustang to be, maybe she won’t question it suddenly just being there now.

  Stupider things have happened. You’ve got pictures to prove it. Court documents. Scars.

  It takes all of twenty-two seconds to make it down 137, ease over the tracks. Like you’d hoped, the body shop’s empty. Open, but closed—Manuel and his helper each a quarter mile directly to the east, watching Rory get buried.

  You downshift, coast deep into the shop, where Gwen’s Town Car had been parked, and leave the keys in the ignition, take the necessary thirty seconds to wipe the steering wheel, the dash, the console, the door, the hood and windshield—everywhere you might have touched—because your prints aren’t just on file, but are probably already out on some desk.

  On the way out through the back door, you see the tow truck Manuel uses. It’s not the one Jim Martindale picked you up in.

  You’re not here to figure everything out, though. Just to save yourself.

  Don’t even cut the tape sealing the door of Fin’s AirStream shut, just pull the door open (rag on the handle, not your hand), let the tape flutter.

  Inside, it’s a cave, and you know without wanting to that after eight years in a cell, this is the only kind of place Fin can be comfortable in anymore. That he’s recreating his prison, bringing it with him.

  But maybe that’s why you’re at the storage units yourself, too: A-block, B-block. Doing time for all your mistakes. Coming back to a place where you know nobody’s going to like you, where they can remind you every day of what a bad person you are. Make sure you’re back in your cell by lights out.

  Where your one attempt at decoration is a calendar, though, the walls of Fin’s trailer are papered in intricate tattoo designs. A gallery, almost.

  You slip the pillowcase from his pillow, use it as a glove, and start opening every cabinet, every cubby, every rusted Folgers can.

  Ten minutes later you give up, sit back against the edge of the stove, know the funeral’s got to be winding down. You try to see the trailer from a different place, with different eyes. Better eyes.

  Cans, yes. People hide stuff in cans.

  You attack the cabinets with a new resolve, shaking all the peas, all the Wolf Brand Chili, praying hard for a jar of sugar like Jim Rockford used, and find instead, in the topmost cabinet, a little sawed-off, double-barrel twelve guage. The twelve guage? You shake your head no, back away from it, know better than to touch it. Start trying to talk yourself into believing you never saw it in the first place, just go through the motions of still looking for the film in cabinets, on shelves, then, finally, the economy refrigerator. There’s only beer in it. You take one, slam it down, wipe the bottle clean. Stare at the door hiding the shotgun. Tell yourself that it justifies what you’re doing. If he’s stupid enough to leave the murder weapon in plain sight, he deserves what he gets.

  But, if he’s stupid enough to do that, the film has to be somewhere obvious too, right? What’s he going to have done, hid it in a statue or something? The town cannon? This is Stanton, not the Hardy Boys. A post office box, you think. But that’s hopeless, a federal crime, one more sick irony—breaking into a federal building to dispose of evidence that can put you in jail, you get caught, have to go to jail anyway.

  It’s not funny.

  This was supposed to be easy.

  You slam the side of your fist into one of the drawings and the sound surrounds you. You sit down again, breathing hard, not ready for the walk back to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage now. Not ready for anything. And then, right there before you, practically with a spotlight on it, is Fin’s album, a three ring notebook. You open it like an ancient and fragile text, look to the door, come back to all the Polaroids of new tattoos, the flesh still risen, glossy black.

  You refocus, remember what he told you: that you should have seen his tattoo when it was new.

  It takes five minutes, but you think you find it towards the back of the album: a concentric pattern of some kind—Polynesian, you guess—not just time-intensive, but meth-intensive.

  You pull the Polaroid out. Behind it is another.

  This one is Gwen. Her bedroom, it looks like.

  You swallow, pull it from its plastic sleeve.

  This proves the affair, anyway—what he wanted you to find? Except, he could have told Felson about this.

 
From the angle of the shot, you can tell that Gwen’s probably naked, but all that’s in the white frame is her lower back, up close, the intricate jewel and finials inked just above her beltline, and, just past it, her face looking back into the camera.

  You study it for too long, even tilt the Polaroid like you’ll be able to see into the bedroom that day, that afternoon. And at that angle, you see that you’re holding two Polaroids.

  You settle into Fin’s bed-couch, because this is going to be the good stuff.

  But then the shot isn’t Gwen at all. From the background, you can tell that it’s the same bedroom, the same afternoon probably, but Gwen’s gone. In the bathroom, maybe, standing on her toes, using two mirrors to see her lower back. Fin alone on the bed for a minute or two, the camera still in his hand.

  What he finds is a piece of paper, a form.

  It’s life insurance. On the top line, the only one even half in focus, is the insurance company’s name—a logo you know, you think—and Roderick Gates typed in, and then the date, mid-June. It’s hardly a month ago.

  You look away from it, to Gwen’s back again, and the whole caper locks into place around her tattoo, like it had to have that afternoon for Fin. Lure the lovesick ex-con to town, tell him he’s the only one, then, after your real lover’s killed your husband, use your old friend the ex-cop to set the ex-con up, because it’ll look too obvious if you do it yourself. The only thing that almost messes it up—that winds up making it all look more real—is that the ex-cop, because he’s working for the husband, lights out for Big Springs instead of discovering the husband’s body, and so becomes a suspect himself for a while.

  The thing is, it all hinges on one thing: you going out to Rory Gates’s mom’s old house by the dump. And not ever figuring out that you were supposed to.

  From Fin’s bed-couch, you look to the east, like you can see Gwen in black at Rory’s graveside, a check probably already in the mail to her. Or to her and whichever of Rory’s old running buddies are there too, being careful to keep his distance from the grieving widow.

  One of his names is Martindale, you know. And that he made it up on the spot, like a joke: Martindale, Martinierg, Martinville. He was telling you it was fake, practically, showing you that he’d just read it off the Martin County limits sign down 137, in his rearview.