Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “What’s he in for?”

  “He tried to charge a fifth of vodka to somebody else’s account. Out at the liquor store. Made a scene, all that, then assaulted Lan—another officer.”

  “He only did that to be sure you’d keep him a few days. So he’d be, like, not on the radar. Above suspicion.”

  “It’s a serious offense.”

  “His first, right?”

  “Yes.”

  You lean back, shrug like it’s obvious. It’ll get busted down to, at most, resisting arrest. Maybe even just drunk and disorderly, depending on how much shame he can muster up for the judge.

  “And that’s when he told you about me, right?” you say. “In trade?”

  Again, yes.

  All so obvious. Look at Toby Garrett’s baby brother like you’re daring him not to see it. “So I can talk to him? Now that he’s not a witness against me?”

  “You his lawyer?”

  “He doesn’t have one?”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother follows the tilt of your head to Arnot King, inspecting the baby food now, moving his lips with the ingredients.

  “No, please.”

  “Pro bono,” you say. “We’ll be there—ten?”

  “I come on at eleven.”

  “Then it’s not your concern, is it?”

  “Nick—”

  “He did it, David. Not just to Rory, but to Gwen, to Dan—to me, and Fin.”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother looks out at his minivan.

  “So you’re saying Koenig and Gwen Gates, that they—?”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother laughs. “Maybe I’ll come in early, see the show.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She’s not his type.”

  “Her type is whoever she can use.”

  “But—you saw it, Mr. Bruiseman. I mean, Rory Gates. Put him and Darryl Koenig in a room, Koenig isn’t the one walking out.”

  “He had a shotgun. Maybe the element of surprise.”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother shakes his head. “Surprise? They both just happened to be in that old house?”

  Give him that. You’d forgotten the meeting had probably been arranged. But, still.

  “And, Rory,” Toby Garrett’s baby brother goes on, tilting his head over in appreciation, “I mean, he used to be a scrapper, yeah? You don’t get a piece of—a girl like Gwen Gates without busting a few heads.”

  “In high school.”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother leans back. “Felson told me she had to lock him up for it her first year, even. Rented tuxedo and all.”

  “She should have left him there,” you say. “Been safe from her. From Gwen.”

  “So you really and truly think it’s her?”

  You nod.

  “And all you have to support this is?”

  You shrug.

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother shakes his head in pity. “Felson’ll, well, you know.”

  He doesn’t quite manage to swallow his smile. Or cover it with his coffee.

  “What would you suggest?” you say. “As a duly sworn officer of the law?”

  “Corroborating evidence,” he says back. “You say Koenig was wearing a fake beard, right?”

  “We’ll never find that.”

  “What can’t he hide, though, right?”

  You study the tabletop between your fingers, finally get it. “The wrecker.”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother raises his eyebrows in appreciation.

  “But Ruby says—” you start. “Manuel, I mean.”

  “You should talk to Tom Howard,” Toby Garrett interrupts. “He’s at every auction, tracks every truck, implement, and piece of junk in Martin County, like, I don’t know. Like how scientists track all those nuts and bolts in orbit.”

  “Tom Howard,” you say, your eyes losing focus, blurring your hand. You look up to Toby Garrett’s baby brother. “That Ford I left out at the house that day. Where is it?”

  “It’s not still there?” he says back.

  You catch yourself. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother appreciates this.

  “You’re not going out there now, are you?” he says. “To Tom’s?”

  “Sherilita’s,” you correct.

  He doesn’t disagree. “You can probably catch him out at the Davidson place in the morning.”

  “Auction?”

  He drains his coffee. “It’s Friday now, isn’t it?”

  “Just barely, yeah.”

  “If Felson asks—” he says, standing.

  “—you were never here,” you finish, already looking away, north and west.

  The cowbell above the door jangles him out, Arnot King’s eyes flicking after him, his head nodding, mouth curling into a smile.

  “What now?” he says.

  “Ever been to a farm sale?” you say, peering up for his reaction.

  On the way out, you fold your half of Gwen’s insurance check down to the size of a business card, slide it into the beef jerky jar.

  20.

  BECAUSE HE’S ALREADY been let down by his dad, doesn’t need you to let him down too, you leave Thomas’s truck parked by the water station before stepping over to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage for a pocketful of beer.

  “I see you’re strapped,” Arnot King says about the longnecks angled out of your pants.

  “I’m going to get the Lincoln.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Want to get it yourself?” you say. “Drive it back without getting stopped?”

  He just stares at you, slides the keys across the coffee table to you. “You’re coming back, right?”

  “Like a boomerang.” You flip the keys around so they slap your palm. “Seven, right?”

  It’s when he’s supposed to bail Jimmy Bones out.

  Arnot King nods, leans back onto the couch, his eyes already closing.

  From the door, just before it closes, you say, “Got you another client, too. Ten o’clock.” You walk away smiling, knowing that Arnot King’s eyes are open again.

  Fifteen minutes later you push the Lincoln’s key into the hole in the door, straighten your back when a voice comes up behind you. “I could have had it towed. You think about that?”

  Your father. He’s sitting on the porch, his hand cupped around the end of his cigar, his legs coming through the wrought iron railing. You, plus thirty years.

  “I just—” you say, your eyes closed tight. “This case, I mean. I’m on a case now. We needed to park—”

  “I’ll have to put a meter up,” he says, then laughs at his own joke until it turns into a smoky fit of coughing.

  “Remember where the Davidson place is?” you say when he’s better.

  “Freddy or Nate?”

  “The one who farmed.”

  “Out by the Rankin place, as I recall.”

  “Up eight—?” You close your eyes for the road number, and he supplies it: 829. The faded two-lane that ghosts 137 for a few miles.

  You nod thanks, pull away before he can say anything else. Go faster than you need to with a beer in each of your pockets, your name not on anything in the glove compartment. Back at 137, by the Town & Country, you sit for too long. One way is Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. The other way, north and then west, under 20, is the Davidson place, nestled in that tangle of pastures and houses deep behind the John Deere House.

  “Boomerang,” you say out loud, like Arnot King should have known better, and duck under 20, close your eyes the whole way past the military surplus. Twenty lost minutes later you park in the tall weeds out by an old stripper basket at the Davidson place. From inside it, behind the steel mesh, a possum watches you. All you can see are her eyes catching the little light there is. The way you can tell she’s female, a mother. Moments after she looks towards you, eighteen smaller eyes glow open all along the ridge of her spine, each of them settling on you.

  You raise your beer to them, nod once, and, with th
e bottom of the bottle, lock the Lincoln’s door.

  You wake clutching the dash, the last half of your second beer splashing into the floorboard.

  It’s light out, bearded men in mesh caps milling all around, a man with a bullhorn wired to his hip calling out prices in a voice high and plaintive.

  On the windshield of the Lincoln, in yellow chalk, is the number 302. It’s a joke; the auction crew had to have been working off a list the bank gave them. While they might have to talk to each other to tell a 1978 4440 John Deere from one five years newer, by no stretch is a Town Car with faded dealer plates a farm vehicle.

  On the hood of the Lincoln near the headlights are styrofoam coffee cups.

  You stare at them until you’re pretty sure you’re awake, then stand into the farm sale, lean on the roof of the Lincoln to get your feet beneath you. Nobody looks back at you when you close the door, spilling three of the twenty styrofoam cups on the hood, and nobody looks when you surprise yourself with a phlegmy cough that goes on and on, but the moment you bring the heel of your hand up to rub your eye, one of the spotters sees you, raises his finger, and now you’re bidding, and everybody’s smiling back at you.

  “Number—” the spotter leads off, holding his spread fingers out to you, waiting for you to show him your yellow card, the one all the farmers have poking up from their chest pockets.

  You shake your head no, back away to the other side of the cotton trailer the stripper basket’s on then keep walking, pushing off from barrel to barrel, truck to truck.

  The auction moves on without you, down a row of shop-made trailers, and for a few steps you’re lost in the junk, are having to see it as Toby Garrett’s brother said it: space debris orbiting Stanton, random pieces giving in to the seduction of gravity, falling into town.

  “Not the model you were looking for?” a woman mostly behind you says, her voice curled into a smile.

  It’s Betsy Simms, still so beautiful without make-up that you have to look away. She’s sitting on a rusted toolbar, eating a breakfast burrito. Her mouth full, she points south. “Thanks for leaving the gate open.”

  You follow, see her horse trailer cocked behind her tall dually.

  “Yeah,” you say, still waking up, it seems.

  “What you’re looking for’s more blue and silver, right?” she says, tearing off another bite.

  The Ford.

  She knows its history with you somehow. With you and Gwen. “You should talk to Sherilita’s ex, Tom—”

  “—Howard,” you finish.

  She comes back to you impressed, and you look away, to the farmers easing from implement to implement now, nodding to themselves, making jokes too quiet for you to hear, too subtle for you to ever get. You have been gone too long.

  “It’s his?” you say, not understanding, really.

  “For about five minutes,” she says. “He bought it two weeks ago. In a lot of four, I think.”

  “How do you know?”

  She adjusts her flat-brimmed hat lower onto her forehead. “It used to be our hay truck.”

  “Your—?” you try, not sure at all what the question should be now.

  “My dad’s, I mean.” She squints when one of the auction crew fires up a front-end loader, black diesel smoke billowing up in a thick column.

  Her dad. You watch the smoke, finally catch up with what Betsy Simms is telling you: her mom’s stuff is in your storage unit, her mom was Mrs. Rankin, the math teacher, so then her dad had to be Mr. Rankin, the farmer. The spread next door, practically. The farm sale that happened two weeks ago.

  “Rory bought it from Tom,” you say. “For Dan.”

  All these first names. You do need a flip-notebook.

  “I’m sure Tom made money on it, though. Knowing him.”

  You don’t need her to explain how it works. You buy a lot of four junk trucks only if you think you can turn around, sell them for more one by one.

  “Not that Rory’s ever got cash on him,” she adds.

  You flash on the St. Nick check, have to agree.

  “What else was in that lot?” you ask.

  “You should talk to Tom,” Betsy Simms says.

  “Which one is he?” you say about the farmers bunched together at the front-end loader.

  Betsy Simms rubs the corner of her mouth with the ball joint of her thumb. It’s a man’s gesture, what you do when you’re used to wearing gloves, but it looks good on her. Perfect, even. She angles her head to see through the sea of caps and hats, then opens her mouth, closes it again. “It’s late July, isn’t it?” You nod.

  “Late July for him means Kansas. They always have a big sale up there about now. He usually makes a week out of it, I think. That beer up there’s three-two, right?” She laughs to herself. “Makes him feel like Superman.”

  You fake a silent laugh, like you know what she means. “No offense here, but you know his business pretty well, yeah?”

  She loses her smile, settles her eyes on you.

  “What are you saying, Mr. Bruiseman?”

  You shake your head no, nothing, understand in a flash why Sherilita recognized Betsy Simm’s truck and trailer so fast through the mini blinds of the water station: she was the reason for the divorce. Or one of the reasons—probably the last. Tom Howard, the ladies’ man.

  You wonder if Thomas knows and lose yourself for a moment thinking of Betsy Simms walking across a freshly-plowed field, towards a tractor, then come back to her as she is now, to ask her about the other three trucks in that lot Tom Howard bought. Whether her father had had an old wrecker, maybe. Whether a certain cropduster might have been looking under the hood that day.

  The way she’s looking at you shuts you up, though.

  “Thought you were supposed to be providing security in town?” she says. “That you were there all the time, keeping our stuff safe?”

  “I am,” you say. “I’m just—” but then, in the silence after the front-end loader’s sold, you hear a more familiar sound: the Lincoln, turning over.

  They’re selling it too.

  You look back to Betsy Simms and she just raises her eyebrows, takes another bite.

  Maybe one mile across the pasture and the field is the husk of her father’s farm. You try not to look at it too much when you ask her where she got that burrito.

  Halfway through the field, walking at right angles to go straight, because it’s easier to stay in a furrow for a few yards at a time, Nate Davidson’s large barn between you and the auction, a memory wells up in the back of your throat: hay.

  You’ve been across this field before, when it was just pasture land, a horse trap. You were eleven, maybe, on a cotton trailer mounded with bales of hay. It was a Halloween ride Sherilita’s dad had rigged up for the fifth graders.

  You track the narrow field west to where Sherilita’s house was—is—where her dad had been pulling you. It’s Tom Howard’s now. Not all the way, though. He doesn’t know about the hay ride, never had that part of Sherilita that turned her head to watch the tall tires of her dad’s tractor turning, turning, his hand on the fender so he could sit sideways in the seat, make sure no one fell off his cotton trailer, got left behind.

  It takes ten more minutes to touch the barn of the Rankin place, catalogue the leftovers of the auction two weeks ago: the cab of a model A, rusted so far into the ground that it would crumble if you tried to winch it out; tractor tires rotting on their sides; a cotton trailer that somebody bought, tried to pull away, but the front set of wheels stayed in place, let the floor of the trailer slide over them. The grease caps on all its wheels on the side you’re on are Diet Dr. Pepper bottles cut in half at the shoulders. The few sand fighters and breaking plows that haven’t been picked up yet still have yellow chalk numbers on them. It hasn’t rained for weeks. You keep your hand to the side of the barn, step around it, watching the windows of the old house the whole time. It’s empty, though; the last person in it, probably, was Betsy Simms, loading her mother’s cardboard bo
xes into the horse trailer.

  You make your way to the end of the barn, holding your breath for what you hope is going to be something, and get more than that: the Ford. It’s nosed under a broken-limbed peach tree, behind the three gas tanks.

  You touch the keys in your pocket. “There you are, then.”

  This would be the best place to hide it, after all. The place it would be least out of place—the place it’s been the last fifteen years, probably, since Gwen’s dad retired it to be a work truck.

  On its windshield again, the best camouflage: 43 in yellow chalk. As if Rory never picked it up, never paid Tom Howard for it. Which, according to Betsy, you guess he probably didn’t. Or, according to him, it was Dan who didn’t.

  Either way, it’s here, isn’t it?

  You walk across to it, touching everything on the way over, finally stop at the bed. In a direct line from the Ford, over its steering wheel probably, is the wrecker you’ve already ridden in once.

  It’s pulled up to a pop-up camper trailer with flat tires.

  For ten minutes, maybe, you just watch it, don’t want to look away.

  This is where it came from. The wrecker. Tom Howard bought it in a lot of four, traded it off to Darryl Koenig. Not for cash, even, but services. Cropdusting. A line of ownership nearly impossible to follow, but you have. And you didn’t even need to dig Tom Howard up to do it, either, which is better—now you won’t owe him anything, can talk to him straight about Thomas, about Sherilita.

  But that’s all later.

  Felson will have to believe you now. The wrecker exists. There are prints in it, even, if she wants to go that far.

  You edge your way up to the wrecker like it’s a skittish horse, like if you can just touch it—

  It doesn’t explode, is just an old truck with a flatbed, and an arm bolted onto that bed. You look through its rusted cables and chains to the Davidson place, Betsy Simms still sitting on her toolbar maybe, and then, unasked-for, you see all at once what the missing glass in Rory Gates’s boyhood bedroom has to mean: the window fell out the other way, from the inside.

  Shot out, maybe?