South of Shiloh

by Chuck Logan

  Jenny remembered a long autumn afternoon of turning maples and long silences.

  This woman is special, the silence whispered. Let me show her to you. This only happens once. The rest is echo. Shadow. Smoke for the dead.

  The memory scattered. Jenny frowned, serious now.

  Maybe in Wisconsin she could find the aunt and uncle who could fill in the background on John Rane. She was mindful of the concern in Beeman’s voice on the phone. But if, as she now suspected, there was something scary in Rane, she was damn well going to protect Molly from it.

  With sweats pulled on over her workout clothes, she sat in the Forester in the club parking lot. She arranged a notepad on her purse, stared at her cell phone, rolled a Sharpie between her thumb and forefinger.

  Grab a straw.

  She punched in 411. What city? St. Paul, Minnesota. What listing? The St. Paul Police Department. An operator, then a machine voice read the general information number.

  Jenny punched the select option to connect to the number.

  “St. Paul Police, how may I direct your call?”

  “I need to contact an officer I met over ten years ago. I think he was a sergeant…”

  “Do you have a name, ma’am; an assignment, a division?”

  “I can’t recall the name but he had a Southern accent and his hair, well, he looked and talked like Elvis Presley…”

  The operator chuckled. “I think you want Lieutenant Harry Cantrell in Homicide. He’s gone for the day but I’ll connect you to his voice mail.”

  “Thank you.”

  A moment later she heard Cantrell’s Midwesternized drawl on a machine. “This is Lieutenant Cantrell, St. Paul Homicide. Leave a message after the beep.”

  “Lieutenant Cantrell, this is Jenny Edin. We met a long time ago at the Alcove Lounge in St. Paul. I was Jenny Hatton then. We met through a rookie cop named John Rane. You and he seemed to be close so I’m hoping you’ve kept in touch. Rane had an aunt and uncle I met briefly somewhere east of Hudson, Wisconsin. I need to reach them but I can’t remember their name. This is urgent so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.”

  Jenny left her home and cell numbers, ended the call, and stared at the phone. She’d been putting off the next call but it was time for a reality check. She thumbed in the number.

  “Patti? It’s Jenny. I know it’s short notice but could you get away for a little while to talk?”

  43

  THEY WOUND UP AT MARTHA’S MENU, A DOWNTOWN restaurant where Beeman insisted on buying Rane the chicken-fried steak with red-eyed gravy and biscuits.

  “Home cooking,” Rane said.

  “Yep,” Beeman said with a slow grin. “This building? Used to be a whorehouse.”

  Rane shook his head, looked out the restaurant window at a flag hanging over a storefront across the street. “Down home Mississippi. Still got the Rebel battle colors on your state flag.”

  “Slow down, John. Technically, the thirteen stars on that Southern Cross stand for the original thirteen colonies, not the Confederate States. And the bars are red, white, and blue—the national colors.”

  “Right,” Rane said.

  Beeman frowned. “Whole state voted to keep that flag, two-to-one. Not just people look like me.” Beeman leaned back. “April 17, 2001. My daddy remembered where he was when Kennedy got shot. I remember where I was when the vote came in, on patrol between 72 and Kossuth.”

  “Man,” Rane said, “I’m a long way from home.”

  Driving back to his house, Beeman got around to asking, “So why the hat with the military badges?”

  “I was told some military trimmings would help out down here so I dug it out of the closet,” Rane said.

  “Goddamn, I guess,” Beeman grinned. “Thing is, I read you were a photographer in the army. How do you rate a combat rifle badge?”

  “After I graduated out of photo school I talked them into letting me research whole blocks of training and then I’d go back and shoot it for Army Times.”

  “Kinda like those books you wrote,” Beeman said.

  “Yeah, the army’s where I started with that approach. So I picked up a list of MOS…”

  “Uh-huh. So how many different MOS you go through?”

  “Well, I did infantry AIT. Then airborne. The ranger school. Survival school. The mountain course at Fort Drum. By the time we went into Kuwait, I was attached to the 101st. Some artillery rounds fell a couple hundred yards from the battalion CP.” Rane tapped the black-and-green camo badge on his cap, above the jump wings. “And the colonel put everybody with an infantry MOS in for a combat infantry badge. I saw the pictures on your wall downstairs. You were on the sand, Beeman…”

  “With the guard; they reconfigured us as MPs down in Hattiesburg at Camp Shelby.”

  “So you know there was a lot of medal inflation in the Gulf War.”

  “Yep. We had it easy, compared to those poor fuckers running over bombs and slogging street-to-street,” Beeman said as he drove up his driveway. They got out and climbed the deck stairs.

  “Beer sound good?” Beeman offered. When Rane nodded, Beeman opened the sliding door to the kitchen. “Get comfortable. I’ll be right back after I unload this gun belt.”

  A few minutes later Beeman returned. He’d changed into jeans, a loose flannel shirt, and worn moccasins. He carried two opened bottles of Dixie beer, handed one to Rane, and they sat on two facing wooden deck chairs. Beeman took a swallow of his beer, set the bottle down, and removed the corncob pipe and a packet of tobacco from his shirt pocket. Slowly, he filled the pipe, then struck a Blue Tip match with his thumbnail. He puffed and blew a meditative stream of cherry-scented smoke into the twilight.

  Rane swigged his beer and watched the spreading evening quiet and Beeman watching him, puffing on his pipe; the glow of the bowl highlighting the faint, bemused smile on his face.

  Rane reached into his haversack, pulled out the pack of Spirits and the Bic, and lit up.

  “Surprised you smoke; thought they outlawed it up North,” Beeman said.

  Rane lifted the bottle. “It’s the beer; old pattern.”

  “Uh-huh. You got any more surprises? Anything you want to tell me, John?” Beeman asked casually.

  Rane glanced around and said, “If I had an expert shooter hunting me with a rifle I wouldn’t sit out on this deck with the kitchen light on my back.”

  Beeman pointed his pipe at Rane and said, “You’re changing the subject.”

  “What do you mean?” Rane said, his voice steady and his face blank.

  “I mean,” Beeman said slowly, “you didn’t come down here to take pictures, did you?”

  Rane started to shrug it off but there was enough light left to see the edge of Beeman’s smile fade. Absent the smile, his face was at home in the closing darkness. Rane said nothing.

  “Won’t beat around with you, John. I called Jenny Edin,” Beeman said.

  Rane stared at Beeman, expressionless, a little off-balance. Like he’d just lost one leg of the chair he was sitting on.

  “I called her,” Beeman continued, “’cause I saw you were carrying your camera in Paul’s haversack. His name’s right inside the flap. You got his uniform in your car. Most, but not all, the bloodstains scrubbed out.”

  “What’d Jenny say?” Rane asked quietly.

  “She said you’re down here trying to figure out how to be a father.”

  Rane stared beyond Beeman into the twilight fuzzing the tree branches together across the broad lawn. Someone had been here and cleaned the dead catfish out of the pond.

  Beeman circled a finger next to his ear. “She explained what’s been bugging me about you. How it was you I talked to on the phone last Saturday. When I met you I had your voice going round in the back of my head and couldn’t pin it down.”

  “She told you about Molly,” Rane said.

  “Uh-huh. It seems you didn’t have any problem with getting started on the father part; the screwing-the-woman pa
rt. Now, you going to tell how wearing a dead man’s clothes is gonna help you figure out the rest?” Beeman asked.

  “Maybe I need to learn what he went through down here,” Rane said quietly.

  “What? Researching getting shot?”

  Rane shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”

  “I believe that. From what I’ve seen so far, you’ve got all these snappy skills and you’re lost, ain’t you John? You don’t know where you’re at.” Beeman shook his head. “You got this veil between you and life, like a widow.”

  Rane drained his beer, dropped his cigarette into the empty bottle, and stood up. “Okay, so now what?” he asked.

  “Finish what we started. Go to Shiloh. Be worth getting shot at to see if you’ll actually take a picture,” Beeman said.

  “You’re a tricky guy,” Rane said.

  “Takes one to know one, huh?” Beeman said.

  After an interval of silence, Rane said, “You’ve seen High Noon one too many times, Beeman. You want to fight a duel with this Nickels.”

  “And what about you?” Beeman asked.

  Rane ignored the question. “Look, I’m beat. All the driving. Getting thumped on today. I’m going to turn in.” He left Beeman sitting on his deck, smoking his pipe, and staring into the gathering dark, patiently dissecting the motives of Mitchell Lee Nickels. And John Rane.

  He walked through the kitchen, noting that the ring was still twinkling on the kitchen table, went down the stairs, padded across the den under the gaze of Beeman’s ancestors, carried his travel kit to the bath, brushed his teeth, and got ready for bed.

  Moments later, lights out, lying between clean sheets on the single mattress, he raised a hand and explored the darkness. A veil, he thought. Then, exhausted, he fell asleep to a faint rumble of thunder.

  44

  RANE NEVER DREAMED. THE INSISTENT HAND rousing him from sleep was real. Blinking, he squinted at a shadow bending over him, backlit by the basement light coming in the doorway.

  “Wake up,” said the shadow and materialized into Kenny Beeman, whose breath smelled like beer and cherry pipe tobacco.

  “Huh?” Rane pushed up on his elbows.

  “C’mon and get dressed,” Beeman said more urgently. “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

  Rain turned the black asphalt of Fulton Drive into a glitter of reflected lights.

  “Marcy Leets got beat up,” Beeman said, weaving in and out of traffic. “They just brought her into Emergency. Some people were coming back when the concert at the courthouse got rained out. Found her staggering from the alley behind her shop. Called 911.”

  Beeman banged his horn, blew through a four-way stop, turned up Tate, and floored it toward 72. He slapped a red flasher on the dash, threaded through another light, turned west on the highway, and gunned the gas. The thirsty Interceptor engine surged.

  “Joe Timms, sergeant with the city, responded, took her in. Called me en route.”

  “How bad is she?” Rane asked.

  Beeman heaved his shoulders. “Don’t know.” Then he retreated into his fierce driving. “Hold on,” he warned as he drifted into a turn; toe to brake to gas, straightened out. Tiers of lights loomed ahead in the rain, a sign. MAGNOLIA REGIONAL HEALTH CENTER. They shot through a parking lot full of cars, toward an ambulance parked under a portico.

  Rane cleared his thoughts. When your heart is beating fast, the word EMERGENCY, stamped in red neon, looks like a frozen shriek in the night.

  Beeman clucked his tongue, reflected, “Margie don’t like it when I go to Emergency on Thursday nights.”

  Then he drifted in a four-wheel skid, slewed at an angle behind the ambulance, and jumped out. Rane followed Beeman, who was moving fast, his bare ankles showing above the worn moccasins. The cop had just tucked in the flannel shirt and buckled on his gun belt. He was no longer smiling; striding, his body coiled, hands and arms held in close.

  A tall, handsome tanned man with styled blond hair stood by the door, smoking a cigarette, wearing a Memphis Marathon T-shirt, stone-washed jeans, and soft, orange, ostrich-quill cowboy boots. Beeman walked up to him and got right in his face, nose to nose.

  “You got anything to do with this, you piece of shit?” Beeman said in a low growl.

  “Not me,” the guy said, not giving an inch and flicking ash from his smoke. Some of the ash dribbled down Beeman’s chest. “I was out at my mom’s when Darl called, playing Monopoly with her, as a matter of fact. You can check,” he said casually.

  Rane heard a car door open across the lot and saw a lean, fox-faced man heave up from behind the wheel of a sleek cream-colored Cadillac SRX, step into the rain, and smooth his flowing Hawaiian shirt a certain way. The pool shooter from the bar, the one Rane had clubbed in the throat with the pool cue. The guy in the ostrich boots dismissed Fox Face with a subtle wag of his cigarette, never taking his eyes off Beeman.

  “Wanna push it, Dwayne?” Beeman asked softly, hands swinging loose.

  “Not me, officer,” Dwayne Leets said in a level voice. “I’m here ’cause my sister-in-law’s been roughed up. Strictly family.”

  “Uh-huh,” Beeman said, shouldering past Dwayne. Rane quickstepped to keep up as they went through the door, past an overweight security guard in gray and brown, who stepped back to let Beeman pass. More doors; Rane stepped over a bloody dressing on the floor. Figures in lime green scrubs moved through curtained bays filled with Stryker gurneys and muted plastic machines and the acute concentration of medics.

  A willowy black nurse with wide, elegant Ethiopian cheekbones stepped in Beeman’s path. She raised a white, vinyl-sheathed hand.

  “Whoa there, Peaches,” she challenged.

  Peaches?

  “Let me by, Sheba,” Beeman said. Rane noted that the nurse Beeman called Sheba wore on her scrubs a name tag that said NOLA.

  Whatever her name was, Beeman firmly put his hands on her arms and moved her aside. Half a dozen hospital personnel in the immediate area paused a beat, and Rane concluded that when Beeman was in motion people made room.

  “Where is she?” Beeman asked. Then, looking past the nurse, Beeman spied Darl Leets standing by the nurses’ station. Two scrubbed children stood quietly big-eyed next to Leets; the younger one held a stuffed kitty. The older one had an Atlanta Braves cap sideways on his head.

  Beeman slowed and the smile was back. “How you boys doing,” he said, instinctively stooping to get on eye level with the younger boy.

  “We’re fine, sir. It’s Ma got hurt,” the young boy said. Rane figured he was six; the taller one maybe eight or nine.

  “But she’s going to be fine, right?” Beeman shot a look at Darl.

  Rane watched Darl Leets’s face shift from pissed to concerned back to pissed. “That’s right, she just got banged up a little,” he said. He had a hand on each kid’s shoulder and he pulled them in closer to him.

  Beeman stood up and before he could address Darl, a cop in a blue city uniform, sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve, stepped from a curtained alcove down the hall.

  “Bee, leave him. Was somebody else,” the cop said. Rane floated, trying to be invisible, staying next to Beeman as Darl bent and said, “Boys, I want you to stand over there by the wall. Keep out of people’s way but stay where I can see you. I got to talk to the policeman. You hear?”

  The two boys nodded solemnly and crossed the hall. Darl turned and looked Beeman directly in the eye. “Listen to Timms, Bee. Weren’t me…” But Darl had enough situational awareness to fix on Rane’s face. “You,” he said simply.

  Beeman squinted at Timms, who held up a cellophane baggie that contained a plastic vial. Timms said, “She clawed the fuck out of his face. I got skin parings from under her nails.”

  “What happened?” Beeman asked Darl.

  “Swear to God, I don’t know,” Darl said. “I was home with the kids when they called.”

  “What’s Dwayne doing standing outside?” Beeman demanded.

  “Shit, Bee.
I don’t tell him where to fuckin’ stand.”

  Rane studied Darl’s face. No longer the laid-back, confident man he’d met in the state-line barroom, Darl was now keeping his anger in check with meat hooks of control.

  Beeman turned to the city cop. “She say…?”

  Timms shook his head and took Beeman by the arm. “Excuse us, Darl,” he said, walking Beeman down the hall, where he bristled when Rane followed. Beeman cooled him with a curt head shake. “He’s okay, he’s with me.”

  “Was dark. She said this guy jumped her from behind, at her shop; in the storeroom in back. She resisted, he hit her, then she clawed his face and he ran,” Timms said.

  “You been over there yet?” Beeman asked, looking up and down the hall.

  “Got a team processing. They just called. Get this. They say there’s a bloody thumbprint on the door, bigger than shit.” Timms dropped his eyes, then looked up. “All the talk, boys are speculating we got a Mitchell Lee situation,” he said.

  Beeman grunted, then asked, “How bad is she, Joe?”

  Timms flexed his jaw, conjured his eyes back and forth. “Ain’t pretty. Took a bad one alongside her eye, ’nother on her chin; face all cut up, got some loose teeth. Tore her dress damn near off. Got bruises on her neck and shoulder and down her front. Could be a lot worse, I guess. But she caught him a deep one on the face. Got wads of tissue in this baggie.”

  Beeman set off again, down the hall, with Rane keeping pace. The doorkeeper nurse was back, beside them. She put a restraining gloved hand on Rane’s elbow.

  “He can’t…”

  Beeman took Rane’s other arm and yanked him forward. “How is she?”

  The nurse shrugged. “We’re cleaning her up, checked her vitals. She has multiple abrasions, contusions, and the bruises. We have some concern she might have lost consciousness. So the doctor might order an X-ray, possibly a CAT scan…”