‘What really burns my tail,’ Undie said, ‘is this week, for once, I’ve got most of the money put together early, and now we can’t find any product.’
‘Don’t give up on Nod yet – he might come through.’
‘I don’t know – I’m not as sold on that guy as I was at first. Yesterday, I thought he looked’ – Undie rocked his hand – ‘like he hadn’t been getting any.’
‘Any what? You mean sex?’
‘That too, but mostly H. I thought he looked strung out.’
‘You saw him yesterday? Where?’
‘Oh … that bar on lower Fifth with the pool tables. Casey’s, I think it’s called.’
‘They let you hang out in Casey’s? Why? They just love to sell you root beer?’
‘I can have a Bud sometimes now if I want it – Drafty’s got fake ID he lets me use sometimes.’
‘No shit? How’d he get that?’
‘One of his uncles died young and he talked the guy’s wife into selling his social.’
‘Drafty’s got some game, huh? Who knew? I took him for kind of a dead-head. If you’re so snug with him, why don’t you get him to find us a new supplier?’
‘I never said we were snug, come on. Drafty’s not close to anybody, as far as I can see. I just … leaned on him a little till he returned a favor.’
‘A favor?’ Naughtie’s face was taking on the expression of a fruit lover in a citrus grove. ‘Our Undie’s just full of surprises today, huh? Tell me, little buddy’ – he put a hand on Undie’s shoulder, which should have felt friendly but somehow didn’t, quite – ‘what kind of a favor could you possibly do for a retard like Duh-yeah-Drafty?’
‘Well …’ Undie twisted under his heavy hand and looked away.
‘Oh, he doesn’t want to tell me, now that is interesting.’ Naughtie maintained a breezy facade that implied he was happy with his stupid slacker’s life, but inside his head an intelligent entrepreneur was scratching to get out. Whenever it almost surfaced, it turned him mean. Right now his killer streak was focused on Undie. ‘But that’s not how it works with us Gamers, is it? We’re all in this together, aren’t we? And you wouldn’t want to lose your spot in the loft on Game Day, would you?’
‘No, of course not. Let go of me.’ Undie shrugged as he turned back, and Naughtie’s hand fell off his shoulder. ‘All I did was find out when his cousin’s court date was coming up.’
‘You what?’ It was kind of fun, Undie thought, to see the way Naughtie’s eyes bulged when he opened them wide like that. ‘How could you do that?’
‘I used my dad’s computer to access the Court House database.’
‘He lets you do that?’
‘Of course he doesn’t let me. I had to hack in.’
‘How’d you learn to do that?’
‘I get all As in Computer Science. Math, too. And if you never noticed I’m smart, you just joined a big group, including both my parents and my stupid sneering sisters.’ Undie realized he was letting his raw spots show, and reined in. ‘It isn’t only Nod that bothers me – that threesome seems to be falling apart.’
‘Falling apart how? We were still getting product until last week.’
‘Think about it,’ Undie said. ‘We haven’t ever seen Blinkin, have we? He was always fighting fires. And now Winkin is gone too. We’ve only ever seen Nod since the first day.’
‘So?’
‘So I feel like we’re being played. Like maybe there never was a dealership, there was only Nod and … I don’t know. I can’t figure out how it works.’
‘Listen, they’re drug dealers! They don’t have regular hours like the mailman. You were the one that said it would be safer to know we were dealing with criminals.’
Undie laughed suddenly, a harsh, unaccustomed sound that startled them both. ‘I did, didn’t I?’
‘So you’re saying you want to quit?’
‘No!’ Undie chewed his thumb. ‘Shit, I really like my Saturdays at Gamers.’
‘Well, we’ll still have them – why not?’
‘I don’t know. Something tells me those guys are trouble. What if they wreck your deal here on the farm? If your landlord fired you, what would you do?’
‘Go somewhere else. You worry too much.’ He pasted on a fake smile suddenly. ‘Here comes the hall monitor.’
‘Come on, boys,’ the new gym teacher said. ‘Didn’t you hear the bell?’
‘Gee, no, Miss Cavendish,’ Naughtie said. ‘I guess we were practicing our Latin so hard we never heard it. Thanks for reminding us.’
He lusted very sincerely after Miss Cavendish, and sometimes he thought he saw a little sparkle that meant she wanted a bite of him too.
THIRTEEN
After he finished cleaning the grill that night, Carlo walked into the sheriff’s office out of the dark alley, carrying a cold bottle inside a narrow paper sack. He put two squat glasses on the corner of the desk and poured three ounces of red wine in each, then waited in silence until the sheriff finished signing the top sheet of a tall stack of paperwork. When Carlo raised his glass, the sheriff sat back, sighed, and raised his.
‘Reason I asked about the cars,’ Carlo said, after a sip. ‘I heard something.’
‘Story time, I love it,’ Tasker said. He pulled out the bottom left-hand drawer and propped up his feet. ‘Tell me.’
‘You know, sometimes at night I sit outside for a while before I go home,’ Carlo said.
‘To smoke one of those cigarettes you gave up a year ago. I know.’
‘This year I’m really trying to quit. But eight kids, before you even get ’em all raised, the older ones start bringing you grandkids. So sometimes I sit on my bench out there in the dark, not even smoking, just letting my feet cool a little.’
‘Till your wife gets some of the kids in bed, huh? So you’re sitting there, not showing a light, and you hear something.’
‘Remember that new couple, what you said? He’s noisy, she’s shy, the perfect couple?’
‘Something like that, yeah. What about it?’
‘They both talk different when they’re alone.’
‘How different?’
‘Like she’s the one in charge. After that fight in the alley she said, out there in the dark as they were locking up, “I told Pepe before we moved here, we have to be the only dealers in McGill County or it’s no deal.”’
‘Hard voice like that?’
‘Yup. She was having a kind of a hissy fit while they closed the store. She says, “Kurtz has gotta get it through his head, he gets all his supplies from me and he takes orders from me. I say who we sell to and who we don’t. And I won’t have his wannabee addicts hanging around back here in the alley, complaining and starting fights.”’
‘Harley’s happy when he hears her like this?’
‘She’s the hammer, he’s the nail. I don’t know who’s happy. That time he said something like, “Drugs wasn’t what that fight was about,” but she just blew him off. She said, “If Kurtz wants to be my dealer he better get his ass in here and sign off on this deal, or I’ll get Pepe to send me somebody who will.”’
‘Got a mouth on her.’
‘Yes. And then she says the most amazing thing – says she’s not letting Kurtz’s people have any more product till he agrees she calls the shots. They still owe her money from that first order.’
‘Wow,’ Tasker said. ‘Queen of the jungle, huh?’
‘Can you believe it? Just got to town and she’s saying she won’t sell to somebody? And she must be still holding out for what she wants, because it’s been very quiet back here ever since.’
‘Well, I appreciate your spy service but I think you should go home now, Carlo,’ the sheriff said, turning back to his bottomless stack of paper. ‘If your feet are cool enough.’
‘Just one other thing.’
‘You hear so much better when you don’t smoke.’
‘What, you don’t want to hear this?’
‘Don’t be s
o feisty, of course I want to hear it. What?’
‘They may be married, but they don’t always sleep together. They drive two cars, leave at different times, and once I heard her say, “Don’t stay up all night with your pretty playmate tonight. I need your help tomorrow.”’
‘So it’s kind of an open marriage, but with henpecking rights, is that it?’
‘Anything is possible, I guess.’
‘I got the links,’ Lyle Underwood told the sheriff the next morning, ‘to those opioid stories you wanted to see. Amazing what went on there in West Virginia for so many years. Those little towns were flooded with thousands of doses of powerful drugs.’
‘None of it ever reported?’
‘Actually, some of it was reported by conscientious workers. And the reports were neatly laid away in drawers at the other end.’
‘But Harley and Lorraine don’t show up as store owners there?’
‘No. They were working for one of the dealers and they got out just before the hammer came down. Our Attorney General is in touch with theirs, though, and they’re forwarding some records – they’ve almost enough on Harley to make an arrest.’
‘Are you getting any of their mail?
‘None of their mail’s been forwarded from Vidalia, but I found an envelope full of it in the trash. Vidalia’s in one of the counties in West Virginia that’s mentioned in the stories. They got connected here very fast. It looks like they were able to bring their connections with them, but somehow leave everything else behind. Clever.’
‘Good job,’ the sheriff said. ‘So our trash collectors are helping just as we asked?’
‘Yes. The solid waste guys have been terrific, keeping everything from the drugstore separate. The empty boxes contained more Oxycontin and more Fentanyl doses than we got people.’
‘They’re fast workers, aren’t they? What about the new shipping company?’
‘Tri-State Shipping is theirs, I think. I can’t find it anywhere else.’
‘So it must be registered in Montana as a new corporation. Look for a license application, credit affidavits …’
A few days later, Lyle said, ‘Effie at the post office says the Dahlgrens still haven’t had any mail forwarded, but I found a lot of old mail in the trash. Mostly unpaid bills and credit card applications. Nothing personal.’
‘Same name or—?’
‘Some. But mostly another name – Dick and Doris Wheeling. All at that same address in Vidalia, West Virginia. Since they moved here, all the mail is coming to Dahlgren. Looks like they made a clean break – they haven’t received anything here addressed to either Wheeling.’
‘OK,’ Tasker said. ‘How are we coming on the cemeteries?’
‘I’ve found two Dahlgrens in Vidalia. No Harley or Lorraine so far on the headstones, but we know they’re using the social and drivers’ licenses of a deceased couple who died there in the nineteen thirties.’
‘Good. Hopefully this won’t drag on much longer and we can make arrests.’
‘You won’t hear any complaints out of me, Sheriff. This is the most fun I’ve had in some time.’
‘That so? Sounds like you need to get out more.’
‘Not according to my wife. She says I need to stay home more.’
FOURTEEN
They finished the helicopter story in time for the Sunday night deadline at the printer. As soon as that part of the extra edition was printed and on its way to subscribers new and old, Alice went to work on the Frank Navarro/Clarence Simpson story, scheduled to be included in the regular Thursday edition in town, and sent out of town as the second half of the Extra.
She was polishing the last few paragraphs on Wednesday morning when Mort hustled out of his office to announce, ‘Heads up, kids. That was the sheriff. He says the coroner just called him to say the autopsy report will come out on Friday morning. I’ll need to get to work on that right away, so you two will be running the newsroom all day.’
‘Get to work on it how?’ Alice asked him. ‘Adjust the font, you mean? That won’t take long.’
Mort waved his arms vaguely and said, ‘Oh, I’ll probably need to do a little interpretation for our subscribers. I’m no expert, but I expect there’ll be some technical language that will have to be explained. Don’t you suppose, Stuart?’
‘Beats me,’ Stuart said. ‘This is my first autopsy report.’
Tasker ordered his copies from the Guardian’s print shop in the same call. Mort’s deal with the sheriff, he told his staff, was for twenty free copies plus digital distribution to two sheriff’s offices, three county attorneys and the headmen of a dozen firefighting crews, provided he got exclusive access to the document until Monday noon. ‘But I thought it was going to be two or three weeks from now.’
‘So did we, right?’ Alice said. ‘We did all this work to fill a blank spot, and now the autopsy report’s coming out right on top of the helicopter story.’
‘I know. But give Mort his due,’ Stuart said, ‘he’s good at cutting a deal.’
Mort read the autopsy as it came out of the printer Friday morning, standing by the BizHub as the warm copies piled up in the tray. When he finished, he went back to the beginning and read it again. After a second reading, he told Sven to run off two extra copies. Mid-afternoon, he called Stuart and Alice into his office and handed them each a copy, sealed in a manila envelope.
‘Keep these to yourselves, understand? This is valuable stuff.’ He asked them to come in the next morning, Saturday, after they’d read it. ‘But don’t let these pages out of your sight in the meantime. I’ve set us up with a chance for a beautiful scoop here, but we have to keep it under wraps until …’
He stared out the window while he drummed a little march with his marking pencil, dum-diddy-ump-ump. When the march ended, he said, ‘Until we’ve published it in the second Guardian Extra. Understand?’
They understood all right. They were troubled by issues about freedom of information, but they both nodded. It was his little paper ‘that could,’ and they knew he was not asking for their opinions about ethics.
He split a brief smile between them and added, ‘I really appreciate your help with this story, and I’ll make it worth your while.’
‘How?’ Alice said, surprising herself with a surge of righteous indignation.
‘What?’
‘How will you make it worth my while?’ Her face felt hot.
Mort was holding a phone and two pencils in his right hand; he shrugged, made a chicken-shooing gesture with his left hand and said, ‘I don’t— What do you want?’
‘A raise in pay.’
‘Right now?’ He tried to make it sound like a joke. Alice stared back at him, unsmiling. When she nodded, he rolled his eyes up to heaven.
‘Your timing is damned inconvenient, Alice. But OK, I guess I can bump you up a buck an hour. Why are you shaking your head?’
‘I need a five-dollar raise from what I’ve been getting.’
‘Five dollars?’ Mort blinked. ‘Come on, now, Alice, that’s ridiculous.’
‘Not really. It only seems that way because my current wage is ridiculously low. That was OK when I was just helping out Stuart with a little editing, but we’re way past that now. Now I write stories and sell ads and work all the time and change my schedule whenever you say to. So I need to get paid like a grownup.’
‘A grownup? Golly Moses.’ The silly phrase was meant to take them back to their childhood relationship of games, tricks, nudges and winks.
Alice stared at him solemnly. ‘OK, maybe five is a little stiff all at once. Make it four.’
‘Really, Alice’ – he puffed up and got pink – ‘I know you’re not accustomed to the business world yet – I’ve been making allowances for that. But usually these things are thrashed out in private.’
‘Stuart’s my nephew. This is private enough.’
‘Well, this feels kind of like blackmail, taking advantage of the situation when you know I’m faced with all t
his work—’
‘We’re all faced with a lot of work. And pressed for time. So let’s make this deal and get back to work.’
Mort scratched his neck and shrugged, sighed and studied the ceiling light for a bit, shrugged again and finally said, ‘Alice, four dollars is out of the question. But you are doing nice work; I’ll go for two.’
‘I can’t think about less than three-fifty, and we need to talk about weekends.’
‘No, now, that’s just what we’re not going to talk about. I’ll consider a three-dollar increase if you’ll agree to go on salary.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You get bumped up three dollars an hour, times forty hours a week, but that’s it. If crazy things come up, like this fire, we all work as long as it takes and there’s no overtime.’
It was Alice’s turn to study the ceiling light. She counted to ten while she studied. When she stopped counting, she said, ‘OK, you win the second round.’
‘Funny thing is it felt more like losing to me,’ Mort said. ‘Where were we before this rumble started?’
‘Autopsy report,’ Stuart said quickly. ‘What time tomorrow morning?’
‘What do you know,’ Mort said, ‘a grownup who wants to talk about the work. Let’s make it nine o’clock.’ He looked into the corner of the room while he added, ‘You, too, Alice.’
Stuart was not being kept at arm’s length any more. In a blink, he was back in favor and Alice was out. Not all the way out, though – Mort still expected her help in the morning.
‘Well, he’s mad but I got my raise,’ Alice said, walking home.
‘With a little twist at the end, remember? You’ll probably end up doing his laundry on weekends.’
‘I won’t. And you’re back in his good graces, aren’t you? All warm and friendly. Like maybe he’s decided to quit begrudging your share of the fire story.’
‘Not sure of that yet,’ Stuart said. ‘I’ll know more about how much his favor costs when I’ve read this report.’ He had his copy wrapped in a plastic garbage bag tucked under his arm, because summer had ended again, the sky was threatening rain, sleet, snow – who knew in Montana at the tail end of October? She had her copy in the many-zippered canvas satchel, almost as big as saddlebags, in which she’d carried eighth-grade test papers safely through Montana weather for nearly thirty years.
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