Burning Meredith

by Elizabeth Gunn

  The lovers faced each other open-mouthed across the visitor’s body, too shocked to speak, until Tammy sniffled and said in a tiny voice, ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Just a … guy I know.’

  ‘You think I killed him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He groped in his pockets for his new phone. ‘I think I better … call somebody.’

  Tom and Naomi were at home, and responded at once to Brad’s awestruck voice. The stranger had regained consciousness and was trying to sit up by the time they got there. Tammy was standing over him, keeping a firm grip on the rolling pin, and Brad had the flip knife secured in the barn. They told the newcomers that an argument about team athletics had gotten out of hand.

  Tom, with his always-confident manner, knew enough medical terms from vet school to convince the man on the ground that his examination was thorough and there was no serious injury. Soon they had him up, and then back in his car, refusing all offers of further help and driving away. Steve Navarro, aka Nod, got painfully into his car and drove to town. He decided to try a pivot – he could see he would not get any money from Naughtie unless he used more force, which was risky. Still on parole, he could go back to jail if Naughtie reported him for carrying the knife he had just confiscated. He thought about the rest of the Gamers and decided to try the little one, the one they called Undie – the one that wanted his high so much. That one should be easy to bluff, Nod thought.

  The Bakers were curious, of course, only half believing Brad’s story about the argument. But they liked Brad and enjoyed having these friendly, attractive neighbors who looked up to them and respected their opinions, so they let it go.

  Tammy didn’t let it go. She had long had a feeling there was more to Brad’s Saturdays with his buds than he let on, and now she wondered how real the new deal with the owner was. She called her mother, made up a story about a plumbing problem at the farmhouse that needed to get fixed today, and easily got permission to leave the baby at Grandma’s house another day. Then she made a fresh pot of coffee, put two straight chairs side by side at the kitchen table and said, ‘I think we need to have a talk.’

  The two of them, for the next couple of hours, had the first real conversation of their short marriage. Tammy had been impressed by Brad twice in two days – Thursday when he cleaned the house, and today when he fought for his life. In a pinch, she was pleased to see, he had more feistiness than he’d ever shown her, and she wanted to find out where that was coming from and what she could do with it.

  Brad had been genuinely awestruck by the way Tammy came to his aid – he had always believed she’d married him only because she could not face pregnancy alone. The fact that she really cared about him was the best emotional news he had ever received.

  The marriage that had seemed so flimsy grew solider as the day went along, not least because Tammy pecked and prodded till he told her the truth about the stranger whose nickname was Nod, and the transaction he had come to make in their yard this morning. She was not really shocked by Brad’s fling with pharmaceuticals, casual drug use having become endemic in her age group. In fact, it gave her a bargaining chip which she did not hesitate to use – in return for full forgiveness, she extracted Brad’s cross-my-heart promise not to do drugs any more.

  Brad had another factor working for him that he didn’t even know about. Tammy had noticed right away how cordial Brad and Naomi were. She had just had two nights of reminding herself how well he suited her in bed, and Naomi’s shining brown eyes put her on notice that a rolling pin wasn’t the only way to protect your turf.

  On Sunday, when Mrs Clay saw Tammy’s face, she just sighed and wrapped the baby up good and warm.

  After years of trying not to hear anything his father said, this month Undie had become avidly anxious to hear every word that came out of Lyle Underwood’s mouth. Something had started to change as soon as Lyle transferred from the police force to the sheriff’s office, Undie had seen that right away. Now that he was trying to become a leader of men – or at least of Gamers – he needed to find out what accounted for the change. It had occurred during the same month the drug supply dried up, and Undie thought there must be a connection.

  For one thing, his parents talked all the time now. It was almost shocking when he first heard them, sitting at the kitchen table after dinner sharing the news of the day, like a normal couple who didn’t have problems that mustn’t be mentioned. He tried to remember when he had heard them talk like that – years ago, he thought, when he was little.

  But now their old affection seemed to have come back into bloom, and the odd thing was, as far as he could tell, their improved relationship had nothing to do with Lyle’s face, which was as ugly as ever. What they were mostly talking about was Lyle’s new job.

  ‘It’s just night-and-day different over here, Mary,’ Lyle said one night soon after he tested for the county and got the job. ‘This man is a real human being. His force isn’t full of toadying sycophants, there’s none of that backstabbing and ridicule going on. Tasker’s teaching me all kinds of searching techniques, and he needs the skills I’ve developed on the computer.’

  ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ his mother said. Undie could hear them both clearly from where he was perched, sitting on top of the chair-back on his easy chair, with the cover off the air vent in his bedroom.

  ‘He’s already talking about paying for some courses at the college, to “increase the scope,” that’s how he says it, of what I can do. He wants to add more functions I can do for the department.’

  ‘You were so smart to take those online courses,’ she said. Good old Mom, always the builder-upper.

  ‘He let me decide on the new printer we should buy, and now I’m working on a PowerPoint program to illustrate our arrest rate and recidivism rate for the most frequent crimes.’

  ‘Imagine that,’ she said. Undie almost couldn’t stand all that smarmy admiration she was giving him, but he listened because he needed to know what lies Lyle was telling her. He still didn’t believe his father could be filling a useful spot on the sheriff’s team, but it was clear Lyle had convinced his wife that he was, and Undie needed to find out how the scam was working. He thought his father’s game, whatever it was, must have something to do with closing the supply line. But surely they didn’t imagine they could keep it closed? No police force was ever going to frustrate that much demand.

  The upside to his parents’ warming relationship was that his father had laid off him a little – in fact, he sometimes seemed to ignore him completely, as if he’d forgotten his son was in the room. That was convenient. While Undie was finding his way to the top of the Gamers’ heap, learning to be a leader of men, being ignored at home was just about his fondest wish.

  After the Gamers lost their leader and their Saturday meeting place, Undie did the dishes every night without being asked, and scrubbed pots quietly but very thoroughly so he could hear the post-prandial summary of the day’s news. As soon as he hung up the dishtowel, he scooted up the stairs to his room, grabbed the cover off the air vent and resumed his listening post. When the fabric on the chair-back began to fray a little, he found a shawl to drape over it. And once, when he hurried too much taking off the air-vent cover, he ripped the wallpaper a little – just an inch, but it showed. He panicked, breathed like a bellows and soaked his shirt with sweat till he found paste in one of the game sets still in his bookcase from childhood, and mended the tear with meticulous care.

  His snooping gained one piece of knowledge he wasn’t looking for: his father wasn’t as stupid as he’d thought. Lyle’s computer skills were still far behind his son’s, but he was learning fast, and sometimes Undie longed to run across the hall and show him, ‘Look, it’s not as hard as you’re making it, just do this …’

  It was an odd feeling, wanting to tell his father something – like a deep itch that he could never quite scratch. He thought about that, and about the other new things he had to learn if he was going to lead the Gamers – espec
ially finding a reliable supplier for the drugs they wanted. He thought about that all the time now.

  The Gamers agreed to get together again the next Saturday, but at their new place, the boathouse, and not until one o’clock. They had a couple of new members, and one of them had to work lunch. ‘My dad’s place, it’s just a hamburger joint, but he gets a rush for early lunch Saturday – he’s the last place on the way out of town,’ he said. His name was Francis Newton, and they were going to call him Newbie, Crow-Bait said; he’d been on the debate team and made such a bad showing his last time out that they kicked him off the team, so now he had the perfect up-yours attitude for a Gamer.

  Undie and his parents were all in their house on Saturday afternoon, getting ready to go out, but not together. Lyle and Mary were going downtown for some shopping and a movie. Undie, ostensibly, had a date to watch football with his buds. It was a nice bright day – the sun melting the last of the snowbanks, water running in rivulets down the steep streets and dripping off drain pipes. Undie left first, or started to – a little early because he intended to walk to Cronin’s house and get a ride from there to the boathouse. He stepped out the front door just as Nod walked up to it.

  Finding his one-time pusher outside his own house shocked Undie literally speechless. Coming from an intensely private family that almost never had guests, he had been sure it would be easy to keep his new life as a druggie apart from his home life as the family spook. The two parts of his life were so different that he had thought of them as existing, almost, on different planets. For a few seconds, he stood on the doormat with his mouth open, silent and trembling.

  ‘Nod,’ he finally choked out, ‘I’ve been looking all over hell for you. How’d you find my house?’

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ Nod said, shaking his head, glowering. ‘But never mind that now. What is it with you Gamers, anyway?’ He stood braced with his feet apart, ready to fight. ‘First you’re begging me to find you some good stuff.’ He wrinkled his features into a babyish pleading mode and imitated him. ‘“Oh, please, please, we gotta have drugs.” So I run all over hell to find product and now Naughtie says you’re breaking up? What kind of silly-ass kid stuff is that?’

  His head and neck hurt from the fight in Naughtie’s yard, so while he searched for Undie’s address he had laced himself up well with Fentanyl for the pain and added some bourbon to keep his anger at just the right level of hot and cool. Intensely focused but coldly determined, that’s how he had to stay. Because he needed the money fast now – no more fooling around.

  He had persuaded the one man he knew from the cartel that these boys were always rock-solid with the money, crazy for drugs and would do anything to get them. ‘Just trust me this once so I can get the pipeline moving again,’ he had said, and Juan ‘Dedos’ Mendoza had rolled his eyes but for once had gone along. He was called Fingers because he was missing a couple from a shootout in a Dollar Store parking lot a few years ago. He was nobody’s fool, but he and Nod had once shared a cell in the county jail for a couple of months, so he knew Nod was not a total nada even if he did change names almost as often as Dooley Davis.

  And now these little shits want to change everything, Nod thought. Like it’s that easy. Naughtie’s got a job, so he’s going to quit using … they had to find a new place, maybe pot was good enough, yadda yadda. So I’m supposed to front half the money myself or face the Mendoza family with their hard eyes saying one way or another you gonna pay, smart ass? I don’t think so.

  ‘You ordered this shit I’m carrying,’ Nod told Undie now, ‘and OK, I’m a little late, but I need the money right away. The dealer won’t wait.’

  He was working up a rage and it felt good, like the time in juvie when he wrecked his cell, just tore that miserable space completely to hell before they could get him stopped. Broke his arm and two bones in his ankle, but a couple of juvenile detention experts with their calm, condescending voices ended up with a lot more damage than he had. He still treasured the memory of the haughty one they called Eugene, getting onto an IT elevator with his head at a funny angle and a pressure bandage on his broken nose.

  Now, while he stood there in the bright afternoon, not quite steady but getting ready to swing if he had to, plenty of steam in the boiler to scare this spoiled brat into paying up, the front door of the house opened from the inside and a sheriff’s deputy he’d seen once or twice – Underwood, his name was – stood in the doorway. A pretty woman who must be his wife stood behind his right shoulder, putting a list away in her purse.

  A firestorm of doubt started in Nod’s brain then; he snapped back to being Steve Navarro because he had just realized that this little brat he called Undie must be the son of Lyle Underwood, who had been a city cop for years and was a sheriff’s deputy now. And now he, Steve Navarro, the parolee, forbidden to do much of anything besides breathe and walk in a straight line, was on the deputy’s doorstep talking drug business with the deputy’s son. Yo, dipshit, maybe you should be wearing a sign in Day-Glo colors that reads ARREST ME?

  All along this little scut he knew as Undie up in the loft had reminded him of somebody, and now he knew why. That very somebody was standing right there talking to the little turd blossom, calling him Jason, not Undie. And a smooth transition was taking place in the deputy’s face, but because he was a cop, for God’s sake, he knew how to keep a straight face while he figured out why the air on his own front step smelled wrong. And the straighter and smoother the deputy’s face got, the surer Steve was that the cop was onto him. The feeling grew as the cop said, all calm and sugary, ‘Jason, you about ready to go?’

  Undie gave him a look that could only mean, You talking to me?

  The deputy and the woman had appeared to be headed for the silver Honda parked in the driveway, until the deputy glanced beyond the Honda to the dark-blue pickup at the curb.

  It wasn’t blocking the cop’s exit, but something about the pickup must have triggered his memory about something else, because he said to Undie, who was still standing on the mat, ‘Oh, but just hang on a minute, Jason, I forgot my—’ Then turned back toward the woman, saying, ‘Honey, let’s take along the—’ and reached out to take her back in with him before closing the door.

  The two of them, Steve and Jason, stood together in front of the door a minute, waiting, since that’s what they’d been told to do. They were both sons, after all, accustomed to taking orders from fathers, so for a few seconds that’s what they quietly did.

  Then the firestorm exploded in Steve Navarro’s brain and set him in motion. He leaned toward Undie, bright-eyed and smiling a little, and said, ‘All going out together, are you? Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about,’ Jason said. ‘I want to talk to you about product but I can’t do it here—’

  He screamed with pain and fright then, because Steve had grabbed him by the hair and now, with an arm around his throat, he was dragging him into the dark-blue pickup at the curb.

  ‘Sheriff,’ Lyle Underwood said softly into the phone, ‘that dark-blue pickup you’ve been showing me pictures of? It’s parked in front of my house right now and the man who brought it here is talking to my son.’ His hand was on his wife’s shoulder, just where the curve started up her neck. She watched him silently, not understanding yet but alarmed, with one hand pressed against her mouth.

  ‘I’ll be right there,’ the sheriff said, calm as if they were all headed to the ballpark.

  ‘My address—’

  ‘I know where you live.’

  Then Lyle heard Jason scream, dropped the phone and ran.

  Mary picked it up and said into it, crying, ‘Sheriff, this is Mary, just a minute …’ She ran to the open doorway, took a deep breath and said distinctly, ‘The man in the pickup has our son! He’s driving up Rosemary Street, uh, passing the Farm and Ranch store? Lyle’s in our car now, a silver Honda, starting after him.’

  ‘All right, Mary, just watch now,’ Tasker said, and rang off.


  Mary ran upstairs hearing sirens, looked uphill from her bedroom window and saw three police cars and a sheriff’s car coming from around town and the nearby suburbs, converging at speed on the vicinity of the Farm & Ranch Store. They all went silent and slowed a block or two away from the store to stay out of the way of the pickup, watching to see which way it was headed. And then Mary actually laughed out loud, because the man in the dark pickup didn’t seem to realize he was driving directly toward the McGill County garage where all the sheriff’s cars were kept. It was on Rosemary Street, around the corner from the sheriff’s office on Sullivan and, unlike his office, it had no sign.

  As the pickup crossed Sullivan Street, the big garage door slid up and the sheriff’s van drove out and blocked Rosemary Street beyond the garage. The pickup’s driver cramped his wheels quickly but it was too late; he couldn’t turn because all the law enforcement vehicles had pulled in close around him.

  Men jumped out of all the cars then. Men with pistols drawn surrounded the pickup, standing behind their doors while the sheriff spoke orders into a loudspeaker. After that one crackling order, though, he was mostly silent as the town and county squads, accustomed to working together, went about the business of apprehending the two males in the pickup. The chase had occurred in town, but Lyle Underwood’s house was just outside the city limits in a suburb called Itasca Point, so the kidnapping had occurred there and jurisdiction would remain with the sheriff.

  They took Jason Underwood, silent and rigid, out of the dark pickup, two men supporting and nudging him until they got him safely wedged into the backseat of a squad car. The officer with his hand on Jason’s head leaned in and asked him, ‘Are you all right?’