Cripple Creek

by James Sallis

  "You think she moved in just to be sure her offspring would be safe? Knowing all along she'd leave afterwards?"

  "Somehow I doubt possums very often overplan things."

  "I thought . . ." Shaking myself out of it: "I don't know what I thought."

  "So. Dinner?"

  "Not tonight. You mind?"

  "Of course not."

  Some time after she left, second bourbon slammed down and coffee brewing, the perfect response came to me: But we slept together, you know, Miss Emily and I.

  Rooting through stacks of CDs and tapes on shelves in the front room, I found what I was looking for.

  It had been one of those drawling, seemingly endless Sunday afternoons in May. We'd grilled chicken and burgers earlier and were dipping liberally, ad lib as Val kept insisting, into the cooler for beers, bolstering such excursions with chips, dip, carrot sticks, and potato salad scooped finger-style from the bowl. Eldon sprang open the case on his Gibson, Val went inside to get the Whyte Laydie, and they started playing. I'd recently had the cassette recorder out for something or another and set it up on the windowsill in the kitchen. Just about where Miss Emily and crew went through.

  "Keep on the Sunny Side," "White House Blues," "Frankie and Albert." No matter that lyrics got scrambled, faked, or lost completely, the music kept its power.

  "We should do this more often," Val said as they took a break. I'd left the recorder running.

  "We should do this all the time." Eldon held up his jelly glass, half cranberry juice, half club soda, in salute. Only Val and I were dipping into the cooler.

  Soon enough they were back at it.

  "Banks of the Ohio," "Soldier's Joy," "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels."

  I left the tape going and went back out onto the porch. Just days ago I'd been thinking how full the house was. Now suddenly everyone was gone. Even Miss Emily. Val and Eldon shifted into "Home on the Range," Eldon, playing slide on standard guitar, doing the best he could to approximate Bob Kaai's Hawaiian steel.

  "What the hell is that you're listening to?" a voice said. "No wonder someone wants you dead, you pitiful fuck."

  Diving forward, I kicked the legs out from under the chair and he, positioned behind with the steel-wire garrote not quite in place yet, went along, splayed across the chair's back. An awkward position. Before he had the chance to correct it, I pivoted over and had an arm locked around his neck, alert to any further sound or signs of intrusion. The garrote, piano wire with tape-wound wood handles, sat at porch's edge looking like a garden implement.

  "Simple asphyxiation," Doc Oldham said an hour later.

  I do remember pulling the arm in hard, asking if he was alone, getting no answer and asking again. Was he contract? Who sent him? No response to those questions either. Then the awareness of his body limp beneath me.

  "Man obviously didn't care to carry on a conversation with you," Doc Oldham said, grabbing hold of the windowsill to pull himself erect with difficulty, tottering all the way up and tottering still once there. '"S that coffee I smell?"

  "Used to be, anyway. Near dead as this guy by now's my guess."

  "Hey, it's late at night and I'm a doctor. You think I'm so old I forgot my intern days? Bad burned coffee's diesel fuel for us— what I love most. Next to a healthy slug of bourbon."

  Meanwhile J. T. waited, coming to the realization that further black-and-whites would not be barreling up, that there were no fingerprint people or crime lab investigators to call in, no watch commander to pass things off to. It was all on her.

  She sat at the kitchen table. Doc nodded to her and said "Asphyxiation," poured his coffee and took the glass of bourbon I handed him.

  "Tough first day," I said.

  "Technically I haven't even started."

  "Hope you had a good dinner at least."

  "Smothered chicken special."

  "Guess homemaking only goes so far."

  "Give me a break, I'm still trying to find the kitchen. Speaking of which, this coffee really sucks."

  "Don't pay her any mind, Turner," Doc Oldham said, helping himself to a second cup. "It's delicious."

  "I'm assuming there's no identification," J. T. said.

  "These guys don't exactly carry passports. There's better than a thousand dollars in a money clip in his left pants pocket, another thousand under a false insole in his shoe. A driver's license that looks like it was made yesterday."

  "Which it probably was. So, we have no way to track where he might have been staying because there isn't any place to stay. And with no bus terminals or airports—"

  "No airports? What about Stanley Municipal? Crop duster to the stars."

  "—there's no paper trail." She sipped coffee and made a face. "Nothing I know is of any help here."

  "What you know is rarely important. The rest is what matters— all those hours of working the job, interviews, people you've met, the instincts nurtured by all of it. That's what you use."

  "Something you learned in psychology classes?"

  "From Eldon, actually. Spend hours practicing scales and learning songs, he said, then you get up there to play and none of it matters. Where you begin and where you wind up have little to do with one another. Meanwhile we," I said, passing it over, "do have this."

  I gave her a moment.

  "Thing you have to ask is, this is a pro, right? First to last he covers his tracks. That's what he does, how he lives. No wallet, false ID if any at all, he's a ghost, a glimmer. So why does a stub from an airline ticket show up in his inside coat pocket?"

  "Carelessness?"

  "Possible, sure. But how likely?"

  I was, after all, patently an alarmist, possibly paranoid, a man known to have accused a possum of overplanning.

  It was only the torn-off stub of a boarding pass and easily enough could have been overlooked. You glance at aisle and seat number, stick it in your pocket just in case, find it there the next time you wear that coat.

  But I wasn't running scales, I was up there on stage, playing. And judging from the light in J. T.'s eyes, she was too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  HIS NAME, or at least one of his names, was Marc Bruhn, and he'd come in on the redeye, nonstop, from Newark to Little Rock. Ticket paid in cash, round trip, no flags, whistles, or bells. These guys play everything close to the vest. Extrapolating arrival to service-desk time, despite false identification and despite Oxford, Mississippi, having been given as destination, J. T. was able to track a car rental.

  "That's the ringer, what got me onto him. Who the hell, if he's heading for Oxford, would fly into Little Rock rather than Memphis?"

  "Hey, he's from New Jersey, remember?"

  We'd found the car under a copse of trees across the lake. There was a half-depleted six-pack of bottled water on the floorboard, an untouched carton of Little Debbie cakes on the passenger seat, and a self-improvement tape in the player.

  June was able to pull out previous transactions in the name of Marc Bruhn, Mark Brown, Matt Browen, and other likely cognates. Newark International, JFK, and La Guardia; Gary, Indiana, and nearby Detroit; Oklahoma City, Dallas, Phoenix; Seattle, St. Louis, L.A.

  "That's it, that's as far as my reach goes."

  But good as J. T. and June proved to be, Isaiah Stillman was better.

  "You told me you managed a conservatorship via the Internet," I said on a visit that evening. "And that's how you put all this together."

  "Yes, sir." I'd asked him to stop the sir business, but it did no good. "I grew up limping, one leg snared forever in a modem. The Internet's the other place I live."

  I told him about Bruhn, about the killings. We were dancing in place, I said, painting by numbers, since we were pretty sure who sent him. But we hadn't been able to get past a handful of basic facts and suspicions.

  "We take the individual's right to privacy and autonomy very seriously, Mr. Turner."

  "I know."

  "On the other hand, we're in your debt. And
however we insist upon holding ourselves apart from it, this community is one we've chosen to live in, which implies certain responsibilities."

  Our eyes held, then his went to the trees about us: the rough ladder, the treehouse built for children to come.

  "Excuse me."

  Entering one of the lean-tos, he emerged with a laptop.

  "Moira tells me Miss Emily left," he said.

  "And Val."

  "Val will be back. Miss Emily won't. Marc, right? With a c or a k? B-R-U-H-N?" Fingers rippling on keys. "Commercial history—which you have already. List of Bruhns by geographical distribution, including alternate spellings . . . Here it is, narrowed down to the New Jersey-New York area. . . . You want copies of any of this, let me know."

  "I don't see a printer."

  "No problem, I can just zap it to your office, right?"

  Could he? I had no idea.

  "Now for the real fun. I'm putting in the name . . . commercial transactions we know about . . . the Jersey-New York list . . . and a bunch of question marks. Like fishhooks." His fingers stopped. "Let's see what we catch."

  Lines of what I assumed to be code snaked steadily down the screen. Nothing I could make any sense of.

  "Here we go." Stillman hit a few more keys. "Looks as though your man advertises in a number of niche publications. Gun magazines, adventure publications and the like. Not too smart of him."

  "The smart criminals are all CEOs."

  "No Internet presence that I can—" Stillman's hands flashed to the keyboard. "There's a watcher."

  I shook my head.

  "A sentinel, a special kind of firewall. The question marks I put in, the fishhooks—that was like opening up a gallery of doors. We were entering one when the alarm triggered. I hit the panic button pretty quickly, so chances are good the watcher never got a fix on me. Probably be best if I stayed offline a while, all the same." He shut the computer off and lowered the lid. "Sorry. Have a cup of tea before you go?"

  We sat on the bench, everyone else gone to bed by this time. I held the mug up close, breathing in the rich aroma, loving the feel of the steam on my face. Stillman touched me on the shoulder and pointed to the sky as a shooting star arced above the trees. Big star fallin', mama ain't long fore day . . . Maybe the sunshine'll drive my blues away. My eyes dropped to the boards nailed up over the cabin and the legend thereon. Stillman's eyes followed.

  "I've been meaning to ask you about that."

  "It went up the moment we moved in." He sipped his tea with that strange intensity he gave most everything—as though this might be the last cup of tea he'd ever drink. "From my grandmother's life, like so much else."

  Bending to lift the teapot off the ground (ceramic, thrown by Moira, lavender-glazed), he refilled our mugs.

  "Hier ist kein Warum. A guard told her that on her first morning at the camp as he brought her a piece of stale bread. There is no why here. In his own way, she said, he was being kind."

  Mind tumbling with thoughts of kindness and cruelty and the ravage of ideas, I struck out for my newly empty house, fully confident of finding the way without a guide now, though once I could have sworn I saw Nathan off in the trees watching to be sure I made it out all right. Imagined, of course. That same night I also thought I saw Miss Emily in the yard, which could have been only the shadow of a limb: wind and moonlight in uneasy alliance to take on substance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  HERB DANZIGER CALLED that morning to tell me the execution had been carried out and Lou Winter was dead. I thanked him. Herb said come see him sometime before he and his nurse ran away together. I asked how long that would be and he said it probably better be soon. I hung up, and had no idea what I felt.

  I sat thinking about a patient I had back in Memphis. He'd come in that first time wearing a five-hundred-dollar suit, silk tie, and cordovan shoes so highly polished it looked as though he were walking on two violins. "Harris. Just the one name. Don't use any others." He shook hands, sat in the chair, and said, "Ammonia."

  1 m sorry?

  "Ammonia."

  I looked around.

  "Not here. Well, yes: here. Everywhere, actually. That's the problem."

  Light from the window behind bled away his features. I got up to draw the blinds.

  "Everywhere," he said again as I took my seat. His eyes were like twin perched crows.

  Eight and a half weeks before, as he rummaged about in stacks of file boxes in the basement looking through old papers, the smell of ammonia had come suddenly upon him. There was no apparent source for it; he'd checked. But the smell had been with him ever since. He'd seen his personal physician, then by referral an internist, an allergist, and an endocrinologist. Now he was here.

  I asked the obvious question, which is mostly what therapists do: What papers had he been looking for? He brushed that aside in the manner of a man long accustomed to ignoring prattle and attending to practicalities, and went on talking about the stench, how sometimes it was overpowering, how other times he could almost pretend that it had left him.

  From session to session over a matter of weeks, as in stop-motion, I watched dress and demeanor steadily deteriorate. That first appointment had been set by a secretary. When, a couple of months in, with an emergency on my hands, I tried to call to cancel a session, I learned that Harris's phone had been disconnected. The poise and punctuality of early visits gave way to tardiness and to disjunctive dialogue that more and more resembled a single, ongoing monologue. When he paused, he was not listening for my response but for something from within himself. Trains of thought left the station without him. He began to (as a bunkmate back in country had said of the company latrines) not smell so good.

  The last time I saw him he peered wildly around the corner of the open door, came in and took his seat, and said, "I've been shot by the soldiers of Chance."

  I waited.

  "Not to death, I think—not quite. Casualties are grave, though."

  He smiled.

  "I'm bleeding, Captain. Don't know if I can make it back to camp." As he smiled again, I recalled his eyes that first time, the alertness in them, the resolve. "It was a report card," he said.

  Not understanding, I shook my head.

  "What I was looking for in the basement. It was a report card from the eighth grade, last one before graduation. Three years in junior high and I had all A's, but some of the teachers put their busy heads together and decided that wasn't such a good idea. I got my report card in its little brown envelope, opened it, and there were two B-pluses, history and math. Just like that."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Sorry. Yeah . . . You know what I did? I laughed. I'd always suspected the world wasn't screwed down so well. Now I had proof."

  After he left, I sat thinking. The world's an awfully big presence to carry a grudge against, but so many people do just that. Back in prison, the air was thick with such grudges, so thick you could barely breathe, barely make your way through the corridors, men's lives crushed to powder under the weight. On the other hand, maybe that was a part of what had motivated Harris all these years. But it gave out, quit working, the way things do.

  Just over a week later, I was notified that Harris had been picked up by police and remanded by the courts to the state hospital. Declaring that he had no family, he'd given my name. I had the best intentions of going to see him, but before I could, he broke into the janitor's supply room and drank most of a can of Drano.

  "You okay, Deputy?"

  I pushed back from the desk and swiveled my chair around. J. T. had taken to calling me that of late. What began as a passing joke, stuck. I told her about Lou Winter. She came over and put her hand on my arm.

  "I'm sorry, Dad."

  Her other hand held a sheaf of printouts.

  "So Stillman was able to zap it here."

  "It's not magic, you know."

  To this day I remain unconvinced of that. But I spent most of two hours bent over those sheets, trying to find someth
ing in them that Stillman had missed, some corner or edge sticking out a quarter-inch, any possible snag, and remembering what one of my teachers back in college used as an all-purpose rejoinder. You'd come in with some grand theory you'd sewn together and she'd listen carefully. Then when you were done, she'd say, "Random points of light, Mr. Turner. Random points of light."

  Around eleven I took my random points of light and the butt that usually went along with them down to the diner. The raging controversy of the day seemed to be whether or not the big superstore out on the highway to Poplar Bluff was ever really going to open. The lot had been paved and the foundation laid months ago, walls like massive jigsaw parts started going up, then it all slammed to a stop—because the intricate webwork of county payoffs and state kickbacks had somehow broken down, most believed. I sat over my coffee listening to the buzz around me and noticing how everything outside the window looked bleached out, as though composed of only two colors, both of them pale. But that was me, not the light.

  Where had I read the broken bottles our lives are}

  "You hear about Sissy Coopersmith yet?"

  Sy Butts slid into the booth across from me. He'd been wearing that old canvas hunting jacket since he was a kid, everyone said. Now Sy was pushing hard at sixty. Pockets meant to hold small game were long gone; daylight showed here and there like numerous tiny doorways.

  I shook my head.

  Sally brought his coffee and refilled my cup for the third or fourth time.

  "You know as how she was working as a nurse's aide, going from house to house taking care of the elderly? Had a gift for it, some said. Well, she'd been saving up her money for this seminar down West Memphis way. Last week's when it was. Got on the bus Friday morning and no one's heard a word since . . . Kind of surprised Lon and Sandra ain't been in to see you."

  "She's, what, twenty-five, twenty-six? Short of filing a missing-persons report, there's not a lot they can do."

  "Never was much they could do, with that girl. Sweet as fresh apple cider, but she had a mind of her own."

  "Some would say that's a good thing."