by Jack Kerley
“Them and Us,” Harry said, turning off the computer with a sigh. “Can’t beat the old favorites.”
Chapter 21
After a night of the deepest sleep in a month I awakened to the sound of piccolos being assaulted by tubas. I pushed aside the curtains. Outside in the street was Miz Best and the improbable dog, Mr Mix-up. True to its multispecies make-up, the ridiculous beast was squealing one moment like a lap poodle, roof-ing the next like a basset.
I went to the kitchen and ate a banana – 100 per cent natural and organic – popped my B-vites and ginseng and turned up the TV to block out the idiot mongrel. Ten minutes later I was leaving, hair shower-wet, shirt unbuttoned, stepping into shoes as I walked out the door. Miz Best had walked to the beach and was on her return trip. Part of the dog must have been Lab, because it was sopping from a plunge in the water. It saw me and exploded from Miz Best’s hand, dashing across the sand like I was a bowl of gravy. It ran two circles around me, planted its feet in the sand, and shook. Water rained from every direction.
I looked at Miz Best. Her eyes were worried.
“Sorry, Carson. Mr Mix-up doesn’t usually go to strangers. You’re the first person he’s run toward. Mr Mix-up’s running out of days and we can’t find him a home. He’s too odd-looking, I think. You know anyone who wants a dog?”
I looked at the star-crossed critter, whomping its feet into the sand while its tongue lolled, alternately squealing and roof-ing, wanting me to touch it or whatever they want.
“Sorry, Miz Best,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets. “He’ll have to take his chances like the rest of us.”
On the way in I stopped at my standard convenience store. Having been made more nutritionally aware by Fossie, I got a banana and a Clif’s bar. My eyes did the usual scan of the newspapers. A headline caught my eye:
Rumors of Scaler’s Mystery Meeting Before Death
The subhead read: Famous Preacher Seeing Woman?
I sat out in my truck, chomping and reading. The details were squishy: police suspected Scaler might have met someone at the cabin that night, odds were it was a woman. But the copy made no mention of a dominatrix and the rest of the sordid actuality. I imagined an enterprising reporter had gotten wind that a couple of detectives wanted to question a woman in conjunction with Scaler’s death, put two and two together.
Though I had no love for Scaler and his hard-line, uncompromising ilk, I hoped the story would go no further. It would be tough enough on his wife to have the suspicion of an affair out there, far worse if the reality was known.
Harry had to prepare for a court appearance on one of the murders we’d investigated a couple months back. I was feeling more energetic than I had in days, wondering if all I’d needed was sleep, vitamins and a better diet.
I decided to head up to Holman Prison and confront Donnie Kirkson, the guy in Ben Belker’s surreptitious photos, the one biker who had any interest in Terry Lee Bailes.
At Holman, a guard was assigned to accompany me. After passing through a series of barred doors and gates, I stopped and looked out a grated window to the yard. It was like recess in one of Dante’s circles of Hell: a couple hundred cons, their shadows extended in the late-afternoon sun. Most had self-segregated into the three primary tribes: white, black and Hispanic. They were hanging out on tables or flipping a basketball or spotting one another while pumping iron. A trio of black guys jogged the perimeter, brown dust flapping from their feet as they padded by below, cutting a hard right to give wide berth to a man on a chinning bar.
The guy weighed three hundred pounds and was chinning all of them easily, his biceps as round as phone poles. His body shone with sweat and his shaved head glowed in the sunlight. I saw a slight black guy mince to the monster. The little guy made some form of entreaty to the hulk swinging on the bar. Without breaking his fluid motion, the behemoth said something brief and the little guy clapped and skittered away.
“Who’s that on the chin bar?” I asked the guard.
“Thunderhead Wallace. An’ it looks like he’s got a date for later.”
“Thunderhead?”
The guard grinned and clenched his fist, letting his arm dangle between his legs for a second.
“Boy’s got a wang that’d shame Johnny Wadd. Likes to polish the internal plumbing of a whole stable of punks. ’Bout the only time he ain’t fucking something is out there in the yard.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Accomplice on a bank heist put him here, but he also has priors for indecent exposure and bestiality.” The guard chuckled. “If you can believe it, ol’ Thunderhead got caught at a cattle farm –”
I held up my hand. “I’ll pass on the details. You know much about Kirkson?”
“A nasty little shit who hangs with the Aryan Nation types, thinks he’s something. The girl he took to the motel and soaked with alcohol? Same age as my daughter. I’d like to get Thunderhead to take Kirkson to a motel.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I said to him, feeling an odd notion bubble to the top of my brain, a thought encircled with inspirational light.
The guard looked from side to side. Didn’t see any supervisors.
“I mean ever’ goddamn word, buddy.”
I thought for a few more moments as we walked, pulled the guard aside before we got to the block. We spoke briefly, me laying out my case, maybe embellishing a few points. He took me to an office, set me in the chair, said, “Third drawer on the left, in the file marked Transfer Directives.” He added the word, “Hurry,” and stepped outside, looking up and down the hall before closing the door.
I was out in under a minute, patting my pocket. The guard was looking the other direction; he said, “I never saw anything.”
“Of course,” I said, following him to a holding area, a gray-walled ten-by-ten cell with a table and three chairs waiting. I sat and drummed my fingers on the tabletop while Kirkson was fetched from his cage. He’d added a few pounds since the photos with Bailes; prison food does that, starch and carbs. But he’d kept the muscle def; under his dirty yellow mullet I could see hard shoulders and a thick neck. His arms were ropy and heavily inked. He preferred to lean against the wall rather than sit. He lit a Marlboro. I asked him about Terry Lee Bailes.
“I’m not sure I remember that name,” Kirkson smirked, true to form.
“Come on, Donnie. Let’s not start our relationship on a false note. I’ve got pictures of you two together. What was Bailes like?”
Kirkson blew out smoke and grinned at the ceiling. The smartass was thinking deal time. This was a guy who’d plied a confused fifteen-year-old runaway with alcohol and taken her to a motel for four days. Now he expected us to fix things so he got time off for talking about Bailes.
“What was who like?” Kirkson said.
When I said nothing, Kirkson sneered. “What’s in it for me? You better be talking time off. Big time off, you got that?”
“I can find others who knew Bailes,” I said.
“Sure,” Kirkson taunted. “That’s why you’re here. I’ll say it one last time: What’s in it for me?”
I pulled a trifolded page from my pocket, snapped it open. It was yellow, a page from a carbon duplicate form. It was a bogus transfer, a cell-reassignment form. I’d filled it out all by myself, signing the warden’s name with a big wardenly flourish.
“What’s that?” Kirkson grinned. “The deal that tells me I’m outta here in six months? It fuckin’ better be.”
I handed Kirkson the sheet. He was still grinning as he started reading, but was staring wide-eyed and gap-mouthed by the time he reached the warden’s sig at the bottom.
“You…can’t do this,” he stammered.
“It’s already done, Donnie,” I said, my turn to smirk. “Your new bed is being made as we speak.”
“My lawyer won’t let –”
I leaned against the wall and folded my arms. “You’re between lawyers, Donnie. Remember? One quit in disgust. Then you fired t
wo in a row. It’ll take days for the court to appoint new counsel. Sleep tight.”
“It’s a fucking set-up. A lie!”
I shook the page in the air. “Official form, official signature.”
“No way. It’s like a death sentence!”
“Not if you play your cards right, Donnie-boy,” I crooned. “I suggest you shave your legs, practice your pucker, and invest heavily in Vaseline. Or maybe motor oil. Word has it Thunderhead Wallace likes to drive all night.”
“You filthy son of a bitch. You BASTARD!”
“Hey!” the guard outside yelled. “Keep it down, Kirkson. Or you’ll go back to your cell. I hear you’re getting a new one.”
“On your way to your new cell, Donnie…” I said, putting the page in my pocket like I was preparing to leave, “you might want to stop at the commissary and get that Vaseline. They sell it in fifty-gallon drums?”
“THIS AIN’T AMERICAN!”
I reached out and hooked my finger into Kirkson’s front pocket and drew him so close I could smell the fear rising from his armpits.
“Really, Donnie? In my America, thirty-one-year-old men take fifteen-year-old runaways to a shelter or a social worker, they don’t fill them with vodka and take them to a motel.”
I poked Kirkson backward with a stiff finger. He grunted, spun away, and sucked the cig to the filter, squished the butt on the floor. When he turned his eyes showed surrender.
“Terry Lee was a fuck-up, all right? He was like a big stupid kid. Why you need to know about him?”
“If he was such a fuck-up,” I asked, “why were you friends with him?”
Kirkson shrugged, studied the floor. He actually seemed confused by my question.
“I always kind of felt sorry for Terry Lee. We both had shit for families. He was so fucking ugly and always trying to be cool and say the right words and act like some kind of stone killer, a mad dog.”
“He wasn’t?”
“Terry Lee Bailes was a Chihuahua with a loud bark. He looked the look and talked the talk, but he couldn’t walk the walk. Underneath all that leather and ink was pure chickenshit.”
It didn’t make sense. No chickenshit would slip past hospital security, steal a kid, then, cornered, try to leap to a grisly death. I put my hand on the chair behind Kirkson, leaned close.
“Bailes tried to steal a kid from a hospital, Donnie. When someone got in his way and the event went south, Bailes grinned and tried to jump out a fifth-floor window. No second thoughts about taking the long dive to the bottom floor.”
Kirkson looked at me. “Wait a minute. You mean you didn’t find it out?”
“Find out what?”
“When you did the thing with the…” Kirkson made a knife-cut motion from his groin up to his neck.
“The post-mortem?” I said. “The autopsy? Those things take a few days to get to, Donnie. Thanks to great citizens like you, there’s a stack of dead bodies at the morgue. It’s a take-a-number operation.”
He grinned. “That explains it.”
I jammed him into the wall. “EXPLAINS WHAT?”
He held his hands in front of his face. “Take it fucking easy – Jesus! Terry Lee was dying. He had cancer in something by his liver. It always kills you. It hurts like hell and you die screaming.”
“Pancreatic cancer?”
“That’s the shit. Terry Lee visited here a week back and told me. He was crying like a fucking baby. I told him to man up, live the rest of his life like there was nothing to lose.” He grinned. “Cuz there wasn’t.”
Chapter 22
Heading back to Mobile, my heart started pounding like a drum and my skin felt tight. I figured it was the irritation of highway driving, an idiot behind every third steering wheel and slowmoving semi-rigs backing traffic up for miles.
I veered down a ramp and took the back roads south, driving through piney woods with trees straight as arrows, crossing slender bridges over black-water swamps. I roared around a bend and saw a typical roadhouse bar, a mason-block building with painted-over windows and a heavy metal door. A sign saying Al’s Hideaway hung over the door on a rusting iron frame. A dozen pickups and cars were on the dusty, crushed-gravel lot. A portable sign near the road proclaimed Big Picher of Beer $8.
I was thirsty and hot and what energy I’d had was fading. I veered into the lot beside the building, skidding sideways in the gravel.
It was as cold as a refrigerator inside. Three men sat at the bar, another five played cards in a back booth. Two chalked cues and stalked pool balls at a table. I heard a decades-old Conway Twitty song on the juke: “It’s Only Make Believe”.
Eyes found me, held for an evaluative two-count, turned back to the serious work of heavy drinking.
The man behind the bar was a porcine guy in his thirties, a bandana covering his pumpkin head. His shirt advertised Colt Arms. His voluminous jeans were held aloft by a black leather belt clasped by an ornate silver buckle big as a dessert plate. He was pulling beers from cases at his feet and racking them in a cooler. He didn’t look happy at being distracted from his labor, muttering shit and padding over.
“Whatcha need?” he asked.
“A couple RCs. And a half-pint of Maker’s.”
He reached in a cooler, scrabbled through some bottles, produced two RCs, dropping them in a bag with the bourbon.
I headed toward my truck and put the bottles in the passenger seat. I heard a bite of tires on asphalt as a big-ass Dodge Ram veered on to the lot. The driver gunned the engine for no reason but to announce arrival. He swerved to send a rolling cloud of dust my way and jammed the brakes to skid to a stop. A bumper sticker said, DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-EAT SHIT. In the back window was a Confederate battle flag, only at the crossing of the bars was the grinning face of country singer Hank Williams, Jr. The license plate was from Ohio.
Ohio?
The door pushed open and out jumped a jostling beer belly overlaying a large frame, six three or four. The belly’s owner had a wide chest and heavy biceps, and I took him for a laborer on a construction site or maybe a loading dock. He looked at me, seemed to sneer at the sports jacket, like I was a lost tourist. He flicked his cigarette to the dirt, hawked up a gob of phlegm, fired it at the butt, missed by two feet.
The passenger was smaller, with tight tiny eyes and dirty fingernails tapping the side of the truck. His wispy beard, long trailing mustache, and hard-edged face made my neurons fire three random words: syphilitic hillbilly Confucius.
“Get a case for the cooler, Beefer,” Syphilucius whined, a nasal wind as flat and nonmusical as air dribbled from a balloon, the tone straight from the plains of a Midwest backcountry nowhere.
Beefer. I looked at the driver and the name fit, probably applied while a high-school lineman pushing aside smaller players like a fat bull, stomping their ankles when he saw the chance. He maybe went on to some second-tier college on scholarship, but found that elbow-spearing opposing players’ necks didn’t make up for slow legs and an inability to remember the play-book.
I looked at the sullen, obnoxious Beefer. My eyes went to the comedic flag on the cab and the bumper sticker. I looked at the license plate. I felt a fast and scarlet anger sizzle through my guts and a deep thrumming in my brain. Normally I would have pushed the irritation out with a few quick breaths, moved on. But something kept my feet planted.
“Hey, buddy,” I called to the wide back.
He turned. Eyes squinted in a flat red face. “Huh? You talkin’ to me?”
I nodded at the flag in the rear window. “I like the flag. Looks good.”
He was pissed at my stepping into his day, bewildered by what seemed a compliment to his truck’s attire. It was a wash, so he nodded, turned away toward the roadhouse.
I said, “Hey, buddy.”
He stopped, wheeled. This time there was no confusion, only ire.
“What now?” he growled, squaring in my direction and pulling off his shades. I removed my sunglasses, absent-minded
ly polishing them on my shirtfront.
“What’s it mean to you?” I asked, looking at my glasses, not him.
“What the hell you talking about?”
“The Stars’n’Bars. The flag of the Confederate States of America. What does it mean?”
“It means I’m a rebel. That’s what it fuckin’ means.”
I puffed breath over my lenses, studied them closely. Resumed polishing. “What are you rebelling against?” I asked.
He moved two steps my way, fists closing. “Stop with the fucking questions, freak. You got a problem with my flag?”
“Your flag?” I twirled the glasses in my fingers and nodded toward his bumper. “But the license tag says Ohio.”
“So the fuck what?”
“Ohio was a member of the Union,” I explained quietly. “Not the Confederacy.”
He moved closer, now a half-dozen feet away. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Get outta my face before you get hurt.”
I turned and took the three steps to my truck, opened the door, set the shades inside. Closed the door and turned slowly back to the Beefer.
“What was the capital of the Confederacy, Rebel Boy? It’s what any Southerner would know. I won’t ask you what famous battle was fought in Manassas, Virginia. I won’t ask you the year the war began. Just prove you know enough about the Confederacy to tell me its capital.”
“What is your fucking problem, asshole?”
“Children who play games with symbols they don’t understand.”
“Fuck him up, Beef,” the guy in the truck tittered. “Fuck him up bad.”
I’d had enough of Confucius and headed that way, but was sucker-punched in the side by Beefer, faster than I thought he’d be. His grapefruit-sized fist knocked me sideways.
I dropped to one knee, gasping. He circled around my back to put a kick into my kidney, but I surprised him my diving toward him, grabbing his foot at toe and heel and twisting with all I had. It brought him down like a sack of wet manure and he swung his fist as he fell, the punch hitting my shoulder. I didn’t want to match strength to strength so I blunted two roundhouse swings, head low, looking for the moment.
