“It’s not that,” Dwight said. “I don’t need a shave. I need some answers, and I need them fast.”
Liz nodded. “I get it. Lon Chaney, Junior kind of stuff, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, sit down for a minute just the same. Let me get this thing good and sharp for you.”
A few minutes later, Dwight hit the streets once again.
No one in sight. Not much to hear, either. No gunning motorcycles. Only the sound of his footsteps.
He passed the diner and crossed the street to the jail. The kid’s motorcycle sat in the side lot, and Dwight grinned at the sight of it.
He flicked open Liz’s straight razor. Polished silver caught the gleam of the sun. The werewolf had stood up to Vin Miller’s fists, but Dwight wondered what the kid would do when he caught sight of a silver razor. Maybe he’d sing a different tune.
Dwight didn’t like Vin Miller, and he liked Vin Miller’s methods even less, but right now he needed some answers.
And right now, he wasn’t going to let like get in the way of need.
Dwight came through the door and saw Deputies Hastings and Rutherford with their hands in the air.
Then he saw the guns.
“Shit,” was all he said.
And the next thing he knew, he was locked up in a cell.
SIX
Vin Miller couldn’t believe it. Here he was, locked up in a jail that was more like a nuthouse.
The whole thing was loony. They’d locked up the sheriff and turned the prisoner loose in broad daylight, and the kid had hauled ass on that big motorcycle of his. Then they’d waited until morning — letting the full moon give way to sunrise — before turning over their weapons to Hastings and Rutherford.
A shotgun, a dainty little chrome-plated automatic, and Vin’s own service revolver.
That was a hell of a note. Big blonde Vera Marlowe packing Vin’s own gun. The undertaker’s daughter with that big old shotgun. The banker’s wife with that chrome-plated automatic. The three of them putting the freeze on every peace officer in town.
For a while they’d all been locked up together — Vin, the sheriff, and the three crazy broads — one in each of the jail’s five cells. Well, Dwight Cole wasn’t really locked up. Rutherford had opened his cell when the women surrendered, but the sheriff wouldn’t come out. He just sat there, looking like a man who’d been pole-axed.
And that’s when the women started in on him. Vera first, saying that she’d just been jealous, mad at the way ol’ Dwight had stopped visiting her, and she didn’t mean visiting her at the diner. She said that she didn’t care about Vin at all, said it right in front of Vin like he was the Invisible Man or something!
Christ Almighty, and Vin the guy who’d been ready to cook breakfast for her!
Then the undertaker’s daughter started in on the sheriff. She said it was a big mistake, them getting involved. She felt terrible about it, especially now that she’d heard Vera’s side of the story, and she said they were just going to have to stop meeting clandestinely. That was what she said. Clandestinely. She couldn’t leave her father alone at night, because if anything ever happened to him she’d feel just awful.
The banker’s wife had no such regrets. Except one, which was that her cell and the sheriff’s were separated by the cell that held Vin. And it was pure hell, hearing that, because Vin had tasted her warm lips when he’d given her mouth-to-mouth. He wanted to remind her of that, of how brave he’d been while capturing the fiend who ate her Chihuahua, but he just didn’t have the heart.
Women! Damn! Vin was plenty happy when the whole wild bunch of them made bail.
Still, the sheriff just sat there in the cell with the open door, that pole-axed look glued to his face, not saying a word. Not that Vin felt sorry for the idiot. Christ, he should have such problems.
It took the lady barber to get the sheriff talking. She showed up and collected her silver razor from him.
“Do you think he was a werewolf?” she asked.
“We’ll never know,” the sheriff said.
“But what do you think?”
“Why think about it? We’ll never know. It’s crazy to think about it.”
“You know,” she said, “you’re the kind of man who always waits too long, trying to figure all the angles. One day you’ll have to make a decision based on faith alone.”
He grinned. “Maybe I’ve already made my decision. Maybe I’m just sitting here waiting to tell someone about it.”
She laughed. “Right. Now tell me the one with the three bears in it.”
“You don’t give me a whole lot of credit, Liz,” the sheriff said. “Maybe — just like our werewolf — there’s a little more to me than meets the eye.” He winked at her. “But then again, maybe not.”
“That’s cute.” She flicked open her silver razor. “But let’s get one thing straight, Dwight Cole — if you come to my bed, you’d better be prepared to stay there.”
That was when Cole got up and left, arm in arm with the lady barber, and damned if Vin Miller didn’t end up thinking that it was just the opening the sheriff had been waiting for all along.
Vin didn’t even want to think about that.
So he just sat there, biding his time, flexing his muscles, hoping that the county public defender was going to be as good as that lawyer who’d gotten him off the hook in the army.
BLOOD MONEY
Her name is Jessie.
She’s about twenty-five. Dark, and thin.
Not delicate. Not that kind of thin.
Hungry thin. She can put it away. Wedged in a corner booth where no one’s likely to see her, she’s working on a lumberjack breakfast special and a side order of hashbrowns. Eggs scrambled dry and sausage and white Wonder Bread toast slathered with every pat of butter the cook put on her plate.
Damn good toast, too. Singed just past golden brown and painted slick purple with blackberry jam from little plastic containers.
Thick Jackson Pollock smears of jam. Jessie really should have gone to art school. Her mother always told her: “You’ve got an eye, dear. Other people don’t even know how to look at the things you see.”
“It’s just that they blink at the wrong times, Mom,” Jessie always answered. “They blink, and they miss the world that’s right there in front of them.”
Jessie stares at the jam. She doesn’t blink. She sees it, every gleaming smear. Darker than wine, dark as arterial blood. A color just short of black, the same color as a tattered human heart.
Just that fast her appetite is gone. She pushes the plate away and catches the attention of the restaurant’s lone waitress, a young woman about her age who is trying to brighten the day of a family whose fishing vacation has drowned in a September downpour.
Age is the only thing the two women have in common. The waitress is a granola eater. Rule of thumb for the California traveler — anywhere that redwoods grow, they grow girls just like this one. Retro-hippies with dull spacy smiles. Tie-dyed and brain-fried Jerry Garcia wetdreams.
Only Jerry has been dead a long time now.
Yeah. Jerry’s dead. But if you take a really good look at the waitress, and if you manage not to blink while you’re doing it, you can tell that he’s still alive, too.
Jessie’s stomach lurches, because Jerry’s not the only one.
The waitress tries really hard to turn on some rainy day sunshine for the vacationing family, but the suburbanites won’t give her so much as a smile. She breaks things off with a resigned shrug and slips Jessie the check on her way to the service window, then hurries off with a couple lumberjack breakfast specials for a pair of truckers on the other side of the restaurant.
At least they look like truckers. The men sit in a booth, their faces lost in shadows cast by worn ball caps, their big hands bathed in dull saffron light from a redwood and glass chandelier. Rain lashes the window on the far side of the booth, but neither man pays any attention to the storm outside. After all,
this is Northern California, home of the banana slug. Up here, mildew is a way of life.
Jessie stares past the men, through the window. She doesn’t want to go outside. Putting it in artistic terms, it’s much too Emily Carr for her tastes. Which is to say that its extremely north woods impressionistic — sky the color of a dead man’s flesh, decaying horizon bleeding cold water, redwood forest on the other side of the highway dense, black, forbidding.
But Jessie doesn’t have far to go now, and at least with some breakfast in her belly she isn’t liable to faint on the way. How to get where she’s going is the question. She doesn’t have a car, and the parking lot doesn’t exactly present many possibilities. A couple motor homes, and the soggy tourists that match up to them don’t look like their Christian charity would extend as far as Jessie. Besides the condos-on-wheels, there are several trucks. Mostly chromed-to-the-tits Peterbilts. A couple of the tractors are empty. Those with loads are hauling dead redwood trees.
That’s a crime in itself to some, but not all. If the deadhead waitress is ecologically minded, she’s forgotten about it. Little Ms. Earth Mama is flirting with the truckers for all she’s worth — coy and carefree, like she just burned her Earth First! membership card.
Tips in this joint, they must come few and far between. The little waitress is giving it her best. Jessie can see that. She knows how hard a buck comes for most people these days.
Yeah. Money comes hard for most.
But not for all.
Jessie looks at her check. Lumberjack breakfast special and a side order of hashbrowns and coffee. Six bucks and change.
Jessie has money. Money that came the hard way. She’s got seventy-seven bucks in the left pocket of her black leather jacket. Lapel on the left side, there’s nine hundred jammed into a rip in the seam. Six thousand in big bills stuffed in a tear in the inside lining. Plus seven hundred split between her boots, and that’s a bitch. Her boots are too small to begin with.
One last sip of coffee before she goes. One of the truckers cracks a tree-hugger joke and the waitress laughs like she’s never even heard of Greenpeace. Hell, a couple thousand dead trees here and there, what does it matters The cafe walls are lined with dead redwood. Like anywhere else, up here life is all about money and how to get more of it. Everyone’s got to make a dollar — hard or easy — and everyone knows how it’s done in the Pacific Northwest.
You grow something, you cut it down, you sell it. Redwoods or dope. Take your pick. And that’s just what is happening now. Because the waitress is slipping money to one of the drivers, trading him cash for a Ziplock bag of California’s finest…
The big man slides the greenbacks into the pocket of his flannel shirt. “Darlin’, I’ll bet you had to carry a hell of a lot of bacon and eggs for that cash.”
“I’m in the wrong business.”
“You got that right. What you need is a growth opportunity.”
“What? Forty acres? Sensimilla?”
“Hell no. I’ll grow the dope. You grow the babies.”
Laughter splashes dry redwood walls. The waitress and the truck driver, both of them laughing hard while his hand strokes her flat young belly.
His fingers find a piercing there. That’s no surprise. After all, the waitress is one of Jerry’s kids. Garcia himself would have admired the silver belly button ring that twinkles in the saffron light, and the trucker is of the same mind. His thick finger flips the fragile hoop up and down and the waitress doesn’t do anything but laugh some more.
The man’s head tilts back as he eyes the waitress. Light spills from the redwood chandelier above, misses his face, bathes his neck…
Jessie shivers.
There’s a swastika tattooed over the man’s carotid artery.
Quickly, Jessie slides out of the booth. It’s time to go. No one’s looking at her. Everyone’s looking at the waitress, at the truck driver, at his hand on the young woman’s belly.
Everyone’s looking at that little silver ring.
Jessie wads the six-bucks-and-change check into a ball and stuffs it into the pocket of her leather jacket, the same pocket that holds seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks. Twenties and fifties pinch her toes as she passes by the unattended cash register, jilting it cold.
She slips through the door. She squints against the storm. Almost looks back. Doesn’t. Her face is suddenly cold. As cold as the face of a dead man Jessie used to know, his heart splattered slick purple by shotgun fire, his dead eyes staring up at a man with a swastika tattooed on his neck.
Inside the restaurant, no one is laughing anymore.
The man with the tattoo smiles at the waitress.
He says, “Now about this girl we’re looking for… ”
Raindrops lash Jessie’s brow. The sour taste of coffee is gone from her mouth, but the taste of blackberry jam is heavy on her tongue.
Crossing the parking lot, she digs the unpaid check out of her pocket and drops it in a puddle. It wouldn’t take much to square things. Six bucks and change. Maybe a buck tip.
If the waitress was lucky — really lucky — she might pass those greenbacks to a customer when she made change. But on a day like today, when the rain comes in buckets, business is sure to slow down. That money could sit in the till for hours, until the cafe doors flew open and the storm blew inside, and a man with skin the color of a rainy sky burst into the cafe, and the little waitress took one look at him and screamed.
Because that man’s heart is a gleaming blackberry tangle in his tattered chest…
He’s a dead man who’s still alive…
A man Jessie can see in her mind’s eye…
The highway is a river. Jessie stares at the dark forest on the other side. Wet in there, sure. But not as wet as out here. She’ll crawl into the dark, wait until the man with the tattoo and his buddy hit the road —
A voice from behind.
“Hey.”
Jessie doesn’t want to hear that word so she walks faster, but a hand drops on her shoulder and spins her around. The guy with the swastika tattoo smiles at her. His buddy smiles, too.
“What do you think, Smitty?” Tattoo says.
“I think sixty miles haven’t changed her all that much.”
“Yeah,” Tattoo says. “But maybe we should make us some changes now, though. The kind she won’t forget.”
“You’ve got the wrong woman,” Jessie says, dropping her head so her long hair hides her face. She shrugs the guy off and digs her hands into her coat pockets as she turns.
Tattoo grabs her again. Spins her again, harder this time. “I don’t think you could forget me,” he says. “The name’s Larry Oates. I’m the guy who shotgunned your boyfriend, remember?”
Jessie remembers, all right. Raw hatred boils inside her. She spits in Oates’ face, and he shoves her, and she stumbles back and ends up behind one of the mobile homes.
Even if they were looking, the people in the restaurant couldn’t see her now. But the tourists aren’t the only ones missing out on the action. Oates is missing out, too. He takes hold of Jessie’s leather lapels and pulls her so close that he doesn’t even see the butterfly knife in her hand.
Chinkchink. The knife spits blade and Jessie jams it into Oates’ gut.
“Shit,” Smitty says. “Shit!” But Oates doesn’t say a word. All he does is grunt, staring straight into Jessie’s cool gray eyes, holding tight to her black leather lapels as she drives the blade deep and he grunts again —
Scarred knuckles bang the side of Jessie’s head and her knees turn to jelly. Smitty’s fist pounds another hard shot to the temple as she sags. Oates just stands there, trying to hold Jessie by her black leather lapels, but her legs are gone now and she’s real heavy for such a little chick — she’s just dead weight, Oates thinks, oh is that a laugh, this chick’s dead weight and my guts are washing away in the rain — and wet leather slips through his fingers as Jessie sinks away and he has to let her drop and the last thing he sees is a tight rol
l of bills squirming from the ripped seam of her left lapel, coaxed free by one of his fingers.
Oates opens his mouth, but pain strangles his words. The money squirms loose and he can’t close his fingers around it and the whole roll slips away and falls along with the girl and —
Smitty’s panicking. Oates knows that’s the wrong thing to do. He tries to focus, looking down, searching for the money —
But all he sees are the chrome grips of the girl’s butterfly knife sticking out of his belly. Then he’s down on his knees face to face with the girl — who’s also on her knees — but her eyes are blank slate and he knows she can’t see him.
Smitty’s fists have seen to that. The chick is out like a light. She falls backward and her head thuds against the pavement. Oates falls forward, on top of her.
The split butt of the butterfly knife jams against the hard ridge of the girl’s ribcage and the hilt of the knife follows the blade into Oates’ belly.
The point of the blade drives through his guts and nips his spinal column on the way through his backside.
The girl’s warm breath washes Oates’ cheek. It tickles — even through the pain it goddamn tickles — and Oates almost has to laugh.
He doesn’t. He manages to restrain himself, because right now laughing would hurt way too fucking much, like losing the goddamn money. Instead, he tries to rise. Blood drips from his lips, splatters the girl’s forehead, washes away in the rain —
The wad of bills rolls along the sloping pavement, carried across the yellow lines that separate empty parking spaces by a rippling stream of rainwater veined with Larry Oates’ blood.
Oates crawls after the money, but his buddy grabs him.
“Don’t try to move, man!” Smitty says.
Pain clamps Oates’ jaws. Smitty doesn’t see the goddamn money… and Oates has to tell him about it… but he can’t even say a word.
The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists Page 13
