Worm

by Anthony Neil Smith

  Russell washed his hands while Hunter babbled like they were still alone. “After this, you want to get a pizza with us? We can get it at Domino’s and eat in the truck.”

  Russell grabbed too many paper towels, wadded his hands dry, then walked out, back to the table, a fresh beer waiting for him and fresh Pauline, scrubbing make-up off her face with a bar napkin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  It wasn’t exactly “life” the way people thought about life. More like a zoo animal. Wake up, eat, go to work, come home, eat, go to sleep, repeat. Make all the jokes you want about that being exactly like life for most working-class folks, but that means forgetting the things in-between that make you smile and laugh, ache and sigh, that make you need a cigarette. After a few weeks, you even forgot the mindless conversations that used to come easily. What they were about never mattered. It was having them that mattered. And now Ferret wasn’t having them with anyone.

  Not even the police. Anymore.

  The first couple of weeks, Ferret was at the station most days, trying to help, trying to pry info from tight-lipped cops. The Feds had to come in for this one. Each round of questioning, same questions, different wording, the tones switching up—understanding, aggressive, exhausted, firm, sometimes even light-hearted if the cop was stupid enough. What sort of move was that?

  Ferret didn’t realize his “help” was actually “helping” them build a case against him. Didn’t matter what he’d told them, who he’d pointed to—without telling them he’d been driving cars packed with money and meth. It wouldn’t make sense to put himself behind bars when he needed to be out looking for Dee Dee.

  After work, a call to the detective in charge. Fucker named Little John Ford. Seriously. And he ran through what the cops had done that day, even if it was something like, “Got a warrant for your trailer. We bagged a lot of possible evidence.” Also, “We talked to your ex-bandmates and some ex-girlfriends, looking for patterns.” And, the heartbreaker, “We spoke to your father-in-law about your wife’s agoraphobia, and your reaction to it.” Ferret would say, almost every time, “I didn’t hurt my wife,” because he couldn’t bring himself to say “kill” because she couldn’t be dead.

  Yes, the police had trashed his trailer, taken so much it didn’t feel like home anymore. He saw the math on the wall. He wouldn’t be able to afford it without the cash, which he couldn’t go anywhere near anyway, since there was always at least two cops or agents or whoever watching him. Every day, every move. Probably while he slept at night, too, even though he was down to about three or four hours, passed out on the couch.

  Finally, after a Christmas that wasn’t a Christmas, he moved out, left most of the furniture and clothes and toys to whoever came next. His presents to Violet, who was taken from him by Dee Dee’s parents without them asking permission—Little John Ford told him to get real when he tried to complain—all returned unopened. Three boxes worth. His phone calls with her, very short, getting shorter each time, because her grandmother insisted it had to be on speaker phone. Grandmother guided his baby girl’s answers. Manipulation. Poisoning her mind. The very thing they were trying to claim Ferret might do to her. “In her best interest, Finn. You understand, don’t you?”

  Of course it was. It sucked to admit it.

  Ferret moved back into the man camp, a new room, the mattress full of some washout’s odor—smoke and beer-sweat. A week’s worth of work clothes to his name. Two pairs of boots. Some sweatshirts. Some CDs and DVDs, or at least the cases with nothing in them. And a coat that wasn’t worth a damn in this weather, but at least the washout had left a company coat in the closet. Since Dee Dee had left, he’d been numb. No changes to the routine. No concept of time. No reason to live beyond how he was told to.

  After work, driving. Driving on shitty, icy roads. Driving all over. He wouldn’t know where to get out and start looking for her. All he did was drive and think really hard. Where the fuck would she be? Right? Jesus, where the fuck am I going to find her?

  Driving, in a fall barn coat over a hoodie, with the heater roaring, cheeks flushed, his lips cracked, absolutely lost without Dee Dee. And in the rearview, always now, the headlights of some unmarked lawman’s SUV.

  *

  So, the in-laws.

  The call had been more awful than he had expected. Everything Lee had ever thought about him but never said, there it was. A purge of it, all held back throughout these long years by Dee Dee’s loving grace. But now, Jesus Goddamn Christ.

  Ferret was still with the police at the school ten hours later when Lee showed up, wearing a suit and tie, for fuck’s sake. He found Little John and his Captain, introduced himself without ever looking at Ferret. Not one word. It wasn’t long after that Ferret lost track of Violet. All Lee’s fault. He had a cop drive her to the Grand Williston Hotel, where her grandmother was waiting for her. The next time Ferret saw her, three days later, it was an hour before her and her grandmother left for the airport. Ferret had no idea. Grandmother Isabelle sat on a couch in the lobby while Ferret and Violet talked.

  “Please bring Mommy back, Daddy. They said you’re the only one who knows where she is.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t.”

  “Please bring her back. Please don’t hurt her.” She believed it. They’d gotten to her, just short of calling her father a murderer, but they’d gotten to her. “Please. “

  “I’ll find her.”

  It was a stupid promise. It was the only one he could give her.

  And then she was gone. Days later, Lee finally said to him, “You’ll never see that girl again.”

  Lee stuck around. Was still around. He’d downgraded to a cheaper hotel, but he was always there, always at the station, always on the news, always meeting with agents and cops and lawyers and private eyes, always wearing his goddamned suit.

  At one of those meetings with a private eye, Ferret was told, “Move on. You’re going to make a mistake eventually. They’re going to catch you. They just want the body, for fuck’s sake. Can’t you give them that and then hit the road?”

  Ferret turned to his father-in-law, who rested one hand on top of the other like this particle-board table was at the White House rather than in a Marriott conference room.

  “Jesus, Lee, I don’t know how else to say it. I didn’t kill Dee. I loved Dee. She was everything to me and I’m all out of surprise. Work with me, please. Don’t do this.”

  Lee sniffed. Stared at his hands. Finally managed to clear his throat and say, “If you tell me where she is right now, I’ll give you a three-day head start.”

  Ferret left the room without another word. He went back to his trailer and stayed there. Two days, two nights. Didn’t eat. Didn’t drink. Didn’t sleep much. It took a visit from Pancrazy to bring him back to the surface. The driller showed up, told him, “Innocent til proven guilty,” and told him to get back to work.

  That’s what he did.

  *

  He took extra shifts. He ate one meal a day. He drove most of the night, always shadowed. He worked himself numb in the cold until Pancrazy gave him a decent pair of gloves. Then he worked even harder as the weather got worse. Heavier snow, stronger winds, packing into ice on the ground, on the casings, on the trucks, on the pumps...

  Driving. Several spinouts because he kept falling asleep. Driving. Stuck in snow banks. No help from his constant shadow as he dug out. Driving. Damn near to Canada one night. That got him a flash from the high-beams. Cross that line, shit hits the fan. But he never crossed it. Driving. Montana. Driving. South Dakota. Driving. Parking in front of the school, same spot as Dee Dee’s car before they’d towed it away.

  Until one night, no wind, no snow, just a full moon reflecting off the snow, making one in the morning feel like midday, he put on his blinker and pulled onto the shoulder of the Interstate. Just him and oil trucks this late, and the unmarked SUV a quarter-mile behind, also signaling and pulling over.

  Grief can fuck with you. In the movies, you do
n’t have time to let it fuck with you. You want revenge, you go get it. But in real life, it’s never that clear cut. There are always more people than the core cast of characters. The idea of some random lunatic making off with Dee Dee had begun to make a lot more sense all these weeks later. Ferret had been so busy trying to get the cops off his own back that he’d never considered—fuck, of course he had considered, but wouldn’t the cops have looked at that, too? How could they have missed it? There were tapes from the grocery store. There were eyewitnesses from the school’s Halloween party. And just look at that guy.

  The fuck hadn’t he gone after Bad Russell for this yet?

  Ferret sat, engine off, fogging up the windows. The chain of evidence. Was it there? Was he getting desperate? Did it fucking matter?

  Ferret rubbed his watery eyes before they froze shut. He started up the truck and U-turned, headed back to the man camp, and went to bed. First time in weeks he slept. He dreamed of something—a long trip, him and Dee Dee arguing about if they were going to miss the flight, but the walk to the gate kept going, like, miles—but by the time the alarm rang he’d forgotten all about it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Hunter felt bad for Ferret, he did indeed. Real bad. The bad had been eating him up inside, which is why he had smoked crystal lately, to try and feel better while he figured out if there was a way to fix what someone else had broken.

  But first things first. Pauline called him Hunter. Pauline didn’t even know that his friends called him Bad Russell, except for Good Russell, who called him Hunter, too. And he liked that. He liked that this girl didn’t know anything except what he’d wanted her to. He liked that she trusted him, as long as kept his word and paid her what he’d promised.

  She was the type, you know, that looked like a stripper when she was stripping, but offstage could’ve been the girl next door. A bit too old for his tastes, but she really was a college student doing this for money, and when she wasn’t doing it, she didn’t wear any make-up and she was near-sighted. She needed those glasses. She liked fleece and khakis. Pass her on the street, and you’d never think “exotic dancer.”

  Which is exactly why Hunter had hired her. See, once Missus Ferret figured out the following her around thing, he had to cut back. It didn’t matter that he was following her for a good reason. Having someone to watch over you wasn’t the worst thing for a woman to have in Williston, no it wasn’t. Still, like the psychos say, perception is more important than reality. How you feel matters more than what’s really going on. He didn’t understand it, because that was stupid. Stupid things shouldn’t make sense. But it made sense to everyone else, or most everyone else, and so Hunter had to accept it and move on.

  Instead, he gave Pauline a hundred bucks a day to keep an eye on Dee Dee when she wasn’t at work or home. And, yeah, some free bumps of crystal. He didn’t approve of her doing the shit, but whatever it took.

  Of course it was impossible, or very nearly so, to guess all her comings and goings, and this wasn’t a full-time position. The best he could do was tell Pauline to make sure Dee Dee and the girl got to the school every morning, and then make sure she got home again in the afternoon after shopping or getting her nails done or whatever moms and daughters did in their spare time. Yogurt. Walmart. Shoe shopping.

  Tops, Pauline was watching a couple of hours a day except on weekends. Hunter still took some shifts now and then when it was most likely he wouldn’t be seen. Should anything happen while Pauline was watching, all she had to do was text him a whole string of XXXs and the location.

  When it finally happened, he still had to call her back because he’d forgotten to tell her to tell him what was happening. Again, stupid. Stupid things don’t make sense. Next time, then.

  Backtrack some first. Let’s not get ahead of the train.

  When Pauline asked why this woman and her kid needed following, Hunter had told her the truth. There were two truths, really, and he told her both.

  When Pauline asked what to do if she was spotted, he had shrugged and said, “Guess I’ll hire someone else until she’s spotted them all.”

  When Pauline asked if maybe she needed a gun or something, he had shaken his head. “Just roll up the car window. You’ll be fine.”

  Hunter wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if she’d gotten herself shot. But Pauline didn’t get a gun and she didn’t get shot. She had a rape whistle and a can of pepper spray. They stayed safely tucked inside her bookbag the whole time. After a couple of weeks plus a few days, she had to send the XXXs. It was morning. She had followed Dee Dee and Violet—not that she knew their names—to the school, and now she was sending XXXs.

  *

  When the police finally spoke to Hunter several days after the disappearance, it was just routine, trying to get any sort of angle on the husband. Hunter knew that’s all he was to them, a character witness. But Hunter had gotten off on a tangent, talking about the oil boom, how it fucked with men’s minds. He had stomped his boot for emphasis—at the well, monitoring the trucks, monitoring the pumps, keeping the circle of energy chasing its own tail. Like, think about it, he told the detective, this Little John guy, “Think about all these trucks hauling water and sand and oil, all these trucks pumping right now, all that gasoline being burnt up right now trying to get more gasoline out of the ground. I sometimes wonder if the higher-ups can’t do math.”

  Seriously—how much gas got burned while they were trying to find more gas?

  Little John and the uniform with him just looked at each other, that look that said I think we’ve got us a genius here.

  What they really wanted to know, really really wanted to know, was if he had seen Finn—Ferret, Ferret—that day. “Was he with you? Was he late? Was he acting suspicious? Have you noticed Finn talking to any suspicious characters? Suspicious minds?”

  No, not those exact words. And at the end, Hunter was thinking of Elvis, but mainly he knew Little John’s was the way thinking worked in the police brains. Ferret must’ve either done took his own wife, or gotten some unknown person to do it for him. A stupid way of thinking. It didn’t make any sense, not if you knew Ferret. But they didn’t know Ferret.

  Hunter did, and this was how he lived up to his nickname, the “Bad” part of it, because he could’ve said some things right then and there that would’ve changed the whole investigation. Would it have saved Missus Ferret? At that moment, Bad Russell couldn’t—wouldn’t—say, but he knew damn well if he had told them what he’d learned from Pauline, he would end up in jail, as would Russell, Pancrazy, Ferret, and Gene Handy, and those others Pancrazy had hired, and their dealers. He knew that if he told them anything and asked for immunity, he’d have the Sons of Silence looking for him every damned day until he was dead.

  So lying to the cops wasn’t just to save his own ass. It was to save a lot of asses. The only ass left hanging in the wind was Missus Ferret.

  Damn shame, too.

  *

  After they ate pizza with Russell—man, was that guy ever a downer, so much so that Hunter didn’t want nothing to do with him, in name or anything else, for the time being—Hunter and Pauline dropped him off at the man camp before heading back to town. They could barely see four feet ahead of them, so it was a good thing Hunter had borrowed Glen Ramsey’s truck for the night. Shit, he had that guy so worried that he’d been able to make a copy of the key and tell Ramsey, “Anytime I need it, I’ll just come take it. But don’t worry. It’s still yours.” Ramsey couldn’t say jack shit besides, “Can you at least let me know ahead of time?” Hunter had responded, “That’s not very convenient for me. But thanks for thinking of it.”

  Pauline had cuddled a little closer to Hunter, and they passed a pipe back and forth, her holding it for him, lighting it up. Hunter had his arm around her. That was as far as she’d let him go, and that was okay for now. She was only play-acting at being a whore. Just because people saw her naked didn’t mean she owed them the next base. That was not the
way Hunter was raised.

  And since he could just fuck the sweet fuck out of her in his imagination later, he wasn’t ready to rock the boat.

  Exhale. “Hunter, sweetie?”

  Sweetie. “Mm hm?”

  “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  He shrugged. His foot got to bouncing again. “I was going to. I want to. But, I don’t know, he wasn’t acting like himself tonight.”

  “You said he could help us?” Everything a question with Pauline. Everything. “Can he help us?”

  “I thought so. But, you know, that wasn’t Russell tonight. Talking about getting a different job. Acting all, like, scared. I’m not so sure I can trust him yet.”

  Pauline let smoke leak from her lips and rolled her head onto his shoulder. “But we need to tell somebody. What happens if they come asking questions?”

  “It’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’m not sure yet. But I’m trying really hard.”

  And he was. He really was. He balled his fist, rubbed the top of his index finger across his teeth.

  Pauline said, “He thinks you did it.”

  He felt the truck slip on the ice. Hard jerk to the left, a squeal, then he had it under control again. “What?”

  “Be careful.”

  “Why would he think I did it?”

  “When he went to the bathroom? His eyes? You never thought about it?”

  Hunter shook his head. “Not really, no.”

  Never would’ve occurred to him. But if that was true, then why did he hold back? He’d had a feeling. A gut thing. Russell wasn’t ready to hear it, that was all. The poor guy. But maybe the gut thing knew something Hunter hadn’t figured out in his brain yet. That’s why gut things happened, so your brain could take a little more battery power to figure it out while you kept yourself from falling off a cliff. Happened all the time out in the field.