by M. K. Coker
He’d spent many, many nights up in that attic room behind the now-shuttered window with the lights burning late, his mother downstairs, waiting to grill him after she’d finished her grading. That he’d finally been diagnosed with dyslexia by then had helped, as he’d been allowed to take many of his exams verbally or given extra time on the written, though the mutters about favoritism and special breaks had followed him throughout school. He’d been drafted into football based solely on size, not talent, and mostly against his mother’s wishes. But it had been his ticket to acceptance. Or at least tolerance.
The name of Marek certainly hadn’t helped endear him to this town where two of its not-so-upstanding citizens had lost their lives to the heavy-fisted Lenny at the Barstool Bar down the street.
Both Valeska and the house looked like they’d taken more than a few hits in the years he’d been gone. Lawns once groomed and porches once broomed had gone to seed and weed. He wondered how many more years the high school would hold out against the siren call of consolidation.
Karen leaned on the doorbell. An anemic buzz sounded inside. With no vehicle in the driveway, he doubted anyone was home to answer. But the door screeched open with a hard pull.
A stunner of a young woman in a lacy pink peignoir stood in the doorway. Her gaze went straight to Marek as if Karen weren’t there. “Oh. Hi. You aren’t Ned. Kyle said Ned was coming tonight.”
Had to be Kaylee Early. The words were simple, the gaze guileless, and the body easy. But made so, Marek had no doubt, by the facilitation of her brother. That made him sick. “Is Kyle home?”
“Oh. No. He went to Sioux Falls for more pills. Did you want to pay him?” She held out a soft-scented hand. “I’ll take it. I can do that. We have a lock box. Only Kyle has the key.”
Marek felt torn between getting the information they needed from someone clearly of legal age and getting the young woman a court-appointed guardian to look after her rights. She was a danger to herself.
“Money for what?” Karen asked from the dim shadows.
“Oh. You scared me.” Kaylee’s flawless porcelain brow furrowed as she took in Karen’s uniform. “You’re the police. I’m not supposed to talk to the police without Kyle.”
“We’re from the Sheriff’s Office,” Karen told her gravely.
“Oh. That’s okay, then. Do you want pills or sex?” Her gaze went from Karen to Marek with a faint frown. “Manage a tree? But if Ned shows up, he gets to go first, okay?”
Ménage à trois? Marek felt his hands fist. “No, we just want to talk.”
“Oh. I don’t charge for that. I don’t think. I’ll ask Kyle. Come on in.” Kaylee turned and sashayed back inside. A diva with a child’s mind. Marek followed into a gaudy living room, a stark difference in tone from his mother’s Arts and Crafts–era affinities. A huge sectional couch in red velvet dominated the room in front of an even bigger wraparound TV. He didn’t want to think about what lay beyond in the master bedroom. If that was what it still was. Maybe the business side ran out of the second-story room, which made him never, ever wish to revisit it.
Kaylee swooped down into the sectional into a pose that showed swells of breast and length of leg. “I like when people come to visit. Mostly, they just want sex, you know? But it gets kind of boring. That’s why I was so mad when Bobby lost the votes. It was all for nothing, Kyle said, letting him have sex without money.” Her lower lip trembled. “We were going to get a big house with a big bed and have lots of babies. I like babies, don’t you?”
Just how, Marek wondered, had this woman-child made it through school, through her brother’s machinations, and through Bunting’s less than pure embrace, with such innocence intact? “Um... yes. I have a daughter. She’s seven.”
Kaylee clapped her hands together. “You have to bring her to see me. I love kids, too, not just babies. Oh, but I have to make sure it’s okay with Kyle.” She gave them a serious look. “He says that little kids shouldn’t be around sex.”
Except when it came to his woman-child sister. Carefully, Marek probed. “The agreement you had with Bob Bunting, what was it for? What was Kyle going to get out of it?”
She frowned, and for a moment, Marek thought that some bit of wiliness had seeped into her dove mind. Then she smiled. “I had to think. Kyle said that it was win-win. I get babies, and he gets a... a blind eye. Isn’t that weird? Who’d want a blind eye? Kyle just laughed. He said it was just an expression but not to worry—he’d get paid, and we’d all get rich.” She fingered the cheap velvet. “I made Bobby promise I could take the couch. I like it.” She actually bounced on it, her body jiggling, and Marek sighed. He just couldn’t deal with the juxtaposition.
“What kind of pills do you sell, Kaylee?”
Until Karen spoke, Marek didn’t know she was back in the room. He figured she’d been walking around, looking for anything that might help the case.
“I don’t sell them. Kyle does. He had to go get more. He helps people. They hurt, you know? Really bad sometimes. He gives them pills that make it go away. He’s like a doctor.”
Opioids, most likely. Not the worst drug out there, at least in theory, but they were laying waste to rural America’s workforce. Just take a painkiller and get back to work. No problem. That lie had been going around for millennia. Take this, cure that, and you’ll be rich, young, on top of the world.
What in the world would become of this child if—or most likely when—her brother was jailed?
Karen asked, “When did you last see Bob Bunting?”
Kaylee pouted. “Kyle hit him. I’m sorry because he looked so happy to see me in his truck. I was mad, but I got over it. I wanted babies, you know? They look at you like you aren’t stupid. But Kyle says he wasn’t the right man for me, and he wasn’t very...well, you know, good looking. But he was sweet. He’d bring me things.” She grabbed a gaudy pink teddy bear. “Like this. Isn’t it great?”
With a girl toy like Kaylee, Bunting must’ve been high in hog heaven. But still, the MO didn’t quite jibe for Marek. He’d met Bunting. He’d disliked Bunting. But a cold-blooded rapist? That still didn’t gel for him. Though the stains might well tell the tale—or shirttail.
“What about Kyle? What did he do after he hit Bobby?” Karen asked evenly.
“Oh. He bought me a big tub of rocky road ice cream at Casey’s. Then we came back here. He went out to the bar. Then he came home and went down to the basement and hit things. He likes to hit things when he’s mad.”
“Has he hit you?” Marek asked.
The puzzled look thankfully answered that in the negative. “Why would he hit me? He’s my big brother. He protects me. That’s why he says he has to work out. He’s got lots of guy stuff in the basement that I’m not allowed to touch because he says it could be dangerous. He looks after me, you know? My mom died when I was born, and we had a stepmom for a while, but she didn’t like us. She called me a ninny. Then we lived with Grandma until she went to heaven when I was fourteen. Kyle took care of me after that. I love him.”
The roar of a truck engine made her squeal. “He’s home!”
Marek rose to his feet just as the door burst open. Kyle sounded much like his engine as he roared, “Get the hell out of my house!”
Kaylee squealed again but in distress. “Kyle, he’s got a daughter. She’s seven. Don’t yell at him.”
With obvious effort, Kyle Early turned on his sister and said through gritted teeth, “I told you never to talk to the police without me here.”
“But they aren’t police. They’re... Sheriff’s Office. Right?”
Kyle closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, Marek felt an unexpected pang of pity, because what he saw was a man determined to protect his sister from the sharks, in his own less-than-legal way.
“That was dirty pool,” Kyle said.
“We don’t have a pool,” his sister replied with a pout. “Bobby said we’d get one with the new house.” Abruptly, she turned sheet white and ran from
the room. The sound of retching came through loud and clear a few seconds later.
Karen was the first to ask. “Is she...?”
The bruiser’s big shoulders slumped. “Pregnant? Yeah. Bunting convinced her to stop the pill. She doesn’t really get it, getting sick, getting more... well....” He flushed and made a cupping gesture over his chest. “I haven’t told her yet that she’s going to have a baby. I don’t know what to do. She’d love the kid. Heck, so would I. People look down on her, always have, but when I’m at my downdest? She’s there to cheer me up. She’s a sweetheart. But...”
But Kyle Early was in the business of vice. And he could get busted at any time.
“I’ll do what I gotta do to pay the bills. But I’m out of your territory as of next week. Going to Sioux Falls. I just need to break it to her. Fingers crossed she’ll be so damn happy about the baby that she won’t care where she is, as long as she has her couch.”
Though Marek had stepped back from his initial judgment of Kyle Early, Karen hadn’t. “What you’ve turned your sister into, Mr. Early, is criminal.”
Kyle only sighed. “I didn’t pimp her like people say. Heck, I’d drag her away from guys who took advantage of her and pop their cork. But she’d just go back to them. And then she’d get her heart broken when they told her they just wanted sex, not babies. Finally, I told her she should make something from the deal, so at least she’d get something to take home with her. It sort of... took off... from there. I’ve never forced her to do anything she didn’t want. Ever. But I could see it was getting old. Then... Bunting. I thought I had the answer to both our problems.”
“A blind eye,” Marek murmured. “And a baby.”
In the coolness of the evening, the blue anchor rippled on the bared arm. “Yeah. And I know what you’re going to ask me next if you haven’t already of my sister. Where I was after I picked her up at the courthouse. Bought some ice cream for Kaylee, brought her home, went to the Barstool until closing, then I came home and beat the shit out of a punching bag. Then I hit the sack.”
Karen shifted, making the floor creak. “You hit Bunting.”
“I did. He made Kaylee mad enough to hit the panic button on her phone. That’s our signal for me to come get her ASAP. I really do try to keep her out of trouble. God knows what’ll happen to her if...”
He couldn’t end that sentence because it wouldn’t end well. Marek could feel the waves of anxiety coming off the man. “Do you have any idea why someone would kill Bunting?”
“I’d look into Bunting’s side deals,” he said with a cynical eye that his sister lacked. “I got the feeling mine wasn’t the only one he’d set up, seeing as he was talking how he’d build Kaylee a big house. But I don’t know anything more. You might try the trailer park. Something fishy there.”
Kaylee came back in, looking as if she hadn’t just been sick, and the glow about her was now obvious. Marek understood Kyle’s dilemma. What kind of life would that child have, raised by a child? Taking it away from her, as the law might well do, might do what nothing else had—kill the innocence.
As if on the same page, Karen pursed her lips. “Honest work is the only way out, Kyle.”
“You think I haven’t tried?” He tapped his anchor. “That was supposed to be my ticket out of this godforsaken place. I thought I had it made, like the recruiter told me, that I could see the world, make money, get on the GI Bill, and get medical care and a pension if I stuck it out for twenty years. But I ran up against a bent officer who threw a trumped-up insubordination charge at me and got me dishonorably discharged. That was twenty years ago. With that on my record, I’ve worked nothing but scut jobs since.”
Honestly, anyway, was the subtext.
Karen wasn’t so easily dissuaded. “You’ve got impressive muscles and a work ethic to keep them that way. Try a gym in Sioux Falls. Or hire yourself out as a personal trainer.” When he blinked at her as if she’d just told him to take a shuttle to Mars, she let out a breath. “If you used as much creativity in thinking of new ways to make money honestly instead of otherwise, you could spend the rest of your life taking care of your sister.” Karen checked her watch then headed for the door. “I noted some suspicious packages on the kitchen counter, Marek. I won’t have time to get a warrant until next week, most likely. Put it on my list.”
With that, she exited, leaving two dropped jaws in her wake.
She’d just given Kyle Early a green light to get the hell out before she took him down. Bent? You couldn’t bend Karen Okerlund Mehaffey with a crowbar. But she’d let out just enough rope to let the man hang himself—or climb out of the hole he’d made.
Marek went to the door. “Kyle?”
Kyle managed to get his jaw working. “What?”
“If you ever need to park Kaylee somewhere?”
Suspicion warred with desperation. Suspicion won. “Don’t tell me. You’ll take care of her?”
Marek stood in the doorway that he’d last seen when he’d piled all his belongings into his mother’s sedan and headed away from Eda County. Never, he’d promised himself and his mother, to return.
If he’d had a little sister like Kaylee to support, not just himself, what would he have done? How far, really, was he from a man like this—or even his grandfather? His mother had pushed him harder than a Dakota wind, but his father had given him roots deep enough to keep him upright. He owed both. Big time. What did Kaylee’s child have?
“Look up Alice Dutton in Aleford. She’s Bunting’s maiden aunt. She’s got a nice little house there with nothing to do now that she’s retired. She likes kids. You might want to meet her before you head out—babysitter if nothing else.”
Kyle seemed to be waiting for the punch line, the payout, the deal. Finally, he nodded. “Okay. Thanks. I know it seems I’m nothing but a loser as a brother. But all I’ve ever wanted was a good man for her. Bob Bunting was bent, but he wasn’t bad, not to her.”
An interesting eulogy, but was it true? Was Bunting bent, bad, or pure evil?
With effort, Marek shut the door behind him. Hopefully, for the last time.
CHAPTER 17
Calls in the middle of night always woke Marek with the shakes—as if his brain had already knocked back a good shot of adrenaline before waking him. Ready to fight or flee whatever threat lurked in the dark. His first thought: Becca. Then the strains of the Lone Ranger pinged. The cold shock of the metal of his phone against his fingers told him that he needed to make sure the furnace was ready for winter.
He rolled over onto his back. “What’s up?”
“Fire at Nadine Early’s.”
Karen’s tone, detached and brisk, told him all he needed to know. He closed his eyes. “She’s dead.”
“We don’t know that yet. Jordan tells me that the fire hasn’t been contained. It’s engulfed the house and threatening the nearby fields. I’m heading out the door. We’ll take the Sub.”
He ran a hand down his face, feeling the scruff. “I need to take Becca to Arne’s.”
“Already called him. He’ll expect her. We can drop her off. Not like it’s far.”
Marek could easily walk her over. He had in the past, but the night was cold, and the urge to get to the fire was powerful. So after he pulled on discarded clothes, he rushed up to the attic room, automatically adjusting his step to avoid the worst creaks—a talent honed early in life, especially on report card day.
The night-light glowed softly, like a tiny fire. His daughter was curled into a blanketed ball underneath the dark Hispanic gaze of Madonna and Child wearing the faces of her mother and her dead brother. While newer retablos had joined the painted wood icon that his old partner had made for Becca, and still more awaited their place from their most recent trip, that older one took prime place on her wall. He’d always thought it morbid—and it always gave him a stab—but that was not how she saw it.
His daughter believed in angels. He believed in devils.
Carefully, Marek scooped her up
, blankets and all, and heard her voiceless protest. It needed no translation. “Sorry, sweet pea. Karen needs me. I’m taking you over to Arne’s.”
After they made the short trip down the road, he was thankful to see the porch light on at Arne’s, or he might have spilled his precious load on the uneven walk.
Clumsy. That was one tag he’d earned the hard way.
Arne met him at the door but didn’t take Becca. He worried he would drop her with his stroke-weakened arm. So in the proverbial Okerlund silence, the two of them did their usual dance. Slitted eyes from Arne. Stiff nod in return. Follow on silent steps and place his precious bundle on the bed across from Joey’s crib.
Marek took a moment to note that both children, in their half-sleep, rolled toward each other as if drawn by an invisible bond. A bond not of familial blood but of blood, nonetheless. Children of violence. Joey had lost his mother, Becca her brother and her mother.
Nod of transfer made, nod of transfer accepted, and Marek rushed back out to the waiting Sub. He slid in, and Karen floored it.
Unlike the woods, on the plains, trouble was easily spotted, from tornadoes to blizzards to fire. Long before they arrived at the Kubicek homestead, Marek could see the huge plume of smoke from a voracious base of bright flame roiling the night. His dyslexic mind went to ‘bright fame,’ the meaning of the name Robert, and he had a brief flight of fancy that Bunting was enjoying a last bit of mischief before the afterlife... or afterdeath.
Once on Kubicek land, Karen pulled up behind a battalion of vehicles.
When Mother Nature couldn’t be trusted, neighbors could. A tractor pulling a disc plow had already made a firebreak to one side of the house, starving the fire of fuel as the dark, damp earth was turned in its wake. Shadowy figures in hastily donned coveralls shoveled another firebreak near an unharvested field to the east, where there was no room for the plow, while volunteer firefighters from Valeska and Reunion blasted the structure, which glowed orange and ash-black like a cheap plastic Halloween haunted house.
