Dead Poor

by M. K. Coker

  “Is that what did him in? Yes, I do.” He turned sideways, slapped a hunter’s knife attached to his belt. “Hunting’s legal. I eat what I kill. And believe me, I wouldn’t take a bite of Bunting. Rotten, through and through. But word was you found him up at the overlook. None of us go up there. We try to stay out of sight—we know we’re the prey here. You want to find your killer? Take a walk on the wild side.” He nodded, not into the woods as Karen expected, but across the creek toward the trailer park. “Go serve your evictions and find out just what’s been going on there.”

  Though she wanted to, Karen didn’t move. “That’s what I’m doing next. But I can’t let you stay here. I’m sorry. But you know as well as I do, your little encampment isn’t a long-term solution.”

  “You got a better one?” he asked.

  Karen wanted to say it wasn’t her problem, but of course, it was. This man, at least, appeared to be simply down on his luck. He’d done what he could, not only for himself, but others. To reward that effort by destroying the small community—family, really—he’d built against long odds went against the grain. She admired their resilience. “We’ve got a number of empty houses in Reunion. I’ve seen the rental signs. There’s got to be somewhere you can afford, if not individually, collectively.”

  Not-Johnson wrapped up his brats with a slow, deliberate motion. “None of the landlords will touch any of us from the trailer park, because thanks to Digges, we’ve all got an eviction on our record. We can’t come up with all the security deposits, the two months’ rent and references, and who knows what else. Do you think we’re stupid? We’ve all been looking. We’ve signed up for every program we’ve heard of, private or public. And we’re just the first wave. Easy pickings, the compliant ones, the scared ones. We went without a fight and tried to make the best of it. If we could afford justice, you’d be putting Digges and Bunting in the Big House for years, not throwing us out of our last digs.”

  He stared down at his ruined brats, his shoulders slumping. He dropped the bundle, to Karen’s stomach’s rumbling dismay, into a trash can. A crowd of flies rose then descended, readying for a feast at the expense of a man, putatively higher on the food chain.

  “Lord of the Flies,” he murmured, drawing blanks from most in the clearing, but Karen had been taught high school English by Marek’s exacting mother. What she’d taken from the tale of the teenage boys stranded on an island was that boys were shit at governing themselves. And she wondered just what this man’s history was, who he really was, but she felt a deep reluctance to unmask him. Was she really cut out to be sheriff, after all? She’d given Kyle Early the green light to skip town to become someone else’s problem, and here she was, doing it again.

  Steeling her spine, Karen turned to Biester. “Do you want me to get a warrant to hunt for the scarf?” As the park manager blinked, she wished she hadn’t said anything. But now that it was out there, she had to follow through. “You said you had a picture of a scarfed figure destroying your trail monitors. On your phone. We can look for the scarf and question the owner.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Biester pulled out his phone from his shirt pocket, then with a glance at the huddle of people who’d silently come out of their tents to surround their leader, he slid it back. “Just go. Take your tents. Your plywood. Your trash. And we’ll call it even.”

  To give him credit, Biester not only called it even, he helped cart collapsed tents, plywood, and bags of trash up to the parking lot for those unable to do so. They stuffed the tents into cars already bulging to capacity with evicted belongings. And Karen and Marek took down license plates as furtively as they could, making Karen feel as guilty as hell. But they needed identities. One blurry-eyed couple who worked night shifts said they would stay with the rest of the pitiful stack of belongings owned by those arriving later.

  Blowing sweat-soaked bangs out of her eyes, Karen knocked on the top of the battered gray Honda in the lead position. Not-Johnson poked his head out.

  “There’s a Lions Club park just outside Reunion. Go through town and turn right then hook left. You can camp there for free for three days.” She might ruffle some feathers, but the park had no restrictions. “I’ll ask around and see what I can do after that. I know Marsha Schaeffer, the social services rep for this county.”

  He stared at her then nodded. “Thank you. That’ll give us a breather, at least.”

  She forced herself to ask the hard question before she let him go. “Does your... the boy... have a responsible guardian? Does he go to school?”

  “Yes, and yes. Don’t worry. He’s in good hands.” He held her gaze until she had to believe him. She stepped back.

  He rolled up his window, honked, and led the little band of battered lives out of the park—to a temporary promised land.

  She almost envied him. He had a reprieve and the rest of his Sunday. She got to throw more joy around. Mary Johnson was right. The devil was loose in Eda County.

  Armageddon had arrived.

  CHAPTER 23

  The hardest scale for justice to balance wasn’t right against wrong, Marek’s father had liked to say, but right against wronged.

  Leif Okerlund had served a number of evictions over his long tenure as the sheriff of Eda County. But Marek doubted that even in the gloomiest days of farm foreclosures had he evicted so many people who lived on the precarious margins of a hardscrabble life. A baker’s dozen, an unlucky thirteen whom Alan Digges had deemed irredeemable, kicked to the crumbling concrete curb.

  With only two left to serve, Marek decided that every evicted family was evicted in their own way. The easy ones, as Not-Johnson had intimated, had already gone. Those who remained were the desperate, the despondent, and those in deep denial.

  He’d quickly learned that, despite his first impressions, the condition of the trailer didn’t indicate which were the evictions. They’d evicted an immigrant family who’d meticulously maintained and upgraded theirs so it glittered like a pearl before swine. Meanwhile, a disabled man had just handed over the keys to Digges’s lockout crew and said, “Have at it, boys,” before limping away from the swill with a lighter step. Marek had watched him head for the woods.

  At their next-to-last trailer, an overweight girl of maybe thirteen sat on the last rickety step of a dingy rust-colored trailer. With a sneer that reminded Marek far too much of Nadine Early, the girl blew smoke from a limp cigarette across a huge puddle that reflected nothing but a bleak future.

  “Is your mother at home?” Karen asked in the monotone she’d adopted after they’d evicted the struggling young Guatemalan family that she’d once helped rescue. Victims of human trafficking and newly minted American citizens, they’d lost first their meatpacking jobs when PBI left town in the middle of the night, then lost their meager wages with the agricultural jobs winding down for winter. They’d been scared to death that they were being deported, but at least Marek, who spoke Spanish fluently, had been able to reassure them on that head.

  After they made a hasty call to a Bosnian family who’d befriended them back in their mutual PBI days, Marek was able to tell Karen that they had a good place to go. Those same Bosnians had once found shelter in Karen’s own basement, so it was nice to see the gesture being paid forward.

  Both Marek and Karen had helped them move their belongings. Unlike in Albuquerque, where companies had sprung up to clean out houses for hands-off landlords, Eda County had never seen mass evictions on such a scale, and it had no mechanism to deal with them. One family had just gotten into their car and driven away, telling the kids they were going to drive to Disneyland. Marek doubted they’d go more than a few miles on a nearly empty gas tank.

  Finally answering Karen’s question, the girl on the trailer step said, “My mother’s dead.”

  The girl might as well have said, “My pet mosquito is dead.” In other words: good riddance.

  “Who, then, is Doris Harkness?”

  Another blow across the bow. “Gran.”

  �
�And is she home?”

  “She’s always home. She doesn’t go anywhere. Ever. You wanna move her, be my guest. She’s, like, five hundred pounds.”

  Though she’d exaggerated by a factor of two, the girl was otherwise correct. Doris Harkness flat-out refused to move from her Kleenex-and-paper-plate-littered recliner in a trailer barely a step up from the homeless encampment—and likely kept up only by the girl.

  With dark circles under her rheumy eyes, the woman glared up at them like a raccoon that had staked its claim. The claim might be to garbage, but it was her garbage. “You’re only taking me out in a coffin. I’ve been in this trailer for thirteen years. And I’ve paid my rent on time for every one of those years. Comes straight outta my disability—I got diabetes something fierce—and the stipend I get for taking in my granddaughter. Had Zoe pretty much since she was born. Her mother got herself killed in a high-speed car crash with that good-for-nothing boyfriend of hers at the wheel—both of ’em had no more sense than a gnat—when Zoe wasn’t even a year old.”

  Though the words were dismissive, Marek heard the emotion underneath. He knew the pain of losing a child, and his son hadn’t even been properly born when Marek lost him.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Karen looked frustrated but resolute, just as she had when faced with all the previous pleas, excuses, and accusations. “As for the trailer, if you’d paid on time, you’d be fine, but—”

  A snort cut Karen off. “I’m the one who takes the check over.” Zoe stepped inside from where she’d been sitting on the steps, giving every appearance of not giving a damn. “Every first of the month. I got ears. I know what happens if you don’t pay on time. Mr. Jorgenson, he was cool. He never looked at me like Mr. Digges did, like he’d scrape me off the bottom of his snazzy shoes. I handed him our check, just like always.”

  A residual outrage rose on the girl’s face, making Marek wonder if perhaps a seed of hope still survived in her that the world could be fair, or should be. “Mr. Digges wouldn’t take the check. Said something was wrong with it. So I took it back to Gran, and she says there’s nothing wrong but the man’s eyes. The money was in the bank, just like always. Not like we ever go anywhere, do anything. So I go back, and he’s already filled out that stupid notice. Hands it to me and says, ‘If you can’t read, that says you’ve got three days to get out—or we’ll do it for you.’ Then he sniffs. ‘Might be good for you, force you to skip a few meals.’ And then he got in that badass car and left me standing there.”

  Marek had quickly learned that the eviction rules in Eda County heavily favored the landlord, but if the allegation were true and not just... blowing smoke... that was beyond the pale. But why would Digges piss a reliable paycheck into the wind? They’d heard this story already, and Karen hadn’t bought it.

  “Can I see the check?” Karen asked.

  Marek wasn’t sure who was more surprised: the girl, the grandmother, or him. But maybe she’d seen the same thing he had in the girl’s face—and didn’t want to snuff out that last bit of irrational trust in the system.

  Doris reached into a little cubbyhole in her recliner and handed over the check. Karen took it by the corner. “Have you made out any checks since then?” When handed the checkbook, Karen thumbed through the mimeographed copies and looked at Marek. “Sewage and electricity paid same day but after the rent. We can track that, can’t we? See if it holds up?”

  “You calling me a liar?” Doris challenged.

  Karen looked over at her. “No, I’m looking for evidence that will hold up in court.”

  Lips sank in over missing teeth. “We don’t have money for no lawyers.”

  When Karen glanced at the flat-screen TV and the cell phone in the cubbyhole, Doris glared at her. “That TV cost me a hundred. See that corner? It was dropped in the store. It’s cracked. But it works. Only way I’m ever going places again is through that TV. Only way I keep in touch with my granddaughter and get my meds taken care of with Doc Hudson is through that phone. It hooks up to that net thing that’s all over the airwaves. I got a right to enjoy a bit of life. Pursuit of happiness, right? A couple hundred a year ain’t gonna make a difference to anything. You prefer I just sit here and die?”

  Marek wondered if the woman had just sunk her last ship out. While Marek had been raised by Leif Okerlund, who’d lived his life with the mantra of Judge not, lest you be judged, Karen had been raised by Arne Okerlund, who followed the more popular, if non-biblical, God helps those who help themselves.

  Karen’s jaw tightened, and Marek held his breath.

  Widening her stance, his niece glared at Doris over the open checkbook in her hand. “Are you going to let me take these?”

  Suspicion narrowed the raccoon eyes. “Why?”

  Between gritted teeth, Karen said, “To see if I can get a print off the check to match Digges. The judge could put a hold on the eviction.”

  Doris’s sunken lips parted. “Oh. Well, I suppose. I ain’t going anywheres.” She cleared her throat as if unsure just how to handle the situation, of the law extending help rather than a slap. “Leastways Bunting ain’t here to back up Digges.”

  Marek took the baggie that Zoe produced from a broken drawer in the tiny kitchen, and Karen slipped the evidence in. “Bunting lied for Digges?” Marek asked Doris.

  Still looking faintly suspicious, Doris nodded. “Lied, intimidated, whatever it took. In exchange for living rent-free. Talk about someone who lived large when he had less than nothing in the bank. You get a load of that monster truck? Got some real good folk kicked out of their homes. People been here for years. Good neighbors.”

  Marek still wasn’t sure what the endgame was, if the accusations were true. “Why would Digges want to get rid of good tenants who paid on time?”

  “Alan Digges has grand plans for this place. Thinks he’s gonna raise rents hundreds of dollars. And he doesn’t care if they stay ’cause then he can take their deposits.” She looked over at her granddaughter. “What’d he call that?”

  Zoe screwed up her round face in a passable, even dead-on, mimic of Digges. “‘Churn, baby, churn. Out with the old, in with the new.’” She blew out a blast. “Bunting said the same thing after he won the election the first time—that he and Digges were gonna clean up in Eda County.”

  The fine grammatical distinction between cleaning up any supposed corruption and cleaning up monetarily by aiding and abetting corruption was indicative of Bunting’s viewpoint on the world.

  “And you better clean up your act.” Doris pointed at her granddaughter’s cigarette. “Put that out. I keep telling you, girl. You keep at that, you’ll never make old bones.”

  That elicited a shrug. “You smoke all the time.”

  “And look at me. If the diabetes don’t kill me, the lungs will. Doc Hudson says I got to start on oxygen soon. That’ll cost money we can’t spare. And, yeah, I know. Gotta stop. I tried damn hard.” Her rheumy eyes blurred. “You know I did, but this eviction stuff, it’s got me puffing away again. I gotta last me five more years ’fore you’re legal.”

  Zoe stabbed the butt into an overflowing ashtray. “I’m glad Bunting’s dead. And I got to see—”

  “Zoe!” For the first time, Doris Harkness moved her bulk up in the recliner. “Don’t make trouble.”

  The girl’s chin wobbled as she looked up at Karen then at Marek. “I saw him dead. And I was glad.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Just beyond the last trailer, the late-afternoon light filtered through the oak trees like an alchemist’s autumnal elixir, turning the bloodstains on the bent grass into the dark red of the sumac that edged the woods beyond. Bunting’s fall had been camouflaged in fall color.

  From where Karen stood, she could just barely see the end of the makeshift bridge into Not-Johnson’s encampment. Turning her head back toward the trailer park, she watched the curtain in the last trailer on the lot twitch like a nervous tic. With good reason. Witness or perpetrator, the man who lived there would soon
find himself on the hot seat.

  Zoe gloated from the gravel road, where she’d been sternly commanded to stay. “See. I told you. Bunting was just lying there, dead.”

  What had Karen’s father said, about how he’d once tracked down an FBI most wanted in a bolt-hole on Bandit Ridge? If you want the best recon, ask a kid.

  Karen had withheld judgment on this particular kid, as she wasn’t entirely sure whether Zoe was taking her for a ride. But apparently, it was Bunting who’d been taken for one, from the kill site here up to the overlook. The grass that grew long up to the gravel was tamped down with foot traffic to the log bridge, but didn’t hold a print. So they were out of luck when it came to forensics. If Larson were free, she could still get him down here to see what magic he could pull out from his investigative hat, but he was still in the Lake region. So they made do. Marek photographed the trampled grass and stains before kneeling to take samples.

  Karen turned back to Zoe, who met her gaze with an expression torn between a told-you-so sneer and an excited delight that turned her into a kid again.

  “Tell me again,” Karen told the girl. “What, when, where.”

  Though they’d done it all in the trailer, with very grudging permission from Doris, Karen wanted it spelled out again on the scene, where it might jog a new memory. Zoe rolled her eyes, but more for form, Karen thought, than anything. This girl had probably never had such a rapt audience. And that was incredibly sad.

  “Told you, I woke up when I heard a car pass, going to Mr. Peterson’s.” She nodded toward the last trailer. “And I came out to take a smoke. Gran gets on me, otherwise. Clock on the wall said one-fifty-three.”

  At thirteen, Karen would’ve been sound asleep at that time, even on a weekend—or at the most, under the covers, listening to banned rock music on her Walkman. But she’d been so busy with school and sports that she’d never had time to get into trouble. And the one cigarette she’d cadged with another girl had convinced her that breathing ash wasn’t something she wanted to continue doing. She needed her lungs to catch up with the star of eighth-grade basketball, Joanie Harrah, a Southern transplant who’d moved on before high school rolled around. What, Karen wondered, had ever become of Joanie? Like Zoe, she’d been the product of a broken home. Had she made it out, perhaps courtesy of her talent? Karen hoped so.