You Believers

by Jane Bradley

  The cop looked up from his notebook. “And you knew full well that associating with a man planning a crime is in violation of your probation.”

  “We didn’t do it,” Mike said. “You know how sometimes guys just talk.”

  The cop glared. “If it was just talk, why was your friend so angry? That wasn’t just talk. You were in on it, weren’t you?”

  “Jesse wanted it, not me.” It would be all right as long as they didn’t get him to say anything about the blue-truck girl. “I let him use my car, made him drop me off at the Taco Shack, told him I couldn’t risk going to jail ‘cause I got to take care of my granny.” He looked up at her, but she only gave him a hard glance and looked away. “Jesse went on and said he was just gonna have a look at the pawnshop. But when he got there, the owner was there. Jesse didn’t want to risk getting close.” He looked at his granny. “So nothing happened. He didn’t even try to break into any store.”

  She reached across the table, poked at his hand the way she used to poke him in the chest as if poking could make the truth come out. “You’re telling me that boy who was yelling, stomping around my house, eating all my cookies, drinking my last Coke, getting you so nervous you couldn’t even sit for ten minutes with me, and you hiding my walker so I couldn’t get out there to see what was going on without risking falling, breaking my hip . . .” She paused to catch her breath. He wished he could go home with her. If they kept him overnight, took her home, he hoped they’d make sure she was all right and that there was food in the house.

  Mike reached, squeezed her hand. “Granny. When Jesse gets angry, he can get mean. I didn’t want you to see him mean. I was trying to keep him peaceful. You don’t know how he can be. I was trying to make sure he wouldn’t do something to hurt you.”

  She shook his fingers loose, gripped the table, and stood. “I am a child of God, and I fear no one.”

  Mike looked up, surprised at the strength in her voice. He saw her leathery skin sagging; he saw the trembling in her arms, the thin bones, the wisps of gray hairs slipping loose. He knew she wouldn’t be around much longer. The things he was putting her through made it all the harder for her to find the strength to keep on. “I know, Granny.” He couldn’t stop the tears from slipping down his face. “I’m sorry, Granny. But I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s Jesse. And I did like you told me. I called in. I didn’t see anything. I just called ‘cause he talked about how he’d like to hurt that rich girl.”

  She sat back down, wouldn’t look at him. “You risked everything I’ve worked for. If they lock you up, what is going to happen to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry, Granny. I’ll make it up to you.”

  She pushed back from the table. “You tell this man here everything he needs to know. You tell him every bad thing that Jesse ever talked about; you tell even what that boy thought about, you hear me?” He’d always thought she’d be the one who would save him from his trouble, who’d pull him out of whatever mess he fell into. But while he had been in one room telling the cop everything he could about how Jesse had wanted to hurt that rich girl in his neighborhood, while he was thinking about how he could use that thousand bucks to get his car fixed and maybe take his granny for a nice shrimp dinner, she was in another room telling another story, telling whatever she could about Jesse Hollowfield, how she’d known Jesse was up to no good because he was always relying on her boy, who had nothing but a granny and a beat-up car. She was the one who’d asked, just the way she was always asking Mike, Why does some boy come from all that money need to be leaning on you? Mike would never answer that question. He’d say he figured Jesse liked him, that was all.

  There was a knock on the door. The cop stood, leaned out. Mike strained to hear the words but couldn’t make them out. His hearing had been off since the time he’d gotten jumped in juvy, gotten smacked in the ears so hard his eardrums busted. Next time it wouldn’t be juvy. If they sent him up, he’d be young meat for anybody who wanted a piece of his ass. That was why he’d stayed close to Jesse. Jesse had never wanted that. Jesse wanted other things Mike could do for him, like cut his hair, get him extra servings in the food line, things like making him an egg sandwich in his granny’s house. Mike hoped one day he’d get some of whatever it was that ran in Jesse’s blood. But now he was figuring that what Jesse had, he was born with. Mike could never be what Jesse was. He was thinking maybe Jesse was the devil. He was wondering if Jesse was sitting right now in some other interrogation room saying some kind of shit about him.

  The cop shut the door. “Looks like you’re staying, Carter.” He went to the other side of the table, gently pulled out Mike’s granny’s chair. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we got to keep your boy.”

  “What?” Mike said. He tried to stand, but the cop pulled him back to his chair. His granny was crying. “It’s all right, Granny. I’ll be home soon. These men, they just doing what they got to do.”

  She reached for him. The cop said, “That’ll be enough, ma’am.” Mike saw another cop come into the room, help his granny to her walker. “This officer will get you home, Mrs. Carter.”

  “I need to go take care of my granny.” Mike stood “You can’t leave her alone.”

  The cop yanked him back to his chair again. His granny turned. Mike hoped she’d come pat his back the way she always did, tell him it would be all right.

  She stood there. He waited for her touch. But she just poked his arm, hard, the way Jesse might do, but not enough to hurt, just enough to let him know she was done. “You should have thought about that before you got in this mess, Michael Ray.” She turned to her walker and lumbered away. He saw her bent back, the hem of her skirt swaying at the back of her calves, her swollen ankles and feet pushing those shoes around. “I’m sorry, Granny,” he called. “I promise I’ll make this all up to you.”

  He waited to hear her voice. She always said, I love you, baby, when he was going somewhere, as if those words could remind him to be the boy she wanted him to be. He thought surely she’d say something, something like a momma would say, before she left the room. But he just heard the clumping, rolling sound of her walker. He couldn’t hear her steps, but he clung to the sight of her walking away. The door closed. Mike was wondering if she’d said something like good-bye, something he just couldn’t hear for the blood pounding in his head. The cop yanked him up, pushed him toward the door. Mike kept his head down the way cops liked a man to do when they were shuffling him to another room. A whipped dog was what they wanted. Roll over and play dead, he thought. He’d never be what Jesse wanted him to be.

  As he walked down the hallway, the cop pulling at his arm to make the cuffs cut a little deeper, he thought, Yeah, I’m a fool all right. Ratting out Jesse. He’s gonna kill me first chance he gets. He’d have to play Jesse’s way. He’d have to show Jesse what he could be if he had to. No one had mentioned the girl in the blue truck. But if they did, if he had to, he’d tell them everything to keep Jesse buried under some jail. He’d tell them how he’d never touched that girl. But he’d never tell anybody how she had stood there beside him. She’d touched him as if he were the last thing in the world she could hold on to. And he had been. She’d never gotten the chance to hold the joint Jesse had offered her out in that field. Mike shook his arm as if he could shake her off. But there would be no getting free from the reach of her hand.

  Some Kind of Power

  Roy warned me about going to the hearing, but he knows me enough to know that a warning to me is more like an invitation than a threat. He told me seeing Jesse Hollowfield in the flesh was nothing like seeing him on tape. Roy said seeing him in person was like watching some kind of shape-shifter. He said one minute the guy was handsome, had a face like the young Elvis, had that mouth the girls loved, and then in a second his face could change, get hard and turn to too much mouth and teeth, like a wolf ready to tear apart whatever got in its way. “When you see that change,” he said, “and you’re right next to it, you just
quiver.” I’d seen Jesse’s face on tape, and yeah, he gave me a sick feeling, but I figured I could take him live just fine.

  Livy was beside me, leaning close. I had tried to reason with her, told her there was nothing to be gained, that seeing his face would only set her to imagining awful things, and she didn’t need that. I didn’t tell her what I’d seen on that tape of Jesse in the interrogation room. But I did tell her that Mike Carter’s granny had said something about Jesse being at her house the day Katy disappeared. And something about a truck out of gas. In most cases that wouldn’t mean much, but Katy’s truck had a gas gauge that always read empty. Livy was trying to believe maybe he wasn’t involved, but for Roy and me, Jesse being involved was something we knew.

  So there was Livy, leaning on the edge of her seat, watching the room like something huge would happen any minute. She’d never been in a courtroom as far as I could tell. I’d told her nothing really big was going to happen. But she had said, “I need to be there, Shelby. When I see his face, I’ll know.”

  I knew the judge was the kind who liked to give the ones he sentenced a chance to say one last thing to the courtroom before they were led away to lockup. He liked the drama, or maybe he was just curious to hear what a convicted man had to say. And I’ll admit, I was curious. Along with everybody else sitting in that room.

  Livy seemed relieved, as if just being near lawyers, cops, and the judge would bring her a little closer to setting things right in her world. I knew she’d never make it back to any kind of world where she thought she belonged.

  It wasn’t really my business to see Jesse on tape. But Roy had convinced the DA that it could be helpful for me to study the man. When Roy led me into that viewing room to watch, he paused a second, some pain moving across his eyes. He said, “You don’t know what you’re in for.” And that was what I felt like saying to Livy that day: You don’t know what you’re in for. But nobody ever knows what might be around the corner of any day. “Bring it on,” I said, the way I always say it when I know I need to face something and I just want it over.

  Roy always sees through my tough talk. He just shook his head, sat beside me, and turned on the TV. The screen showed Jesse sitting there, looking at his hands shackled to the table. He looked up, scanned the room, looking for the camera. Then he caught sight of it, a tiny thing, the lens probably no bigger than a pea, but he knew what he was looking at. He made some effort to straighten in his seat, grinned. Then he said, “You tell Mike, you get the word to Mike, I hope he enjoys that reward.” When he leaned back in his chair, I could hear the creaking of metal, the clank of cuffs on the table, “You tell him . . .” Then he laughed with the low, dirty sound men can make.

  When the detectives came into the room, he sat up as tall as the shackles would allow and said, “You tell that bitch Mike he’d better fucking enjoy the money. It’s gonna be the last he spends.”

  I remembered the detective grinning. He was a friend of Roy, had Roy’s cool way of playing an interview. He said, “Mike?”

  Jesse looked up, fearless. “You tell him I know where his fucking granny lives.” His lawyer grabbed his arm, said, “Stop.” The lawyer must have known Jesse, had to be a family friend. It wouldn’t be any man who’d lay a hand on Jesse, try to hush him like that.

  “I’m curious,” the detective said. “What do you know about a truck being out of gas?”

  Jesse shrugged, looked at the backs of his hands. There were scars there. I could see them. The detective asked if he knew anything about a blue truck with Tennessee plates, left abandoned, out of gas.

  Jesse just smiled and said, “I want everyone to see I’m cooperating here. But I don’t have an answer to this question. Why would I know anything about a blue truck? I drive my momma’s car.”

  Then the detective asked where Jesse had been on the day he’d gone to Mrs. Carter’s house.

  “Mrs. who?” That grin played again on his lips.

  “The grandmother of Michael Carter.”

  Jesse threw his head back with a little laugh. “Oh, my boy Mike. Yeah, I was hanging with Mike that day. He wants to be my bitch sometimes. But I don’t need no bitch. We tried fishing in the river. We didn’t catch nothing. So we went to his granny’s house to find something to eat.”

  “That’s all you did that day. Fished, caught nothing, went to his granny’s house.”

  Jesse looked at his lawyer, smiled, said, “Somebody deaf around here?”

  The lawyer reminded him that he didn’t have to answer.

  Jesse leaned back as best he could to look relaxed, but the shackles kept him hunched forward. “Yeah, I was with Mike. He was having car trouble, and I told him I knew a guy might fix it cheap. But the guy’s shop was closed. So we tried fishing. Gave up. It was one of those days nothing goes the way you want, so we went to his granny’s house.”

  The detective sat, leaned close. “You spent the entire day with Mike Carter.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse said. “You tell that little bitch I said I spent the entire day with him. You tell him he knows every goddamned thing I did. Only reason he called in on this Land Fall shit is he knows that’s where I live, and it pisses him off. You ask Mike what we did that day. Goddamned snitching bitch.” There was spit in the corners of his lips. He had white, white teeth. It was something you didn’t want to see when his smile shifted to a snarl.

  I knew they should never let a man like him on the streets. I knew then that I wanted to hear the sound of Jesse Hollowfield being led from the courtroom to serve the suspended sentence he’d been given for beating up a hooker, leaving her unconscious in an alley for some drunk to find. I knew once he was locked up, he’d never get out. He’d do time for the hooker and the Flynn girl, and in time I’d see to it he’d do time for Katy Connor. I wanted to be there and watch his smug little world start tumbling down.

  When they lowered the lights in that room to show the slides of the Flynn girl, Jesse leaned forward for a closer look. A grin played at his mouth when he saw the thin cut on the blue-veined throat. I saw the lean white belly, a red knife mark tearing across, the skin, not deep enough to gut her, the bruised arms, the neck all blue and again a knife mark on her chest, thin and jagged, enough to make her bleed but not deep enough to make her bleed out and die. He leaned closer, studying the marks, no remorse, just interest, like a surgeon’s interest in a cut badly made, how he might get it right next time.

  “Anything you want to say?” the detective asked.

  Jesse shrugged. “Seems to me whoever did that needed a sharper knife if it was real blood he was after.”

  “She bled plenty,” the detective said.

  “The way I hear it, she lived,” Jesse said.

  His lawyer tried to restrain him from talking. But Jesse was too proud for silence. He jerked free of the lawyer’s hand on his shoulder, leaned to the detective, and said, “You ain’t got nothing on me. Like I said, that shit in my backpack, I found it. I was out walking my dog and found that shit scattered on the sidewalk. My guess is whoever did this, they got spooked and ran, spilling that shit on the sidewalk. Me, I was just walking my dog and scooped it up. Ain’t no crime picking up stuff off a sidewalk.”

  “But you kept it,” the detective said. “You took it in your backpack, tried to fence it off to your buddy Zeke.”

  He got a little frozen look then. I could see thoughts turning, the way a man looks when he’s hit a wall at the back of an alley, scans the walls for a place to grab, swing up, get the extra step, the leap, anything it takes to find a new way to run. Then he shrugged, looked at his lawyer. He turned back to the detective and grinned. “I got a fucked-up childhood, man. My daddy, he’ll get me out of this. Hell, I might even be crazy. We ain’t played that card yet. Crazy?” He rolled his eyes, made a gurgling, choking sound, something ugly enough to back away from when I was only looking at the recorded image of him on that screen. “I can do all the crazy I need, man.”

  The detective stayed right on him, patte
d his shoulder the way you pat a dog that’s done just what you want. “You left evidence, Jesse.”

  Jesse looked at his lawyer, who told Jesse keep his mouth shut. But Jesse liked to talk. “Bullshit.”

  The detective leaned closer, grinned. “Oh, yeah, you were careful—condoms, kept your clothes on, and we’ll find those in time.”

  Jesse grinned, said, “You just keep on looking.”

  The detective went on as if he hadn’t heard his words: “And those batting gloves your daddy bought you. When was the last time you were in a batting cage?”

  Jesse shrugged.

  The detective went on, “You sure have worked your way through that box of batting gloves we found in your room. You’re good, Jesse; no prints anywhere.”

  Jesse nodded. “I told you I found that stuff on the sidewalk. I was walking my dog. Ask any of my neighbors. I’m always out walking my dog.”

  He sat straighter then, said, “I’m a model son, I tell you. Just go ask my dad and mom. Mow the grass, rake the leaves, walk the dog. Don’t know why you gotta pick on me just ’cause I did some time in juvy.”

  “Yeah, you were careful,” the detective said. “Sat in that living room, eating Chinese food, stuffing it in that hole in the ski mask. You even got rid of the scotch bottle, the chopsticks, used condoms, took care not to leave any DNA. It’s like you’ve really studied up on these things.”

  Jesse laughed, said, “Yeah, all that CSI I’ve been watching. I learn all my best tricks watching TV.” The cop leaned forward, his grin just as tight and hard as the one on Jesse’s face. But Jesse didn’t see that. He was enjoying himself. He said, “You know, I watch a lot of those shows. CSI, NCIS. It’s mostly the tits and tight asses I like to watch. ’Cause the research, man, it’s fucking Disneyland if you ask me.” Jesse kept his smile tight, but I could see the tension in his eyes, not putting out anything, his expression blank as he could keep it as he waited for the next words the detective would say.