Blanco County 04 - Guilt Trip

by Rehder, Ben

“How was it?” Colby persisted.

  “You ever been to a wedding before?”

  “Well…yeah. Plenty.”

  “It was just like all of those.”

  The only difference, Marlin thought to himself, was that he should’ve been up there instead of the groom—some guy named Scott, who worked in the world of advertising of all things. Wrote copy or slogans or whatever you call it. Marlin had formed a mental image right from the start: a slick, schmoozy guy who dressed all in black and said things like “Let’s do lunch.” Christ.

  Colby chuckled to himself. “So you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Nope.”

  Three months ago, Marlin had received a call from Becky Cameron, a woman who had spent a year by his side and later blew a hole in his heart by leaving. On the phone, she had told him she was getting married, and she would be honored if he could attend. She would also understand if he chose not to. The news filled him with a wistfulness so intense it dulled his senses for several days afterward. But yeah, he had gone, and Becky had looked so damn beautiful standing at the altar, all he could think during the ceremony was…What if ?

  What if I had moved to Dallas to be with her?

  “You got a bum deal with Becky, that’s all it was,” Colby said quietly.

  Marlin didn’t reply.

  “She was a big-city nurse, she needed a big-city hospital. Nothing you could do about that.”

  Marlin remained silent.

  “Lots of good women in Blanco County.”

  Marlin looked at him. “You think so?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “That girl you’ve been seeing lately—”

  “Melinda.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Austin.”

  Marlin nodded, making his point.

  “Yeah, but it’s worth the drive,” Colby said. “Every minute of it.”

  “If things got serious between the two of you, where would you live?”

  “I haven’t thought that far in advance.”

  “Think she’d want to move out to the ranch, live more than an hour from the nearest decent mall?”

  Marlin could tell from the expression on Colby’s face that his friend now had something new to worry about. “How many people live in Blanco County, Phil?”

  “I don’t know. Little over eight thousand?”

  “Right around there. So we’ve got about four thousand females. How many of them are roughly our age?”

  “Maybe ten percent.”

  “Okay, four hundred. How many of them are single?”

  “Not that many.”

  “Probably ten percent again, right?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “Forty women.”

  “You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”

  “Why not? I didn’t have much else to do while I was sitting in the church.”

  Phil drained the last of his beer. “Forty women. You’re right, that ain’t many to choose from. Some of them are probably pretty ugly, and I bet the rest wouldn’t find a redneck like you all that appealing.”

  After Phil left, Marlin stepped inside, Geist at his heels, and began to strip off his filthy uniform. He sat in the kitchen in his underwear and ate some cold fried chicken, barely able to keep his eyes open. He put some food out for the dog, then checked his answering machine. There were two messages.

  Hey, John, it’s Max Thayer returning your call. The message you left on my voicemail—I think it’s a great idea, and I’ll support you however I can. Give me a call back.

  A beep, then:

  Uh, yeah, this is David Pritchard calling. I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Vance Scofield’s attorney. Anyway, I understand you’re leading the search, and there’s something I think you need to know. I’ll give you all the details when we talk, but here’s the short version. I’m the president of the Rotary Club in Blanco, and we’re raffling off a new Corvette. Each ticket is a hundred dollars and… well, I guess you don’t need to know all that. Anyway, Vance is the treasurer, and he had the Corvette stored in a metal barn on his property. So I went over to his place just to check on things. Here’s the problem. The Corvette is gone…and, uh…Vance was the only one who had the keys.

  5

  JUST BEFORE EIGHT o’clock on Tuesday morning, a seventy-year-old man named J.D. Evans was clerking at the Exxon outside Minneola, Florida, when a couple of youngsters came into the store. Both were about twenty, maybe twenty-one, the boy tall and skinny and pale, the girl looking like a pin-up with long blonde hair.

  “Morning,” J.D. said, holding his fifth cup of coffee, just one more hour to go on his all-night shift.

  The boy nodded and headed down the candy aisle toward the cooler in back. The girl skedaddled right to the bathroom, like most of the women do, but not before J.D. got an eyeful. She was a sight, all right. A real looker. Enough to make J. D. remember one or two just like her, back when he’d sown a few wild oats of his own.

  J.D. went back to the newspaper on the counter.

  “You got any Snapple?” The boy was calling out from the back of the store.

  “Any what?” J.D. hollered back, squinting.

  “Snapple.” The kid shrugged, maybe a little embarrassed. “It’s what she drinks,” he explained.

  J. D. said, “If we do, you’re in the right spot.”

  The boy looked again. “Don’t see any.”

  “Guess we’re all out.”

  That seemed to satisfy the kid. He turned back to the cooler, and J.D. went back to his sports page, keeping tabs on the Braves.

  He heard the bathroom door swing open, and a minute or two later both of the youngsters were at the counter. Now the girl was front and center, busting out of a low-cut top, her shorts riding low enough to give J.D. a heart murmur if he wasn’t careful. He tried not to stare.

  The boy plopped a liter of Mountain Dew and a bag of Cheetos on the counter, followed by a package of hair coloring and a twelve-pack of Miller High Life.

  “Y’all doing all right this morning?” J.D. asked, giving himself an excuse to run his eyes over the young lady.

  She smiled back at him, the kind of face that draws men like birds to fresh-mowed grass. “Real good. And you?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  The boy was grinning at him, too, kind of an I-know-what-you’re-up-to expression on his face. J.D. winked at him and rang up the first two items. “Awful early for a cold one, ain’t it?”

  “Doctor’s orders,” the boy said. “He told me to get lots of fluids.”

  J.D. gave a polite chuckle.

  “You got some ID? All you young’uns look like babies to me.”

  The boy slipped a wallet from his hip pocket and produced a driver’s license.

  J.D. eyeballed it, working the numbers in his head. “Now, my ‘rithmetic is a little rusty,” he said, “but I believe this here says you’re twenty. Drinking age is twenty-one.”

  The boy, cool as you please, reached into his wallet and dropped a sawbuck on the counter. J.D. shook his head. The boy dropped another. J.D. scooped them up and tucked them into his pocket, then added the beer to the total on the register. “What brings y’all over from Texas?” he asked, bagging everything up.

  “Selling Bibles,” the kid said, pulling hard on J.D.’s leg, all three of them knowing it. “The holy word of Jesus.”

  Now they were all smiling. These kids spreading the gospel was about as likely as J.D. cleaning the toilet twice per shift. “What, like missionaries?” J.D. asked, playing along.

  “Yeah,” the girl said. “You interested in that kind of work? We could use some help.”

  Damn, the girl’s voice was like honey on a biscuit. Flirting with him, too, all part of the joke.

  “I’ll have to pass,” J.D. said. “Can’t you see I’m making a solid fortune right here?”

  The boy grabbed the bag and said, “Well, if you decide you are interested in a missionary pos
ition, just talk to ol’ Stephanie here. She knows all about that stuff.”

  The girl giggled and swatted the boy on the arm. “Lucas!”

  Then out the door they went, and J.D. watched through the glass as the girl sashayed her fine little butt out to the Corvette parked at the curb.

  In Red O’Brien’s way of thinking, hiring illegal aliens was about like poaching deer. That is, he didn’t want anybody else to do it, no sir, but he didn’t see the harm if he did it now and again himself. If a large job came Red’s way—say, clearing a thousand acres of brush or building a rock wall or putting up a deer-proof fence—Red was more than happy to round up a crew of wetbacks and get after it. Those boys worked hard and cheap, any day of the week, and you didn’t have to hassle with insurance, Social Security, FICA (whatever the hell that was), or any of that other shit.

  Then there were the other times, the lean times, when Red wasn’t the boss but was working for somebody else. Instead of hiring the crew, he was on the crew. All at once, Red would be in direct competition with the illegal immigrants, and his attitude would change considerably. Red would suddenly realize that the same men he’d hired just last month were now taking jobs away from regular old white boys like himself.

  “Them border-crossing beaners are causing the downfall of American society!” Red had proclaimed to Billy Don one day, pointing toward two illegal aliens laying bricks.

  “Who, Manuel and Tony?” Billy Don replied. “Naw, they wouldn’t do that. They’re nice guys.”

  That certainly didn’t make Red feel any better. When he saw work slipping through his hands because of the illegals, it made him wonder—Lord have mercy on him—what good it was to be a native-born American anymore.

  And that’s exactly how Red felt when he pulled up to the job site on Vance Scofield’s ranch Tuesday morning and noticed a couple of extra Mexicans working the fence line. This was what Red had been afraid of.

  “Uh-oh,” Billy Don said. “They’s three of ‘em now.”

  “You always was quick with numbers,” Red replied, throwing his truck into park. He spotted their boss, Jack Chambers, pulling ten-foot T-posts off a trailer. “I’ll do all the talking,” Red said.

  Billy Don groaned. “Then we’re screwed for sure.”

  “You wanna keep this job or not?” Red snapped.

  “Jeez, Red, I was just kidding.”

  “Then let me handle it.”

  Both men got out and walked over to the trailer, where Jack was wiping sweat off his forehead, smiling as they approached. “I was wondering if I was gonna see y’all again,” he said. “Where were you boys yesterday?”

  Red played it innocent. “Flooded in at home. You mean you was working?”

  “Me and Jorge got out here right after lunch. Put in a good six hours, just the two of us. I left a message for you.”

  “Yeah, sorry ‘bout that. We was outside cutting up a pig,” Red said. It wasn’t a lie, either. Yesterday morning, they’d made it back to Red’s trailer with the truckload of wild hogs just fine, crossing the river as soon as it got low enough, no sign of the rancher. But since most of their night had been wasted sitting in the truck, waiting for the rain to stop, they’d had to use the afternoon to butcher the hogs before they spoiled “Besides,” Red said, “we kinda figured the job was on hold, what with Mr. Scofield being drownt and everything.”

  That brought a frown to Jack’s face. “Well, yeah, he might be, but he already paid in advance. That means we gotta finish it up.”

  Red kicked the mud with the toe of his boot. “I see you got some new boys working.”

  “When you didn’t call me back, even last night, I had to do something. Jorge brought a couple of his cousins along.”

  Red glanced over at the trio of Mexicans, busy as bees, unloading tools from the bed of Jack’s truck, ready for a long, sweaty day. “We sure could use the work, Jack,” he said.

  Jack removed his cap and scratched the crown of his head. “You’ll show up when I need ya?”

  “You know we will. It was just that damn rain the other night. A misunderstanding.”

  Jack appeared to think it over. “Listen,” he said, “I promised them two new ones a full day’s work. But you come back tomorrow and I’ll get you back on the job, okay?”

  Red figured that was a reasonable proposition, so he shook Jack’s hand and he and Billy Don turned for the truck.

  “Hey, Red,” Jack called. “I saw Loretta last night.”

  That stopped Red dead in his tracks. Billy Don, too. They both turned around.

  Billy Don said, “My ex-wife?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, I said Loretta. Red’s ex-wife.”

  “Yeah, she’s mine, too,” Red said.

  Jack was puzzled. “Wait. You saying you was both married to her?”

  “It’s a long story,” Red said. “Where’d you see her?”

  “I was married to her first,” Billy Don said.

  Lucas knew he should feel different about the whole situation—nervous or scared or that remorseful thing they were always talking about on cop shows—-but he didn’t. It was damn near impossible. He was tooling along the roads of Florida in a brand-new Corvette, the girl of his dreams by his side, and all he could feel was great. If there was hell to pay later, then that’s what he’d do—pay it later. For now, he was going to see how long he could make it last.

  “What you got in your suitcase?” Stephanie asked, after she’d drained her third beer. She’d been tossing the empties—hers and his—out the window at cattle-crossing signs, making a game of it. Hit the cow, win a prize.

  “‘Bout forty pounds of black-tar heroin.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You asked.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Clothes, mostly.”

  “What else? Anything special?” She said it all singsongy, like she was angling for something. He knew what it was, too.

  Ecstasy.

  She loved the stuff. Lucas, well, he could take it or leave it. He did, however, enjoy the effect it had on Stephanie. Made her a wildcat, all sexed up and ready to go. And he had half a dozen tablets in his suitcase.

  “Steph, you know we oughta hold off on that. Least while we’re on the road.”

  “I don’t see any reason why I can’t do some. I’m not driving.”

  The thing was, she had a point.

  He cut a glance at her from the corner of his eye and it made his heart thump. God, what a wonderful face she had. There were times when Lucas felt he could stare at it for hours, just get lost in it and forget all his troubles. He almost expected to hear harps playing when he was around her, like she was an angel straight down from heaven.

  She belched and said, “Where the hell are we, anyway?”

  “You know how, when you’re looking at a map, Florida hangs down into the ocean like a big ol’ dick?” he asked.

  “You’re so gross,” she said, giving him that look where she was trying to frown but was about to laugh.

  “Well, we’re about halfway down it.”

  She yawned and lit a cigarette, and they bounced along the narrow county road for a few miles. Staring out the passenger-side window, she said, “Lucas, you really think we’re doing the right thing?”

  “Hell yeah. You know how you love the ocean and everything? Well, Key West’ll be a hell of a lot nicer than Port Aransas, I promise you that.”

  She looked at him with no expression at all. Lucas had dealt with her mood swings before. Just a few days ago, she was thrilled about this spontaneous adventure.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You miss your mama?” he asked.

  She scrunched her face up, thinking about it. “Not really.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s just riding in this car. I’m gettin’ sick of it. When the hell we gonna get there? You told me two damn days.”

  “Don’t snap at me, Steph. It’s only been
two days.”

  “And we’re not there yet, are we?”

  “Yeah, but we’ve been mostly sticking to the back roads, and it’s a lot slower. I didn’t account for that.”

  “Plus, I’m sick of staying in shitty motels.”

  “You know what? Anytime you wanna get out and walk, just let me know.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Whatever.”

  He hated when she got all cranky, and he hated it even more when he didn’t have the backbone to give it right back to her. This time, he’d stood his ground. With a girl like Stephanie, that’s what it took sometimes. Otherwise, she’d bend you around her finger like a piece of baling wire.

  A few miles down the road, she caught his eye and stuck her tongue out at him, all playful. He ignored her.

  “Oh, Mr. Tough Guy,” she said. She swung sideways, her back against the passenger door, her long, tan legs draped over into his lap. She began to work her foot along his zipper. “Let’s see how tough you really are.”

  Later, after he pulled back onto the road, she said, “What if they come looking for us?”

  “Who?”

  “The cops. Who else?”

  “I told you they won’t.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “They won’t have any reason to look for you. Not too hard, anyway. Me, there’s nothing to connect me to him, really.”

  Lucas was just trying to put Stephanie at ease. They’d look for him, all right. The question was, would they be able to find him? The Corvette, too, would be a problem. He’d known that from the start. That’s why he’d decided to sell it—and Miami was probably the best place to do it. Find a chop shop and unload the damn thing. Far enough away from home that the cops wouldn’t be watching for it.

  6

  “IF YOU DONT mind, Mr. Pritchard, just start from the beginning,” Bobby Garza said. Marlin noticed that the sheriff was looking tired this morning. Garza had a sweet little three-year-old boy, but the kid was currently battling the stomach flu. It had probably been a long night at the Garza household. Garza was a good-looking guy with thick black hair, but today he looked nothing short of rumpled.

  Pritchard was a pear-shaped middle-aged man with sandy hair and glasses. He had arrived at nine o’clock, as promised, and he was now seated at the small table in the conference room at the sheriff’s office, Garza to his right, John Marlin to his left. Marlin had already given Garza the high points the night before, but they both wanted to hear the full story.