by Jake Hinkson
Stan nodded toward the swivel chair shoved up against the cluttered desk and said, "Felicia."
She sat down and asked, "What are we doing here?"
"You and I are going to call on Fuller while Elliot takes the car down the road."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Three miles south down Melnyk Road there's a garbage dump called Thickroot Landfill. Follow the signs to the main building. The place is run by a guy named Arnold Thickroot. Tell him you're there for me."
"And then what?"
"Then he'll dispose of the dearly departed. You'll come back here, and we'll take it from there."
"Why aren't you coming with me?"
"I don't like doing bidness face to face with people I don't have to."
"Can she come with me?"
"No."
I looked back at him. "Why not?"
"Because I need her to meet face to face with Fuller."
"I know Fuller," she told me grimly. "I sort of set this whole thing in motion, so it makes sense for me to do this part."
I asked Stan, "You sure I can handle this, with the ... twins?"
"Yes," he said. "You're smart. You've done well all day today. This part is easy. Short drive. No cops out here. Three miles south down Melnyk Road. Thickroot Landfill. Signs to the main building. Arnold Thickroot. Tell him you're from Stan."
"You'll be here, in the back of this gas station?"
"I've arranged for Felicia to be picked up here by one of Fuller's guys. She'll be brought back here. You meet us back here and we all go back to the truck together."
None of it felt right. I told Felicia, "I hate to leave you."
"This part requires trust," she said. "We've built up trust today, I think."
I wanted to hug or kiss her. I patted her shoulder.
When I walked to the door, Stan said, "Elliot."
I turned around.
"Be smart."
* * *
I pulled out of the parking lot and drove south. It was hilly country out there. Melnyk Road swooped and rose like a roller coaster, while in the distance a jumble of farmland and farmhouses flickered by in the moonlight. After a while, the country closed in, the horse pastures giving way to a narrow corridor of trees. I drove down a steep hill, around a bend, and passed into another land, this one occupied by smaller houses, churches and the occasional gas station.
Dread boiled in my stomach. I tried to think about things, but it was hard to think, alone with two corpses shoved into the backseat.
Still, I tried. I couldn't figure Stan. Why had he come along with me only to bail out at the gas station? Was it as simple as he said or was it something else?
I checked my rearview mirror.
What if I was being set up?
Maybe there was no garbage dump. He could have called and tipped off the cops. I'd be driving around these back roads with two dead bodies, looking for a place that didn't exist.
I passed some houses, a car wash, a Baptist church with a sign out front that read: WHAT PURPOSE IS DRIVING YOUR LIFE?
I checked my rearview mirror. Nothing. I passed more houses, one with a muddy nativity scene still sitting in the yard.
Suddenly a car raced over the hill behind me. It charged up fast. I checked my speed. I was doing the speed limit, thirty-five. The car speeding up my ass was clocking sixty, at least. Its headlights blasted into my rearview mirror, and the car hovered a few feet off my bumper. I waited for the blue lights.
They didn't come. Instead, the car peeked out from behind me so it could see down the black two-lane. Deciding the coast was clear, it passed me. A Honda Civic full of teenagers. One kid flipped me off as they passed, and they all laughed. Once they were in front of me, the driver hit the gas again and they were gone.
I was so busy watching the kids I nearly missed the gravel road jutting out of the woods and the good-sized sign at the end of it reading: THICKROOT.
I slammed on the breaks and the SUV skidded fifty feet, screaming like a soul in hell. When it jerked to a stop, the bodies in the back thumped together.
I shook my head a few times, put the Armada in reverse and backed down the two-lane until I got to the groove-worn gravel road winding off into darkness. I didn't know how far a drive I had, so I eased along, keeping the SUV's wheels in the ruts. I hit the high beams and they jumped out as far as they could, but there was nothing to see except gray trees against a wall of black.
The road snaked off through the trees, and I followed, zigzagging through the darkness like a mouse squirming through a maze. It seemed to go on forever. After a while, I noticed the path ever so slightly easing downward. I picked up some speed. I wanted to get this over with. Then the road steepened, dust swirling in my headlights, gravel snapping under my tires. I followed a sudden, sharp turn, and it spat me out into Thickroot Landfill.
A skinny road subdivided a stinking ocean of trash, then climbed halfway up a distant hill toward a metal shack. A sign along the road read: Quad 1 Sect 1. I followed the road up the hill and passed sections two, three, four. After a small break between sections, I passed sections five through twenty-five.
Each section was an acre-wide pit, and every inch of that pit stunk like the inside of a septic tank. I had the windows rolled up, but it didn't matter. I didn't try to fight it, either. The putrescence had been there before I showed up, and it would be there a long time after I was gone.
I pulled up to the darkened shack and shone my lights on it. Leaving the SUV running, I got out and peered through a good-sized window next to a wide metal door. With the high beams behind me, I could see a desk, some chairs, a coffee machine, a television. On the wall behind the desk hung a poster of a spotted owl taking a dump on the constitution over the inscription: EPA: ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ASSHOLES. Another poster featured the same spotted owl wearing an EPA button and wiping his ass with the American flag. Below him was the inscription: I'm Saving Trees By Recycling This Old Flag.
I turned around and looked up the hill. The road twisted through the trash and disappeared over the ridge.
With a shift in the wind, the sharp stench of the garbage suddenly hit me in a wave. I covered my nose and mouth with an arm and ran to the Armada and climbed inside.
"Damn." I slammed the door, but the stink hung on me like I'd been sprayed with cat piss.
I backed onto the road and followed it up the hill. At the ridge, it jerked hard right into the woods again. I followed it and after a few minutes arrived at the top of another pit. I followed the road down into the pit, passing signs for Quad 2 Sect 1. I passed alongside the sections in the quadrant until I came to another shack halfway up another hill. The shack was smaller than the first, and a light was on in the window.
I stopped and got out. Beside the shack sat a grimy bulldozer. I walked up to the window of the shack but didn't see anybody inside. It had basically the same set up as the first place but no posters. On the wall behind the desk hung a map of the landfill. Colored tacks peppered the board.
I tried the door, found it locked and decided someone must have simply left the light on.
I climbed back into the Armada, drove up the hill, wound through a curtain of trees, and that's when I hit pay dirt. The road dropped sharply into the third quadrant, but from the top of the ridge, past the foul, sprawling acres of garbage, I could see another ridge in the distance. And at the top of that ridge in the moonlight sat a large dark house, its windows aglow.
I swung down into Quad 3, but it was different from the first two, narrower, darker somehow. It occupied a hollow rather than a valley, a rotting cavity among these rolling foothills of garbage.
It smelled worse, too. The stench seemed to claw at the windows as I sped through the acres of trash. Ahead of me in the moonlight, I could see the main road shoot up to the ridge, away from the house.
But at the foot of the hill, next to a crooked sign reading: ThIcKrOoT, a spindly dirt drive crept off from the main road and twisted up toward the house. I wound up the
pocked little path, easing over gaping holes and exposed rock, and finally parked beside a dented orange van in the yard.
The house had never been much to look at, I'm sure. Essentially a two-story wooden box with warping gray boards, it clung now to a bald spot on the side of this scrubby hill, its yellowing windows staring out at the swamp of garbage rotting at the edge of the yard.
I got out and slammed my door to announce myself in case whoever was inside had not heard me come up the road.
There was no sign of movement inside the house. I began to walk toward it when somewhere behind me someone said, "Hold it there, asshole."
-CHAPTER THIRTEEN-
The Thickroots
I stopped and the man behind me said, "Just stand there." Then he called to the house, "All right! I got him!"
The front door of the house opened and spilled light into the dirt yard. A round man clutching a shotgun stepped outside.
With the light at his back, I had a hard time seeing his face. Tufts of black hair stuck out above his ears, but his head was as bare as the moon. He wore jagged old spectacles held together by clumps of duct tape.
"Who are you?" he asked in a dirty baritone.
"Stan the Man sent me."
"Who?"
I blinked.
He stepped to the left, and the house's illumination hit me like a floodlight. After a moment, though, when my eyes adjusted, I could see him a little better. Fleshy cheeks bunched around a greasy ball of a nose. Heavy, stupid eyes peered at me behind the spectacles.
"Well?" he said.
"I'm looking for Arnold Thickroot," I said. "Stan the Man told me to deliver a package," I jerked my head toward the SUV, "to Arnold Thickroot."
"That a fact?"
"Yes, it is."
He glanced at the name badge on my shirt. "Your name Juan?"
"Sure."
"Kinda pale for a Juan."
"My mother was an albino."
He laughed and scratched the two days worth of stubble on his chin. "All right, Juan. I'm Thickroot."
"Then I have a package for you, Mr. Thickroot."
The fat man lowered his gun. "Well, I guess I better see what you got." To the man in the darkness behind me, he said, "Three, you keep an eye on him."
"All right," Three answered. I didn't turn to look for him, but his thin voice sounded young.
Thickroot gestured to the Armada. I turned and walked to the back and lifted the hatch. The two packages lay stiffening in their cramped casket, and at some point—perhaps when I'd hit the brakes back on the two-lane—one of them had popped open, and part of a face peered out. I couldn't tell who it was. Ashen-skinned, his rolled-back eye turning a milky gray, he'd lost any hold to identity.
"Well," Thickroot said, "he's dead as all hell."
I nodded. "Yes, he is."
He covered the dead man's face. "You do that?"
"No."
"Stan?"
I shrugged.
Thickroot nodded and called out, "All right, Three. C'mon out of there."
The man who stepped out of the dark holding a shotgun turned out to be a dirty, chop-haired girl. She couldn't have been a day over seventeen, but she looked me in the eye with a steadiness Thickroot lacked. Broad-shouldered and heavy-set like her father, she was about as delicate as a brick. She wore jeans and, despite the heat, a dark flannel shirt. Near her heavy work boots hovered an old dog, dirty, mangy and pregnant.
The girl looked me over.
"Hi," I said.
To her father she said, "You want me to get the truck?"
"Yeah. And the dozer. Get it all ready."
"Where you want to take 'em?"
Thickroot frowned at the girl. "Where do you think?"
"Sixteen?"
"Course. Move your ass."
The girl stepped toward her father, the gun pointed at the ground. "Don't try to show off, Arnold."
Neither father nor daughter backed down until, at the same time, they both seemed to step away. Thickroot cradled his gun in the crook of his left arm. The girl wandered back into the dark trailed by the silent dog.
Thickroot shook his head, and said, "She'll probably be a little while. You come on in the house with me."
I turned to see where the girl was, but she and the dog were gone.
Thickroot said, "My girl, Arnold Thickroot the third. I just call her Three."
"Was she just hanging around out here? Waiting for somebody to drive up?"
Thickroot didn't answer as he turned and walked back toward his house.
I followed him up to the house. He walked inside and left it to me to close the door. A small foyer led into a wide, bright den with high cream-colored walls and a large ceiling fan. An enormous burgundy recliner, which looked to be of a set with an enormous burgundy sofa, sat in front of an enormous flat-screen television against the wall. And on the television was a porn movie. On the single bookcase against the wall sat rows of porn DVDs and tapes. The house looked like it had been decorated by a middle-class suburban sex addict.
Thickroot walked through the room without glancing at the people—four of them if I counted right—fucking on the TV screen. He disappeared into the kitchen.
I stared at the orgy for a minute. The sound was turned down, and the bodies onscreen copulated with silent vigor.
"Hey man, you care for a drink?" Thickroot called from the kitchen.
As if he had flipped a switch in me, I suddenly realized I was starving. I couldn't remember the last time I had eaten. I hurried after him into the kitchen and found him standing in front of the refrigerator, the gun still tucked into his armpit. Dishes filled the sink, but not in a gross way. They were dishes from tonight's dinner, not last week's. Likewise, the kitchen—and what I'd seen of the rest of the house—seemed to be clean and furnished by Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond. An island anchored the middle of the room and the wide windows looking out onto an empty backyard seemed to expand it.
"I'm starving," I said. "And I haven't had anything to drink for a while."
Thickroot turned and looked me up and down. "I got some leftover mac and cheese," he said.
"That sounds delicious."
He pulled out some blue Tupperware and held it out to me. "Microwave's broke," he said.
I told him thanks, said I loved cold macaroni and took the tub to the island. He handed me a fork.
"What you want to drink?" he asked.
I shook my head. I was already forking down clumps of the macaroni as fast as I could.
He handed me a Budweiser and a Fresca. "Either one or both. Help yourself." He leaned against the counter and watched me eat.
I cracked open the can of soda and swallowed some.
"You are hungry," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
He nodded. "Sorry there ain't nothing but old mac and cheese. The girl ain't much of a cook, I reckon. She's okay, though. Keeps me fat, anyway."
I waved that away. When I stopped to breathe for a moment, I told him, "This is the greatest meal of my life."
Thickroot laughed. "Then you're worse off than me, and that's saying something."
I nodded. "You don't know the half of it."
"Aw hell, man, I bet Stan pays pretty well."
Having nothing to say about that, I kept eating.
He asked, "So how'd you come to be working for Stan?"
I stopped shoveling down macaroni. Everything about the situation told me not to trust Thickroot. I had a sip of the soda and told him, "Just lucky, I guess."
"That Stan, he's a funny one," Thickroot said.
"Yeah."
"Why'd he kill them two out there?"
It occurred to me Thickroot probably didn't know DB was a cop.
"I don't really know," I said. "I mean, it happened so fast. I wasn't expecting it and then ..." I just let the sentence wander off. Then I had some more macaroni.
Thickroot shrugged. "Well, Stan's one crazy son of a bitch of a man. No figuring a crazy
bastard like that."
I finished the macaroni, washed it down with the soda and cracked open the can of beer. I took a long pull off it.
Thickroot laughed at my face. "You've had a rough day. I can tell."
I kissed the side of the can. "Liquid gold."
"How long did you say you been working for Stan?"
"I don't work for him."
"Really?" Thickroot jerked his bald knob of a head toward the yard. "You're driving around a couple of dead guys for him. If you ain't working for him, you must be one hell of a friend."
I took a long slow drink and said, "I owe him."
"Money?"
"A favor."
Thickroot lifted his heavy eyebrows and said, "Well, it's a tough thing, being indebted to a fella like Stan, I reckon." Something had changed in his face, though. He'd lost all interest in me. He pulled a beer out of the fridge, and I followed him into the den. Still standing, I watched him settle down into the big recliner. He propped the shotgun against the recliner's arm. Then he pushed out the footrest, folded his arms on his gut like a drunk might relax on a bar, and stared at the television.
The movie had moved into something resembling a plot. A blonde with enormous breasts was sitting at a desk talking to a ponytailed man in a business suit.
After a while, they started kissing. They were peeling off each other's clothes when I heard a truck pull into the driveway. A minute later the girl walked in the front door. She held it open just long enough for the dog to walk in, then she slammed it shut. Thickroot jerked around in his recliner.
"You ready?"
"Yeah," the girl said. She stood there by the door and acted as if I wasn't there. She could only have been sixteen or seventeen, but I could tell that her years were the equal of most people's lives. The old dog sat down next to her, its dirty, swollen belly plump against the floor. They both smelled like they'd been wading in a sewer.
Thickroot turned to me and put on some of the friendliness he'd had in the kitchen. "How about you, Elliot? You ready? We'll get your packages all stowed and taken care of and you can get on out of here."
"Sure," I said.
He smiled. Friendly.
I nodded. I even gave a curt smile back. But Thickroot had used my name. And I hadn't told him my name.
