by Thomas King
Thumps kept his hands up where Cooley could see them. “There’s a good explanation.”
“I’ll bet there is.”
“I’m really sorry about lying to you.”
“No big deal,” said Cooley, and he lowered the nose of the rifle to the floor. “You get used to it. Floyd used to lie to me. So did my old man. Hell, politicians lie to me all the time.”
Thumps let his hands drop by degrees. He was reasonably sure that Cooley wasn’t going to shoot him. But Cooley was angry, and you couldn’t always tell what angry people were going to do just by looking at them.
“Where’d you get the gloves?”
“I can explain that, too.”
“Nice colour.”
Thumps peeled the gloves off. His hands were wet and pasty-looking, as if he had left them underwater too long.
“Red Hawks,” said Cooley, looking at the wall. “Old Duke is going to be pissed off he didn’t spot this the first time out.”
“It’s not what it looks like.”
“It is what it is.”
“You really don’t think Stick did this.”
“They don’t pay me enough to think.”
Whoever had painted “Red Hawks” on the wall had wanted the world to see it. The letters were large and well formed, the kind of letters you used to see in books on penmanship.
“We’re going to have to call it in.”
“I don’t know,” said Cooley. “We could always lie to the sheriff. I’d like that.”
“No point in looking for trouble.”
“Seems to me, we’ve got trouble already,” said Cooley. “If we call the sheriff and tell him the truth, he’s going to be angry with you for snooping around and messing with his case.”
Thumps sighed. Cooley didn’t know how right he was.
“And he’s going to scream at me for letting you in.”
“We have to tell him about this.”
“I suppose we do,” said Cooley. “But maybe we could rearrange things a little first.”
Thumps was impressed. For a guy who wasn’t paid to think, Cooley was doing a pretty good job. “You want to tell the sheriff you found this?”
Cooley shrugged. “If I tell him that I found it, he won’t need to yell at you.”
Thumps nodded. “And if he doesn’t know that you let me in . . .”
“Then he won’t yell at me,” said Cooley.
Thumps reminded himself for the hundredth time not to judge a person’s intelligence by their size. “You’d do that?”
“Sure,” said Cooley. “Who knows? By now, there may be a reward.”
“You won’t mention I was here?”
“Do the math,” said Cooley. “If I tell Duke that you were here, he’ll probably throw your ass in jail.”
Thumps had to admit that was a real possibility.
“And if you’re in jail,” Cooley continued, “who’s going to find Stick for me?”
So, it wasn’t generosity.
“I can’t do that, Cooley.”
“You don’t have to catch him.”
“What if he didn’t kill Takashi or Floyd?”
“Then he’s got nothing to worry about.”
Thumps searched Cooley’s face for a sign that he could take the man at his word. “I’m going to need time to figure this thing out.”
“Sure.” Cooley’s smile was back, but it was a painful smile. “Floyd’s not going anywhere.”
As Thumps rolled through the gates of the resort and turned onto the main road, he wondered whether Cooley had heard the second lie. The one about time. The last thing Thumps needed was more time. The more time he had, the less likely it was that anyone would find who had killed Takashi and Floyd. What Thumps needed was a clue. A big, straightforward clue. Something plain and easy to read. Like writing on a wall.
But like everything else about this case, the writing on the wall didn’t make any sense. If Stick and the Red Hawks had killed Takashi, why would they have wanted to advertise it? And if they had wanted to advertise it, why cover it up? Unless they’d second thoughts—remorse, fear, maybe panic—and then had tried to paint over the evidence.
As Thumps thought about the case, he realized that the problem wasn’t too few clues—it was too many. Someone had shot Takashi. Someone had moved his body. Someone had shot Floyd. Someone had painted “Red Hawks” on the wall of the computer complex. And someone had tried to paint over the words. In Thumps’ experience, clues tended to work toward agreement, like pieces of a puzzle. The more you had in place, the clearer the picture. This case had more than enough clues, but they tended to contradict each other.
Just like the Obsidian Murders.
The memory was in his head before he could block it. Thumps tried to shove it back where it belonged, back into the darker places of his mind. But the similarities between what had happened on the California coast and what had happened at Buffalo Mountain nagged at him. Similarities not with the killings, but with the confusion around each murder. That case hadn’t made any sense, either.
One summer, bodies began showing up on beaches along the northern California coast. Ten people in all. Five women, four men. One child. There had been no similarity in their ages, their occupations, or their friends. Five were from the area. Five were on vacation or travelling through. Each body had been left just above the high-tide line, arranged in the sand as if part of a grotesque mosaic.
The Obsidian Murders. That’s what the press had called them. Because in the mouth of each victim, the killer had placed a small piece of obsidian, something you wouldn’t find on a beach, something the killer brought with him.
Then, as quickly as they started, the murders stopped, and all that remained to mark a summer of terror were the pieces of investigative flotsam—bags of physical evidence, photographs, forensic reports, psychological profiles. And a police force that was exhausted, humiliated, and defeated.
The sign welcoming travellers to Chinook took Thumps by surprise, and as he turned the corner by the Burger King, he realized, with some concern, that while he could remember going over every haunting detail of that summer on the California coast, he couldn’t remember making the drive from Buffalo Mountain to town.
There were three places in town where Thumps was reasonably sure a person could get doughnuts. Not that he was a connoisseur of doughnuts. In fact, he hated the damn things. Doughnuts and cops might be more than just an occupational joke, but in Thumps’ case, there was no truth to the rumour. Even as a kid, he couldn’t stand the soft, bready texture or the way doughnuts folded up in his mouth like a wet wash rag. He especially hated the thick slick of sugar that snapped off in thin sheets like broken glass and filled his mouth with an unbearable sweetness.
Thumps stopped at Tim Hortons first, a chain that owed most of its success to its coffee. Thumps had to agree that the coffee was better than average, but what he liked about Hortons were the paper cups they used. Thumps was no fonder of Styrofoam than he was of doughnuts.
The girl at the counter looked to be twelve.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I take your order?”
“I’ll have a medium coffee.”
“Anything in it?”
“Black.”
“Would you like a doughnut?” asked the girl, each word bouncing out of her mouth like a ball.
“No.”
“We have some really fresh apple-cinnamon muffins.”
Maybe younger than twelve, Thumps thought. Only the very young could be this happy.
“Do you know who works the morning shift during the week?”
The girl smiled and handed him his coffee. “I’ve only been here a week. But I can ask Jill.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“She’s been here a month.”
Jill, as it turned out, had worked the morning shift for the past three weeks. But she didn’t remember Takashi stopping in for coffee and
doughnuts on a regular basis.
“We try to remember our regulars,” she said. “Have you seen our ads on television?”
“He was Asian. Late twenties.”
“Sorry. Did Jackie tell you about our fresh apple-cinnamon muffins?”
Thumps’ next stop was Sugar and Spice, an upscale boutique bakery that a couple from New York had opened a few years back. Gordon and Linda Packard were nice enough, but Chinook wasn’t Manhattan, and some of the exotic breads and desserts that Linda served up were lost on the locals. Thumps suspected the Packards didn’t like doughnuts any better than he did but had decided to make a few to try to fit in.
They hadn’t seen Takashi, either.
“What time would he have come by?” asked Linda.
“Probably between seven and eight.”
“No chance,” said Gordon. “We don’t open until nine.”
Thumps wasn’t even sure that doughnuts and coffee were a regular stop for Takashi. Just because Beth had found doughnuts and coffee in the man’s stomach didn’t mean he ate them every day. But what Thumps knew about human nature gave him hope that doughnuts were, in fact, a part of Takashi’s routine
Dumbo’s was Thumps’ last good hope. Morris Dumbo was a skinny reed of a man who enjoyed complaining the way some people enjoy chocolate. He was an uncomplicated, unrepentant mix of bigotry, sexism, and general vulgarity, a social garbage can on legs. Morris believed that everyone had a God-given right to smoke, drink, and shoot at anything that moved or got in the way, and that all food consumed by civilized people should be deep-fried.
Thumps had eaten at Dumbo’s a couple of times, and that had been enough. He had nothing in particular against fried food, but the oil Morris used to make his French fries, chicken parts, and fish sticks looked and tasted as though it had been squeezed out of the crankcase of a diesel. Why his doughnuts were considered the best in town was a mystery to Thumps. But they were. Among those in the know, Dumbo’s doughnuts were regarded as the Cadillacs of cholesterol.
Dumbo’s looked ordinary enough from the outside with its complement of pickups and semis hunkered down in the parking lot. The brown clapboard building was covered with crudely painted red-and-white signs that advertised everything from “good food” to “Indian souverneers.” Sometime in the not-too-distant past, Morris had strung Christmas tree lights along the eaves of the building. But instead of taking them down after the holidays the way most people did, Morris left them up so he’d have something to turn on for a special occasion. When George W. Bush beat Al Gore out for the presidency, Morris had left them on for a week.
Inside, the place was pretty much like any number of beat-to-shit western cafés. Tables with plastic tablecloths and mismatched chairs. Wood floors. Bathrooms marked Stags and Does. What made the place unusual was the large area behind the counter where Morris had set up a television set, a dirt-brown sofa, a pressboard coffee table, two end tables, and a Budweiser clock. As far as Thumps could tell, this was where Morris lived.
Morris was wiping down the counter when Thumps came through the door.
“Hey, chief. Long time, no see.”
Dumbo’s was dark, much like Al’s, but the odours were sharper and uglier. If meanness had a scent, Thumps reasoned, it would probably smell like this.
“You see what our wop mayor is trying to do?”
“The swimming pool?”
“Fucking waste of money. Am I right?”
Thumps wanted to tell Morris that he wasn’t right, that the community pool the city was finally going to build was a great idea, but he didn’t want an argument. He wanted information.
“What’ll ya have?”
“Friend of mine stopped by here Saturday.” Thumps knew he was on thin ice. Morris had probably heard about the murder at Buffalo Mountain. But there was the chance that he hadn’t paid any attention to it. Or didn’t know that two plus two was four. “Takashi, Daniel Takashi.”
Morris’ face remained blank. “Never heard of him.”
“Asian guy. Late twenties,” said Thumps. “He really liked your doughnuts. Said yours were the best.”
“You got that straight.”
“We were supposed to drive over to Glacier last Saturday,” said Thumps, making it up as he went along. “Kick around for a week or two.”
“That so.”
“But we missed each other.” Thumps shook his head. “A real pain.”
Morris’ eyes closed down into slits. “I got food to serve.”
Thumps glanced around. There were two truckers at a table by the window. Otherwise the place was empty. “Now, I got to catch up with him.”
Morris had a thin, razor mouth and short brown hair that sat on his bony head like a scrub brush nailed to a brick. He was not a pretty man, nor was he particularly ugly. He was simply unpleasant.
“You want coffee or what?”
Thumps sighed and took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket. “Sure.”
Morris brightened up a little. “Doughnut?”
For the next hour, Thumps sat at the counter and listened to Morris storm about everything from welfare to the price of liquor. In the lulls, he would float the conversation around to Takashi, doughnuts, and coffee, slowly dragging information out of Dumbo the way an auger drags dirt out of a hole.
“Came in every day,” Morris told him. “Black coffee and a chocolate long john.”
“Must have really liked your doughnuts,” said Thumps, with all the enthusiasm he could muster.
“Who cares what they like. Long as they pay and keep their mouths shut.”
Thumps ate the doughnut slowly and toyed with the idea of going to the bathroom and putting his finger down his throat before the fat and the sugar and the caffeine hit his bloodstream all at once.
“We were going to do some fishing.”
“That so.”
“But my alarm didn’t go off.” Thumps wasn’t sure he could finish the doughnut, no matter how long he sat and talked. He had no idea how Takashi had managed to eat one of these things each day or why he would want to.
“Got nothing against your friend, but do you know what those people do?” Morris got the coffee pot and refilled Thumps’ cup. “They come over here and take over. They buy up all the real estate. They steal our timber. And our government gives them a bunch of money so they can sell their televisions and their cars for less than we can make them. Morris paused and looked around the room. “That’s what happened to that slant up at Buffalo Mountain, you know.”
“What?”
“He tried to buy up the resort and the tribe killed him.”
“No kidding.”
“First smart thing those Indians have done in a long time.”
That was the nice thing about hate, Thumps thought to himself as he prodded the doughnut with his fork to see whether it had any weaknesses. You didn’t have to be right. You just had to be committed.
“What really heats my grease is that they get rich screwing us. You know what one of those leather jackets costs?”
Thumps pushed the doughnut to the edge of the plate. He was contemplating an unfortunate accident, the doughnut tripping and falling to its death, when he heard the echo of the question. “What?”
“Your buddy, chief. That fancy leather jacket he wears every day. Indian Motorcycle Company. My brother says those damn things start at five hundred.”
Thumps forgot about the doughnut. “An Indian Motorcycle Company jacket?”
“Along with that cute little San Francisco 49er cap and those fag dark glasses so you couldn’t see his eyes.”
“Saturday?”
“Everyday.”
“And a 49ers cap?”
“A real pussy team. The Niners haven’t been worth watching since Joe Montana left. Now there was a real American.”
“He didn’t wear a sports jacket?”
“Joe Montana?”
“No, Takashi. When he
stopped by on Saturday.”
Morris leaned on the counter. The man’s breath was foul, and Thumps had to turn his head to one side to find calm air. “Why the hell would a man wear a sports jacket if he was going fishing?” Morris thought about this for a minute and started to smirk. “You know what happened, don’t ya, chief? He stood you up.”
“Stood me up?”
“For a broad.”
“He came in here with a woman?”
“Don’t have to see them to know they’re around.” Morris touched the side of his nose with his finger. “I can smell them.”
Thumps tried to picture the man as a baby, and he wondered whether Morris’ parents had bothered to read the instructions on the Q-Tip box.
“That morning, he picked up two cups of coffee. You drink yours black, am I right?”
“That’s right.”
“So did your friend,” said Morris. “But the other cup had cream and sugar in it.”
“But you didn’t actually see a woman?”
“Who else drinks coffee with cream and sugar?” Morris picked up the remote control and turned on the television. “You can’t trust them, ya know.”
“Women?”
“Chinks,” said Morris. “But you’re right. Women aren’t much better.”
The first thought Thumps had, as he stepped out the front door into the late afternoon sunlight and walked to his car, was to take off all his clothes and burn them. But his next stop wasn’t going to be much of an improvement over Dumbo’s. In fact, if the other day was any indication, it could be worse. Best to wait, he told himself, and burn everything at once.
SIXTEEN
Thumps had no idea what kind of hours Dr. Beth Mooney kept, but as he pulled up to the old land titles building, he hoped that she was playing doctor in her family-practice office, checking runny noses, and not playing coroner in the basement, cutting up corpses.
“Beth. It’s me, Thumps.” He listened at the intercom to see if he could tell which floor she was on.
“Come on in.”
“Up or down?” He crossed his fingers and hoped for the best. “Up.”
“Second floor?”
“All the way.”
