Then Pike saw they weren’t looking at the boy. They were looking at him. His stomach was a plastic yellow and his intestines were poking out, glistening a light powder blue in the bar light. Pike stared stupidly and tried to poke the slippery mass back into his stomach cavity. He doesn’t remember any reaction to it at all. Just the blank that was his younger self.
CHAPTER 35
~ Two of them hung up on me for mentioning his name in the form of a question.~
When the sun rises, he walks back into the bedroom and picks up the phone. Jack doesn’t even wait for a hello. “I’m gonna need more out of you,” he says. “Whatever you’re doing up there, I need to know what it is.”
“Or?”
“Or you get nothing from me. Or I call every officer I know in the Cincinnati Police Department and tell them you’re considering doing harm to one of their own.”
Pike walks the phone to the window, looks down. A huddle of three old men, blowing into their hands, stamping their feet, waiting for the bar next door to open its doors. “The other night Krieger cornered Wendy,” he says. “Said he had business with her of some kind. I’m looking to figure out what kind.”
There’s the sound of Jack drawing off his cigarette. Then exhaling. “Krieger’s partner is Christopher Vollmann,” he says finally. “He’s the cop who found Sarah’s body. It could be Krieger recognized Wendy from her mother’s murder.”
Below, the bar opens and all three old men turn in unison, their faces like looking-glasses into their appetites. A wave of nostalgia for those kind of appetites washes over Pike. “Could be. You get an address for Vollmann?”
“Leave it. I’ve talked to every cop I know since you called me last night and the only agreement I’ve got out of them is you don’t fuck with Krieger. Two of them hung up on me for mentioning his name in the form of a question.”
Pike hangs up the phone.
Rory’s out of bed and on the floor, doing pushups in his boxers,his broad back streaked with morning sunlight, breaking with muscle like a field of dense stone breaking through the soil. He turns his head to Pike. “What was that?”
Pike cleans his glasses on the bed sheet. “Krieger’s partner is the cop that found my daughter’s body.”
Rory stops at the top of a pushup and swings to his feet. “Whoa.”
Pike pulls on his boots. “You baby-sit the junky. I’m gonna talk to him.”
“No way.” Rory grabs his shirt off the bed. “I should be with you.”
Pike looks at him. He’s a brave kid, no matter his reasons for being here. “Not this time,” Pike says.
CHAPTER 36
~ He’s got all the equipment of manhood save the parts that matter.~
There’s one Christopher Vollmann listed in the clerk’s phonebook. In Westwood, a working class neighborhood on the West side of Cincinnati. Pike finds it easy, a dirty white colonial with small patch of a snow-swept dead grass for a yard, surrounded by a chain link fence. He hefts the gate open and dodges dogshit up the walk to the dirty white porch. A graying woman with the furrowed brow of a Chihuahua answers the door. “Yes?” Her hands are spattered with pottery clay, she wipes them clean on her smock.
“Mrs. Christopher Vollmann?”
She parks her hands on her hips. “I’m his mother. If you’re a reporter, turn around and take a long walk towards whatever hell you believe in.”
“I’m a friend of a friend.”
“Right now my son doesn’t have any friends.”
“Who is it, please?” A woman appears in the entrance hall from one of the side doors. A young full-mouthed brunette, holding an infant in a pink sleeper.
“Don’t worry yourself about it, Marie,” Vollmann’s mother says. “He was just leaving.”
Pike moves past her. “You Christopher’s wife?”
Vollmann’s mother answers for her. “They’re separated. This is my house. You don’t step around me to get inside.”
“I am his wife,” Marie says. Her accent is thick French. “Do you know Christopher?”
“No. But I think my daughter did.”
“I’m calling the police.” Vollmann’s mother turns briskly to a wallmounted phone. “You will leave my house.”
“My daughter was a hooker.” Pike eyes Vollmann’s mother. “I don’t know how your son knew her, but I’ll bet you’d rather your son’s buddies weren’t the ones to figure it out.”
“A hooker? A prostitute?” Marie’s voice trembles a little, then steadies. “He was with her?”
“That’s the easiest answer.”
“Shut up, Marie,” Vollmann’s mother says. “My son’s never needed to fuck whores. At least not until you.”
Marie’s eyes widen like she’s been smacked across the face with a wire hanger. The infant turns her face into her mother’s shoulder and begins to whimper. “Excuse me,” Marie says. “I must feed her now.” As she exits the hallway, Pike catches a glimpse of finger-width bruises on her neck.
Vollmann’s mother stares after her with a hatred that runs all the way down into her, like a bucket into a very deep well. Pike lights a cigarette and flips his lighter shut with a loud clink. Her face snaps towards him. “What do you want?”
“My daughter’s dead and your son found the body. I want to know how he knew her.”
“My son has never fucked whores.”
“You said that. You can call the police and see how it plays out. Or you can show me where he is and I’ll be on my way.”
Her face twitches. “Follow me,” she says, pivoting sharply on her heel. She leads Pike to a flight of stairs, up it, and down a hallway to another short flight of stairs that leads up to a trapdoor. She bangs on the trap door. “It ain’t locked,” a man’s voice calls.
She shoves the trap door open.
Vollmann stands in front of a full-length mirror propped up against the wall. He’s a crew cut blonde kid with a weightlifter’s body, holding a S&W .44 in his right hand, a police issue shotgun leaning on a weight bench next to him. He rolls his head on his neck and closes his eyes, breathes, then jerks the revolver up at his own face in the mirror. He opens his eyes and takes stock of his sight alignment. Then reholsters the gun in his shoulder holster. “What do you want, Mom?”
“I have someone who wants to talk to you.”
“So? What the fuck’s he want?”
“Answers,” Pike says.
Vollmann glances over at him. “Well. Go on ahead and say your piece, seeing how you’re standing there.”
“Alone.”
He shrugs. “You heard him. Get out of here, Mom.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“I said get out of my room, Mom,” Vollmann says between clenched teeth. He whips the gun out of his holster and centers the sights on his face. He flexes his gun hand, admiring the muscles as they play down his arm. “Now.”
“This is my house.”
“This is my room.”
Pike takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes. “Mrs. Vollmann, I won’t talk to him in front of you and I won’t leave until I’ve talked to him.” He replaces his glasses. “You can leave, or we can wait.”
She stamps her foot in frustration, her eyes flicking between Pike and Vollmann, brimming with strange rage. Then she spins furiously and exits, slamming the trap door down behind her.
“Jesus.” Vollmann twists his T-shirt on the barrel of the .44 and holds it up to the light. “She acts like I’m a fucking kid.” He reholsters the gun. “What do you want?”
“You found Sarah Pike’s body?”
“I did.” Vollmann picks a beer can out of a stack of cans on the floor and upends it over his mouth. His Adam’s apple jerks like a piston for a minute, then he wipes his mouth. “The bitch had been dead for two days and the junkies were using her as a cum dump. We had to scatter four of the filthy cocksuckers off her just to ID the body. I never smelled anything like it.” He crunches the can in his fist, tosses it on the floor. “What the fuck’s it
to you?”
“I’m her father.”
He shrugs. “Then you know everything about her there is to know. She was a junky. It ain’t like any other end was likely.”
Pike takes a step closer to Vollmann. “I want to know how you knew her.”
“I didn’t know her.”
“That’s the one answer I’m not gonna believe.”
“Well, fuck you, then.” Vollmann fumbles in the stack of cans for another beer. “Believe whatever you want.”
“How’d you find her?”
“We were talking to a bum we know. He told us there was a dead girl. We investigated.”
“We? You and Krieger?”
Vollmann’s eyes are like pissholes in a snowbank. “Fuck you.”
“Krieger’s dirty,” Pike presses. “Krieger’s your partner. How’d you know her?”
Vollmann drops his beer and grabs at his shotgun, all in one short clean motion like he’s spent hours practicing it. Doesn’t matter, Pike jerks the shotgun out of his hands by the barrel, slams the butt into his nose. Vollmann yelps like a puppy, blood cascades into his cupped hands. “I think you broke it,” he whines.
“It won’t kill you.”
“Fuck you. I’m a cop.”
“You ain’t a cop. You’re a dumb fucking thug who wandered into a job with a pension.” Pike reverses the shotgun and holds it in the crook of his arm, his finger on the trigger guard. “Hand me the .44, by the barrel.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Vollmann looks at him, shaking his bloody head in wonderment. “I’m still a cop to the cops, no matter what they think I did. All I have to do is say your name over the telephone and I’ll turn your whole world into shit.”
“I’ll take that chance.” Pike ratchets the shotgun’s slide back far enough to check the chamber, loaded. He walks to the trap door and slides the dead bolt closed. “How’d you know my daughter?” he asks, returning.
“Fuck you.”
Pike flips the shotgun in his hands, slams the butt into Vollmann’s temple. Vollmann lets out a thin shriek, pukes beer all over himself. Vollmann’s mother tries to open the trap door. She bangs on it.
“Now that could kill you.” Pike reseats the shotgun in the crook of his arm. “How did you know my daughter?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t.” He sits down. “I didn’t.”
“OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR!” Vollmann’s mother screams.
Pike flips the shotgun in his hands. “One more time.”
Vollmann scrabbles backwards across the floor, hitting the wall. “No. I didn’t. Krieger did.” He hides behind his knees. “Jesus Christ, man, I’ve been a cop less than a year. I’m not dirty. I did what Krieger told me to.” He gulps air to keep from puking again. He’s got all the equipment of manhood save the parts that matter. But remembering his half strangled wife downstairs, Pike has a hard time working up any sympathy for him. He has no doubt the kid isn’t lying, he did exactly what he was told, with relish. That’s why Krieger picked him as a partner.
“You ever heard of King Cambyses?” Pike asks.
Vollmann shakes his head, gulping like a drowned rat.
“He was a Persian king who learned one of his royal judges was corrupt. He skinned him alive and had a chair made of his hide. Then he made his son take his father’s place, literally. He was made a judge and ordered to preside from the chair made of his father’s skin. You understand what I’m telling you?”
Tears cut canals down Vollmann’s blood-slicked face. “I have no fucking idea.”
His mother pounds on the trap door in a desperate flurry. “I’LL COME THROUGH THIS DOOR! I’LL RIP YOUR FUCKING FACE OFF!"
“What did he tell you to do with my daughter?”
“No. Nothing. I’m telling you, we just found her body.”
“Why’d you write up the report?”
“Kreiger never wrote reports if he could help it. I wrote them all.” He draws up his T-shirt and dabs at the blood and snot that coat his face like an oil slick. “I never knew your daughter.”
“How did Derrick know her?”
“How would I know that? He never told me nothing.”
“How did he react to her body? When he saw it?”
“He was like he always was. He kind of looked at her, that’s all. I don’t know, I couldn’t ever tell what he was thinking.” He folds his hands in his lap. “Do you think I could have a beer?”
Pike nods. “COCKSUCKER!” Vollmann’s mother’s screeches behind him. “MOTHERFUCKER!” There’s another word, too garbled to understand.
The kid digs a fresh can of beer. “I’m sorry about your daughter.” He pops the tab. “If I’d have known she was your daughter I wouldn’t have said what I did.”
“Yes you would’ve. And you didn’t tell any lies.” Pike racks the action on the shotgun, ejecting shells until it’s empty, then tosses it on the floor. Then he opens the trap door.
Her cheekbones are bulging under the skin on her face and her fists are clenched and red. “You get out of my house right now. Or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
CHAPTER 37
~ I am not in the middle.~
Pike exits the house feeling like he’s been beat all over with a tire iron, and wouldn’t mind beating something back. Then, just as he puts his hand on the door handle, he hears footsteps clattering towards him, too quick. He turns with a tired grin, gripping the handle of his .357.
It’s Marie, without the baby. “Please, mister.”
Pike’s grin disappears. He takes his hand off his gun.
“Please.” She stands in front of him, her breast rising and falling. “Was Christopher with your daughter? With her in a sexual way?”
“No.”
Her face deflates of tension like a balloon draining of air through a pinprick hole. “Oh good.” She pushes a long curl of brunette hair away from her cheek and crosses her arms over her breast, almost smiling. “Good.”
“You need to leave.”
She looks at him, curiously.
“Whatever’s going on between those two, you need to be out of the middle.”
“I am not in the middle.” She flushes and her eyes dart at the house as if she expects they have ways of hearing her. “I am his wife.”
“One of them is gonna kill you. Maybe both of them together.”
“Oh, no, sir.” She shakes her head vehemently and stamps her foot. “They will not hurt me. I am their family. My daughter, too, she is family.”
Pike turns to his truck. She’s the kind of woman who always ends up getting exactly what she asks for, and he doesn’t have the stomach to look at her anymore.
CHAPTER 38
~ It’s all the same shit to me. I don’t believe none of it.~
Over breakfast, Cotton offered Derrick a share in the Green Frog. Then proposed an expansion into other ventures. Marijuana is Kentucky’s number one export, and there wouldn’t be nothing to stop them from using Derrick’s connections to move it. They could sell it by the bale, north into Cincinnati and beyond. None of the local law’d bother them. Growing pot on the mountains is a hell of a lot cleaner than what the mining companies do to them. It’s a proposition worth thinking over, and Derrick does, spinning the steering wheel and leaning around a bend in the road, pulling a Miller Lite out of the cooler by his side.
This is how you think on things. One hand easy on the wheel, a beer in your lap, your car taking the mountain curves with quicksilver fluidity. Drinking and driving can be the most important thing in the world. It’s the answer for that high lonesome feeling you can’t shake any other way, it’s the only way out when you’ve got no way out at all. It was the only thing Derrick could do for two years after getting home from Vietnam. Driving these mountains, watching the tops get sheared off them, one by one. Then driving the hell away from them.
The fuel gauge has been dipping towards E for half an hour. Derrick sees a little gas station at the peak of a long ridge. He slides th
e Monte Carlo into the lot, pumps his gas, and heads inside.
An old timer in a battered ball cap and a pair of bib overalls sits behind the counter, smoking a Pall Mall, reading the local paper. Derrick takes a twelve-pack of Miller Lite out of the cooler, grabs a fistful of venison jerky from the rack, drops it all on the counter. The old timer slaps the newspaper shut in disgust. “You believe this shit?”
“It’s all the same shit to me. I don’t believe none of it.”
The old man shakes his head. “Yeah, but as young as that girl was? And them being football players, too?”
“Football players ain’t immune to young pussy. It’s an industry.”
“But eleven years old? And two of them eighteen? And them tying her to a chair?”
Derrick feels his face harden. He softens it. “I ain’t heard nothing about it.”
“They had this clubhouse, back in a hollow. Like a cabin. They didn’t tie her up sitting in the chair, either. They tied her up bent over it. You know what that was about. And when they were done with her they left her there two days. They say they clean forgot about her, what with football practice and all.”
“Nobody noticed she was gone?”
“Her parents ain’t worth a shit. Couple of damn druggies. Hell, they was probably glad to get rid of her for a day or two. She’d still be up there, I guess, but a hunter found her.”
Derrick nods. “So what’s happening to them?”
“Nothing but getting their names in the paper. They’re saying she was into it. And that they may have got carried away, but they’re real sorry about it. Hell, won’t nothing happen to them, as long as they’re healthy enough to play. We’re going to state with these boys.”
“And what does she have to say about it?”
“She don’t have nothing to say. She ain’t out of the hospital yet. She ain’t all right in the head, neither. Not from them, she was born that way. Her parents are suing, of course. A couple of them boys come from money.”
“So what do you have to say about it?”
“I say there ain’t no good way I can think of to tie a retarded eleven-year-old to a chair and hump on her. But I’m an old man. I might be old fashioned.”
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