“You high?” Pike asks.
Rory tosses the towel on the floor and takes a slug off the coffee, scalding his tongue. But he barely notices. “My hand was hurting.”
Pike nods, slowly. The snow is melting of the roof, the water tip-tip-tip-tapping on the ground outside. Rory can see the drops falling through his window. The sun is pouring into the cabin in a easy wave. “I owe you an apology,” Pike says. He uses his middle finger to adjust his glasses on his nose. “I came here to give it.”
“What for?”
“For taking you with me to Cincinnati.”
Rory leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees. “I’d do it again.”
“I know it.”
Rory folds his hands in front of his face, tries a chuckle. It comes out weak. “It won’t be a trip I’ll forget anytime soon.”
Pike sets his coffee cup on the floor. “Say anything you need to say. I’ll listen.”
“Will it help?”
“No.”
“Should I even ask why it don’t seem to bother you none?”
“I know some things you don’t.”
“Like?”
“If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad?”
Rory throws his towel at Pike, who catches it. “Don’t quote at me.”
Pike looks at him steadily. “What we did had to be done. We didn’t have any choice about it. Compared to some of the things that get done that don’t have to be done, we come up pretty light on the scale.”
Rory’s thoughts catch and stall like an overloaded engine. “We had to kill him? That black guy with the hooker?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t know as he would’ve got me with that knife.”
“Sure I do. As soon as we turned around if nothing else. He was morally yellow. He was exactly what it looked like he was. Like Derrick.”
“You can spot them?”
“I wouldn’t have shot him if I couldn’t.”
“You’re a scary motherfucker.”
“No,” Pike says. “I just know what scary looks like. You could work on it yourself.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to be you.”
“I ain’t telling you to be. I’m telling you that you’re all over the place, and you need to get your shit together. Part of that is learning how to see. Right now, you’re the kind of kid that’d show up at a knife fight bare-fisted.”
Rory covers his face with his hands. “Jesus,” he says again. “I never have any fucking idea what to say when I’m talking to you.”
“That’s my point,” Pike says. “Owning your own words is a good place to start. What you do and say, that’s what you are.”
Rory’s face is still in his hands.
“Take all the time off you need. I’ll pay you. If you need anything else, let me know. I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Why did you come back?” Rory drops his hands and looks at Pike. “Here. To Kentucky. And where the hell did you go when you left? You could tell me that. Telling me something about yourself that made any kind of sense might make me feel a whole hell of a lot better.”
“I went all over, but I ended up in Mexico,” Pike says, with nohesitation. “I worked for a coyote named Joaquin. He managed a tunnel from Juarez into the basement of an El Paso safehouse. I was one of his drivers. It was my job to pick up the illegals and get them to their jobsites in the back of my truck.”
“So why’d you came back? You wised up and got sick of it?”
“Not hardly. Joaquin was scared shitless the illegals would rip him off, use the tunnel for free. So he had it built with locks on the tunnel door and a basement like a bomb shelter into the El Paso house. When he got a load in there, he’d lock them up and call one of us. It was our job to get there quick, before the air ran out.” Pike lights a cigarette and stares into his smoke. “One day he called to tell me he’d let a group through the day before and hadn’t been able to call anyone. He told me to check on them, but at this point I could probably take my time. There was a girl in the group named Guillermina. I knew her.”
“Jesus.” Rory stares at him. “What’d you do?”
“I went to his house. His wife had had a heart attack the day before, which is why he hadn’t called me. They’d been at the hospital the whole day.”
“And?”
“And I shot them both.”
“Both of them?” Rory asks. “His wife too?”
“I don’t regret that. She lived well off of what he did.”
“So did you.”
“That’s the answer to what you asked. It’s why I came back.”
Rory nods. Then starts laughing. And laughs until his eyes water, until his nose runs. He wipes it on the back of his hand. “I’ll be damned. That didn’t help at all.”
CHAPTER 65
~ Derrick grins the kind of grin that makes his pacemaker work double time.~
Dana’s mother spits smoke out of her cigarette like the thought of her daughter has curdled the tobacco. “The Cleveland Roadside Motel in Hamilton. She called me last night looking for money.” Her breath is two parts gin.
Derrick replaces his badge into his pocket. She’d never even looked at it. “What else did she say?”
“That she needed the money to buy a bus ticket. That she’d made a mistake and there was a man after her. That she needed to find her way out of town.” She waves her cigarette across her chest in dismissal. “It’s the sort of thing you surely hear from these women all the time.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“Of course I believe her. In her life it all sounds perfectly plausible. I just don’t want to be involved in it.”
Derrick grins the kind of grin that makes his pacemaker work double time. “What if I’m the man she’s talking about?”
“Then I suppose you’ll have at her. If it’s not you, it’ll be someone. That’s not in doubt.”
Derrick digs a business card out of his breast pocket, holds it out to her. It has a fake name on it, the same name as the badge he showed her. “Will you be home for the next couple days?”
She sips from her gin glass, taking the card without looking at it, swaying slightly like a heat wave rising off a highway. “I have nowhere else to be.”
CHAPTER 66
~ I don’t know as I’d follow her.~
Rory’s been wanting a tough one. One of the local rednecks with a face like a pork chop. For a minute he thought he’d lucked out, too. The kid stepped in the ring, built like a linebacker, the biggest yet. But he’s nothing. Slow, with a fat face that makes a good target, advertising every punch with a flick of his eyes in the direction he’s swinging. One of the college boys by the ring cups his mouth, “KILL THAT INBRED MOTHERFUCKER!"
“I’ll make him squeal like a pig,” Linebacker says over his shoulder. To prove it, he hauls off with a heavy right lead.
Rory’s floating on Vicodin. He tucks his chin, lets the blow slide off his forehead, counters with a left hook that flattens Linebacker’s nose, breaking it. Linebacker tries to throw another right lead. Rory heaves up his arm, blocks it, pins Linebacker’s nose again in the same spot. Then he clinches him. “I ain’t gonna knock you down,” he says into Linebacker’s ear.
Linebacker pushes him away, wipes blood across his glove. “You can’t knock me down, faggot.”
Hate falls over Rory like a drop cloth. “Sure I can.” He hooks him in the gut, follows with a bone crushing straight lead, disintegrating his nose. “But you’re gonna give up standing.”
“Fuck you.” Linebacker spits blood, tries a weak one two combination. Rory slaps both punches down and fixes a straight left into the kid’s nose. He twists his glove on it. Cartilage crackles, grinds against the bone underneath like he’s grinding his fist in gravel. The blood drains out of Linebacker’s face. He swallows.
“Sick, ain’t it?” Rory says, grinning. Linebacker sways, holding one glove over his face, the other lilting at his side. Rory drills him in th
enose again. Rotating his glove, using his fist as a pestle. Linebacker drops to one knee and pukes. Prodigiously. A frothy sloshing wave of beer and chili. Then he collapses on all fours, shooting a furious wet look at Rory before puking again.
“That’s what I meant,” Rory says over him. “You ain’t hurt bad enough you couldn’t still fight, but I’ll bet you don’t.”
He doesn’t.
“Jesus,” the ring announcer says. Then skitters out of the way as Rory moves to exit the ring.
Rory stalks to the table. He doesn’t sit down. “I’m sick of them motherfuckers.”
“It showed,” Pike says.
“I saw it, too,” Wendy agrees.
Rory’s jaw clenches, relaxes, clenches again. His shoulders tight, rippling under his shirt. He hangs his head and massages the knuckles of his left hand, staring barely restrained rage into the floor.
“Sit down,” Pike says.
“I’ll stand.”
“You’ll sit.” Pike says, and something in his voice turns Rory’s knees into water, so he sits. Pike’s hand grips his shoulder and squeezes. Rory closes his eyes, wanting to mist away into the barsmoke.
“You two need anything?”
Rory’s eyes snap open at the waitress. “Bourbon. Double. With a beer back.”
“Getting drunk ain’t a bad idea,” Pike says, after the waitress has walked away.
“That’s good. I plan on it.” Rory reaches down in his shorts pocket, fumbles up a fistful of pills. He palms them into his mouth.
The waitress returns with the bourbon and the beer. Pike hands her a bill before Rory can find his money. “Two more bourbons. And another beer back.”
“Whatever you say.”
Rory downs his bourbon and waits. The liquor hits the pills, a wave of nausea makes his eyes unfocus. He lets his head hang back on his neck and stares at the crossbeams in the ceiling. He drains his beer without once lowering his head. There’s a slide guitar somewhere inthe background, floating out of the jukebox. It’s long and sad. It sheds him like water, leaving a hollow feeling in its place.
The waitress returns with the drinks. Pike pays her and slides them across the table to Rory. “There’s an extra bourbon in there,” the waitress says. “It’s from an admirer.”
Rory drinks it.
“You wanna know who she is?” the waitress asks.
“Nope.”
“Right there.” The waitress nods across the room at a blonde girl in a fleece-lined jacket, smoking a cigarette at the bar. “She wants to say something to you. I’ll go get her.”
Rory looks up to stop her, but she’s already gone, speaking to the blonde. Then the blonde’s there in front of them. She’s thin and pretty, her eyes are a little reddened by beer. Two other girls who look just like her are standing by the bar, grinning the kind of grin that usually indicates some kind of brain damage. “I know you,” she says. “Your name’s Rory.”
Rory looks at her.
“I went to high school with you. Used to sit right across from you in English. You even went out with my sister.”
Rory looks away from her. Up at the ceiling. Then back, and she’s still standing there. “And?”
“And nothing really. I wanted to say hello.”
“Well. You did.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.” She turns to the bar. And stops. She turns back to Rory. “You know, we were all real sorry. About what happened. We’d have told you that but you were gone.”
“I bet you could’ve gone without saying it altogether, if you’d tried a little harder.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and walks away.
A scowl crosses Wendy’s face, like a flock of geese blacking out the sun. “You’re a fucking idiot.”
Rory looks at her in surprise. “Me?”
She leans way forward over the table and picks up his empty beer bottle. She flips it once in the air, catches it by the neck, and hurtles at him. His head ticks sideways like it’s set on a spring and the bottlewhips past him. He hears a clunking smash and turns to watch a brunette in tight jeans collapse, blood spritzing from her head like it’s a plugged sprinkler. A fresh-faced girl screams and drops to her knees, smacking at the blood like she’s trying to slap out a fire.
Rory turns wide-eyed back to Wendy. Or where Wendy had been. “What was that?” he says to Pike. Pike shrugs his shoulders, a look of honest confusion on his face. Rory blinks and wipes his hand down the side of his face where the bottle would’ve hit. He feels halfway sober all the sudden. “Where’d she go?”
Pike flicks his eyes at a side door used for loading music equipment. “Though I’d say she needs a minute.”
CHAPTER 67
~ Tuning himself up for what’s to come.~
The motel’s a roadside shitpile outside the Hamilton city limits. Ten powder blue units surrounding a paved cul-de-sac, birdshit spattered, the snow melting in filthy streaks down the siding. Derrick buys a Coke and a candy bar from a vending machine by the office and hunkers down on his heels to eat, his eyes on the one car in the lot besides his. A rust-colored Volkswagen beetle, strangle crumpled around the middle like its been rolled sideways down a hill.
The candy bar is the first food he’s had in two days. It’s dirt in his mouth and he has to force-swallow it. But he knows he won’t be eating for a long time afterwards. Lightning from a far-off storm plays over the dismal snow-covered plains. Nobody passes the hotel on the highway and nobody enters or exits any of the hotel rooms. The only other soul around is Bogie, asleep in the Monte Carlo. His head leaned back in his seat, his mouth moving as though he’s singing to himself.
The lightning plays out. There’s a lull and it starts again, this time closer to the hotel. There’s been no sleep lately. The lightning flashes behind Derrick’s eyes, thudding at the base of his brainstem. It reaches down and clutches his heart, forces it to dance to its measure. Derrick drops the candy bar wrapper from his limp fingers and stands creakily. Tuning himself up for what’s to come.
Then he’s finished with the candy bar. He walks in the hotel office and flashes a badge at the pimply flat-headed kid behind the counter. “Dana Jennings.”
The kid’s head is a long blood-sausage, his chin blending with his neck in a mass of fat. He holds up three fingers without looking up from his magazine, like this is a question he answers to cops three or four times a day.
CHAPTER 68
~ Her lips are bloodstains against the white of her skin.~
Rory finds her in the side alley. Squatting on the concrete stoop in front of the kitchen door, smoking a cigarette. The smell of wet snow and exhaust. Street lights bleeding all over the wet blacktop. She turns as Rory sits so that he’s facing the back of her head. He stuffs his hands in his sweatshirt and clears his throat. The back of her head bobs slightly as she pulls smoke off the cigarette. One of Pike’s Pall Malls, the size of a small tree in her skinny fingers. “You probably shouldn’t be smoking,” Rory says.
“You probably shouldn’t be a fucking idiot.”
He swallows and breathes in the cold air. It’s sweet and thick, flavored of bourbon. “I was blowing off steam.”
“I don’t give a shit about your steam.”
He rolls his shoulders and winces at a shooting twinge at the top of the rotation. He’s having trouble focusing. Wendy flips her cigarette in a red spark that ends in a sizzling collision with a snowdrift. Rory thinks seriously. Tries to, anyway. “I guess I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
She turns to face him, the whites of her eyes shot through with red like gunpowder sparks, her mouth like a bloodstain against the white of her skin. He reaches out and knuckles her tear wet cheek. She smacks his hand back. “You’re a fucking idiot.” She kicks at the snow and moves to turn her head away from him.
But he doesn’t let her.
CHAPTER 69
~ Prying her open, exposing her like an oyster.~
Derrick covers the hotel door’s peephole with a gr
imy thumb and knocks. He doesn’t expect her to answer, but she does. And when she sees him she tries to whip the door closed, but Derrick jams his foot in and drops his shoulder, pounds it wide open. She spills backwards onto the greasy gray carpet and he slaps the door shut behind him. She scuttles to her knees and wraps her arms around his thighs, wearing a long white T-shirt and nothing else. Derrick looks down into her matted brown hair, the strangely tender whiteness of her scalp, feels the resolution he’s so carefully formed start to slip. He puts his hand under her chin and pulls her face up gently. “It’s okay,” he says. “I just have questions.”
She takes his hand and runs it down her slimy tear-slicked cheek. He’s never seen her without makeup. He lifts her to her feet and leads her to the bed and sits her down. He hunches on his boot heels in front of her and lights a Marlboro. He sticks it between her pale lips.
“They shot a john,” she snuffles. “Shot him dead right in front of everybody. Then kidnapped me. Nobody will touch me anymore. I had to get away before somebody hurt me.”
“Relax.” Derrick puts a hand around her head and massages the back of her neck. “I only need to know what you told them. About me.”
“Nothing.” A wave of tremors ripples from her cigarette hand all the way up her arm. The loose skin on her face flaps like a battered flag in a hurricane wind. “Nothing much. Nothing worth worrying about.”
“What?”
“I told them you didn’t kill Sarah.” She sniffles and lifts the hemof her T-shirt to wipe her nose. “I told them she died of an overdose. But they thought you’d killed her. The big one wanted to think it, anyway.” She makes a sound that could be sandpaper being dragged down an iron bar, or a chuckle. For a second the old Dana’s back, her face as dull and vengeful as a spent shell casing. “I made sure to tell him different.”
“And that’s all you told them?”
Her eyes skid away from his face. “Yeah.”
He takes her jaw firmly. “What else?”
“You’re not gonna hurt me?”
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