“Well . . . No, really?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Bubba looked over at me and shrugged before looking back at Augustan. He handed him the card. “Call this guy. He works for me. He’ll fix your friend up. The fixing’s free, but the drugs’ll cost you.”
“That’s fair.”
Bubba rolled his eyes at me and let loose a sigh. “Grab your laptop, would you?”
I did.
“Tadeo,” I said.
Tadeo lowered his shaking hands from his face.
“Who hired you?”
“What?” Tadeo blinked several times. “Uh, a friend of Max’s. Kenny.”
“Kenny?”
Bubba said. “You got me out of bed so I could shoot some prick over a
Kenny
? That’s fucking humiliating.”
I ignored him. “Redheaded guy from the house, Tadeo?”
“Kenny Hendricks, yeah. He said you knew his old lady. Said you found her kid once when she went missing.”
Helene. If it smelled of stupid, Helene just had to be somewhere nearby.
“Kenny,”
Bubba repeated with a bitter sigh.
“Where’s my bag?” I said.
“Other drawer,” Tadeo said.
Augustan said to Bubba, “I can call your doc now?”
“Augustan always?” Bubba asked. “Never Gus?”
“Never Gus,” the big guy said.
Bubba gave that some thought, then nodded. “Go ahead. Call the number.”
Augustan flipped open a cell and dialed. I found my bag in the desk drawer, found Gabby’s picture and my case files, too. As Augustan told the doctor his buddy was losing a lot of blood, I put the laptop in my bag and walked to the door. Bubba pocketed his weapon and followed me out of the garage.
I
n my dream, Amanda McCready was ten, maybe eleven. She sat on the porch of a yellow bungalow with stone steps, a white bulldog snoring at her feet. Tall ancient trees sprouted from a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. We were somewhere down South, Charleston maybe. Spanish moss hung from the trees, and the house had a tin roof.
Jack and Tricia Doyle sat behind Amanda in wicker armchairs, a chess table between them. They hadn’t aged at all.
I came up the walk in my postal outfit, and the dog raised its head and stared at me with sad black eyes. Its left ear bore a spot the same black as its nose. It licked its nose and then rolled on its back.
Jack and Tricia Doyle looked up from their chess game and stared at me.
“I’m just delivering the mail,” I said. “I’m just the mailman.”
They stared. They didn’t say a word.
I handed Amanda the mail and stood waiting for my tip. She leafed through the envelopes, tossing them aside one by one. They landed in the bushes and turned yellow and wet.
She looked up at me, her hands empty. “You didn’t bring anything we can use.”
• • •
The next morning I could barely lift my head off the pillow. When I did, the bones near my left temple crunched. My cheekbones ached and my skull throbbed. While I’d slept, someone had seeded the folds of my brain with red pepper and glass.
And that wasn’t all—none of my limbs or joints were pleased when I rolled over, sat up, or breathed. In the shower, the water hurt. The soap hurt. When I tried to scrub my head with shampoo, I accidentally pressed my fingertips into the left side of my skull and produced a bolt of agony that nearly put me on my knees.
Drying off, I looked in the mirror. The upper left side of my face, one half of the eye included, was purple marble. The only part that wasn’t purple was the part that was covered in black sutures. Gray streaked my hair; it had even found my chest since the last time I’d paid attention. I ran a comb carefully over my head, then turned to reach for the razor and my swollen knee yelped. I’d barely moved—a minor shift of weight, nothing more—but my kneecap felt like I’d swung the claw end of a hammer into it.
I just fucking love aging.
When I entered the kitchen, my wife and daughter clasped their hands to their cheeks and shrieked, eyes wide. It was so perfectly timed, I knew it had been planned, and I gave them a big thumbs-up as I poured myself a cup of coffee. They exchanged a fist bump and then Angie opened her morning paper again and said, “That looks suspiciously like the laptop bag I got you last Christmas.”
I slung it over the back of my chair as I sat at the table. “One and the same.”
“And its contents?” She turned a page of the
Herald
.
“Fully recovered,” I said.
She raised appreciative eyebrows. Appreciative and maybe a little envious. She glanced at our daughter, who was temporarily fascinated by the pattern of her plastic place mat. “Was there any, um, collateral damage?”
“One gentleman may have a bit of difficulty entering a potato-sack race anytime soon. Or, I dunno”—I sipped some coffee—“strolling.”
“And this is because?”
“Bubba decided to speed the process along.”
At his name, Gabriella raised her head. The smile that spread across her face was her mother’s—so wide and warm it hugged your whole body. “Uncle Bubba?” she said. “You saw Uncle Bubba?”
“I did. He said to say hello to you and Mr. Lubble.”
“I’ll go get him.” She burst out of her chair and out of the room and the next sound we heard was her scrambling through the toys on the floor of her bedroom.
Mr. Lubble was a stuffed animal bigger than Gabby. Bubba had given it to her on her second birthday. Mr. Lubble was, as best we could figure, some kind of a cross between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, though it’s possible he represented a primate we were wholly unfamiliar with. For some reason, he was dressed in a lime-green tuxedo with a yellow tie and matching yellow tennis shoes. Gabby had given him the name Mr. Lubble, but none of us could recall why except to assume she’d been trying to say “Bubba,” but, at two, Lubble was the closest she could get.
“Mr. Lubble,” she called from her bedroom, “come out, come out.”
Angie lowered her paper and ran a hand over mine. She was a bit shocked at my second-day appearance, which was worse than my first-day appearance when I’d returned from the health center. “Should we worry about reprisals?”
It was a fair question. With any act of violence, you have to assume reprisal is a given. You hurt someone, most times they will try to hurt you back.
“I don’t think so,” I said, realizing it was true. “They’d mess with me, but not with Bubba. Plus, I didn’t take anything from them but what belonged to me.”
“In their minds, it didn’t belong to you anymore.”
“True.”
We shared a careful look.
“I’ve got that cute little Beretta,” she said. “Fits right in my pocket.”
“Been a while since you fired it.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes when I take those ‘Mommy time’ drives?”
“Yeah?”
“I go to the range on Freeport.”
I smiled. “You do?”
“Oh, I do.” She smiled back. “Some girls relieve stress with yoga. I prefer emptying a clip or two.”
“Well, you always were the better shot in the family.”
“Better?” She opened her paper again.
Truth was I couldn’t hit sand on a beach. “Fine. Only.”
Gabby came back in the room dragging Mr. Lubble by one lime-green arm. She placed him on the seat beside her and climbed up into her own.
“Did Uncle Bubba kiss Mr. Lubble good night?” she asked.
“He did.” I would have felt worse about lying to my child if I hadn’t already set the precedent with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
“Did he kiss me good night?”
“He did.”
“I remember.” Apparently the lying starts early and we call it creativity. “And he told me a story.”
“About what?”
“Trees.”
“Of course.”
“He also said Mr. Lubble should get more ice cream.”
“And chocolate?” Angie said.
“And chocolate?” Gabby considered the pros and cons. “Okay, I guess.”
“You
guess,
huh?” I chuckled, looked over at Angie. “That’s all you, by the way.”
Angie lowered her paper. She was pale suddenly, her jaw too loose.
“Mommy?” Even Gabby noticed. “What’s wrong?”
Angie gave her a weak smile and handed the paper to me. “Nothing, honey. Mommy’s just tired.”
“Too much reading,” our daughter said.
“No such thing as too much reading,” I said. I looked at the paper and then back at Ange, gave her a confused look.
“Lower-right-hand side of the page,” she said.
It was the Crime Blotter, an if-it-bleeds-it-leads section they served up on the last page of the metro section. The last item read: “Maine Woman Slain in Car-Jack.” I saw the lede then and put the paper down for a moment. Angie reached across the table and ran her warm palm along my forearm.
A mother of two was gunned down in an apparent carjacking in the early hours of Tuesday morning as she left work at BJ’s Wholesaler in Auburn. Peri Pyper, 34, of Lewiston, was approached by the suspect as she tried to start her 2008 Honda Accord. Witnesses reported hearing signs of a struggle followed by a gunshot. The suspect, Taylor Biggins, 22, of Auburn, was arrested a mile away after a police pursuit and surrendered without a struggle. Mrs. Pyper was flown by medevac to Maine Medical Center but was pronounced dead at 6:34
A.M.
, according to MMC spokesperson Pamela Dunn. Mrs. Pyper is survived by a son and a daughter.
Angie said, “It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything.”
“Patrick.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said again.
• • •
It was a three-hour drive to Auburn, Maine, and in that time, my attorney, Cheswick Hartman, arranged everything. I arrived at the law offices of Dufresne, Barrett and McGrath and was led into an office with James Mayfield, a junior partner in the firm, who handled most of their defense litigation.
James Mayfield was a black man with salt-and-pepper hair, a matching mustache, and considerable height and girth. He had a bear of a handshake and an easy way about him that seemed authentic and unforced.
“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Mayfield.”
“You can call me Coach, Mr. Kenzie.”
“Coach?”
“I coach baseball, basketball, golf, football, and soccer in this town. People call me Coach.”
“And why wouldn’t they?” I said. “Coach it is.”
“When an attorney of Cheswick Hartman’s stature calls me up and says he’ll cochair my litigation on a case, pro bono, I sit up in my seat.”
“Yes.”
“He said you are a man who never breaks his word.”
“That was kind of him.”
“Kind or not, I want your word in writing.”
“Understandable,” I said. “I brought my own pen.”
Coach Mayfield pushed a stack of papers across the desk and I began to sign. He picked up the phone. “Come on in now, Janice, and bring the stamp.”
When I was finished signing a page, Janice notarized it. By the time I was done, she’d notarized fourteen pages. The contract was, in its essence, quite simple—I agreed that I was working for the firm of Dufresne, Barrett and McGrath as an investigator on behalf of Taylor Biggins. In that capacity, anything Mr. Biggins said to me fell under attorney-client privilege. I could be charged, tried, and convicted if I ever discussed our conversation with anyone.
I rode out to the courthouse with Coach Mayfield. The sky had that milky blue cast it got sometimes before a nor’easter, but the air was mild. The town smelled of chimney smoke and wet asphalt.
The holding cells sat in the bowels of the courthouse. Coach Mayfield and I met Taylor Biggins on the other side of the bars, where the jailers had left a wooden bench for us.
“Yo, Coach,” Taylor Biggins said. He looked younger than twenty-two, a stringy black kid wearing an extra-large white T that draped his body like a dinner bell over a toothpick, and drooping jeans he kept pulling up over his bunched-up boxers, because they’d taken his belt.
“Bigs,” Coach Mayfield said and then to me: “Bigs played Pop Warner for me. Baseball and football.”
“Who’s this?”
Mayfield explained.
“And he can’t say nothing to nobody?”
“Not a word.”
“Throw his ass in a hole if he does?”
“Without a flashlight, Bigs.”
“A’ight, a’ight.” Bigs wandered around his cell for a minute, his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. “What you need to know?”
“Did someone pay you to kill the woman?” I asked.
“Nigger, what?”
“You heard me.”
Bigs cocked his head. “You saying, was I
put up
to this dumb shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Who the fuck would do what I did if they was thinking straight? I was high as a motherfucker, man. I been whaling on the clear for three days.”
“The clear?”
“The clear,” Bigs said. “Meth, cheese, crank, whatever you want to call it.”
“Oh,” I said. “So why’d you shoot her?”
“I wasn’t
trying
to shoot nobody. Ain’t you been listening? She just wouldn’t give up the keys. When she grab my arm—
pop
. And she stop grabbing my arm. I just wanted to take her car. I got a friend, Edward, he buy cars. That’s all it was.”
He looked out through the bars at me, already heading down a dark corridor’s worth of DTs, his skin shiny with sweat, eyes wider than his head, mouth taking quick, desperate breaths.
“Walk me through it,” I said.
He gave me an injured, incredulous look, like I was putting him out.
“Hey, Bigs,” I said, “besides Coach here, you’ve got one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country looking into your case because I asked him to. He’s capable of cutting your sentence in half. You understand?”
Bigs eventually nodded.
“So answer my questions, dickhead, or I’ll make him go away.”
He wrapped his arms around his abdomen and hissed several times. Once the cramps had subsided, he straightened and looked back through the bars at me. “Ain’t nothing to walk you through. I needed a car that’s easy to chop. A Honda or a Toyota, man. Those parts give for years—swap ’em out on a ’98 or an ’03, don’t matter. Shit’s interchangeable as a motherfuck. I’m in the parking lot, got me a black hoodie and these jeans, ain’t no one seeing me. She come out, go to the Accord. I run up, let her see my black face and my black nine? Should be enough. But she talks shit at me and she won’t let go them keys. She just keeps holding on, and then her hand slips and hits my arm? And, like I said,
pop
. She drops. I’m all, ‘Ho,
shit
!’ But I need my clear, so I grab the keys. I get in the car and punch it out of there but all these shields start blowing into the lot, cherry bars flashing. I didn’t even get a mile before they box my ass up.” He shrugged. “That’s it. Cold? I know it. If she’d just given up the keys, though . . .” He bit down on something and looked at the floor. When he looked back up, tears poured down his face.