Red Dog (15 page)

M
EANTIME, THE ROOFERS GOT TO WORK.

“I can't sleep with that racket going on day and night,” Anci said the next morning over breakfast. “They started in at five this morning, and it's like the hammers were inside my head.”

“Well, it's only a couple of weeks, and then it'll be gone.”

“And then we'll have a new roof to burn.”

“Not this time,” I said. “Night of the fire, I had a vision, and the vision gave me an idea. How would you feel about us hiring a protector monkey to watch over the new roof?”

“A protector monkey?”

“Like an orangutan.”

“Okay, one, that's not a monkey. That's an ape. Two, give me your phone.”

“Why?”

“I'm going to call your doctor, see about having you committed.”

“Uh-huh. Couple weeks under the watchful eye of our new protector monkey, you'll secretly be wishing you'd jumped on board in the first place.” I showed her a catalog. “I like these kitchen countertops. What do you think?”

“Bamboo?”

“It's renewable.”

“Renewable's good,” she said. “I like it fine, but it's A. Evan's money. Maybe we should get something in honor of him.”

“Dirty concrete?” I asked.

She spooned cereal into her mouth.

“Or petrified cow shit. With a sluice grate for the floor. Damn it all.”

“What?”

“Bran-Wichelle. It keeps jumping into my head—ever since you mentioned it—but for the life of me I can't remember why.”

“Well, keep pondering. It might be a clue.”

“Wouldn't that be something?”

I
WAS CLEANING UP THE BREAKFAST DISHES WHEN
B
EN
W
INCE
called. That's something you love to see on your cell phone caller ID:
RANDOLPH COUNTY SHERIFFS
.

“I think we've got a problem here, son,” he said.

“You, too? Maybe I should start a 1–900 line, take credit card numbers.”

“I'll be frank. I don't recommend that. You typically have enough misfortune of your own without getting tangled up with everyone else's. Listen, I'm sheriff of a county known for its high murder rate and general lawlessness, and even I ain't never seen anyone up to so much troublemaking.”

“I'm a lovable rascal,” I said. “But at least I mean well.”

“I guess intentions matter some. During sentencing, at least.”

“I've heard tell. So what's the problem?”

“Rather show you in person,” he said. “You think you can make it down here?”

“Sounds urgent.”

“Well, it is. Maybe more than. And speaking of urgent . . .”

“Or more than.”

“Or that. You don't happen to know an old cat named Soapy Howard?”

“Soapy? I don't think so.”

“He runs the package liquor up around Bald Knob.”

The image of a hillside hole-in-the-wall flickered to mind. I'd been there the day before, looking for snacks and information.

“I might have seen him.”

“Might have,” Wince said. “You don't know him, but he knows you, Slim. You and his brother used to work together at a Sommes shaft mine in Kentucky.”

“So?”

“So he says you dropped in on him last week, asked a lot of questions about someone named Cleaves. Said you looked pretty rough, too,” he said. “You scared hell out of the kid he's got working the counter for him. He said you looked like you'd been beat up pretty good. Your face.”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“You ought to get yourself some electric clippers, then.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Damn it, I'd hoped Soapy was wrong. Now I really need you to come in, and the sooner the quicker, too.”

“Double urgent?”

“Don't make me come get you, boy. If I come get you, or send someone to, we'll have to put you in cuffs. I'd rather Anci not have to see that.”

“You've given me rope before.”

“Maybe. But this is different.”

“Do tell.”

“Okay, here it is. I think you got sprung a while back from Jackson County and had your knickers in a twist about being locked up on the Reach murder. I think you're a rabble-rouser who doesn't like to get the runaround for something you didn't do. Plus, you were on the hook for it. Reach's murder. Maybe you even had good intentions. Just between you, me, and the riot guns, I think you mean well, usually, even if you do go about your business like a Ward Nine New Year's Eve party. I think you went looking for the Cleaveses and couldn't find them, but you kept looking until you somehow ran afoul of bad men and got yourself worked over but good. How's that?”

“That's a lot of telling.”

“It is,” Wince said. “There's also the little matter of J.T. Black going missing.”

“What was that now?”

“You heard me. Don't pretend you didn't hear me. After your phone chat the other day, Sheriff Lindley went looking for him. Wanted to ask him a question or two, but his house is cleared out. Truck's gone, too, and his still is broken down.”

“Where's he gone?”

“If we knew that,” Wince said, “he wouldn't be missing.”

“Okay, I'll come in. When?”

“I'm thinking right now.”

“Give me a day,” I said.

“A day? Why not a year? A guy like you can do more damage in a day than most folks do in three lifetimes, one of them as a reincarnated Genghis Khan.”

“Genghis Khan?”

Wince shrugged with his voice.

“On my mind probably account of a documentary I watched the other night. History channel. Interesting fella, if you ignore the mass murder.”

“What if I promise not to cause trouble?”

“That's like a dog promising not to drag his nuts on the carpet. Make you a deal, you got till five o'clock.”

“Thank you.”

“At 5:01, I come looking.”

I said thanks again, but he'd already broken the line. I found Anci in the kitchen.

“Saddle up,” I said.

“For real?”

“You heard me. Let's do it.”

It took her a moment to believe she wasn't being conned, but the prospect of troublemaking lit up her face.

“I get to come with?”

“Peggy and Opal are working. I've got to meet Jeep, but he's out on business of his own and can't make it over here.”

“Hot damn.”

And off she went to put on her motorcycle gear and scrounge up her private detective kit: notebook, pen, flashlight. I did the same, except I put on more than leather gloves and boots. I strapped a 9000S under my jacket and an S&W 442 to my ankle. I also put my knife on my belt and a mean look on my face. Had time, I would have gotten a scary tattoo, too. As it was, I felt like a walking arsenal, the flawless expression of American manhood.

While I waited for Anci, I fretted some more about the night to come and what it was certain to bring. The evil of it, and the cruelty. Man's inhumanity to . . . well, everything, all of it. My mother had raised me to believe that a person was only as strong as his willingness to be merciful to the weak, but as far as I could tell this was a view not widely held, and there were times I wondered whether even she believed it, given who she'd married and raised a family with. Maybe none of us really believed it. I don't know. When it comes to philosophizing, a newborn kitten understands things better than I do.

I was still pondering it all when Anci came down again
and took one look at me and said, “You're worried about something.”

“Oh, I am, am I?”

“Don't lie. And don't play dumb, neither. I know you better than anyone, and I know that look. You're chewing on something, and I want to know what it is.”

“And here I thought I was supposed to be the grownup in this relationship.”

For once, she didn't have a smart remark. In fact, she didn't say anything at all. She just sat down beside me and put her hand on top of my hand.

“Sometimes the world is a pretty rough place,” I said, and I wanted to say more but nothing else would come out.

Anci waited a moment and then nodded and said, “It really is. Sometimes, anyway. Maybe even most of the time. But that's where we come in. To put things right.”

I looked at her and she looked back up at me. She smiled. I leaned down and kissed the crown of her head.

“I'm damn proud of you, kid.”

“Hell, I know it.”

“Y
OU TWO COME IN.
I'
LL SCARE UP A SNACK.
”

We came in. Carol Ray Reach's house. She and Anci shook hands. I got a quick peck on the cheek and Anci's raised eyebrows. We went into the kitchen and the aforementioned snack was scared up: coffee for me and Carol Ray, milk and cookies for Anci. I thought she'd protest this treatment—she would've at home—but instead she tucked in gratefully. We'd managed to skip lunch somehow, and the cookies were her favorite, oatmeal raisin.

“I never saw you as the milk-and-cookies type,” I said to Carol Ray.

“You've had me all wrong then, Slim. Sweet innocent old me with my pantry full of oatmeal treats.”

“There's a rather large gun in the pantry,” I said. “I couldn't help noticing.”

She nodded.

“That's my Ruger Redhawk double-action, sugar. And rather large is right. You could use it to turn an Egyptian pyramid back into sand. I might be sweet and innocent, but
I'm nobody's baby. Truth is, I've got them stashed throughout the house, case of a rainy day.”

“I bet I can guess why, too,” I said.

“I bet you can.” She glanced quickly at Anci, then back at me. “You don't mind if she listens in on this nasty business?”

“He doesn't mind,” Anci said. “Fact of the matter is, I'm kinda the brains of the outfit.”

“Well, now, I can see that.”

“Don't take much imagination, does it, way he carries on?”

“Not really, no.”

“I'm literally standing right here,” I said.

Carol Ray turned her attention back to me.

“I talked to old man Black like you asked,” she said. “He's heard of you, sugar. And let me tell you, your name did not exactly make him gladsome. Says you were tangled up with Roy Galligan a couple of years back.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh's right. He wants to meet you. Says he wants to meet the person who brought down Matt Luster.”

“That's not what happened,” I pointed out. “It's not even the same time zone as what happened.”

“Maybe you can tell him that, you meet him this afternoon. Four o'clock. Whatever you do, don't bring a gun, and for God's sake, Slim, don't wear a wire. You're not planning on wearing a wire, are you?”

“I don't think so.”

She nodded, said, “Good. That is good. The on-site security is . . . meaty.”

“Meaty?”

“Imagine a fleet of bulldozers in leather ties.”

“I'll wear a hardhat,” I said. “One more thing. Any chance you've seen J.T. around?”

“J.T.? Nope. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “Except the local law told me he's missing.”

“Missing?” she asked. “This something I need to worry about?”

“I honestly don't know,” I said. “Maybe keep the Redhawk handy.”

“Believe me, I will.”

I tapped Black's address into my phone. Anci did the same. Then I told Anci it was time to hit the highway. She stuffed the rest of the cookie in her mouth and chugged her milk.

“Stay out of trouble, Slim,” said Carol Ray.

“Too late,” Anci and I said at the same time.

Anci looked up at me.

“Jinx. You owe me a Coke.”

A
NCI DRANK HER JINX
C
OKE—CHOCOLATE
C
OKE, TO BE
exact—and ate some French fries. They were the good kind, crinkle-cut and fried in grease that'd had time to mellow in the trap. Probably since the states were arguing about nullification. Jeep had come out to meet us. He ordered a barbecue and some coleslaw. I was too anxious to eat anything much, except I stole some of Anci's fries, so my lunch was fries and the stink eye.

“Four o'clock at Leonard Black's and an hour later at the sheriff's?” Jeep said. “You'll never make it.”

“I have to,” I said. “My squirrel's in a bag as it is. I can't stand another bust. Besides, I have to be on the outside come tonight.”

Jeep pondered this for a moment this and then said, “Maybe I should give him a call.”

“Who?”

“Wince.”

Anci snorted. I snorted. I threw up my hands.

“Oh, merciful hell,” I said. “Please don't. You're not exactly his favorite person, you know? He's still not convinced you didn't disappear that meth dealer last year.”

Jeep growled, “Fine. I'd recommend you call your lawyer, but that'd probably just make things worse. Wish I knew what it was all about, though.”

“We'll find out at five o'clock.”

“Righteous.”

I looked at Anci.

“This is the part where you're supposed to pester me about coming along. Then I tell you no, it's too dangerous, and you make a wisecrack and say a dirty word like a kid on TV.”

“Kids on TV don't get to say dirty words, stupid. You go on along to whatever caper it is you've set up,” she said. “I'm on to something and I mean to follow it through.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Jeep smiled at me and shook his head—
kids
—but Anci
was serious. She munched her fries and stared bullets through the big plate window and out into the world of mystery.

O
NE MORE TIME, WE PARTED COMPANY.
J
EEP AND
A
NCI
struck out on some mission or other. Anci wouldn't say what, except to promise it wouldn't be dangerous. I figured whatever it was, if Jeep was with her, she'd be safe enough. Hell, she'd be safe if there were Nazi werewolf bikers involved. Jeep tried to argue that he was too busy to play chauffeur, but in the end she corralled him into it, and off they went. It wasn't ever very hard to talk Jeep into troublemaking.

Meantime, I headed for Leonard Black.

All my years underground, I'd stayed clear of Black coal mines and their sorrowful repute. Underground work is dangerous by nature, but some of these local strings were less like jobs than advanced forms of suicide. That's how I thought of the Black mines. Things just seemed to go wrong inside of them—too many injuries, too much misadventure—like they were broken or sick. One miner I knew up in Colton, Billy Goat McElroy, thought they were haunted. He got to worrying about it so much he hatched a scheme to bring his pastor down for some kind of Church of Christ sortilege, but the bosses caught wind of it first and got him fired. Not much later, Billy Goat died under what you'd call less-than-ideal circumstances, hanged from the bottom of a back-road bridge, and the locals whispered that the ghosts had got him after all. I always thought he was just
depressed about his lung and heart problems, but folks tend to prefer their superstitions.

Haunted or not, these days there wasn't much of it left, the Black strand. The old-style gopher holes had long bled out their seams, and the bigger drops had mostly been bought up. Black remained a name in the downstate, though. He was a character. The story went that he'd won the land lease to his first coal mine by shooting the balls of the former owner's prize bull with an Eagle Arms Company Front Loader, but I suspect that was just the hoax-craft of local legend. Still, Black had a local reputation as a recluse and a bit of a nut: at nearly eighty, he affected both an enthusiasm for vintage motorcycles and a version of the paranoid-style of American politics that made even the local militia head cases keep their distance. That is, the stories swirling around him tended to be whoppers, but they also tended to ring true.

His spread was west, near Cape Girardeau between Commerce and Thebes, and
boy
, was this a dreary slice. You think you know ugly land, I'll show you ugly land. It was like the Lord had paused in the work of His creation to take a shit, and He took it right on Cape Girardeau. The rock-spotted hillsides were clotted with gray mud and touched with scrub and saw grass. The Ohio was pretty, I guess, but Leonard's view of it was spoiled by smoke stacks, power stations, and the slow drifting hulks of coal barges. Even the old farmhouse had sucked in enough smoke and fumes that the shingles had turned black. It sat there on its plot like a funeral cake.

Black looked funereal, too, though more like the guest of honor than just a guest. He met me at the door in an open robe like a coal-mine Hefner and grinning a skeletal grin. His skin was pink as faded rose petals, and the eyes behind his misaligned antique spectacles were gray and lifeless. J.T. was a pretty big guy, but Leonard surprised me with his smallness. If I'd wanted to, I could have put him in my pocket and run away.

The two boys he kept as hired help weren't pocket-sized, though, and if there was anything especially floral about them I couldn't make it out. Maybe their matching purple and gold sweats. I was ushered into a living room as big as a hunting lodge and garnished with all manner of murdered animal parts. I admit, I've never understood it. I'm not a vegetarian, and I wear leather boots and such, but killing an animal just to hang its face over your fire pit seems more an act of meanness than decorative ingenuity. For an instant, I pondered what Eun Hee Mandamus would have made of it, but the violence of the resulting thoughts made me put my pondering away.

“Is that a bat?” I asked, pointing to a place just below the I beam.

Leonard grinned.

“Ozark big-ear. You have any sense of what it takes to hit one of those little fuckers on the wing and leave enough to put on a plaque?”

“Fancy killing.”

Leonard did not grin.

“You disapprove?”

“Well, bats are pretty. Also useful. For example, they eat bugs.”

“That one don't.”

The muscle had left us for a moment, but now they came back. They were so big they made the room hotter. One of them stuffed a cold drink I didn't want into my hand. The other one slipped a cigar I wanted even less between my fingers. Both of them shoved me into a chair. The chair was okay, I guess. Leonard sat opposite.

“We don't stand much on ceremony around here,” he explained. “You are lucky they didn't sit you in your drink and set your thumb on fire. Or make you smoke your chair and stick that Habano up your ass.” One of the tanks filled Leonard's highball with something as green as a newborn cicada. He sipped it and frowned. He looked at me and frowned some more. He was good at frowns. Almost as good as Paul Bruzetti. A master. “You're here about my boy.”

“You get right to business.”

“I prefer to keep my business dealings straightforward and to the point.”

“And this is business?”

“My boy is. His future is,” Black said. “So yes.”

“It's about your boy,” I said. “I think Carol Ray mentioned it maybe.”

“She did. You mixed up with her?”

“Mixed up?”

“Intimately?”

“No, sir. I've got a woman. A good woman. And by the way, I'm not sure any of this is your business.”

“And I'm not sure I like you deciding what's my business. Everyone in my line knows you, Slim. Everyone knows what you did to Roy Galligan.”

He rose suddenly. He set his drink down and crossed to an ornately carved cabinet at the back of the room. He opened the cabinet and drew out a rifle, a Parker & Snow musket, I think. Maybe 1861. He came back across the room and pointed it at me. I almost felt honored.

“Tell me,” he said, “I was to shoot you now, Slim, would it save my boy some trouble?”

“Maybe.”

“You don't mind having a gun pointed at you?”

“I mind it plenty,” I said. “But it keeps happening to me, and maybe I'm starting to get used to it. I don't like it, though.”

“I wanted, I could put a ball in your brain—and with my eyes shut, too—then we'd cut you open, fill you full of hand weights, and sink your carcass in the Ohio.”

“Hand weights?”

“They work better than rocks, and the boys here have a few to spare.” He shrugged. “It's convenient.”

“And what should murder be if not convenient.”

I thought he might go ahead and do it, shoot me with the Parker & Snow, but just then one of the tanks approached. He used his hand to lower the barrel of the Parker & Snow and whispered something in the old man's ear. Then he walked away again. Leonard looked at me. He rested the gun against the arm of his chair and sat.

“I've elected not to shoot you.”

“I'd hoped you might.”

“For now, anyway.”

“Fair enough.”

He sipped some more of his drink. His hands shook around the glass.

“So this is about J.T.?”

“It's really about Sheldon and A. Evan Cleaves.”

“The Cleaveses? Shit.”

“I've had that same reaction.”

“I don't doubt,” he said. “They have that kind of reputation. Like wildfire. People have made the mistake before of bringing them in on something. Work-type things. Wet work. They're impressive. They're frightening to those who can be frightened, and they talk a good game without saying much. I don't know that makes much sense.”

“I follow it, though,” I said.

Leonard nodded his appreciation at my following it and said, “My opinion is that A. Evan might actually be crazy. Sheldon acts crazy, but he's more an old fox than a loon.” Here he paused to take another sip of his drink. “Usually, though, it don't work out. Or it gets out of hand. Wildfire can't be controlled, nor crazy. Folks usually end up regretting ever hearing their names.”

“I know I do.”

“And you think my J.T. is tangled up with them somehow?”

“I don't know,” I said. “My guess is, the lot of them are tangled up in something. I don't know whether J.T. brought them in or whether they all got brought in on it together by
someone else. I'm sure as hell confused why they dragged me into it. It's not like there weren't enough men with guns lying around. But they did drag me into it, and now the only way for me to get out of it is to talk to the right people and convince them to leave me alone.”