Going Nowhere Fast (10 page)

"He's right, Joe," I said.

"Dottie, don't even get started—"

"I know, I know. Whatever's in that envelope is none of our business."

''That's right."

"Even if it could clear us of the charge of murder."

"Yes. I mean, no. No! Woman, I told you not to get started!"

"Baby, I can't help it. I'm curious, and so are you. It's written all over your face."

"Say what?"

"Come on, Pops," Bad Dog told his father. "Give it up. You're an ex-cop, man, you can't help but be curious. It's in the blood."

Having Dog and me read his mind like an open book has always rubbed Joe the wrong way, but for once he didn't foam at the mouth refuting the accuracy of our perceptions. He merely sulked for a brief moment before holding out his right hand to Dog and saying, "Okay. Let's have it."

Dog grinned and gave him the envelope. We all huddled in a tight circle and held our collective breath as Joe lifted the flap and reached inside to withdraw its contents: three eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies and a pencil sketch on a lined piece of paper. We looked each item over carefully as Joe flipped through them, and then Joe said out loud what each one of us was thinking:

"What in the hell?"

The photographs were all different shots of a man going out to his mailbox; stepping out of his front door, moving down the walk, taking a handful of letters from the box. He was a white man somewhere in his middle to late forties, wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants. He was trim and immaculately clean-shaven, with a wide band of scalp running front to back on the top of his head like a small highway. All in all he seemed very ordinary, except for one small thing: He looked scared. In all three photographs, his eyes were not on what he was doing so much as on his surroundings; it was as if he were expecting some kind of trouble to drop on him at any minute. The pencil sketch, meanwhile, was still more obscure: just a poorly drawn outline of someone's disfigured right foot. The drawing showed much of the third and fourth toes to be missing; the former was nothing but a tiny stub, and the latter was only marginally more than that. Their tips were identically angular, so that it seemed they had been trimmed simultaneously with a pair of garden shears.

"I don't get it," Bad Dog said. He took the envelope from his father and looked inside, but of course, it was empty.

Joe glared at him. "What's to get? You wanted 'evidence,' and you got it. Three pictures of a white man going out to his mailbox, and a drawing of someone's messed-up right foot. Proof positive none of us killed Geoffry Bettis."

I took the photos and sketch from my husband's hands and examined them myself. Written on the back of one of the eight-by-tens, I found a Flagstaff, Arizona, address I hadn't noticed before, but other than that, the material revealed nothing new to me. Certainly nothing that could be seen to help our cause, anyway.

"Come on, Dottie," Joe said. "We're wasting time. Let's get this boy over to the rangers' office before they come looking for him. It'll look better for him that way."

"Joe, this stuff has to mean
something
," I said, handing him the photographs and sketch so he could put them back in the envelope.

"Look. I don't care if it does or it doesn't. All I know is, it's got nothing to do with us, and that's all that matters right now. So let's stop talkin' and start walkin', all right?"

"But why would a man put stuff like that in a safety deposit box at the Grand Canyon? Unless it was somehow very valuable?"

"I don't know, and I don't care. Hell, we should've never opened this envelope up in the first place! All we did was add another count to the charges they're going to eventually bring against us."

"Joe—"

"You're gettin' on my nerves, Dottie. Okay?"

"But she's right, Pops!" Bad Dog cried. "Those pictures have gotta mean somethin'!"

"They do. They mean you've told your last lie in the state of Arizona. Now, let's go."

He took Bad Dog by the arm and started marching him down the road again. In a last-ditch effort to change his mind, I stayed put, but I don't think Joe ever even noticed. He had finally taken all of Bad Dog's nonsense he could take.

And one way or another, he was going to get to the bottom of things.

*     *     *     *

"I was just about to call you people," Ranger Cooper said. "I've got good news."

We were standing out in the receptionist's area, shaking in our boots as we waited to be called inside to his office, when Cooper came out to greet us instead, grinning from ear to ear.

"I just got off the phone with the sheriff's office. They say they've found Bettis's car. Seems some fellow robbed a convenience store down in Williams last night and was driving it when they picked him up this morning. They aren't sure, but they think they've got their man."

His grin grew wider, fanning the bristles of his red mustache out like a peacock's feathers. It was starting to look cute to me again.

"What I'm trying to say, folks, is that you can all go home," Cooper said.

None of us Loudermilks knew what to say. Exoneration was not what we had come here to receive. We'd come instead braced for surrender, ready to make some embarrassing confessions and to suffer some painful consequences, and now we were being told that none of that unpleasantness would be necessary. We were free to go home.

"I don't understand," Joe said.

Cooper didn't know what to make of our lackluster reaction to his announcement. He just kept smiling, as if by making a happy face he could get the point across to us that something very good had happened.

"I said you can all go home. They've found Bettis's killer. See, the car—" He stopped, seeing that he still wasn't making a dent in our shared state of disbelief. Finally, he reached back for the knob on his office door and said, "Come on inside, folks. We can talk about it in here."

When we were all sitting down, the ranger asked, "Are you all okay? You look kind of funny."

Joe still had the envelope Bad Dog had taken from Geoffry Bettis's safety deposit box gripped tightly in his right hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him slide it quickly up into his lap and out of sight, hoping to do so before Cooper could take notice of it. "Funny? Really?" He looked at me, then at Bad Dog. Dog's mouth was hanging open like a castle drawbridge. "No. We're just surprised, that's all." Joe laughed as if relieved.

"Yes. We can't believe it," I said, following my husband's lead.

"I see," Cooper said. He was watching Bad Dog drool.

"You were saying they found Mr. Bettis's car," Big Joe said, using the comment as camouflage while he kicked the leg of our son's chair to bring him around.

"Yessir," Cooper said. "They say a rear window had been busted out and the ignition had been hot-wired. This guy they found driving it says he stole it from one of the parking lots here late Tuesday afternoon and never even set eyes on Bettis, but the sheriff's boys aren't buying that. They say this fellow's got a rap sheet as long as your arm, and the gun they took out of the car when they arrested him—the one he used in the convenience store robbery, apparently—was similar to the one that killed Bettis: a small-caliber thirty-eight. They won't know for sure that it's the right gun until they run it through ballistics, of course, but they seem pretty satisfied that it'll prove to be, sooner or later."

"So they're letting us go," I said.

"Yes ma'am. Soon as they get your trailer back up here, you people are free to leave."

"And when will that be?" Joe asked.

"Excuse me?"

"When will they get Lucille back up here? Today, tomorrow—when?"

"Oh, oh. Lucille, she's your trailer?"

"It's what we like to call her, yes," I said, so that Joe wouldn't have to look like an idiot all by himself.

"Well, they didn't give me an exact time, but I would think they'd have her back to you no later than Saturday afternoon. Just as soon as they can get her all back together, anyway."

Now it was my turn to say, "Excuse me?"

"Aw, Jeez Looweez," Joe said, groaning with a sudden sense of foreboding. "You mean to tell me they tore her down?"

"'Well, sir," Cooper said, doing a fast and uncomfortable retreat, "not completely, no. That is, it's my understanding they were still in the process when Mr. Bettis's car turned up. How
far
into it they were when the detectives called them off, I don't know, but—"

"We're going down there to get her ourselves," Joe said, not issuing a warning but stating a plain fact.

"What's that?"

"I said we're not gonna wait for them to bring her back up here. We're gonna go down there and pick her up ourselves. First thing tomorrow morning. I don't want her leavin' Flagstaff till I've had a chance to look her over first. You got that?"

Flustered, Cooper said, "Well, sir, Mr. Loudermilk, I'm not so sure—"

"Look. Those people have had our trailer nearly two days now, and I want her back—but not in pieces. If she's got so much as a bolt or screw missing, the time to find out about it is now, while she's still in their custody, not three days from now when we've taken her back out on the road. So we're going down there to get her. Early tomorrow morning. You can give us instructions on how to get there before we leave. All right?"

You could see from the look on Cooper's face that it wasn't all right, at least not with him, but he was observant enough to recognize that an argument with Joe at this point was only going to end with three Loudermilks locked up in a jail cell. So rather than say what was really on his mind, the ranger merely shrugged and said, "Sure, sure. If the sheriff's boys don't mind doing it that way, I don't see why I should. I'll call 'em soon as you leave."

"Good," Joe said. He stood up from his chair and, informing Cooper that our meeting had just been adjourned, turned to Dog and me. "Let's go," he said.

We were filing out of the room, with Dog taking up the rear, when, at the last minute, Dog stopped, turned, and asked Cooper, "Whatever happened to that big guy who got arrested yesterday? You know, the giant brother that went crazy in the trailer park?"

Cooper made Dog wait for an answer, apparently finding the question odd. "Why? He a friend of yours?" he asked.

"Who, him?" Dog shrugged. "No, man. I just saw 'im get busted yesterday, an' wondered what happened to 'im. Big cat like that sort of catches your attention, right?"

Again, Cooper sat on his answer awhile before letting us in on it. "We let him go. We only brought him in to ask him a few questions and give him some time to calm down. For one reason or another, the man got a little excited out there, and we thought it might be a good idea to detain him for a while. That's all."

"Then, he went home, huh?"

"Maybe. I don't know. We didn't remove him from the park, if that's what you're asking. We had no reason to."

"He looked like a football player or somethin'," Dog said, his disappointment in learning Dozer Meadows might still be around only barely showing.

Cooper gave him a blank stare. "I guess he did at that."

Dog was smart enough to close the book on the subject right there.

*     *     *     *

"Thanks, Pops," Bad Dog said when we had returned to our cabin.

Joe didn't even look at him. "For what?"

"For not blowin' the whistle on me. About that stuff I took out of Bettis's safety deposit box, I mean." He was trying to have a tender moment with his father, but Joe was making it difficult, kicking off his shoes and throwing himself upon the bed to let Dog and me know he would be asleep inside fifteen minutes.

"There wasn't any point," Joe said gruffly, arranging the pillows behind his head to his liking.

"But you could have turned me in anyway. I mean, what I did
was
against the law and everything…"

"Forget about it. You robbed a bank and scored three photographs and an outline of somebody's deformed foot. America's Most Wanted, you're not."

Joe laced his fingers over his stomach and closed his eyes.

"On the other hand, young man, you do have a lot of explaining to do," I said, while the opportunity to catch our son in a contrite moment presented itself.

"You mean about the wallet," Bad Dog said, looking at the floor.

"That's exactly what I mean, yes. What on earth possessed you to steal a dead man's wallet? How could you possibly do something so… so…"

"Moronic," Big Joe said, his eyes still closed.

"That wasn't the word I was looking for,"I said, wasting a perfectly good glare on him. Turning back to Dog, I went on, "Something more appropriate would be a word like 'callous.' Or 'unfeeling.' Or—"

"Hard up," Joe interrupted again.

"That's two words," Bad Dog said.

"The point is, Theodore," I said, "that stealing from the dead is an unconscionable act. It's sick. And I cannot understand how any son of mine could be capable of such a thing."

"Moms, I told you: I've been runnin' for my life! I need a grand to pay the Doze's fine, and I need it fast!"

"So you picked the pocket of a dead man sitting on the toilet. You just bent down, reached into the pants around his ankles, and—"

"I didn't pick nobody's pocket! I found his wallet in the refrigerator!"

"In the
refrigerator?
"

"Yeah, in the refrigerator. Behind all the beers. I know it sounds crazy, but that's the truth. First thing I did when I came into the trailer was go to the refrigerator to get somethin' to drink, and there was the wallet, just sittin' there. Starin' at me. I thought it was Pops' till I looked inside an' saw Bettis's name on everything. Everything 'cept his receipt for the safety deposit box, anyway. Name on that was Jeffrey Bettman. Then, after I found his body in the bathroom—"

"Where is the wallet now, Theodore?"

"Huh?"

"The wallet. Where is it now?"

"I don't know. I tossed it into the Canyon."

"When?"

"Right after I took it. That same night, late."

"And it was empty?"