I had a couple hours left in the day. I dialed Jeep Mabry and learned that Peggy and Anci had left school on time and without fuss. Since then he’d gotten the stink-eye from a crow a couple of times, but that was the extent of the day’s activity. I thanked him for the hundredth time and received only an irritated grunt in reply. He was off to his shift at the King Coal. I dialed Peggy next but ended up leaving a message saying I’d come to the hotel as soon as my errands permitted. Then I dialed Tony Pelzer’s number again. Nothing. That nothing was getting a bit nettlesome, I confess.
Then I drove back out to the Crab Orchard preserve. There are three manmade lakes out there, and Devil’s Kitchen is one of them. It covers almost eight hundred acres, is ninety feet deep at its deepest point, and has earned the fealty of local fisherman for some of the best bluegill and trout fishing in the state. Pelzer’s place was just outside the park near Devil’s Kitchen, north a bit of the preserve, in a tiny nothing of a place called Bluegill Point. I stopped in at a shade-tree bait store for a pack of smokes and some snacks, just in case it turned out I was in for a wait.
And wait I did, but nothing came of it. I knocked on the door but no one answered, and I hung around for a while but no one ever showed up. A sign in the yard said Pelzer Security. A beat-up red and black GMC van sat in the driveway, its crumpled hood secured with bright yellow bungee cord and a concrete block, but it didn’t go anywhere, either. It didn’t look like it could go anywhere if you hitched it to a team of elephants. When I finally grew bored of listening to the honking of the local geese, I fired up the truck and headed home, or whatever was passing for home that night.
When I got back to the Park Avenue and went upstairs to the room, I found Anci and Peggy arguing over one of Anci’s video games. Scary thing, set on a zombie island. I didn’t like her playing it, but this was one of those battles I ended up giving ground on. You do that sometimes to keep the peace, and you do it sometimes because it’s okay for a kid to win every now and again, but mostly you do it out of sheer exhaustion. Anyway, the two of them had attached the console to the hotel room TV, and I was in the bathroom over the sink with the water running and a brush in my mouth when I figured out what that meant.
I swung back into the bedroom and said to Peggy, “You went to the Vale.”
She glanced up at me briefly over her remote control and then looked back at the set.
“You’ll have to take that thing out of your mouth and rinse, darling, because otherwise it sounds like you’re drowning in mashed potatoes.”
I went and rinsed and came back and said it again.
“That’s better.”
“Stop avoiding the subject.”
“Anci needed some things,” Peggy said. “Necessary things. You only packed her one pair of shoes, for one.”
“We were in a bit of rush, I recall.”
“She also needed something to keep her from going bananas while her daddy runs around playing Philip Marlowe.”
“It’s true, I do,” Anci said. She was good enough to kick zombie butt and have a conversation without missing a beat.
“I’ll tell you,” I said, “I’m not happy about this. You might have run into trouble.”
“And I’m a big girl.”
“Me, too,” said Anci.
My nerves were fried, and I wanted to holler at both of them, but instead I sat on the edge of the other bed and watched them kill zombies for a while. They were pretty good at it, though I noticed Anci saving Peggy’s bacon on more than a couple of occasions. When they were done, we walked up into town and had dinner at a little café that probably didn’t know it was catering to three people on the lam from meth pirates. Despite what should have been our bad nerves, we had an appetite. Peggy ate a giant salad, and Anci and I had burgers so big they nearly filled our plates. We ate without talking much and then I paid our check and we went back out onto the street.
It was a quiet night in town. I guess every night in that town was quiet, but that one was almost unseemly in its silence. Up the sidewalk, two guys were loading a television as big as a movie screen into the bed of a pickup truck, and the streetlamps were flickering and buzzing. A black sedan moved slowly up the street, turned right against the red light, and disappeared around the corner. The wind pushed around a few candy bar wrappers. That was pretty much the extent of the nightlife. The evening had come on cool, so Anci slipped on her pink gloves, and Peggy shrugged deeper into her jacket. I started wishing I had a hat or a fur-lined turban or something to bottle in the heat.
Peggy and I were walking side by side, Anci just a pace or two behind us but keeping up, because she was a long-legged critter like her old man.
Peggy said, “I’ve been thinking. You two really should come stay at my place for a while. You’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable. Anci could have her own room. And frankly, that hotel is kinda low-rung.”
“It’s better than the last place,” I said.
“Hard to believe.”
“It’s better than the last place,” Anci said.
I said, “I appreciate the offer, but anywhere I go is likely to become a target. I think it’s probably safe to take Anci, though.”
I knew that would cause a ruckus, and it did. Anci stopped in her tracks. We were next to a storefront Tae Kwon Do school, but the idiot posing on the poster in the window wasn’t nearly as scary as my twelve-year-old. She gave me a look that would have frozen the balls off a bronze statue of Charles Manson and folded her arms across her chest. “Only if you’re going to haul me off, kicking and screaming,” she said.
“Not a debate,” I said.
“What does that mean? You don’t just get to decide what’s a debate and what’s not.”
“The hell I don’t. I’m your father.”
“Fine, and I’m your daughter. We’re related. What’s that got to do with anything?”
We kept at it for another moment, arguing on the sidewalk, when another car came by. For an instant, I almost didn’t pay it any mind—it was just a car on the street—but then I recognized it as the black sedan from before. He was circling the block again, and his windows were tinted so black you couldn’t see inside the cabin. As he passed us, he slowed way down, then suddenly sped up again a little as he went by—but not before I noticed the Knight Hawk parking sticker on his bumper, and then it hit me like a ton of frozen bricks.
“Oh, Sam Hell,” I said aloud. “My keys.”
Peggy was confused. “Your what?”
“My keys. I put them on the table. At Steamy’s. It had my hotel key on the chain with the name of the hotel. That sneaky little motherfucker.”
“Darling, I don’t know what you’re saying.”
The black sedan slid up the block and again neared the corner. But this time, instead of rounding it, he pulled to the curb and stopped. The brake lights flashed bright red and died.
I turned to Peggy. “Take Anci, right now, and run back to the café.”
“Slim . . .”
“Goddamn it, do it now.”
Everything froze for one awful instant, and then everything jumped up like a terrified cat and screamed. Peggy grabbed Anci by the arm. She was scared and did it too hard, and Anci cried out a little and fell. The doors of the sedan flew open and two dudes got out, one from either side. One was a fat guy with a beard and a ball cap. His head was like a muck bucket, and I wondered whether he was the man Mary-Kay Connor had seen arguing with Guy Beckett that day in Johnston City. The other was a thin guy in a denim jacket. They were killers. You could tell it by looking at them. That, and the fact that they were both holding guns down by their legs. The fat guy skirted the back of the sedan and stepped up on the sidewalk to join his buddy, and the two of them came toward me in a fast walk. They walked shoulder to shoulder, with just a bit of room between them, in perfect lockstep, and generally gave off an impression of having worked together on this kind of project before.
For just a second, my feverish brain grabbed hold of some distant idea about chivalry—or maybe it was something I’d picked up watching late-night westerns—and I imagined they might wait for Anci and Peggy to round the corner before opening fire. Then the thin dude raised his pistol and snapped off three quick rounds. So much for Gary Cooper. The sound of the little automatic was a light pop, like a bottle of flat champagne. I felt one of the bullets rip the air beside my head. The others went wild, one of them blowing out the window of the Tae Kwon Do school. Peggy screamed, and when I looked back Anci was struggling to drag her into a doorway and out of sight. That was some kid.
They came at us. I jumped and hit the curb and street with my shoulder and rolled and came up behind the pickup truck. The dudes with the TV dropped it and ran in two directions, and the big set hit the ground flat-faced and broke with a sound like a cannon shot. Bullets hit the truck and there was a flash of light that blinded me for a second or two. The fat guy fired, and the truck’s passenger-side mirror left its post and went whirling down the street. The front windshield exploded, and then the back, showering me with glass. Suddenly, the truck lurched forward on one side, and I realized that one of them had shot out the right front tire.
“You’re wasting ammo, dipshit,” I heard the thin guy say.
“Well, it’s mine to waste, cock-knocker.”
“Don’t make me take that thing from you.”
“I’d like to see you try. Go on.”
“Oh, shut up.”
It was one thing to be murdered on the street. It was another thing to be murdered by an old married couple. That didn’t sit right at all. Lots of things didn’t sit right. These bastards had fired bullets at my daughter. I should have been frightened—and I was—but my fear had been overtaken by an anger like a whirlwind. I wanted to kill them both and drink their blood. Unfortunately for me, the only thing I had on me was a pocketknife, and against firearms that wasn’t much. I inspected the pickup truck, and found it to be the only one in southern Illinois with an empty gun rack.
I could feel them coming at me, still fast, from either side of the truck. Their plan was to arrive at the truck bed at the same instant and catch me between them, but the fat guy stepped on something and fell, and the thin guy got a step or two ahead of him. I seized the moment. I pushed left, toward the street side, and met the thin guy head-on. I’d timed it well, and I managed to catch him with his right foot in mid-step, so he was slightly off-balance. His left leg was forward and presenting itself as a target, so I kicked hard at the knee and got lucky. The bone cracked with a sound like wet corn snapping and went the wrong way. Some of it broke through the fabric of his pants. The dude dropped his gun and moaned and went down on his good leg. He reached for his piece, desperate, but I kneed him in the face and lunged for it too and was just a hair quicker.
He looked up at me and said quietly, “Goddamn.”
I staggered a half step past him. I meant to shoot him in the shoulder, put him down that way, but he twisted his body at the last moment and tried to stand up. The bullet hit him in the side of the head, and his brains shot out and splattered against the side of the truck.
The fat guy came around the bed and tailgate, stepping over the busted TV. He saw what had happened, roared a curse at me, and fired off twice, hitting the buildings across the street. He had a bigger gun, and the sound of it echoed around the little downtown. We were on either side of the truck now. I fired back but missed. I’d shot a gun a little, of course—I’m a son of the country, after all—but I’m not much of a marksman, and I missed the fat guy badly and ended up shooting the Tae Kwon Do champion in the head.
“Motherfucker,” fat dude said. He got impatient and charged. Thinking to bull-rush me, I guess. I backpedaled fast and lost my footing in the other dude’s blood and brains and went over hard on my tailbone. The fat boy loomed over and raised his gun.
“Motherfucker,” he said again. He couldn’t think of anything else, maybe. He raised the gun and the gun jerked and there was an eruption like a belch of hellfire and some smoke. But then something weird happened: the fat guy’s head blew right off his neck and jumped into the truck bed with a hollow metal bang. The rest of him slumped, smoking, onto the street. Two men down.
I looked up to find Jeep Mabry standing there with a sawed-off. He said, “I’m thinking now that coming to look in on you was the right call.” Or words to that effect.
I started puking my guts out, and Peggy kept screaming, and those were the last sounds I heard for a while.
The cop who took us to the station was named Willard. He was a stump of a guy with a flat nose and some unfortunate pattern baldness that maybe didn’t make him the happiest camper in the world. He arrested me and Jeep, read us our rights, cuffed us, and drove us to the station house, where he put us in separate interrogation rooms. I asked to see Anci and Peggy, and was told I couldn’t, not yet, but that they were okay, badly shaken up but intact. No injuries. They’d seen a medic, and they were together. Then he went away again and left me for about an hour. I sat there twiddling my thumbs and trying not to think too much about the man I’d killed. I didn’t even know his name or his story. I didn’t know whether he’d been paid to do what he tried to do, or whether he did it because he liked it or what. Came down to it, I guess I felt okay about what I’d done. He’d tried to hurt my family, after all. But you were never going to love a thing like that, at least a healthy person wasn’t.
After a while, some cops came in: Willard and Ben Wince and one of the state cops I’d seen before at Luster’s house. I stood up, and Willard raised a hand and said, “Don’t do that, please. I ain’t a priest, and this ain’t church. You don’t have to stand up when I come in a room. Besides, it makes me nervous.”
He and the others sat. I sat back down.
I said, “I’m a little nervous myself.”
“I would be, too. You just blew a man’s brains out on the streets of my fair city, and that’s nothing to be too relaxed about.”
“They shot first,” I pointed out. “And I’m guessing that if you check their histories you might find a story of violent crimes and other nefarious doings.”
Wince grunted and Willard showed his teeth. He said, “That we did. And that they had, but that don’t exactly clear the slate. Dead bodies have a way of complicating matters. You want to tell me your story? I already got a pretty good one from your boy in the other room.”
I shook my head.
Willard said, “No? You don’t think I did?”
“Not unless you cut his tongue out and used it to write a story yourselves,” I said. “I don’t mean to make a fuss. I know how this looks, and I’ll cooperate fully, but this was a case of self-defense, pure and simple. Those bastards shot at my daughter. You worked some kind of miracle, brought them back to life, I’d shoot them again right here. Twice.”
Willard sucked that around for a moment. His eyes lost their hard glint and he traced a shape on the tabletop with a finger.
“Well, there is that,” he said. “The fact that the ladies were there goes a long way to corroborate your story. Plus those guys with the TV.”
“I felt bad about that. It looked like a pretty fancy setup.”
Willard ignored that. “I’m thinking only a stone lunatic would drag his kid into a firefight like that.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t one, though. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here.”
“Less thanks.”
He thought some more and finally shrugged. “Again, that isn’t going to open any cell doors, but I admit there’s a few points here in your favor. Your girlfriend tells it that they just came out of nowhere, and started shooting up the place.”
“That’s pretty much it.”
“You ever seen either of them before?”
I said, “I’ve been trying to place them. One of them might match a description given me by one of Guy Beckett’s girlfriends. There was a Knight Hawk parking pass on the car, but I guess the car might belong to someone else. I don’t know who the dead guy was, but I don’t think he worked at the Hawk.”
“So you’re thinking this has something to do with the Beckett disappearance?”
“I’m thinking it’s likely. I’ve fallen behind a bit on some bills lately, but I don’t think I’m behind enough for anyone to resort to this kind of thing.”
Willard nodded. “Okay. Let me ask you this then. And I caution you to think carefully before answering.”
“I’ll try.”
“Any chance you get tangled up with a guy named Clay Reeves earlier today?”
“Jump Down?”
“I believe that’s the name he goes by, yeah. Kinda silly, you ask me.”
“A little.”
“What is it with you guys and those nicknames, anyway?” Willard said. “I go to the hospital, ain’t everybody calling someone ‘Trauma Ward’ or ‘Crash Cart’ or any such foolishness.”
“Crash Cart’d be a pretty good nickname.”
“Now you’re just trying my patience.”
I said, “Hell, I don’t know what it is. Something in the air down there makes people act like dummies, maybe. I’m not a psychologist or a scientist. All I know is, once a miner gets a nickname, it sticks with him . . .”
“Or her,” Wince said.
Willard looked at him.
“You running for office?”
“As it happens,” Wince said. “Year from now. But this thing, my sister’s a miner.”
“Or her,” I said, nodding at Wince, “It sticks with him or her pretty much forever. I’ve known people who basically stopped responding to their given names in favor of their mine names. A lot of them even have them on their gravestones.”
“Now that’s deep.”
“Sure is.”
The state cop said, “This is a waste of time.”
This was a young guy with carefully combed hair and a face like a carnival prize. His shirt was tucked in, and his tie had a knot as tight as a hooker’s fist, so I gathered he was a pretty fancy cop. Willard didn’t appear to think much of him, either.
He said, “You got somewhere else to be?”
“As a matter of fact . . .”
Willard groaned and rubbed his face and said, “I recall correctly, you’re at our disposal for the duration, Dave, so please, dispose.”
Dave disposed. He sat there like an angry bump. Wince chuckled.
Willard said to me, “Jump Down.”
“I saw him earlier today at the Knight Hawk. We had a little chat over beer and coffee. He drank the beer. Surprisingly friendly, he was, actually. He told me the story of the green condom, and I tried to talk him out of killing me and my family.”
“I don’t known about any green rubber, but it looks like he didn’t really take the rest of it to heart.”
“Looks that way, yes.”
“When’d you leave him?”
“About three this afternoon. Little earlier maybe. We were at Steamy’s.”
“Anything come of it? Anything physical, I mean.”
I shook my head. “Not even hard words. I’ll tell you, that surprised me a bit. The boy’s a buzz saw in a world of forest. I thought it’d go hard, but he seemed eager to let the whole thing slide.”
Willard sighed. He turned to Wince and Wince shrugged. He didn’t look at Dave. He didn’t care what Dave thought, I guess. Dave noticed it, too, and sulked it up something fierce. Finally, Willard looked at me again.
“Well, that’s a problem then. You say you left Reeves this afternoon, and apparently some time between then and around four thirty or five he must have dispatched his boys to pay you a visit.”
“Or later, possibly,” I said. “I didn’t see them until tonight.”
“Or possibly later,” he agreed. “Funny thing is, we’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to run him to ground, but we’ve come up empty. No one seems to know where he’s at. You got any sense of why that might be?”
We sat there for a long moment. If this were a crappy novel, there’d be a line here about a dog barking in the distance.
Finally, I said, “You think something’s happened to him?”
“I think that’s possible, yes. Maybe he’s run off from something. Something threatening, if you follow me. Another possibility is, he’s already cold as a crate of Russian hammers.”
“Or maybe he just doesn’t keep regular hours. He’s in that kind of business.”
“He is,” Willard said. “Problem is, someone torched one of the kid’s flops this evening. One of those of those awful places at the trailer park outside Carbondale. Obvious arson job, and now no sign of Reeves, so you can see how this looks to us.”
“I was with Peggy and Anci all night,” I said.
“Your buddy wasn’t, though, and he’s got something of a reputation for getting into scrapes. Oddly enough, he’s refusing to alibi himself right now. Now why you think that is?”
“He couldn’t have done it,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. In fact, he could have done it, and if he thought that Jump was a real threat to me or Anci he probably would have. But I thought he would have asked me first, or told me after. I said, “I need to talk to him.”
“Not right now, you can’t.”
“When?”
“When we decide to let you. If we decide.”
He stood up. I remembered his lesson and remained seated. Dave smirked at me. The two of them went out. Wince lingered behind just a moment.
“I told you to stay out of this mess, Slim,” he said.
“Wish I’d listened.”
“If you don’t wish it yet, you will soon,” he said, and then he was gone, too.
They kept us until morning, then kicked us loose. Neither Jeep nor I had a lawyer, and neither of us had any real money to speak of, so we ended up sharing a public defender. The guy turned out to be a real goober. He showed up late, read slow, talked slower, and was covered more in food stains than clothes. I hate to sound like that—the public defender system is a good thing—but you got the feeling that, in this guy’s hands, you could walk in to donate to the policemen’s fund and end up tied to a metal table. Anyway, the sense was that they wanted to charge us, but our self-defense story kept getting in the way. The goober warned us not to enjoy fresh air much, because charges were probably forthcoming.
That was something to ask about, but Willard didn’t make an appearance, and no one else really spoke to us except the guy at the properties desk, who just grunted and gave us back our things. I had a few bucks missing, and I think Jeep lost his Timex, but neither of us raised a fuss. Outside, the day was cool and bright. The two of us were underground coal miners, so the physical effect of a few hours in a holding tank was pretty small, but it still felt good to be outside again, and we paused a moment to stretch in the sun. There’s nothing like an overnight in jail to convince you of the wisdom of the righteous life.
“I’d rather not spend any more time in there,” I said. “I shared a cell with a drunk who kept time by farting.”
“Not my favorite experience, either,” Jeep said. “Some time around midnight, they tossed in a first-timer who wanted to be King of the Cell, and for some reason he chose me as his target.”
“Sometimes they’ll choose the biggest guy, thinking it sends a message. How’d it go?”
“For him? Not well, but after that everyone left me alone. One guy even offered to make my bed.”
“I’m hoping you didn’t take him up on it,” I said. “They already think you killed Jump Down.”
Jeep didn’t say anything.
“You didn’t, did you?” I said.
Jeep didn’t say anything.
“Because, the thing is,” I said, “he’s missing. One of his places was burned, too, which feels like revenge to me. You were supposed to be at work last night, but instead you showed up to shotgun one bad man a few hours after another bad man mysteriously vanished.”
Jeep said, “You think I did it?”
“I don’t know for sure that anything was done. Jump Down probably isn’t the easiest guy to get in touch with. Maybe the place burned on its own. If that’s where he kept his meth kitchen, my understanding is they burn easier than birthday candles. I’m just saying that if anything did happen, now might be a good time to come clean.”
“In front of the police station?” he said. “You really are new at this.”
“Well, maybe you can tell me all about it later,” I said, but instead of answering he trailed off to phone his wife.
Anci and Peggy had left the station house the night before, and I wasn’t sure exactly where they’d gone. Back to the hotel, maybe, but more likely to Peggy’s place. Wherever they were, I wouldn’t feel completely comfortable until we were all together again. Willard had promised me there’d be some kind of police protection, but I got the feeling that was the kind of arrangement that would keep away the honest but not much else. I punched in Peggy’s number. Anci picked up. Like I thought, they’d gone to Peggy’s.
“She’s out, by the way,” Anci said. “As in, like a light. You’ve never seen a person sleep so hard. I tried waking her a while ago, but it’s like trying to rouse a tree stump. I’ll try again in a while. Maybe tomorrow morning.”
“She had quite a start,” I said. “We all did. It kinda takes it out of you. How are you holding up?”
Anci shrugged with her voice. “I’m okay. That’s never happened to me before, and I hope it never happens again.”
“It won’t, I have anything to do with it. To that end, I’ve got to talk to your Uncle Jeep about a few things. Then I’m going to see about finding us a new hotel. Might be time to move again, given the circumstances.”
“Maybe back to the Pin Oak.”
“Maybe not.”
“Peggy’s house is okay, though. She gave me my own room. It’s small, but it’ll be nice sleeping in a room where the only snoring you have to hear is your own.”
“Sorry.”
“You can make it up to me by making it so we can go home again,” she said.
“Well, that’ll be soon, I hope. It’s not safe yet, exactly, but most of the people I was worried about have been accounted for. I’ve got one or two more small things to look after this morning, and then hopefully things will start to fall into place.”
“Sounds like a plan. Pick me up from school today?”
“You got it.”
“On the bike?”
“Right on.”
I hung up and was heading back to meet Jeep when the phone buzzed again. I looked at the screen. There was a text from Anci, which she must have sent as soon as we’d parted: “Don’t forget your meeting.” But I was all about that incoming phone call. My heart lifted, and I wished I had a pocketful of confetti to throw. The number was Tony Pelzer’s.
“You’ve been calling me?” a voice said. It was an odd creature, this voice, rough and high at the same time. Also, there was something distantly familiar about it, though maybe that was just my imagination.
I said, “Once or twice. I think it’s time we meet.”
“I think so, too. I’m here at the house. You know where it is?”
“I know where it is.”
“Okay. Come out. But, listen, I want you to be cool, okay? I want you to be very cool. Can you remember that?”
“Cool is my middle name.”
“I’m guessing it ain’t.”
“I know.”
“But I want you to. Be cool, I mean, because it’s not always easy.”
“You sound anxious, Mr. Pelzer.”
“I’m very anxious,” he said. “And it’s Tony. And fuck you.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Twenty minutes?”
“More like forty.”
“Fine. But don’t dawdle. Forty-five and I’m gone. And for the love of Mike, don’t bring a piece.”
I rolled again toward Bluegill Point. Along the way, I stopped by the Vale and swapped the truck for the bike, because I’d promised to give Anci a ride on it later. I checked the kitchen window lock, but it was the same as before, and I went inside and looked at Anci’s computer, but all I saw on the makeshift security feed was Peggy stopping by to pick up some of the Anci’s things. I collected my helmet and Anci’s and my jacket and gloves and went out again. The weather was still cool, but the clouds had pushed off, and the sky was clear and blue and beautiful. You’d never think all this strife was going on under that sky. I strapped Anci’s helmet to the rack on the back of the bike and took off.
It was just after nine o’clock when I found myself back on Tony Pelzer’s doorstep. The GMC was still there, but in a different spot, so either Pelzer had gotten it running or gotten that team of elephants. The sign with his name was still there, so the elephants hadn’t stepped on it. I went up on the porch and knocked and after a short moment there he was, shirtless, with a soft belly and a bruise the size of a grapefruit on his furry chest. I felt a shock of recognition and a few things sliding into place. I remembered the weird things he’d said on the phone, and I remembered what Mary-Kay Connor had told me about him and his job. I’d thought maybe the badge and police uniform were pieces of a costume. That they might have been part of a security job hadn’t occurred to me. I tried to be cool, but he was right, being cool wasn’t easy.
Tony Pelzer was Round-Face.