He didn’t need them—the gun was probably enough—but he’d brought along two boys: big, meaty things with scars on their awful faces and a frozen dislike in their eyes. They were horrible and they didn’t do anything to hide it. You tried to imagine them having human mothers, but you couldn’t do it. Sharks, maybe. They put me in the backseat of a green maxi-cab. The boys got in front. Jump climbed in with me and we roared quickly away from the parking lot. No one bothered to look up at us as we left. Probably they had abductions there all the time.
I said, “This is kidnapping.”
“Shut up.”
“Well, it is.”
Jump nodded. He turned his head slightly, as though to look thoughtfully out the window. His eyes wobbled in his head in that way of theirs, and then he suddenly swung with his right arm and shoved me back against the seat.
He said, “It is. And I said shut up.”
I shut up. The maxi cruised out of town and south a ways on Spillway Road until we cut back west toward a gated access into the wildlife preserve. The maxi lurched to a stop, throwing us against the backs of the seats in front of us. The big guy who was driving turned around and apologized to Jump Down with a look, and the other guy got out and rustled around in the bed for a moment and then there was the sound of metal snapping. The door opened and the boy got back in and we were underway again. I figured he’d used a pair of bolt-cutters to snip the chain off a barrier arm and take us into the woods.
You’re about to die like that—and I was pretty sure that’s where we were heading—your mind starts tearing off in all kinds of directions. I thought of Anci and Peggy and of what they’d think when they’d learned I came to harm. I silently asked Peggy to take care of Anci, and I asked Jeep Mabry to keep guarding over them and make it so they were safe. I found myself thinking of my old man and the bad he’d done and how maybe I’d tried to make up for a few of those things in my own way and through my own actions, but I didn’t ask anything of him that didn’t involve regrets and lost chances. When I was young, we’d come to this very preserve every fall to watch the migration of the Canada geese. One year, we found a goose with a badly broken wing, and instead of just leaving it there or killing it like I thought he would he’d wrapped it in his jacket and taken it to the rangers’ station and then driven with the ranger to an animal rehabilitation preserve in Tennessee. Not much later, he’d gone away, and in that first year of loneliness I took my sisters back to see the geese on my own, but it wasn’t the same and we never went again. I thought of Guy Beckett’s body in the Grendel mine, and I wondered whether anyone would ever find him again. That was a lonely place of dying. I thought of how I wish I’d listened to my own good sense and refused to take Matthew Luster up on his devilish bargain, and how taking him up on it meant that Peggy and I would never get to make our life together, assuming we could have salvaged our relationship. I was thinking all that when the truck stopped at last and the engine died. The front doors opened and the big boys got out. One of them opened Jump Down’s side, and allowed him to step out. The other pulled open my side and reached in and pulled me from my seat and to the ground like a sack of flour.
Jump came around the truck and over to me and squatted down. He rested his hand on his knee, and the big revolver filled his fist. I could feel the sweat trickling down my face. Jump said, “Shit just got real. You don’t look so good, Slim.”
“Don’t feel so good, either.”
“Yeah, and you shouldn’t. Here I let you off the hook, and look what I get in return for my generosity. You’ve made a lot of trouble for me, cousin.”
I said, “Not me, but I guess I understand why you think that way.”
He nodded at that, more thoughtfully than I imagined him able. He scratched his head and spat into the dirt and said, “The cops are after me, man. They came to my place the other day and talked to my mother.”
“You live with your mother?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. So what?”
“It’s just kinda weird, don’t you think? I mean, given your . . . occupation.”
“I’m a coal miner, man. Nothing else. And the old lady was upset, and when she gets upset her phlebitis acts up. You think that’s funny?”
I didn’t realize I’d been smiling. “It’s kind of funny,” I said.
“It’s not funny,” he said, shaking his head. “You are wrong. It is a very painful and frustrating condition.”
“Okay, I apologize. It just wasn’t what I expected you to say.”
“Top of that, the meds she needs to control it aren’t exactly cheap, you know.”
“I said I was sorry.”
He wasn’t listening. “So she gets mad and she’s already in discomfort. She has to dip into her bingo money, and that makes her even madder, and she takes it all out on me. Guess who I’m blaming.”
“Me?”
“Good guess.”
“Or Galligan.”
“There you go with that Galligan business again,” he said. “We’re talking about Roy Galligan here, right?”
“Less you know some Galligans I don’t.”
“How you figure?”
I shook my head and said, “Look, if you’re going to shoot me, I’d just as soon as you get on it, save me the headache of trying to ram information into that bank vault between your ears.”
“You’re trying to piss me off,” he said. “Get me to do you quickly. I get that. I’m not a zombie, man.”
“You’re close.”
“There you go again,” he said. He laughed quietly under his breath. The piles of meat shuffled nervously. One of them scraped a foot on the gravel path. He was like a horse scraping out the last ticks of my life with his hoof. “You should be careful, though. Guns have a way of just going off. At this range, the Commander here would rip a hole through your throat, and you’d bleed out in under a minute.”
“Pretty thought.”
“I told you the other day I’d hold my fire, and I did, but then someone told the cops that I’d sent some men to shoot you and your daughter, and now I’m on the hook for it. I’m living in one of the mobile labs, and I have to sleep in a gas mask, so if I wanted you dead, Slim, there’d be plenty of reason already to put a hole in your brain.”
“So why not?”
“Why not is, I haven’t built myself into something by going off half-cocked. You deserve shooting, but I know who your old man was and I know who you’re butt buddies with, and I’m not crazy about the idea of any more of my men going missing. Or me.”
“Wait,” I said. “Who went missing?”
“You’re pissing me off, man. You know your boy Mabry pulled one of my men off the count in revenge for the other night.”
“He didn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“He wouldn’t,” I said. “Tell the hard truth, I’m thinking he wouldn’t need to.”
“What? You think my guys can’t look after themselves?”
I shrugged.
Jump Down said, “You think all that muscle’s just for show, or what?”
I shrugged.
Jump Down said, “You think you could take them? You think you could take even one of them?”
“It’s not my policy to piss off the guy holding the gun, but, yeah, I think I could. Without much trouble, either. Certainly I wouldn’t need to turn Jeep Mabry loose on them. C’mon, look at those two. They’re like something you won throwing baseballs at milk bottles. They’re adorable.”
He said, “So what you’re saying is, you think you could take, say, Lonnie there?” He waved vaguely in the direction of his boys. Both of them showed me mouthfuls of rotted teeth. I didn’t know which teeth in which mouth belonged to Lonnie.
“Tell you what, let’s make a deal,” I said.
“I’m not sure you’re in a deal-making position.”
“Probably not, but here’s one anyway: Let Lonnie and me go a round. He beats me, it’s anything goes. I won’t squawk. Put holes in me if you like. Whatever other wickedness you have in mind. But if I beat him, you give me twenty-four hours so I can go after Roy Galligan and put our troubles to rest. Yours and mine.”
Jump Down thought about that some. He looked at his boys, but neither of them said anything or revealed how they might have felt about my idea. Probably they liked it fine. I didn’t look like much. I was wet and cold and scared and had a bump on my head. My courage was as phony as a three-dollar bill. I’d laughed at an old woman and her phlebitis. Jump Down turned back to me and said, “Why on earth do you think I’d go along with something like this?”
“I don’t know. Meanness maybe. Or boredom. And then there’s always the off chance that I’m telling the truth. You can kill me, but tomorrow your problem is still the same.”
“Galligan?”
“Galligan.”
“Okay, maybe. But you got to put up more. Just not squawking isn’t too much for me to win, and I plan to win anyway. I got the gun, after all.”
“You’ll win,” one of the boys said. Lonnie, I guess. He studied me, and I studied him back. He was the larger of the two, which I found disappointing. Besides being smaller, the other guy moved with just the slightest limp, so I’d kinda hoped Lonnie was him. Lonnie was something else, though. He had arms like tree limbs and a head like a concrete block. His chest was as big around as a Hula-Hoop, and his hands looked like they could palm a Thanksgiving turkey. Fighting him wasn’t my favorite idea.
I said, “What more can I put up?”
“Yourself, one,” he said. “Mabry, two. In other words, after Lonnie there kicks your ass, you’re both on my payroll for, say, a year. Except I ain’t actually paying you, get it?”
“I get it,” I said. “We’ll be errand boys.”
“Errand boys, or whatever else I need.”
“Muscle?”
“Mabry, maybe. You, I ain’t so sure. You’re kinda wiry.”
“Pot, kettle,” I said. “Besides, Mabry won’t ever agree to any such foolishness.”
“He will if you tell him to. Everybody knows he’d strangle his mother for you. Anyway, it’s either this or you don’t walk away from here. So what do you say?”
There was just the one thing to say. I agreed. I figured that if I died, Jeep would murder the boy for killing me, and if I lived, Jeep would murder the boy for being such a lunkhead and hatching such a dim-witted scheme. Either way, he was in a world of hurt. That made things seem slightly cheerier.
Lonnie didn’t do anything to help my mood, though. Jump Down and the other boy stepped back and Lonnie came over to me, cracking his knuckles and shaking a hitch out of his neck and making a noise in his throat like snot boiling. He went maybe six foot seven or so and was basically built like a Sherman tank. I figured him for a solid 325 at least. I’d seen plenty of big guys in my time, but that motherfucker was big enough to project a Charlton Heston movie on. I stood off the ground and got into something resembling a fight stance, and Jump Down barked something, and Lonnie lunged in with a jab that hit me in the top of the chest and sent me over backward.
That hurt like hell, but I’ll tell you, I immediately felt better about my chances. A single punch can tell a story, and Lonnie’s told me plenty. He’d done some bouncing work and probably some other kind of hard physical labor—mine or farm work, probably—but he’d gotten by mostly on body mass and bad looks, and his fighting style seemed more haphazard than anything. His footwork was a series of stomps, and when he advanced on me he did it with his hands low and his head forward.
I clambered to my feet, and the boy came in again and tossed off a painfully slow right hook. I cut inside the shadow of his big body and kicked him in the gut. I rolled right and went outside and hit him on the left ear so hard he went down on a knee. He looked up and swiped at me with one of his mitts, and I tried to get out of his way but he grabbed the top of my leg and flung me across the road like a rag doll. He laughed. He liked that one okay. I got up and we circled one another. His buddy shouted some encouragement, and the kid got cocky and lunged in again, swiping at my head. This time I got lucky and he missed badly and overextended himself right into my jump front kick. That was a good hit, but not my best, and it sent him spilling slightly sideways but not down. He was stronger even than he looked, though, and he came right back at me, lunging all his weight off his back leg. He hit me a stunner in the left shoulder, and I felt the arm go dead, but the boy’s momentum was too strong and he chased his own punch and lurched forward on his toes. I moved slightly left and turned back into him. I stuck out my foot and tripped him, then grabbed hold of his hair and bounced his face off the side of the maxi-cab so hard he left a shallow dent. He dropped to the ground and stayed there.
Jump Down looked at me and at his boy. He turned his head and spat again and looked at the gun in his hand and did some thinking. His eyes wobbled and shook like boiling eggs and finally I could see him make his decision. He shrugged. He said, “Okay. Like we agreed, twenty-four hours. Then we got to take care of this for good.”
I stood there. Jump Down stared at me. He said, “Goddamn it, I said you got your twenty-four. What the fuck else do you want?”
I said, “I need a lift back to my bike.”
I reached Indian Vale just as the first barks of thunder rattled overhead. That big front was pushing through, and this one was going to be a boomer. The sky darkened some more, and the stars ducked away and hid their bright heads. I got off the Triumph and walked up to the house just as a violent wind stirred and the weather cut loose. Rain slammed the house and rattled the windowpanes and a crack of lightning cut through the sky west of the valley.
Jeep Mabry and Pelzer were waiting for me under the overhang of my front porch.
“I’ll say this for you, Slick,” Jeep said, “you know how to make an entrance.”
They’d already introduced themselves—I’m guessing with a grunt and a nod—but I did the pleasantries again anyway and watched them size each other up. I told them what had happened with Jump Down, and Pelzer laughed and shook his head. Jeep fumed.
He said, “Soon as we’re done with this business here, that little bastard is dog food.”
“I kinda thought you’d say that,” I said. “But let’s take one massacre at a time.”
I walked past them and into the house and found Peggy and Anci calmly doing math homework at the kitchen table. There were some sodas and chips and other supper leavings strewn out, as was Peggy’s Winchester Model 94 short rifle. She put her hand on it when I came in the room.
I said, “Easy there, deadeye.”
She said, “Good lord, you gave me a fright. What the heck happened to you?”
“Ran into an old pal.”
“And he kicked your ass?”
I said, “He had a momentary upper hand, but things evened out in the end.”
Peggy said, “That’s Tony Pelzer out there.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, he can’t come in here. Apologies to whatshisname . . .”
“Jeep.”
“Apologies to whatshisname, but I don’t want him in here with us, and me and this rifle here told him so.”
“They can wait on the porch,” I said, and told her what there was of it to tell. She took it in and looked at me a long time. She ruffled Anci’s hair and whispered something in her ear, and Anci hopped down off her chair and went quickly and quietly out of the room with a worried glance at me.
When we were alone, Peggy said, “You’re going to leave that little one behind.”
“Just for a while.”
“That’s not what I mean, Slim. What I mean is, you’re going to go off and get yourself shot to hell and leave her behind for good and permanent. What kind of a father would do something like that? I didn’t know better, I’d think you were enjoying this thing a little.”
I don’t mind telling you, that got me a little warm under the bandages, and I said so. Days of bad sleep, worse food, and hot-and-cold-running beatings had got to me some, I guess. I said, “And I think you’re forgetting that our alternatives aren’t too attractive, either. I let this thing go, I got to spend my midlife crisis looking over my shoulder for stray bullets. Anci, too.”
“You could run.”
“Run where? Another town? Another state? And what would that teach Anci?”
“It’d teach her that sometimes you get in over your head. That sometimes it’s okay to cut your losses.”
I said, “And someone taught you that, Peggy.”
She stepped to me and hit me in the mouth. It was a pretty good shot, too, and I stepped backward twice and hit the wall. Thing like that can go one or two ways. Sometimes a punch makes you madder and sometimes it knocks your mad right out of the room, and Peggy’s hit did the latter. We both looked at each other in that shocked way you get under such circumstances, and then we laughed a little.
Peggy said, “Goddamn it all. Look at me.”
I touched my bloody mouth with my fingers.
“It’s okay.”
“I ain’t apologizing, you asshole,” she said, but she smiled sheepishly. “I’m just pissed I didn’t knock your sorry ass out.”
“Oh. Can I say that you’ve got a pretty good swing for a schoolteacher? Or will that just lead to more violence?”
“I grew up on a chicken farm with four brothers,” she said, proud. She got her purse and dug until she found some scraps of pink tissue for me. “And I was the oldest. My mom made sure I knew how to fight.”
“I knew all that,” I said, “except the part about your mom. She sounds like a hell-raiser.”
“You would have liked her,” she told me, and smiled sadly at her memories. “She was as ornery as a Republican mule, and she could drink all the men in the county under the table.”
“Sounds tough.”
“She was. Maybe too much so. But something gets everybody, eventually. You sure you got to do this thing?”
“Pretty sure.”
She picked the rifle off the table. She said, “You want some backup?”
“I want Galligan and his men in one piece at the end of this,” I said. “You come along, there won’t be enough left to fill an ashtray.”
“Say that again. I don’t know the last time I was so mad.”
“Me, either. You mind keeping watch over Anci?”
“We’ll be here when you get back.”
“Thank you.”
We kissed, and she touched my face and said, “I know I said I wasn’t, but I am sorry about before. About hitting. I guess there’s been some tension between us lately.”
“Maybe a little.”
“This is all my fault. Everything that’s happening.”
“It’s nobody’s fault. Or it’s all our fault. Or something. It’s the way we built our world, and I guess it was inevitable that it’d come to tears one day.”
“Maybe,” she said. She paused and looked into me deeply for what seemed a long time, and then she said, “And Slim, my answer is yes.”
“Your answer?”
“To what you’ve been asking me. You and me. Let’s build that family together.”
“You’re sure?”
“Damn sure.”
We kissed again and said our good-byes and a few other things, and after a moment I went out. Jeep and Pelzer were waiting. Pelzer was smoking a cigarette.
He said, “You’re bleeding again.”
“I know.”
“You bleed more than a nun’s vision. It makes a body nervous.”
Nervous or no, we gathered up our things and moved out into the swirling night. Pelzer drove his beat-up van. Jeep and I shared my truck.
Jeep said, “Hell of a night for this.”
Hell of a night for anything. The rain came down hard and pelted the windshield, and the wind shoved our vehicles around like scraps of tin. We’d settled on checking Galligan’s De Soto residence first, but about halfway there Pelzer’s van slid off the road into a ditch. He was banged up some, but when we stopped the truck and ran back through the washer to rescue him he seemed not much worse for wear.
“This is crazy,” Pelzer said over the noise of the rain.
It was crazy, but it was the plan, such as it was. It took us a half hour to pull him out of the ditch and get back on the road, time we keenly felt. When we finally reached Galligan’s place, we found the house dark and seemingly empty, something Jeep Mabry confirmed with a quick reconnoiter.
“Told you,” Pelzer said.
I shrugged. “Time well spent, though. I’d hate to run all over the tricounties looking for them only to find out later that they were in the most obvious spot all along.”
“Meanwhile, Temple Beckett is being put in a box.”
“Pelzer,” I said, “you open your mouth again for something like that, I’m going to let Mabry here turn you into a sock puppet.”
Jeep grinned and folded his arms. Pelzer looked at him for a moment, assessing his chances, probably, then lapsed into a sullen quiet. His chances sucked, and he knew it.
Jeep looked at me. “Where to now, Slick?”
“Goines’s place.”
“You know where it is?”
I knew where it was. The place was a rental, and not even in Goines’s name, but you look hard enough, you can always find someone to bribe. It’d taken a bit of doing—and a bit of cash—but eventually I’d come up with an address. The place was a stone-and-wood A-frame somewhere between Pomona and nowhere, in a lonesome spot at the dark edge of the national forest and without a neighbor anywhere in sight. A perfect hideout. We separated again and rolled out that way, our windshield wipers barely keeping up with the storm, and after a bit of knocking around in the dark and the wild rain we managed to find the place. Under the clouds, it looked a little like an Indian cave or some kind of black-magic church, and when the lightning flashed overhead it cast a fearful, peaked shadow on the grass.
Jeep said, “Okay, better. But are you sure they’re inside?”
“Sure enough,” I said. “It’s a little late to be out for a stroll.”
“They could be somewhere else entirely.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Their cars are around back, hoping to avoid anyone noticing. Not that there’s anyone out here to notice, but I guess they’ve elected to be extra cautious. You can’t see the cars, but look there in the grass. Tire marks, and the grass is flattened down. Recently, too.”
“Nice eye, buddy,” Jeep said.
“If you two girls are done complimenting each other,” Pelzer said, “maybe we should go see what there is to see.”
I nodded. Jeep nodded. He looked at Pelzer. For a moment, I thought he might knock his head clean off. He must have decided we’d need Pelzer’s gun, though, because instead of head-knocking he hopped down from his truck and raced off through the rain into the dark. Pelzer and I followed, quickly and quietly. We didn’t really have much more of a plan than that. We ran through the yard, through the howling wind and sheets of rain, straight toward the house. We were tough men on a mission, and we had all kinds of guns. There would probably be murders. We were finally living up to our potential as Americans.
Jeep was fast, but surprisingly, Pelzer was faster. He got in front of us and hit the front porch at a leaping sprint. He caught air and slammed into the door with his shoulder. I guess he had a picture of it in his mind. This was a good door, though. An expensive door. The wood flexed less than a millimeter and spat him out like a wad of gum, and he landed on the concrete with a yelp.
Jeep looked down at him.
“You dumb little peckerwood.” He shook his head. “I don’t guess you thought of trying the knob first?”
Jeep tried the knob. The door clicked open, and Jeep pushed it once gently then reared back and kicked it hard with the bottom of his boot. A big guy with a tattooed face was there to greet us. The door greeted him first, smashed into his mush and drove him over and to the ground. He tried to get up, but Jeep stomped his knee and kicked him in the nuts, and the guy burped a word I’m pretty sure he made up on the spot.
I came in behind Jeep. Pelzer followed me, ducking low and to the left as soon as he was inside. I sort of hoped that they’d be hiding out in small numbers, but the room was full of assholes and firearms. The furniture had been scooted back against the walls and the den turned into a kind of situation room with a table in the center. The lights were on and some candles were lit in case the lights went out. There were bottles of booze everywhere and cigarettes and ashtrays. There were six guys present, too, besides tattoo-face: three rednecks, a mountain man with a big beard who looked like he ate weightlifters for breakfast, a fat boy with a leather jacket and one of those swollen faces looks like it’s about to pop, and Goines, still wearing that silly orange hat. Seriously, he looked ridiculous.
Everything that happened next happened in a jumble. Redneck #1 slid a long-barrel .38 from the crack of his ass. But Jeep was ready. He whipped out his twelve gauge and emptied fire and steel into the room. Redneck #2 got hit and parts of him went down in a pool. The table pretty much disappeared. Everyone else jumped from under their hats and dove for cover.
A gun went off and there was a flash of heat and a spark and I hit the deck. It was like someone had hit me in the chest with a post-hole digger. When I got up, the dude with the beard was charging me. I didn’t have time to get my footing, and he tackled me and down I went again, harder this time, but came up with the bastard’s leg. I tried twisting him to the floor, but he was like a block of lead; he barely moved. He whacked me a good lick in the eye, and I dropped his leg and rolled over and away and came up two-footed and ready to fight. Just then, the storm picked up even more. The wind punched the house, and the wallboards rattled and moaned threateningly, and a window blew out. Rain and some freezing something came pushing in and the power flickered and died and darkness draped the room like a widow’s frown.
I turned again and the Beard was there, like a nightmare. He punched me in the top of the chest, going for my neck maybe, and I fell over and rolled. I came up on the balls of my feet, leapt in. I snatched a small, decorative mirror off the wall and hit him with his own face, and the Beard went down and stayed there.
I looked up and wished I hadn’t. The room was like an operating theater. Pelzer had Redneck #3 and Fatboy by the hair, one in each hand, and he was banging their heads off the coffee table so hard that both their faces were flattened like wet clay. He only stopped when I yelled at him, and the boys slid one way and other, sighing in relief as they slumped onto the smashed furniture.
“You’re spoiling my fun, Hawkshaw,” Pelzer said.
“Fun, hell. That was about to be murder.” I looked around on the floor at the various bodies and parts of bodies. I didn’t see anything orange. I said, “Where’s Goines?”
“Here.”
Back of the room was a kitchen and one of those kitchen cutouts. Goines must have slipped down behind the counter during all the excitement. There was a blur of Day-Glo as he stood and swung into the room and shot Pelzer in the head. Pelzer disappeared behind the sofa, and Goines turned the gun and shot twice at Jeep, who dove for cover. Then he turned his attention to me. I didn’t have any cover available.
What I had was maybe half a second. A sawed-off shotgun rested on the pile of matchsticks that had been the coffee table, and I dove and reached for the pistol-grip gunstock but came up instead with a table leg. Good enough, I guess. I swung it hard at Goines’s wrist and hit it, and he yelped like a calf and dropped his Dan Wesson .45 Bobtail. He tried to pull back and into a football kick, but it was a clumsy effort and I jabbed him between the eyes and swung the table leg at that silly orange hat, going for the home run.
The boy was quick, though. Quick as a greased cougar. He stepped under my swing and cracked me a good one in the ribs and then dropped to the floor and hooked my legs and brought me down with him. On my way, I reached out to arrest my fall and dropped the table leg, but the Bobtail was there beside me, and I grabbed it and fired off two wild ones. The air tore around us and Goines screamed and jumped backward off me and crab-walked toward the kitchen.
“Careful, slick,” Jeep shouted behind me.
But I didn’t listen. I launched myself into the kitchen, and Goines sprung suddenly back into view. He whipped something through the air, and the something hit me in the head, and I realized all at once that it was a toaster swinging by its cord. It was one of those old-timey ones, too, the metal ones that are built like bank safes, and I pitched over sideways, and there again was Goines.
“You goddamn troublemaking sonofabitch,” he said. “I’m sending you to hell tonight.”
I still had the Bobtail, but Goines grabbed my wrist and twisted until I dropped the gun. He kicked it away. The kitchen was small, like you usually find in cheap rentals, and there wasn’t much room to maneuver. Goines pressed himself away from me and spun right and hit me with an elbow-strike that sent me staggering against the stove. He moved in and jabbed again but missed, and I picked up a Teflon fry pan and struck him a good one across the chops with it. Blood looped from his nose and mouth and he bent down as though on reflex, and I hit him on the head again and again, like I was driving a rail spike, but the fucker refused to pass out or die. He avoided another hit and swung a right hook into my ear and grabbed me by the throat and sent me crashing into the wall. I hit the wainscot with such a thud that a clock dropped on my head and spat its little wooden bird across the linoleum.
I got to my knees and crawled into the living room and stood quickly. Before I could turn, though, Goines hit me in the back and drove me forward onto my face. He kicked me in the ribs until I rolled over, and he kicked me in the head and then reared back and made like to stomp me through the carpet and into the crawl space, and I rolled to my left and this time came up with the sawed-off and shot him in the foot.
Well, that was a sight. There was a roar and a blast of hellish smoke, and Sonny’s foot just kinda vanished in a puff of suede and boot stuffing. His standing-leg buckled, and he sank down on his butt and grabbed his shoe. He looked up at me, and I looked down at him and suddenly found myself staring down the barrel of the gun, and man, let me tell you, all kinds of things run through your mind in a moment like that. I couldn’t very well leave it lie, couldn’t leave the little shit running around and unleashing hell on me and mine. My brain was going like a wheel, and it wasn’t thinking about whether to add Goines to my Christmas card list. More like how much lye such a thing might require—Fatboy included—or where I might get a hacksaw that time of night.
But I didn’t get to give any of that, or murder or self-defense or whatever it was, much more thought, because just then there was another shot, this one straight up into the ceiling and roaring loud. I looked up to find Roy Galligan, dressed fine in a suit as white as the season’s first snow, coming down the stairs holding an antique Colt Kodiak double. His hair was the same pale blond, and upon his finger was a circle of carved anthracite. He was a fancy one, the kind of guy who made you want to use words like “upon.” His belt buckle was mighty, and his alligator boots winked with silver buckles. The house seemed fairly to creak under his weight.
“That’s enough, if you don’t mind,” he said, voice like a cave-in. He stopped to survey the room. “Holy God. It’s an abattoir. How did it come to this?”
He didn’t bother about my gun. He strode into the room, kicking pieces of this and that—furniture and employees—out of his way with equal disdain. He stepped to the kitchen and rested the Kodiak against a counter. He opened a cabinet and brought out a crystal decanter and a handful of glasses and set them on the bar.
“I saw you the other day up there to Coulterville. Buying chili. You’re Slim, aren’t you?”
“You Roy?”
We agreed we were who we were. Jeep came out and dusted himself off, and Pelzer stirred on the floor. He sat up and rubbed a swipe of blood around the side of his neck.
I said, “Thank God. I thought you were dead.”
“I thought so, too.” His hand went to the side of his head. He glared at Goines on the floor. “For a second anyway. Little shit shot my ear off.”
“Better than your skull.”
“Or my balls. Think they can sew it back on?” he asked.
“If you can find it,” I said. “It might have gone under the couch.”
He fished around until he found his ear under the sofa.
“Good eye. I bet they can sew it back on,” he said.
“It’s a world of medical miracles. Take this.”
Pelzer put his ear in his shirt pocket and climbed to his feet. I handed him the sawed-off, and he stood there holding it and eyeing Galligan like something growing out of his nose.
Galligan looked back at him and smiled sweetly and said, “My opinion, boy, you look better without it. Evens out your head some.”
I said, “You like gambling, don’t you, man?”
“What else is there, boy?”
“A long, healthy life, one.”
He regarded me with pity. “You’re welcome to it. I’ll take my money and my fun,” he said. “I don’t suppose I have to ask what this is about, do I?”
“Foremost, it’s about Temple Beckett. Where is she?”
Galligan sighed. He drank his drink and looked at the loss with sorrow. I bet he always did that. He wanted his pie and to have it, too.
At last, he said, “Upstairs. First door on the left.”
“Anyone else up there we ought to know about?”
“No,” he said. He looked around the floor a little. “It looks like you got them all.”
I nodded at Jeep, and he and Pelzer went upstairs. They took their guns. I had the 9000S to keep an eye on our host. You could only trust a man like Roy Galligan so far, which was to say not at all.
“It’s also about Guy Beckett,” I said when we were alone. I had to raise my voice, the storm was so loud, but the old man seemed not to have noticed it at all. “He’s dead, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said.
“I’m not guessing,” I said. “I found him in the Grendel. Drowned in all the poison water you’ve been funneling into it.”
“I confess, I’d wondered about that. He had to have gone somewhere, after all.”
“He stumbled down there to pick up a water sample, maybe,” I said. “Or to take pictures of your jerry-rigged pipe system. Whichever, he got lost in the dark somehow and couldn’t find his way back out. Eventually, he panicked and got hung up on something and drowned. I found him in a room off the face.”
Goines swore softly under his breath. His face was pasty white, but the boy was rawhide tough, I’ll give him that. He toyed around with taking off his boot but gave it up when the job got too painful, and now he just sat there staring up at us with his crazy eyes.
Galligan looked at him, too, though maybe with less admiration. He said, “Foot full of lead, Sonny? Well, there are worse things. Sit tight, we’ll get you fixed up.” He turned to me again and said, “Did you bring him out? Beckett?”
I shook my head, and Galligan winked meanly at me and grinned like we were sharing diabolical doings.
He said, “Because you want money.”
“Because I want to be left alone,” I said. “Anyway, there wasn’t time to bring him out. I’m not sure I could have done it by myself anyway.”
Galligan nodded. He said, “Probably not. I had the sad fortune of moving some drowned bodies after the flood of ’45, and they were as heavy as granite blocks, even the little ones.”
“Let me ask you this: how much water would you say you’ve funneled from the King Coal into that old coal mine?”
If I’d hoped to surprise him with my brilliant detective work, I’d have gone home and cried into my pillow. His face didn’t even change when he said, “Well, I don’t know precisely. My calculations, the Grendel goes some four hundred acres or so.”
“And it’s full.”
“And it’s full. Well, it’s more or less full, as such things go,” Galligan said. “I’m not the first one to do this sort of thing, you know.”
“You installed a false wet seal,” I said, “from one mine to the other. Real seal directs acid mine drainage to a holding tank where you’d treat it with your supplies of anhydrous ammonia.”
“Is that what I did?”
I ignored him. “But treatment’s expensive and a pain in your ass anyway. You like doing things your own way and don’t want anyone in the state capital or Washington calling the dance, so instead of treating the water you started funneling it to the Grendel.”
“I’m awfully clever then.”
I continued ignoring him. “I’m guessing you’ve been doing it for several years at least, funneling water and falsifying reports to the government. But then things hit a snag. The Grendel’s slowly collapsing, as abandoned mines will, and the acid drainage pooled near some of its structural flaws and started leaking. If it all broke out of the mine—Martin County style—and ended up in the lake, everyone would know what you’ve been up to, and you’d be looking down the barrel. But to clean it up, you had to increase your supply of anhydrous ammonia, which you couldn’t do on the books without attracting attention from the Feds. They’d want to know what you were using it for, so you decided to hit the Knight Hawk’s tanks.”
“What a wily character I am.”
There were noises on the stairs. Jeep and Pelzer were coming down. Temple was in Jeep’s arms, unconscious.
He said, “She’s drugged out of her kettle, but she seems okay.”
I looked at Galligan, “And man, are you lucky.”
He smiled a little, but it wasn’t a happy smile. He didn’t like being under a thumb, and here he was under the biggest thumb of his life maybe, but he was smart enough to let it play out and live to fight another time.
He said, “You were telling my story back to me, I think.”
“I was,” I said. “You used up your own back supplies of ammonia, I guess, and then hit on the idea of tapping the Knight Hawk’s tanks. Chances are, the local meth gangs would catch the blame, and anyway no one would ever think to accuse you of something like that. Only problem was, you didn’t know that you’d been seen by Dwayne Mays and Luster’s son-in-law, who were working on an unrelated news story. That is, you didn’t know until things started getting hot and Beckett panicked and went to Luster for help. Luster must have figured out what you were doing, and he knew he had you. He came to you and told you what he knew and . . . what? . . . asked you for money? Coal mines?”
Galligan didn’t say anything.
I shrugged and said, “Maybe both. Maybe magical fairy dust. Don’t matter, really. Whatever it was, you weren’t about to be outmaneuvered by him, so you killed him and you killed Mays. You would have killed Beckett, too, but he took care of that business all by himself. Then you learned about Beckett’s environmental club and went after them, and Temple, too, fearing he’d told them too much. That’s a lot of bodies to leave on the ground, man.”
“I’m not saying anything,” he said, then quickly held up a hand when I started to speak. “Let me finish. I’m not saying anything, except that we didn’t do anything to Dwayne Mays.”
Pelzer threw up his hands and said, “Oh, steaming bullshit.”
Galligan looked at me. “Believe what you want. Believe that earless fool there. I’m just saying that no one in this room did anything to that reporter on my orders. That’s a promise.”
“Not sure I believe that,” I said.
Galligan shrugged. “Like I said, believe what you want. I don’t care. But what I will say is this: that sonofabitch Luster and I go way back. In a way, we were like brothers. Brothers who despised each other, but brothers nevertheless. We fought with each other during the fat times, and banded together against the unions during the lean. We did some things together that maybe you’d have a hard time believing, things that ought to have tied us together forever with blood. But when he came to me with his hand out and threats in his mouth, he broke our covenant. He broke the bond that our fathers took so seriously and the only thing that keeps this part of the world from drying up and blowing away.”
“So you sent Sonny here to deal with him.”
“If I did—and you understand that I’m not saying I did—it would have been a mercy, like putting an animal out of its misery. The man I knew was already dead, and all that was left was an old fool whose desperation threatened to bring down everything we’d both built up over the years.”
I said, “Dwayne Mays threatened you, too.”
“It’s not the same,” he said. “Any story about my mines would never have left his computer. Certainly it never would have been published. His boss and I are old friends. Besides, there are better ways to take care of nettlesome reporters. One thing, they think almost any amount of money is a fortune. Plus, Dwayne made noises about being a man of principle, and there’s never anyone easier to bribe than that.”
“That’s a mighty cynical view of things, old man.”
He said, “I’d say it’s more realistic than cynical, but you have it any way you want.”
“This doesn’t leave us in a good place.”
He said, “You’ve got the gun, boy. When you have the gun, you’re supposed to use it, or use the threat of it to get what you want. A long time in this part of the world, I’ve managed to get what I want. Mostly, it’s with money, but sometimes it’s through threats and sometimes it’s through other kinds of actions, some of them less wholesome than others. After a time, you can rely on reputation. People do what you want them to do because they’re afraid of what you’ll do otherwise, but that only lasts for so long. Sooner or later, all of this will be gone. Eventually the Grendel will let go of its hold on all that water, and my secret will be out, and I’ll probably lose a few dollars here and there, either in court or by feathering the pockets of our noble civil servants. Maybe I’ll get out of the business entirely, and a few more hundred or a thousand men will lose their jobs. But what’s any of that mean in the grand scheme? You know I’ll never be arrested, and you know I’ll never see the inside of a cell. Son, this is the United fucking States of America. Land of the free market, home of the despoiler, where the only kings are citizen kings. When the hell is the last time you ever heard of a well-off white man going to jail for befouling the goddamn land? So I suggest you either use your gun or threaten to use it and tell me what you want.”
I said, “It’s a nice speech, but you didn’t go through all this trouble for nothing. Truth is, you’re scared.”
For the first time, I’d touched a nerve. Sonny sucked a breath, and Fatboy stopped groaning, and Galligan drew himself up and turned as red as a radish.
He said, “You filthy little maggot. You dirty white nigger.”
Jeep laughed. I brushed aside the insults and said, “How much is avoiding treatment saving you?”
“Depends,” Galligan said when he’d collected himself. “Some months the flow out of that closed section is a bit heavier than usual. Treatment for our string is running more than a million a year.”
“Used to, anyway.” Goines.
“It’s going to again,” I said. “Here’s what I want, me and my gun: Finish what you started. Clean it up. I don’t care how you do it, or where you get your ammonia from, but clean the shit up.”
“I’m not sure I can do that now, son,” Galligan said softly. He breathed deeply and retook full control of himself. He smiled a little and shook his head, as though at the folly of his own weakness, and then he poured us a round of shots, even passing a double to Fatboy, who sat up long enough to moan about wanting a doctor.
Galligan said, “But hell, maybe you’re right. It’s not like we were saving a fortune on this deal anyway. That’s the bitch of it all. All this woe, and all these unfortunate endings, and for what? A few bucks and the safety of a few fish?” He paused and drank and swished the liquid around in his mouth and finally swallowed and said, “I’ll look into what you say. Doing what you say, I mean. I don’t know that it’s possible at this point, but I will give it a looking-at. I’ll do it maybe because it was what I planned to do in the beginning anyway, but mostly I’ll do it because I don’t want my end in this world to be spent dealing with environmentalists and reporters and other kinds of fools.”
“I take that personally,” I said.
“Go right ahead. I meant it personally. Anything else?”
“Just take care of your wounded,” I said. “And leave me and mine the hell alone.”
“It’s a deal, Slim,” he said. He strode forward like a giant and gripped my hand.
“It needs to be,” I said. “For your sake.”
And the old boy showed me his teeth. “Oh?”
I gestured over my shoulder. “This is Jeep Mabry.”
Galligan looked at Jeep. He betrayed no emotion, but his eyes lingered on the big man perhaps just a moment too long.
Jeep said, “It needs to be, for your sake.”
Galligan nodded and said, “Any time, boy. Come for me, and we’ll see. Maybe we’ll go the devil together. I feel more ready these days than not. My time will be soon, and I’d like it to be memorable.”
We went out. The rain was still coming down, but the worst of the tempest had passed and now rumbled away to our east. Flashes of moonlight licked the clouds. Temple snored.
I said, “We’re alive. I can hardly believe it.”
“Me, either, really,” said Jeep. “Question is, do you believe him? Galligan?”
“About everything?”
“About Dwayne Mays.”
I said, “I don’t know why, but I kind of do.”
“I kind of do, too.”
“We’re missing something,” I said.
“Jump Down after all?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Pelzer grunted under Temple’s weight, “Maybe a little less talk, a little more doing?”
We climbed into our vehicles and got the hell out of there, leaving behind the wreckage for someone else to clean up.