It was a Saturday afternoon in the springtime, and my mother was crying in the kitchen with a gun in her hand. My sisters were huddled on the floor away from the windows with their backs to the stove and they were crying, too. I was crying. I was six years old. The door opened. My sisters screamed and my mother screamed with them and discharged the gun into the floor, and then my father walked in.
Like I’d be one day, my father was a coal man, but unlike me he was an important one. Maybe the most important in the downstate. He was a union leader and strike organizer and an inspiration to every other coal miner in the area. His name opened doors, or closed them, sometimes slammed them. He was an organizer or a bureaucrat or a thug, depending on whom you asked, and I hated him and was afraid of him. He was tall and skinny like I was becoming and had slightly stooped shoulders and a hawkish nose on an angular face. His eyes were gray and his hair graying prematurely. He looked at us now without expression and stepped smartly to my mother and took the gun from her.
He said, “You’ll hurt somebody,” but he might have been chiding her for being careless with a potato peeler.
My mother said, “There was a person here.”
“A person?”
“A man. A big man. He had red hair and a mark on his cheek. Like a birthmark.”
My father said, “His name is Deaton. He’s a company goon. What did he want?”
“Just to say hello,” she said. “And that he knew us. He wanted us to know that he knew us. He said the girls’ names.”
My father nodded slowly and then turned and walked further into the house with the gun, and that was the last that was said of any of it, at least in front of us. We were in the midst of a strike that year, a monster that had stretched on since early in the winter, and my father was leading the local UMWA. His friends had been beaten. His truck had been set on fire. But no one had ever come to the house before. No one had ever said my sisters’ names. In another few weeks, the strike had ended—quietly, the way those things always seemed to end—but it wasn’t until late summer that I happened to hear a news report on the radio, the discovery of a body in the waters of the Hog Thief, shot full of bullets. The man had been missing since sometime in the spring, and his name was Deaton.
Until further notice, I had been reassigned to my current task: finder of missing photographers. I’ll be honest: as career changes go, it was jarring. I left the Knight Hawk around twelve-thirty and headed south and east along the IL-13/127 corridor. The thinking was, I should at least talk to Luster’s daughter and get some sense of this Guy Beckett and what he might have been working on and where he might have gone. Way I saw it, the most likely explanation for Mays’s murder and Beckett’s sudden disappearance was that Beckett’s committing the former—for whatever motive—had necessitated the latter. I had a feeling that the cops were probably thinking the same thing. I had a second feeling that Luster and Jonathan were maybe thinking the same thing, too, but neither had said so. We can get as advanced as we want as a species, but something in us will never let go of the idea that giving voice to an unpleasant possibility will somehow make it real.
I rolled the bike past Grubbs, Vergennes, and Grange Hall. Like a lot of rural places, southern Illinois is basically a bunch of small towns knit together, a Babel’s Tower mix of rednecks, rubes, freaks, tweakers, gun nuts, and aging hippies––real hippies, not the newfangled crunchy kids they’re turning out these days––who’d fled into the dark-licked hills sometime during the bloodiest days of a war that wouldn’t stop shaping their lives and had never come out. The land they occupy is low farmland, or river basin, or rock-clotted hill country, evidence of the Illinois glacial advance of some two hundred thousand years ago.
It’s a pretty place, too, at least it is when it’s not turning itself into a mudhole. By the time I reached Spillway Road, the clouds had rolled over to show their dark bellies, and the rain was coming down in sideways sheets, sucking little plumes of white smoke from the asphalt. The wind picked up and snakes of gray water slithered across the paved ribbon of highway. I tell you, at this point, I started seriously regretting my decision to ride to work. I soaked down to the skivvies in seconds, and the rain buffeted the bike across the lane and nearly off into the woodsy roadside. Somehow I held on, but there were moments in there when I felt like a spider clinging to her web during a typhoon.
The address Jonathan gave me was inside something called the Crab Orchard Estates. I wasn’t sure what that was—it sounded like some kind of nineties real estate agent’s wet dream—but I had a sense of where it must be. I aimed the bike toward the Crab Orchard wildlife preserve and took the shoreline road until I spied a gated community spreading its way west and north along the edge of the water. There was a check-in box with a black man sitting inside. When I pulled up, he leaned closer to the window and slid back the glass.
He said, “Little damp today.”
“I don’t know, I’m thinking of building an ark.”
“Probably more practical than, say, a motorcycle.”
“Probably,” I said. Everybody was a comedian. “Let me ask you, you know where I can find Temple Beckett’s place?”
“She know you’re coming?”
“What I’m told.”
This was getting down to business. He produced a clipboard and looked holes in it. He flipped some pages and put the clipboard back on its hook. He picked up a phone and dialed, but I guess no one answered because after a moment he set it down again, too.
“She ain’t called down about anyone, and I can’t raise the house. What’d you say your name is?”
“She’d probably have called me Slim.”
“That a coal mine thing?”
“How’d you guess?”
“You got a bucket tied to your scooter there,” he said. He sighed. “I let you go up and something happens—something ain’t supposed to happen, I mean—I’m the one’s gotta answer for it.”
“Well, maybe I could leave something here with you. You know, some kind of collateral.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“Leave something? Like what?”
“My union card, maybe.”
“You even got a union card?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so. These days, I don’t know anyone’s got one. They’re like unicorns.”
“Getting to be.”
He waved his hand at me.
“Go on up. Just don’t do anything come back on me,” he said, and gave me some sense of the direction I should go. Then he said, “You know, I used to be in the mines my own self. Worked a scratchback mine up at Olney years ago. My father worked it, and his brother, and some cousins of mine, and I swore I never would but damned if I didn’t. I’ll tell you, that was something like a hell on earth.”
“Five-foot seam?”
He leaned forward in the window a little. The rain beaded on his short, silver hair and eyebrows.
“Lemme tell you, we’d have strangled our mothers for five-foot coal. You ever heard of Kelvin’s Scratch-Ass Mine?”
“Can’t say.”
“Well, that was us. The Scratch-Ass Boys. Four feet in most places. Couple three-and-a-half foot spots. Like that old song, ‘Thirty Inch Coal.’ You know that one?”
“I heard it once or twice.”
“Ridin’ on a lizard in thirty-inch coal,” he sang. His voice was soft but deep, and it sounded like history. “It was like that. You raised your eyebrows, you’d hit the ceiling. You got so you had scabs all up and down your back and spine and on your knees and hands. My wife ain’t like those scabs on my hands. Calluses, neither. Bought me this cream to use. Smelled like some kind of flower, lilacs, and wouldn’t you know that’s what those other Scratch-Ass sonsofbitches ended up nicknaming me. Lilac. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and after twenty years I finally did, and it’s nice not being Lilac anymore, but look where I ended up. Sitting in a damn box all day.”
“Least it’s got a high ceiling,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s dull. Go on up, Slim. But behave.”
I promised to behave. I thanked him and started to roar away. He started to push shut his window. I stopped and said, “Hey, one more thing. I grew up around here, but I’ve never been to this development before. You happen to remember what used to be here?”
“Sure. Once upon a time, this was the old Grendel Mine company town.”
“I thought I knew it. That was a Roy Galligan mine, memory serves.”
He nodded.
“Still is, technically. The mine’s up the hill there apiece, across from that King Coal outfit. You can kinda make out what’s left of the tipple. It’s dead, but Galligan still owns the land lease.”
“Galligan and Luster. I guess they own most of them around here these days.”
“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t know Luster. Heard his name, of course, but that’s the extent of it. Roy Galligan, though, him I know.”
“I can tell from your tone you don’t like him,” I said.
He chuckled. “He ain’t on my holiday shopping list, no. You might think you’ve met a sonofabitch in your time, but let me tell you, you ain’t. That old man is so bad, they’ll have to come up with a new definition of the term just so ordinary bad men won’t get all full of false piety.”
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
“Thanks. You sit in this box all day, you have time to think about stuff like that and how to say it. Good old Roy,” he said, but he didn’t mean it. Nobody who said “Good old Roy” ever meant it.
I thanked him again and waved and puttered through the gate, which opened for me on its mechanical arm. Even with his directions in mind, it took a bit of getting lost on the shiny loops of paved road before I found my bearings. Sure enough, this was the old Grendel Mine company town. Way back when, it’d been the largest and most modern of its kind in the area, basically a self-sufficient community. There’d been company housing and a company store and company script stamped with the name of the company president and streets named after the important coal men of the time. The town had a mayor—who reported directly to the mine owner—and its own police force. The only thing it didn’t have was a bill of rights for the residents. That’s what the union was for, and the rifles. Anyway, it was gone now. The streets were renamed things like Candy Cane Lane and Golf Club Way, and the old lake shanties and company shacks had been torn down and replaced with starter mansions. South was the Duck Neck, and the marina with white boats resting uneasily in their slips, and more of the preserve. Up the piney slopes to the southeast was another mine, the old Grendel colliery, closed now these twenty years or more.
After a while, I managed to find Temple’s address. It was at the far end of the development, abutting a wall of shingle oaks and, closer to the lake, bald cypress and tupelo and piles of duckweed. The house was an imposing gray foursquare with a lot of big, rectangular windows and a triangular projection like a silver toque near the back of the house. A mahogany-hulled Chris-Craft runabout bobbed near the quay, and a little red sports car with an eggshell ragtop and beaming chrome side pipes crouched in the bricked driveway. There didn’t seem to be any airplanes or rocket ships around, but maybe they were in the back. I went up and knocked. After a moment, the door opened and a woman appeared.
She didn’t look happy. That was the first thing that struck you. She was a small woman with white hair and wrinkled eyes, though she didn’t look old enough for either, and her mouth was clenched like a fist. She was dressed in jeans and a blouse with a light pattern, and there was a wooden disk on a twine cord around her neck. She put a hand on her hip and frowned and said, “You the man from the mine?”
I told her I was the man from the mine. I said, “You’re Temple Beckett?”
“Don’t be an idiot.” She closed the door, leaving me in the downpour. Bad guess, then. I stood there, getting as wet as a fish’s teeth. A long time later, the hard-bitten woman opened the door again.
“All right, come in.”
I came in. The hallway was dark wood and blue tile painted with little flowers, and it was what you’d call a good-size space. I’ve been on smaller runways. A life-size painting of a redheaded woman on horseback took up one wall. The other was partially covered by some kind of woven wall hanging, African or maybe Honduran. On either side of the doorway, widemouthed vases coughed dried ornamental grass, and the ceiling was fitted with a segmented skylight that ran the length of the space and let in the day’s stormy light.
“I didn’t know any of this was back here,” I said to the woman.
She handed me a towel and said, “That’s what the gate is for.”
The sitting room was pretty big, too. You could have parked a bus in it and not missed the space. The ceilings couldn’t have been higher than twenty feet. The furniture was farmhouse, but expensive-looking farmhouse, and tasteful, as were the knickknacks and framed pictures. There were photos of an older woman—Temple Beckett’s mother, maybe—but none of the old man. At least none that I could see. The floors were polished walnut, stained very dark, and the walls were lined with bookshelves so tall you’d need a man from the circus to bring down the high volumes. Like in the hallway, the ceiling was pitted with skylights, these as deep as wells, and the floors were draped with worn Oriental rugs. As I often was, I was again struck by the sheer amount of money in the world and how much trouble the world went through to make sure none of it ended up in my pockets.
I stood there, dripping on a rug. The wrinkle-eyed woman frowned at me, then told me to wait and went out again. I missed her immediately and consoled myself drying my hair with the towel. There was a picture of Guy Beckett on the coffee table, and I picked it up for a better look. He looked the same. The doughboy was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was missing, too. I was still thinking about it when the door opened again and a second woman came into the room.
“Put that picture down, please.”
She was about my age, early forties, though I had to look at her hands to tell it. She was good-looking, too. Good-looking is putting it mildly, maybe. I looked around vaguely for a priest to strangle. She was tall and lean, with the kind of green eyes a lazy novelist would describe as “piercing.” Her copper hair was pulled back from her face with a strip of brown cloth. I imagined that its more honest self was touched here and there with gray, but that was just a guess. The rest of her was dressed like a pioneer fashion model in a deerskin jacket with turquoise beads sewn on the pockets, a powder blue roll-neck sweater, faded jeans, and buskins made of the same stuff as the jacket.
I put down the picture. She looked at me and it and frowned the kind of desperate, exhausted frown that turns the room upside down and shakes the sympathy from its pockets.
“You’re Slim?”
It was Luster’s daughter, all right. You could see him in her, the way she moved and spoke. She held herself like the native she was—rock-shouldered, fighting shyness, full of Midwestern grit—but she held herself like a native who’d spent time and sweat and money to unlearn it all. Mostly money, probably. She didn’t want to shake hands.
“You found us,” she said. She didn’t sound any too thrilled about it. “I guess I should offer you a drink. You people like to drink, don’t you?”
“Ma’am?”
“Coal miners.”
I’m a big boy who knows when he’s being picked on, so I didn’t take offense. I said, “I’ll take coffee if you have it and it’s not too much trouble.”
She frowned some more in that beautiful way of hers, but nodded. She summoned someone named Susan, and the wrinkle-eyed woman came back. Temple asked her to put on a pot. Susan looked at me like something she wanted to sweep into the street and walked quickly out.
I said, “I’m just going to say it. I don’t think she likes me.”
“She doesn’t. But don’t take it personally. She doesn’t like anyone.”
“Even you?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I’m not sure. Frankly, she’s had a hard life. In some ways, terrible. But she’s been a great help to me, and I’m willing to put up with her moods, even when she goes a little sour on me.”
“So she takes care of you, you take care of her?”
Temple sat down on the sofa. It was one of these things swallows you like a biblical whale. She crossed her legs at the knee and pointed one of the buskins into space. She gestured for me to sit, and I spread my towel on a leather chair across from her and settled into it. The white leather on the armrests smelled like wealth and comfort.
Temple said, “A bit crude, but that’s basically it. Isn’t there anyone you take care of?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“A kid?”
“Daughter. She just turned twelve yesterday. Or thirty. It’s hard to tell sometimes.”
I glanced around the big room. Rather subtly, I thought.
She shook her head and grinned meanly at me and flipped her hair. She had a sexy, toothy look about her that reminded me a little of Gene Tierney. I wanted to put on my finest JCPenney’s suit and comb my hair and solve her mystery for her.
She said, “You can just ask me, you know?”
I felt myself blushing. I looked at her and smiled and shrugged.
“No young ones of your own, I guess?”
“No.”
“Sorry. This really isn’t my thing. Private-detecting, I mean.”
“I guess not.”
“I tried to convince your dad.”
Temple said, “That’s not always so easy. Believe me, I know. My father tends to get what he wants.”
“Well, I think what he wanted was a detective of some kind. Instead, he got me.”
She waved her hand at me. She wore a ring fixed with a chunk of black stone big enough to choke an elephant. “I think what he probably wanted was you,” she said. “And here you sit. Big as life and wet as the lake. At least he seems to like you.”
“More than he likes your husband?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know. The way you said it, I guess. Your voice. It didn’t sound like you were talking about yourself. Top of that, your husband’s a reporter, and I have a sense that Mr. Luster has a fairly low opinion of the fourth estate. I think maybe he thinks Guy is out to get him.”
“He said that to you?”
“Not in so many words, but yeah. This story he and Dwayne Mays were working on, for example.”
“I don’t think . . .”
The coffee must have already been on because just then Susan came back in with a tray of it. In front of Temple she set a cup made of paper-thin bone china. Me, she gave a thick porcelain mug that might have lived in a garage for a few years, or maybe the crawlspace under the house. Susan dipped her head facetiously at Temple and went out again.
Temple watched her go. She looked at the door for a while after it shut, then turned back to me with hard eyes and said slowly, “I want be honest with you.”
“Okay.”
“It’s no offense, okay, but I don’t need you here. I don’t need you and I don’t want you. Let’s be up front about that.”
“Seems reasonable, really.”
She ignored that. “You’re my father’s idiotic idea. Not mine. I tried talking him out of this, but he wouldn’t listen. He never listens. And here you are, without the faintest idea what you’re doing or where you’re going or what to do, and none of the experience even to know that you don’t know it. You don’t, do you?”
“Not really.”
“I’m worried that you’re a danger to my husband, Slim. I’m worried that you’re going to get in the way of the police investigation. If that happens, you could get Guy killed.”
They were good points, all of them. I sipped some of my coffee and set the mug on the table. The coffee was hot and strong but didn’t taste like poison. Maybe Susan liked me after all. Maybe we were dating now.
I said, “Fair enough. Truth is, I don’t want to be here. Just between you, me, and Susan—who I assume has her ear pressed to the door right now—I don’t think much of your old man’s scheme, either. Your appraisal of my skills is sound, and I won’t argue with it. On the other hand, I don’t plan on getting in anyone’s way, especially the police. I’ve got no reason to think they’re doing anything but a bang-up job, and as far as I’m concerned they can keep doing it. Frankly, I just want to be able to report something to Mr. Luster and get my pension.”
She gave me a look.
“Your . . . pension?”
“Yup.”
“That’s what he promised you?”
“All wrapped up like a newborn baby and stashed away somewhere warm and safe.”
“Well, isn’t that a little . . .”
“What?”
She blew out a breath and said, “I don’t know. Desperate?”
“Ouch.”
For the first time, she smiled a little. She seemed embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really don’t know how to act right now.”
“No harm,” I said. “As for desperation, I guess it depends what your aspirations are. Mine’s college for my daughter and an occasional haircut for myself.”
Temple sighed quietly, then stood and paced behind the sofa. “Fine,” she said finally. “Let’s get it over with then. Ask your questions.”
“Thanks,” I said sincerely. “Let’s start with what you think might have happened.”
“I think Dwayne was murdered. I think my husband’s disappeared. More than that . . .”
“I’ll need to know about your marriage. What it’s been like. Whether you’ve been happy with Guy.”
She laughed at that. Kind of bitterly, too. But even her bitterness was like art. Her head went back and her ponytail poured over her shoulder like a vein of molten copper and curled up at the full swell of her breast. She was good-looking, all right. Peggy would turn me inside out with a butter knife to hear me say it, but there was something otherworldly about Temple Beckett, something that had to do with more than money.
I said, “Mrs. Beckett . . .”
“Temple,” she said, interrupting. “I want to be called Temple. And none of this is about my husband and our marriage or our happiness.”
“Well, wait a minute now. Why aren’t you happy with Guy?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t.”
“You didn’t, but your face did.”
“My face?”
“Your expression. Your mouth, mostly. The way the corners flex when you talk about him. Not a happy look, Mrs. Beckett.”
“Temple.”
“There’s that, too.”
She gave me a Susan look. Not gladsome. She came back around the couch and flopped down, as though exhausted.
“You’re married?”
“Not anymore.”
“But you were.”
“A long time ago.”
She said, “Then you know that no marriage is perfect.” But I got the sense that hers was less perfect even than that. “And I’m telling you, you’re on the wrong path. You’re thinking I was unhappy with Guy, for one reason or another. Deeply unhappy. Maybe you think he was having affairs. Maybe you think I was. Or both of us. Maybe he drank or knocked me around or just called me a cunt once too often or whatever. Anyway, you’re thinking that maybe I had an affair with Dwayne and that Guy found out about it and killed him.”
I said, “I admit the possibility crossed my mind. But my guess is that’s usually how these things turn out. The simplest solution is usually the right one.”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I’m not interested in murder.”
“I’m not, either. Tell me about Dwayne Mays.”
She nodded her head. “I wondered when you’d get to that, but frankly there’s not much to say. He and Guy came up together and went to school together. State school, nothing fancy. Neither of them could ever afford fancy. Dwayne’s parents had a farm out near Union City, I think, and Guy’s family never had two nickels to rub together. I went away to better schools but came back in time to be a kid with them. They were thick as thieves, but rivals, too, in that way men have. I learned to dislike Dwayne over time, the way he was always getting Guy into trouble, but Guy never saw it. Or wouldn’t. Later, they worked together. Dwayne was rambunctious, egotistical, eternally horny, fanatically dedicated to his work, and principled to a fault.”
“You’ve had time to think about this.”
“I’ve thought about it,” she said.
“Let’s talk some more about the eternally horny thing.”
“For . . . for men. Dwayne was gay.”
“And your husband . . .”
“Wasn’t,” she said. “Not even half.” She breathed out a sigh and looked at the watch on her perfect wrist. You could take a picture of that wrist and hang it in a museum and folks would come from all around to see it. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve been more than fair with my time. I’ve got a hard afternoon ahead. I’ve got to talk to my father . . .”
“About me.”
“About you. And then I’m meeting with the detectives in an hour. The real detectives.”
“Sheriff Wince.”
“You’ve met him?”
“No, but I’ve met some who have. My understanding is he’s chewing on a theory that your husband and Mays ran into danger working their latest story.”
She nodded. She said, “The meth story.”
Well, that took me aback. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Meth story? Not the Knight Hawk’s safety practices?”
It took her an instant. Then she glared, but there was fear behind it. The piercing eyes pierced deeper. “You sonofabitch. You have no idea how dangerous what you’re saying is. To me. To my husband.”
“Mrs. Beckett, do you have any idea who they might have been looking at? Chances are, if they’re at the Knight Hawk, I know them.”
“Get out. Now.”
“Temple . . .”
“I said now.”
She raised her voice enough that the door swung open immediately and Susan reappeared. I was right; she’d been there the whole time. I guess you couldn’t fault her loyalty. I sighed and stood up to go, folding my towel.
“I hope everything works out,” I said.
She didn’t answer. Either it would or it wouldn’t. She turned her back to me and faced the bank of windows along the western wall, down toward the waters of Crab Orchard Lake.
I followed Susan back through the house and the runway-hallway beneath the skylight. I had hoped the weather would be slowing some, but it was raining even harder now, and the glass was dark and loud with it. I’d have to find an overpass to park beneath until it let off.
Susan opened the door. She indicated the folded towel. I was still holding it.
“I don’t guess you were planning to walk off with that,” she said.
I handed it to her. “It is awfully fluffy,” I said. “The ones we have at home are like sandpaper.”
“Everybody’s got a problem.”
“Just one? That sounds so nice. Hey, one thing . . .”
“Don’t bother.”
I ignored her. “Dwayne Mays. I ran out of questions before I could get his address.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Besides, you can get the address anywhere.”
She was right about that. But I waited, looking at her. Truth was, I was starting to like her. I know that sounds weird, but it was true. She was the kind of person, when you met them, all you wanted to do was drown them in the nearest body of water, but then six weeks later you were BFFs. She wasn’t bad looking, either, in a hard-bitten kind of way. She reminded me a bit of a dispatcher I’d had a fling with once, a tough bird who could drink just about any man under the table and who was so good with a knife she could shave the hairs off a flea’s nuts without waking the dog.
At last, Susan sighed. Her wrinkled eyes flooded with the day’s dark light. She said, “Crainville. North of town. He rented a place there.” She gave me the address. “But if you go, beware.”
“Too much curb appeal?”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m not paid to be.”
“There’s no other way to say it: The place is a rat trap. Actually, I’m not even sure I can imagine rats living there,” she said.
“So you’ve seen it?”
She sneered. “Clean your thoughts. I went there with Beckett sometimes, or dropped off negatives when Beckett couldn’t get free.”
“You mean photo negatives? I thought they did all that with computers these days.”
She said, “Beckett couldn’t stand them. He thought that digital cameras were ruining the art. Or”—she waved a contemptuous hand and changed her voice to what I guessed was an imitation of Beckett—“diluting it. Something like that. He insisted on using film. Dwayne transferred everything to a computer.”
“This Mr. Beckett sounds like an interesting fella.”
“If by interesting you mean patronizing misogynist, then yeah. He was interesting.”
“You’ve got quite a vocabulary for someone who opens doors for a living,” I said.
“And what do you do for dollars? You work in a hole, right?”
“Touché,” I said. “So, if I’m hearing you correctly, the name Guy Beckett doesn’t lift your heart.”
“No, it does not. My gorge maybe.”
I raised my chin back toward the house. “He didn’t hit her,” I said. “Her father would have him cut into pieces and melted the bones in a coking furnace. Drinking? Or drugs?”
“No more than the usual.”
“I’m thinking it’s women, then.”
“It’s women,” she said. “Beckett has a weakness.”
“A lot of men do.”
“Not like him,” she said. “He’d stack ’em five high at a time.”
“He ever make a grab at you?”
“If he did, he didn’t do it more than once. But everyone else was fair game. And this was a guy with some hustle. Book clubs, church groups. Name it. He’d join anything if there were women there. Even our local environmental club. Crab Orchard Friends, something like that.”
“Saving the earth is not his thing, I guess?”
“Not his thing. Guy Beckett cares about Guy Beckett and his needs, period, full stop.”
“And what do you care about?”
“More or less the same thing. But at least I’m honest about it.”
“And here your mistress thinks you’re loyal to her.”
She glared at me. If she could, she would have unhinged her jaw and swallowed me whole.
“This is loyalty. This is what loyalty does. It raises its voice, and it tells a fool that she’s running headlong down a dark tunnel toward an oncoming train.”
“Beckett?”
She nodded. “Ruin on two feet. Believe me, she’s better off without him.”
“Well, someone must miss him. Family?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, friends, then. There’s got to be someone.”
“I don’t know, really. Except for Dwayne, I rarely saw any friends. The ones I did see were mostly work people, but they never seemed to like him much, either.”
“Sounds kind of lonely.”
“I don’t know that he ever noticed.”
“Okay,” I said. I stepped out onto the front porch. “One last thing.”
“My God, what?”
“You said ‘was’ before.”
She was confused. And as stern-looking as a chainsaw sculpture. “What?”
“A minute ago. I said Beckett sounds like an interesting character, and you said, yes, he was.”
She said, “You can always hope.”
She closed the door.
I drove back through the Estates. I stopped at the check-in box and thanked the old guy once more and got his name—besides Lilac, I mean—something I forgot to do the first time. I tried to imagine what I could do next. I’d asked my questions and learned something about Guy Beckett and his sad story of domestic disquietude. I guessed that, in the best case, he’d just run away from home. That seemed unlikely, but at least it was a possibility.
I’ll tell you, though, the more likely angle, the meth-trade angle, wasn’t something I was going to touch with a fifty-foot barbed pole. Hell, a pole of any kind. This isn’t some nice, clean drug business with imported suits and orderly accounts like they show on TV. These people were animals; you come between them and their fix or their dollars, they’ll kill you dead and lick your bones clean.
I didn’t want my bones licked clean. I wanted more coffee. I found a place a few miles up the road and drank a hot cup and made idle chat with a former longwall operator who wanted the government to keep out of his Medicare. I made a couple of polite attempts to explain the situation, but he was impenetrable. After a while, I gave it up and paid for his coffee. I told him I hoped the government kept out of it, but he just sighed and shook his head. Like Susan said, everybody’s got a problem.
A half hour later, the rain finally slowed down, till it was nothing more than a light mist, and I got on the bike and rolled east on IL-13 toward 148. Crainville was along the way, but Dwayne Mays’s house would still be sealed off, most likely, so I decided to leave that for another day. Or never. Honestly, my real plan was to stall for time and hope the cops worked the whole thing out. Either Beckett would show up dead, or he’d turn himself in for the Mays murder, or he’d get caught. Less likely, he’d stumble home with a hangover and a crotch full of rot and a paternity suit. However it happened, I’d collect what had been promised me and that would be the end of it.
I thought it over for the next mile or so. I rehearsed it a couple times in my mind, the way you do when you’re satisfied with yourself for outwitting the world. I passed the lake and its troubled waters. Some fool was out in a fishing boat, and the boat had gotten swamped and filled nearly to the gunnel, and another boat was on its way out to save the day. Probably he’d get swamped, too, and then they’d have to send another one. Life was like that sometimes. The only thing worse than the accident was the rescue. I didn’t want that to be true of this thing I’d gotten involved in. I wanted what was best for my daughter and the family I was trying to build, sure, but there was a line I wouldn’t cross—and places even my father’s name wouldn’t get me out of. I was still philosophizing about that, and life, and Guy Beckett, when my rearview mirrors winked red and blue at me, and I glanced back to find myself being pursued by a sheriff’s department prowler.
Well, I wasn’t speeding. It was too wet for that, and I’m always cautious on my bike. Illinois is one of these states that honors your right to severe brain damage in the name of personal liberty. But despite the lack of a helmet law, I always wear one, and I’m never one of these dummies you see riding in shorts and sandals or whatever other nonsense they dream up on their way to third-degree burns. A motorcycle is lethal in all kinds of ways, but weather and other motorists are the real risk. So I wasn’t speeding. Maybe my brake light was out. I’m usually good at my pre-ride checks, but you never knew when something was going to go wrong and fuck you over. I pulled off 13 and onto the wide neck of Greenbriar Road where there’s nothing but a dark cut of forestland and some empty fields. I switched off the bike, put down the stand, pulled off my helmet, and sat there.
Cops usually make you wait while they call in the stop, but this one kicked open his door and marched directly over. He was a tiny thing, five foot six at most, with a round face and a gut that would swallow punches like jellybeans. He was wearing the tan-and-brown and widescreen shades, despite the lack of sunshine, but everything was too small on him. His uniform hugged him like a second skin and revealed far too much of his manly side for my liking, like it’d been cut down to size to fit him but cut down too far. His pale wrists hung out of his sleeves a good two inches, and the temples of his sunglasses spread almost flat across the expanse of his face.
“Taillight?” I said.
For a moment he looked confused, or startled, that I’d spoken. Then he gathered himself again and shook his head and said, “You Slim?”
I said that I was Slim just as it dawned on me that he shouldn’t know that yet.
It was too late. He said, “Okay. Good. This is for you, you sonofabitch.”
“Wait,” I said, but he wasn’t paid to wait, I guess. His hand swept up and hit me upside the head with something hard. A baton, maybe, or a bank safe. I dropped sideways off the bike and hit the street and rolled down the hill and right into a ditch, where I belonged.