2

It was more of a pit than an authentic quarry.  They’d been hauling gravel out of it for probably forty years.  The old end had filled with rainwater and enough windblown gravel dust to make for a pond so silty you could almost walk across it.  The new end was a landscape of hummocks and holes with loaders all over the place.  I’d decided I’d just as well start over there, didn’t know what else to do.

The last living Truslow brother ran the business from a trailer that looked like it had been wrecked and marooned instead of towed into place and parked.  It was beat to hell and coated in dust, and when I banged on the door the whole thing shook and rattled.  I took the “Christ Lord!” I raised as a come-the-hell-on-in.

There were probably desks and cabinets and office machinery in there somewhere, but invoices had run away with the place in tissuey triplicate.  They’d half buried the furniture like some kind of paperwork flood tide, and my knock had caused a slide that Brewster Truslow was steamed about. 

“Look what you done,” he told me like things had all been all tidy before.

A phone was ringing somewhere, and Brewster’s right-hand girl was looking for it. Her name was Alice, and she’d worked for Brewster ever since her husband died.  Brewster had parked a D-9 on him and had been too drunk to know it.  Alice had opted for a career instead of a criminal complaint.    

“Answer the damn thing,” Brewster snapped at her.  Rarely did those two pass a civil word between them.

Alice somehow laid hands on a stapler.  She wheeled around and fired it at Brewster.  The sheriff could have stood for some throwing lessons from her.  It bounced off Brewster’s shoulder and plunged into paperwork. 

Me and Brewster exited the trailer into the uproar of the quarry, mostly just to get away from Alice. Brewster remained a hell of a specimen, though he was probably pushing eighty.  It must have been a Truslow thing because his brothers were built the same way. Rangy and thick, what people used to call husky.  Truslows didn’t wither with age, didn’t shrink and grow infirm.  They all just quit one day and toppled over. 

Brewster’s brothers had gone that way—Arnold in a hay field and Junior at the Kroger.  I guessed Brewster would pitch into his invoices and just vanish some afternoon.

He talked to me as we walked, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.  I followed Brewster halfway across the quarry, dodging trucks and huge Case loaders, until we rounded a heap of rock and came into a peaceful alcove where most of the gravel had already been dug out.  The place was shaped like a Roman amphitheater on a post-industrial scale.  The dozers and trucks and old loaders parked in it were fairly dwarfed by the setting. 

“What the hell is it now?” Brewster asked me. 

I knew what he was thinking.  We didn’t usually come around unless one of the quarry boys had done some serious demolition.  They spent all day digging holes and busting up rock and were gifted at making big stuff smaller with violent efficiency.  I’d last driven out to talk to Brewster about a Mullens on his crew who’d cut his brother-in-law’s Camaro in half with a cement saw.  His brother-in-law had been in the backseat with a woman at the time, a woman who was not that Mullens’s sister.

“It ain’t like I’m made of bail money.”

I hadn’t decided how much I’d tell him, but “Have you seen a guy in madras pants with a yarmulke spiked to his head?” didn’t strike me as the way to open up.  I was just figuring how to let Brewster know this wasn’t going to be about bail when I spied the damn thing across the way beside a Peterbilt tandem with a flat.

“What’s that?” I asked Brewster and pointed.

“Where?”

“The wooden thing.”

“Shit, man, that’s an honest to God trebuchet.”

“A what?”

“You know, for throwing shit.”

“A catapult?”

“Naw.  Catapults is for pussies.  This damn thing flat flings stuff.”

I was a little too stunned there for a moment to know just what to say.  I’d been living in a world where Ronnie was reliably wrong about everything, and here he was sort of right about something at last. 

“Come on,” Brewster said and led the way.

“What did you call it?”

“A trebuchet.”

“Yours?”

Brewster shook his head and jabbed his thumb nowhere much.  “Some boys built it.”

“What boys?”

“Jimmy.  J.W., Hank.  You know.”

I didn’t know.  “Why?”

“One of them’s got a girl in middle school, studying knights and shit.  Needed something for class.”

I could smell it wasn’t authentic from probably fifty yards away.  The stink of creosote came wafting at me.  It was made entirely from phone poles and back hollow ingenuity.  I was sure I’d never seen anything quite like it.

“Kind of got out of hand,” Brewster told me.

Before then, I’d never heard of a trebuchet, and I had to circle it around and study it to try to figure out how it worked.  A catapult’s a simple thing.  A pole with a weight fixed to one end, a cup fixed to the other.  You load in a rock, cock it back, and then just let it go. This was something else entirely. It didn’t have a cup.  It had a sling on the ground that looked to be made from old tire belting with a tow rope fixed to either end.  It was hanging from a tapered phone pole that had been whittled down with a chain saw. The fat end was attached to what looked to me like a ton of concrete or two. 

“So you pull this end down?” I asked Brewster and pointed at the sling end.

That prompted an elaborate explanation in no particular order.  It started with “Yeah” and ten minutes later it ended with “You let it fly.”  The parts in between were so rife with detours and backtracks and general murkiness that I wasn’t even marginally better informed by the time Brewster shut up.

“Let’s go get Jimmy and those boys,” Brewster suggested.  “They’ll put on a show.”

“Not right yet,” I told him.  I’d noticed by then just where the thing was aiming, which was not toward the pond across the way but up into the woods. “I don’t want anybody over here just yet.  Nobody at all. You hear me?”

Then I called Ronnie to get him out to guard that trebuchet.  Once I told him what I had to, he uncorked two well shits back. I had to figure that was Ronnie’s brand of gloating.

“What the hell’s going on?” Brewster asked me.

“Can’t say yet. Nothing good.”

It wasn’t like I could call in our crack forensic squad.  We used the state police occasionally, but mostly we just figured stuff out.  You got to know who around was capable of what and how he’d probably go about it, so blood and fiber and fingerprints didn’t generally enter in.  We had suspects we’d rule out and suspects we’d rule in, and we’d just dog them and their people until somebody got arrested. 

The madras guy was different.  He didn’t appear to be one of ours, and there wasn’t a local tradition of troubling much over killing people.  You shot them or you stabbed them or you beat them with a pipe.  Sometimes you hit them with your truck and occasionally you hid the body but only if you needed to do something special before you went to jail.  Had a fishing trip planned maybe or an anniversary party, the sort of thing a murder charge was sure to muddy up.

If our madras guy had been in coveralls and stinking of Blue Ribbon, I’d have been looking hard at all of those boys working in the quarry, but this was too exotic for any of them.  They wouldn’t dress a guy to fling him.  And then there was the phone call and lady talking German.  This felt like something we might be chewing on a while. 

Ronnie showed up while I was still inspecting the trebuchet and taking pictures of it with my phone.  The thing was so big and complicated that Ronnie found himself well-shitless.  He just stood there gawking at it while Brewster told him how it worked, which I would come to find out was not remotely how it worked at all. 

Ronnie let Brewster finish before he finally said, “I bet that thing could throw a cat a mile.”

“You’ve never seen this before?” I asked him.

Ronnie shook his head.

“But you heard about it.”

Ronnie shot me his acid reflux smile.

“What did you hear?”

“Something like this was out here,” he told me.  “And they fling stuff with it sometimes.”

“What stuff?”

“Rocks,” he said.  “Into the pond.  That’s all I ever heard.”

I couldn’t see anything in the way of evidence.  I gave the sling a good once over, and there was stuff sticking to it, but I couldn’t tell what it was.  I decided the first thing I needed to know was if that trebuchet could throw a two-hundred-pound man (I was guessing) clear up into the woods.  Since a volunteer seemed unlikely, I needed some trebuchet expertise, so I put in a call to the library where I’d cultivated a colleague. Martha had been widowed a few years back.  She had a taste for Irish whiskey but enough Baptist in her to blanch at the thought of marching into the store to buy it.  That was one of her husband’s duties.  I took it up when he died.  I kept her in Black Bush in exchange for Martha finding out for me whatever I needed to know.

“There’s a book here on catapults for children,” she told me, “and a big atlas-sized thing on the middle ages with a chapter on siege machines.  But I think you want to call the university.”

“Who exactly?”

She gave me a name and a number, a professor of history in Charlottesville. I dialed him.  He talked like he was from London by way of Omaha.  He was busy, he told me with a sniff, but he had a student I might consult. 

“The lad,” the professor said, “is a fool for trebuchets.”

I helped Ronnie string the crime scene tape and then took him aside and told him not to speak to Brewster or anybody about what we’d found in the woods.

“It’s all over town,” he assured me.  “Fido probably, or that other boy.”

“Then let Brewster hear it half-assed and thirdhand like everybody else.”

Ronnie nodded.  “I got you.”

I figured I’d bought about half an hour.  That was as long as Ronnie could ever keep anything bottled up.

***

I walked back out past Brewster’s trailer and climbed into my Crown Vic, worked my way east the twenty miles toward Charlottesville and the campus.  I’d moonlighted a little as a campus cop and so knew where everything was, all the parking lots I could cut through, the alleyways I could travel.  I had a fair enough idea of where the history department was located to find it only after a couple of tries. 

My busy professor was in his office ogling a coed.

“Yes?” he said when he saw me in his doorway in a tone that suggested I could come back later to tidy up the place.

I brought out my badge. 

“Oh,” the good doctor told me.  “He’s just down . . .”

“Show me.”

He patted his coed on the hand and told her, “Deux secondes.”

She told him back, “Yeah,” and tossed her hair.  She told him back, “Whatever.”

I followed him down the corridor, into a stairwell, up a flight to another hallway.  He pointed.  “The T.A.’s office is down there.  He’s third back on the right.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mr. Lomax.”  Then he gave me a “Ciao” and a backwards wave and went back to his girl.

The teaching assistants were packed into cubicles, two crammed into each.  Just inside the door I found a girl grading papers.  She had a binder clip holding her hair up and ink on her lips from chewing her pen.  She glanced up at me in the doorway.

“Lomax?”

She pointed back deeper into the warren.  I couldn’t find him even then.  Too much clutter.  Too many undergrads.  They were sitting on the floor with their papers and complaints, come to argue for better grades.

“Lomax,” I said with some volume.  Still nothing. 

A raven-haired creature, pixieish but with lip studs and tattoos, stuck her head out of one of the cubicles and gave me the once over.  She drew back out of sight for a moment and then emerged again.  She beckoned me with a finger.  Her peeling nail polish was black.  I followed her into what proved to be Lomax’s lair.

He was a thoroughgoing nerdling, a boney little thing in corduroys and a bowling shirt.

“Lomax?”

He nodded.

I showed him my badge. “I hear you know a thing or two about trebuchets.”

He exhaled with surprise, even almost smiled a little.  I doubt Lomax had ever been sought out for a trebuchet consult. 

“Yeah,” he told me and pointed at a contraption on his desk, a half-finished miniature trebuchet that he was making freehand out of a length of shelving oak.  It was a far sight better looking than the one out at the quarry.

I cued up a photo on my dinky phone and handed the thing to Lomax.  “Ever seen one like this?”

He squinted at it.  The little dark, studded girl closed in so she could see it too.  “Dude,” he told me, “buy a camera.  Are those even real trucks?”

I nodded.  “At a quarry.  Next county over.”

He found the rest of the photos without my having to show him how.  “Phone poles?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

Lomax could only shake his head in such a way as to suggest a phone pole trebuchet crowded outright sacrilege.

“Say you had a two hundred-pound man in the sling of something like that.  About how far do you figure you could throw him?”

Lomax shrugged.  “I’d need to see it.  Run a couple of tests. I can’t just look at your shitty pictures and say.”

“Have you got a car?”

“Nope.”

“You free now?”

He shrugged again and nodded.  “She comes too,” he told me.

The little dark girl said, “Yeah.”

They talked mostly to each other along the way, or rather she’d whisper to him and he’d ask me what she’d told him she wanted to know.  Lomax might have been the trebuchet expert, but his girlfriend, Onyx, was the brains.  The stuff she pressed him to ask was all well worth the finding out.  Who’d built the trebuchet and why?  What had they been doing with it, and why would I want to know how far it would launch an actual man if somebody hadn’t already launched one?

I could tell by the way they marveled and gawked they’d not ventured west before.  Just outside Charlottesville the terrain rolls in a gentrified sort of way, but in Nelson County, where we were headed, everything is steeper and rougher.  There are a few leftover estates, eighteenth-century manor houses on hundred-acre tracts, but they soon give way to regular mountains and valleys and deep back hollows.

The clapboard houses are unpainted as often as not and not the least bit Jeffersonian.  The yards are full of cars and dogs, awash in indiscriminate crap.  Most everything missing from Charlottesville ends up out here somehow where the truth’s a little scarcer and the blood’s a lot less blue.

They’d both gone silent by the time I’d pulled into the quarry.  The place was loud and dusty on a monumental scale, and all the vehicles in it could have crushed us in an instant.  The truck and loader cabs were twenty feet above our heads, so I was left to hope those boys could see us rolling through.  I picked my way back to where the trebuchet was.  Of course, there wasn’t any sign of Ronnie.  Once I’d let the siren go, Ronnie came crawling out of a truck cab where I had to figure he’d been sleeping the whole time I was gone.

“Good Lord,” Lomax said once he’d spied the trebuchet, and that was all I needed to hear to know that hillbilly contraption could probably fling a man most anywhere it pleased. 

When Ronnie saw Onyx he fairly gawked at her to take her in like she was maybe familiar to him but the albino cave-blind version of a creature he’d seen before. 

When I reached him, the first thing Ronnie said was, “What in the world’s with her?”  Ronnie usually favored chunky girls and didn’t know what to make of Onyx—slight and gaunt with her studs and her grim tattoos.

“College kids,” I told him.  “They know all about these things.”

With that me and Ronnie watched Lomax mount the trebuchet.  He climbed enough like a monkey himself to win Ronnie’s admiration.  Lomax checked the spindle and the pivot.  He had a close look at the bindings.  Inspected the sling and the various fittings nearer to the ground.

Then he came off the contraption entirely and crossed to where we were standing so he could take the thing in whole.  That’s when he laid out for me and Ronnie how it actually worked, which started out like Brewster’s version before departing radically.

“Load to ballistic ratio, that’s what matters with these things.  How much do you think that weighs?” he asked, pointing at the hunk of concrete attached by a swivel to the fat end of the main pole.

“A ton or more,” I told him.

“So if everything moves like it ought to, you could throw some heavy shit with this.”

“How do you cock it?”

“Depends on who’s around.  Six guys maybe if you’re just manhauling, but if you’re using a winch or a truck or something—one or two guys’ll do.”

“Show me.”  I picked out a hunk of rock I suspected we could move.  Maybe not two hundred pounds precisely, but close enough for us.  “Throw that.”

“Cool,” Lomax told me and went to work laying out the sling. 

Onyx, for her part, did a little dance, a slow dervish of a thing, well across the lot and out in the monstrous open.  Ronnie watched her, chiefly in the way of creepy, salacious leering until I told him, “Hey,” a couple of times and got him to turn around.

“Funny girl,” he said and licked his lips like he was hopeful of dining on her.

“Here,” Lomax said as he gave Ronnie the end of a rope.  He pointed at my Crown Vic.  “Tie it to something that won’t come off.”

That trebuchet was rigged up with massive twin steel pulleys that Lomax had run the rope through in a block and tackle sort of way. The idea was to raise the ballast and cock the arm with the car.  Ronnie made fast the rope to the chassis in between glances at Onyx who was wheeling around with her arms out like some sort of desolate squaw. 

He was almost out from under the sedan when I started easing it forward.  The rope pulled down the skinny end of the pole until the concrete lifted into the air.

I could tell by the way he was standing, the way he was turned and ready to run, that Lomax half expected that trebuchet to splinter and collapse.  So I went extra slow until I’d pulled the skinny end of the pole all the way down to the bottom frame, as far as it would go.  Lomax locked it in place with a bolt as big around as a coffee can.  It had a rope fixed to it.  That was what you yanked when you were ready to fire. 

Ronnie, of course, went directly over and stood underneath the hunk of concrete.  He gazed up at it and told us all, “Well shit.”

“Now what?” I asked Lomax.

“Load her up,” he said, which meant moving the rock I’d chosen.  We didn’t have a pry bar among us and so just rolled it as best we could.  Me and Ronnie finally managed to pick it up and load it into the sling.  

The sling lay underneath the ballast at the fat end of the pole.  One end of it was fixed to the arm that would pivot up when the concrete dropped.  The other looped onto a hook and would come loose to the let the rock fly once the arm was swinging and the skinny end was in the air. 

That anyway was how Lomax explained it to us.  For my part, I half expected nothing much to happen at all.  I’d seen the sort of rubbish that hillbillies made in the throes of inspiration.  Canons and beer stills and cougar traps and race cars that all functioned about like hillbillies tended to work themselves.  Half-assed and part-time and to no useful end.

Lomax played out the trigger rope, the most sensible thing about the contraption.  It was long enough to let us all hide behind a loader bucket.

“Well,” he told us.  “Here goes.”

He gave the rope a yank.  Me and him and Onyx shrank a little.  Ronnie was too charmed by the chalice of blood tattooed on Onyx’s neck to pay much notice to anything but her ink. 

When nothing happened, Lomax yanked again.  “Pin’s kind of pinched,” he told me. 

He wanted me to help him, but I shook my head and said, “I need you to pull it yourself.” 

I figured if wiry Lomax in his corduroys and bowling shirt could manage to fire that trebuchet on his own then anybody who wasn’t bedridden could have managed it as well.

So he yanked and he tugged, and he slowly succeeded at moving the pin a little.  He was on the ground by then, digging in his heels, pulling with all he had.  Lomax, out of steam, gave a weary last pull as prelude to telling me, “I can’t do it.”

That’s precisely when the pin popped out and all the fun began.  The block of concrete dropped and pulled the fat end of the long pole down.  The skinny end came up and pivoted around, bringing the sling and the boulder with it.  It all happened so deliberately, it was hard to believe that rock would go anywhere, but when the arm was up maybe fifty or sixty degrees off of the ground, the sling came around and passed it.  It let go at one end, and off that boulder sailed, high and hard, into the forest.

There really wasn’t much to say about it, except maybe, “Well shit.”

Our rock arched deep into the trees, an easy eighty yards or more, and we heard it crash into the canopy as it disappeared among the leaves.

I didn’t know what else I was hearing at first.  Pop, pop.  Pop, pop, pop.  And then a bullet hit one of the loaders.  Whoever we’d tossed that rock on top of was shooting out of the woods.  I could tell it was a pistol, so the slugs had no force to speak of by the time they finally made it to the quarry.  They rattled down among the vehicles like hailstones, clattering into the dump truck beds and off the loader steel.

“Stay here.” That was strictly for Onyx and Lomax, but Ronnie chose to abide by it as well, so I headed out alone at a trot toward the tree line at the far edge of the quarry.  I kept waiting for more gunfire, but nothing ever came. 

I had to fight my way through a patch of scrub and hateful blackberry bushes before I plunged into the forest proper and had a look around.  I didn’t see anybody there at first and so pressed on ahead, up a rise and deeper into the gloom of the place.  I thought I heard something or somebody running.  It could have been a deer.  I worked my way on up the slope to where it flattened out, and I could see ahead the place we’d churned up earlier in the day.  It only looked different to me because of the boulder we’d pitched in it. 

I was nearly up to the rock we’d thrown when I found the first shell casing.  A .380.  It was a wonder the bullets had even made it to us.  That’s the sort of gun you carry if you don’t want to carry a gun.  I collected five casings altogether and put them in my pocket.  I didn’t spy a thing otherwise that seemed odd or out of place, and so I headed back the way I’d come and reached the quarry soon enough. 

Lomax was climbing on the trebuchet, studying it afresh.  I had to think he’d gained a new appreciation of jackleg siege mechanics.  It was a wonder what fellows with phone poles, augers, chainsaws, and beer could do. 

“Anybody?” Ronnie asked me once I’d gotten entirely back.

“Gone,” I told him.  “Found a few of these.”  I showed him the brass casings.  “Why don’t you take these two to Charlottesville.  I need to talk to Brewster again.”

I gave Lomax and Onyx each one of my cards.  “I owe you one.”

“Cool,” Lomax said while Onyx slid her card down into what passed with her for cleavage. 

I didn’t bother to knock on the trailer door but just waded right on in.  Brewster and Alice were fighting over the stapler they couldn’t find now that Alice had gone and thrown it.  They argued for half a minute after I’d come in out of inertia more than anything else. 

Then Brewster told me, “Hear you got a dead guy in a tree.”

I wondered if Ronnie had lasted even a solid half an hour.

“Something like that.”

“Shot out of that thing?”

“Seems so.”

“Don’t figure it’s one of my boys, do you?”

“Don’t know who it is just yet.  How do you button up this place at night?”

“Got a chain, but . . .”  Brewster was wading through invoices by then so he could join me at the door.

We went out into the quarry again, and Brewster walked me to the entrance.  His crew had all noticed me nosing around and were starting to pay some attention.  I could see them looking down at us from the cabs of their loaders and trucks.  They had a chain all right, but it had a hook instead of a lock.

“Got a watchman or something?” I asked Brewster.

He spat and told me, “Naw. Who in the hell is going to get away with a loader?”

“Boys who built that thing still here?”

Brewster nodded and unclipped a two-way radio from his belt.  He barked something at Alice that seemed mostly about those boys but a little about the stapler as well. 

“Come on,” he told me, and we returned to the trailer where Jimmy, J.W., and Hank all straggled over in time.

The trebuchet story they told me was the same one Brewster had.  J.W.’s daughter had needed a project for her history class.  She’d been hoping for help on a castle made out of flour paste, but her daddy and his buddies went a little crazy and knocked together that trebuchet.  They’d found plans on the internet for the giant English one called Warwolf.

“Siege of Stirling,” Brewster told me.  “Long goddamn time ago.”

“Teacher came out and saw it,” J.W. said.  “She sure told us a thing or two.” 

Jimmy and Hank both mumbled and nodded.

“So you just kept it to mess around with?”

“We shoot shit off sometimes, but it’s been a couple of months since I’ve even gone around there,” J. W. told me.

“And you boys?” I asked the other two.

Hank shook his head.  Jimmy said, “We always throw shit together.”

“Anybody else know how to use it?”

“Not that complicated,” Jimmy said, “but don’t nobody mess with it but us.”

I thanked them and sent them on their way.  It was after five by then, and work at the quarry was winding down.  Men were climbing out of their loaders and parking their trucks.

“I don’t want anybody around that thing,” I told Brewster, “until I can get it gone over good.”

***

I headed back toward the station and called the sheriff along the way.  All he wanted to talk about was his tire puncturing case out at the dental clinic on the branch.

“Caught her,” he told me.

“Her?”

“Had an ice pick and a root canal that didn’t take.”

I tried to run a thing or two by him, but he cut me off.  “Don’t want to hear about your mess yet.  Tomorrow maybe,” he said.  “The lid’ll probably be off by then.”

So I went on home instead.  I rent a house in what is charitably described as a valley.  It’s more a groove really where a stream runs and people sit on their porches and watch it.  I get afternoon sun for an hour and a half, but I’m rarely there to see it. 

I sat out front with my feet on the railing and sifted through the mail.  The power bill and a flyer from the hardware store.  It appeared they were overstocked with socket sets and air compressors.  I argued with myself about drinking the beer I was saving for Friday and lost.  Since the bugs weren’t bad, I stayed on the porch and sipped my beer to make it last. 

My neighbor shouted over to ask how things were.  He’d been occupied much of the past year driving his wife to her cancer treatments.  Then she’d died and left him with nothing much to do.  So he gardened and he mowed and he fixed stuff—railings and doorscreens and such—and he talked to just about anybody he could waylay for it.  The mailman.  The meter reader. The odd wayward motorist.  Me. 

I didn’t bother to tell him anything.  I knew I didn’t need to.  “This shoulder of mine’s giving me fits,” he said.  “Can’t hardly move it at all.” 

I didn’t even need to pretend to listen.  I just sat and nursed my thoughts while my neighbor Everett trained palaver on me.  I knew for a fact my part of the world was filled mostly with people like him.  Trying maybe, but harmless.  And then there were the trifling sorts who’d steal anything you left in reach to take.  There were ruthless folks around as well.  I’d run into more than a few, but the stuff they did they often seemed to get provoked to do. The madras guy was evidence of a different thing afoot.  There was somebody out there—and he probably looked like anybody else—determined to be up to no damn good and bad right down to the ground.

Everett was telling me all about a fence post hole he’d dug.  That was the culprit, he seemed to believe, for the trouble with his shoulder.  I finished my Friday beer and let that punctuate a day that had gone well sideways from a bucket of chicken and a dog.