5

I remember waking up beside her.  She was sitting up staring at me.  I’m a little cloudy about most everything else.

I know we had tequila and Tater Tots along with the rest of her beer.  And I recall she yanked her blouse wide open without bothering with the buttons.  The next thing I knew I was waking up to some kind of predawn warbler and she was leaning against the headboard wide awake.

“Hey,” I said.

I must have looked like I was going to apologize for ungentlemanly behavior or something because she told me preemptively, “Shut the fuck up.”

I gave her a t-shirt to wear beneath her jacket since her blouse was buttonless and wrecked.  She ate a cold egg roll for breakfast, complained about my coffee, shucked an ear of sweet corn for sport.  When her car wouldn’t start, she kicked it once, viciously in the door panel.  She shouted out a good morning to Everett as she slipped in my Crown Vic. 

My phone rang before I could back from the driveway, a call from the station house.

“Yeah,” I said and listened to the sheriff at some length.  I tossed my phone on the dash and rolled back into the street.  “Damned if Ronnie didn’t find the car.”

I guess technically Ronnie gets credit for finding the Mexican as well, or credit anyway for locating the guy who was plundering that Roadmaster until he discovered it had a Mexican in it.  It took us a while to locate the place.  The sheriff had given me directions, and the sheriff was notoriously bad with a map. 

Finally, we rolled up on Ronnie’s 4x4 on a backwoods gravel road.  He was parked behind a Dodge half ton, its bed piled high with junk.  We climbed out and looked around, didn’t see a soul, so I reached back in and hit the siren once.

“Hey!”  It was Ronnie down in a gully.  The road fell off to a branch, and he and a fellow who turned out to be one of those Afton Pughs were down there next to that massive Buick mucking up the scene.

“Don’t touch shit,” Kate called to them, glaring from the roadside.

“That’s her,” Ronnie told that Afton Pugh who shaded his eyes for a better look.

I had to guess word had gotten around about the fight over at The Cue Ball and the girl from out of town who’d fired a shot to break it up. 

“Come on out,” I told them.

“There’s a Mexican down here,” Ronnie said.

“Fucker’s dead,” that Pugh informed us and shook his head and spat, as if death were just another brand of Mexican shiftlessness.

“Leave him and come on up.”  They seemed to hear me this time and climbed out of that gully holding onto vines.

“You know A.W. don’t you?” Ronnie asked me.

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

A.W. was busy leering at Kate by then.  “Heard about you,” he told her and grinned, showed her all fourteen of his teeth. 

“He found it,” Ronnie said.  “A.W.’s Rollie’s daddy.”

“With the scar?”

Ronnie nodded.  “A.W. called Rollie.  Rollie called me. Mexican shook him up a little.”

“What are you doing out here?” I asked that Pugh. 

“Picking up shit.”  He pointed at his truck.  “Haul it to Coyners.  They pay decent for scrap.”

People around here don’t go to the landfill because they charge a buck or two for everything you dump.  They’d rather pitch their trash into a ditch or down a gully, and not just garbage but washer dryers, bedroom suites, and TV sets.  The road we were on was a scrap picker’s dream.  No houses back on our end, and it dead-ended in a thicket.  I could see a water heater, a busted propane tank, and what looked like a tractor axle in the back of that Pugh’s truck.

“All that from here?” I asked him.

“Pretty much.”

“Pull anything out of the car?” Kate said. 

He shook his head.  “Mexican put me off.”

We all heard the engine about the same time, and then a cherry red tow truck came rolling into view.  There was so much paper and pouch chew and note pads and stray tools piled on the dash that I could barely make out the driver in behind it all.  A little greasy fellow, as it turned out, under a greasy camo cap.

He lurched to a stop and climbed out to join us.  Wiped his nasty hands on a rag.

“Who called you?” I asked him.

“Rollie.” He ran his greasy finger from his temple to his chin to let me know he was talking about the Rollie with the scar. 

“Sit tight for a minute,” I told that boy.  Then me and Kate left the roadside and went skidding down the slope.

We let the back tailgate stop us.  That wagon was nosed into the scrub, almost standing on its grill.  The back window was down or busted out.  A suitcase had gotten cracked open, and men’s clothes were dumped and scattered all over the place.

“You open anything?” I shouted up the hillside.  Ronnie figured that was for the Pugh and turned to look at him.

“Goddamn Mexican in there,” he told me, which I had to think meant “No.” 

The Mexican was up against the front seat back, curled up on his side like he was asleep.  Before I could wonder what we ought to do, Kate was over the tailgate and in. She worked her way to the body.

“No holes that I can see. No blood.”

She pulled something out of that fellow’s front pocket and tossed it back my way.  It was a flattened pack of Iroquois cigarettes.

She crawled over the seat back and lodged herself against the windshield to pick through the stuff up front.  “Key’s in it.  Road atlas.  Whopper box.  Shoulder bag.”

She brought that last one with her and handed it to me before she climbed out over the tailgate.  It had a couple of books in it, a steno pad and pens, a tin of Altoids, and an envelope full of business cards from a watering hole on Southern Avenue in Watchung.

I looked up and found the wrecker driver on the edge of the road.  “Think you can haul it out?”

“Kind of a beast,” he told me back.  “Let me see who else is around.”

He went for his radio as we climbed back up through the vines.  Ronnie pointed out handholds to us while that Pugh provided assistance by not shooting more spit on our route than he’d already shot.

He gloated at me and Kate both once we had gained the roadway.  You’d have thought he’d just won the Powerball or maybe predicted the rapture.  “Didn’t I tell you that Mexican was dead?”

The second truck showed up in a quarter hour, some kind of rollback.  This guy was tidy and sullen and wiry.  His coveralls were spotless.  His cap wasn’t even sweat stained. The name embroidered on his pocket flap was Chip.

“Let’s just get it up here so we can have a look.  Then we’ll figure out where to take it,” I told them.

Greasy wrecker boy said back, “All right.” The tidy guy just nodded, and he was the one who slipped down into the gully with the cables and hooks.  They hauled that Buick up by the chassis, and even with two trucks it was a strain.  The winches groaned and bucked.  The trucks slipped some on the gravel, but the wagon finally cleared the gully, dead Mexican and all.

Kate just walked around it at first while Chip unhooked the cables.

“The county’ll pay you,” I told him.  “Give Ronnie your particulars.”

He pointed at the greasy wrecker boy. “I’ll get it from him,” he said.

Then he was off and away, and greasy wrecker boy stayed on. 

“Call the EMTs,” I said to Ronnie before joining Kate at the station wagon.

“Got a sheet or a tarp or something?” she asked me.

It turned out that Pugh had a threadbare piece of carpet in his truck.  He only gave it to us because he didn’t know a Mexican would sprawl on it in the road and just be dead.

He was a puny thing.  Twenty to thirty, I guessed. We laid him face up, and Kate went through his pockets. She found a scrap of paper.  It looked like a shopping list in Spanish.  Twenty-seven dollars in folding money and a couple of quarters and dimes.  A solitary key to what looked like a padlock as best as either of us could tell.

We opened his shirt.  No blood.  No marks.  Two amateur tattoos.  Some sort of flower and an armadillo that looked like a sponge with a snout.

Kate pointed out the speckled hemorrhaging up around his eyes.

“No bruising,” she told me as she showed me his neck.  “Smothered, I’m guessing.”

“Our lookout?”

She nodded.  “Could be.  Loose end.”

“Fit the pattern?”  I was getting the camera out of the Crown Vic by then.

Kate shook her head.  “They probably just stopped giving a shit about us. Doing whatever they like.”

“If I’d been killing people for going on thirty years, I don’t guess I’d give a shit about us either.”

I was taking pictures of the body and the Buick both when a rattlesnake made the mistake of venturing into the road, up near the dead end but not so far that Ronnie didn’t see it.  He let out a whoop that brought that Pugh and the wrecker boy to alert, and they all three went charging over to plague and torment the thing.  From the fuss they raised you would have thought they’d found the baby Jesus.

“Now I see why you haven’t unpacked,” was all Kate bothered to say.

The EMTs rolled up.  Fido and some new boy I didn’t know.  There was turnover among the techs, due to Afton Mountain chiefly.  The interstate ran up over the top, and fog settled on it routinely, banks of the stuff so thick you couldn’t see a stinking thing—particularly at seventy miles an hour.  People didn’t just die up there.  They got reduced to parts and gravy, and even the most callous local sorts couldn’t tolerate that forever.  Except for Fido, of course.  Nothing touched him.  He would have hunted kittens if there’d been a season for it.

“Look,” Ronnie yelled at Fido as soon as he’d rolled out of the truck.  The dead Mexican didn’t interest Fido, but a rattler was something else. 

They killed it, of course, made out like it was some sort of hillbilly duty to kill a viper minding its business in the middle of nowhere much.  Fido did most of the damage, crushed that snake’s head with a rock.  They decided the Afton Pugh could have the rattle.  He chopped it off with his pocket knife and came over to show it to Kate in a transparent attempt to disgust and appall her.  She took him up on his offer to let her hold it and threw it into the woods.

“Shit, lady!” he said, all wounded.

“Shit, pinhead,” she told him back.

Kate gave over the Mexican to Fido and the new boy.

“Richmond?” Fido asked her.

She nodded.

They loaded him in and met the sheriff as they were pulling out. He climbed from his cruiser and looked around.  “Where the hell is this?”

Then he reached back in and grabbed his hat, which he was still forlorn about.  He’d been working on the damage suffered over at The Cue Ball and had succeeded at making the stomped part look shabbier and worse.

He closed on the Buick and peered in through the side glass.  “Ronnie said there was a Mexican.”

We nodded.

“Killed in the crash?” he asked.

I shook my head, and the sheriff exhaled, inconvenienced again. “Goddamn crime spree,” he told us.  “People won’t like this. I got a call from that boy on channel nine.”

He was talking to me now.  He knew I knew he detested few people like that boy on channel nine.  Always taping the sheriff with his mouth hanging open and in profile with his paunch.

“He don’t use half of what I say, and he always makes me look fat.”

“Argyle,” Kate told him and shook her head.  The sheriff considered his vest.

***

We ended up having that wrecker boy haul the Buick to the quarry.  He dropped it right beside the trebuchet.  Then I called in to Richmond again to remind them about the tech I’d requested, but it was like talking to customer service in Dublin or Bangalore.

We made a circle on the county map in my gazetteer, and Kate and I visited every store and gas mart it enclosed.  We stopped at three Burger Kings and showed the employees a picture of Barry Ward.  Nobody remembered him buying a Whopper, but they all said, “He looks dead.”

We showed a few of them the Mexican too as long as they were handy and got variations on “How in the hell am I supposed to tell them people apart?”

We visited the rest stops either side of the mountain and talked to the attendants there.  One of them rattled on about the piece of shit Buick his wife’s sister’s husband used to own.  Another one asked us—“hypothetically now”—what would happen to a fellow if he had a judgement against him and he was supposed to pay a boy he damn well didn’t want to pay, and then he up and didn’t pay him?

We ended up at a barbecue place over near Stuart’s Draft, sat outside in the shade of a sycamore tree at a picnic table.  My chopped plate was chiefly gristle.  Kate just drank iced tea and smoked. 

“We’re dead in the water.”

She nodded.

“Either he’s too smart or we’re too dumb?”

“He’s just been lucky, and I’m guessing nobody knows him.  So no cop has stumbled on him, and there’s nobody to turn him in.”

“He could just keep going from now on.”

“Happens.”

I thought it might be different with Kate on the case, proper FBI and all.  I was guessing they’d found a way around dead enders.  I’d been on more than a few myself.  I’ve mostly worked county P.D. throughout the South, and I’ve seen chiefly hothead killings but stuff like our guy in the tree sometimes.  Just straight up who-the-hell-did-this-and-whys.  You ask your questions, you gather your evidence, you round up all your possibles, but it’s like you’re almost doomed to end up where you started out.

“I found a guy in a culvert once, shot in the back of the head.”

Kate was chewing her ice and didn’t appear to be listening.

“Paducah, Kentucky.  Nobody had ever laid eyes on him before.  It took us a couple of months just to identify him.  Some car dealer from Steubenville.  The gun turned up in Miami.  Never even had a suspect, couldn’t ask anybody shit.”

“Fucking hypnotic.”  Kate flicked her butt away.

My phone rang.  It was Ronnie on the line.  “Brewster called.  Wants to buy your Buick.  Says he don’t care that the fuel pump’s no good.”

I was about to light into Ronnie, remind him that Buick was a crime scene and belonged to our dead guy anyway, which meant it wasn’t ours to sell.  But then I stopped for a second and thought to myself, “The fuel pump’s no good?”

“Shit howdy,” was all Kate could manage at the sight of Brewster’s quarry office. She’d opened the door too fast and created a draft that had sucked out a cloud of invoices, so Brewster and Alice were having a tandem conniption inside.

Brewster came out and shoveled invoices over the threshold with his foot, and then he shut the door and informed Kate, “Little behind on our filing.”

He led us through the quarry uproar and over toward the trebuchet.  He was telling us stuff all along, so I just kept saying, “Yeah,” until we rounded that last rocky hummock into the trebuchet alcove where I saw the Roadmaster wagon with its doors open and its hood flung up.

“I’ll give you three,” Brewster told me.  “Ain’t worth it.”

“Not mine to sell.”

“All right.  Thirty-five hundred.”

“I’m not dickering.  I can’t sell it.”

“Thirty-seven fifty, and that’s a far sight more than it’s worth.”

“Doesn’t belong to me.”

“Yours?” Brewster had turned to talk to Kate.

She shook her head.  “Dead guy.  His wife might want it back.”

“All right, four.  But that’s it.”

“We’ll pass it along,” I said.  “Tell me about the fuel pump.”

“Not much to tell.”  Brewster opened the driver’s door and reached in to turn the key.  We could hear the engine grinding, but it didn’t seem tempted to catch.

“Got spark,” Brewster told us as we moved with him to the grill. 

I don’t know shit about cars, but I was obliged as a man to act mechanical, and when Brewster snatched off a plug wire as a visual aid, I nodded about like an Afton Pugh.

“You can even hear the damn thing.  Turn the key, sugar.”

I took a half step back because I couldn’t be sure what sugar might get up to.  She appeared to sort through her options, some of them unsavory, before she stepped around and simply turned the key.

I followed Brewster around to the passenger side and bent low with him to listen. “Hear it?” We were listening near the rear wheel well. 

“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t hear a thing.

“Bearing’s going.  Got to drop the tank.  Ain’t no easy thing to get at.”  Then he shouted at sugar, “All right!” 

“It got pushed into a gully.  Could that have busted the pump?”

Kate came back around to join us in time to hear Brewster tell me, “Naw.  That bearing’s been coming on for a while.  Car don’t look wrecked or nothing.”

“Vines caught it,” I told him.

“Bearings go out.  That’s just what they do.”

“So say I’m driving along.  What happens?”

“You get it going, it stays going.  Even now it might fire up.  But you’re bound to end up stuck somewhere.  She’s only going to work when she wants to.”

“So if I shut it off it might not start again?”

Brewster nodded.  “Forty-two fifty, and that’s the best I’m going to do.”

Me and Kate stayed on in the quarry alcove, with its relative peace, while Brewster went back to his sea of invoices and his crabby secretary.  He turned around and yelled something before he left us altogether.

“Yeah,” I shouted and then asked Kate, “Did you make that out?”

“Probably forty-three.”

I climbed in the Buick and turned the key.  This time it fired up and ran.  I switched it off and tried again.  It just ground and wouldn’t catch.

“So he stops somewhere and turns it off.”  Kate perched on a rail of the trebuchet.  “It won’t start back up, and somebody comes along to give him a . . . lift?”

“To where?” I asked her.

“A garage?”

“On Sunday?  Around here?”  I shook my head and thought for a second.  “But he could sure as shit get a tow.”

I called Ronnie and got directions to the greasy tow boy’s shop.  It was way the hell out near Nellysford and close enough to the ski resort that the junky clutter of the place must have offended second-homers.  They had rusty cars scattered everywhere in various states of disassembly.  Engine blocks and fender scraps, tires piled up, and an entire heap of mufflers and exhaust pipes.  There were plenty of roadworthy vehicles parked and awaiting work as well.  The place was just down the road from a brand new brewery and a shopping plaza, and it looked like tow boy and his boss had been pressed to put up a fence. 

They’d made it out of pallets and old barn tin, and it wasn’t in the vicinity of plumb, just a ramshackle thing that patrons could see from the patio of the brewery and be reminded by the sight of it of all the crap it hid.

Greasy tow boy went by Toad.  He said his given name was Rodney but hadn’t anybody called him that, he told us, since back before he ate that frog.  He worked for a guy who came out and joined us in the cluttered lot, emerged blinking from the repair bay like he’d not seen sunlight in a while. 

If anything, he was greasier even than greasy tow boy, more deeply iridescent and slimy, and he smelled like an oilfield roughneck.  He turned out to be a Mackie they called Hoss. 

So me and Kate and Toad and Hoss had a chat together about towing. 

“Say I’m broken down and call triple-A.  Who are they going to send?” I asked them.

“Where are you?” Just like greasy tow boy earlier in the day, Hoss kept wiping his hands, but they wouldn’t come clean.

“Interstate.”

“Where?”

“Afton.”

“On top? Going up? Coming down?”

“That matters?”

Hoss and Toad had a jolly tradesman’s laugh between them before Toad finally deigned to tell us, “Oh hell yeah.”

“We ain’t a proper Triple-A place, but we’ll go pluck em if we poach the call.”  Hoss nodded and kept wiping as Toad spoke.  “You sitting out there on the shoulder.  You don’t care.”

“So the calls go out over the scanner?” I asked them. 

Hoss nodded.

“It’s whoever can get there first?” Kate said.

Hoss told her, “Yeah. About the way we do it.”

“Is there some kind of record of who picked up what?”  I asked them.

“We know what we snatched,” Toad said.  “No big list I know of.”

“How do I find out who towed what?”

“Pick up the phone,” Toad told me.

“How many tow trucks in the county, you figure?”

Hoss and Toad paused to calculate.  Hoss finally told us, “Lots.”

“You know most of the guys around here?” I asked them.

They shrugged like they couldn’t decide between them how many most would be.

“Like that guy this morning,” Kate said.  “You know him?”

“Seen him around,” Toad told us.  “Up on the highway in the last big snow.  It was me and him and everybody else hauling cars out of there.”

“This ain’t all about that Mexican is it?” Hoss wanted to know.  “Them people get up to all kinds of shit.”

Kate didn’t say anything for a while once we were back on the road, not even something sharp and derogatory.  She just smoked a cigarette and then another, so I was the one to offer up, “At least we’re getting somewhere.”

“If you say so.”

“He probably broke down.  He probably got towed.  Figure out who hauled him and we’re that much closer to where he ended up.  Nothing wrong with that.”

“When I was driving around the country,” Kate told me, “stopping at all his spots, everybody I talked to thought they were getting somewhere too.”

I pulled in beside her coupe in my groove.

“You might need a fuel pump yourself.”

But she got in and turned the key, and it started straightaway. When she didn’t climb back out, I leaned on her door and talked to her through her window.

“You don’t want supper or anything?”

She shook her head and dropped her shifter into reverse.  It was step back and let her go or get run over. 

I got company watching her head up the road and out of my groove altogether.  Me and Everett watched Kate’s taillights pulse as she braked up at the bend. 

Everett jabbed me with his elbow and said to me, “Sweet girl.”