27

EARLY WAS SITTING in the Rolls. Jack had walked Sam off down the hill to sweet-talk her. Early was thinking about Fontaine and the cops, thinking about Bobby Adair in that blond wig and that little black skirt, thinking about that fat pig calling him a nigger, thinking about the fat pig’s daughter, which, give it up, Early, you were, too, looking at her like he said—checking out Bobby in his blond doo-dahs, but checking out the little brunette as well. Not so much for her own sake, because he preferred dark meat anytime, but he was looking at her and thinking, man, you need to get yourself a little woman. A strong little well-put-together woman like that, looks like she could ride ride ride.

Then Sam stepped up to the car. “Jack’ll be here in a minute, he had to take a whiz.” Early hadn’t heard her coming, he almost jumped out of his skin, and the next thing he knew, that Mercedes flashed by like a silver bullet.

Sam jumped in the passenger side, shotgun, yelled, “Punch it!” So what was he going to do? Holler, “Hey, Jack, get on back up here to the car, there goes the con girl Mickey?” Mickey’d be in Memphis eating herself a plate of barbecue by the time Jack dragged his slow fat butt up.

So Early did what any reasonable man would do. He punched it.

*

Sam would say one thing for Mickey Steele. The woman could drive.

Early’d slid right up behind her silver Mercedes, she’d signaled him on by. “Pull even with her,” Sam’d said to Early. He’d looked at Sam like she was nuts, you couldn’t see a thing, two lanes of curving mountain road. Thick pine forests marched up on the mountains on one side, dropping sharply to the deep blue lake on the other. “Nine chances out of ten,” Sam assured him, “nobody’s coming the other way. Eight out of ten she’s not going to push us off the shoulder.”

“We live through this,” he said, “you get to drive for Jack.” Then he pulled even with the Mercedes.

“Now you nudge her over into the wall,” Sam said. They were on the lakeside, Mickey hugging the hill.

“I’m barely holding this mother in the road as it is!”

“Do it!”

Early pulled the brown Rolls closer to the big silver car. There was only an inch or two between them, and the road was treacherous. Sam looked over at Mickey’s white knuckles gripping the wheel. Mickey turned and looked at Sam, wide-eyed. Sam could see the small flicker of recognition. Then Mickey lifted her left hand from the wheel and saluted Sam with her middle finger.

Sam laughed. “She’s a pistol, all right.”

Then Mickey stomped it and pulled ahead, straddling the centerline, weaving back and forth so they couldn’t pull up on her. She was slamming into the curves, fishtailing, sliding, but hardly flashing her brake lights at all.

“We’re all going to die,” said Early. “Gonna be one big roadkill stew.”

Then SLOW! STOP AHEAD! screamed a big yellow sign.

“How far is it?” Sam was leaning over, practically in his lap.

“I can’t see! All I can see is her rear end!”

The road rose again, then twisted down the mountain in a series of S-curves. Up ahead was a little clearing, and there was the stop sign, a BIG ONE, and there was the crossroads, and there was a loaded lumber truck, the long pine timbers bending and bouncing off the back like batons, the truck with the right of way, hauling on through, and there was Mickey, tapping her brakes, one, two, three.

“We’ve got her!” Sam clenched her fist. “She has to stop.”

Of course she did, except, right up on the muzzle of that huge beast of a truck, Mickey stomped the gas, and the Mercedes flew right past its teeth. The trucker didn’t even brake. It was that fast. He just kept going. Sam could see his lips moving. “I bet he wet his pants,” she said to Early, as they sat there, fully stopped, and the tall truck passed like a freight train before them. They couldn’t see to the other side. But one thing was sure. Mickey wasn’t going to be waiting for them.

*

“I’ll go in with you,” Archie’s partner said.

“Nawh,” said Archie. I’ll do it by myself.”

“Now, Archie, I don’t think so.” T.J. stepped out of their blue-and-white patrol car in front of the little wood-frame house where Cynthia lived on Exchange. “You know Cynthia won’t talk to you. And you really ought not to be with her by yourself.”

Archie wheeled. “What the hell does that mean?”

But before T.J. had to answer, Cynthia and Loydell stepped out on Loydell’s front porch next door, right up to the edge of the porch that was bordered with red geraniums.

“Y’all came to tell me something about Olive, I guess,” said Loydell. “I appreciate your doing that, Archie, I sure do. Let me sit down here in the swing before you say it.” And she plopped her skinny body down. Cynthia stood, her arms crossed, her mouth tight.

She’d been telling Loydell about Bobby coming into Tate’s and then how they’d all been out at Greenwood Cemetery, herself and Lateesha shooed away by Early after he and Fontaine got real serious and down in the mouth about that old Sunliner of Bobby’s they’d found. Early gave her and Lateesha each 10 bucks, told them to take a hike over to Central, they were way out by the track, but they could call a cab to get back home.

Well, of course, all they did was sneak around the back way and hunker down in some bushes. They saw the whole thing. Fontaine digging that old car up with the backhoe, then pulling it out with the tractor. The carrying on about what was in the trunk. Bobby losing it. Early and Fontaine dragging him off somewhere. Sam staying with Olive.

Loydell had known in her bones, of course, that Olive was dead. So it hadn’t been such a shock as it might have been, though she hated the indignity of her friend being treated like that, like a sack of cow manure or something.

Now she had to muster all the strength she had not to let on to Archie that she already knew about Olive. Because then there’d be that part about Bobby. And she knew Cynthia had never stopped loving Bobby, and she cared about him herself, for that matter, Olive’s only grandson.

Archie zipped through the news of Olive’s death like he was delivering a weather forecast, might be showers tomorrow, mess up that picnic you’d planned, and then he got to what he really wanted to say. Couldn’t wait. In fact, he was rubbing his fat hands together in front of his gut, his legs spread wide in that way that Loydell had always found particularly offensive.

“Actually,” said Archie, “what we come to warn you both about is that Bobby Adair got out of Cummins yesterday, and we’ve already been out to Olive’s place and found a bunch of his stuff and lifted some of his prints, and so we’ve got an APB out for his arrest, parole violation at the very least, but I think we’ve probably got enough to hold him for Olive’s murder.”

Loydell flew up out of the swing so fast it banged against the side of her house. “What in the hell are you talking about, Archie Blackshears? Bobby Adair loved his grandma to death.”

Archie grinned. “Well, I wouldn’t go around saying that if I were you, ma’am. You know, it just goes to show you never know, don’t it? I just thought you ladies”—he tipped his hat—“Miss Loydell, Cynthia, honey, would want to be apprised that Bobby’s on the prowl around here somewheres. Keep my doors and windows locked if I were you.”

Then he nodded at Loydell and his daughter. Cynthia didn’t say a word, but she made a low sound in her throat so that if she’d been a dog, Loydell thought, you’d throw a muzzle on her fast.

*

There was the road straight ahead. There was a turnoff to the right and another one to the left. There was no sign of the silver Mercedes in any direction.

“Which way, boss lady?” Early asked.

One out of three were not great odds. Which way would Mickey have headed? The sun was a red ball low in the sky behind them, just about to dip below the horizon. “Right,” said Sam. “Turn right.” Her general operating procedure in life had been when in doubt, head south, and do it full out. In any case, there was no point in pussyfooting, thinking they might turn back, have another go at her.

This road was another curvy two-lane blacktop just like the one they’d been on, except it was lined with pine forests belonging to Weyerhauser. Little signs said the trees had been replanted in 1982 and 1983.

“There! Turn there!” Sam pointed at a gravel road that headed off into the woods. A dirt cloud was still rising.

“It’s probably another logging truck,” said Early. But he turned. Then he said, “Did you see that sign?”

“About the trees?”

“No. Jameson’s Crystals, two miles ahead.”

Sam drummed on the dash with anticipation. Frustration. Impatience. She hated the thought they were flying in what could be a dead-end direction, while back on a road somewhere else, a road they didn’t take, Mickey was laughing her ass off, the wind blowing her red hair as she made her getaway.

Reporting could be like that, when you were on a hot story, and you decided, Okay, that’s the lead I’ll follow. That one, plucked from a multitude. And if it turned up dry, it might be too late to go back. Your other sources could have clammed up. They could have walked. They could be dead.

They passed a mobile home. A satellite dish. A little girl in a pink dress playing out in what passed for a yard. Hey, little girl, did you see a silver Mercedes roaring past? Unreliable witness. No time to ask. The cloud of dust still billowed before them, floating just above the road like red-brown smoke. Somebody was minutes ahead. Too bad, Sam flashed, they didn’t have Pearl.

And, okay, if this turned out to be a dead end, Doc and Speed were probably still back at the house. But she wanted them all. And Mickey had been right there, right in her grasp. Once again she could see Mickey raising her left hand. Flipping her off. Sam wanted her bad.

The road signs were coming fast and furious now, warning them that this was their one big chance, not to be missed, to buy crystals at Jameson’s. Or you could buy a permit and dig for your own.

“Why the hell else would you come out here?” Early asked.

They passed another mobile home. A bunch of black-and-white chickens clucking. One of them marched right out into the road. It missed being free-range fricassee by a tail feather as Early swerved.

Then there was a little frame shack. This had to be the world-famous Jameson’s. It looked like a hot dog stand that somebody had hauled out in the woods, except that it was covered with shelves that were littered with quartz crystals. It was as if the little shop had turned itself inside out. But there was no Mercedes. No sign of life.

And then the road ended.

“What now?” Early braked to a halt.

Sam slumped. The end of the line, and they’d come a cropper. “Back around. Pack it in, I guess.”

“Go pick up Jack?”

Jesus, she’d forgotten all about him.

Early started to back around, and as he did, Sam saw that a rutted path road continued on behind the shack.

“Wait,” she caught Early’s arm and pointed. “Go there. Go back there.”

In another quarter mile the woods ended and the earth dropped off into a man-made crater a half-mile in diameter. The huge red hole in the earth looked like a strip mine. It held a couple of dump trucks, a backhoe, a grader.

And, perched right at the edge, sat a silver Mercedes.

Sam said, “Pull right up on her ass and bump her.”

Early turned and stared.

“What? I said bump her!”

Early pulled up, gave the Mercedes a good whack. The silver car jumped within inches of the precipice.

Mickey’s head spun in the driver’s seat, and then her hand came up.

“Duck! She’s going to shoot!” Early yelled.

Sam scooted down in the brown leather only a few inches. She wanted to see. “Hit her again, Early. Hit her!”

He slammed her. The Mercedes’s front was edging over, going, going, and in the last instant before it was gone, Mickey flung open the door and jumped. She landed onto solid ground, rolling and tumbling.

Sam was out of the Rolls and stomping on Mickey’s right wrist before Early got his seat belt unlatched.

“Get the hell off!” Mickey screamed.

“Drop the gun!” Sam yelled.

“What gun?”

What gun, what gun, what gun? The echo bounced back from the other side of the rock crystal crater, the big ugly gouge in the earth.

Sam looked down and saw only a fresh manicure, her own foot, a slender arm, and a pretty face. Mickey was saying, “Jesus, that was one hell of a waste of a good car.”