Chapter 12
After the intrusion of the Nightriders, the afternoon was quiet. Heat broiled down out of the pure blue sky. The temperature seemed to be racing past the slow creep of the sun. Almost no one came into the shop or onto the dock to take their boats out. The lake was a glossy green plane, like old glass with just enough ripple to give it some character.
Three of us were hot and sweating in the un–air-conditioned bait shop. But Nelson was looking like he’d been steamed and rung out. His clothes were wet and sticking to his bony frame. Water ran in constant beads down his face and into his shirt. Despite that, he was standing straighter and, I thought, breathing better. Everything about him was signaling that turn he’d told me about. He was smiling when he asked if he could take us all to one of the music shows on the Branson strip.
Dad and Uncle Orson looked at me like it was my decision. I made it.
Nelson asked me to take him to his house for appropriate clothes and I found myself telling him we would only go out if he took a nap. The other two men in the room were suddenly very interested in the view out the window. They were no help to him when Nelson tried to tell me he was fine and didn’t need to be treated like an invalid.
He took a nap.
It’s funny how power can go to your head. I told the other two to dig out some clothes of their own. No jeans tonight. No one argued. Dad said he would have to go home for clothes and to make some calls he’d been putting off. Uncle Orson gave him a look, but Dad gave it right back. I didn’t worry about it. They had probably been arguing about my life. They’d get over it.
It was good to have something to do. Downtime is nice but my head was full of strings. None of them seemed to lead anywhere, but every one of them wanted pulling. I probably should have been thinking about what I had done to the Barnes kid and the possible consequences. Or maybe I should have been thinking about what I was getting myself into with Nelson. That was a knotted rat’s nest of strings it would take an army of therapists to straighten out. The truth was that none of the obvious things had my attention. As I got into the truck for the trip over to Nelson’s house it was something new bothering me. Like a splinter it had gotten under my skin without my even noticing, but once there it kept nagging.
The biker, Leech, had said something. “Sell out and get out.” It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but it bothered me later and was still working on me as I drove. These guys had been trying to get rid of Nelson. Maybe they were just not very bright or maybe they thought he knew what it was all about, but something got lost in translation. They wanted him gone. And they wanted him to sell out something before going.
Other people, the creep and his muscle from Moonshines, were trying to get him to sell out too. His own partner seemed to want a deal made. Nelson had said Middleton wanted to buy him out but seemed to be trying to fix Figorelli up with the deal. The easy thing would have been to ask Nelson. Or it should have been. I had the feeling he was holding back from me almost as much as from them. I decided to make a little detour to Moonshines before heading over to Nelson’s. It was time to have an off-the-record conversation with Mr. Middleton.
That turned out to be harder than expected. I got to Moonshines and they were busy with an afternoon crowd. Everyone working wanted to know where Johnny Middleton was too. They were just too busy to look for him.
I found him at the far end of the parking lot in the only shade available. The car was a Jaguar, but it had apparently lost a lot of its resale value. The engine was off and the windows were up. Flies were already crawling along the edges of the door and window glass. I didn’t open the door. There was no point. Heads don’t hang like that unless the person attached to it is dead.
I called it in, then I called the sheriff at home. Even without a closer look I could tell that he had been shot at least two times. There were bloody red blooms at his temple and in the center of his expensive white shirt. A quick look around the ground showed no brass casings, but that didn’t mean a lot. They could be inside the car or the killer could have used a revolver. The other option had to be considered: There would be none because the killer had taken them with him. I was betting that there would be casings in the car along with the small-caliber weapon that killed Middleton.
Television and movies have muddied a lot of water for cops. People now think that there is a magic DNA machine in every department that tells us the killer the same day. They think we can pull prints off of anything and enhance video too. They think miracles are routine and never imagine the hard work or man-hours that go into every major case. At the same time everyone knows now that Mob killers use .22s and shoot in the head. Every night of the week they get a little crime lesson that includes gems like use an untraceable weapon and drop it at the scene so you won’t be caught with it.
Most citizens would be amazed how hard it is to keep a weapon untraceable. And the thing about .22s: TV will tell you it’s so the low-power bullet goes in the skull and bounces around without coming out the other side—the truth is it’s mostly about noise. Like when you shoot someone in a car with the windows up. Even in the full light of day, in a public parking lot, a .22 or .25 fired within a running car would be swallowed up in the usual noise of traffic, wind, talk.
Deputies arrived within a few minutes. The sheriff was there in about fifteen. He brought my shield and weapon.
“I was going to wait another day,” he said. “Thought you could use some time to ponder on what had happened.”
“But?”
“But—since you were involving yourself in an investigation and dragged this into our yard—I figured it would be better to have you back on duty. And by the way, if anyone asks: I was out at your place and gave you these things an hour ago.”
“Okay, I understand,” I said, not entirely sure I did. “What about what I did to the kid?”
“I have it on good authority there won’t be any charges coming from that. And your record will show that you were overly enthusiastic in your apprehension of a suspect, rather than that you used wildly excessive force on some kids getting dirty in the woods.”
“What good authority?”
“My authority. And the DA’s. Barnes had Angela Briscoe’s crucifix in his pocket.” He let that sink in for a moment before he said, “We also followed up on your request for time and location of the speeding ticket he got the day of the killing. It was given that afternoon, less than a mile from where you found Angela.”
“Circumstantial,” I said.
“Lethal-injection circumstantial,” he said right back.
“Death penalty for a juvenile?”
“That shit’s not up to me, thank God. And speaking of penalty . . .”
“What?” I asked. He stood there looking at me like he had bad news that he enjoyed delivering. He did.
“I’ve added a mandatory additional six months to your therapy requirements. It’s written up and put in your file.”
“Sheriff, that’s—”
“Don’t say it. Not another word because I promise that you will regret it.” Sheriff Benson, an honest man, stared straight into my eyes with a look that said nothing will ever be plainer than this. “It’s bullshit. I bet that was what you were gonna say. It’s what I would have said. And it is. But it’s the kind of bullshit that is keeping you on the job—cause, God’s honest truth, girl—you have a problem. I’m on your side fighting it, but if you ain’t doing the work it will eat you alive and I will cut you loose. Do you have any more to say about it?”
“No, sir,” I answered.
“Good. This is your scene and your investigation. Get to it.”
“Sheriff?” I said before he could walk off. “There is something I wanted to ask you.”
He waited and I thought carefully.
“Major Reach suggested to you that maybe I killed the man who hurt me in Iraq. You told me how you felt but didn’t say if you believed I did it.”
“Is that what you’re asking me? Do I believe you killed that man?” I nodded, watching him watch me. He didn’t look away. Then he said, “No. I don’t believe you killed him. But I do believe you could.”
Somehow that made me feel like my own violence was a punch line to the bloody scene I had been given to investigate.
* * *
We’d gotten the car door open and I was right about the weapon. It was a .25 automatic, the kind of gun ladies were supposed to keep in their purses in bad neighborhoods. This particular example was old and the grip was only metal frame covered with tape. There was a casing partially ejected so the gun had jammed after only two shots. Two were enough. When everything obvious was photographed and then collected I released the body to the coroner’s office and told a deputy to get the car towed and secured.
I went back into Moonshines to talk to the employees. No one could give me a time that Middleton had left the building, but several mentioned a group of bikers that rolled into the parking lot and left just as quickly. That was troubling. One or two hanging out and trying to push meth was a concern, but a normal one. A bunch of them at the scene of another murder was something else. Clare had seen bikers around where Angela had been found. I saw Leech on Angela’s street the next day. Cotton Lambert had beaten Nelson and tried to run him off. Twice, some of the Nightriders had been at Nelson’s house. Then they’d come to the dock, warning Nelson away again.
There were links that just weren’t clear yet. But how did Danny Barnes’s killing Angela Briscoe fit in? Did it fit in at all?
I spent another hour taking notes and sketching in my pad. At one point, flipping through pages, I noticed one of my sketches of the Leech image with the arrow points. That was something else that was puzzling. Why all the graffiti about a greasy biker? I wanted to find out more about it but there was a fresh case at hand. When I had everything down and noted and timed, I sent a deputy looking for Byron Figorelli.
Johnny Middleton’s murder looked like textbook Mob work. That didn’t mean a thing because the whole point of having a textbook style is to send a message. Mob hits only looked like Mob hits when someone wanted them to. That someone may or may not be Mob. Again, this was thanks to the Godfather movies and that Sopranos show.
With that in mind, the only people around who fit the mobster description were the guys I had put in the can Saturday night. No one had mentioned them today, but they were my first choice for this.
Imagine my surprise when Byron Figorelli and Jimmy Cardo, the man Billy had stunned when we arrested them, came rolling up into the parking lot in an RV the size of some homes.
It took about two minutes to ascertain that they’d been clowning it up in go-karts and at the batting cages, getting a lot of attention from management all day long.
Once again I had to note that my life was never easy.
* * *
As soon as the scene was cleared and I had talked to everyone at Moonshines, I started home. If I hadn’t seen a billboard for the Oak Ridge Boys, the show we were going to, I would have gone all the way back. Almost four hours after I had left the dock I finally pulled into Nelson’s drive.
I was careful this time, going slow and checking every spot someone could hide. Before going in I walked the perimeter and checked the doors and windows. Inside, everything was the same and secure as well. Before going to his bedroom I stood for a few minutes in the middle of the great room with the view and the art in progress. It was a good room and fit the man.
It would be impossible not to know I was falling for Nelson. It was just as impossible not to picture myself here, with him, maybe in winter with snow on the ground and a fire in the woodstove. A month ago—no, less than a week ago, even—that thought would have probably given me a panic attack. I could not have imagined—this—any of this, my feelings, desires, plans for a future.
Things—life—seemed different in just the last few days. It was so strange to think that I had spent years worried about men. I had feared them and their intentions and believed all of them capable and ready to do the kind of things to me that had been done in that other life. Standing there in Nelson’s house, for the first time I began to see the men who were actually in my life. They were so much more than the shadows I was running from. So many good men surrounded me that I wondered then how it was I had only seen the bad.
The rack of paintings beside the work space drew me. I knelt beside it and flipped through the canvases and art boards. It was a catalog of the Ozarks, colors and places that I thought lived only in my mind. Streaks of paint, built-up and shifted, pushed by brush and knife all conspired to present the world the way I had always thought of it. Beautiful.
Nelson’s tools were there, scattered but clean and ready. I held his brushes and smelled the rag that rested by the easel. It smelled of the oils and thinners he used. It smelled like his hands after he worked.
To one side, there was a small end table with a drawer that stood open. Inside the drawer was a small case. It would have been so easy to write it off as just another box of paint. I couldn’t do that. It was obviously new. Everything else was worn and used. Then there was the texture to it. The box was dead, dull plastic. It had a utility that clashed with the wood and animal bristle all around it. Most of all I couldn’t ignore it because I had seen its kind so many times before.
I opened the case and pulled the revolver from its perfect vacuum-formed cradle.
Sometimes we stumble across parts of other people’s lives that we know are secret, even if they are not well hidden. We seem to have a sense about these things and touching them imparts an instant guilt that is greater than the action. It’s the knowing, not the finding. And we can never unknow.
The revolver had never been fired. It was loaded with only two cartridges.
Only two?
With sudden clarity I knew that two was one too many.
I looked back in the drawer and found the receipt and the box of shells. The paperwork was dated about a month prior. There was something else. Stuffed to the back of the drawer where they had been shoved aside like a horrible joke were a pamphlet for a hospice and another that was titled End-of-Life Options.
I put it all back just the way I had found it and went upstairs to gather Nelson’s clothes.
* * *
We made it to the Oak Ridge Boys show just in time. Everyone but me looked rested, ready for a night on the town. I wore my other pretty dress but felt like a sack of potatoes wearing heels. There was too much to think about. While the Boys were singing about Elvira, I was doing a mental inventory and craving a drink. At least the craving kept me awake.
After the show I got my drink, but it was only beer and I was careful. If I had been alone I would have gotten into Uncle Orson’s behind-the-counter-special reserve. I drank my one beer while we had an impromptu fish fry for a late dinner. Dad dredged catfish filets in cornmeal with salt and lemon pepper, paprika, cumin, rosemary, and sage. That’s his mild recipe. When I’m not around he’ll usually add cayenne and probably some other things I don’t want to know about. While he dredged, Uncle Orson manned the outdoor fry pot. Nelson and I cut red potatoes and roasted them while we blanched some asparagus then sautéed it in olive oil with garlic and melted Parmesan cheese over it in the covered skillet.
It was another feast and it should have been joyous, but I kept watching Nelson’s plate.
“You’re not eating as well as last night,” I said even as I told myself not to.
“I’m doing okay,” he said. “I’m loving the fish.”
“You’ve only had one bite.”
“I’m pacing myself.”
“Only one bit of potato.” I said it like an accusation and I suppose it was.
“But an entire stalk of asparagus,” he said through an embarrassed smile. “If we’re keeping count.”
I shut up. But it was difficult. I knew he wasn’t trying to starve himself, but it still felt like that and pissed me off. While we were cleaning up he asked if I would take him to get his truck in the morning. He said he had things to do in Springfield.
The whole keeping-my-mouth-shut thing fell apart there. I tried to sound casual when I asked what things.
He didn’t look at me when he said, “Doctors’ appointments.”
The multiple wasn’t lost on me. “Want me to come along?” I asked, still trying to keep it a casual offer.
Nelson shook his head and then he put on a smiling mask of good feelings. “You’ll be busy tomorrow with important things,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t have any idea what’s important,” I said. I had spoken quietly but it felt like shouting. The look on Nelson’s face said the same thing. He was confused and hurt by my self-serving and selfish little one-line tantrum. I left him standing there and went outside. My footsteps were just heavy enough to keep him from following.
On my way out I grabbed another beer and went to the top deck of the houseboat. That spot that had become Nelson’s unofficial work space. It was high with a wonderful view of the lake and a perfect place for brooding. I was feeling sorry for myself, not him. He didn’t invite sorrow and that made me wonder if I was bringing it into his life.
No one came up to talk to me. I could feel them giving me space and being kind about it. That pissed me off too. I wanted someone to poke their head up so I could chew it off. My therapist said that when I share my anger I’m really trying to share my pain. Sometimes I fantasized about shooting her between the eyes.
The night was so clear in the sky that it was hard to tell where the lake ended and the horizon began. Stars reflected in the still lake shimmered and broke in the small waves before reforming. As open and lonely as it was, I had never heard quiet in an Ozarks summer night. Sound crowded in from every direction. Cicadas buzzed constantly. Frogs, both lake and tree, were chirping as well. It was a comfort.
Somewhere in the water a fish broke the surface and splashed. The sound was loud even within the millions of night calls going on. It rolled over the surface of the water and I could imagine it being carried down the lake and well into Arkansas.
I climbed down the little aluminum ladder and paused at the window into the cabin. Nelson was inside sleeping. My lonely vigil up top had been longer than I thought. For a couple of minutes I watched him. Half of me wanted him to wake and see me. The other half wanted him to keep sleeping. That part cherished the anger I still felt and wanted to milk it a while longer.
I needed another beer or something stronger, so I went into the dark shop.
“I wondered how long it would be,” my father said. He was sitting at the table with a beer open in front of him.
“Were you so sure I would come in here?” I asked. Even to me my voice sounded petulant and pushy.
“Yep.”
“How?”
He studied me from the shadows. I couldn’t see his face exactly; just the outline, but it was enough. I knew for a certainty that whatever he said to me was going to be perfectly reasonable, not unkind, but would sting. It would also be completely true. His hand reached forward to grip the neck of the sweating beer bottle. He held it between his thumb and two fingers and swirled the last quarter of the liquid around. Then he drank it all, turning the bottle up and finishing with a satisfied sigh.
“This is where the beer is,” he said. Quite reasonable. Quite true.
“Yes,” was all I could say.
“This was the last one.” The bottle hit the tabletop with a hard thunk. “I couldn’t drink them all. I had to pour some out. Your uncle’s going to be a little put out with me, but what else is new?”
“Why would you do that?”
“You have to ask?”
I didn’t, but I wasn’t in the mood for admissions.
“You have a problem,” he said. “It’s not insurmountable and it’s not the end of the world, but it has to be addressed before it consumes you.”
“You think I’m a drunk?” I asked. It was both a question and an accusation.
“No,” he answered, reasonable and not unkind. “I think you have a million reasons to drink. If you deal with them you won’t need to drink anymore.” He smiled and then said, “Then you can drink for fun. Like me.”
“You think it’s that easy?”
“Nothing’s easy.” He was still smiling.
“I’ve got a therapist, you know. I don’t need another. It’s her job to deal with my problems.”
“No,” he said, dropping the smile. “It’s your job. Have you been working at it as hard as you could?”
I didn’t say anything back. What could I say? I didn’t like therapy. I liked hitting people and getting drunk. At least sometimes I thought I did.
Then he asked, “Can you handle the burden you’re adding on?”
My cheeks flushed with heat and my eyes brimmed with tears. I didn’t like where this was going at all but I was afraid of walking away.
What I finally ended up saying was, “That’s none of your business.”
Dad smiled and said, “It is. Of course it is. You will never be none of my business.”
What he said made me think of the Briscoe family. Longing and loss, love violently truncated. I wondered: If I could see my father’s eyes, how much would they look like David Briscoe’s? All these years I had denied him the chance to know his daughter’s pain. Sharing always has a bit of the selfish to it, but I couldn’t see if it was more selfish to share the truth with him or to keep it from him.
It didn’t matter because that was not the time. Nelson was the elephant standing in our room.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.”
Finally, with a deep preparatory breath, I told him, “I don’t know what to do.”
He pulled out the chair beside him, making room for me. I sat down and all the words fell from my mouth like they had been teetering on my teeth, waiting for me to stop balancing them. I gave him a synopsis of the past couple of days: the murder, the whiskey, meeting Nelson, beating the boy. All of it came spilling out and when it was finished pouring and it was just talk—the talk was all about Nelson.
When I told him about the gun I had found, I ran out of words and energy. I ended up saying, “I don’t know how I feel.” I’m pretty sure Dad heard the lie in my voice. Then I said, “I don’t know what to do.” And we both knew that was the truth.
“Do about what?” he asked. Dad was all about precision. “How you feel or how your feelings are going to hurt you?”
“It already hurts.”
“Oh, honey, the hurt hasn’t even started. This—” He gestured around the darkness with a hand showing nothing and everything. “All of this—is the sweet hurt. A life well lived hurts like hell. That’s why I don’t believe in that kind of afterlife. Who needs it?”
“If this is the sweet stuff I’m not sure I can handle anything more.”
“That’s the choice you have to make, isn’t it?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I think you ought to like him. A lot. I think you should help him and be kind and care. . . .”
“But?”
“But he’s hurt waiting to happen. If you can’t take it, it’s not fair to him to keep it going. Is it? He damn sure can’t take it. Maybe that’s the question. Which one of you is the strong one?”
“A relationship where I’m the strong one? That’s hard to imagine.”
“You’re strong, sweetheart. You’re just like your mother. It would be so much easier if she was here for you to talk to. She didn’t know her strength, either.”
“You never talk about her.”
“The end was one of those hard hurts. Something that takes your wind and leaves you gasping. It’s hard to talk about even the good stuff without feeling some of the hurt again.”
“What if you didn’t have to go through it? What if you knew about the breast cancer when you met her?”
“What-ifs are just that—what if? But I’ll tell you, if I knew—I would have made all the time we had even better.”
I kissed my dad on the cheek and hugged him hard. It reminded me how badly I wanted to kiss Nelson.
“Good night,” I said and headed for the houseboat. Dad didn’t say anything, but when I got to the door I heard the hiss of a beer bottle opening. “I thought you said they were gone?”
“I lied. Dads are allowed.”
“Hey, I thought you said we were going to handle my problems?”
“We are. You only really have the one. Everything else is just part of it.”
“And what’s that, Dr. Freud?”
“Fear, sweetheart. You are afraid. That’s what I’ve been telling you. Life is kind of an angry bitch. She fights you every step for every piece of joy in your life. Being afraid of the hits she gives won’t make her hit any less or any less hard. It just makes you miss the joy.”
Nelson was sound asleep when I got back in the cabin. Even with the lake below us and a cool breeze sneaking through the windows, it was hot inside. He was sleeping shirtless and without covers. Boxers only. I decided to take life by the balls, but in only the most loving of ways. He woke smiling and we stayed close and naked the rest of the night.