Louis moved through the kitchen as if Vinnie might be just on the other side of the wall, sound asleep in his bedroom. But the door was wide open, and the bed made, the old checkered quilt smoothed over and folded down at the head, just as he had left it. As Hattie had left it, rather. Vinnie hadn’t made a bed since the days when their mother was there to stand guard over him.
He ran a mug of yesterday’s coffee through the microwave, then went on into the front room to watch for Mitchell’s arrival. It was just after six in the morning, and the sun was already creeping up over the east slope. Not much of anything else seemed to be awake out there. Cars waited empty in their driveways up and down the block, porch steps dotted with the morning newspapers, still rolled, banded and uncollected. At his lawn’s edge, a single crow waddled along with its head scanning from one side to the other, looking like a man who’d had lost his keys the night before.
It had taken some time for Louis to readjust to Vinnie not being there, to put things right-side-up again. Beyond a thankful silence, it was the small things that snagged him: the random appearance of drinking glasses on window sills, or a pair of nail clippers, unfolded and sitting behind the television. A jar of mustard in the freezer. Whispered clues showing the remnant road-map of what had been Vinnie’s day-to-day existence.
At the end of the block Mitchell’s cruiser came into view, headlights flickering as he steered into the driveway. Louis gave him a wave through the window and drank down the last of the smoky, day-old brew, a layer of grit settling in his throat on its way down.
“You sleep all right?” Mitch asked as Louis eased himself down the porch steps.
“Fine,” he lied. In fact, it had been a rough night. Waking up every couple of hours, straining to make sense of the quiet. He had been riddled with nightmares the last couple of nights, though he could not remember a single detail about them once he was up and holding familiar to the space around him. It had seemed so real, though, the spiraling and screaming, the sensation of something sharp raking at his sides. And then the sudden kick into consciousness as his arm would claw at the air, desperate to catch himself before falling.
“Must be glad to have your place back,” Mitch said.
“It’s quieter, that’s for sure.”
Mitch said, “You sure you’re all right? You look like you were up watching the late movie.”
“Lester Fanning,” Louis said, changing the subject. “We’re just gonna talk to him, okay? Keep an eye out for anything obvious.”
“Louis, we talked about all this already,” Mitch reminded him.
The initial plan had been for Louis to make the drive to Whiskey Hill on his own, but Mitchell put his foot down hard against it. What they already knew about Lester was reason enough for caution. What they didn’t know could well end up with a bullet in the back of both their heads. “And,” Mitch added, “if it turns out he needs his ass brought in, you’ll want a second pair of cuffs.”
They walked through a half-dozen scenarios before finally getting into their cars and driving out onto Highway 16, Louis’s cruiser in front, the breaking sun intruding through the passenger window and blinding out his periphery. He leaned over and flipped the visor across the window and laid onto the gas. They’d spent way too much time at the house going over everything in too much detail just for the sake of repetition. The last thing he wanted was to give Lester the benefit of the morning.
There were rigs passing from the north now, and movement in the distance, black spots of cattle grazing in the grassland against the low hills. It was like this when Louis had come to Stevens County for the first time, the sun hovering low like a giant dandelion flower, and an emerald sea of wheat fields that rolled on forever. Something so simple as a blown front tire had brought a half-dozen offers of help within twenty minutes. An off-duty smokejumper guided him to the nearest garage while the man’s pretty young wife gave Louis a warm bottle of 7Up from the back seat and told him she’d pray for him, though he was not sure why. Not up until then—nor since—had he experienced such generosity in his life.
“Watch out up ahead.” Mitchell’s voice crackled on the radio. Some hundred yards in front of him a figure moved on the shoulder, loping from the pavement to the shoulder, at one point almost disappearing in the line of fence posts.
Louis took the mic in his hand. “I see him,” he said. He let off the gas, hit the lights, and began to steer carefully toward the shoulder. As he got closer, the figure seemed to shrink deeper into the fence line, finally ducking down into a mound of sage at the base of a leaning post.
“I think it’s a kid,” Louis said. He pulled off the road and shut off the engine.
Mitchell was already out and walking up the shoulder when Louis climbed out of his car. The kid—a boy, it looked like—came up from the brush now and held to the fence post as if it were the only thing holding him up. Louis figured he was about eleven or twelve and a sad thing for sure, his bare arms scratched up, blue jeans streaked with dirt and his hair in good need of a heavy comb, or a clipper.
Louis stood against the front wheel well, looking past the boy down to the nearly endless belt of highway, to where the road finally disappeared between a set of little twin hills.
“You’re out in the middle of nothing, aren’t you?” Louis said.
The boy nodded. His dirty face showed patches of clean under his eyes, wiped over his cheeks to his ears.
“You hurt?”
He shrugged, and looked down at his own body, reviewing his condition, maybe, before answering. “I guess not,” he said finally, his voice like baked mud.
Mitch said, “What’s your name?”
The boy looked between the men, from one to the other. “Rodney,” he said. “Rodney Culver.” And then he pulled back just slightly, as if he half-expected they would know just who he was.
“Where’d you come from, Rodney?” Louis asked.
“Wyoming.”
“You’re a long way from Wyoming, son.” Louis looked back to Mitch, who cocked his head in acknowledgement. “You didn’t come all the way to Washington by yourself, did you?”
Rodney shook his head, then stared down at his dirty shoes.
“You hurt, son?”
Again, a shake of the head.
“Where might your other half be, then?”
Rodney looked up from his shoes. His eyes were welled up now. He looked ready to break up.
As usual, Mitch was one step ahead. “I’ll bring him back with me,” he said, and then he went on over to his cruiser and reached in through the window for the handset.
Louis said to Rodney, “You’ll head on back with my deputy,” and when the boy’s shoulders sunk, Louis added, “He’s a nice man, has a little kid of his own. He’ll drive you into town and see if he can’t figure all this out for you, get you where you need to be.”
Mitch came back and said, “We’re all set. I’ll run him to the station and get things situated there, and then come right back if I can. In the meantime, you can go on up to Tiny’s, or head back to the The Blue Plate and wait for me. Have a cup of coffee.”
Louis said, “I don’t need any more coffee.”
Mitch leaned into him. “I don’t want you going up there on your own, Lou,” he said. “I want you to promise you’ll wait to hear from me.” The boy was at Mitch’s car now, standing with his hand on the passenger door.
“If he’s that Wyoming kid,” Louis said, changing the subject, “and that fella brought him across state lines as a fugitive, the feds are gonna have to come in to sort it all out.”
Mitch stood there for a moment, looking at Louis. Waiting for an answer he wasn’t going to get, Louis supposed. Finally he went on back to his car and got in, then hooked a U-turn and sped off back in the direction of Boone, the little pale face of the boy staring out at Louis through the passenger window as he circled back. As soon as Mitch disappeared around the bend, Louis climbed back into his car and fired it up. He drummed his fingers on the dashboard and considered the distance to Tiny’s Roadhouse, and back to The Blue Plate, where the service was always slow and the coffee disappointing. It was already past seven o’clock. Out to the west, a tawny cloud lifted into the sky.
“To hell with this,” Louis said, tossing his hat onto the passenger seat and knocking the car into gear.
It was just under a mile past the substation, marked by a big green transformer box right there at the highway. The dirt road broke left and snaked up to the northwest, through the low-lying firs and white oaks, up to where the line of pine trees began, where weekend hunters and anglers tended to wander. There were enough tributaries in there to lose a man for days, but Louis steered on in anyway, keeping himself to the right, driving past the NO TRESPASSING signs, the warnings of guard dogs and stenciled pictures of shotguns.
He kept to a crawl, giving himself a quiet trail of dust and ample opportunity to make sense of the view that spread out in front of him. At last the road leveled out and he came upon an injured-looking wooden gate, the planks cracked and warped by the weather. The drive dipped to a swale before rising up into a thicket of Ponderosas and larches. Through an opening near the top he could see the rough-hewn siding of a house, and the front end of a familiar sedan peeking out from behind the trees.
He brought his cruiser to a stop next to the Buick, and got out of the car, his thumb hooked over his belt, near his holster. There were vehicles here to rival the U-Pick, rusted-out sedans with sprays of grass reaching out of open hoods, pickup trucks on cinderblocks, a paneled van with half-drawn curtains in its windows. At the front end of the Buick sat a good-sized stack of boxes, a heap of clothes piled over the top. Men’s flannel, denim and such.
Halfway between the Buick and a vine-choked Volkswagen Beetle, a slick-looking green Bonneville sat with its windows rolled down and its rear driver’s side door swung wide open. Wyoming plates, in fact.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Louis said aloud. If the circumstances were different he might have knocked the car in reverse, and slipped back down the mountain. Waited for Mitch after all. But there was the tired sound of a weathered screen and Louis turned to the front doorway, where Lester Fanning stood gaping, his mouth slack and stupid, a cardboard box the size of a television balanced in his arms. He wore a duck-billed cap on his head, pushed back like a yokel, eyes ticking from Louis to his cruiser, to the Buick and the Bonneville.
“Lester.”
“You here to check on my taillight?” Lester gave a throaty laugh and took a step forward, raising the box to his chin. “Mind if I set this down?” he said. “It’s heavy as a sonofabitch.”
Louis nodded.
“I would not want to spook you,” Lester said, lowering the box to the porch. “End up shot on my own porch.”
Louis said, “I appreciate the consideration.” He unsnapped his holster, just the same. “Looks like you’re headed somewhere urgent.”
“Just clearing out some clutter,” he said, walking toward Louis. “Getting an early start before the sun starts punishing us.”
“It will do that,” Louis said. He fought the urge to look back over to the Bonneville, but gave in to a quick scan over the area. The myriad of rusted-out cars, the pine-cloaked shed in the distance, its orange, mossed roof poking above the smaller trees. One thing at a time, Louis.
“As long as you’re loading things up,” he said, “I wondered if I might take a look at that trunk of yours. Once more.”
“You came all the way out here for that?” Lester laughed and shook his head. “Seems like a long drive just to get a second look but come on then.”
Louis followed him to the rear of the car, standing back as Lester popped the trunk open. It was like he’d remembered. The red and green wool blanket, folded like a gift over the bottom. Jumper cables and jack, tucked against the side. The wires to the taillight were secure.
“You want me to take all this out?” Lester asked.
Louis shook his head and leaned against the fender, running his hand over the length of the open trunk door. The paint was smooth, unblemished all along the edge. “I guess I’m just curious is all.”
“Curious, you say? What about exactly?”
“I’m curious why you swapped out the old one,” Louis said. “The old trunk lid.”
“That’s it?” Lester asked with a laugh. “You want to know about the old trunk? That’s easy. The old one, it got all dented up when I was in town one day. One afternoon. Some kids playing ball. Kids’ stuff is all.”
“In Boone?”
“Naw, I was up in Colville. Stopped off at the park to eat some takeout. Some Indian kids. They were playing is all. No real harm.”
Louis thought of the old trunk lid there at the U-Pick, and all the divots that had poked up from below, from the inside. He would come back to that.
“You’ve got quite a collection of rigs here,” he said.
“One of my vices,” Lester said. “I bring ’em in but can’t seem to take ’em back out.” He laughed again, that sickly crackle from deep in his throat.
Louis thumbed his holster and looked back over to the Bonneville, at the door that lay open like an invitation. Lester’s breathing heavy, clipped. Beyond them, the drone of Louis’s radio carried on inside that car, the windows rolled up tight. He should go and see what the chatter was about, to check in with Mitch. But he could not stand in two places at once. Lester stood there smiling at him, like some little schoolboy standing for a portrait.
“Out of curiosity, what else do you bring in, Lester?”
“Excuse me?”
“What else do you bring in? You ever bring in guests here? People looking for a quick stopover on their way to somewhere else?”
“Ain’t that what guests do? Stop over?” When Louis didn’t answer, Lester stepped back on his heels, his lips tightening over his teeth. “I don’t know what you’re sniffing at,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Louis finally said. “I meant family. Old friends.” He gave a pause then, just enough to draw out the question.
Lester’s face shifted a slight bit, a single bead of sweat rolling down his temple like rain on glass. Louis took out the little red booklet from his trouser pocket and slapped it against his leg. Lester looked down and locked onto it, and Louis was struck by his face in that moment, how he seemed to go through a half-dozen thoughts in the blink of an eye.
The creak of the screen hinges from behind snapped Louis’s attention from Lester and the Buick, and the green Bonneville, and Wyoming, from the radio still crackling in his cruiser. A woman came out onto the porch, a cardboard box in her arms, the tangle of cords spilling over the edges like tendrils. She held in place, the screen door resting against her shoulder, her mouth in an O.
Louis told her Good morning, and it was when he took a single step toward her that she reached out her hands to him, the box slipping from her cradle, tipping outward, the contents of radio and clock, and glass jar—a vase, maybe—blue as a peacock, the white of the sunlight catching its rim as the thing tumbled end over end to the ground.