(40)

I awoke to the alarm, and by the time I had turned it off, I was thinking more clearly.

I didn’t really need it, but I took another hot shower to keep my body lubricated and to warm my brain. The warmer it got, the more my brain thought the right answer was to pick up my car at the garage and go home. If it wasn’t ready, maybe I should take a bus.

That thought didn’t go away, but I pushed it to the back of my feelings, got dressed, did the aspirin trick again, and at three fifteen picked out the more attractive of the ax handles and went downstairs.

I didn’t see Mrs. Chandler and decided not to bother her. With the worries she had, way she must have felt, she might be taking a nap.

I thought about the gun in the closet but stuck to my decision not to take it. Truth was, I had shot a gun only a few times in my life and was more likely to shoot my dick off than hurt someone else. Besides, how nasty could three octogenarians be?

Nasty as the help they hired. Who said there would only be them? Still, I didn’t get the gun.

When I stepped outside, the rain had passed, but the clouds were threatening more, and I could see webs of lightning behind them, and hear distant thunder.

Ronnie was already parked at the curb in her cruiser. I climbed in and she said, “Let me start with I’ve missed you.”

“You too.”

“My God, what happened to your head?”

“You’re going to love this story.”

“Before I hear it—” She leaned over and we kissed quickly. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it felt good. On the drive over I capsulized my adventures. I violated my promise to Winston again, told her the location of his hideout. I told her about the materials from Mrs. Chandler, that the most important of them were stashed in the trunk of my car. I left out the part about how I feared for Ronnie’s parents. I would save that for when I could take more time to explain.

She listened as she drove, giving me the sort of sideways glance you might give someone who had arrived at a formal wedding wearing a rabbit costume with a hole in the ass end.

“So, two men in disguises in a copper-colored Ford chased you down to the lake, and Flashlight Boy saved you. He lives underground with rats and clothes from graves, and you and him went prowling inside the country club by a secret entrance?”

“Sums it up. Also, did I mention he’s the one putting the bones in the cars and that Shirley was right when it comes to ritual, how it’s connected to life experience?”

“You left that part out.”

“That little ritual doesn’t include the bones in my father’s Buick. That part I’m not so sure about. The murders are separate too.”

“It sounds like a Gothic gumbo.”

“Yep. Oh, there’s a creosote god named Johnny involved as well.”

“What the hell, Danny?”

“Know how it sounds, but I think I know now what goes on in the clubhouse, how it’s connected to the murders. But I need to check something first before I lay that out. I could be letting my imagination run away with me.”

“I hope you are.”

“So do I.”

We were already at the library. There was a big black car parked outside, but no copper-colored Ford.

When we got to the glass door there was a Closed sign on it, and there was shadowy movement behind it. The lock clicked, and Estelle let us in. She was dressed in a baby-duck-yellow dress and matching high heels and her hair was almost the color of her dress. She had been in the hair dye again.

She studied Ronnie a moment but didn’t say anything. She led us to a back room without speaking, opened the door like a theater usher, and in we went, with her following after.

It was a conference room and not all that large, but it had a stage for kid performances and civic events up front, and here was a long table on the stage, and there were three figures sitting behind it. The cooling unit growled behind the walls and the air inside was a little chilly, considering outside it was as warm as a fat man’s ass crack.

Estelle took a seat in one of the chairs at the back of the room. A woman’s voice from behind the table called for us to come up. Her voice had a foghorn quality. We walked to the stage. I decided I didn’t like looking up at them and took the steps onto the stage, and Ronnie followed.

We stood in front of the table and the three wizened creatures that ruled their small world with iron fists and a magnolia fart looked about as threatening as concrete yard gnomes.

The woman, who had to be Kate Conroy, was sitting between the other two in a motorized wheelchair. She looked like a large bird that had broken its wings. Her arms were thin as sticks in her black suit coat. The sleeves hung slack around them. There was enough room in her ivory-white shirt for two children of moderate size, one of them riding a pony.

Her face was all bones and white parchment, but I could envision the woman she had once been, the one with the high cheekbones and the heavy lips, the one who could easily have been the model for the painting I had seen in the country club. A woman with power in the head, power in the body, and a heart like a block of ice.

The man to her right was a big sag of a fellow and seemed to have been placed in the chair as if he were a beanbag, with most of the beans collecting in his stomach. His head was large and his shoulders wide, though they sloped dramatically. His face looked to have enjoyed the sun too much and there were more spots on it than on a pinto pony.

I knew him immediately. He was a white-haired, well-cured version of his son, Jack Jr. They both had those feral eyes and exuded all the warmth and animation of winter roadkill. He had both hands wrapped around the knob of a cane and was leaning forward on it. If someone had snatched it away, he might have collapsed onto his shiny black shoes in a puddle the color of his blue suit and his fire-red tie.

The man on Kate Conroy’s left was a ball of clothes with a head stacked on top. A plastic oxygen mask covered his face and distorted his ancient features. The mask had a hose and the hose ran to a small oxygen tank with a Dallas Cowboys logo pasted on the side. The tank fitted into a silver pull-along rack. It hummed pleasantly, like a drunk in church.

It had to be Judea Parker, Estelle’s uncle. His eyes were closed and his mouth was drooling. He seemed to be napping deeply or recently dead.

It was strange to think these were the powers that be. The ones who, through money, connections, and intimidation, had created their own fiefdom in which their subjects mostly existed without awareness of just how much a part of it they were.

“Mr. Russell,” Kate Conroy said, and her voice was surprisingly strong, even a bit lusty.

“Kate Conroy, I presume.”

“You presume right. And I see you’ve brought a little friend from the affirmative action pool.”

I felt Ronnie grow stiff beside me, but she didn’t respond to the remark.

“Let’s cut right through the shit,” I said. “Tell me what you want.”

“Commendable. I like cutting through the shit. What we’re here to tell you is we need you to go home, wherever that is.”

“I can’t be the first person ever to complain about how you do business. And suspect how you do a lot more of it.”

“No, but you’re the first person that has the skill to make what we do sound more interesting than it is. You seem to be trying to turn simple business opportunities we’ve taken advantage of into some sort of crime. Like that nonsense about the dam so many years back.”

I’d been planning to play it clever, but I was feeling a lot less clever today. Last night they had tried to kill me, of that I was certain, though by proxy.

“Here’s cutting through the shit. I find your rituals interesting.”

“What?”

“I find Creosote Johnny hilarious and silly, and when I think about it, the three of you seem like three ancient children with a thick wallet and a big club. Bullies that never outgrew being assholes.”

It was like the lights in the room shaded, the air-conditioning dropped a few degrees.

“You seem to have been prying where you shouldn’t,” Jack Manley Sr. said. His voice wasn’t as strong as Conroy’s. “Sometimes you can dig a hole so deep, you can’t get out of it. And you’ve misunderstood a lot of what you’ve found. Rituals. That Creosote Johnny stuff. That was from when we were kids.”

I decided to hold back that I had been in their lair, but I said, “I got it from a good source. I admit there are some holes I need to plug, but I’m starting to feel like the material to do that is out there, and all I have to do is reach for it.”

“Reach too far,” Manley Sr. said, “you might not like what you grab hold of.”

“I’ll have to have a long reach either way. You guys go back a distance.”

“We dined with dinosaurs,” Kate Conroy said, and she showed me a lot of her dentures, “and yet we’re still here. Now and again, don’t you know, others have tried to rock us off our thrones, and we didn’t rock. Things turned unfortunate for those would-be usurpers. But we’ll give you this. You are determined, and, worse, you seem to be driven by some sort of self-righteousness. You haven’t figured out yet that the world is already owned, and certainly this little piece of it, and the owners are not like you. The careful, kind, considerate, and fair-play jokesters aren’t the ones who will out. They don’t seem to understand that to make things happen, to make the big things work, the oil that runs the gears is nasty. Has to be.”

“And you’re the oil?” Ronnie said.

“Ah, it speaks. Yes. We are exactly that. And let me tell you what you both are. You’re insignificant. You’re caught in a trap of morals and ethics and platitudes. All of that is window dressing for life. Let me tell you what life is. Life is nothing more than survival. Darwin didn’t discover that empathy helped us survive; he discovered being the strongest and the most determined helped us survive. We aren’t that strong anymore, but we got here through strength and lack of sentimentality. There’s those who would like you to believe that the ones who haven’t made it, who haven’t made their way to the top of the food chain and accrued power and money, didn’t because they didn’t have the breaks, didn’t have the opportunity. That’s bullshit. We are here and have been here and have run things and controlled things because we are the best of the best. Some people are just born better. Some people, they come from inferior stock. You can take your sympathy and your Social Security and your Medicare and your welfare and stick it up your ass. Let those who can rule, and let those who can’t manage as best they will. I’ve nothing against throwing a bone to them now and again, but they live off the bones and scraps, while we live off the meat, the hearts, and the lungs of the universe. It doesn’t matter if you understand or don’t understand; that is the way of Darwin, the way of the universe, and you two, you’re like most, you’re down there in the scrap heap.”

“There are people richer and more powerful than you,” Ronnie said. “So doesn’t that make you inferior to them?”

Jack Manley Sr. made a croaking sound, like a frog that had tried to leap too far. Parker was still immobile. Kate Conroy lifted one side of her mouth and showed a few teeth.

“Girl,” Jack Manley Sr. said, “we don’t need your sass. You are at the very bottom of the heap. They can dress you up in all manner of uniforms and clothes, give you a banana and put a hat on you, hand you a banjo, same as a monkey, and you’ll still be what you and your kind always were. The bottom of the heap.”

For a moment, I thought Ronnie might go for her gun and see how fast and accurately she could shoot all three of them, but instead she grew silent.

“If you’re the top of the heap,” I said, “you’re like that little swirly on top of fresh shit.” I nodded at Parker. “And what’s with him? Is he training to be third base?”

“It’s not like I expected you to understand,” Conroy said. “I suppose I wanted to warn you is all.”

“That shows some sympathy, doesn’t it?” I said.

“It shows we’d rather do this easy than hard. Whatever you find, whatever you do, we can explain it away—”

“Or pay it away,” Jack Manley said.

“It’s just a lot easier for us if we don’t have to deal with inconveniences,” Conroy said.

“I’ve enjoyed our time in the air-conditioning,” I said. “But not much else. We’ll see ourselves out.”

“You’ll let it go, then?” Conroy said. “We could give you a bit of financial incentive. You and your little piece can go somewhere up north and screw and leave things as they are. As they ought to be.”

“Highly unlikely,” Ronnie said.

“I take money, I agree to what you want, I wouldn’t trust you to let it be, even if I was willing to do that,” I said. “One day I might find myself with a garrote around my throat.”

I didn’t think Kate Conroy could turn any whiter, but the last three ounces of blood in her seemed to drain into her shoes.

“And I’d check that sucker’s pulse if I were you,” I said, indicating Parker.

“Goodbye, now,” Conroy said. “You’ve had your warning.”

As we started out of the conference room, Estelle rose and accompanied us to the exit. When we were all three just outside the door, Estelle’s face looked cold and sad and ghostly. She said, “For God’s sake, Danny, the both of you. Run. You have no idea.”