"Did you see Tennis McCoy in that car?"
"No one else would wear that fucking hat." Woody smiled. "It all grows curiouser and curiouser."
"The term you're looking for is 'more and more fucked up."
"Lewis Carroll didn't have as dirty of a mouth so much as a filthy mind."
"I wish to hell I knew what you were talking about most of the time."
"You should consider reading a goddamn book sometime."
We drove around the block and parked at the bottom of the Wendy's parking lot across the street from the motel. Woody got into the locked box in the truck bed and brought out two sets of night vision binocular. He handed me a pair as he got back into the truck cab.
"You check the first floor, I'll scan the second," he said.
Which we did, sitting there without exchanging a word, watching people come in and out of their rooms and me straining to push back on my bladder, which decided about 30 minutes in that I needed to pee and it didn't care about anything else. I watched the world move through the weird green haze of the binoculars, keeping any thoughts of liquids from my mind.
The silence gnawed at me after a few minutes, but it never phased Woody. He was content to sit without talking, staked out and watching the hotel. He sat there like the snakes you see in pet shops, coiled and seemingly at sleep. Anyone who's ever been in the woods knows among the worst mistakes you'll ever make is to poke at an animal you think is asleep.
After close to an hour, a motel room door opened and Burwell stepped out of the room. Burwell gave the perimeter a scan as someone I didn't recognize stepped out of the room. This guy filled space with a wide chest and broad shoulders and dressed in jeans and an untucked polo shirt that didn't do much to conceal the pistol he had in a belt holster. He stepped to one side of the door, hands folded in front of him. Burwell put his head back into the room, and a moment later he walked out, Davies close behind him, and Tennis McCoy behind her.
Tennis McCoy paused outside the motel room door, looking back inside. Isaac McCoy stepped into the doorway, and Tennis hugged him for a second. Burwell said something and pointed back into the room, and Isaac retreated inside, closing the door behind him.
Burwell and Davies led Tennis McCoy back to the Ford Focus and drove off back toward the McCoys' holler. Then we sat there for a few moments. The muscled-up agent stood at the door, pulled up a plastic lawn chair, sat down, and played on his cell phone.
"Can't say I saw that one coming," Woody said.
"It's like the Spanish Inquisition."
Woody nodded. "No one expects that shit."
22
The security company phoned me at five in the goddamn morning and told me they were short-staffed and asked me to come in. Despite hating the job with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns, I said I would since it gave me an excuse to get out of my house and go worry about something else besides the various things that didn't make much sense.
I was in the guard shack by 7. The air was already warm and sticky, and I fanned my face with a copy of the Parker County Sentinel-Tribune. They kept Pete's murder on the front page; it wasn't two days old, and there wasn't anything else going on in Parker County. The article rehashed what everyone knew, with a terse quote from Simms about how the Parker County sheriff's department was assisting the state police in the investigation, and a line from Jackie about how the investigation was ongoing. There was no mention of federal agents Burwell or Davies, or of Isaac McCoy.
Mitchell, the asshole with questionable photos on his phone, left the box as I got there, and he gave me a snarled lip and a shrugged shoulder. I ignored him. I'm sure he had other audiences interested in morally iffy celebrity porn.
The day unfurled without hurry. The sun seemed reluctant to launch itself high enough into the sky to burn off the humidity hanging off the mountains, and once it did, it pulsed down in an intensity that bordered on abusive. The sound of four-wheelers in the hillsides cut through the roar of heavy diesel machinery slicing coal seams.
I thought of my own summers when I was a kid, hiking through the hills, getting lost, scratched up on thorns, my clothes ripped and covered in briars. By then, Mom had gone, and it put only Billy and me, and it was obvious he had never intended to raise a child by himself, so he left me to my own devices more than he should have. I'd turned out okay, I suppose, outside of some attitude issues. And a drinking problem. And a divorce. And a lingering sense of loneliness. And no clue what to do with my life.
Maybe I wasn't so okay.
I couldn't have been happier to leave with work if Farrah Fawcett had stepped out of that poster from the 70s and waited for me at my car in all her big-haired, pointy-nippled glory.
I was neither shocked nor disappointed when I didn't see Farrah Fawcett in the parking lot. Instead, I got Matt Simms, planted on the hood of his county cruiser with his feet on the front bumper, drinking coffee from a Sheetz to-go cup. He picked up another cup resting beside him and reached it out toward me.
"No idea how you take yours, so it's black," he said.
"Black's fine."
"Like you like your women?"
"I like them willing; I'm not picky about the rest."
"Perhaps you should be."
"There's a wise adage about beggars and choosers that comes to mind." I sipped my coffee. It was barely below boiling and singed the weakest of my taste buds. "How's your little lady?"
"Rachel's good. She's saying I should get into another line of work."
I popped the lid off the cup and blew at the steam rising from the surface.
"What's she suggest? Selling vacuums door to door? Delivering newspapers? Preaching the gospel of the Lord? You'd look about right behind the pulpit on Sunday morning."
Simms rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, then ran it across the leg of his pants, leaving a damp streak behind. "I'd see myself more as the tent revivalist. Barring those possibilities, I may start up a bluegrass band. Can you steer me in the direction of a good banjo player?"
"Are you required to have a banjo in a bluegrass band?"
"Ever seen a bluegrass group without a banjo?"
"Can't say I've spent much time on the bluegrass circuit."
Simms smiled. "I had a job delivering newspapers when I was about 12. One of the other guys was an old dude, in his 50s, which isn't 'old' anymore based on our now, but when you're 12, that might as well as been 100. The old guy wasn't right upstairs; I don't know if he was born this way, or he took a baseball to the head, or he got kicked by a mule, but he was like a child sometimes. He always insisted the big money was in bluegrass music, how this was the key to getting rich. And this is 1982, so we're all sitting around listening to Billy Idol or Foreigner, and at no point did I ever flip on the radio and the DJ went from Styx to Earl Scruggs. There were never stories about banjo pickers and fiddlers selling out Shea Stadium and women throwing their panties on stage."
"I'll bet that if you're a woman at a bluegrass concert, you're throwing a big ol' set of granny bloomers on stage."
"It's almost a nightmare to imagine. Besides, Rachel's mindset is more in the line of me going into a private security kind of thing."
I tapped the sewed-on patch on my polo shirt. "From personal experience, let me say it manages to both suck and blow at the same time. That's a negatory there, Ghost Rider."
"Her thoughts are geared towards us moving to Charleston when my term expires and working with her brother. He's got this consultancy thing down there, says he's got the work and he needs the extra hands."
"You feeling good enough about where things are, you want to work with the family? You two been back together, what, four or five months?"
"Things are better than before the divorce. I don't live at the office, the way I used to. We both like one another again, so there's a start. She's either gotten better at faking orgasms or I've gotten better at getting her to the station on time."
"Thank you for the worst euphemism for sex I've
ever heard."
"I'm spit-balling, Henry. It's been a long day. It's been an even longer fucking life."
I drank more coffee. "Someday we'll get to why you came to see me. I'm sure it's not just to bring me coffee, as much as I appreciate it."
Simms pushed himself off of the car. "You want to sit in the AC? I know it's shitty for the environment, but I've got so much sweat running down the crack of my ass, my balls are going to be cooking in soup soon."
"There's a million ways you could say 'let's sit in the car with the air conditioning on' besides that, but I can't imagine one encapsulating it quite the same way. So sure, let's sit."
23
The AC in the cruiser blasted so strong, the sweat almost crystalized on my face. I half-expected to see sides of beef hanging in the backseat, it worked so good. It was goddamn heaven back there.
Simms had the radio tuned to a country station. I didn't recognize the song, but it sounded like every other song I'd heard on country radio for the past decade. The guy sang about this girl he loved, and how they liked to drive around in his truck, and then a guitar solo threatened to turn everything into a mid-80s rock song, and it got undercut by a steel guitar, and the guy sang more about his truck before going back to talking about the girl. If I'd have been the girl, I'd have been jealous of the truck. I bet he wore tennis shoes with his cowboy hat.
Quieter than the music was the CB radio, which hummed with white-noise static. It was set to the police band, and would burst to life with something from the state police dispatcher before settling back into silence.
We sat with the AC blowing and the music playing and didn't say anything, until Simms said, "I had Feds come by asking questions about you."
"IRS? ATF? Another random set of initials?"
"Can you not do the funny-glib thing and be serious for a few minutes?"
Simms' face was drawn and tired. The skin under his eyes was loose and the color of plums. He looked like he needed a week-long nap to rest up so he could sleep a month afterwards.
"You don't look good," I said.
"Lot on my mind."
"'Heavy is the head upon which rests the crown.'"
"Did you quote Shakespeare?"
"Your guess is as good as mine. Woody said it once. It seemed to fit," I drank coffee. "You talk to Carl Thompson?"
"About twice a week. He's in Pittsburgh now, in rehab. They say he's got a few months before he comes home."
Thompson had been Simms' chief deputy until earlier in the year, when he'd been shot by the National Brotherhood. The bullets had damaged his spine.
"He going to walk again?" I said.
"No idea. He's stubborn as shit. If anyone can, he will." He looked at me. "He still doesn't like you much. For what it's worth, I don't blame you for Carl getting shot. He does, though, and he's the one who gets to hold the grudge."
"I get a lot of blame for people getting shot, even if I'm not the person pulling the trigger."
"Trouble follows you, Henry. Like stink off rotten fish. And I hope your intentions are good, that you're like the rest of us, trying to do the right thing, and you just end up attracting people who aren't as good of intentioned."
"What if I'm not, though? What if I'm just a greedy guy looking out for himself?"
"Then you're an asshole like the rest of us, and you should keep your fingers out of other people's pies."
I turned down the radio. "What about this visit from our friends, the Feds?"
"It's always pleasant when the guys in the Jos. A. Banks suits show up. Until I met you, I never had much cause to deal with the federal government except to pay my taxes and not vote for president." He shook his head. "You dropped into my world, and it feels as though shit rains from the sky."
"What d'you tell them?"
"That you're a dick, you're a smart ass, I'm not confident you're not crazy, your friend Woody is likely a psychopath, and if I had to, I'd trust you with my life, and I hoped to hell to not have to."
"I appreciate the part about trusting me. Fuck you about the rest. Except about Woody, because he is nuts. The Feds say why they want to know about me?"
"Federal spooks aren't about to tell me anything. They came in, asked their questions, and left. They volunteered nothing. Is this about your dead friend at the motel?"
"Yes."
"Which also has to do with the McCoys."
"Also yes."
Simms stared out the windshield, resting the flats of his hands against the steering wheel. He took deep breaths, eyes closed, sucking air in through his nose and out of his mouth, as he pressed his palms against the wheel. He did this for a minute, opening his eyes again and saying, "I don't need this, Henry."
"I don't think this is anything you've got to worry about, Matt."
"I hope not, because I've got my own shit, without your shit coming into play in my life. Whatever happens with this, I'm not involved. Keep me out."
"You're out."
Simms took another deep breath. He kept his vision focused forward, eyes straight ahead.
"I've got cancer, Henry," he said. "Liver cancer. Stage three."
Simms arced his neck back and leaned it on the headrest behind him. His nostrils flared as he breathed.
"After everything happened with the National Brotherhood, and Rachel and I got back together, I noticed I was losing weight. Then one day Rachel said I looked yellow, and I laughed it off, but she kept on me until I went to get it checked it out. Blood work came back funny, so they did a biopsy, and fuck me running if they didn't find cancer."
"Is it treatable?" I said.
"The doctors tell me it is, but what the hell do they know? I'm on a list for a transplant. They're also talking about maybe slicing off a chunk." He looked at me. "I'm tired all the fucking time. My shit's white, like chalk. I didn't expect it, first time I saw it. I thought I might die from the heart attack from it. Plus, there's the joy of getting jaundiced and turned Asian-looking. I called myself 'the yellow threat' the other day." He laughed, a small, somewhat bitter sound. "Rachel didn't take that comment well."
"I wouldn't expect she would. How's she handling it?"
"How you'd expect if you found out your husband's most likely going to die. She doesn't deal well with the cable going out; this is beyond her capacity to process. She won't talk about it directly, so she talks around it, about how I'll get better, and how we need to think about what I want to do after the transplant. It's why she's pushing me to find another job. She said she thinks we should have a kid." He shook his head. "Me wanting kids was part of why we divorced the first time. She always said she had no interest in wiping someone's ass or making someone's sandwich. Now she's saying a kid would give me extra reason to live. I told her wanting to live is usually reason enough to live. Besides, I don't know I want her having to plan a funeral and a baby shower at the same time. Something could get mixed up and then the kid's traumatized for life."
"If he's your kid, I'm sure that'll going to be trauma enough."
Simms' lips curling upward into thin spirals, his heavy eyes cast down. "You know what I want to know?"
"No. What?"
"You're a drunk, right?"
"I prefer 'alcoholic in recovery,' but we'll go with your terminology."
"I thought it was you guys who liver got cancer. Drunks, drug addicts, people with hepatitis. The worst I've ever done is take too many over-the-counter painkillers. You, you damn near drank yourself to death, and look at you? Fit and happy and—" He sucked in some air, and the next set of words caught in his throat as he bit at his bottom lip and clutched to his side. There was a groaning noise. He leaned forward and put his forehead against the steering wheel. I could hear him pulling in lungfuls of air.
The song changed on the radio. It was a woman this time, singing about her grandfather.
Simms sat back upright. Thin streams of tears ran from the corners of his eyes. He sniffed and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.
; "How are you doing?" I said.
"Outside of the dying, I couldn’t be better."
"This is the stupidest question of the day, but I’ll ask it anyway: is there anything I can do?"
He rubbed at his side, around where I imagined the liver to be; it had been a long time since high school anatomy.
"Only if you've got a liver I can borrow for the next 20 years or so."
"I'm kind of using the one I've got." I looked at my coffee cup. "This isn't where I find out you drugged my coffee and I wake up in a bathtub full of ice, is it?"
"I positive that only works with kidneys. But if you're so inclined as to let me try, there's an empty cooler in the trunk, and I sharpened my pocket knife the other day, and I bet we can find you a towel you can bite down on."
"I appreciate the offer, but I'll pass."
"No one else is taking me up on it, either. This is where you figure out who your friends are." He took a deep breath, followed with an exhalation. "I'm afraid you're going to get stuck in shit you won't be able to charm your way out of this time, Henry. The McCoys are trouble on their own, and it's no better when you've got federales in the picture. Whatever it is, watch your step."
"Thanks for the warning."
"Not a problem. Has Jackie Hall told you anything with the homicide investigation?"
"Nope. When I talked to him yesterday, the Feds hadn't gotten to him yet. Surprising they talked to you first."
"They're the federal government; they get to do however they want. Now, if you don't mind, get the hell out of my car; I've got paperwork to do before I go home and fuck my wife."
"Do any of your exit lines not involve you having sex?"
"Warren Zevon, when he was dying of cancer, he said you learn to be grateful for every sandwich. I'm trying it out with orgasms. Try to not get killed, huh?"
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