“You ever tire of it?”
“Of what?”
“Of having to look back at the shit you’ve screwed up.”
“If you’re doing it right, you don’t keep revisiting your sins and transgressions. You make the amends and you move on. It’s not your responsibility to keep living in the past. Our pasts are what got us drinking to begin with. If we could have dealt with our shit like sane people, we most likely wouldn’t be alcoholics.” Woody smiled. “I knew I liked AA when I heard there was coffee at every meeting. You have to respect a group that’s centered on caffeine.”
I looked at my pie plate. I had wiped out the coconut cream like it was an indigenous people. The emptiness made me sad. I wanted another piece, but I also wanted to fit into my pants.
“I heard there’d be donuts,” I said.
Lily wasn’t what you would have called “thrilled” when I told her about the bar fight.
“I’m gone a few days, and you two can’t help yourselves but find trouble to get into, can you?” she said.
“You’re adorable when you get all serious like this,” I said. “I feel like one of the two of us should be spanked. Do we flip a coin or what?”
She fought the urge to laugh, but the urge won, breaking her face into a wide smile. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
I sat in my kitchen staring at my phone while Lily was in her hotel room in Berkeley, California. The room seemed nicer than most of the motels I had stayed at, or homes I had lived in. In the background, her room window opened to a view of the city, and an expanse of ocean beyond it. Everything seemed to have a sparkle to it, a glisten and gleam that felt both foreign and inviting, hopeful and foreboding. It’s a weird thing when you spend your life surrounded by mountains, then you look out into a different part of the world and realize there’s an actual horizon out there. The metaphor of it all might be obvious, but goddamn if it’s not a thing.
Lily had been at this national meeting of high school principals longer than it takes to gestate an elephant. Her life was often an endless series of gatherings for affiliations, associations, federations, leagues, and organizations, with endless discussions of best practices and developing paradigms, and sometimes little to show for the time away except for new tote bags and the still-lingering question of what was the best thing to do for the students of Parker County High School.
On my undersized phone screen, I watched her, a dull internal ache throbbing inside me as she moved around the room and readied for bed. She wore a nightgown with spaghetti straps that revealed lightly freckled shoulders, her chestnut-colored hair pulled back, the wire-rimmed glasses she used when she took out contacts. I could have kept on looking at her for hours.
“Where’s the hellhound?” she said as she wiped makeup off with a towelette.
“In the living room, sleeping it off.”
“Perhaps you should take her to meetings as well.”
“I try to not judge Izzy’s lifestyle choices.”
“She would be the one living creature you don’t judge.”
“I resemble that remark.”
She threw away the towelette. “Did Woody ever explain things any more about the other night?”
“Are you asking if he ever attempted to justify us nearly getting killed?”
“That’s exactly what I said, Henry.”
“He won’t. He’s told me all he thinks I need to know, and he’s likely correct about that.”
“You don’t have a curiosity about his reasoning?”
“I do, but curiosity about Woody is like curiosity about the origins of man, or lesbian yoga; there are some things we’re just not meant to know.”
“I don’t know how you two function. I’m not ignorant about male relationships, and I know that men can be friends for decades without really knowing one another, but you two put your lives in jeopardy and pretend it’s nothing.”
“We never pretend it’s nothing; every time one of us almost gets the other one killed, we are damn well aware of it. But it doesn’t change we’re willing to do it. Woody has his bizarre code of honor, like he’s a goddamn samurai, and because he’s my friend, I end up with it by proxy.”
“Except Woody doesn’t have a cute brunette girlfriend who would not be happy at all about his death and/or dismemberment. How do you think I’d feel finding out you got the shit kicked out of you by bikers, and I’m two thousand miles away?”
“This is one of those questions where there’s no right answer, isn’t it?”
“No, there’s completely a correct answer. The answer is, if you don’t care enough about yourself not to get killed, then I would hope you care enough about me not to let it happen.”
“Are you suggesting I don’t care about you?”
“I’m not. I know you care about me me. But care about yourself enough to not want to die.”
“We must be doing this wrong if you think I want to die. Let me assure you wholeheartedly I like being on this side of the soil.”
“What more could a woman want to hear?”
“So out of curiosity, since we’re on video chat and everything, what are the odds of you and I getting saucy on here?”
She gave me the look no end of students had surely received, for saying what was undoubtedly the stupidest thing she had ever heard
“For real, Henry?” she said. “You want to have webcam sex?”
“I’m sure webcam sex isn’t a real thing since you’re there and I’m here and I’m not looking to have sex with a webcam. I’m simply saying I’m looking at your shoulders and I know how easily those straps slide down.”
She smiled a coy little expression, mostly one side of her mouth, and reached up with one hand and slipped a strap down, letting it fall. She tugged at the strap, pulling down the front of the nightgown, revealing more of herself.
I responded with the biological push and blood flow you would expect.
Lily repeated the action with the other strap, her arms now crossing her chest, tugging at the nightgown until the hint of cleavage swelled, and frankly, it wasn’t the only thing swelling.
She bent over and moved her face closer to the phone until it was all I could see on my screen. Her mouth parted, and her tongue pushed past her teeth and darted across her lips.
“Henry?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Go to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I love you.”
She disconnected the call, and the screen went blank.
Goddammit.
Not because she ended the call before things got good. Because she loved me. And I loved her.
7
I had physical therapy the next morning. I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d keep going. My gimpy knee was about as good as it would get, which meant I wouldn’t win a foot race, but most of my limp had faded, and with it most of the pain. It was almost like I was a regular human being. Almost.
My phone rang on the walk out to my car. A local number—I recognized the exchange—but I didn’t know who it was, so I let it go. They didn’t leave a voice mail, so fuck ’em, I figured. I made one of those little bets we do with ourselves it was someone wanting to sell me insurance.
My cholesterol felt low, so I drove over to Tudor’s for a steak, egg, and cheese biscuit. My phone rang again as I idled in the drive-through. This time it was Woody’s name on the caller ID.
“Yo,” I said, because I’m cool that way.
“Meet me at the Chandler County courthouse.” His even tone implied this wasn’t a request.
“What’s going on now?”
“The sheriff is looking for Dave,” he said. “They said he shot the club president for the Highway Saints.”
The Chandler County courthouse was a stone-and-steel thing that felt like it should have come with its own techno soundtrack for chase scenes. The county’s previous courthouse had predated the Civil War, and it had burned down five or six years earlier after a gas leak caught fire and
went boom. What the county got in its place was an anonymous-looking pile of metal and rubble that could have been planted anywhere else in the world and would have blended in. It almost made your heart ache to think about.
News crews clustered like cold sores outside the courthouse, a jumble of video cameras and newspaper photographers. Woody stood about fifty feet away, next to a marble World War II memorial, smoking.
“They caught Dave about a half hour ago,” he said. “They’re bringing him in. Sheriff’s department and the state police. They found him holed up at his hunting cabin. He didn’t put up a fight.”
“What happened?”
“The Saints have a place on the other side of town, in the back half of a wrecker company. Jimmy Omaha was coming out of the building after midnight, headed for his hog, when Dave’s work van plowed through the gate, slammed to a stop, and someone popped two shots into him. Security cameras at the wrecker lot caught the whole goddamn thing.”
“How do you know this shit already?”
“Dave’s wife, Sheila, called me. She said he went back yesterday afternoon to the Dew Drop to get his van, and it was gone.”
“He file a police report?”
“Hadn’t gotten to it yet.”
“How’d he get to the cabin?”
“Sheila said he took his four-wheeler up there yesterday afternoon, after he saw the van was gone. He was up in the cabin all night. That’s where the police found him this morning.”
“This a thing he does much, vanish overnight into the hills?”
“She says it is. He’s been stressed out more of late. Crabby, hard to deal with. She sounded like she’d been grateful for the break.”
A line of sheriff’s cruisers came around the block and up the street toward the courthouse. They parked and uniforms got out. Sheriff Gibbs came out of the lead vehicle, circled the cruiser, and opened the back to lead Dave out. Dave wore camo shorts and a WVU T-shirt and a baseball cap, his wrists cuffed and bound behind his back.
The phalanx of news people stirred, and Woody and I rushed to get closer, threading our way through the crowd. Crews rumbled back like a storm cloud, moving toward the police as Gibbs and his deputies walked across the street and headed toward the courthouse stairs. The cameras came to life, and questions blended together into a white noise like its own language. Did you kill Jimmy Omaha? What was your association with the Saints? Why was your van in the video? Was it related to the bar fight on Saturday night?
Dave kept his head down and his mouth shut. Gibbs’s hand rested firmly on Dave’s cuffs. He glanced over and saw us and shook his head and steered Dave straight up the courthouse steps, disappearing inside.
The next step was Dave’s arraignment in front of the magistrate. Clerks shuffled papers around as we trailed the news crews into the room. The TV guys set up off to the side, and the newspaper guys crouched down out of range of the video cameras.
Woody and I stepped to the back of the room.
“What’s Dave do for a living?” I said.
“Owns an HVAC company,” Woody said.
“Sheila ever tell you why he’s got such a hard-on against the Saints?”
“She has not.”
“And you’ve asked?”
“I have. She says there’s history there, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.”
Sheriff’s deputies led Dave into the courtroom and planted him in front of the judge’s bench. Dave kept his eyes turned to the floor. The news guys craned their cameras toward Dave.
The county attorney was already at his table, chatting it up with Sheriff Gibbs. The two men would whisper to one another like schoolgirls playing Telephone, then lean away and crack out giant laughs.
The magistrate was a short woman with gray hair and small glasses and a nameplate at her desk that read, “Magistrate Delores Walker.”
A third man came in. He looked like he was skipping a third-period English test. His face was shiny and round, his blond hair long and floppy in front and cut short and tight in the back and the sides. His dark gray suit didn’t fit him right, with the cuffs on the jacket too long and the hem on the pants too high. He introduced himself to Dave. Dave nodded and turned his attention back to the floor tile.
“I suppose that’s Dave’s attorney,” I said.
“I hate he’s missing the prom committee meeting for this.”
The magistrate called everyone up. Dave’s attorney shuffled papers from his briefcase, didn’t pay attention to where he was going, tripped, and tumbled into a deputy. The deputy stood his ground, gave the attorney a peeved look, and pushed him back upright. The attorney smiled like he’d been caught with his dick hanging from his pants, brushed himself off, and took a stance on the other side of Dave.
Walker said, “What have we got, Mr. Ferrell?”
The county attorney said, “The state accuses Dave Miller, forty-two, of Raineyville, of murder in the first degree. Mr. Miller shot and killed James Murdock, also known as ‘Jimmy Omaha,’ a member of the Highway Saints.”
To Dave’s attorney, Walker said, “Defense?”
“Your Honor, my client was at a hunting cabin at the time of Mr. Murdock’s death.”
“Nothing’s in season right now, so what exactly was he hunting?”
“My client doesn’t need an excuse to be alone in the hills, does he, Your Honor?”
“What about an alibi? He have one of those?”
“He was alone, Your Honor.”
Ferrell said, “The state has videotape footage of Mr. Miller’s van pulling up into the parking lot of the Saints’ place of business, and of Mr. Miller reaching out of the van window and shooting Mr. Murdock point blank.”
Walker nodded. “Bail’s set for a half-million dollars.”
The public defender coughed like he had choked on a cracker. “Your Honor, that’s excessive. My client has roots in the community, is a business owner, and he’s not a flight risk.”
“Your client’s accused of killing a member of the Highway Saints,” the magistrate said. “I can guarantee he’s safer in the regional jail than he would be on the street.”
8
The sheriff’s office was on the third floor of the courthouse. We walked over after the deputies took Dave away, the attorneys exchanged bland pleasantries, and the news people went out to find what other shit they could talk about to fill up the six o’clock broadcast.
Woody and I sat in the waiting area, getting eyeballed by the sheriff’s secretary, who looked as if she remembered when the state was still part of Virginia. She tapped away on a typewriter like it was 1962 as Gibbs came around the corner and saw us and said, “Should have known you two would show up.”
“That’s everyone’s first reaction,” I said. “You learn to love us, though.”
“That’ll be a dark day indeed, I suspect,” he said as he led us inside.
Framed photos and certificates covered the walls of Gibbs’s office. He aged through the photos—he’d been trim and dark-haired once, with a tendency toward wide lapels and polyester pants back in the day. In one he was hunting, holding up a dead deer’s head to show off the antlers. In another photo he was at a law enforcement event in uniform with several other sheriffs. He had an enclosed case on one wall, with a signed baseball bat and a baseball inside. The baseball was signed by Elbie Fletcher, an old Pirates first baseman from the thirties and forties.
He smiled when he caught me checking it out. “Baseball fan?”
“To a degree. I don’t keep up the way I want to.”
“Neither do I. The game’s not the same as when I was younger. That’s an old man way of looking at things, but it’s the truth. I still want it to be a thing that they make the movies about, where the guys who play, they were who we wanted to be when we grew up, and that’s not it now. Now it’s computer modules and steroids and names I can’t pronounce.”
“Makes a man miss Pete Rose, doesn’t it?”
He smiled wistfully. “It does
. The haircut, less so.” Gibbs took a seat behind his desk. “But to business. You are here to discuss Dave, I would guess.”
“It’s not like we don’t enjoy your company, Sheriff,” I said.
“Been at this long enough to know damn few folks hang around because they like my personality.”
Woody took one of the visitors’ chairs. “How convinced are you that Dave shot Jimmy Omaha?”
Gibbs reached into a desk drawer and brought out a baseball he tossed back and forth between his hands. “We’ve got video of Dave’s van crashing through the front gate, pulling up as Jimmy’s walking out, and someone reaches out through the driver’s side window with a gun and shoots Jimmy three times, right in the head. I’ve seen men hang for less.”
I shrugged. “When I was with the state police, we used to see ’em walk free on more than that. It’s not always the evidence; it’s the twelve people who couldn’t get out of jury duty.”
Woody said, “You sure that was Dave’s arm?”
Gibbs said, “It’s an arm on fuzzy security video. What I do know is it’s Dave’s van. Clear as day you see the name and telephone number for his HVAC place on the back when it pulls up. Compound that with Dave stirring shit at the Dew Drop the other night, and things look bleak, I’ll tell you that.”
“Can we see the video?” I said.
“State police have it. Besides, what interest you have in watching chunks of Jimmy’s brain splatter across the wall?”
“Because we don’t think Dave killed him,” Woody said.
I started to say something like “We? Who’s ‘we’? You got a frog in your pocket?” I opted to take the road less traveled instead, and kept my mouth closed.
I planted my ass in the other visitor chair. It was old, the seat worn smooth and shiny from decades of other asses, with a perfect divot right down the middle. “What reason Dave got to kill Jimmy Omaha?”
“Whatever reason he had to want to start a fight Saturday night,” Gibbs said. “And since he never came into the office, we never got to chat about that, and he wasn’t what you’d call ‘verbose’ when we found him this morning. I don’t suppose he cared enough to share with you boys that night we met, did he?”
Friend of the Devil Page 4