She Talks to Angels

by James D F Hannah

  “Be careful. You’ll be shunned at the county Republican meetings.”

  “I should be so fortunate. They all look at Brooklyn like kids look at those coin-operated rides outside a grocery store; everyone’s clamoring for a ride, and it doesn’t seem to cost much. Brooklyn does what she wants to do. I can control that no more than I can control the weather.”

  “You’ve both figured out your own partnerships with Gillespie. She’s banging him like a screen door, and you’re taking his money.”

  “Mitchell is the richest man in Parker County. He’s one of the richest men in the state. It’s wealth where you watch everything the same way you used to watch your ant farm when you were a kid. But that’s not Mitch. Not how he is. He likes his toys too much.”

  “What toys?”

  “Us. People. The wrecked and the wretched. Mitchell never stopped being the kid who tapped on the glass of his ant farm and shook it up and down, disturbed the colony, and destroyed the world inside—a little something to remind those ants who God was.” He sipped at his drink. “He told me he sent for you and told you to stop looking into Meadow’s murder. I bet you expected him to write you a check.”

  “It seems to be the way you people deal with problems.”

  “Not Mitchell. Those Buddhist monks, they meditate and they fast and they evolve past the concept of hunger or pain? That’s Mitchell but with money. He’s moved beyond the point where throwing cash at a situation seems like a solution, because he doesn’t understand what money is like anymore. His idea of a ‘cashless society’ is one where he owns everything.”

  “Must be a nice situation somewhere like Parker County.”

  “He doesn’t notice it. You think he knows people are poor or they’re hungry, that they’re shooting heroin to ignore they’ve got nothing else in their lives? Means nothing to him. The only reason I mean anything to him is because we have a shared history. We knew one another when we were only rich. He moved past that to the level where they make reality shows about your kids.”

  “If he’s so rich, why use your bank for this deal? Why not one of those big multi-national things out in New York?”

  “Because he knows I need it. The bank needs it. I’m the living embodiment of trickle-down economics, where Gillespie’s meals get bigger and bigger, and I hope the crumbs he drops are enough to keep me alive. Besides, when it all started, it was supposed to be about building a golf course. That’s the funny thing: Mitchell had planned to actually build the goddamn thing. It was something for him to bide his time with, give him something to do. He wanted this huge thing built because he was tired of having to travel somewhere to play a decent game of golf.”

  “Hell of a lot of waste and destruction on people’s lives to ensure a decent tee time.”

  “Like I said, Mitchell doesn’t have to care anymore. Most of that land was empty anyway. Thousands of acres of shitty, hilly land that no one wanted and God didn’t give a fuck about.”

  “Except it was sitting on top of a fortune in natural gas.”

  Charles sipped at his drink. “We got the first geological report, and it was nothing. We were proceeding as normal, but then we got a second report. Someone at the firm we hired noticed an abnormality in the initial report, a number that looked off, so they performed a second investigation, and there it was. Billions of dollars in natural gas.”

  Woody said, “Enough to take Gillespie away from being one of the richest men in the state to one of the richest in the nation, I bet.”

  Charles glanced at Woody, then at me. “Who the fuck is this hippie?”

  “My faithful Indian companion,” I said. “Keep talking.”

  “When we got the second report, Mitchell knew those mineral rights would cost him millions to the owners, so he couldn’t let anyone know about them.”

  “But he would still make a fortune,” Woody said. “Why not just pay for the rights?”

  “For the same reason that, when phone booths were around, everyone checked the coin return, just in case there was something there. Did you need the quarter? Probably not. You did it for the game aspect of it. That quarter, it wouldn’t make a difference to you, but you always checked for that quarter. You get a coupon for fifty cents off frozen peas. That fifty cents gonna change your life? Hell no. But goddammit you want that fifty cents. Think that quarter or that fifty cents, and that’s those millions to Mitchell Gillespie. This is his money we’re talking about here, and he isn’t about to let anyone cheat him out of it. It’s how rich people get rich: by spending enough money to make more money and keeping whatever it was they made. Hell, Mitchell would have a big vault of cash, swim around it like Scrooge McDuck if he could.”

  “I never understood how that worked,” Woody said. “Not like coins are liquid or anything. Shit’s still all going to be solid, you jump in there. You do a swan dive into a money pit full of nickels, you’re gonna break your neck when you hit.”

  “They’re cartoon ducks who have business empires,” I said. “Physics is the least of the issues there.” Back to Charles. “When we took the paperwork, Gillespie sent his guys after me?”

  “No, I sent them,” Charles said. “He called me that afternoon, said files and a cell phone were missing, and he went insane. He was ready to have you put down like a dog then and there, and I talked him into letting me handle it. Those guys owed me a favor, and I knew you’d be at the hospital with Dagny and Deacon, so I sent them to try to convince you to listen to reason.”

  “You need to hire a better class of criminal. Those guys were nowhere close to good. Plus, I lost a car key because of them.”

  “My understanding was they’d have beaten the ever-loving fuck out of you if some woman hadn’t shown up and pulled a gun.”

  “We must remember the story differently.”

  “We must. But when it became apparent you weren’t going to be persuaded, Mitchell dispatched his goons after you.”

  “I’d already had the displeasure of their company. I can’t say I’m thrilled about them burning my house to the ground, but they beat my dog, too. The house wasn’t much of a loss, but I’m pissed as fuck about my dog.” I pointed back at Woody. “He’s even more pissed.”

  Woody nodded. “Like you wouldn’t even understand.”

  Charles nursed his drink. “Why’d you take the cell phone?”

  I didn’t answer, and instead I watched Charles for a sign he knew something about the cell phone. He leaned against the counter, sipping Jameson’s, a tired and broken man. The question wasn’t weighted, not gauged to get a particular response. This was curiosity. That’s all.

  I swallowed one set of words hanging in my mouth and searched for another. “What do you mean?”

  “You got the paperwork; why take Mitchell’s cell phone?”

  “He said I took his cell phone?”

  Charles shook his head. “Jesus, but you are the worst fucking detective ever. Who the hell else’s phone would it be, dumbass?”

  By now you’re likely thinking to yourself, This is where Henry drops the dime on Mitchell and tells Charles that the cell phone was Meadow’s. Bring on the angry vigilante justice, am I right?

  Except I didn’t tell Charles. And like every other goddamn bad idea I’ve ever had, the reason seemed good at the time. See, I knew Meadow’s cell phone tied Mitchell to April’s murder, and there had to be reasons for Mitchell wanting that phone enough to kill for it. But I didn’t know what the reason was yet, and until I did, telling Charles would do nothing other than compound problems. Charles was already an unstable molecule, a keg of dynamite waiting to explode, and telling him about the phone—and opening the emotions suppressed for years—would only light that fuse. It wasn’t an explosion I was ready to cope with yet. I needed to handle things one at a time.

  Charles set his drink down. “This has gotten to be too much. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It should have been something simple.”

  “Fraud and murder are never as simple
as we’d like to make them.”

  I snatched the drink and threw the contents down the drain. Charles had a second where he might work to stir up anger, frustration, indignation, or something resembling a spine, but the effort seemed more than he could manage. Instead, he let his head drop and exhaled a sigh.

  I rinsed the glass out and filled it with water and handed it to Charles. “It’s important to stay hydrated when your world is getting ready to collapse around you.”

  He gulped the water down like a child and wiped his mouth with his forearm. “Goddammit.” He jutted a forefinger at me. “In hindsight, I should have let Mitchell kill you. All you’ve done is push and push into shit that was never any of your business.”

  “Like you paying off Logue to make sure Dolan took the plea and went to prison.”

  “He called me, told me he’d confessed it all. You should have seen his eyes light up when I handed him that envelope of cash. I could have had him for half the amount.” He glared at me. “Logue knew when to take the money and get the fuck out of the way.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t use Jerry Logue as my moral barometer. Outside of it being illegal, it was a hell of a lot of advocacy to ensure your daughter’s alleged killer went to prison.”

  Charles spat out a chuckle. “It’s a fucking shame you’re not as smart as you think you are, Malone. If you were, you’d still only be half as stupid as you should be. You see, I didn’t pay that money to put my daughter’s killer in prison; I paid money to make sure her killer stayed free.”

  Jesus, but I was afraid of what was coming . . .

  “Are you saying—”

  Charles nodded. “Yeah. Deacon killed Meadow.”

  40

  How Meadow comes into possession of heroin, how she gets busted, how she agrees to testify against Parker County drug dealers.

  Deacon.

  Deacon’s deep in the hole, mired in the spiral of shooting up, coming down, jonesing for the next hit, wash, rinse, repeat. Spends hours locked in his room getting high and staring at the empty void that was his existence. Heroin: cheap, plentiful, easy to get, and it doesn’t take much for a rich kid to come up with the money for the next ride.

  Meadow stays clean. Going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings—several counties over, where no one knows her or her family. College around the corner for her. Her new life. Her new start.

  But Deacon comes to her, presses money in her hand, tells her he needs a fix. Pleads and begs and tells her he’ll do anything.

  Meadow knows this feeling. She remembers it from motel rooms in Charleston, the gnawing at the bottom recesses of her gut, the thirst she can’t quench, the hunger pulling her in a thousand directions, the itch you can’t scratch without one more hit. Because that’s what she always told herself. Just one more time. Every time is “just one more time.”

  She talks in meetings about how hard it is to watch Deacon struggle. Seeing him and knowing all the pain he’s going through. They tell her she can’t fix him. Offer help, offer support, don’t enable, know he’s got to do it himself.

  But she sees Deacon—twitching, red-rimmed eyes pushed into sunken sockets, pale skin covered in sores, hurting in a way she recognized and remembered—and she couldn’t say no.

  So she buys the heroin. Turns down an offer for a free hit for herself. Meadow nearly throws up. Disgusted to think of what she had done to herself, the person she let herself become.

  She doesn’t notice her tail light’s out. The state trooper does, and notices the baggie poking out from underneath the passenger seat. Boom. There’s enough heroin there to put Meadow in prison. Real prison time.

  She says she’ll testify. Part of it’s a hope she’ll get rid of some local drug dealers, make it harder for Deacon to score. Give him a chance to get better, she hopes.

  Ignoring how both nature and drug addicts abhor a vacuum, and there’s always a next one to show up. She’s naïve, optimistic, but she’s eighteen, and that’s one of those last times you get to own that shit.

  Meadow, to her credit, never sells her brother out. Never rats him out to her father, or to Dagny. Robert berates her at every opportunity, telling her what she’s put at risk with the family business and the family name and the family reputation. What he doesn’t question is why his supposedly clean daughter is out scoring heroin again. Brooklyn stays drunk and shakes her head every time they pass by one another. This is about the level of support she’s come to expect from her mother. Dagny is consumed with being Dagny, caring for Deacon and working at the bank and ensuring the gears turn, and being a Charles continues to appear effortless and easy. Deacon is Deacon, which is a polite way of saying he’s a disaster at a low simmer, never erupting into full catastrophe, always needing to be watched lest he evaporate into nothing.

  Meadow cannot fucking wait to get the hell out of this goddamn town.

  The night she dies, Deacon overhears a phone conversation between Meadow and Eddie Dolan. Deacon confronts her. Tells her how stupid she was to go see “that retard”—Deacon’s words—a day away from leaving Parker County. Escaping is the better word. But meeting Dolan at a landfill? Couldn’t find anywhere sketchier to meet?

  Deacon wants to come with her.

  Which seems ridiculous to Meadow. She knows Eddie. Knows how he is. Knows she will be safe.

  Deacon, not caring. Threatens to tell their father if she doesn’t let him go.

  Meadow acquiesces. They drive out to the landfill. And Deacon, swallowed by the all-consuming blackness of his addictions, who barely has fucking room to breathe and—when life smiles at him—to take a shit, shoots up once they get there and park. Meadow sees this, and she’s furious. She tells him she’s tired of his shit, to get his life together, wondering what will happen when she’s not around to keep an eye on him.

  A bit of reality hits him square between the eyes, like the fucking Hammer of the Gods. Here he is, mid-20s, an alleged adult, and his little sister rips him a fresh, shiny one.

  What more do you want, Deacon? What more do you think anyone’s got to give you? You’re draining us all dry. Not money. Our fucking hearts. You’re breaking our hearts, because you don’t love yourself enough to stop this shit, and we can’t make you, and you’re going to make us all fucking watch you die, and there’s not a goddamn thing any of us can do to make you stop. Not me, not Daddy, not Dagny, no one. Just you.

  Now here’s where shit gets weird. Blending and blurring, life and time and space puréed until the thin little walls are gone and everything’s one consistency. Like the old days, when you were turning the channels on the TV—back in the Stone Age when you had to turn an actual fucking knob—and you could hold it between channels, and there’d be pictures from two different shows, shadowy and blurry, action lying on top of action, with the dialogue overlapping, and nothing made sense except it looked like Dan Tanna from Vegas was talking to Mr. Drummond on Diff’rent Strokes.

  Deacon lies in that chemical swirl, heroin pumping through his veins, chugging through his brain—no sensation of good, or bad, or any-fucking-thing, which was the whole goddamn point, striking numbness, a sensation of nothing. No light, no dark, no hope, no fear, no anything. Here’s the sweet spot, the bull’s-eye on the addict target. It was a good time to be alive, though you didn’t feel alive because you felt nothing.

  Can you dig it?

  The coming down, that’s the worst part. You claw yourself out of your own grave, working through from the wrong side of the dirt. Sputtering your way upward, pushing through the inky black void you’ve worked so hard to find, and feeling those first golden tendrils of sunlight on your face, hearing the world around you, feeling the warmth and . . .

  Feeling. It was all that motherfucking feeling again. Which isn’t what you wanted. But goddammit if it wasn’t there again, and the itch starts right then—the want, the desire, the need not to feel again, to push it all back, to make all of it go away.

  Deacon pulls himself through all this, already wa
nting another hit, looking forward to knocking out those receptors in his brain, to make the chattering monkeys shut up, when he realizes he’s not in the back seat of Meadow’s car. He’s on the ground. The stench of spoiled food and dead animals and decay and rot crawls into his nostrils and jolts him back to reality, to the here-and-now, and he realizes immediately he is not prepared for this shit.

  There’s blood on his hands. None of that metaphorical shit, either, about guilt or regret. No, this is real-life blood, dried dark and crusty in the crevices of his nail beds and creases of his fingers. He rolls over and sees Meadow’s face blindly looking back at him. At least, what used to be Meadow. Now it’s just a clump of brain and bone and blood. And her eyes. Staring at him. Empty of anything that made Meadow, Meadow. No love. No hope. No fear. Nothing. That feeling that Deacon’s always looking for, always chasing after. That’s all Meadow gets now. Forever.

  Deacon feeling something, however, because you don’t come out of a heroin binge with your sister dead next to you and not feel shit. Deacon can’t stop the things he’s feeling. Can’t put this into words.

  He can’t breathe. Heart hammering. He crawls away from whatever it is that used to be Meadow, far enough away to realize part of the stink he smelled was Meadow.

  All this feeling, and he does a thing he hasn’t done in years. Since his mother’s death. Deacon cries.

  Here’s what Deacon knows: This. Ain’t. Good. He sees the pipe next to Meadow, with pieces of her clinging to the metal. Deacon works harder not to vomit than he has at anything else ever. Puking isn’t a big deal for a heroin addict. The commonality of puking is more than the commonality of bowel movements—a way for the body to purge at least some stuff that shouldn’t be there. But Deacon works to hold his stuff together. Pushing it all back. Because of Meadow.

  Wipes the tears from his eyes and gives himself the once-over. He’s covered in blood. All over his clothes. All over his hands. He checks himself over for cuts, wounds, anything that might mean—