She Talks to Angels

by James D F Hannah

  “No you won’t,” Woody said. “Your guys, they’re not good enough.”

  Hall stared at Woody like Woody had materialized whole from a fog. “I’m sorry, but who the fuck are you?”

  Miller said, “You saying you have better people than the United States government?”

  “I’m saying I know a guy. And yes, I’m also saying the guy I know, he’s better than your guys. He used to be one of your guys.”

  “Think your guy wants to work for Uncle Sam, fight for truth and justice, and all of that jazz?”

  “He might be persuaded.”

  “What would help with the persuading?”

  Woody glanced at me.

  I said, “The Feds intervene with the prosecuting attorney’s office on Dagny Charles’s behalf. She serves no prison time, and she gets psychiatric help, ends up in a good facility. She worked for her father, she knows how his business was run, and she’ll be worth more to you this way.”

  “Fuck you,” Hall said. “Do you—”

  “Also, Gillespie had henchmen,” I said. “I’m positive they killed a woman several nights ago. I don’t have anything in the way of proof of it, though.”

  “Henchmen?” Hall said. “Who the fuck says henchmen? Mitchell Gillespie wasn’t a goddamn Bond villain.”

  “This a hunch you’ve got?” Miller said. “Because hunches ain’t worth shit in this world.”

  “These are the guys who did Gillespie’s dirty work,” I said. “There’s no way they’ll go down for the murder, but they have to go down for something. This woman had a kid.”

  “Does it matter what we bury them for?”

  “Nope, so long as you bury them deep.”

  “It’s a deal,” Miller said.

  Hall was ready to explode. “Goddammit, Miller, you do not have the authority for that. And we know nothing about whoever the hell it is this person is talking about.” He pointed his hand at Woody. “Who the fuck is he even talking about?”

  “Agent Hall, I will make you go sit in the car again if you don’t calm your tits,” Miller said. “This is just a concerned citizen offering assistance in an investigation.” Miller fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Woody. “Have your guy call us.”

  Woody took the card and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Certainly.”

  Miller patted Hall on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  Hall kept his ground. His eyes bounced back and forth between Woody and me. Finally, he shook his head, and he and Miller got back into the Explorer and drove away.

  As the tail lights faded into red pinpoints in the distance, I said, “You know him?”

  “I think we might have killed people together,” Woody said. “There may have been a coup as well.” He shrugged. “You lose track of faces after a while.”

  “Of course. What’s a coup between friends? Though he’s FBI. Those guys don’t do . . . whatever the hell it was you used to do.”

  “He’s not a Feeb. At best, he’s OGA.”

  “Which is?”

  “Other Government Agency. One of those ones no one talks about because, like you said, violations of international law. Besides, in this day and age, Henry, who the hell stays at the same job his whole life?”

  47

  “I’m thinking about getting a dog,” Lily said. She was cutting deep divots in the ground, pulling out the dirt, and dropping in geraniums. At least, I thought they were geraniums. Those are the purple ones, right? I couldn’t say for sure. I just knew that, with her hair pulled back, wearing a Parker County High T-shirt and shorts that would have caused gasps among most of her parents, and her face smudged with dirt from when she would try to wipe away the sweat, Lily looked as beautiful as I had ever seen her.

  “Why do you want a dog?” I said. I leaned against the porch railing, drinking a Diet Coke. The Saturday sun sat low in the sky, and we had spent most of the morning doing adult business before getting up and making breakfast and watching movies. Lily broke down at some point and said she needed to get actual work done.

  Izzy and Lily had bonded with ease since my dog-horse started visiting. Izzy got along with anyone who didn’t interfere with her naps and would sneak her food. Neither seemed to be an issue. At that moment, Izzy snored on Lily’s couch.

  “I might enjoy the companionship,” she said. “Be nice to have an additional presence around.”

  I pulled a clump of weeds from the flower beds. Lily had given me specific instructions on what to pull and what not to pull since I had no idea what was a weed and what wasn’t. “You never felt the need to have a dog, did you?”

  “No, but I like Izzy. I can see where people enjoy having dogs.”

  “You sound like you’re studying it for a research grant.”

  “I approach matters academically. It’s how I look at you and me.”

  I wiped sweat off my forehead. “Things seem to be going well as far as that goes.”

  She smiled. “Yes, love, they are. You can take a breath. I’m not dumping you.”

  I did a sigh of relief. The week after Dagny killing Mitchell Gillespie and shooting Brooklyn Charles had been trying. There’d been no end to investigative authorities—Feds, state police, the fire marshal, TV reporters—wanting to chat, and it wore me out. I was still sleeping on Billy’s couch. Lily offered to let me stay at her place, but I wasn’t prepared for a long-term encampment. Truth be told, sleeping on Billy’s couch was an improvement over the previous situation, but I missed my own space. No one in their forties should have to endure living under their parent’s roof.

  How Lily would deal with the aftermath of everything had been a question mark for me. Viewing it all in hindsight, she took it as well as could have been expected. She still let me come over. I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

  After the flowers, we headed inside and I put a pizza in the oven while she showered, and poured myself a glass of ice tea. She came into the kitchen wearing clean shorts and a tank top, her hair still wet and finger-combed, as I brought the pizza out of the oven.

  She asked me what would happen with Deacon and Dagny. I told her the truth, which was that I didn’t have a clue. Woody sent names to Miller—guys who wouldn’t sing and dance at the opportunity to work for the government but who would do it because they owed Woody a favor—and I’d gotten the sense that Miller was a straight shooter. I hoped Dagny didn’t do jail time. She didn’t deserve it. At least, not for shooting Gillespie. If anything, she’d served a public good with that.

  Shooting Brooklyn, that was another matter. The surgeons at Parker General removed a length of Brooklyn’s large intestine, so she would tote around a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. Would probably be a big barrier on the seduction process, I suspected. But she admitted to giving Deacon the heroin, an action fueled by anger and rage at the idea that her daughter had been taken away from her. That she had barely acknowledged her daughter for years didn’t cross her mind.

  Robert Charles started telling the Feds everything about Mitchell Gillespie and literal decades’ worth of real estate scams, bank fraud, and financial manipulation. Gillespie’s fingers were in many pots, with institutions across the nation, and high-paid execs shitting their shorts as they waited for inevitable indictments.

  That left just Deacon, now awake and confessing to killing Meadow. It seemed a monumental relief to him, coming out from underneath the burden of guilt. He told the cops everything. There weren’t any formal charges yet, but they were coming. There were hoops to be jumped through to reverse Eddie Dolan’s conviction, and to charge Deacon, but it would happen.

  The part about Gillespie was harder. The abuse had been ongoing for years, Deacon said. Started when he was about ten. Heroin had been part of his escape process—a shitty way to process hurt because he had no way to go to his father and explain to him about “Uncle Mitch.” When Gillespie discovered Deacon’s addiction, heroin became a bartering tactic and the cruelest of ironies: Gillespie led to th
e addiction, then he threw fuel on the fire. And because God is a comedian playing to an audience afraid to laugh, Deacon’s addictions led to Gillespie’s death. The wheel always comes back around.

  You’d have imagined it would have ended as Deacon got older, but somewhere in his head, Gillespie’s abuse became someone showing him affection and love he didn’t find anywhere else. Deacon was staring at years of psychiatric help, and odds weren’t good the prison system would provide him with what he would need.

  Katie Dolan called to tell me thanks. It was doubtful Eddie would be a free man before his mother died, but at the least she would know her son was innocent. I hoped there was comfort in that for her.

  Which seemed to leave just Lily and me to figure us out. We ate pizza and laughed and touched one another’s hands. We watched another movie that night—Unforgiven, because she liked Westerns—and crawled into bed.

  In the darkness, our bodies next to one another, her heart throbbed softly against me, and I tried almost to will my heartbeat to match the march of her own.

  “It’s a shame, all of those secrets they all thought they needed to keep,” Lily said.

  “It’s a thing people do.”

  “My students, every day, that’s what they do is keep secrets. About who they are, about what they do, what they want, what they want to be. There’s no amount of social media and selfies that will show who they are because they know if they do that, they’ve given away something they can’t get back. Everything is a fight for self-preservation with them. I feel like Meadow reached the point where she didn’t want to hide anymore. She tired of the secrets. She saw them with her family, her friends, the people around her, and it became too much. Meadow was a balloon ready to pop.”

  “Then why would Deacon kill her?”

  “You don’t think he did?”

  “No idea. He doesn’t remember doing it. To tell you the truth, everything makes less sense now than when I started. But for all of that kid’s curses, this isn’t one of them.”

  “Curses?”

  I sat up on one side, looking at her. “Consider what he has left. If he goes to prison, he won’t survive. If he doesn’t go to prison, he’s got no one here to help, and he’s not out of the woods. He’s got a lot of journey still ahead of him. He is a young man out of options, no matter how much money he has or doesn’t have. Robert Charles went on and on about having nothing left, but that’s precisely what he’s left his son with, is nothing.”

  She pressed herself closer, reached around and took my arm and brought it around her, clutching it to her chest. I smelled her floral-scented shampoo. Or maybe I imagined I still smelled the flowers from earlier. I wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. It was all I thought about as we drifted off to sleep.

  48

  At first, I didn’t hear my phone ring. It was almost midnight, and I was in the Aztek, across the street from the fire department, waiting on Jimmy Knowles to leave. Jimmy was the guy who owed Cyrus—the fire department chief—ninety bucks. I was not waiting to muscle him, if that’s what you’re thinking—Jesus, people, but even I’ve got more self-respect than that. No, I had other business with Jimmy Knowles.

  (Also, a life tip: if you’ve “got business” with someone after 10 p.m. that involves sitting in a parked car and waiting for them to exit a building, that “business” is shifty as fuck. #themoreyouknow.)

  Light shone through the building windows, and music blasted from within. It sounded like The Kentucky Headhunters. At least they had that going for them.

  So what with my laser-like intensity focused on the fire department, it took a while for the sound of the cell phone ringing to register. I glanced over and watched it dance across the passenger seat. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it anyway.

  “Hey, tough guy,” the voice said. “Been busting any skulls?”

  It was Ashley. It took a beat for me to realize it was her. There was less edge to her voice and less sense of confrontation. You could have mistaken her for the teenager she was.

  “Hey, yourself,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “Oh, you know, school and all the standard shit.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Fine, I suppose. Beats blow jobs for a living. Except algebra.”

  “Algebra blows. Metaphorically speaking.”

  “Check you out with your fancy words.”

  “Gotta keep up with you. You get educated, you won’t want to hang out with me.”

  There was a long pause. “Yeah, whatever, Henry,” she said.

  “So are you settled in at Mary Alice’s?”

  “I am. The other girls are cunts, but they’re coming out of shitty situations, too, so I can’t say much.”

  “How’s Mary Alice?”

  “She’s glorious, to tell the truth. She might be the best person I’ve ever met in my life. Though most everyone I’ve met is an asshole, so that bar’s not very high.”

  “Hang around long enough and you get to meet a better class of asshole.”

  She laughed. “Better than you?”

  “I’m middle-bar asshole.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Yes, you can. Vienna waits for you.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Are they not teaching you the classics, you crazy child? About the Bard of Long Island, Billy Joel?”

  “I literally have no clue what you’re talking about, and I’m regretting calling you.”

  “Regret is a common thread among people who call me. Though I have to ask: was there a motive in this call?”

  The grinding of gears from the other end was almost audible.

  “I wanted to say thanks,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Nothing to thank me for, though. You’d have figured your way out of there.”

  “Maybe. I Googled that girl you told me about. The one who worked at the motel.”

  “Meadow.”

  “Yeah. It hit me hard. She was pretty and people liked her and she had money, and she still managed to end up dead. Me, I got nothing but me. What would have happened if I’d hung around?”

  “You’re a tough cookie. You’d have gotten yourself out.”

  “Jesus, a ‘tough cookie’? Who calls someone that?”

  “I realize now what a mistake it was.”

  Another pause.

  “Did you see the cops broke up the Washington Inn this morning?” she said.

  It had made national news—a human trafficking ring in Appalachia. Seventeen girls, most over eighteen, if by a hair, but a couple still teenagers, most of them homeless runaways. There was an extensive webcam operation running out of the place, and underage prostitution. An APB was out for Thomas “Tommy” Clark. The name “Gerald Black” hadn’t been mentioned. I didn’t hold my breath it would be, either.

  “Tommy’s photo wasn’t very flattering,” I said.

  “Not like he had much to work with.”

  “Harsh. True, but still harsh.”

  “Did you do that? Tell the police?”

  “I told a friend in the state police. Dominos fell into place from then on.”

  “You live to stir shit, don’t you, Henry?”

  “The motel had been going on long enough.”

  “Do you try to save everyone?”

  “No. Just whoever I can.”

  “There’s only so many life preservers on any ship. That’s what Mary Alice says, is you have to learn to swim on your own, and sometimes that involves getting thrown in the water.”

  “She’s a wise woman.”

  “She’s not bad.”

  The noise from the fire department was quieting down. They’d be breaking it up for the night. I wouldn’t have a big window of opportunity to catch Jimmy Knowles another time.

  “I might get a tattoo,” Ashley said.

  “Something tasteful, I hope. Vines and a dragon and Celtic symbols? And aren’t you a wee bit young to get a tattoo, anyway?”
r />   “I’m planning ahead.”

  “Used to be ‘planning ahead’ meant you were thinking about retirement, not body art. And nothing from the neck above. Those are never good.”

  “Jesus, no. It won’t be for the world to see. It’s a thing for me, and not someone else.”

  The doors opened across the street and men filtered out. They tended to be older, bigger guys, with a smattering of dudes who looked barely old enough to shave, all dressed in jeans and dark blue T-shirts with the Parker County VFD logo on them. I recognized the assistant chief from the bank and ducked down until he drove away, then I scanned the crowd for Jimmy Knowles’s face.

  “That’s the way to go,” I said. “Ashley, I hate to do this, but—”

  “No, it’s cool. Go bust heads and shit.”

  “If you wanna talk, you know to call me.”

  “I do. Behave, Henry.”

  “Never,” I said, and cut the call off.

  Jimmy Knowles looked every bit like a diesel mechanic, which made sense because that’s what he was. I’m sure he was many other things, but he paid bills working on diesel engines. He was broad-shouldered and broad everywhere else until he resembled a cylinder with limbs. Light from the streetlamp glistened off his greasy-splattered baseball cap. He waved bye to a couple of the other guys, spit out a glob of tobacco juice, and headed toward a king-cab pickup on a jacked-up suspension, his hands buried deep into his pockets.

  I rushed toward him and yelled out his name. He cranked his head around to look back at me.

  “Can I help you with something, mister?” he said. He looked friendly, but the tone was edged, defensive, ready to strike.

  “You can,” I said. “Where’s Cyrus at tonight?”

  “No clue. Not my job to keep track of the chief.”

  “Nailing the chief’s wife; where’s that fall into your responsibilities?”

  Knowles wanted to act surprised, but he didn’t have the face for it. What he had was a face like a mongoose, full of long, stretched-out features and big eyes. He wasn’t a good-looking man, but then again, Cyrus wasn’t much to look at. I suppose Mrs. Thompson had a type, and some piss-poor judgment. Then again, Mrs. Thompson had a tendency toward shapeless frocks, naked yoga in her living room, and not closing her curtains.