Then: if the state cops were looking at him, why hadn't he felt anything at work? There hadn't been any curious looks, or veiled questions. Could the state cops be holding it that close, not even letting the sheriff in on it?
Or-how about this-they'd found out that he'd been hanging around Calb's, and in the process of checking on him, they'd talked to Letty and she'd mentioned seeing him at the dump, dragging the bags. Of course, putting him with Calb wouldn't get them to Deon and Jane, because he'd kept that connection very quiet.
Think.
All right, here's another possibility: it was all a coincidence. She was out there trapping, and the cops had taken her out. But why would the cops do that? It wasn't like they were a taxi service.
Think.
Better talk to Mom.
The day had started simply enough. He'd slept late after a strenuous evening with Katina Lewis, had then gotten up, gotten dressed, and had gone into the office to see if anything had happened with the murders of the Sorrells.
Micky James was working the comm center: "The state boys are back," James said. "They've been asked in to cover the Sorrell murders, too. They're going to be up around Broderick. What the hell you think is happening?"
"Dope dealing up at the res, if you ask me," Singleton said. "It's all gotta be tied together."
Back home, he'd decided that snooping was probably more dangerous than doing nothing-and his thoughts turned to the Caddy out in his garage. He needed to do some fine sanding on the last clear coat, and doing that kind of work always smoothed him out, along with the car. Gave him a chance to think.
In the garage, he realized that his breathing gear was still out at Calb's, and the paint he was using always specified breathing gear. That meant a trip to Broderick.
He'd gone to Broderick without a thought in his mind. As he came into town, he saw a silver SUV pulling out of the body shop, heading out on the highway, north. He pulled into the spot that the SUV had just left and found the shop deserted. Not unusual for a Sunday. He ran the door up with his remote control, went inside, and got the breather gear. Didn't feel the slightest vibration from the silver truck.
"Loren?" A woman's voice called to him. He looked back to his right, and saw an older woman walking across the highway from the church. "Hey," she called. "Did you talk to Katina?"
"Not since last night. She said she was heading back here… " And for a moment, Singleton thought the woman was going to tell him that Katina was missing. If she'd gone missing, for any reason, he might be cooked.
"She was here, until ten minutes ago," the woman said. She was an older woman, who looked like a Saturday Evening Post caricature of Grandma. "She tried to call you-she's probably down at your place, now. She said if you came by, looking for her, to tell you that she'd wait."
"All right."
"Did you talk to the state policemen?"
"No… "
"They were just here. They've been going around town."
"Silver truck?"
The woman nodded. "Yes. You just missed them."
They were headed north. To Letty West's? He thanked the woman, and as soon as she was back in the church, headed north out of town, after the silver SUV. He was no more than fifteen minutes behind it, he thought. He took it slow going out, looking for their car at West's house. It wasn't there-in fact, there was no car at West's. Of course, they might have come back past Calb's when he was getting the breathing gear, but he hadn't seen or heard any traffic, and the shop was quiet.
They were headed north…
Then it hit him. Shit. The dump. He denied it to himself — Couldn't be the dump.
He wheeled the Caddy out of the parking lot and put his foot down. The Cadillac would make a hundred and ten. He had to fight the undulating highway and the soft suspension, but he stuck with it, pushing the car as hard as he could. The dump road came up in four minutes, with no sign of the silver truck. He turned the corner, eased down the road… saw nothing until he came to the entry.
Turned in.
There they were, caught like deer in the headlights. The whole goddamned bunch of them, standing around the SUV.
He lifted a hand, mind gone blank, backed out, and raced away…
The scene went round and round in Singleton's brain, and he couldn't stop it. There were too many permutations, but it all came back to one problem: he didn't believe in coincidence. The state cops had been out there with Letty West for a reason.
He'd put the two girls four feet down in the center of the landfill, under the clay cap. He'd dug through to the garbage layers, shoved the bodies in, refilled the holes and carefully tamped down the clay. Even if he went out to look for the bodies, now, he'd be lucky to get within twenty feet of them. Letty West, if she'd been back in the woods and had seen him cutting the holes, would never be able to put the cops on the exact spot.
Still: if they knew he'd been involved, they'd find a way to get him. Christ, they might hit the house. In fact, that's the first thing they'd do. If they found the money, he'd be gone.
And what else did Letty know? Had she seen his Caddy at Deon's? He'd parked it in the back, but he'd seen her walking down the creek behind the place. Had she seen it there? He'd been there often enough. Did she know he'd gone to Vegas with James Ramone and later with Deon and Jane?
He better get a story. He needed a story, and a good one. And he needed to think about Letty West.
Goddamnit. He looked at himself, caught his own eyes in the rearview mirror. He'd never been like this. Could this be fear?
Katina was at his house, sitting on the back stoop in the cold, a brown grocery sack next to her leg. He pulled into his driveway and she stood up, hugging herself across the chest, jiggling up and down, trying to keep warm.
"Where've you been?"
"Had to go in for a couple of hours," he said. "Got guys running all over the place with this Deon thing." He got his keys out, unlocked the house, and she picked up the sack and followed him inside. He walked on through to the front hall, took off his coat, hung it, leaned back against the wall, and pulled off his boots.
"Something wrong?" she asked.
He didn't exactly jump, but felt himself twitch. "Huh?"
"You look a little stressed."
"Just, uh, wish I didn't have to work tonight," he said. "Anything new with the Deon thing? From Gene?"
"Not that I've heard. The state police have been going around town, talking to people. Talked to Ruth for quite a while. She didn't have much to tell them."
"Good. Be dumb."
"The Lord looks over the innocent," she said. "I brought a couple of rib-eyes and some veggies. I thought we could eat here."
"That'd be good," he said.
They had a quiet afternoon, Katina cooking, Singleton looking through car trader magazines. Calb had a computer on his desk, and he'd shown Singleton how to get online and browse car-rehab sites. Singleton did it, from time to time, but preferred paper. He trusted the magazines-he liked the color and he liked to lie on his couch and look at a photo for a long time, thinking what he might have done with the same car. He had a hard time doing it this afternoon: he kept thinking about the scene at the dump, with the two cops and Letty West.
He finally got up and went into the hall to call Mom; he got no answer. Probably at the casino, he thought-she usually was on Sunday nights. She liked her slots. Since she'd come into the money, she'd moved up to the dollar machines.
He went back to the couch and dozed fitfully, the odors from the kitchen getting better and better, almost driving the Letty West demon out of his head. Then Katina called him into the kitchen and he found a tablecloth on the kitchen table, and a couple of white candles, in fancy glass candleholders. He said, "Whoa."
"I thought you'd like it," Katina said. She blushed a little, as though she were shy about it, or maybe it was the heat from the stove. She'd made a salad with white seeds that looked like sunflower seeds, but weren't, and mashed potatoes to go with the stea
k.
Singleton sat down and said, "Pretty okay," then popped up and said, "You forgot the ketchup."
She said grace, as she always did, and then was quiet, until they were halfway through dinner, when she asked, "Have you ever thought about having a child?"
He said, "What?"
Singleton didn't know exactly what had happened, there, during dinner and afterward. They'd watched television and then wound up in bed, again, which was fine with him-but he'd gotten up to watch the ten o'clock news, and to get into his uniform, and she'd left, light-footed and apparently lighthearted, singing to herself.
He watched the news: they were still talking about Sorrell, and they had a quick piece of tape with Letty West, but it was old tape that he'd been seeing for a couple of days. He dozed for a while, sitting in front of the tube in the La-Z-Boy. When he woke up, he groped around for his cigarettes, found them, found the matchbox, and ripped the match down the igniter strip.
In the flare of the match, it occurred to him that the Sorrell killings had been no problem at all. He'd just gone and done it. Nothing pointed at him and a threat had been eliminated.
Truth be told, he realized as he stared into the flame, he'd enjoyed knocking down the Sorrells. Nothing to do with his mother-he'd enjoyed it for himself. Here was that king-shit Sorrell guy, all the money in the world, all big and smart and walking around in his house in silk pajamas, and here was Singleton, with his little ole mother…
But who had the gun, king shit? Who acted fast?
He knocked them down in his mind, knocked them down again, then swore as the flame bit down to his fingers.
"Goddamnit," he said, aloud. He lit another match, lit the cigarette.
Letty West,he thought, waving the match out. Up there in the night, with nobody but her mama.
After lucas and Del dropped her at her house, Letty changed clothes and then went out to the highway and hitched a ride into Armstrong. She wasn't stupid about it. She always waited until she recognized the truck before she put her thumb out. In that part of the county, she recognized one in twenty, and they always stopped for her.
At the library, she got a computer and went online, called up the Google search engine, entered how to with TV reporter and got some strange websites.
Three boys from her class came in, two of them wearing Vikings sweatshirts and the third wearing a sweatshirt that said Scouts, which was the high school nickname. One of the Vikings boys was named Don, and Letty considered him somewhat desirable. She felt a pressure from them, almost like a pressure on her face. They got on computers, two of them facing her, and they all clicked along through the net.
Two hours later, disturbed by what she'd read on the websites, and carrying fifty pages of printout, she hitched back home with an eighty-three-year-old drunk who'd spent the evening with a lady friend, and couldn't keep his truck straight on the street. She flagged him down, and he let her drive. She dropped him at his house, halfway up to Broderick, and told him she'd come over in the morning with the truck, when he was sober.
As she went through Broderick, she stopped at the store and bought a bottle of milk and a box of cereal. The house was dark when she got back. She lit it up, turned down the heat, ate a quick bowl of cereal, and then went back into her mother's bedroom, to look at herself in the mirror.
She wasn't bad-looking, she decided. Actually, she was quite attractive. But she would need to soften up her face. She looked good now, but if she kept making grim lines, she could wind up looking like a crocodile. She had no makeup skills at all, but the women at the hair salon could fix that. They had a whole library of books and magazines, and an ocean of experience. Letty had never spent a dime on makeup. She'd start now.
The web sites had stressed that journalism wasn't very important, but skills were. That was her next assignment: print out everything she could find on TV schools.
Then she thought: School. Homework. Social studies. She climbed the stairs, found her textbook, and looked up the questions she was supposed to answer. Then she thought, They can't hold it against me if I'm helping Lucas and Del…
She dumped the book, went back downstairs, turned on the TV, watched for a while, reading the printouts, and every half hour or so went to look at herself in the mirror some more. She hardly ever did that-this was not a matter of vanity, but a matter of technique. Of skills. She found that if she used her mother's compact, she could hold it next to her eye and get a good right-angle profile in the dresser mirror.
One of the web sites had said that you had to look like TV. The site said that every female host of the Today show had been chosen because she looked like she'd be good at fellatio.
She'd carefully written fellatio on a piece of paper and carried it over to the library's New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and looked the word up: "Sucking or licking of a sexual partner's penis."
She thought, Huh, and, a second later, Every one of them? Then she'd ripped the piece of paper into a hundred bits, in case one of the boys from her class might see it, thrown the tiny bits of paper into the wastebasket, and changed pages in the dictionary.
She was watching an old Letterman rerun, and critiquing technique, when headlights swept through the yard. After a moment, they died, and she walked out to the front door. Boots clunked across the porch, the door rattled, and her mother stepped inside.
Martha West was moderately loaded-bars weren't open on Sunday so, like the old man, she'd also done her drinking privately. "Hi, honey. Whose truck is that?"
"Reese Culver. He was drinking and asked me to drive him. I'm gonna take it back in the morning."
"Okay. You got traps out?"
"Yeah, down at the dump."
"You better get upstairs, then, get to bed. It's after eleven o'clock," Martha said. Letty would have to get up at five o'clock to make it out to the dump. "You had something to eat?"
"Had some Honey Bunches of Oats," Letty said. She stood up and stretched. "There's some left, and I got a bottle of milk."
Martha yawned. "Okay. Get to bed."
Letty took the social studies book up the stairs with her, closed her bedroom door, dug a notebook out of her school pack, sprawled on the bed, and started working through the questions. If Lucas and Del didn't come through, she'd need the answers. Besides, with Reese's truck outside, she could sleep an extra forty-five minutes in the morning, and take the truck up to the dump before she returned it.
The problem with Broderick, Singleton thought, was that there weren't any back roads to the place. If you wanted to go there, you went on Highway 36, or you didn't go. He took the.380. He'd have to get rid of it, he thought, and the thought pained him. He'd paid $350 for it at a gun show in Fargo, and he hated to lose it. It'd worked just fine with the Sorrells. Couldn't ask for more, not for $350, not in this world.
At eleven o'clock, with the sky black with the daily overcast, he went on the air to tell the sleepy dispatcher that he'd take a quick run down south, to show the flag-the sheriff emphasized that when nothing was going on, he wanted his deputies out to be seen. The dispatcher said okay and went away. He turned north.
Broderick showed scattered speckles of light when he crept into the south side of town. He pulled in behind Calb's shop and got out, let the wind bite at him for a moment, listening. Then, satisfied that he was alone, he pulled his parka up around his head, hunched his shoulders, and started off. He'd brought a penlight, and used it in quick flicks to guide himself along the back of the building, then past the old power transfer station, through an empty lot behind the darkened convenience store, and finally out on the open highway.
The West house was maybe six hundred yards down the road, a quarter-mile to a half-mile. Not far. Once or twice around the track at Custer High. He might have been walking into a coal pit, for as much as he could see. Not a single vehicle passed in either direction. The only sound was the wind, the scuffle of his feet on the road, and his own breathing.
When he reached the West house, he fou
nd that it was not entirely dark. Light glowed through a shade on a north-facing window on the second floor, and a variety of small lights-a TV power light, a bathroom night light, a green light that might have been on a telephone, a small row of red lights that looked like a power supply-actually gave his dilated eyes enough light to navigate.
Moving slowly, he felt with his feet for the track that crossed the culvert into the driveway. When he got close, he sensed a bulk to his right. Martha's Jeep? Too big. Pickup. Goddammit. Who was here? He moved around behind it, looked for any movement in the house, then squirted the penlight at the back of the truck.
He recognized it, all right. The dented corner panels, where old Reese Culver tended to back into solid objects, like phone poles. What was the old man doing here, with virtually all the lights out? There'd been rumors, off-and-on, that Martha West might fuck for money, but nobody paid them much attention. It was generally taken as wishful thinking in a town that needed somebody who fucked for money. But Reese Culver? If he was staying the night, the old fart, he had to be paying.
He thought about it for a minute, two minutes. Shit. He put his hand in the pocket, gripped the pistol, took it out once to make sure he wouldn't snag the pocket, put it back in, and walked up to the porch.
Martha West had just crawled into bed when she heard the knock at the door. She thought the knock was Letty, upstairs, until it came a second time. She looked at a clock. Almost midnight. Who was it, at this time of night? — and a sudden chill went through her shoulders and she thought: Deon Cash and Jane Warr. Just at midnight. The knock came a third time, and she picked up a ratty old terrycloth robe and threw it on, and walked through the darkened front room to the front door.
The porch light was burned out, so she turned on the interior light and looked out through the glass cut-out on the front door. The first thing she saw was the embroidered star on the parka, and then Loren Singleton's face. No ghosts, anyway. Had something happened?
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