Nail's Crossing

by Kris Lackey

  “Yes, I am.”

  “If he’s over here, he’s layin’ low.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  Antlers was ninety miles east—a pretty big investment. It all hinged on Prince Albert. Maytubby shook his head at that mental sentence. Did Creech just remember that sign from some poaching expedition? Or was he telling the truth and just forgot what road it was on?

  On his way east, he found Bond parked in the shade just outside Wapanucka. “Calf fries and scrambled.”

  “Even I don’t eat calf fries.”

  “Make you tall and strong.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “Hannah, nobody’s going to have enough road to reach the speed limit, much less break it.”

  “Psychological warfare.”

  “I talked to Raleigh Creech.”

  “He spit on your boots?”

  “No, but he smelled like last week’s roadkill. Said he kicked Love’s sister out for cheating on him.”

  Bond’s piercing laugh was startling and infectious.

  “He spied on her with his rifle scope,” Maytubby said through giggles. She laughed harder. “Said he saw her riding in a ‘poontang boat.’”

  Bond was pink now and pounding the cruiser’s headliner. When she caught her breath, she said, “’Course he did,” and wiped her eyes. Her giggles returned. “Probably a Crappie Pro.”

  “Camo,” he blurted as he fell into a wheezing laugh.

  Passing motorists stared at them. They took a while to catch their breath.

  “Creech told me Love is holed up on the Kiamichi, by Antlers. Said he was telling me to get back at Patty Love. I asked some cops there about the landmarks in his directions. Some are where Creech puts them. Nobody’s seen Love, except maybe the woman in Stratford who said she saw him in Ardmore.”

  “You believe that subhuman?”

  “His stalking tale was so good, I feel like I owe him.”

  “So you don’t believe him?”

  “Not really.” Glancing at Bond’s radar readout, which was flashing really pitiful numbers in the thirties, Maytubby was reminded of the white Cobalt. “Hey, what did that preacher you stopped look like?”

  “Stick-up red hair, kind of thin. Top shirt button buttoned. Oh, something about one of his eyes.” She looked at Maytubby’s face. “Left eye. It kind of …” With her left thumb and index finger she drew an imaginary extension of her eye toward her temple.

  “I think I’ve seen this fellow before. Show me his DPS photo.” She clicked at her computer until a photo popped up. “That’s the guy. He was driving an old gray pickup like the one the Stratford woman said Love was driving in Ardmore. Specifically, the redhead was driving a gray-primered ’66 Ford.”

  “Plate?”

  “Intentionally ignored it because I thought the woman was lying.”

  “Mm.”

  “I know. Was there a dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror?”

  “No.”

  “Plate?”

  She scrolled down her records and gave it to him. He memorized it. “Name and address for the license?”

  He tried not to lead the witness. “Anything physically unusual about the plate?”

  She looked down and to her right. “Didn’t look fake. Paint was even. Lot of dust.”

  “Had the dust settled evenly on it?”

  “Oh, man.” Bond sighed and put her hand over her mouth. A car passed doing eighteen miles an hour. “There were darker patches—square, matter of fact.”

  “Like what duct tape for a lost license plate would make.”

  She nodded.

  “Your preacher might have been driving the white Cobalt we think picked up Love when we were chasing him in the Kullihoma grounds.”

  Bond tapped at her computer, handed Maytubby a slip of paper with the driver’s name, David Woodley, and his address on South Jefferson in Tushka. When he read the street name, the driver’s name set off a distant tintinnabulation, which in turn reminded him to ask if Bond remembered the dealer logo.”

  “All I remember is, I couldn’t make sense of the spelling. Some weird name.”

  “F-U-S-I-L-I-E-R?”

  She shrugged.

  “You run the VIN?”

  “No. Here.” She tapped on her keyboard. “This car was purchased by Woodley in Jennings, Louisiana.”

  “From Bubba Fusilier.”

  “Is Woodley a Cajun name?”

  “I doubt it. David Woodley was an LSU quarterback who went pro. Played for Miami and Pittsburgh in the eighties. Died in the early aughts.”

  “Sounds fishy, huh?”

  “Yep. But why pick a famous name as your alias?”

  “He looks young enough, he might have heard the name but not connected it to the player.”

  “True. Or maybe a little inside joke he could risk because he thought Woodley was such a dinosaur, nobody would remember him.”

  “Anything on him?”

  She tapped some more. “No.”

  “Did Waitin’ Satan have a church address stamped on his back page?”

  “I didn’t read that far.” She pulled open the ashtray and plucked out the paper ball, gave it to Maytubby. He pulled on some latex gloves, slowly unpacked the ball, and spread the pages flat against his palm. At the bottom of the back page, in a blank space reserved for the church’s name and address, a red-inked rubber stamp had skidded a little when it hit the page: Sun Ray Gospel Fellowship. “Hannah, could you Google this Oklahoma City address?”

  Sweat stung his eyes as he leaned in to look at her computer screen. “The Sun Ray Fellowship isn’t two blocks from the Western Sky Motel. You remember, that’s one of the places Tate called on her disposable cell.” Bond turned up the cruiser AC. She got the street view, and they peered at a tattered building that had, in some former life, been a fast-food restaurant. Its steel awnings, peeling several coats and colors of paint, winged away from their boxy fuselage. In yellow tempera paint, a stylized sunrise radiated beams across the broad canted plate glass of the tiny dining room. The name of the church was spelled out in red blocked capitals between the sun rays. They Googled for a website and found none, only some fragmentary references to the church.

  “Are there circuit preachers anymore?” Hannah said.

  “Some little churches need them. Some of my family go to churches with circuit preachers.”

  “Might explain how Woodley met White Lexus.”

  “What is this, Pride and Prejudice? While you’re at Google Maps …” He pointed to the radar readout. “Six miles an hour. Really? Could we have a street view of Woodley’s address in Tushka?”

  The Google camera car had visited Tushka when a nasty thunderstorm loomed in the southwest. As the cursor jerked down Jefferson Street, the town’s main drag, they could see lightning bolts in some frames. “Cool,” Maytubby said.

  Bond held a flat palm toward the screen. “You think somebody lives in that?”

  The image was three years old, so Maytubby didn’t bother looking at the driveway or the mailbox. He did see that three years ago, the Atoka County Health Department had posted an orange condemnation notice on the house at that address.

  He shook his head. “Not much help. At least Tushka’s on the road to Antlers. I’ll put Woodley’s vehicle and plate out there.”

  Bond’s radar buzzed, blinking 52. Maytubby backed away from her cruiser as her strobes came on.

  “See?” She leaned toward him, pointing a thumb at the speeder. “I mess with their minds.”

  Chapter 10

  Maytubby never passed up a chance to take Chicken Fight Road, which was to Oklahoma as Music Street was to New Orleans. It made a little shortcut to US 69, the truck-hammered Tulsa-to-Dallas conduit that, for a quarter mile, became the main drag of Tushka, a town
best known locally as the site of the Choctaw stomp grounds. His turn indicator clicked monotonously as dozens of rumbling semis passed going the other way, blocking a left turn into the porte cochère chez Woodley. His between-trucks glimpses of the place showed that the condemnation notice had not moved and that the weeds growing in the driveway ruts were waist high.

  On the porch, he squinted under his hand. No furniture inside—nothing but blistered linoleum, an empty shoe box with no lid, and a scattering of rat turds. Nothing in the backyard but a curious neighbor at the shared cyclone fence. Maytubby waved at him and asked if he knew who owned the house and if anyone had lived here recently.

  The thin man of seventy or so, shirtless, in clean chinos held up by green galluses, pointed to the house. “That house,” he said regally, “airn’ inhabited. Ner has it been since the owner was diseased. Her name was Opal Noll. She was the dead end of her race.”

  Maytubby thanked the man and kicked the cruiser over some section roads, rejoining Oklahoma 3 at Darwin and crawling through downtown Antlers, past the Phoenix Theatre and Pirate Bail Bonds. He stopped for the only traffic light in Pushmataha County. Ethel Road tunneled into the Kiamichi’s riparian thicket and occasionally emerged into a bright clearing.

  A Rustin Concrete plant coated the tree leaves with gray dust for a half mile. Maytubby had read that when H. C. Rustin founded the business in the 1950s, he gave all the credit to Jesus Christ, who had sent him dreams with every detail of the business he was chosen to build—right down to the floor plan.

  When he reached the dead end of Ethel Road without finding Prince Albert in or on a can, Maytubby looked for him on 3. On his third pass over a three-mile stretch, he saw a sliver of bullet-riddled rust leaning against a fence post: a silhouette of the prince, no taller than a ten-year-old. Maytubby had been looking for a billboard. From it, only one road led toward the river: the same one he had driven down from Ethel. Back up it he went, crossing Ethel and keeping his eye peeled for elk antlers.

  The road shrank to a pair of ruts and juked as it neared the river. When the yellow dead end sign appeared around a bend, he resolved to go home. It was getting dusky. He backed to do a bootleg turn. Two points into the three-point turn, there was the skull, up in a burr oak, lips painted on it, just as Creech had said. It crossed Maytubby’s mind that such a thing might be the country relative of tennis shoes on a telephone wire. It would mean lots of weird encounters at deer camps. The shale-crunching turn didn’t do much for the cause of stealth, but a cop driving a shiny black Charger with lighthorse stenciled on the fender didn’t have much to lose. Still, out of habit, he backed the cruiser around the bend from the drive and into some underbrush.

  The dirt drive turned upward, away from the river, and disappeared into some pines. Sometime long ago when there was rain, the drive had spilled sand over the county road’s chat. Many cars had passed the drive since anyone drove in or out of it.

  Maytubby told his dispatcher what he was doing. She could see exactly where he was—could call in the coordinates to vaporize the place or his car.

  He opened his car door, and the heat rolled over him. It would still be over a hundred at nine. He left his campaign hat on the seat and tied the blue bandanna around his crown. He could work better without the head oven, and he liked the flair of rebellion. Walking along the drive, he saw, between recent tread marks, little patches imprinted by the thick Ground Hawg lugs. Tread design matched the prints in Majesty Tate’s drive. So Love had likely been here sometime before Nub Jump’s mules dragged his pickup out of Kullihoma. Likely after, too, in one of the other vehicles.

  Maytubby pulled the little tape measure and digital camera out of his shirt pocket, laid the tape over the tread marks, and photographed them. One of the treads might have been the low-end Cobalt, which wore a 195mm—about eight inches. He walked into the woods and paralleled the drive, pausing now and then to listen. Nothing but birdsong and distant river sounds. The shadows deepened but didn’t cut the heat at all.

  It was a long driveway. After topping the little river bluff, it fell again toward the river before it reached a cottage someone had started decades ago and never finished. Tar paper peeled off the stained plywood walls, and warped window frames bugged out on every side. The roof was covered with Visqueen anchored by stones. A zany stovepipe canted dangerously over the plastic sheeting. The house had no electric service. There were no meth RVs or any other vehicles. The only outbuilding was an outhouse, distinguished by a paneled door painted orange. Everybody in the house would have to pass through it, so Maytubby studied the footprints. Herman Survivors had certainly marched in this parade.

  The windows were not blacked out, as Maytubby had expected, but hung with rotten bedsheets and canvas tarpaulin. Missing panes had been replaced by chunks cut from Styrofoam ice chests and taped in place. He knocked on the front door and announced himself. Not even a creak. He looked into every room and saw no camp stoves or ammonia bottles or tubing in any of them. No spoons or syringes. People had been living here.

  Torn blankets, scored by slivers of evening sunlight, lay over the two foul mattresses in both rooms, and cast-off men’s clothes littered the floor. A Franklin woodstove stood in the center of the house, with skillets on both lids. In the kitchen sink, which was served by a hand pump built into the counter, crusted pans and open food cans were piled as high as they could go. Fast-food litter covered the dining table and much of the floor. Possibly a hundred empty liquor bottles lay on the floor. A kerosene lamp with a smutched globe stood on an upended fruit crate. Some empty boxes of Marlboro reds gaped on top of the trash. Love’s brand, but that didn’t mean much. At least Maytubby wouldn’t have to dig through the trash.

  For all its Pap Finn squalor, the place was disappointingly light on evidence of criminal enterprise—no guns, no booty, no needles, no sticks of dynamite. But the men who slept here did not have regular jobs. It wasn’t clear how often they slept here. The crust on the pots and cans was hard and cracked. Mice scurried over the Sonic and Burger Barn wrappers.

  Out on the road, chat popped. Maytubby sprinted into the brush and toward the sound, hoping to get a glimpse of the vehicle. Brambles snared his legs twice, sent him sprawling on hot earth. And the house was a long way from the road. Nearing the last rise before the hill fell to the road, he heard the vehicle—by its sound, a small car—accelerate quickly and spin on the gravel. Chat buckshot clattered against the dead end sign. The driver had seen the cruiser.

  Maytubby broke through a stand of redbud saplings and out into the road. The fleeing car was veiled by dust. All he could say for certain was that it was a light-colored compact. It had slewed through the dirt at the end of the driveway, erasing its own tread marks.

  When the cruiser was jolting over the shale at forty, he snatched off his bandanna and wiped his face and neck with it. At Edna Road, which was paved, he looked all three directions, saw no dust plume on the unpaved road straight ahead of him, and decided on Edna Road west, which led toward HQ in Ada. As he passed fifty, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a dusting of bright litter on the right. He stopped quickly, fired the strobes, and backed down the grass shoulder until the cruiser was on top of the mess. He opened his door and snatched up a folded sheet of slick paper inked red and white. Satan was in the red. And he was waitin’. Maytubby had just paid a visit to the Reverend Woodley’s parsonage.

  After rebroadcasting the Cobalt’s possible connection to Love, its plate number, and a description of Woodley, Maytubby hit Oklahoma 3 for the eighty-mile trip. He charged his cell from the cruiser’s lighter. After filling up at a new prefab truck stop in Atoka, he called Les Fox, who told him that neither medical examiner nor Feds had said boo all day. Then he called Jill Milton, told her where he was, and asked if ten thirty would be too late for a visit.

  “For a visit, yes.”

  “How about a quote visit?”

  “It would n
ot be too late for that. Oh, hey!”

  “Yes?”

  “I remembered where I saw that white Lexus—or its twin. Solomon Stoddard was driving it in Paoli.”

  “Something to chew on.”

  “As you traverse the darkling plain.”

  “As I drive through Tupelo.”

  A bank thermometer blinked an orange 101 when Maytubby slowed into Coalgate. Evening chill. He glanced at Wiley Bates’ house. It was dark, even the porch. Bates’ pickup was gone. His boat was gone. It was not the weekend.

  Maytubby braked, made a U-turn on South Broadway, and pulled up to Lorenza Mercante’s liquor store. It was ten o’clock—closing time for all liquor stores in the state—and she was dropping a two-by-four into its cradles, barring the door. Seeing Maytubby get out of his cruiser, she brought the board back up so he could come inside.

  “I saw you go past and then turn around right quick,” she said. “I know what you want.” She tossed her head toward Bates’ house. “Wish it was something else. He emptied his house into his pickup about an hour ago, hitched up the new boat.” She smiled at him.

  “Wha …?”

  “Just messin’ with you. North, this time.”

  “Thanks a lot, Ms. Mercante.”

  “Lorenza. What’s going on?”

  He stared at his and Mercante’s reflections in the plate glass. Headlights on the highway flashed across Bates’ windows. “I wish I knew.”

  “Wolf Eyes still on the loose?”

  “Unless he fell down a well.”

  “You’re still going to kick his ass for me, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She smiled.

  Chapter 11

  After a day of driving through the poorest counties in Oklahoma, Maytubby felt a jolt of disorientation when his headlights swept the Tudor, Georgian, and Spanish colonial mansions that studded the crown of King’s Road. The Fittstown boom of 1934 had built most of them, their oil-patch upstart owners now long dead. Long dead the chauffeur who first occupied the garage apartment where Jill Milton now lived. Gone to rust the yellow Bentley or Duesenberg or whatever he once steered.