I kept it vague, because I couldn’t tell Carlees where Gentry got the information about Barnwell and Ligett. I couldn’t tell him I’d had anything to do with planning it.
“The only thing I know is that he went to Arkansas. Somewhere in Little River County. He wouldn’t let me go with him,” I said. I was a pretty good liar, but that sounded flimsy as hell to me.
“Jesus. Yeah. He’d want to protect you. And he was supposed to come back this morning?”
“I thought he’d be back hours ago, and I don’t know what to do. I’m in Missouri right now. I was going to call the police down there or hospitals, but since I’m not family, I wasn’t sure they would tell me anything.”
“No, it’s good you called me and not our mom. I’ll call the sheriff down there and see what I can find out. I’ll let you know what I hear,” Carlees said.
“Okay, thank you.” I knew I wasn’t going to hear from Carlees again, and I didn’t think I could stand to. He wouldn’t be so nice once he knew what had happened.
I was sitting there, looking at Edrard’s phone, when the bathroom door opened and a woman said, “What the—who—uh, Rick?”
I stood up and turned around, just as Rhys came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. The woman was in a towel, too, with another wrapped around her hair.
“Jesus Christ, Zee. I was seriously getting worried,” he said. Then he looked at the stuff I’d gathered up to pack. “Where are Gentry and Edrard?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t—” I had to take a deep breath, because I wasn’t ready for how big the lie needed to be. “They wouldn’t let me go. They left me in Murfreesboro. They left me there and they never came back.”
“What are you talking about? They left you?”
“They decided it was too dangerous. They didn’t want me to go. I was supposed to wait for them, but they didn’t come back.”
“God, if they were smart, they ditched you there and drove back to Wichita,” Rhys said. As shitty as that was, it was true. They should’ve done that. “How did you get back?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. They left me with Gentry’s truck, and the two of them went in Edrard’s truck, and they didn’t come back. I just called Gentry’s brother. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Wait, what about your cousin?”
“He stayed in Murfreesboro with me,” I said.
Rhys started pacing up and down, still in his towel, while the woman stared at him, then me, then him. I went back to packing.
“This is your fault,” he said. “This is all your fault.”
“I know. Of course, it’s my fault.”
“We need to call the police and tell them what kind of crazy-ass thing you talked Gentry and Edrard into.”
“Rick, do you think we should—”
“Will you shut up, Tiffany? I need to think.”
Tiffany winced, but instead of getting mad, she shuffled back to the bathroom and, after a minute, turned on the blow-dryer. I stuffed a few more things in Gentry’s bag and zipped it up.
“I’m calling the police.” Rhys picked up his phone off the dresser. “You can explain it to them.”
“Yeah, well, I hope you don’t mind getting arrested, because they’ll arrest you, too.”
“Why would they arrest me?”
“You were here when we planned it,” I said.
“I fucking was not!”
The hair dryer cut off and Tiffany said, “Rick, is everything okay?”
“Dry your goddamn hair, Tiff,” he said.
She turned the dryer back on, maybe just as white noise to drown us out.
“You planned it,” Rhys said. “And you and Gentry both told me not to call the police.”
“For the same reason I’m telling you not to call the police now,” I said. “I’m going to have a lot of questions to answer anyway and, unless you want to answer a lot of questions, you should stay out of it.”
“You deserve to go to jail.”
I couldn’t argue with him, so I did something I hated myself for. There was going to be a lot more of that in my future.
“Please, I am begging you not to call the police. If I go to jail, there’s going to be nobody to take care of my mother, who is disabled, and nobody to take care of my nephew, who is only five. Because if Gentry and Edrard didn’t come back, I don’t think my sister is coming back. For all I know she’s dead. And I can’t—” I couldn’t cry on command and I was too scared to cry for real, because I wasn’t sure I could stop if I got started. I took a step closer to Rhys, who backed up against the dresser like I’d threatened him. I took another couple steps until we were face-to-face.
“I can’t abandon them. Please. What do you want? Money? I can get you some money. Do you want me to beg you?” I got down on my knees, even though I wasn’t sure how I would get back up. A bolt of pain ran up my leg, and a muscle spasm followed it, so that it felt like my phoenix was coming to life. “Okay, I’m begging you. Whatever you want. Just please don’t call the cops.”
Rhys looked down at me the way men like him always looked down at me. Somewhere between contempt and curiosity with a side of maybe. Honestly, I think if Tiffany hadn’t been there, he would have made me suck him off.
“Jesus Christ. We have to call somebody,” he said, but he put his phone back on the dresser. We meant me.
“I already called Gentry’s brother. Should I call Rosalinda?”
“God. I guess so. I need to get out of here. If we’re not telling the police, I’m going home. I can’t have anything to do with this. Whatever happens with Gentry and Edrard, this is your fuckup. This is on you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Tiff, are you ready to go?” he yelled.
The hair dryer turned off and she said, “Sure. I can be ready in a couple minutes.”
Apparently Tiff was the same kind of sucker as LaReigne. She’d driven all that way to let Rhys talk like shit to her.
To give them a chance to get dressed, I went out and got in the truck. I’d brought Gentry and Edrard’s phones with me, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to turn Edrard’s phone on. I imagined the kind of text messages his wife had been sending him for the last twelve hours. Surely she’d been expecting to hear from him. In Gentry’s contacts she was under D for Dame Rosalinda.
I was prepared for her to think I was Gentry, like Carlees had, and when she answered, she said, “What have you done with my husband?”
I told her exactly what I’d told Carlees, but it was harder, knowing how badly Edrard had been hurt. She yelled at me, but after I told her I didn’t know what happened, she got so quiet.
“If they got arrested will he get to call me? He probably doesn’t even know my number if he doesn’t have his phone. Who should I call?”
“Hang on,” I said. “Let me see if I can find a number.”
I left her on the line and pulled up the Internet, to look up the number for the Little River County sheriff. I gave her the number four or five times, because she kept jumbling them up when she repeated them back. It made me feel like a monster. An odious serpent. I had come to her house and stolen her husband, and now I was toying with her.
It was close to half an hour before Rhys and Tiffany came out of the motel room. I wondered if he’d called the cops, or Gentry’s parents, or Rosalinda, but when he came and stood at the truck window, I didn’t ask him any of that.
“If anything has happened to them, it’ll be your fault,” he said. “Girls like you, it’s how you operate. Take a nice guy like Gentry and use him. But if something happens to him, you’ll have to live with that.”
“I know.”
He got into Tiffany’s car and they drove away.
Girls like me. I wished I was the kind of girl Rhys thought I was. Girls like me, thoug
h, girls actually like me, we weren’t master manipulators. We were garbage fires of failure.
I went back in the motel room and finished packing. After I loaded the bags into Gentry’s truck, I wiped down the room and the keys, and left them on the dresser. Then I stripped the sheets off the beds and bundled them up. The housekeeping cart was parked a couple rooms down, so I carried the sheets over and stuck them in the laundry bag.
The housekeeper came out of the room she was working on and gave me a funny look. She was an Indian lady in a sari and a Justin Bieber shirt. By the time I got in the truck and started it, she’d gone back into the other room.
At the Walmart, I bought what I’d promised Dirk: rubbing alcohol, bandages, and aquarium antibiotics. Plus a case of beer and a frozen lasagna.
Standing in the checkout line, I was behind a woman with two daughters. Like some fantasy version of Mom, LaReigne, and me. I looked at the family-sized lasagna in my cart, and it seemed stupid and sad to me. My family was smaller. Again. Pretty soon maybe a single-serving lasagna would be all I needed.
CHAPTER 45
Alva
I figured I’d best get rid of that burner phone, but before I could, it gone and rang again. Shot me bolt upright in bed, even though I’d knocked out half a bottle of bourbon trying to get to sleep. My cough was always worse at night. The clock said it was half gone two. I got the phone outta my night table and that no-name Fury said, “What the hell happened? What did you get me into? I thought your people were going to negotiate. Ransom, that’s what you said.”
“That’s what I said.” My heart was hammering in my chest, but my brain was like a mess of cotton.
“I’m hearing there are men dead down there. What did you get me into? What am I supposed to do if folks start asking me questions?”
His voice gone up higher and that, more than anything, shook me. He sounded like Dirk, young and scared. Men dead, and I hadn’t heard nothing from Dirk nor Zhorzha one.
“I didn’t get you into nothing,” I said. “You got your money. I don’t know your name.” He didn’t answer, but he went on breathing heavy in my ear. “If you got any sense, you’ll hide that cash and ditch that phone, just like I’m gonna do with this one.”
“I never talked to you.”
“No, sir.”
“Okay,” he said, but he was on the line breathing til I hung up.
I put my boots and sidearm on before I went out to the shed. I didn’t know too much about cellular phones, but I took a screwdriver and a hammer to it, until I got it separated into a bunch of little electronic parts. I took the whole mess out into the woods and buried it.
By the time I was done it was near four o’clock. I stood out on the porch, listening to an owl down by the creek, thinking how the world had got bigger and shrunk up at the same time.
Didn’t reckon I was likely to get back to sleep, so I gone into the house and put the kettle on, brewed up some coffee. Then I took down my mam’s Bible and done what she always called witching. Stood it up on its spine and let it fall open where it would.
The verse I got come from the Book of Joshua: And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him.
The story of Jericho wasn’t nothing to set my mind at ease, and I done what I always did, gone looking for some kind of comfort out of the Psalms.
Around nine o’clock, I brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and I was drinking that and reading the Bible when Dirk pulled up in the drive. He’d left alone and he come back alone, wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, with blood dried down his left arm.
“What happened to you, boy? And where’s your cousin?” I said.
“The motel. She’s coming later.”
Men dead, that’s what the Fury had said.
“You need to get that arm seen to.”
“Later. I just wanna sleep for a while.” Dirk gone into the front room and a couple minutes later, I heard Patsy Cline on the record player. That was always one of my mam’s favorites. I wondered if he remembered that, or he’d been told enough times he thought he remembered. Family stories were funny that way, how they carried on long after they stopped being facts. When I gone in the front room, he was lying on the sofa with his arm over his eyes. I left him be.
Zhorzha wasn’t too much further behind him, looking tired but not bloody. She come in carrying grocery sacks and a case of beer, like we was set to have a barbecue.
“I guess Dirk told you what happened,” she said.
“Dirk ain’t said ten words to me, but that Fury called me in the middle of the night. Said folks got killed. Truth be told, I ain’t had the stomach to turn on the news for fear of what I might see.”
She wouldn’t look at me. Spent a good ten minutes fussing around lighting the oven and putting a tinfoil pan in there. When she finally come to the table, she put a can of beer in front of me and opened up one for herself.
“I almost got Dirk killed. He got shot. Did you see?” She dug around in another of the grocery sacks and pulled out some first-aid supplies.
“Yep, he’s in there bleeding on your grandmam’s good divan, I reckon.”
“When he wakes up, I’ll clean up his arm,” she said.
“And your man?”
“I left him. His friend who went with us, he was pretty badly hurt, so Gentry stayed.”
“You think them Klansmen are gonna deal kindly with them?”
“He and Dirk took care of them.”
“Sweet Jesus, girl. You gone in there and killed them boys?”
“We didn’t plan to. We tried not to. They shot first. Anyway, I hope they shot first, because otherwise it was Dirk.”
“Well, he ain’t the brightest, but he don’t got a hair trigger, neither. That’s more Dane’s style,” I said.
“I’m sorry. I really fucked things up. Do you think they’ll come here, the people you talked to?” She took a big swallow of beer and grimaced.
“If they do, I’m armed. I don’t go nowhere without this.” I patted my sidearm. “Besides, ain’t much benefit to let it be known they talked to me. Get them killed quicker than me. We won’t hear from that Fury again.”
“I hope you’re right.”
I’d thought ten-thirty was a mite early to start lunch, but the lasagna wasn’t ready til noon. By the time it come outta the oven, Dirk was up. Zhorzha bandaged his arm and counted out them antibiotics.
“You sure it’s safe to take that shit?” he said, when she put the pills in front of him.
“Yeah, I’ve taken them plenty of times. Unless you know another way to get antibiotics without going to the doctor.” She picked up the bottle and pretended like she was reading off it. “Possible side effects: may grow gills and flippers.”
“Jesus, fine.” He tossed the pills back with some beer and then we was ready to eat.
We gone through lunch, not talking about nothing serious, but after we ate, I reckoned we had waited as long as we could. I gone into the front room and turned on the news. Dirk come and sat down in the rocker, but Zhorzha stood in the doorway, swirling her beer around in the can. We didn’t have to wait too long for the news to come around to the story. Folks love a good story with blood and suffering.
“The manhunt for escaped mosque killers Tague Barnwell and Conrad Ligett ended in Arkansas last night, with the death of Ligett and the arrest of Barnwell. Authorities have not released details about the circumstances surrounding the arrest, but local sources say three other men are dead, and another man and a woman are in custody at this hour.”
That was all they had, and the same old mug shots of Barnwell and Ligett.
“What do you make of that?” I said.
Zhorzha was standing there, beer in one hand, her other hand clutched over her stomach.
“Shit. I guess Edrard didn’t make it. That’s a goddamn shame. He seemed like a real good guy,” Dirk said. He got himself puffed up the way men do when they want to talk tough. “He took a couple slugs in the gut. That’s why we had to leave him, you know.”
“Hush,” I said to him. Zhorzha looked peaked as hell and none too steady on her feet. “Girl, you ain’t gonna faint, are you?”
“No,” she said. For once Dirk took his cue from me and kept his mouth shut.
“Y’all got your story straight? Them federal marshals, they’re gonna circle back around with more questions.”
“I didn’t go,” Zhorzha said. “That’s what I’m telling them. I don’t know what happened.”
“Exactly. I don’t know nothing,” Dirk said. He got up and gave Zhorzha a hug, before he gone into the kitchen and out the back door.
“Is your man likely to tell them otherwise?” I said.
“I don’t think so, but what about LaReigne?”
“What about her?” I said. “You ain’t so much as said her name til now. I was starting to think she fell off the edge of the world, except I’m guessing she’s the one they got in custody.”
“She wouldn’t leave. I went there to get her, and I got Gentry’s friend killed, and she wouldn’t leave. She’s in love with that piece of shit, and she stayed there with him.”
“It may not matter much what she says about you. And maybe she gone off and done something stupid, but that don’t mean she forgot it’s her job to protect her little sister.”
“Except she abandoned us. For that asshole. Why would she do that?”
Zhorzha finished her beer and stared down into the empty can, like the answer was in there.
“Well, she takes after your mam. Dot woulda done anything for your daddy, right up to and including breaking him outta prison, if she coulda figured out how. For that matter, LaReigne takes after me and your daddy. Consider the goddamn reckless thing I did for Tess, and he helped me. I reckon you got more of your grandpappy’s sense than we did.”
The Reckless Oath We Made Page 29