by Ben Rehder
“Needed a ride. I knew you wouldn’t be doing nothin’ important.”
That was another thing Red was tired of—the way Billy Don had been acting lately. Grumpy.
“You want me to come in or not?”
“Don’t matter to me.”
The elevator stopped on the third floor—the top floor—and the doors opened.
“Well, hell, I’ve come this far,” Red said. He gestured for Billy Don to exit the elevator ahead of him. “Age before beauty.”
Dustin Bryant woke up in the motel room after nine. They’d been out late the night before, first at some of the bars, and then hunting with a spotlight on a lease—a place not far from where Gilbert had taken potshots at the game warden. No pigs to be seen.
Dylan was still asleep in the rollaway cot and Gilbert was snoring loudly in his bed. Boy, he’d been hammered last night. Dustin had been drinking, too. Not as heavily as Gilbert, but he’d definitely been drunk, and that’s why he couldn’t be sure if things had been as serious as they’d appeared last night.
It had looked really bad, the way the little guy in the green car had dropped like a deer shot in the head. Blood everywhere. Gilbert so fucking proud of what he’d done. “Queers should stay in the city where they belong,” he’d said when he got in the truck. They left the guy stretched out in the parking lot. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything.
Still, Dustin had expected the cops to be waiting at the motel when they got back from the hunt at about three in the morning. After all, the little gay guy would tell them a tall redheaded man had done it, and that would be an easy tip-off. But no. No cops. It looked like Gilbert might get away with this one, too. Maybe the gay guy hadn’t gotten a good look at Gilbert. That was entirely possible, because it had all happened so quickly.
Dustin flipped onto his side, facing the nightstand, and noticed the little alert light on his cell phone was blinking. Voicemail waiting. He dialed in to retrieve it.
Hey, Dustin, it’s Sheriff Bobby Garza. We know exactly what happened last night at the convenience store. The whole thing is on video. Gilbert is getting out of control, ain’t he? But we can still charge you and your brother as accessories. We’re talking a felony, or maybe several, depending on what the county attorney recommends. But we can probably work something out if you give me a call. Better yet, swing by my office and let’s have a little chat. Bring your brother, but leave Gilbert at the motel. Better hurry, because this generous offer is only available for a limited time.
They stepped into Armando’s room and Red immediately saw that he’d been mistaken. Big time. This wasn’t a simple case of someone popping Armando in the nose or smacking him across the mouth.
Armando’s face was heavily bandaged, but the parts Red could see didn’t look good at all. In fact, it looked like Armando had slammed his face into the dashboard during a car wreck. His nose was heavily taped, meaning it was most likely broken, and both eyes were ringed with black. Armando’s lips were swollen, and there was a nasty split, closed with stitches, running between his top lip and his nose.
Armando slowly raised one hand about a foot off the bed in greeting.
“Jesus Christ,” Red said, wanting to add, They sure fucked you up good, huh?
“Red,” Billy Don said quietly, meaning, Shut up or he’ll know how bad he looks.
They both moved over beside the bed.
“Hey,” Armando said, wincing as he spoke. Red could tell that something was wrong with his mouth. It wasn’t just swollen. Armando noticed where Red was looking, so he said, “Yeah, they’re gone.”
He opened his mouth just enough to reveal that his two front teeth—the upper ones—were missing.
Red badly wanted to make a remark about how Armando’s boyfriend would appreciate the missing teeth during certain activities—but he managed to hold it in.
“Well, shit,” Billy Don said. “What the hell happened?”
Armando did a slow head shake. “Can’t remember. The deputy thinks I was either punched or head-butted.”
“But why?”
“No particular reason.”
On the one hand, Red couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Armando, but on the other hand, it was just a few days ago that Red felt like punching Armando himself. If Armando had been jerking someone’s chain the same way he had jerked Red’s, well, some people might get pretty angry about it. On the third hand, even if Armando had smarted off or made some comment to draw attention to his gayness, he didn’t deserve to get clobbered as badly as he had been.
“Did you say something to the guy?” Red asked.
Armando started to answer, but Billy Don said, “Don’t matter if he did.”
“Hell, I was just curious.”
Armando said, “I was on the phone to Sharon. She heard it. I didn’t say anything to the attacker, but he said something to me.”
“What’d he say?” Billy Don asked.
Red could tell that Armando was hesitant to answer, because he was obviously in pain with each word, or maybe he simply didn’t want to talk anymore. But after a moment, he said, “He called me a faggot.”
In the elevator on the way down, Billy Don said, “You know what I wanna do?”
“Stop at Sonic for a large order of tater tots?”
Billy Don glared at him.
“Jeez,” Red said. “Ain’t gotta lose your sense of humor. Relax. I ain’t never seen you like this. What do you wanna do?”
Billy Don reached out into empty space with both hands and made a circle, as if strangling some imaginary person on the elevator with them. “I wanna find the guy who done it and beat him like a rented mule.” He suddenly pointed a sausagelike finger at Red. “And you’re gonna help me.”
“Like hell I am.”
“You are, too.”
“I got a pig to kill. We got a pig to kill.”
“Don’t care. You’re helping.”
“If you think I’m gonna—”
“’Member when that dude came lookin’ for you ’cause you banged his wife? Who was it that told him you’d been killed in a thresher accident? I did. Saved your ass that time.”
Red didn’t say anything.
“And who took you to the clinic when you had diarrhea so bad you had to ride in the bed of the truck?”
Red still kept quiet.
“And what about the time—”
“Okay. Enough. But we gotta make it quick and get back to looking for the pig.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
The elevator dinged and the door opened.
Red said, “What exactly are you gonna do to this guy if we manage to track him down?”
“Don’t know yet. Guess we’ll cross that bridge when I break his goddamn face.”
“Did we or did we not have a conversation with that little Spillar bastard’s mother yesterday?” Dexter Crabtree asked Ryan, who was working out in the exercise room of Crabtree’s Highland Park mansion.
The question sounded sarcastic and rhetorical, as Crabtree intended, but he honestly wasn’t completely certain he had met with Vera Spillar. He was pretty sure he had, but the trip yesterday had a dreamlike quality to it that made Crabtree a little unsure whether the meeting had actually taken place. He remembered dropping his phone into the toilet. Then buying a new one. And being incredibly relieved that the old SIM card still worked, so he hadn’t lost his contacts and other data. All of that was real.
“You sure as hell did,” Ryan said, curling seventy pounds with ease. He was shirtless, flushed, with beads of sweat streaming down his chiseled torso. Crabtree couldn’t help but wonder sometimes why his son was so gifted physically and so sub-par intellectually. “The kid hasn’t switched back to UMT yet?” Ryan asked.
Crabtree turned and left the room. Went into his office. Got online and looked up the phone number for the Marble Falls Wal-Mart. Dialed. Of course, he didn’t get a person right away. Got some damn voicemail menu first, but he kept punching “0�
� and eventually a live human being answered. He asked for Vera Spillar. The woman started to hem and haw, saying Vera would have to return the call during a break, so Crabtree said it was a family emergency and he’d appreciate it if she’d move her ass. She put him on hold.
Maybe it wasn’t smart calling Vera Spillar—leaving a trail—but it wasn’t like he was calling her at home. And it wasn’t like an NCAA investigation would ever go so deep as to subpoena the phone records of a Wal-Mart. And if it did, how could they ever prove that he was calling the Wal-Mart to speak to Vera Spillar? Of course, they had video cameras that would show her leaving her cash register at exactly the same time—
Damn. He was letting his imagination get away from him.
“Who is this?” a woman asked. That washerwoman hick accent again. Sounding suspicious. She wasn’t buying the bit about a family emergency.
“Your old friend from yesterday. I bought some gum, remember?” He hoped he really had bought some gum.
“Oh. Yeah. I’ve been waiting for you to call.”
“What’s the hold-up?”
“I’ve been doing some thinking.”
Crabtree couldn’t remember a single time in his life when a woman had said “I’ve been doing some thinking” and it had turned out well for him.
“Thinking? About what?”
“About my boy playing ball at your school. And how much that’s really worth.”
Crabtree didn’t say anything. If he did say anything, he was afraid it would devolve into a raging, bile-spewing rant—possibly with a threat of violence. He could feel a sharp pain directly between his eyeballs.
“I done some research,” Vera Spillar said. “Crazy how much money is involved in college football. The schools make big bucks. The coaches—hell, most of them is millionaires. The TV networks cash in, too. Then you got all them companies selling shirts and mugs and bumper stickers and whatnot. But what do the players get?”
“What about the scholarships? They get a free education.”
She snorted. “That ain’t much compared to the serious money everyone else is raking in.”
Crabtree took a deep breath. Calm. Have to stay calm. “You don’t consider ten thousand dollars to be serious money?”
“Oh, sure, it is to me. But it probably isn’t to a guy like you.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“You think I didn’t figure out who you are? Do one of them Web searches for ‘University of Middle Texas football’ and your name pops up in half the posts.”
Crap. Not good. But he wasn’t going to be manipulated by a Wal-Mart cashier, for God’s sake. “I don’t have time for this. We got a deal or not?”
Her tone was all business. “Double it to twenty grand or Colton’s sticking with Oklahoma Tech. And I want all of it up front. Send me the other half of those bills you got, plus ten grand in bills you ain’t torn up.”
“You sure are bossy all of a sudden. Maybe I’ll just look for a different lineman.”
“Fair enough. Good talking to you.” He could tell she was about to hang up.
“Wait!”
“I’m listening.”
“You want me to drive all the way back down there again? Screw that. You come and get it.”
“Ever heard of FedEx, genius?”
CHAPTER 25
Seventy-three-year old J.D. Evans had been clerking at convenience stores from Florida to Texas for the better part of four decades, and truth be told, he enjoyed the work. You met all kinds of people on the job. Rich folks and poor folks. People from countries with names that J.D. couldn’t pronounce. Tourists and locals. Assholes and salt-of-the-earth types. Drunk college girls who didn’t mind giving an old man an “accidental” peek down their blouses. Illegal day laborers wanting beer and microwave sandwiches. Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs. Interesting bunch.
Of course, “interesting” wasn’t always a compliment. You had people coming in that ended up creating a problem one way or the other—maybe intentional, maybe not. See a guy sprinting for the bathroom and you know there might be a nasty clean-up job later. A toddler trailing after his mom might bust half a dozen jars of applesauce on the floor. Kid wearing a loose jacket in warm weather was planning to shoplift. Man wearing a hoodie and sunglasses at night might stick a gun in your face and demand all the cash. J.D. had been robbed six times over the years.
People stopped to ask all kinds of questions, too. How do you get to the state park? Where’s the best barbecue ’round these parts? Any strip clubs in the county? So it wasn’t a surprise when an enormous, unshaven cedar chopper came into the store just before noon and asked several questions, starting with, “Was you working last night?”
J.D. had seen this big old boy before. Several times. Billy Don was his name. Usually Billy Don was an easygoing fellow who tended to load up on beer, chewing tobacco, and assorted snack foods. But tonight he appeared gravely serious. He hadn’t even glanced toward the pork rinds or the Slim Jims.
“I sure was,” J.D. said. “Till closing at midnight.”
“So you was here when the guy got decked in the parking lot?”
That was another “interesting” aspect of working at a convenience store: Fights in the parking lot. Seemed like there was at least one a month. Some of the stores J.D. had clerked were neighborhood hangouts, with punks and thugs and regular old kids gathering outside nearly every night. Lot of drinking and drugging going on, and the next thing you know, someone gets his ass whooped. Like the episode last night, with some guy getting clocked on the side of the building.
“I sure was,” J.D. said again.
“You see what happened?”
“No, sir. Happened around the side.”
J.D. glanced out the window and saw Billy Don’s running buddy sitting in his old Ford truck, waiting.
“You ain’t got any cameras over there?” Billy Don asked.
“No, sir. Wish we did.”
The big man looked like he didn’t know what to ask next. Finally he said, “Think any of your customers saw it happen?”
“Don’t appear that way. Cops asked, but nobody said nothing.” By now, Billy Don looked downright distraught, so J.D. said, “Was that poor feller a friend of yours?”
Billy Don nodded.
J.D. could only imagine what Billy Don might do if he caught up to the sorry son of a bitch who had cold-cocked the little guy in the Prius. Probably a lot worse fate than would happen to the man through the legal system. So J.D. was all for it. A piece of garbage like that needed to be dealt with.
“All I can tell you is what I told the cops,” J.D. said. “I don’t know who done it for sure, but I got a pretty good idea.”
A customer entered the store—a man dressed in khakis and a golf shirt—so J.D. paused for a moment. After the customer had made his way to the back of the store, J.D. told Billy Don all about the tall, drunk, obnoxious, redheaded man.
Marlin was having lunch at the crowded Kountry Kitchen with his best friend, Phil Colby, when two things happened almost simultaneously: Marlin’s cell phone vibrated with an incoming message from Tatyana Babikova, and a tall, redheaded man walked through the front door of the restaurant.
Marlin had just begun to read Tatyana’s message when Colby—who had heard all about the incident on the widow’s ranch two days earlier—said, “Oh, here we go.”
There was a tone to Colby’s voice that made Marlin glance up. He saw the redheaded man standing near the cash register, waiting for the hostess to seat him and the two men standing beside him. Twins, from the look of it, although one had a goatee. The Bryant brothers.
Marlin simply watched. None of the three men had spotted him yet. Marlin set his phone down. Tatyana could wait.
“Weems, right?” Colby said.
“Yep.” Marlin had only seen Weems in person the one time—from a great distance. But he’d seen photos, and the redhead was definitely Weems.
“They look like rejects from one of those cabl
e-TV hunting shows with a bunch of backwoods hillbillies,” Colby said. “Where most of the locals have more guns than teeth. And their most valuable asset is an outboard motor.”
Marlin waited. He could feel his shoulders tensing up. He wondered how Weems would react if he noticed Marlin.
“Look at the feathers in their hats,” Colby said. “I’d feel like a major tool walking around like that. What is it, Halloween?”
Marlin was dedicated to his duties as a peace officer, and he knew he shouldn’t be relishing a confrontation, but that was exactly what he was doing. Hoping Weems would come over. Hoping he would feel compelled to say something stupid and possibly incriminating.
The hostess hurried over to the waiting men, trying to keep up with the lunch rush. She grabbed three menus from the hostess stand and began to lead them through the dining area.
Weems was halfway through the room when his head turned, scanning the crowd, and his eyes settled on Marlin. For half a second, he kept walking and there was no expression on his face at all. Then something registered. Apparently it dawned on him that he was looking at a uniformed game warden. He grinned and immediately diverted his route toward Marlin’s table. The hostess and the Bryant brothers continued on their way, unaware that Weems was no longer behind them. Weems stepped right up to Marlin’s table without any hesitation at all.
“Howdy, Officer. How’re you today?”
Marlin waited just a beat, then said, “Can I help you with something?”
“You’re the county game warden, right?”
“Says so right on his shirt,” Colby said.
Weems ignored Colby. His focus remained on Marlin. “Heard you had some trouble the other day. Somebody fired a couple of shots in your direction.”
Stay calm, Marlin thought. Don’t fall for his bullshit.
“That’s true,” Marlin said. “You know anything about it?”
The noise created by the other diners in their vicinity had virtually disappeared.
“Me? Heck, no,” Weems said. “Sheriff asked me the same thing, and I can’t figure out why. I wouldn’t do nothing like that. Unless I thought I could get away with it.” Weems let out a loud guffaw. “Just a joke. Everyone’s so uptight around here. Y’all need to loosen up.”