by Sandra Brown
His heart in his throat, Huff joined his daddy at the empty window frame and saw a shiny black-and-white car with a red light on top of it. Sitting inside the car with the lawman was Mr. J. D. Humphrey. But he wasn’t smiling like he’d been when he’d given Huff the inner tube. And when they got out and headed toward the shack, the peace officer was smacking a billy club against his hard, wide palm.
His daddy told Huff to stay inside and went out to greet the visitors. “Evenin’, Mr. Humphrey.”
“I don’t want any trouble from you.”
“Sir?”
“Hand it over.”
“Hand what over, Mr. Humphrey?”
“Don’t play dumb with us, boy,” the lawman barked. “J.D. knows you took it.”
“I didn’t take nothing.”
“That cigar box, where I keep all the cash?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it’s gone missing. Now who else coulda taken it?”
“I don’t know, sir, but it wasn’t me.”
“You dumb piece o’ white trash, you think I believe that?”
Huff peered over the window ledge. Mr. Humphrey’s face had turned real red. The law officer was smiling, but he sure didn’t look very friendly. He passed his billy club to Mr. Humphrey. “Maybe this’ll put some smarts into him.”
“Mr. Humphrey, I—”
That was all his daddy had a chance to say before Mr. Humphrey struck him with the club. It caught his daddy on the shoulder and must have hurt something terrible because he went down on one knee. “I swear, I wouldn’t steal—”
Mr. Humphrey hit him again, this time in the head, and it sounded like an ax splitting a stick of firewood lengthwise. His daddy keeled over onto the ground. He lay real still and didn’t make a sound.
Huff stood rooted to his spot at the window. He was breathing hard, with disbelief, with terror.
“Jesus, J.D., you whacked him right good.” The lawman chuckled, bending down over his daddy.
“That’ll teach him to steal from me.”
“Won’t teach him nothing.” The lawman straightened up and withdrew a handkerchief from his back pocket. He used it to wipe blood off his fingers. “He’s dead.”
“You shittin’ me?”
“Dead as a hammer.”
Mr. Humphrey hefted the club as though weighing it. “Has this thing got an iron rod in it?”
“Good for nigger-knocking.” The lawman nudged Huff’s daddy with the toe of his boot. “What was his name?”
Mr. J. D. Humphrey told him. But he didn’t get the name quite right. “He was just a white trash drifter. You try and do the Christian thing, give a down-and-outer a helping hand, and he winds up biting it.”
“Ain’t that the gospel truth?” The lawman shook his head over the sorrow of it. “Well, I’ll get the undertaker out here tomorrow. I guess the county’ll have to pay for the burial.”
“I heard the medical school up to the university can always use spare cadavers.”
“There’s a thought.”
“I reckon he stashed your money somewhere inside this rathole.”
The two entered the shack and spotted Huff hunkered down beneath the window, cowering against the wall that was insulated with old editions of the Biloxi newspaper. “Oh, hell. Forgot about his boy.”
The lawman tilted back his hat, propped his hands on his hips, and frowned down at Huff. “Scrawny little puke, ain’t he?”
“Trailed his sorry daddy everywhere. Ask me, I think he’s a bit backward.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know his real name,” Mr. J. D. Humphrey replied. “All’s I ever heard his daddy call him was Huff.”
• • •
“Huff?”
“Huff?”
Eventually he realized that his name wasn’t coming to him from out of that hot evening in the summer of 1945.
He suffered the inexpressible sense of loss that he always did upon emerging from this recurring dream. He was always glad to dream it because it was like having a visit with his daddy. But it never ended happily. When he woke up, his daddy was always dead and he was left alone.
He opened his eyes. Chris and Beck were standing on either side of his hospital bed. Chris smiled. “Welcome back. You were in la-la land.”
Embarrassed by the soundness of his slumber and the sentimentality his dream always conjured, Huff sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Just catching a little catnap.”
“Catnap?” Chris said, laughing. “You were practically comatose. I didn’t think we were going to wake you up. You were talking in your sleep, too. Saying something about not getting a name right. What were you dreaming?”
“Damned if I remember,” he grumbled.
“We came to help you get ready for your trip home,” Beck said, “but obviously we’re too late to be of much use.”
He’d been up and dressed since before daylight. He’d never been one to lie about in bed, and being in the hospital hadn’t changed that habit. “I’m ready to get out of here.”
“We’re past ready to see you go.” Dr. Caroe breezed in, his lab coat snapping like a sail behind him. “The staff has had their fill of your foul disposition.”
“Then sign me out. I’m already late for work.”
“Don’t even think about it, Huff. You’re going home,” the doctor said.
“I’m needed at the foundry.”
“You need more rest before you resume normal activity.”
“Bullshit. I’ve been doing nothing but lying on my ass for two days.”
Eventually they compromised. He would go home today and rest, and if he was feeling well enough tomorrow, he could return to work for a few hours, gradually building back up to his previous schedule. This quarrel was all part of the grand charade, of course, performed for the benefit of Beck and Chris.
Caroe, the son of a bitch, was making like Al Pacino in the role of caring physician. He would give Huff the green light on returning to work when Huff gave him the greenbacks for helping him convincingly fake a heart attack.
The dismissal paperwork put a huge strain on his patience, as did having to leave the building in a wheelchair. By the time they finally got him home, he was in a high snit.
“He’s meaner than a snake,” Chris said to Selma. “Beware.”
Unmindful of the warning, she fluttered around Huff, settled him into the den with a glass of iced tea and a lap blanket, which he threw off, bellowing, “I’m not a goddamn invalid and it’s ninety fucking degrees outside! If you want to be working here tomorrow, don’t ever tuck me into this chair with a blanket!”
“I’m not deaf so you don’t have to yell. And mind your tongue, too.” With characteristic aplomb, she picked up the blanket and refolded it. “What do you want for lunch?”
“Fried chicken.”
“Well you’re having grilled fish and steamed vegetables.” That was her parting shot as she left the room, soundly closing the door behind her.
“Selma’s the only one who can get away with talking back to you,” Chris said from across the room. He was throwing darts, but with a notable lack of inspiration.
Beck was seated on the sofa, one ankle propped on the opposite knee, arms stretched along the back cushion.
Huff put a match to his second cigarette since leaving the hospital. “You’re doing a damn lousy job of it.”
“Damn lousy job of what?” Beck asked.
“Pretending that you don’t have a care in the world.” Fanning out the match, he said, “Drop the playacting and tell me what’s going on.”
“Dr. Caroe told you not to smoke.”
“Screw him,” Huff said to Chris. “And don’t change the subject. I want to know what’s going on. Who’s gonna be the one to tell me?”
Chris took a seat on the vacant sofa. “Wayne Scott is making a nuisance of himself again.”
“What now?”
“He’s still probing,” Beck said. �
��And all his probes are in Chris’s direction.”
Huff drew on his cigarette, wondering where the likes of this pain in the ass detective had been when his daddy was murdered in cold blood. Nobody had asked a single question about how he came to have his head cracked open wide enough for part of his brain to ooze out. Huff wasn’t even sure if his daddy had been buried, or if his corpse had been turned over to the university medical school to be mutilated by a group of bungling students.
He had been taken to the jail to spend the night because they didn’t know what else to do with him. Mr. J. D. Humphrey had told the lawman on the ride into town that his wife would have a hissy fit if he took Huff home with him. “He’s probably got head lice. She’d never let me hear the end of it if our kids turned up with nits.”
That night, while he lay crying on the cot in the jail cell, he heard the lawman tell another lawman, who’d been put in charge of keeping an eye on him, that it had been Mrs. Humphrey, J.D.’s wife, who’d taken the cigar box of money, which a search of the shack had failed to produce.
“There was a big sale on textiles at the dry goods store. She was low on cash, so she stopped by the salvage yard and helped herself without bothering to tell J.D.”
“Well, if that don’t beat all,” the other man had said.
They’d had a good laugh over the misunderstanding.
The following morning, Huff had been given a biscuit and sausage patty sandwich for breakfast, then the lawman ordered him to sit and wait and not to give anybody any sass.
Which was what he did until the arrival of a skinny man wearing a seersucker suit and wire-rimmed spectacles. He told Huff he’d come to take him to an orphanage. As they drove away from the jail, he said, “I’m not gonna have any trouble out of you, am I, boy?”
He’d had no idea of the hell about to be rained down on him and the institution he oversaw. He would live to rue the day that he’d picked up young Huff Hoyle from the jailhouse.
For the next five years Huff had lived—more like existed—in a home for orphaned children run by people who preached Jesus’ love but who would beat the living daylights out of you with a leather strop if you looked at them crosswise, which Huff Hoyle often did.
When he was thirteen, he escaped. He left with only one regret—that the bastard in the seersucker suit didn’t know it was Huff who’d killed him. He should have woken him up and given him a chance to put on his spectacles before covering his face with the pillow.
He’d made no such mistake with Mr. J. D. Humphrey. He made sure his daddy’s murderer saw him and heard the name he whispered close to his ear before he smothered him in his own bed while his fat wife snored peacefully in the twin bed not three feet away.
The lawman saved him the trouble of having to kill him. Huff asked around town until he heard about him coming between two niggers who were arguing over a hunting dog. One of them had a knife, which wound up buried to the hilt in the lawman’s gut. It was said he died screaming.
Since the night his daddy died, he’d maintained a low opinion of men who wore a badge, and that contempt showed now. “What has Deputy Scott got his drawers in a wad about this time?”
Beck told him about the interrogation that had taken place the night before. Now and then Chris would interrupt with a droll denial or an acerbic quip about the deputy.
When Beck finished, Huff said, “Chris, your explanation of the phone call should’ve squelched Scott’s excitement. Especially since I did ask you to stay after Danny about that church. But Scott is dogged and he’s ambitious, and that’s worrisome. Sounds to me like he’s not going to give up and drop this nonsense.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, Huff,” Beck said.
“I don’t understand what’s going on with Red,” Chris complained. “Both times I’ve been called in, he hands the reins over to Scott. I’ve had to sit there and take crap from that yokel without a peep from Red. Is he holding out for more money? If so, let’s give him a few bills and be done with this. Either that, or let’s get proactive and do the police work ourselves.”
“Police work?” Huff looked from Chris to Beck. “What’s he talking about?”
“Chris thinks that someone killed Danny and deliberately made it appear that he had.”
“Somebody is framing me, Huff.”
Huff shifted in his recliner to find a more comfortable spot. “Framing you, huh? What do you think of that theory, Beck?”
“It’s feasible. You’ve made some powerful enemies over the years. I suppose if someone wanted to get you where it really hurts, they’d go after one of your children. It would be a double coup to have another child blamed for it.”
“Any ideas who this individual might be?”
“Slap Watkins,” Chris declared.
Huff looked at him for several moments, then a laugh rumbled up from deep inside his chest. “Slap Watkins? He hasn’t got sense enough to kill a june bug and get away with it.”
“Hear me out, Huff. He is bad news.”
“Of course he is. All those Watkinses are degenerates. But I’ve never known them to be killers.”
“They’re fighters. They’re violent. After three years in Angola, Slap could have graduated to homicide.” Chris scooted forward, balancing on the edge of the sofa cushion. “As soon as he was released from prison—mad at the world, I’m sure—he applied for a job at the foundry. Danny didn’t hire him. Slap knew as well as anyone that we hire a lot of parolees because they work cheap. Danny, who was rich, who represented everything that Slap hates and blames for his misfortunes, turned him down. Couple that with the fight we had with him three years ago, and I think it adds up to a good motive for murder for revenge.”
Beck picked it up from there. “Watkins may have been watching Danny, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Sunday afternoon, he followed Danny out to the fishing camp.” Summarizing, he spread his hands. “That’s the hypothesis.”
“Slap is just stupid enough to have forgotten the bait when he staged a scene to make it look like Danny had gone there to actually fish,” Chris added. “Nor would he know about Danny’s aversion to fishing.”
Huff got out of his recliner and made a turn around the room, enjoying the sight of his possessions, savoring the burning tobacco taste on his tongue. Finally he said, “Sounds neat and tidy, all right, but it’s all speculation. You’ve got nothing to back up this hunch.”
“We’ve got Slap himself,” Chris said. “He’s become extremely smug. Why else would he approach Sayre in the diner? He would never have made a move on her before. And he insulted the whole family the other night. Beck heard him.”
Huff looked at Beck, who nodded. “He did. Other people heard him, too.”
“What’s Red’s take on it?”
“I’ve only mentioned it to him once,” Beck said.
“He didn’t seize on it,” Chris said, clearly annoyed with the sheriff’s seeming indifference. “Don’t you agree that he should question Watkins?”
“At the very least.” Huff moved to an end table and knocked an ash off his cigarette into an ashtray. “Leave Red to me.”
Before more could be said, Selma tapped lightly on the door, then opened it. “A package just arrived, Mr. Hoyle.”
He motioned for her to give the Federal Express envelope to Beck. “Whatever it is, do you mind dealing with it?”
“Of course not.”
Beck took the envelope from Selma and ripped it open. There was a single sheet of paper inside. Huff watched Beck’s eyes as he scanned it quickly, then began again at the top and reread it, taking more time. When he finished, he cursed beneath his breath. Huff intercepted the worried glance he shot Chris.
“Bad news?” Huff asked. “Come on, come on, let’s hear it.”
Beck hesitated, which fueled Huff’s temper.
“Goddammit!” he shouted. “Am I or am I not still in charge of this outfit?”
“I’m sorry, Huff,” Beck said quietly. “Of course you are.”
“Then stop fucking around and tell me what’s in the letter.”
“It’s from Charles Nielson. He heard about Billy Paulik’s accident.”
Huff put his cigarette in his mouth and rocked back on his heels. “And?”
Beck sighed. “And then some.”
• • •
Chris wasn’t happy to see George Robson lurking around his office when he returned to it following a turbulent lunch with Huff, through which he had bitched about everything from Charles Nielson to Selma’s menu.
“Can I have a minute, Chris?” George asked.
Chris could think of no plausible excuse to refuse the request, so he motioned him into his private office.
Physically, George had little to recommend him. His personality didn’t particularly attract friends, either. His anxious attempts to please only made him annoying. He was an overgrown nerd who tried to fit in, and who might have even deluded himself into believing he had, without realizing that he never would.
It was his self-delusion that made him perfect for the position he held.
Chris found it amusing that George could be so blissfully unaware that he was being made a cuckold by the man who asked him to take a seat and offered him something to drink.
“No thanks.”
“Then what can I do for you, George?”
“It’s about that conveyor. I had someone here this morning to replace the belt.”
“All right, so what’s the problem?”
“He, uh . . . that is the technician, recommended that it remain out of commission until it undergoes a complete overhaul.”
Chris leaned back in his chair and frowned. “Huff won’t like hearing that.”
“No, I don’t suppose he will.”
“So what’s your recommendation?” Chris looked at him mildly.
George licked his lips. “Well, safety is my first concern.”
“Naturally.”
“And that machine has already cost one man his arm.”
Enjoying the way George squirmed under his steady gaze, Chris didn’t comment.
“But . . . but in my opinion,” he stammered, “an overhaul would be unnecessary. I think she’s ready to start back up.”