Pretty Pretty Boys

by Gregory Ashe

  AS THE IMPALA BOUNCED along the gravel road, stirring chalky clouds behind it, Somers tried to get himself back under control. What had happened? The question kept running through his head. One minute, he and Hazard had been exchanging details about their respective failed relationships. Somers had said something—some dumb joke, something just to break the tension—and they’d both been laughing. And then, a moment later, everything had changed. Lightning. That’s the only thing Somers could compare it to. Sticking his tongue to a lightning rod when a storm was in full swing, that kind of jolt. And then he’d looked over and seen Emery Hazard, so fucking hot that it was a miracle everything in twenty yards hadn’t burst into flames.

  And that was the part that had shaken up Somers, shaken him up like a can of beer in a paint mixer, the simple fact that Hazard was hot. Somers wasn’t one of those macho, outdated guys who couldn’t admit when another man was good looking. He had eyes. He knew when a man was hot or not. And sure, in college, a couple of times he’d messed around with Ricky Wade, the year they’d been roommates. But messing around was one thing, and the way Hazard looked—

  Somers pulled his head back to the present. They followed the gravel drive, which curled through a thick hardwood growth. The trees grew so close to the road that their branches scraped and rattled against the Impala. Within minutes, the state highway vanished behind them, and then the only thing left was the trees and the dust and the winding gravel. The smell of the gravel filtered through the car’s vents, and it made Somers’s mouth dry. Or maybe his mouth was dry for another reason.

  Hazard’s voice interrupted his thoughts; as always, Hazard sounded cool, almost distant. “Who are we going to see?”

  “Here,” Somers said, fumbling the piece of paper that Upchurch had given him from his jacket and passing it to Hazard.

  “Mimi. That’s all he gave you?”

  “He said she’s relatively new to the Ozark Volunteers, but she’s already a big deal. Moving up pretty quickly.”

  “You know her?”

  Somers shook his head.

  “God,” Hazard said, turning the paper in his fingers—long, strong fingers, Somers noticed before shaking the thought away. “She’s probably an eighty-year-old racist under a few inches of hair bluing and cold cream.”

  “High expectations.”

  “What is this place?” Hazard asked. “You ever been back here?”

  “No. There’s a lot of places like this. Farms, ranches, cabins, hunting lodges. A lot of them are just trailers, though. Land’s pretty cheap out here, and sometimes the people who end up in the Volunteers will just pile trailers onto a piece of land—friends, family, anybody who needs a place.”

  “Great. We’re driving right into a trailer-trash compound. We’ll be lucky if we don’t have to shoot our way out.”

  “We’ll be fine. They’re stupid, but they’re not that stupid. And anyway—”

  Somers forgot was he was about to say, though, because at that moment the trees dropped away, and a long stretch of open ground opened up in front of them. Most of the fields were planted with corn, heavy and golden in the lowering sunlight, the stalks crisply golden—

  —the color of Hazard’s eyes—

  —with one last, late harvest. Beyond the cornfields, a house rose on a bluff. It wasn’t a trailer. It wasn’t, as Hazard had put it, a trailer-trash compound. It was beautiful, modern, and it must have cost a fortune—more, Somers knew, than he’d ever make in a lifetime. Mostly glass and steel, with walls of windows that burned an opaque orange in the sunlight, the house looked like something plucked out of an architectural magazine. People talked about houses like this in Wahredua—rich people came to the Ozarks like everyone else, and they put up some flashy buildings like this—but Somers had never heard about this particular one.

  “What the hell is that?” Hazard asked.

  “That’s trouble,” Somers said.

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “That’s what I mean: trouble.”

  Hazard, when he spoke next, had a calculating note in his voice. “What do you know about the Ozark Volunteers?”

  “What do you mean? You grew up here. You know what I know.”

  “No, I don’t think I do. In fact, I’m starting to think neither of us knows anything about them.”

  As the Impala trundled up the bluff and towards the glass mansion, Somers asked, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, look at this place. It’s money, and you’re right that it means trouble. But if this is one of the rising stars of the Volunteers—and that’s what Upchurch said—then it also means that we don’t know what we’re sticking our noses into.”

  “You mean,” Somers said, studying the structure as they drove towards it, “they’ve got more resources than we expected. More organization. A bigger reach.”

  “Yeah, all of that. But I also mean that they’re not white-trash rejects. They’re not . . . they’re not pariahs. People who build houses like that, people with the money and the, I don’t know, the taste for lack of a better word, they’re not social outcasts living off government subsidies.”

  Somers felt the bottom of his stomach drop out, and he forced himself to speak the next words. “They’re important people. And they’re not afraid to be connected to the Ozark Volunteers.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?” Hazard asked, his voice pitched so low that Somers knew he wasn’t meant to answer the question.

  When they pulled to a stop in front of the house, Somers said, “You want to call this off? We can go back, talk to Upchurch again, pull the details on this land and the house. Better to walk in with our eyes open.”

  Hazard stared through the window, studying the house. His big hands were clenched in fists again, and blood trickled from under the bandages. “No,” he finally said. “They’ve already seen us. If we leave, they might not be here when we come back. Or they might be prepared.”

  “This is one of Upchurch’s contacts,” Somers said. “They want to help.”

  “No, they want something. We just don’t know what it is yet.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that, so Somers got out of the car. Hazard followed, sponging blood from his hand with a handkerchief. Somers didn’t know how Hazard had managed to split his knuckles open, but the wounds looked like something you’d get from throwing a lot of hard punches. Had somebody tried to cause trouble with the new detective? Had somebody tried to hurt Hazard?

  “Hey,” Somers said, and when Hazard glanced at him, Somers nodded at the bandaged hand. “You’d tell me if something went down and you needed help, right?”

  “Huh?” Hazard glanced at the bloody bandages and then shook his head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “But you’d tell me?”

  “If I wanted you to beat someone up for me?” Hazard smiled as he echoed Somers’s earlier joke.

  “I’m serious,” Somers said, but he was fighting a smile too. “You say the word.”

  Hazard shook his head and, without further response, jabbed the doorbell. From inside the house came a pleasant chime. A moment later, the door swung open. The women who stood there came very close to matching Hazard’s guess: she was short, with a mass of bluish-gray hair piled on her head, and pendulous, flabby arms that she raised towards the two detectives.

  “Miss Mimi?” Somers said.

  “Come on in,” the old woman said, the flabby skin of her arms swinging as she gestured. “She’ll be right down.”

  “You’re not Mimi,” Hazard said.

  The old woman shook her head and repeated, “Come on in.” As she tottered away from the door, Somers followed, with Hazard a step behind him. The foyer was impressive: high-ceilinged, slate tiles, a few aesthetically ambiguous ornaments in carefully placed niches, like this was some obscure museum instead of the home of a white supremacist leader. The old woman led them deeper into the house, into a large room that ran the length of the building. Three of the walls were glass,
and they faced into the lowering sun, the tinted glass muting the world into tasteful shades of gray. Ivory-colored leather and polished chrome composed the furniture, which was arranged in clusters of sofas and chairs. It wasn’t like anything Somers had seen in Wahredua. It wasn’t like anything he’d seen outside an Ikea.

  “Wait here,” the old woman said before shuffling off into the house.

  As Somers turned in a circle, taking in the wealth and luxury displayed around him, an alarm began to ding in the back of his head. He knew he wasn’t as smart as Hazard. He knew that Hazard had, in his own way, already figured out the source of this alarm. But Somers could feel it now too, the sense of wrongness, the sense that he had missed something. The sense, he admitted to himself, that he had stuck his foot in a bear trap.

  “Keep her busy,” Somers murmured.

  Hazard nodded and positioned himself at the midpoint of the room, his back to the wall of windows, where he could watch both doorways. With one last glance over the icily perfect furnishings of the room, Somers hurried back the way they had come. He paused a moment in the foyer, taking a second inventory, but aside from the vases and sculptures in their lighted niches, nothing drew his eyes.

  He crossed the foyer and entered a dining room. A table set for eighteen took up most of the space, another startling contrast in gossamer white porcelain and black-stained wood. Another display of wealth. Another display of refinement, control, and power. More windows looked out over the cornfields, which had grown red as the sun dropped to the treeline. Red like they’d been washed in blood, and even Somers had to admit that was a little fanciful. Somers wondered what Hazard would think of the comparison; Hazard didn’t seem like he had an imaginative bone in his body. A stir of air brought the smell of incense, interrupting Somers’s thoughts, and the smell grew stronger as Somers passed the table.

  One doorway, on his left, opened onto a state-of-the-art kitchen. It had granite counters long enough to land a jet plane, racks of gleaming cookware suspended from the ceiling, and enough knives to make Somers nervous. The old woman who had answered the door now sat in the kitchen, huddled in a battered easy chair on the far side of the room, with a dinged-up table at her side. The old woman—and the shabby furniture—were the only things in the house that didn’t look like they’d come out of a packing crate the day before. At the moment, the old woman’s head nodded, as though she were close to falling asleep. Somers let the door swing shut and continued moving through the dining room.

  At the far end, double doors opened onto a study. The sound of raised voices made Somers pause. Hazard was one of them. The other belonged to a woman, and something about the tone was familiar, although it was hard to tell from a distance. Neither speaker sounded happy, and Somers smiled; Hazard could get a saint hopping mad without even realizing it, and Somers was counting on Hazard’s natural instinct for provocation to keep Mimi busy for a few more minutes. He slipped into the study.

  Like the rest of the house, this room was a model of sleek, modern design: a glass-and-metal frame desk, tubular chairs with ivory-colored upholstery, a wall of windows that looked out on the darkening forest. Bookshelves covered two walls, and Somers snorted after a careful glance: the books had clearly been chosen because of their bindings and not because of any textual merit, and literary classics marched alongside old copies of Reader’s Digest—as well as books on native wildflowers, deer hunting, small motor maintenance, and the art of opening the inner eye—only because all those books shared bindings in the same range of color. Judging books, Somers thought with another snort, only by their covers.

  It was the desk that took his interest. It was one of those exposed designs, with only a glass top—no drawers, no hiding places. Folders were stacked next to an open Macbook. Somers tapped the computer, but it was password locked, and he wasn’t willing to waste his remaining time trying to get past it. Instead, he shuffled the photographs. Hazard was right; they had walked into something that neither of them understood, and Somers was determined to get some clue of who they were dealing with—and why she was willing to help them—before going any further.

  When he opened the first folder, though, a chill clamped around his chest. Glossy eight by tens filled the folder, all photographs of Emery Hazard. Emery Hazard coming out of the Art Deco doorway of his room at the Bridal Veil Motor Court. Emery Hazard buying coffee at the Casey’s where Mike Grames worked. Photographs documenting, from what Somers saw, most of Hazard’s time in Wahredua. Photos of Hazard half-carrying Somers into his apartment building. A photo of a man’s outline—it had to be Hazard, look at those fucking shoulders—silhouetted against the front window of Somers’s apartment. A photo of Hazard punching the brick wall by the Dumpster outside the Crofter’s Mark. So that was how he’d hurt his hand, Somers realized. But why the hell had he been punching the wall?

  Somers set aside the folder and his questions. He took up the next folder and felt the chill tighten. These were pictures of him. Of John-Henry Somerset clapping a hand on Hazard’s shoulder. Of Somers leaning over Hazard’s shoulder in the station—in the goddamn station, how did they get pictures from in there—and looking at something on Hazard’s desk. The list of missing persons, Somers guessed. More and more. These pictures went back further. It made sense, Somers decided. Whoever had been watching them had had a lot longer to study him than Hazard.

  Many of the pictures, Somers was disgusted to see, showed him drinking. Drinking with Upchurch and Swinney and Lender. Drinking alone. Drinking until he was so puffy and shit-faced, so blasted out of his mind, that Somers barely recognized himself, and many of the photos stirred no memory. Shame—slinking deep inside him, so low it felt like it was in his knees—stirred. No wonder Upchurch had tried to warn Hazard. No wonder Hazard had gotten so pissed that he’d punched a brick wall. Somers was a fucking mess—no, worse than a mess, he was a fucking trainwreck. And here he was, in a stranger’s house, staring at the photographic evidence.

  Towards the back of the folder, a photograph made Somers stop and grip the paper so tightly that it crinkled in his grip. It had been taken from a distance, with the sun setting in the background, so that the man in the photograph was nothing more than a black outline. But the rest of the details were clear: the white-washed cottage, the spring rye waving in the breeze, the rill that cut southwest, dropping down the sloping fields until it disappeared in the treeline. It was impossible to tell from the photograph, of course, but the man was crying. And he was carrying a forty. No, two forties. And he’d been drunk, shit-faced drunk, but not drunk enough that he’d forgotten. Not drunk enough to black out the memory of pounding on the door, begging Cora to talk to him, to let him see Evie, begging her to put a bullet in his head so he didn’t have to feel this way anymore.

  Somers knew he was breathing funny. A rushing, tingling noise filled his ears. His fingers felt stiff, wooden, and when he folded the photograph he did it all wrong so that the paper bent at a wonky angle. He couldn’t do it any better, though, so he just folded it again, and again, and shoved it into his pocket. He dropped the folder, no longer caring that some of the photographs spilled out, revealing his presence in the room. He needed to get out of here. He needed fresh air. God, what he needed was a drink or ten. Somers staggered past the desk and towards the doors.

  Raised voices met him, and the doors flew open. The woman who stood there was familiar, but Somers’s rage and pain kept him from trying to place her face. She was slender, built like a runway model, with wrists and ankles that looked like they’d snap if she picked up anything over five pounds. Her skin had a golden tan, and her dark hair met her shoulders in a perfectly trimmed line. Bare shoulders, Somers realized. The woman wore a simple, sleeveless white shift dress. The effect was stunning.

  Behind her, Hazard wore an expression of twisted discomfort. A strand of his long, dark hair had fallen over his forehead, but as always he seemed oblivious. His big arms bunched over his chest, and his glare moved from the woman to Som
ers. He wasn’t just angry at the woman, Somers realized, and slowly realization trickled through his own welter of emotions. Hazard was angry at Somers. Why? Because Somers had sneaked off to explore? No, Hazard was a professional, and he understood the importance of a discreet look around. Because Somers had been caught? Maybe, but this seemed a magnitude of anger greater than that.

  “John-Henry,” the woman said, and horror began to open up inside Somers because he recognized that voice. “This is an illegal search. Should I call my lawyer?”

  Somers stared at her. It was the dark hair that had thrown him. It had gotten much, much darker, over the last few years. Or perhaps she’d simply dyed it. And she was thinner, of course. And her breasts—he jerked his eyes up to her face. The features were the same, only more refined. Mature. The kind of face that women would kill to have and men would kill to wake up next to. Even a man like Emery Hazard, Somers guessed.

  He knew those features because, since high school, he’d been waking up to someone who looked very much like this woman.

  “Hello, Naomi,” Somers said, wishing his voice didn’t sound so dry, wishing, in a sudden burst of clarity, that he’d taken all those photographs that were evidence of his dissolution, his despair, his complete and utter shittiness.

  “Hazard,” Somers said, and damn his voice sounded dry, “you’ve already met Naomi, I guess.”

  Hazard grunted.

  “Judging by how pissed you look,” Somers managed to add, “I’m guessing she already told you I married her sister.”

  HAZARD STARED AT SOMERS, trying to figure out what was going on. Somers’s last words still rang in the air. This woman—drop-dead gorgeous, even to a man like Emery Hazard—was Somers’s sister-in-law. Naomi Malsho, she had said when she’d found Hazard in the living room. And right then, Hazard had started to put together some of the clues. Hazard had, after all, grown up in Wahredua. He remembered what Cora Malsho looked like. Naomi was her younger sister, only a few years younger, but enough that Hazard had never known her. But the looks were there: the kind of beauty that could set a town on fire, with the embers still hot a hundred years later.