It’s one of the aliases on your booking sheet. One Toby Garrett must have passed on to his baby brother. It’s what Gwen called you in the storage unit, the name you still feel in your spine, even when you’re expecting it.
You focus on Arnot King’s face now.
“You didn’t have a beard three years ago,” you tell him.
“A shotgun,” he says back, loosening his thin tie.
You close your eyes. “Please don’t call me that.”
“Nabby?”
It’s your initials plus that time you stole the milk money. A name some parent must have thought up, because nobody in the fourth grade knew nab. Hearing it at school that first time, you knew in a flash that the world wasn’t a fair place. That you were going to have to do what you could to compensate.
Arnot King shrugs the name away like it was never there, then says again, to prove it, to drive it home, “A shotgun. To the face. Execution-style.”
You focus on the closed file, say it—“Tell me”—and he does: James Roderick “Rory” Gates was found in the second upstairs bedroom of the farmhouse he’d grown up in. It had been his room, maybe. And it seems he had either tried to cover his face with his hands, or tried to cover both barrels with his hands. It hadn’t been pretty. The only part of his hands that still had skin was behind his wedding band.
“Evidence for the prosecution one,” Arnot King says, holding a long finger up.
Next, going by the tire tracks around the farmhouse, you and Rory were the only ones who’d been there since the murder.
“How long had he been dead?” you interrupt, leaning forward, suddenly sure it happened last night, while you were in Big Springs. That you’ll plead guilty to impersonating yourself, even show them the prison logbook if it’ll get you out from under a homicide beef.
Arnot King shrugs. “Ever since he got shot. That’s what happens with a shotgun, as I understand. Even in a place this…provincial.”
“When did he get shot?”
Arnot King flips through the file. “Thursday or Friday of last week.”
“They can already tell?”
Arnot King pulls up another photocopy, turns it around for you.
It’s a missing persons report. Gwen Gates filed it last Friday.
The next photocopy is from the phone company, a record of your call to her the day before that.
“I was checking in,” you say, pushing the sheet back.
Arnot King looks at you about this. “In the capacity of…?”
“Unlicensed private investigator,” you say, looking to the door now, the one Toby Garrett’s baby brother is pretending not to be standing at.
“So this”—Arnot King, reading—“this Gwen, wife, woman. She wanted you to use your significant investigative abilities to find him for her?”
“She knew where he was,” you say. “I was working for him too.”
“For the dead guy?”
Yes.
Arnot King leans back. “And the wife can confirm this?” “He wrote me a check,” you say.
“They have a joint account.” Arnot King likes this. Then he sees you looking towards Big Springs. “What?” he says. “I—it’s already used.”
Torn up, more like. An out-of-town check made out the first time to a ‘St. Nick?’ Left at a smoky bar you’d just ducked out of?
Arnot King keeps his smile but it’s fake now, part of the show.
“I have proof,” you say, closing your eyes to keep it all straight, “that—that she was having an affair. Like Rory said.”
“Proof?”
“Pictures. They’re being developed.” “The kind you—that Judge Harkness became aware of?” You shake your head no. “Her car. In a body shop down the street.”
“For damage you yourself inflicted?”
“Allegedly inflicted.”
He stands up, spins away. Pours a nervous cup of coffee, his lips thin, mad.
But then you start nodding to yourself. He catches it, sits back down quietly, so as not to mess this last thing up.
“Yeah,” you say, smiling. “The wrecker driver, body shop guy.”
“Her lover?”
You shush him with your hand. “They’re saying I called Rory,” you say, “to meet him out there for whatever reason. But I talked to Gwen that day. You can ask her. That phone record. But the reason I went out there in the first place, it was because the wrecker driver told me Rory was living out there. That Gwen had kicked him out.”
Arnot King processes this. Then, as he has to, he says, “This is the same wife who also reported him missing?”
Yes.
Slowly, as if already defeated, Arnot King pages through the file, finds nothing.
“And—will she confirm this, you think?”
You give him her number. He stands, tells you he’s going to pretend you don’t have that memorized and goes to the phone by the door, makes motions through the glass for Toby Garrett to pick up, listen, confirm.
All you hear from your side is Arnot King’s polite questions, the tone you take with a new widow, but you can already tell what the answer is: Rory was with her the whole time. No, she never talked to Nicholas Bruiseman on the phone last Thursday. Maybe her husband? Had he been drinking, Nicholas Bruiseman?
Arnot King re-cradles the phone like it’s made of glass and comes back to the table. “And you wonder why defense lawyers resort to narcotics.”
“Drive-through girls,” you add, smiling.
He laughs. “You don’t have that Christmas tape, do you?”
You shake your head no, you don’t, and for what feels like minutes, it’s quiet. Just the coffee dripping like a metronome, counting off the seconds of your life. Your heart ticking down.
You tell yourself you understand. That this is fair. It’s just the card you’ve pulled, somehow. It’s what happens when you bet Jimmy Bones eight hundred dollars you don’t have, all on the fall of a ball. You should have seen it all coming, really. And, if you’re honest, you guess you kind of did, right? And now you’re standing, to shrug your way out of the room, start planning a complicated escape (heating ducts, grease, a blonde wig) and then your life after that (living out in the pasture, learning to digest mesquite beans, drink water from stock tanks), but, for no reason you can name, Arnot King doesn’t take the hand you offer him in farewell. Instead he just looks up at you, nodding to himself, finally shaking his head in something a lot like regret.
“This tow-truck driver,” he says, his voice low, legal. “What reason would he have to lie to you about Rory living out there, you think?”
You look up to him slow. Feel a smile growing.
“I don’t have any money,” you say. “Judge Harkness made the fine kind of exactly match my bank account.”
“Nothing to pawn?”
“They held me in temporary for two weeks that first time. Every time they’d call my name, they’d read my address out loud to be sure it was me.”
Arnot King nods, seems to understand that to a tank full of accomplished breakers-and-enterers about to be released, your address had been an invitation. There’d been waves of them stripping your apartment down to the hinges and knobs that weren’t even yours.
“Then you’ll owe me,” he says, shrugging off your gratitude. “My firm has need of investigative services from time to time…”
“I’m not a real PI,” you say.
He leans close, says, “And you think I’m a real lawyer?” then flares his eyes wide, stands. Leaves holding the tow-receipt from last night over his shoulder like a flag, like a pale yellow handkerchief. Like your only chance.
7.
THAT NIGHT, BECAUSE IT’S CHEAPER, and empty, and just one cell over, Sheriff Felson puts you in the drunk tank. You ask the deputy—nobody you know, finally—for a wake-up call, maybe a chocolate mint on your pillow. He says he’s got something chocolate for you, then angles the television over so you can watch the news with him through your window. You watch on
the chance you’re going to be on it.
By six in the morning, Toby Garrett’s baby brother’s there and you’re in the break room, have Gwen’s number punched in, the one you’re not supposed to know.
Her son answers.
“…Dan,” you say, having to close your eyes to pull that name out.
“Dad?” he whispers back, quieter, and like that you’ve become a ghost. Each second you don’t say no, it’s another second where Dan’s world can make sense again. Where it can be a place his dad didn’t get shot in the face with a shotgun, anyway.
Your first instinct is to apologize to him—but, for what? Sorry that somebody shot your old man, kid?
Gwen saves you. From bed it sounds like. “It’s for me,” she creaks.
Dan holds the phone for a breath more, hangs up slow.
“I’m sorry,” you tell her, just because it was already in your mouth.
“He was—” she starts, can’t finish.
“You crying?” you ask, wincing to hear it out loud, wanting to crawl into the phone line, reel your words back in.
She’s crying now, anyway. Good job.
You don’t know what to do and so you say it again—sorry— ease the plunger down with your index finger.
Five minutes later she calls back. It nearly shakes you out of your chair, makes you drop the phone from your head, the base from your lap. As far as Toby Garrett’s baby brother in the window of the door knows, you’ve been talking to her the whole time. Listening anyway, the receiver pressed to the side of your head. Now she’s in your ear again, saying to just let her explain, please.
“Explain?” You’ve had five minutes now to run through everything you should have said the first time, if she hadn’t turned on the waterworks.
“You’d understand if…if you were me.”
“Who would be me then, you think? Somebody good at taking the fall? I didn’t do it, Gwen. You know that.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“But you told them I didn’t talk to you that day. What that means to them is that I talked to Rory. Told him to meet me out at his old place. In the right light, it looks a lot like premeditation. Even in the wrong light.”
On her end, for too long: silence. Her holding her phone down, saying a muffled bye over it to Dan. A screen door closing.
At least he’s not on the phone.
“I just want to know why,” you say. “What it would have really cost you to tell them.”
She laughs a bit, at herself maybe. “If you were working for me, or whatever, then that means there were—that there were marital issues. And Dan, I can’t let Dan find out anything like that. Not now. I don’t know what it would do to him.”
It makes you wish you had some pictures of her in bed with Fin, his blue body coiled around her.
You stand, whip around the break room table, keeping your head low so you won’t pull the base crashing to the floor.
“Marital issues other than him not living there? Dan not pick up on that somehow?”
“I mean—”
“They think I killed him, Gwen,” you say, barely controlling your voice.
It starts her crying again. She can’t catch her breath, talks anyway. “…but, but they say, they think you were working for him too, Nick. See?”
You do see, or close enough. If you were working for her, then you were probably working for him too. And, because he’s dead now, his jealousy gets automatically justified—Gwen will have been having an affair, will be that kind of widow, that kind of mom.
The moment she says yes to Sheriff Felson or Arnot King, three thousand people will hear it. Hear under it. Three thousand and one, counting her son.
But still.
“Good thing I came back when I did, yeah?”
“Nick—”
“Don’t worry about it, Gwen.”
Tick, tick, the coffee dripping, filling the room. Then, from her end, “What if I just come down there and—”
You hang up before she can finish, catch Toby Garrett’s baby brother just starting to look away.
The first drunk of the day shows up an hour later. He smells like pesticide, has two days’ worth of beard dusting his face, ten years of hair tangling from under his cap, and is wearing an old Greenwood Rangers letterman’s jacket—the sleeves dark leathery blue, the vest-part nubbly and light.
He’s ranting about how he’ll do it, by God.
Inside of two minutes, he’s flat on his back on one of the bunks, a forearm across his eyes, his slack jaw slipping so far back into his head that it looks dislocated.
“Hey,” you say, to be sure he’s asleep.
At least he doesn’t have any ticks, fleas, or lice. Nothing within twenty feet of him could.
You stand at the cell door watching his thin chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and only become aware that the door behind you’s open because it pulls more of the pesticide into your eyes.
It’s Sheriff Felson.
In one hand she has her nightstick. In her other, the silver microcassette recorder.
You try not to smile.
“We were doing you a courtesy, you know,” she says. “Just you and me, comfortable, talking.”
“Lady Miranda be damned,” you add.
What she’s mad about is what she probably just got back from whoever the prosecuting attorney is around here: the microcassette.
If you did the buttons like you think you did, the only incriminating thing on there is your full name. And maybe not even that.
She stares at you until you shrug, say about the sleeping man, “He drink the stuff, or what?”
“Wha—?” she says, just seeing him it seems. When she does, her hand curls around the nightstick tighter, says without looking up, loud enough for any deputies behind her to hear, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Toby Garrett’s baby brother is the first to get to the door, look over her, into the drunk tank.
“You’re not one of mine,” she tells him.
“Ma’am,” he says back.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Felson says again.
“None of the sandals fit him,” a real and breathless deputy chimes in, studying you—trying to explain the spectacle you must be here.
“The other picture,” Sheriff Felson says back.
The deputy narrows his eyes at the sleeping drunk man then looks away in pain. Leads you back to your first cell, Toby Garrett’s baby brother trailing behind like he belongs here.
You don’t say anything, just try to listen.
It doesn’t help.
What’s wrong with this picture? Like it should have been obvious.
You sleep instead of eating, and then it’s lunch and Arnot King is back.
This time, because the break room’s off-limits—Felson’s orders—everything Arnot King says he says with his hand over his mouth, his eyes flicking up to imaginary microphones, hidden cameras.
“Bad news and bad news,” he says.
“Wouldn’t want to break my streak.”
He’s wearing the same suit as yesterday. “That film you say you turned in,” he says. “There’s no record of it—are you sure you filled the envelope out right?”
You blow a laugh out through your nose. It’s happened before, on restaurant waiting lists, radio call-ins, for door prizes: nobody believes Bruiseman could be a real name. So they crumple it up, throw it away.
“It was just her car in the shop, like I said.”
“It might have a time index on it or something.”
“Hey, yeah,” you say, impressed.
“You’re supposed to think of that, kimo. From here on out. I file motions, you see the cop-stuff. Got it?”
You nod.
“Bad news number two,” he goes on, standing for the door.
Behind it is a man in thin, greasy coveralls, the brim of his cap curled into a paper towel tube, pretty much, his face squinted up like an interrogation room’s the last
place in the world he needs to be.
“Ronald Warrick,” Arnot King says.
“Who?” you say, certain for a moment he’s the sleeping man’s twin brother.
“Exactly,” Arnot King says, and unfolds the yellow tow-receipt onto the table.
“His name was—was Jim Martindale,” you say, then, to Ronald Warrick: “You know him? Tall guy, beard, shades? Think he manages the body shop or something.”
Ronald Warrick rabbits his eyes to Arnot King, shakes his head no. “I do eighty percent of the towing in Stanton, yeah? Other twenty’s just, y’know, people pulling people.”
“Ask Ruby, or Rubio, at the body shop—” you say to Arnot King.
“Manuel’s place?” Ronald Warrick slips in, incredulous, and you look to him like he’s not even talking English anymore. “Short little bugger of a guy?” he goes on. “Can fix anything that, y’know, has parts in it?”
Arnot King waves the back of his hand at Ronald Warrick, as if sweeping him out the door, dismissing him. It’s almost Middle-Eastern—royal, like a prince might do.
“Where you from?” you say, after Ronald Warrick’s gone.
Arnot King looks up to you, tries to make sense of your question.
“Monahans,” he says. “Then Crane. Why?”
You study the two-way glass.
Monahans isn’t even two hours away. And Crane. They were the Golden Eagles, or—Hornets? Wasps?
“Play basketball?” you ask him.
He chews the inside of his left cheek some.
You get it already: this is serious.
“I’m about out, here, Nicholas,” he tells you.
You cover your mouth with your hand. “I didn’t want to have to do this—” just as somebody on the back side of the two-way glass knocks three times.
Arnot King closes his eyes in pain, like he knew this was coming, knew they were listening, that they had lip-readers in there, and sketch artists, maybe a telepath or two, and maybe he’s right: the light comes on behind the glass, and it’s Sheriff Felson. Only, beside her, no make-up, her purse clutched tight to her chest, is Gwen.
“Can we?” Sheriff Felson says through the little speaker.
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