Arnot King stands deferentially for their entrance, offering his chair.
You sit there, watching Gwen.
For the second time that day Sheriff Felson palms the silver microcassette recorder, showing it to everyone in the room.
“Haven’t we been through this?” you tell her. “It was an accident, I guess.”
“You accusing him for faulty equipment now?” Arnot King says.
“What’s she doing here?” you say about Gwen.
“I’m right here,” she says.
“She’s trying to save you,” Sheriff Felson says. “Lord knows why.”
You look at Gwen for a clue, but she’s not playing any eye footsie today.
“What is it?” Arnot King says, about the recorder.
Sheriff Felson shakes her head in disbelief. “Looks like it wasn’t all a lie.”
She hits play on a muffled recording of the day Gwen hired you.
You can only stare at her about it. That she didn’t trust you is the only thing on your side now. You don’t know what to say.
“And—and this,” she says all at once, unfolding an envelope from her purse. “Janet called me about it on her lunch.”
It’s the St. Nick check from the Wagon Wheel, Rory’s signature down at the bottom, “for services rendered.”
Sheriff Felson huffs through her nose—a true Stanton Buffalo—shakes her head.
“Services?” she says to you.
“Interested?” you cut back.
Arnot King steps between the two of you. “So?”
It’s not as articulate as you think it should be for a lawyer, but it’s enough.
“It doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” Sheriff Felson says, finally.
“Then who did?” Arnot King snaps back.
“Fin,” you say, staring at Gwen about it. “Anthony Robert Payne.”
She looks up to you, then to Sheriff Felson, then to the ground. “Tony?” she finally says.
“We know about the one-on-one, um, tutoring,” you tell her. Then, for everybody else: “You heard how I said that, right? ‘Tutoring?’”
Gwen looks to the side again. “Tony’s a strong writer, yes. Was it forged checks? Something like that. But—you thought he and I, that we were—?”
She laughs a bit, brings a tissue to the inner corner of her right eye. “Nick, God. I didn’t help you just so you could mess his life up too, just when he’s putting it back together. That’s not the way—Rory wouldn’t want us to—”
She can’t finish. Sheriff Felson guides her out.
“It was him,” you tell Arnot King. “Ex-con, in the ballroom, a candlestick that goes bang.”
“Reasonable doubt.” Arnot King gives you that. Then he leans in, his mouth covered, but draws back at the last instant. Goes out front again.
He comes back an hour later with more bad news: Sheriff Felson can still hold you either until they talk to Fin, or for seventy-two more hours. You do the math: seventy-two hours away is Saturday night. It means you won’t get out until Monday morning. Provided your paperwork doesn’t get lost.
“I can’t be gone from Aardvark that long,” you say. “It’s in my job description.”
Arnot King rolls his tongue around his lower lip, says so quietly you can hardly hear him, “Unless you…you almost were going to tell me something earlier, am I right?” When you just stare at him, he palms the recorder, hits play on your voice, already cued up: “I didn’t want to have to do this…”
You each have your fingers steepled over your noses. Any words you do or don’t say will be remaining in church, pretty much.
“I must have—” you start, but he shakes his head no, as if he’s feeling sorry for you here. To be losing your job and your bed both at the same time.
It might be funny if it were some other slob.
“They’re sewn into the back of the couch at Aardvark,” you say.
Arnot King pats your shoulder once, like he’s your sponsor or something, closes the door on his way out, and—because he’s trying to be quiet, because he’s trying not to be grand with his exit—you just manage to catch the look on his face as he turns to the empty hall.
It’s the way you watch the dogs come around that last turn when your dog’s ahead by a length.
“No,” you say out loud.
Because you’re the dog, here. You have been all along.
You go to the door to bang on it, to insist on…what?
Instead of hitting the door with the side of your fists, you just press your forehead into it.
Before Arnot King can even be to Midland with those negatives from the couch—the fifth roll of film that Judge Harkness never knew about, that you shot for personal use—Sheriff Felson leads you to the property desk.
“Seventy-two hours?” you say to her like you’ve been rehearsing, the lower lids of your eyes pressing up, because you already know how she’s going to answer: “Seventy-two what?”
You’re the dog, all right.
They were processing you out all along.
The whole way to Property, you watch the door for him, know he’s not going to be there to give you that victory ride across town. That he was just using you to get the one thing he would have to want worse than anything: a few clear shots of the only female judge in Midland meeting a man on the first floor corner room of an interstate motel with curtains that sighed up on the air conditioner’s cold breath every few seconds, exactly like an invitation.
At the time you thought she was Jimmy Bones’ friend’s wife. Eight hundred dollars to you.
Instead, it cost you everything.
The property clerk—the same deputy from last night—slides your heavy brown envelope over, has you initial the log.
“So that’s really your name…” he says in wonder, holding the log up to read it better.
You walk out, open your envelope in the street. Pretend not to notice that he forgot to keep your old detective shield, as evidence.
Pocket it. Keep walking.
8.
SHERILITA GIVES YOU FRITO PIE and a plastic spoon to eat it with. When it breaks off—Frito pies are supposed to be made with chili, not yesterday’s chopped beef—you reach over the counter for another. When it breaks too, you just tilt the small bag up, shake the pie into your mouth, get an eyeful of corn chip and barbecue sauce instead.
“Better than jail?” Sherilita says, wiping down a table that’s already clean.
You hold the napkin to your eye like an ice-pack. “Miss me?”
“Thomas wanted to play last night,” she says.
You stare at the empty bag in your hands, tilt your head next door to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. “It was open, yeah?”
She shakes her head, her eyes wet with humor.
“Still think you’re a private eye?” She stands, looks next door too. “No, Nick. Last night it was locked. Anything else?”
“You know Manuel, down at the body shop?”
Sherilita laughs to herself. “He a suspect now?”
“It’s his shop there across the tracks?”
“You’ve been gone too long,” she says. “He used to do tires down at White’s?”
You just stare at her, can vaguely recall somebody rolling a tire slow along the red brick wall of the old part of White’s. But that’s all. And it’s mostly just the tire. You thank Sherilita anyway, study the empty bag in your hands some more. Talk yourself out of going downtown, to Higginbotham’s, to ask the clerk if that’s where Arnot King bought the bolt cutter. The way you talk yourself out of it is that you don’t have the Ford anymore, and Arnot King’s already been to the drugstore for the film—right?—and, even if you know that’s where he bought the cutters, it won’t make the gate in front of Aardvark Economy Custom Storage any less open.
At least he popped the lock, you tell yourself, didn’t go for the chain.
The office door should have been open for him, too—or, he’s skinny enough to have reached t
hrough the payment slot, twisted the knob from the inside. And the couch, a child could break into a couch. Should be second-nature to a lawyer.
You close your eyes against it, don’t want to see him there anymore. Don’t want to think what you’re already thinking—that, if he takes the roll of film straight to Judge Harkness, you have maybe ten hours to catch a ride out of town.
If he stops to get it developed, make some copies for safekeeping, you have a day, maybe two.
But maybe he’ll just save it, for some motion he needs allowed, some search and seizure he really needs made illegal.
That’d be worse, though. Then, Judge Harkness could be sending her bailiffs or troopers or hip-pocket cons over any day. To deal with that kind of pressure, that kind of uncertainty, you’d have to steal a beer truck, hide it behind Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. Camouflage it as an RV or something. Paint a pair of old people on the windshield.
“What?” Sherilita says, wiping down another table.
“Nothing,” you tell her, holding the empty Frito bag up. “Thanks.”
“Family recipe,” she says with half a smile, not a muscle more.
What you remember best about her from school is that once, when she was up to be the FFA’s sweetheart, the way she kept acting like she didn’t want it, like it was stupid, it made you follow her down the hall after she didn’t get it. Not to say anything—you were fourteen—just to watch her at the double front doors. The way she looked back once, then stepped out.
“Dane Wilson,” you say. When she looks up, you add, “His little brother. The one who died.”
She stops wiping the table, watches you across all four tables of the water station. “What about him?”
“Wasn’t he supposed to be in our grade?”
She nods, raises a shoulder like so?
The reason he wasn’t was that his dad, Henry “Shoo Fly” Lawler, took him on the rodeo circuit with him when he was six, so he had to wait a year longer than everybody else for first grade. But then Shoo Fly died in front of eight thousand people in Denver.
Three years later, his son would be dead too, in a stock tank.
“Did you ever know him?” you say.
“Why?”
You shake your head no, no reason. Jerk your eyes away from sunlight flashing in off the side mirror of a truck pulling up next door, its no-nonsense grill guard right up against your chain link.
Sherilita leans over to the blinds, says it like the two of you have been living together for years: “It’s for you.”
“Miss Johnny Law?” you say, standing.
Sherilita pretends not to have heard you.
You crumple your bag into the trash, can already hear it crinkling back open before you’re even out the door.
The truck next door is a three-quarter ton Ford, a new one. Goosenecked to it is a horse trailer, a thirty-foot job. For wiener-dog horses, you think. The limos of the range. Seat six cowboys at once.
Without meaning to, you say it: “Giddyup.”
The woman coming back from the gate looks from the broken lock in her hand to you.
“Excuse me?” she says.
“Help you?” you say back, and on accident notice that her cheeks are freckled, beautiful in that schoolgirl way. The kind of woman who lives miles outside of town, watches the sun set every night, never has to wear make-up.
Or maybe you’re just out of jail.
“Trying to find somebody here,” she says.
“Hey,” you say, holding your hands out to the side, presenting yourself.
She looks from you to the storage units, as if reconsidering. “How much?”
“Twenty-two a month on a one-year lease,” you reel off, “five less if”—you smile, nod to yourself, should have seen this weeks ago—“if you pay cash up front.”
“That include unloading it?”
You look to her gooseneck, wince a bit.
“Our insurance—” you start, unsure how you’re going to end this lie, if it even is a lie, but then see she’s studying the lock in her hand again, the cut metal of its thick hasp still raw.
“So, my mom’s stuff,” she says after you trail off, “it’ll be safe here, right?”
You grin as if just tolerating this, keep your hands balled in your pockets, your weight on your heels, and can suddenly feel Sherilita at the water station window, her fingers parting the blinds.
She’s waiting for you to do the right thing. Or to do one more wrong thing.
Her and everybody else.
You narrow your eyes to the horse trailer again, ask if she can leave it overnight.
“You’ll unload it?” she says.
“Special bonus for cash customers,” you say, your lower lip between your teeth.
“Five off a month, or total?”
“A month,” you tell her after a thoughtful pause, like this is a special deal you’re making just for her.
She stares at the Aardvark sign, tracks up to the Motel sign dwarfing it, and lifts her chin downtown. “I’ll have to go to the bank.”
You nod—anything’s okay with you—and she guides the trailer through the gate on the first try, backs to the empty unit on the B-side using just her mirrors, unhitches it, cranks the legs down, the loose metal feet crunching into the caliche like the landing gear of an alien craft.
“Take your time,” you tell her, and standing on the running board to climb back into the cab, she looks back at you like you’re bleeding. Like you’re speaking a foreign language.
You lift your hand in farewell, say it inside: twelve months times five dollars. Because the real discount for paying ahead’s ten. Sixty’ll almost make up for the seventy-five you dropped at the bar in Big Springs. You smile, turn around, close your eyes to catch up with yourself: Stace’s parents don’t even have to know that empty unit in B is rented, do they? Not if this is a cash kind of affair.
These are the same people who gave you a job, a room. Picked you over an ex-con—fresh-con, you used to call them.
But maybe you can make it up to Aardvark in some way. Provide excellent security. Stop liberating stuff from the units. Walk the straight and narrow, like you’ve really been meaning to get around to one of these days.
Instead of starting on the horse trailer—it’s a night job anyway, a twelve-pack, midnight kind of effort—you push through the office door, roll the couch back over.
Under it is Arnot King, longways, facedown, his hands underneath him.
For too long you stand there, watching his back rise and fall.
No, you say inside, no, and back out, go to the fence, hang your hands high on it exactly like a prisoner in a movie. Because she knows her part, has probably been waiting in the wings for forty minutes, Sheriff Felson eases past, her passenger side window already down. If asked, of course she’s just making rounds, rolling the streets up before lights out. Each of you knows better, though. She tips her hat to you, then makes her index finger into the barrel of a gun.
You try to look past her, so that her invisible bullets can bounce off you, but they pass through instead, each one a direct hit.
“Can’t be happening,” you say finally, and go back, look through the payment slot.
Arnot King is still there.
“How—?” You spin to the parking lot before the thought’s complete.
His car, whatever he drives, it’s not there. You push out through the gate, don’t even know if you want a Stingray or a BMW or whatever—something slick to match his suit, something on lease because it’s all for show. It doesn’t matter: all the cars at the boarded-up Dairy Queen and the Sonic are Stanton cars, regulars. Town & Country, too. Franklin’s, Graves, the new bank. And the carwash, it’s empty, and at the water station there’s just Sherilita’s Sunfire, Felson’s cruiser in the drive-through. There’s Wheeler’s, you suppose; your lawyer’s car could be anything on the lot there.
More important, why wouldn’t Arnot King just park in front?
Two
minutes later, all the change in your pocket thumbed into the payphone, Melinda’s saying your name into her dispatch headset again. Kind of mournfully, you have to admit.
“Emergency,” you tell her.
“Wrong number,” she says back.
“Last time,” you promise.
Thirty seconds later, Arnot King’s make, model and year: a bright yellow Mustang from last year. Ford. Meaning it’s not with the new Chevrolets up front down at Wheeler’s, anyway.
You re-cradle the phone before thinking to thank her, are studying Stanton with different eyes now, trying to filter out everything but Mustangs.
It’s nowhere.
You turn back to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, and it dawns on you slow: as far as Arnot King is concerned, you were never here.
You nod, smile, and back through the front door of the water station again.
Sherilita stops sweeping, watches you, then what you’re watching: the storage unit. Through her window.
“Big stake-out?” she says.
“Commandeering this chair,” you tell her, finding it with your hands.
“Just like that,” she says, her fingers interlaced over the top of her broom.
“Just like that,” you say back, and nod out the window, ask if she saw a man from Monahans go in there about forty-five minutes ago?
“Monahans?” she says, leaning close to the blinds now.
The two of you take the window in shifts, the other working the counter and the drive-through.
You’re halfway through a second sliced beef sandwich—the expensive, fresh stuff—when Sherilita says, not looking away from Aardvark Custom Economy Storage for an instant, “Betsy Simms is from Monahans?”
You fall across the counter, across the tables.
Betsy Simms is the horse woman, with the freckles.
It’s been three hours.
“No.” You fall out the front door, the apron you’ve already forgot about trailing behind your hip on the right side, your thumbnail lined with barbecue sauce again.
You catch Betsy Simms just as she’s about to knock on the screen door of the office.
She turns to you, lowers her sunglasses to her sharp cheekbones.
“Two ten,” she says, holding out a cash envelope from the bank. “No tax, right?”
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