Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  What Arnot King hasn’t guessed is that one truck blasting out of here doesn’t make sense—What about Dan Gates? Or, even if him and Thomas had decided to just use one truck, why Thomas’s, when they had Rory’s tricked-out three-quarter-ton?

  It doesn’t make sense, but maybe it doesn’t matter either. They’re kids, were just supposed to do what they’ve already done: strand you out here, burn some time until you can lose your lawyer on grounds of serious conflict of interest. You crack the lug nuts loose as slowly as possible, acting like they’re tighter than they are, then take too long figuring out the magician’s wand that, if you fold it just right, say just the right words, will become a jack handle for a few turns at a time. Still though, it hardly takes fifteen minutes to get the tiny wheel off, roll it out into the darkness as hard as you can. Right as it crashes into some dry weeds, you remember it’s Sherilita’s and notice all of the sudden that you’re holding your breath, like you’re waiting for something. The tire to roll back? No, but…nothing on the ground. Something else.

  The belly of a yellow cropduster plane, banking up from the field. That’s it. You track what its course would be, what its course was.

  Arnot King interrupts you with your full name. “Nicholas.” He’s calling as if from far away.

  You pull your eyes from the empty fields, focus on the house. Say it to yourself again: that there should have been two of them out here—Thomas, driving away already, and Dan.

  You keep the tire iron by your leg, follow Arnot King’s voice up the stairs. In the first tiny bedroom, the one that was glowing ten minutes ago, is a dull, upturned hubcap, a bed of coals still smoking in it, beer steaming off them, all the glass in the room swept up against the baseboards.

  The next room is the one Rory used as a kid. The one he died in. There’s still yellow tape fluttering around the doorframe, meaning the window’s gone in there too.

  “Check it out,” Arnot King says, rolling the wheel of his lighter.

  This is the room you were supposed to have stumbled into last week.

  It smells like nothing now. The same as outside.

  “Not bad, yeah?” Arnot King says, the lighter flickering out, stranding you with the afterimage of all that’s left of Rory: kitty litter, to soak up the bloodstains. An evidence flag used once for a photograph then forgotten. A leg-sized hole in the floor, where the pellets from the shotgun punched through, because Rory’s head wasn’t enough to stop them. His head and hands. And whatever he was saying at the end. To—who? Fin? Gwen? Jim Martindale?

  Except Rory was Jim Martindale. You just didn’t see it. Weren’t looking for it, didn’t know what you were getting into.

  It wasn’t a suicide either. Because there was no shotgun. Because he signed the insurance form, and everybody knows the insurance doesn’t work if you off yourself.

  Arnot King strikes his lighter again and you look through the window hole, still waiting for the yellow plane to strain up into the sky, barely clearing a power line, its twelve nozzles still blowing, blowing—

  Pesticide.

  You focus again on the kitty litter, look up to Arnot King, and then he interrupts you. “There’s no glass.”

  You keep your mouth open, look down to the baseboards.

  He’s right.

  “They swept it up,” you tell him. “Evidence.”

  There’s still bottles though, the fingerprints on them twenty years old. Yours, maybe, chalk still trapped in them from the hash marks of whatever town you’d played in that night.

  Arnot King runs another toothpick into his mouth. “You were going to say something, detective?”

  You look out to the field again. “I have to meet somebody in town at midnight, I think.”

  Arnot King hooks his head down to the Sunfire. “Your girlfriend?”

  You smile one side of your face. “One of my old friends’ little brothers. I think I know who did it.”

  This time, instead of pulling blindly across the packed dirt around the old house, you have Arnot King walk ahead of you to kick beer bottles out of the way. You wind up on the side of the house opposite the road you came in on. You look back to it long enough that Arnot King says, “What, kimo?”

  “We don’t have another spare,” you tell him.

  He hooks his chin up the road you’re half-on. “Where’s this go?”

  “The long way.”

  “Long enough you can explain this-all to me?”

  You nod, take the road Thomas already took, and tell Arnot King what you should have seen all along, when Felson got you moved from the drunk tank back to your cell: it was the cropduster. He was committing the perfect crime. The reason there was only your tracks and Rory’s at the old house was that he’d set his plane down in the road, or the field, then walked in, walked out. That he was the main and only witness against you, that should have been enough. But, if not, there was more: not only had he committed the perfect crime, but now he was hiding in the perfect place: jail. Probably for disorderly conduct or public intoxication, some nothing-misdemeanor he’d been just asking for.

  “So he’s this—this Martindale character?” Arnot King says. “The one who’s real and not made up?”

  You hadn’t taken it that far yet. But, maybe. Probably. Yes.

  “And you didn’t recognize him?” Arnot King says, more delicately.

  For the third time in a week, you say it: “He was—he had a beard, glasses. A hat.”

  “His voice, though?”

  “I never heard it. In jail, I mean. He just, like, yelled once, maybe.”

  Arnot King sits back, shakes his head, says like a punch line, “Timing.”

  You turn to him.

  “You could have figured this out a long time ago,” he says. “The world was trying to tell you.”

  You slow for a turn, accelerate too fast out of it, the dump spread out below you. “Maybe it was all a plan,” you say. “How else was I going to get Fin to give me that film, if it wasn’t in payment for saving his ass?”

  Arnot King smiles, isn’t buying it for even a moment.

  Two seconds later the cab of the Sunfire is flooded with light.

  A truck behind you. Right on you.

  Arnot King looks at you, his eyes hot. “I thought he wasn’t out here?”

  “You tell me,” you say, and jerk the Sunfire over into a berm and stand on the brakes. The truck flashes past, just a shape in the risen dust.

  You kill the headlights, back up, sling the nose around, and take the road you just came up. At the last possible moment, though, the road plummets down into the dump, the incline so sharp you can’t even see the packed ruts coming up to meet you.

  Arnot King has his hands on the dash, his head turned sideways for the coming impact.

  Halfway down the hill you lock the front tires, turn them sideways, plowing up more and more dirt. The one time they catch, threatening to shoot you off into rat-nest refrigerators and cable spools, you whip them back, hit the brakes again, and finally come to a stop, the one thick chain of the gate stretched tight against the Sunfire’s windshield, its thin metal No Trespassing sign flipped upside down, tapping the glass.

  Neither of you laugh, or breathe.

  Across the dump, a pile of trash lights up suddenly: the truck, cresting the hill behind you.

  It creeps down at a sane speed, its lights on bright, so you still can’t see anything but them.

  Dimly, you become aware of Arnot King already out of the car, trying to pull the rusted padlock from the post, the chain scratching across the paint of the Sunfire’s hood, Sherilita’s antenna already snapped off.

  You stand from your side of the car with the tire iron, have to shield your eyes from the truck.

  If you’re right about the cropduster, then the bad guy’s already in jail, and the only person who could have been driving the Ford the other night was Dan, the one Rory bought it for in the first place. Meaning this is either him, in the Ford, or Thomas, in his Chevy
.

  Twenty feet out, the truck goes down to parking lights, to a square Chevy grill.

  Thomas.

  He steps out, sees you but doesn’t say anything. Says instead, to Arnot King, hunched over the chain, “Mom?”

  Arnot King stands, looks to you for an answer.

  You let the tire iron fall down into the Sunfire’s driver’s seat.

  “Thomas,” you say.

  He steps to the trunk of the Sunfire, a tire iron in his hand too.

  “She’s going to be pissed about her car,” he says, pity in his voice.

  “Happy to know where you are, though.”

  “That’s what you’re doing?”

  You nod, hope Arnot King isn’t about to question this.

  “Why out here?” you say to Thomas.

  He shrugs, looks away, and you fill your own story in for him: his father was supposed to drop everything, come looking for him, right? It makes sense. If he’d wanted Sherilita to find him, he would have camped out at Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, or the old motel, or on the roof of the high school, or at a friend’s, or just in his truck, always moving. Out here, though—farmland—only a farmer would know it. One like Tom Howard, who runs all of Sherilita’s dad’s old fields. They’re checker-boarded all across Martin County. Probably a couple within dirt-clod distance of here, even.

  You don’t make Thomas actually say any of this—or make him listen to it, either.

  “Got enough to eat?” you say.

  “Liquid diet, yeah?” he says. “Learned from a pro, you could say.”

  You lean back against the Sunfire, your arms crossed.

  “I told her I’d bring you back,” you say, looking at the dump instead of him.

  “She paying you?” he says.

  “She’s a friend.”

  Thomas nods at Arnot King. “Him too?”

  Arnot King lowers his face, waves two fingers’ worth of hello.

  “Lawyer,” you explain. “Never leave home without one.”

  Thomas shakes his head, chews his gum loud. He comes back from his truck with a beer for each of you. This close to the dump, it’s the most right thing to do. Halfway through, he throws his can out into the piles of trash. “Sucks out here anyway.”

  “Burrito?” you say, tilting your head to town.

  “You buying?” Thomas says.

  “Who said anything about buying?” When Thomas smiles, you add, “I didn’t even know you and Dan hung out.”

  Thomas stops on the way back to his truck, looks to you, then Arnot King. “Dan Gates?”

  “It’s his house,” you say.

  “Just because his dad died in it?” Thomas says, and then, after you can’t think of the next question, the follow-up, he gets into his truck, backs all the way up the hill, leaves his headlights on so you don’t drive his mother’s Sunfire into an old washing machine.

  “What was that about?” Arnot King says, his eyes locked to the mirror on his side, his large hand cupping it, keeping it steady.

  You don’t know.

  19.

  THE DREAM YOU HAVE in the last booth at Town & Country lasts, you think, about two seconds. The bite of burrito in your mouth is still warm when you wake back up anyway, but now you have a feeling you didn’t have before: that you’re sitting in a fiberglass boat in a stock tank that stretches for fifty yards around you in each direction. Standing at the edge of the tank, on the toolbox of a truck you can’t see, is the Lawler kid. He’s still six years old. You lift your hand to wave to him just as you notice the boat’s filling with water, that the water’s seeping in through a .38 caliber hole. Slowly, deliberately, like it’s a puzzle piece you’re placing, you lower the hand you were holding up to the Lawler kid, point your finger like the barrel of a gun, and force it into the hole to stop the water, but then jerk it back out fast when something fine and silky like hair brushes over the tight skin of your fingertip.

  “You’re one to talk,” Thomas says. He’s sitting across from you. Evidently.

  You rub the dry skin around the corners of your mouth, have no idea what you might have just said.

  Standing in front of the coffee machine, waiting on it, his eyes glazed into marbles, is your lawyer. By the register is a beef jerky jar, the plastic kind with a hand-sized hole angled up from the side. If you have a business card, you can drop it in, maybe win a tank of gas. In the forty minutes the three of you have been there, Arnot King has slipped six cards into the jar. He doesn’t even have liability insurance, doesn’t even have a car.

  You take another bite, wipe the bean juice from your mouth and tell Thomas his mom’s going to turn into a pumpkin if he’s not home in T-minus five minutes.

  “What about you?” he says, balling up his burrito paper.

  “Meeting somebody,” you say, and slide the Sunfire keys across the table. Thomas catches them, looks out to the parking lot. You tell him you’ll leave his truck at the water station.

  “You just don’t want to be the one to give it back to her like that,” he says, nodding out to the Sunfire, it’s plastic underbumper hanging.

  “Tell her to take it out of my expenses.”

  Thomas shakes his head in what you hope is a total absence of faith in the adult world, but stands anyway. You wave away the two dollars he offers for the burrito.

  “Rich man,” he says, walking away.

  Sixty-seven thousand five-hundred dollars.

  Five minutes later, on military time, Toby Garrett’s baby brother rolls up in a minivan, parks where you can’t see without turning your head. You don’t have to, though. You can tell the law is there because one moment your lawyer’s watching the coffee drip, a seventh Allegator card palmed in his hand, and the next moment he’s faded back to the funnels and lubricants and Brodie knobs of the trucker wall, is keeping his back to the parking lot.

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother sits down opposite you. “That Thomas I saw?”

  You say in your most everyday voice, “It’s what I do.”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother toasts you with his coffee.

  “Double shift?” you say about him still being in uniform at twelve when he was in uniform at noon, too.

  “Personal time,” he says back, and nods out to the wood-panel minivan, his patrol car already checked out to another officer.

  You slurp the top off your coffee.

  “You said you were going to explain—what?” Toby Garrett’s baby brother starts off with.

  “My eternal gratitude. For picking up that Brazos character. Keeping the streets of my hometown safe.”

  “Glad we could be of assistance. Anybody else it would be convenient to you for us to detain?”

  You look to Arnot King. He’s reading the ingredients or directions off a tube of oatmeal. You remember when they used to have coke glasses buried in them.

  “I know who did it,” you say, come back to Toby Garrett’s baby brother all at once.

  He smiles. “Was that supposed to be dramatic?”

  You let your head continue its motion past him, settle your eyes on a rack of abridged audio books.

  “If you don’t want to know…” you tell him.

  “I thought you already figured it out once, though,” he says. “You were wrong then?”

  “I was right then.”

  “So it’s still Gwen and—whoever, that other guy?”

  You nod once.

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother shrugs, leans back in his seat. “So tell the Sheriff, then. Get her to release—”

  He stops himself, pulls his bottom lip into his mouth.

  “Release Fin?” you say.

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother nods.

  “What?” you say. It’s not really a question.

  He stalls with another slurp of coffee, grimaces like it hurts, what he just almost told you. What he shouldn’t have told you. You say it again, “What?”

  He pulls up one side of his face. “You’d have found out anyway. What you
and him are talking about on Felson’s tape—”

  You feel all the blood leave your face, are pretty sure you taste it going down.

  “The film?” you whisper.

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother nods, shrugs again, and says like it’s obvious. “He had it on him when he surrendered. It’s in his property basket.”

  “Still?”

  “Felson doesn’t—it’s on the report, but she doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter, though. Legally, we can’t touch it.”

  You breathe out through your eyes, it feels like. “But, legally,” you say, “you could, say, step out for a sandwich down at the water station.” He shakes his head no, like this is a joke. “On me,” you add.

  “Just get him released, you’re so sure it’s not him. Then everything’s above-board.”

  “I don’t have that kind of proof yet.”

  “Like last time.”

  Even the people who are supposed to be helping are working against you.

  “That was you out at the dump?” Toby Garrett’s baby brother says.

  You angle your head, catch his eye.

  “The landfill?”

  He laughs without smiling much. “Just hope you weren’t fooling around with the crime scene.” “That’d be obstruction.”

  “Tampering, at least.” Toby Garrett’s baby brother shrugs. “In addition to offering to bribe a peace officer. A two-dollar seventy-five cent bribe, last time I looked at Sherilita’s menu.”

  “You were there, though,” you say, leaning forward, your hands cupped over your coffee like you don’t want it to hear the confession he’s about to make.

  “The dump?”

  “The house.”

  “So?”

  “You should have seen it too, then.” To explain, you ramp your hand up from the edge of the table, bank it over the napkin dispenser.

  “Darryl Koenig?”

  “That cropduster?”

  Yes.

  “Think about it,” you say. “One truck out there, the Ford. That I left. But, after you eliminate me, who does that leave? You can’t walk out of there—”

  “But you can fly,” he finishes.

  You shoot him with your finger gun, blow the smoke off. Toby Garrett’s baby brother shrugs, doesn’t seem to not believe you, anyway. It’s a start.