Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Pawing through the odd spoons and bits of string, though, you find your hand moving slower and slower, finally stopping altogether. The only thing you can see anymore is the pop-up camper framed in the kitchen window.

  Two beds. There were two beds in it, both being used at once, not Dan going back and forth from one to the other.

  And—and Rory’s three-quarter ton, hidden out in the draw.

  Why hide that truck, instead of the Ford, when the Ford was the one the police were missing? And why drive the Ford to town at all, even? Why two trucks?

  Out at Rory’s old house, two trucks is what you’d expected: one for Dan, one for Thomas.

  But, here, there’s just Dan, just one driver.

  How would he even have got both trucks to the Rankin place?

  You lower your eyes, stare into the white of the sink, and see it again: the envelope secreted away in Gwen’s purse. All the invoices, the lines filled up with the names and numbers the headstone guy’s going to carve.

  Is that what the real message was? The names and numbers?

  But—but then who?

  So far, the only person in her life that’s left her even one note was Rory, and that was his name on the insurance form. But, Dan? Does Dan know what she did? Is that why he’s been hiding from her, because he’s still loyal to Rory? To the memory of his dad?

  The only other person who could leave the note, who knew, would be her other backdoor man, Jim Martindale. Whoever that is. But unless she’s double-crossing him somehow, he shouldn’t have to be leaving notes, could just tell her.

  You rub your lips. After Jim Martindale and Dan, then—and you, and Fin, but he’s in jail—the only person left who knows for sure what happened is Rory himself.

  And then you stop smiling, look at what you know for sure: in that old house out by the dump, Rory was blown away in what the papers want to sketch out as a small-time gangland-style shooting, a single shot to the face.

  Except maybe that’s not what it was. Not at all.

  The glass blown out of the window of Rory’s old bedroom finally makes sense a little bit: there wasn’t just one shot. There were three. The first, however it happened, had turned his head into ground meat, killed him for sure. But still, his head probably kept most of the pellets. Didn’t leave enough to go through the floor and leave that kind of hole. It probably wasn’t a straight-down shot either, because who’d want to lie down there in the rat shit and faded rubbers?

  No, the hole in the floor was from the second shot, when the shooter, Jim Martindale, stood on Rory’s arm to steady it, nuzzled the barrel into the palm, looked away to pull the trigger. But then that left a hole that was unacceptable, made it look like he was trying to erase the fingerprints. For the third shot, he held the other hand up to the window, so the pellets and glass and meat would fan out into the dirt. Presto, no second hole in the floor, just one person standing up to shoot another person made to lie down and that lying-down person holding both hands in front of his face. It made sense to all us types not there to see it happen.

  The problem, though, is why go to all that trouble? Why lure Rory into his childhood home only to shoot him enough that fingerprints wouldn’t matter, that dental records wouldn’t matter, that his DMV picture wouldn’t matter?

  “Because it wasn’t him,” you say out loud. Slowly, the colors bleeding into each other against the faded wood of the old house, Rory changes places with his shooter, holds the gun now. He’s the one leaving invoices on Gwen’s windshield, reminding her over and over that the name on them is wrong. Daring her to turn him in, to cash that check, become the criminal you’ve been saying she is all along.

  From the moment Gwen stepped into the room with the body Felson had told her was her husband, she had known all this, known just by looking at the wedding band that Rory was out there.

  The reason that 5 or 2 or N doesn’t mean anything is because you were trying to make it fit with her somehow. But it doesn’t, it won’t. And she’d have seen that immediately.

  Why else give away the money?

  Or, to look at it another way, who else would have reason to drown her now?

  You back away from the sink, sit down into the space where the stove used to be and just stare up at the ceiling, your elbows on your knees, arms straight.

  Gwen didn’t come out here to find Dan at all, or to wait for you to trick her into a confession. What she came out here for was to confront Rory. To apologize, or to tell him to stay away from Dan, or to threaten that she knew he was a killer, that she was going to turn him in. Maybe even to tell him that you had the insurance money now, that she wasn’t a part of this anymore.

  Whatever she’d said, it didn’t matter. Rory hadn’t been in the listening mood. Not after being dead for a week.

  You close your eyes, ball your fists, know you should have seen this all earlier somehow. You should have guessed it, listened to your gut. Should have had a better gut.

  All week you’ve been toying with the idea of applying for a PI license, for kicks and grins.

  Now you’re not so sure. Of anything.

  You open your eyes when you have to, when you can’t hide anymore, when someone in boots is coming down the stairs half a house away.

  You wait, wait, and then Rory walks in, his mouth full with spit, eyes unable to settle on anything for long. He crosses to the sink, trails a brown line down into the drain then scoops his dip out into the curve of his right index finger, flicks it after the spit.

  He’s wearing the same clothes he was the last time you saw him.

  In his left hand, clinking against each other, he has two longnecks.

  He takes a long step forward, holds one out to you, and you take it, drink half down in one gulp. It makes your eyes water.

  “You a ghost?” you say, looking up at him.

  He nods yes, tips his beer up.

  You hold yours up to the light. “You don’t let Dan drink, do you?”

  “I’m a good father,” he says back.

  It’s why there was no beer in the camper. He leans back against the counter, crosses his boots, stares out the back door.

  “I really liked her, y’know?” he says, running his eyes along all the counters.

  “Gwen?”

  He laughs a single laugh through his nose. “Mrs. Rankin.”

  You nod, liked her too, you guess. Have all her stuff down at Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, even. For some reason it makes you feel like crying.

  “So what now?” you say.

  “Does it matter, really?”

  You study the lines in the linoleum, can see from your seat that there are three layers of it, really, each about an eighth of an inch thick. Mrs. Rankin, aging, standing at the stove, probably never noticed her ceiling getting closer. Because it was coming down at the same rate her vertebrae were compressing.

  “Did that check clear?” Rory says, bringing you back to him.

  “Check?” you say, not even sure what the word means anymore with Gwen lying dead fifty yards away.

  Rory smiles big, sets his beer on the edge of the sink, and says, something final in his voice, like he’s about to try and joke his way out of the room, “St. Nicholas…”

  You smile a little.

  Rory looks away. “You know, it would have—if you just would have dropped it, yeah? Just let him go to jail, do his time like a good little tattoo guy.”

  Fin.

  “It wouldn’t be his time,” you say. “It would be yours.”

  Rory spits a grain off the end of his tongue. “He wanted my wife, he should have been ready to take the fall too, I think. Fair’s fair.”

  “Maybe you should have shot him too, then.”

  “I wish—yeah. That would have been better.”

  “Putting the shotgun in his camper was the next best thing?”

  He shrugs like that’s all in the past already, doesn’t matter.

  “I couldn’t drop it,” you say. “It’s what I d
o, I guess. Now.”

  Rory rubs a spot on his forehead, looks right at you for once. “You carry a gun, Detective Bruiseman?”

  You shake your head no.

  “You have one, though, right?”

  You keep shaking your head no.

  “Gonna be hard to shoot you” he says, pushing up from the counter.

  You finish your beer. “You can always drown me, I guess. Throw a chain on top of me to keep me down.”

  Rory smiles, even laughs a bit. Rubs his nose.

  “What about Jim Martindale?” you say.

  He stops with his index finger right at his tear duct. “Who?”

  You shake your head no, nobody. That must have been part of Gwen’s scam, not his. Jim Martindale was her third man, the one who was supposed to have shot Rory out at the old house.

  “I thought it was the cropduster,” you say, rubbing a dirt dobber nest that’s under the lip of the counter. The dust sifts down onto your shoulder.

  “Cropduster?” Rory says back.

  “He’s the only one who could have—who could have got out of there without leaving any tracks.”

  Rory tongues his lower lip out. “Not the only way, hoss. You’ve been gone too long.”

  “Dan picked you up,” you say, when you figure it out.

  Rory stares at you hard. “In what? You had his truck, as I recall.”

  Open your hand, give him that.

  “It wasn’t Gwen,” you say. “Was it?”

  “Let it go already, man. It’s all—it was stupid.”

  “But you’re going to shoot me anyway.”

  Rory shrugs.

  “With what?” you ask, peering up at him.

  He puckers his lips out in something a lot like regret, you think. “It’s upstairs.”

  “The shotgun?”

  He steps forward to have another angle out the back door.

  “The Davidson place?” you say, watching him.

  He nods.

  “It’s my lawyer,” you tell him. “And the other guy who wants to kill me.”

  Rory covers his mouth with the web of his hand. “I know how you feel,” he says. “You’ll wait here, if I, y’know, go upstairs?”

  “Of course,” you say, playing along.

  He smiles wider, with his eyes even, and says, “She told me about you, you know that? You and her, after that Colorado City game?”

  You nod, remember, could never forget the thirty-four lines her hair made in the window glass. How deep they were.

  “So you’re just, just taking care of everybody she ever—that she?”

  In answer, he thumps his can of dip into the side of his wrist, packing it. He leans forward to get it into his lip. Holds the can out to you. You shake your head no.

  “Never too late to start,” he says, fitting the chrome lid back on.

  “Got enough bad habits,” you say back, and he nods, his eyes watering with the rush of nicotine. His mouth too full of spit for words, he points upstairs, that that’s where he’s going. You nod that you understand, yes. And goodbye. Like two people passing on a road, he lifts his finger to you, slips past, becomes a sound on the stairs.

  Two long steps later you’re through what’s left of Mrs. Rankin’s screen door, scrabbling through the dirt and weeds for—

  You don’t know.

  Easing back from the Davidson place is the black Town Car, but at the careful pace Arnot King’s picking along the grain-drilled road, they’re two minutes away. For you, now, that’s a lifetime. Maybe more.

  You crouch as low as you can, look back to the house—no Rory, yet—and step behind a rusted tank, almost fall over the hood of Gwen’s Town Car. You start to go around it but then stop, look back to it.

  Ten seconds later, you’re low in the driver’s seat, waiting for the lighter to pop back out, hoping that fuse doesn’t feed off the ignition.

  It doesn’t.

  You roll out of the car cupping the red coils in your hand and curve as much of your body as you can over the driest weed you can find, blow gently and desperately on the thin yellow arm you hold the heat to.

  Just as the coils of the lighter go from red-hot to ash-grey, a small, nearly invisible flame licks up into your skin. You feed it air, breath, life, and then it moves up the weed branch, catches the branch above it too, and you’ve got a fire.

  Ten seconds later, the weed is a candle flame, isn’t going to stop. You back away, find a tumbleweed, throw it on and then step as calmly as you can to the other side of the Town Car, watch the smoke billow up into the sky when the flames find something green in there, some Johnson grass or volunteer hay grazer.

  It’s going to get Gwen’s car, but you can’t help that.

  On the other side of the tank, where you can’t see, you hear Mrs. Rankin’s screen door rattle shut, know Rory’s standing on the concrete block of a porch, watching the smoke too. A gun in his hand.

  “Yeah,” you say to him quietly, and then have to step back from the heat.

  At the wire gate between the Rankin and Davidson places, Jimmy Bones and Arnot King are watching, waiting.

  “Come and get me,” you say to Rory, still not loud enough for him to hear, and, keeping the smoke between you and where you think he is, you make your way back through the junk to Gwen. It’s the last place he’d want to be, you think.

  Twenty minutes later, the fire touches the house, catches, and the sparks start drifting down around you.

  The grass smolders, little curls of smoke wisping up, and then you hear a crackling, do the only thing you can: ease Gwen back over the edge of the tank, into the water, and follow her in, hold her until the sirens come winding up the road.

  24.

  WHEN IT LOOKS LIKE the grassfire’s going to cross the fence onto the Davidson place, one of Nate Davidson’s forty-two sons opens a riser, lets a sluice of well water run between his father’s land and what’s now, you guess, Betsy Simms’s.

  The volunteer firemen let the house burn down, focus instead on soaking the pasture to the north, the direction the wind’s blowing. Because if the fire gets there, in July, it’ll run up along 137 toward Lamesa until it hits one of the sandy fields where there’s nothing to burn but arrowheads and glass insulators fallen from ancient telephone poles.

  Felson asks you if you know how this all started.

  You look out at all the blackened, dead ground, and blame it on Rory. “He was trying to smoke me out, I think.”

  Felson stares at you and stares at you. She still hasn’t noticed the dull wedding band you don’t remember slipping on. Probably because you didn’t want to lose it in the floormat again. Except now you can’t get it off and don’t want to make too big a production about trying, either.

  If you can’t have the Ford, though, then, yeah, this kind of marries you and Gwen, right?

  It meant enough to her that she didn’t drop it out the window going sixty, anyway.

  The 5 on the back, though. It’s the first part of a date, has to be. May. You need to find out who-all from your graduating class—maybe two years in either direction—who-all got hitched in May. And which of them’s a widow now, even if she doesn’t know it.

  Each box you open in your mind, there’s a smaller box inside it.

  Maybe this is something all storage unit security personnel eventually have to face at some point of the job.

  “What?” Felson says about whatever’s funny here.

  You shake your head no, nothing. Snug the blanket around your shoulders a bit more. You’re sitting at the back edge of one of the two ambulances to respond, are a victim. It’s not yet five o’clock.

  “Rory,” Felson says. “So you say.”

  You shrug yes like you’ve been doing ever since she got here an hour ago, but this time, instead of explaining it all to her, you feel something purring against your chest, raise your hand to it.

  The silver microcassette recorder, in voice-activated mode, its heads sluggish with water.

>   You pull it up from your pocket, shake it out and rewind it all the way, set it on the bumper for Felson.

  She pushes the play button but there’s too much emergency personnel milling around and she has to retreat to her cruiser, close the door.

  What’s on the tape, you know, is your and Rory’s voices—yours louder, his distant, like he’s dead.

  But he’s not.

  And he’s not here, either.

  For a while after you handed Gwen over to Toby Garrett’s baby brother, you’d watched the horizon for Rory’s small form moving away, but he never was. Or he already had.

  Felson comes back ten minutes later with the recorder in her hand, a new flatness in her eyes.

  She’s listened to it twice, you know.

  “So?” you say.

  Without looking at you, she nods.

  Any other day, you’d make her say it, that you were right. Make her apologize, make her understand that if she’d just listened to you, then maybe Gwen would still be alive.

  On this day, though, it doesn’t seem worth the effort. Isn’t going to change anything.

  “What about Fin, then?” you say.

  Felson sucks her cheeks in, purses her lips out in thought, and nods once, her eyes flashing to you for a fraction of a second. She knows Fin has whatever it is Judge Harkness is looking for, and that, whatever it is, it’s probably going to ruin you, to keep on ruining you. And that you’re lucky now to not already be in jail or in the coroner’s van with Gwen.

  “When?” you say, still talking about Fin.

  “Depends if your attorney presses all his charges or not,” she says. Then, nodding out to the pastures, “You think he’s still out there somewhere?”

  “Rory?”

  “The tooth fairy, Mr. Bruiseman.”

  You smile about this, how comfortable it’s getting to be with her.

  “Thomas’s dad lives over there,” you say, pointing with your chin to the southwest. “Right?” And the way Felson nods without even having to think about it pulls you back twenty four hours, to the library in the high school, when you’d said nearly the same thing to Gwen—that you were working for Thomas Howard.

  Her response had been different, though. She’d had to think to bring Thomas Howard to the front of her mind. When he was in her own son’s grade, had probably been playing with him since diapers.