Jo was in the nearby kitchenette pouring two glasses of bourbon. “You want some, Crow? What about your friends, they need to wet the whistle?”
“Nah, not for me.” Crow backed to the wall by the small television set and scooted down until he rested on his heels. “Not for them, either.”
One of the dogs came up to Crow and sniffed at his crotch. Crow bopped it on the head with his knuckles. It yipped and backed away.
“Don’t be hurting my animals,” Jo said, handing the bourbon to her daughter. “Tell him he can get the hell out of my house if he’s going to abuse my animals.”
“Tell me yourself, Mama. I can hear you.”
“Don’t call me mama. I would have smothered you at birth.”
Heddy interrupted, saying, “Mama, I don’t know when I’ll get to see you again.”
Jo drained her glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before she said, “I don’t reckon you came to see me much anyway.”
“I know, but this is different. I have to go pretty far away.”
“Will it be Canada or Mexico?”
“Look at her,” Crow said. “Ain’t she the smart one.”
Without hesitation Jo whipped her empty glass around and threw it at Crow, narrowly missing his head. The glass struck the wall where it was soft from termite infestation, bounded off, and rolled over to Heddy’s foot. She leaned over and retrieved it, handed it back to her mother. She mouthed “Stop it.” silently to Crow.
“Well?” Her mother asked. “Canada or Mexico?”
“Does it matter? I just have to go. And I won’t be coming back.”
Jo turned, her loose flowered house dress flapping around her ankles, and found the bottle. She poured herself another shot.
“Who’s all those tongue-tied people you got with you there? They going to?”
“Never mind about them, Mama, that’s on a need-to-know basis and you don’t need to know.” Crow laughed at his little witticism, but not for long. Jo put down her glass on the counter very deliberately and reached over to the stove for a kettle of water. Steam rose from the spout.
“I was heating water for washing dishes, seeing as how my hot water heater’s busted. But now that Crow’s here, I think I can use this hot water for scrubbing out a dirty mouth and that would be a much better use for it.”
Crow came up from the floor instantly, shaking his head. “Tell her to take it easy, Heddy. I’m in no mood for her games.”
“You started it, Bully Boy,” Jo said, advancing with the kettle swinging in her hand.
“Heddy, you tell her. Tell her now!” Crow reached into his satchel feeling for his gun.
“Mama, that’s enough. I didn’t come to fight.”
Jo halted and looked at her daughter. Her eyes slid over the other people on the sofa and stopped on the little girl.
“Kid,” she said.
Heddy looked to where her mother’s gaze was fastened. She said, “Yeah, that’s her parents there.”
“You took a kid?” Jo asked. Her words were slurring slightly and it was obvious to everyone by the way she swayed unevenly on her feet while holding the kettle aloft that she was not far away from a stupor.
“Heddy, we better go.” Crow edged toward the door. Both dogs came to him, sniffing his pants legs and whining. He carefully pushed them away, a grimace on his face.
“Why’d you take a kid, Heddy? Damnit, girl, didn’t I teach you anything? You don’t mess with old people, cripples, and kids. You don’t kick dogs and you don’t lie to a priest. Those are the cardinal rules. You don’t break them. What’re you doing with that kid?”
“Mama, I don’t want to get into that. Why don’t you pour me another drink?” Heddy held out her empty glass. Her mother didn’t look at it. She was still focused on Emily.
“What’s your name, girl?” Jo asked.
Heddy stood up abruptly. “A drink, Mama? Want to pour me one?”
“Emily,” Emily replied.
“That’s a pretty name, Emily.” Jo immediately turned on her daughter and jerked the hot kettle almost above her head. “I ought to scald you a new one, Heddy! What are you doing with Emily around a bastard like Crow? Have you lost what little brains you were born with?”
“Mama, put down the water.” Heddy’s voice was menacing. She stood her ground. “Put it back on the stove. Right now.”
“I’ll put it on the stove. After I douse you good, I’ll put it back on the stove.” She began to upturn the kettle, but just as the boiling liquid started out the spout, Heddy grabbed her mother’s wrist and held on tightly.
“Put it down. In the kitchen, Mama.”
Jo’s eyes glazed over and then seemed to come to life again. “I have to put this down, it’s killing my wrist,” she said, turning when Heddy let her go and placing the kettle on the stove burner. “I’m so weak lately. I can’t hold onto anything.”
“Let’s go, Heddy,” Crow said again, fidgeting by the door, his hand on the doorknob.
When her mother turned to her again, Heddy walked into her arms. She hugged her while the old woman stood there, her own arms limp at her side.
“I might call,” Heddy said, stepping back. “Some day.”
“Do you no good. I don’t have a phone. They shut me off. You wouldn’t have a few bucks to spare, would you? I’m all out of dog food and my animals are getting tired of eggs and bourbon shakes. Gives them the runs.”
“Christ,” Crow muttered, looking around with distaste at the newspaper-strewn floors.
“He’s no good, you know.” Jo pointed a caffeine-stained forefinger at Crow. “He’ll bring you down over this. He used you to get out and now he’ll dump you or get you killed. But you got no right to take that kid into it. That’s plain against the rules. I thought you had learned better.”
“We’ll let the kid go in a little while, don’t worry about her. Listen, Mama, take this money.” Heddy reached into her purse and withdrew a wad of bills.
“Oh boy. Where’d you get this?”
“It doesn’t matter, keep it. Buy yourself a phone. Get dog food. Whatever. And maybe I’ll call one day.” Heddy turned and motioned for the Anderson family to rise. She marched them out the door behind Crow, who was the first through the opening.
Jo reached down and hugged the dogs to her chest so they wouldn’t follow. On the path outside, Heddy turned and said, “You’re no good either, Mama. No better than Crow. And I loved you too, no matter what. At least I was good for something.”
She left her mother standing with her mouth hanging open and the dogs whining in her arms. She slammed the car door and viciously turned the ignition key. She revved the motor good and loud.
She sat a moment, thinking very bad thoughts. She thought if anyone in the car said one word to her, she’d take out her gun and kill him for it. One word. Any word. Boo. Love. Mother. Drunk. Filthy. Ignorant. Pitiful. Slow. Backward. Trashy. Crazy. Any word at all. And she’d kill him. It wouldn’t take two seconds.
#
HAWKINS watched the little girl tell him about the murder Heddy committed at the gas station. Then the tale of the side trip to see Heddy’s mother in Kansas. What a downward spiral this family’s life had taken once in the clutches of an escaped convict and his lethal girlfriend. The more that was revealed, the more Frank wondered at Emily’s resilience.
When Jay found out that Heddy killed the drug chemist sent to recover the stolen money, did he admire the woman in some way? Maybe he started to empathize with her as she took down the “bad guy” and protected herself and the loot. It was, after all, dirty money, up for grabs. Combined with her mysterious and strange sexual bravado, her willingness to use deadly force might have seemed alluring to a man teetering on the edge.
His own wife presented no challenge, and in fact her very acquiescence infuriated Jay. Heddy, on the other hand, moved around in the same dangerous world as Jay, albeit on the other side of the law.
Frank really wanted to get a hand
le on what happened in that car on the flight to Mexico so he could understand how a twelve-year law enforcement veteran ended up ready to throw away his family and his life in order to be a part of the criminal underground.
It was always possible, it occurred to Frank, that this wasn’t the first time Jay had walked on the dark side. There was no evidence, but perhaps Jay had already been dealing with drug dealers or thieves, taking kickbacks or bargaining for a piece of the illegal profits. Even in a small town there was money under the table changing hands.
Frank had casually asked Jay, “Do you like your job?”
It was usual the patient lied when asked this because with Frank being tied to law enforcement he held the patient’s future in his hands. He could recommend the officer be let go.
Despite that possibility, Jay answered as truthfully as Frank thought he could have under the circumstances.
“I used to.”
“Does that mean you don’t like it anymore?”
Jay wouldn’t meet his gaze. “It’s harder to like it.”
“Talk to me about the problems you think you’re having with your job.”
Jay barked out a harsh laugh. “Money, for starters. I’m shopping for a new car, trying to trade in our old one. You have any idea what new cars cost? Not much less than my yearly salary. It’s going to make us skimp on other things in order to get one.”
“Your wife works, doesn’t she?” Frank pushed aside papers in Jay’s folder looking for the information he wanted. “She teaches school...”
“Yeah, and you want to know what teachers make?”
“Point taken. All right, there are money worries. Anything else about your work you want to talk about?”
“I’m getting tired of being despised.”
“How do you mean?”
“When I first came on the force people showed some respect for cops. You know how they are now. To the public we’re about one notch above the killers and rapists. They don’t trust us, they don’t want to see us unless they call and then they want us there in two minutes flat to lay our lives on the line for their safety.”
“You resent your place in society.”
“I guess you could say that. Were you ever on the street?”
Frank sat back from the force of Jay’s vehemence. There was enough anger there to blow fuses. “I was on the street early on, sure. It was some time back...”
“Then you don’t know what I’m saying. If you haven’t been out there lately and felt that disdain, you can’t imagine how thick it is.”
“I’d think in a small town such as yours...”
“It’s no different! I’ve had grade school kids call me pig, the homeless, what few we have, spit on me, and one rich society bitch threaten she’d get my badge if I didn’t agree cheerfully to keep a round-the-clock watch on her palatial home while she flew off to Paris for two weeks.”
“That’s tough,” Frank remarked, having heard some of these same complaints before. He knew it was no picnic out there, big city or small town, but Jay’s anger was out of all proportion to the perceived insults he suffered from “the public.” He was walking around with a chip on his shoulder so big it was about to topple him over.
When Frank carefully suggested that maybe Jay should think of looking for another line of work, he grew abusive.
“Yeah, why don’t I go for your job? Sit in a nice office with bookcases and an intercom. Spend my days safe and warm, listening to sob stories.”
“Is that called for?” Frank asked.
Jay stood and paced around the small office. “Maybe not. You asked how I feel and what about thinking of another job. I’m sorry, I seem to blow like this all the time. It’s why I’m here, isn’t it? As for other work, I’m not trained for anything else. I guess I could go into security, but I hate that. It’s about as exciting as branding cows on a farm.”
Frank concluded that Jay could turn into a dangerous man. Feeling trapped and unappreciated, in need of more money for a better lifestyle, furious with his stake in life, he was ripe for some kind of fall.
Frank’s attention came back to the little girl’s story. After cold-blooded murder, and the stop at Heddy’s mother’s trailer, what had Heddy and Crow done then? And what was Jay’s part in it?
It was important to know as much as he could find out. He’d had a stake in Jay Anderson for months and the books couldn’t be closed until he found a way to understand how it all came down.
#
THROUGHOUT the long day Heddy drove relentlessly, her silence a heavy cloud that hovered over and informed the other occupants of the car. She stopped for gas once where she and Crow took their hostages to the bathroom one by one. She stopped again for food around noon, hotdogs and fries and shakes at the drive up window of a Dairy Queen.
By afternoon even Crow had grown morose from spending hours trapped in the silent car. He began to complain, at first in a joking way and, then, when Heddy did not respond, more noisily.
“I can’t take another hour in this car, Heddy. You’re going to have to give it a break.”
Heddy failed to reply. She drove steadily, her hands gripped hard on the steering wheel. She smelled of booze and desperation. The combination cast a sour scent over the air inside the car.
“Heddy, now goddamnit, you let that dead son of a bitch back there throw you like this and it’s not going to help our chances. Or if it’s that thing with your Mom, hell, brush it off. She can’t help herself. But whatever it is, I have to tell you I am not going to sit in this car every day while you fucking sulk.”
“She’s thinking how much she likes me,” Jay said.
“Oh your mouth,” Crow said, fairly shouting. “He’s getting to you, Heddy. I can’t believe you’re letting him do that.”
“I’m finding a place to stay the night,” Heddy said quietly. “If you’ll just shut up. Christ, I get tired of trying to get y’all to shut up.”
Crow jerked back in the seat and sat fuming. He had tied a dozen knots in the leather straps of his shoulder bag. Now he set about untying them to keep from hitting someone in the face. He knew he was dangerously close to losing it and he didn’t want to do that. He never should have done more crank when he knew there was this much tension. Speed put him out of control--what he usually wanted--but he’d made a mistake doing so much of the drug while trapped in a car, unable to move around and let out the streams of energy that rolled off him like clouds of steam.
Within fifteen minutes of announcing she was going to stop, Heddy slowed in a small town just over the border in Oklahoma. She found a little motel on the outskirts and got a room with two double beds. Once they were all inside, she stood with her hands on her hips to address Crow.
“We’re being followed.”
Surprise corralled his face, pulled it down and threw it in the way you hog-tie a calf and throw it to the ground under the five-second bell. “You know that for sure?”
Heddy saw Jay grinning and pointed to him. “He knows it. It’s a little dark blue car. It picked us up not far outside that town where I had to shoot Rory. It must have followed us to my Mom’s and waited somewhere.”
“So they know you stopped here, at this motel. Jesus Christ, Heddy..!”
“Whoever it is, they would have known no matter where we stopped. What we have to do now is stay on watch.”
“I dunno...maybe if we offered to give the money ba...”
“Crow!”
His head came up at how she’d interrupted him. “What?”
“We ain’t giving back nothing, nothing, you hear me? It’s ours. We need it and we’re keeping it. So just get that out of your head.”
“You took something you shouldn’t have,” Jay said in a voice that showed he was interested in all the details. “It’s not the cops you’re worried about now, is it? Don’t you know you’re involving innocent people in your screwed up little affairs? You need to let my wife and child go at least.”
“Tie him up,�
� Heddy commanded. “I’m going out to find something to eat.”
Crow bound Jay and pushed him onto one of the beds. He left Carrie and Emily free. He started pacing the room, passing the bed where Jay lay, and watching him carefully the way a hyena watches a crippled antelope on a wide-open plain.
“What’d she get you into?” Jay asked. “I know you do what she says and you think she’s bright, but now she’s dropped you into a world of trouble, hasn’t she? How smart is that? Maybe you ought to try making your own decisions for a change.”
Crow passed a small lamp on a table opposite the bed, grabbed it, ripped the cord from the wall and hurled the lamp at Jay’s head. It missed, muddy brown glass shattering against the headboard. Carrie gasped and Emily let out a short scream before she covered her mouth with her hand.
“Go ahead,” Crow warned. “Keep it up and see what it gets you. Talk about Heddy some more why don’t you? Bad mouth her when her back’s turned. You think I don’t know what you’re doing? Split us, turn us against one another, that’s what you’re doing. I’m not completely STUPID! Do I have a sign on my back saying I just joined the human race?”
Jay kept quiet. He glanced at his wife and back at Crow still standing over the end of the bed, furiously slapping at one thigh with his hand, the repetitive action a nervous tic.
“I’m not saying a thing,” Jay finally said.
“It’s about goddamn time, man. I get tired of it and there’s no predicting what I might want to do to you. But it won’t be pretty so keep it zipped, okay?”
“Must be the mob you stole something from,” Jay said.
“Oh man!” Crow was on the bed like a flash, pummeling Jay in the gut with both fists while calling him names and threatening to shut his mouth permanently. Jay’s hands were tied behind his back and all he could do was head-butt and knee the other man. Carrie rushed to rescue her husband and Emily was at her mother’s back, trying to pull her away from the melee.
Carrie hauled back on Crow’s leather vest until he slipped to the floor. He jumped to his feet, fists up, glaring at her. “I ought to give you some of it,” he said.
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