by Kris Lackey
“And you would know that how?”
“I waited tables in Brooklyn. You knew that.” She filled her own glass.
“Yeah, I just imagined …”
“Vegan enchiladas and the house red?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah, like that.” He fitted a pecan in the cracker’s jaws and faked a grimace as he squeezed the handles. The nut snapped loudly. Pieces of shell ricocheted off their glasses. “Got-dang!” He dropped the nut into his palm and took a metal pick to its meat. “When you were waiting tables, is that when you were seeing the fire-eater dude from Texarkana? What was his name?”
“‘Dude.’ When are you going to let the mists of the past shroud him forever?”
Maytubby cracked another pecan and said, “Never!”
They dipped chips in the peach salsa. Jill melted butter in a copper skillet and sautéed shallots over low heat. Maytubby chopped the pecans and some shelled walnuts, dried cranberries, yellow raisins, and crystallized ginger. He fed Jill a piece of the ginger with his fingers. “My knife is really gummy,” he said. He slid a pan of nutmeats into the toaster oven. “I think Waddell’s regional label should be Clear Boggy Valley.” He held his glass up to the light. “A crisp, peachy Oklahoma Viognier with notes of soybean and methane.”
She took the squash halves out of the oven and set the pan behind the skillet. “Speaking of smoking at a gas pump, I also saw Slob today. In Comanche. He was with Rooster.”
Maytubby took his eyes off the toaster oven and looked at her.
“Rooster didn’t see me. He was in the Sentinel truck, smoking and texting.” She picked up a wooden spatula, tilted the skillet, and pushed the shallots into a small bowl. “I saw the other guy on his knees, stocking a machine down a hall. Detour. When I was in an empty classroom talking with a health teacher about the Eagle play, she saw Rooster through a window, sitting in the truck. Then she closed the blinds and hugged herself.”
Maytubby turned off the toaster oven and slid out the pan of nuts. “The horror?”
“Yeah. But not just his looks. Last weekend, her family was walking through a parking lot in Ardmore? Rooster drove up, jumped out of his pickup with a pistol, and accused her husband of cutting him off. Shouted obscenities, waved the gun around. Made the kids cry. Got back in his pickup and peeled out of the lot.”
Maytubby shook the roasted nuts into the skillet. “Did …”
“I told the teacher my fiancé’s a cop. White late-model Ford Supercab, big front bumper.”
“The Supercab that passed you the morning you were on your way to Gonzalez’s—white Ford?”
Jill knitted her brow, stirred the skillet, and turned off the fire. “Ford, yeah. Light. Silver or white.”
“This investigation is lousy with white Ford Supercabs. But there wasn’t one parked at Rooster’s workplace—Sentinel Vending—when I was there.”
She spooned the stuffing into the squash hearts. “Maybe they like to share.”
“I had never thought of that.” Maytubby opened a cabinet and took out a square green bottle of olive oil and small bags of spices. He set them on the counter. “I was out your way this morning. Cache.”
“Home of Quanah Parker’s White Star House.”
“Yes. And of a makeshift landing strip with buried contraband. And a dubious Cessna that buzzed the Ford.”
“Wait,” Jill said. “What …”
“Here’s a strange,” Maytubby said quickly. “The counter guy at Sentinel was my landlord’s handyman when I lived in Santa Fe. Small-time crook. My landlord died, but his daughter told me today the guy’s name is Duncan Calls.”
Jill took a sip of the Viognier and looked at Maytubby. “Lots of Callses on the Dawes rolls.”
“And Duncan Calls is a Chickasaw citizen.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“Don’t think so.” Maytubby drizzled the squash halves with olive oil and seasoned them lightly with cardamom, nutmeg, and cinnamon. He crumbled brown sugar over everything and slid the pan back in the oven.
They stood near the small white range because it was warmer there. Jill said, “I got Nichole’s text in Comanche.”
“I was in suburban Paris.”
“It reminded me that her mother lost her own father when she was young, like you lost your mom. She might be an insightful guide.”
“I was passing through Mill Creek late this afternoon and saw her taking the girls out of her car. Nichole wasn’t with them.”
“I hope the FBI leaves her in peace.” Jill sipped her wine. “Why were you in the City of Lights?”
“I was watching a fastidious man from Moriarty deliver an illegal rifle to a white-supremacist camp in the country. The Marietta embezzler picked up the duffel holding the rifle from Rooster and the Stank at the aforementioned gas station. After the Moriarty guy received the bag, Hannah knew I was tailing him, so she stopped him for a taillight. He acted weird about the bag, so she had cause to look inside.”
“And she didn’t arrest him, because then he wouldn’t lead you to his clients.”
Maytubby nodded.
“And how do you know he’s fastidious?”
“His ecru jeans are creased.” He did not mention the liquor sack creases.
“Where did he go?”
“To the Powell Road compound. Hannah is watching the embezzler’s mobile home. Shady gathering. The fastidious man may show up there later.”
“Get the place cleaned up.”
Maytubby sipped his wine, picked up a stray pecan chip and ate it. “Actually, the embezzler—his name is Richard James—keeps a tidy trailer. Also trims his soul patch.”
“Dude wore a soul patch.”
“Another reason to distrust the embezzler. Also, you lie like a rug.”
Jill set her wineglass on the counter, took Maytubby’s and did the same. She took his hand and led him into her bedroom. “Let’s burn the squash.”
CHAPTER 29
When Maytubby’s cell vibrated, he was washing the last bit of pecan charcoal off a dinner dish. The shower spattered in the back.
Hannah said, “Where’d he buy a new bulb for the Jeep?”
“Coalgate. Hooch, too. He bring that with him?”
“He brought something small. But it’s dark and the moon’s not doing me much good. For some reason, they didn’t leave the blinds open so I could see their every move.
Maytubby set the dish in the drainer. He listened while Hannah breathed.
“You know what?” she said. “This watching people through binoculars at night is bullshit. I’m going to Alice’s house. Eph told me the OSBI car was there today.”
“I won’t tell Scrooby you’re horning in.”
“He’s got a cadet working down here. I think it’s past her bedtime.”
* * *
On the way to Wapanucka, Bond stopped at her house in Tishomingo. In her bathroom, she opened the cupboard door, pulled out all the folded towels, and tucked them under her arm. In the bedroom, she stripped the blankets off the single bed and draped them over her neck. From her single dresser, she grabbed a set of long underwear, which she pinched under her chin. With her free arm, she retrieved a magnifying glass from her rat drawer and stuck it in her hip pocket. She grabbed a fistful of Slim Jims from a kitchen drawer and stuck them in her back pocket with the glass, microwaved a mug of cold coffee, and set it on the Buick’s hood while she stowed everything else in the trunk.
* * *
Now there was yellow crime scene tape around Alice Lang’s dark house, strung between arborvitae trees. Bond doused her headlights, pulled disposable gloves and evidence bags from the door pocket, and slid the elastic band of a Petzl lamp over her head. Her duty belt, cell phone, aviator hat, and pistol lay in the Buick’s passenger seat.
She ducked under the tape, slipped o
n the gloves, and opened the fuse box. The spare key was gone.
She closed the box and stared at its cover while she brought to mind the inside of each of the house’s old sash windows. She focused on their sweep locks—always visible because Alice loved sunlight and kept the blinds open. Going from room to room in her mind’s eye, Bond remembered which windows Alice opened in temperate weather. Then she tried to remember whether any of those had broken or missing locks. A flock of resident Canada geese honked by, low in the sky.
The middle window in the living room. It was missing the sweep altogether. With her Petzl, she found a cinder block to stand on, giving her better leverage to thumb the sash bars up. After she got the window open, she had to push past the closed blinds with her head. The blinds scraped off her headlamp as she hand-walked her legs in.
The house no longer smelled of boy, anise, sage, and oak smoke as it had just after Alice was killed. The scents more familiar to Bond had returned: stale mercaptan, dryer sheets, and Pine-Sol.
Bond picked up the headlamp and held it in her right hand. She wasn’t hiding the light; the wall of evergreens outside did that, at least on the back and two sides. She was here to crawl the wooden floor and glean.
As she lay prone, Bond took the magnifying glass from her back pocket. Breathing as shallowly as she could, smelling a faint blend of paste wax and Pine-Sol, she moved the glass slowly, the enlarged area lit by her lamp, which she shined at an angle to the floor. Her peripheral vision was blackness.
If the cadet wore shoe covers and didn’t do what Bond was doing now, there would be little on the floor unrelated to the crime. Alice Lang swept, washed, waxed, and buffed her oak floor obsessively. The cadet would have spotted anything as obvious as a dusty footprint.
Whoever took Alice had also closed the blinds, probably before she arrived. Bond first crawled along the baseboard under the windows. When she came to furniture, she stood and examined its surfaces. After finishing the baseboard perimeter, she crawled one length of the living room, exhausting a yard-wide strip, then pivoted and worked her way back on the next parallel strip. She found four days’ dust blown through fissures in the sashes, a couple of mouse turds, a flake of dried leaf.
In the dark kitchen, a wall clock ticked off the seconds until dawn. When she had covered half the floor, she looked at her watch. Two hours and ten minutes had passed since she left the Buick. Her neck and elbows ached.
Walking with her sweet Jesus through the green fields of paradise. Hannah Bond clenched her jaw and whispered, “Maggot!”
The pain instantly left her neck and elbows, and she inched along the floor without pause for two more hours.
Either the cadet had done a good job, or there was nothing on that floor to begin with. Bond had pinched a few grains of unusually light-colored sand into a bag, but that was all. She stood and stretched. For another hour she glassed venetian blind slats up to eye level. Then she gently raised all the blinds to just above the wide wooden sills. She examined each sill as she had the floor and the slats. Through the front windows, she could see the sodium lamps of Wapanucka. When she finished a sill, she lowered its blind.
The last bottom rail clattered softly over its sill. Up in the darkness, a creature scratched at the rafters.
Bond did not pause. She walked quickly to the unlocked window, ducked under the blinds, opened it, and went out as she had come in, hands first. She turned and shut the window.
* * *
Thirty-five minutes later, at 1:10 a.m., Bond turned off Oklahoma 1 onto Greasy Bend Road. It approached the Washita River through thickly forested bottom. In the Buick’s headlights, a fox loped across the road, its eyes briefly flaring.
As Bond rounded the last curve before the river, the bridge’s trusses loomed over moonlit branches. No vehicles were parked near the bridge approach on either side. Bond parked under the bridge on the upstream side, screened from headlights coming either direction. She turned off the Buick’s lights and watched the water’s surface in moonlight. She could barely sense its motion. She knew that would soon change.
CHAPTER 30
When Hannah Bond aged out of foster care at eighteen, almost twenty years ago, she had a mental list of things foster parents had forced her to do that she would never do again. Noodling for catfish ranked high. One of her foster fathers—not the one who killed her little sister—took her, when she wasn’t yet ten, to this very river, upstream near the Arbuckle Mountains. He made her strip to her undershirt and underpants and stand on the bank under an August sun while he swam and dived along the vertical banks, groping for catfish in submerged nests. He could hold his breath for more than a minute—enough to create suspense.
When he had pulled a fish from its nest, he burst to the surface, the cat bent between his fists. He inhaled loudly as he flung it to the flat bank near Hannah. Some of the fish were a yard long.
When he lurched up out of the Washita, his T-shirt stained mud-red and his hands bloody, he told her it was time she learned to help feed her family. She had not expected this. She was a strong swimmer, but the river bristled with snags and it was murky. She could not see where she would be sticking her hands. But she set her stoic frown and nodded once.
If she balked for an instant or looked him in the eye, her foster father would break a switch off a bank willow, pull it through his fist to strip off the leaves, and lash her back until she bled.
She swam beside him, on his left, across the river to the base of a stone bluff that cut the current a little. When they reached the bluff, he grasped her right wrist and counted down. They went underwater, their legs splaying as they pushed themselves down the submerged rock, half swimming.
Hannah felt him pause and push her hand into a horizontal cleft. The current dragged her hand slowly along the top lip of the stone. The cleft shallowed out; another opened just above it. She needed air needed air needed air. An image of the willow switch made it worse.
The fish struck her hand like a rattler. Hannah fought the urge to inhale, almost blacked out as her foster father wrangled the fish—and her—upward to light and air. The fish somehow released her hand as she broke the surface. She gasped and gagged, flailing at the river. He leg-kicked backward, flung the big cat onto the opposite bank.
Hannah stood in the shoals, her breath raspy, and let the blood-tinted water run off her fingertips.
CHAPTER 31
Bond had years ago removed the bulb from the Buick’s dome and trunk lights. She had just grabbed her duty belt and opened the door when her cell phone vibrated. She retrieved it from the passenger seat and saw Maytubby’s name on the screen. She shut the door.
“Awful late, Bill.”
“It is, Hannah,” he said softly. “Any luck at Alice’s house?”
“Not a damn thing. Some white sand.”
“You mean no blond hairs.”
She exhaled through her nose.
“Are you back home?”
Silence.
“Where are you?”
Hannah stared at the river.
“Where are you?”
“Greasy Bend Bridge.” She scowled at herself.
“I was afraid of that. Magaw would never let you check out a wet suit.” Maytubby hung up.
“Shit,” Bond said to herself. She tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, opened the door, grabbed her duty belt, pulled the unlit Petzl over her head, and walked around to the trunk. She flicked on the headlamp and pulled out her blankets and long underwear. The north wind had laid, and a light frost sparkled in the moonlight.
With her free hand, she threw the bundle of cotton over her shoulder and shut the trunk. She began to walk the bank upstream from the bridge, where the killer would have thrown the pistol. Only ten paces from the bridge approach, she struck thick underbrush that tugged at her freight. Bond twisted and bulled her way through brambles and scrub oaks to a
place she judged that the weapon would have struck the water.
Here she stomped down a small clearing and laid her baggage on the earth. She unrolled the blankets, lifted two corners of the pile, draped the halves over low limbs; then she took some disposable gloves from her duty belt and pulled them on. The duty belt she covered with brush. She yanked off her boots and socks, shed her aviator hat, coat, shirt, and pants. She turned her head, and the lamp, toward the Washita. Here the bank was shallow but sinewed with roots. If the water was forty degrees, she had twenty minutes in it before she would forfeit her judgment.
She laddered down the roots and mud to the edge of the water. Here she turned off her headlamp, slid it over her head, and threw it onto the higher sand beach. She flat-dived into the river, keeping her head above water so she could pant against the shock. Seven or eight shallow breaths, then she dived to the bottom and sank her hands into the mud. She grasped the mud against the current, kneading it for the gun as she moved between the banks.
In the frigid blackness, she brailled empty shotgun shells, cans, bottle necks, coontail weed, fishing line. Her left hand slid over an object made of smooth metal and wood. She shot to the surface, panted. She heard the faint sound of a vehicle engine behind her and saw a brief sweep of light on the surface. When she turned in the water, still panting, the bridge was empty. She dived again. With both hands, she pulled it from the mud. By the time she had it to the surface, she knew that it was a hatchet. She flipped it onto the bank for the cold-case locker. Nobody threw a hatchet in the river for nothing.
Every ten seconds, she swam upstream to the surface, panted, and dived again. After four dives, she could sense the numbness advancing. But her sinuses throbbed. Some coyotes barked far downstream. She heard the willow switch smack her spine. And then James mocking Alice. She filled her lungs, bent at the waist, swam a few strokes upstream, went down again.
Hundreds of bottles. A submarine forest of bottles, their necks roped with waterweed. They must have been thrown far to sink and lodge here. She fingered them gently so the broken ones didn’t cut her gloves. She couldn’t hold herself against the current. When she broke the surface this time, she had to swim farther upstream.