by Unknown
That got the gal’s attention. She lifted her chin and flashed a smile. Had a darling little gap between her front teeth, nice skin, a smattering of freckles. “Hello, ma’am. I’m Silver Mason. Pleased to meet you.”
Ouch—that goddamn “ma’am.” When was that word going to ease on out of the language?
“Mason . . . would that be the Masons out Route 12? I went to school with a couple of the girls.”
“No, sorry, I’m from Saint Louis. I came out here for work. I’m an intensive care nurse over at Lutheran.”
Arthur Junior frowned impatiently. “I just figured I should find out what your interest in the family was, Mrs. Hardesty.”
“Well now, Arthur Junior, I wouldn’t say it’s the whole family, exactly, just your brother Roy Dean. He seems to have gone missing, and I was wondering if there was any chance he might’ve taken something along with him that doesn’t belong to him.”
The cast of Arthur Junior’s expression shifted, and Stella could see plain as day that a variety of emotions were doing battle on his face. A twitchy little tic appeared at the edge of his jaw, and his eyes narrowed to slits. After a few moments he turned to Silver.
“Darlin’, I’m afraid this is going to take a few minutes. Just some boring business shit. Would you mind if I talked to Mrs. Hardesty alone for a bit?”
Silver gave him a sunny smile. “Oh, that’s fine. I’ll go watch the darts for a bit.”
They watched her walk away. Silver had a nice little figure, a narrow waist and ample curves; for a fleeting moment Stella felt wistful remembering the long-ago time when she could still sashay her way to a man’s attention.
“You might think about hanging on to this one,” she said. “Looks nice, talks nice, gainfully employed . . .”
“Yeah. So listen, I don’t know what my dumb-fuck brother’s gone and done now, hear? I’ve got no part of his dealings. He stopped showing up on Dad’s job about a month ago, won’t answer my calls or nothing. Hell, he hasn’t even been out for Sunday dinner, and Mom’s about to hit the roof. To be honest, Mrs. Hardesty, I ain’t seen him for two, three weeks now.”
Stella evaluated Arthur Junior. She was inclined to believe him. The criminology course said she should look for facial tics, perspiration, and fidgeting—all things that were tough to see in a dark bar.
“Now, Arthur Junior, there’s a chance you could be lying to me, sweetie, and I’d have no way of knowing it. I wonder if I mentioned that the thing Roy Dean took off with is needed in the worst way by a friend of mine. No, now, I’m not saying you know anything about this mess—and I’m not saying you don’t. You may have heard . . . when it comes to my friends, I take their needs pretty seriously.”
The faint little flicker in Arthur Junior’s eyes clued Stella in: he’d heard. She didn’t know how much he knew, but it looked like it was enough. There were days when it paid to have rumors floating around about how you’d ruined a numbskull’s day with a bit of old-fashioned violent reckoning.
“I hear you, Mrs. Hardesty.” Arthur Junior bit his lip but didn’t take his eyes off her face. “What is it you think Roy Dean took?”
Stella considered her options. She generally had a policy against revealing any of the facts of a case unless absolutely necessary. And given her new information about Pitt Akers, along with Roy Dean’s general lack of affection for Tucker, it almost didn’t seem worth stirring up a fuss over such a long shot. Still, time was critical, and she couldn’t see any reason not to get as many eyes looking out for Tucker as possible.
“A little boy,” she said. “Chrissy’s boy, Tucker.”
Arthur Junior said nothing for a moment. It clearly wasn’t the answer he expected to hear. He frowned, the lines appearing on his forehead making him look a lot like his father.
“Why would he go and do that?”
“I really don’t know. I’m just trying to connect with anyone who was with Tucker right before he disappeared. And your brother was there, at Chrissy’s, picking up some belongings he’d left.”
Arthur Junior took a deep breath and let it out real slow. He stared off at Silver, who was chatting with a couple of local gals over by the dartboard; then turned and looked back down the bar at the assembly of drinkers.
“Look here, maybe we better go somewhere else to talk. Let me just get rid of Silver. If I give her my keys, can you run me home after?”
The evening was shaping up to be full of surprises. “That would be no problem, Arthur Junior,” Stella said.
While he left to make his arrangements, she sucked down the rest of the whiskey and beer. Didn’t make any sense to waste it.
“Anywhere particular you got in mind to go?” Stella asked, once they pulled out of Big Johnson’s parking lot in the Jeep.
“Yeah. Head out Old State Road Nine.”
“You gonna clue me in where we’re headed?”
“In a bit.”
Stella nodded to herself and drove along, well within the speed limit. She was drive-safe, her BAC adequately low due to her sizable frame and the big dinner she’d had and a tolerance maintained with a healthy daily dose of Johnnie Black, but there was still no sense calling attention to herself.
A bright slice of moon lit up the road with a soft glow.
“I’m older than Roy Dean by two years,” Arthur Junior said after a while. “Bigger, too. Taller, at any rate. But do you know, by the time I was ten Roy Dean would sneak up on me and take me down when I wasn’t lookin’.”
Stella nodded. Now the boy had decided to talk, it was best to let him unroll his story at his own pace.
“Now that’s the kind of thing you just hate when you’re a kid. Specially if your friends know about it, getting your ass kicked by your kid brother. So I made it a project to beat the crap out of him. And you know what? I never did. See here?”
Stella glanced over; Arthur Junior had pushed up his short sleeve to reveal his shoulder, but Stella couldn’t make much out in the dim light in the Jeep. “Hmm,” she said anyway.
“Fucking bite marks. I got him down, got his arm pulled behind him one day, had half a mind to break it I was so mad, and he bit me. Mom wanted to take me to the hospital, but Dad said I was just going to have to learn to fight back. Now that was plenty humiliating, let me tell you. And Roy Dean just standing there grinning at me the whole time.”
“Your folks didn’t punish him?”
“Well, sure they did, but the thing was, wasn’t much you could do to Roy Dean that would make any kind of difference. I think they took him off TV for a month, but he didn’t care—he just invented new kinds of trouble to stir up. When he got bored, Roy Dean used to sit out back on this split-rail fence Dad built behind the vegetable garden, and when a rabbit or something would come by he’d shoot it with his slingshot. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he just kep’ at it and kep’ at it, and now and then he’d get lucky and hit one. Thing’d drag itself off and Roy Dean would follow, and if he caught up, he’d stomp the thing dead with his boots. I’ll say one thing for my brother—he ain’t got a lot of quit in him.”
Stella thought of little Tucker and got a very bad feeling in her gut. On the off chance that Roy Dean had taken him, she prayed he was keeping his temper under control.
“Arthur Junior, I gotta tell you, you’re not painting a very pretty picture of your brother. But what would he want with a little boy that isn’t even his?”
“I have no idea,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”
“You could have told me that back at BJ’s,” Stella pointed out. “Not to sound ungrateful, but if you don’t know where Roy Dean is, there’s other holes I could be digging in. Why exactly did you want to go for this here drive?”
“Because I believe I know where Roy Dean has been spending his time lately, and it ain’t no kindygarden, see what I’m sayin’? It’s bad news, serious bad news—no place to be haulin’ kids into. If Chrissy’s kid is with Roy Dean, then somebody needs to do something.”
&nbs
p; “Jeez, just what is this place anyway? Some kind of strip joint?”
“I believe I’ll just show you. Turn off on Methaney there.”
Stella glanced at Arthur Junior; his arms were folded across his chest and he had an angry set to his jaw. She did as she was told.
She hadn’t driven Methaney in years. A couple of decades ago, someone still farmed soybeans out here, but the soil didn’t give up much, and the fields lay mostly unworked and fallow, sowthistle and carpetweed taking over.
“Drive slow,” Arthur Junior said, his voice a near whisper, “and don’t stop.”
After a half mile or so, they drove by a hand-painted wood sign that hung by chains from a couple of posts driven into the ground next to a gravel turnoff. In big block letters, it read BENNING SALVAGE. Five yards into the turnoff, a tall set of steel gates was locked tight with a heavy padlock.
“Oh,” Stella said. “The junkyard. That’s what you wanted to show me?”
“Ain’t just a junkyard,” Arthur Junior said, his voice low. “Drive on by, and when you get down to the T down there, turn around and come back. But don’t stop, hear? Don’t be lingerin’.”
The boy was spooked, that was for sure. Wasn’t any way anyone could hear them out here, but Stella didn’t bother to point that out. Driving past the property, she spotted lights on in a little prefab house up on a berm shaded by a couple of twisty scrub oaks. A few pickups and sedans were parked out front. Further back on the property, sodium vapor lights on blocky steel poles illuminated other buildings and sheds. And beyond that, cars—acres of cars in various states of body condition and decomposition, skeletons of wrecks and rusting carcasses whose innards were being stripped a little at a time to patch up other cars. All along the edges of the property ran a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. Nasty to look at, especially since some of the barbs caught the moonlight just right and glinted shiny and menacing.
She figured there was a mean dog or two not far off. It wasn’t just junkyards that had them—in Stella’s experience every family compound out in the sticks had a few flea-bitten curs, bred to meanness with stick beatings and fights over scraps of garbage. When one got hit by a car or lost a fight or mangled a leg on a trap or fence and had to be put down, there was always some scrawny mutt bitch around ready to deliver a new generation of hardscrabble pups.
She turned back to Arthur Junior. “I knew a Benning or two. One of ’em was just a few years behind me in school.”
“That woulda been Earl. He’s probably about forty-five—he’s owned the place since his dad passed. But he has a partner. You know—an associate. Don’t know his full name but he goes by Funzi. Comes down from Kansas City with some of his guys and stays for a few days now and then; I think he has a place down on the lake.”
“Funzi? What is that, Italian or some such?”
Arthur drilled her with that gaze again, and this time Stella did turn and look at him. In the moonlight his face looked pale as milk, his eyes deep sockets. And the boy looked scared shitless. “Uh-huh. Italian, like Alphonse. Mrs. Hardesty, you know what Italian means up in Kansas City, don’t you?”
Stella made the turn, a gentle curve on the scruffy remains of a farm road, and started back. The junkyard was on the driver’s side of the Jeep now, and she watched carefully as it rolled by. No signs of life anywhere, but the light in the windows of Benning’s house showed sheer curtains pulled shut. A blue flicker from one window probably meant a TV. Big one, no doubt—seemed like the humbler the dwelling, the fancier the TV these days.
“What are you trying to say, Arthur Junior? Benning’s mixed up with some sort of Cosa Nostra shit? The Family comin’ down here to the Ozarks for a little R and R?”
“It ain’t funny.” Arthur Junior’s voice was suddenly sharp. “You don’t mess with those boys.”
“I didn’t say it was funny, but you got to admit—I mean, I’ve never seen any godfather types around town, you know? Haven’t been any horse heads turning up in folks’ beds or anything like that.”
She could feel Arthur Junior’s gaze fixed solid on her face. “If you get to tangling with these guys, you’d damn well better be as good as they say you are,” he said coldly. “You have no notion what they’re capable of. I told Roy Dean, I begged him not to get mixed up with these guys, but he just can’t say no to a quick buck, not ever.”
Stella didn’t say anything until the junkyard was in her rearview mirror, and then she put a little steel in her voice, just like she used to when Noelle was a teenager sassing her about one thing or another.
“Now listen here, Arthur Junior. Unless Roy Dean took Tucker, there’s no reason for me to do so much as give Benning and his pals a cross-eyed glance. I’m real sorry your brother ain’t got a lick of sense, but he’s not the one that hired me, so I’m not going to go rattling any cages just for kicks.”
“I didn’t say—”
“So if you know anything about Tucker you aren’t telling me, any reason I should worry about him and Roy Dean, then you need to come clean and tell me exactly what’s going on. Won’t do anybody any good for you to keep giving me these little pieces of the picture, hear? Otherwise, your brother’s a big boy—he’s on his own.”
“I don’t know anything about Tucker, like I said,” Arthur Junior said, his voice flat and resigned. “Only . . . maybe you could just listen to me and, I don’t know . . . give Roy Dean some advice, or, or, like convince him, maybe . . .”
Stella glanced at the dashboard clock: after eleven already. There was no way she was hiring on to talk sense into a blockhead like Roy Dean—she knew firsthand how futile such an effort would be. Still . . . she was a little bit moved by Arthur Junior’s fraternal loyalty. Sticking up for a sibling like that—well, that showed character. And character was rare enough that it might merit a few more minutes of her time.
Heading back to a bar to finish this conversation didn’t make much sense, though, and that only left one place she could think of. She turned back on Old State Road 9 toward town.
If Arthur Junior was surprised to end up at Denny’s, he didn’t show it. Stella had the hostess seat them in a corner booth away from the handful of other customers. When the waitress came, Stella waved the menus away and ordered them both a Grand Slam and coffee. Any remnants of her earlier buzz were long gone, and she meant to ensure that she and Arthur Junior were alert for the rest of the conversation, and not fainting from hunger.
She dug out the fresh notebook she’d tucked into her purse before leaving the house. This one had a Hannah Montana cover, with silvery foil and sparkles on the gal’s picture. Hard to believe that Billy Ray Cyrus was old enough to have a teenage daughter; seemed like just yesterday Stella was dancing around the living room to that tune of his, laughing at Noelle as she shook her little-girl booty.
Once the waitress set their coffee down, Stella wrote the date and “Arthur Shaw, Jr.” and “Denny’s” at the top of the page and said, “I get that you’re worried about your brother . . . now shoot.”
Arthur Junior took a deep breath. “It’s cars, see, Mrs. Hardesty. Roy Dean jacked a car way back in high school, and he got caught and did some juvie time for it. But I guess the bug bit him good. He’s always been wanting a better ride than he’s got, even though he’s not willing to work regular to get it. Long about last January he comes to me and says some pal of his says they can make good money stealing cars from up in Independence and Kansas City and taking ’em to salvage yards to sell for parts. So I guess Roy Dean and him do this for a while and then Roy Dean comes to me and says, why don’t he and I team up? Takes two, see, because you drive up there together and then one guy watches out while the other one gets the thing started, then you got to drive your own car back along with the one you stole.”
“I thought you boys don’t get along,” Stella said. “Why would he want you to go in on this thing with him?”
“No’m, we don’t generally, but the way I figure it is, Roy Dean knew he could t
rust me. I’d never rat him out or anything. That ain’t the way we’re raised. Plus, I think his friend was wanting to always take the bigger half of the haul, it being his contacts and all.”
“What do you mean, contacts?”
“Well, there’s four, five salvage shops in the county. More if you’re willing to drive a ways. But not all of ’em will take a car without title, you know? And those that will, you gotta kind of build up a relationship with them, just like any other business. And if you really want to make some good money, you got to know what they’re looking for. See, there’s makes and models they need parts for more’n others.”
“Sounds like you know quite a bit about this, Arthur Junior, for a guy who didn’t want to get tangled up in it.”
Arthur Junior hung his head, looking sheepish. “Well, thing is . . . Roy Dean, he just wouldn’t let it drop. And you should’ve seen Mom. Roy Dean, dumbass that he is, tells her we’re going to start a fucking body shop together, fix up cars and resell ’em. Excuse my language. Sorry. And Mom was so happy, you should’ve seen her. . . . All she ever wanted was for Roy Dean to stay out of trouble, and here he’s got her thinking he’s gonna go straight and that I’ll be there making sure he keeps his nose clean.”
Stella remembered the weary look in Arthur Senior’s eyes when he talked about his boys. “What did your dad think of all this?”
Arthur Junior stirred his coffee with a spoon, eyes downcast. “Dad . . . well, I think he quit believing anything Roy Dean said back when we were kids, but you know, he just wants Mom to be happy.”
“That’s a female affliction for you,” Stella said with feeling. “Trying to believe one thing when all the evidence points in the other direction. If women weren’t so darn bent on fooling themselves . . . well, I guess that’s another subject. Go ahead, tell me the rest. Did you join up with Roy Dean or didn’t you?”
“I . . . well, I hate to admit it to you, Mrs. Hardesty, but I rode up to Independence with Roy Dean a couple times. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe that I could talk him out of it or something, but—I mean it was just so damn simple. People leave their cars right out in the open without even locking the doors, and do you know how easy it is to hot-wire them? Especially pre-ninety-five, ninety-six, all you have to do is go under the steering column and get at the wires and touch them together. It’s not hardly rocket science, and Roy Dean always was good with that stuff, and the thing is these aren’t new cars. These are like old Camrys and whatever. It’s almost like a victimless crime, because with a car that age, people are done paying it off and the insurance company writes a check and, you know, they just go and get another car.”