by Tom Bouman
Headlights cut through the darkness, swept past my house and into the field where I sat, and my instinct was to hide. The lights cut off. A shadow stepped out of the car and stood. With some dismay I stood too. The walk through my field took a strangely long time, and then time glitched and I stood face-to-face with Lee Hillendale, Kev’s defense attorney.
“Evening,” he said. “I tried to raise you on the phone. I wouldn’t have come, but it’s time-sensitive. That, and you’re the one Kevin trusts.”
“What about him?”
“I’ve been to see him. He wants to talk, but only to you.”
“How is he?”
“He got the shakes, plain and simple. The nurses said he was going on about demons. Then asking . . . asking to die, apparently.” The lawyer seemed weary. “I mean, what do you do? Quitting is going to knock you sideways. Maybe kill you if you do it wrong. Not quitting just kills you slower.”
“We don’t always know where we are until we try to get out of it,” I said.
“That’s . . . yes. But how would I ever pay the mortgage without the demon rum? Anyway. He’s on diazepam now, turning a corner, and he’s coherent. You’ll want to hear what he has to say. Ross is making a mistake. My guy didn’t do it.”
“I’ve been hearing that,” I said, getting a grip on the thoughts spiraling over each other in my head.
“You haven’t heard everything. Be down at the medical center before seven a.m. Room 265. The idea is you’ll relieve Patrolman Hanluain. You’re not coming there to talk, is the appearance. Someone else from the sheriff’s office will show up about seven-thirty, and we can play it off as a mistake. Kevin’s worried about being seen to cooperate.”
“He should be worried in the other direction,” I said.
“Henry,” said the lawyer, “consider this a part of discovery. I tell you what I’ve got. In return, you tell me what you’ve got. If you’ve got nothing, it’s in everyone’s interests to know that. But I don’t trust Ross to shoot straight on this. Or Dally, even. And Kevin has some interests he needs seen to.”
“This is . . .” I said, shaking my head.
“Before seven o’clock, if you want to do the right thing.”
“Okay.”
I made it back to the bonfire. The night had been crowded out and crabbed by the lawyer, the missing girl, and whoever had taken her away. I lay back on the blanket and stared up, unseeing.
Next morning I had no time to chase the turkey. I got dressed and headed to the medical center, where Kev and Hillendale were waiting. The place had been built with money donated by gas companies, and I didn’t hate that. The operators had image problems, and if they wanted to give the county a hospital or the high school a new science center, I can take that for the good. As skilled a general practitioner as Liz is, we did need something more for the county than the little Fitzmorris clinic. The hospital was built on a bare hillside. The place was wide open and I found a spot next to Hanluain’s patrol car.
Room 265 was easy to find, guarded as it was by a pudgy deputy in a foul mood, leaning against the wall in a hard plastic chair. Hanluain’s eyes were closed but I doubted he was asleep. “Didn’t you just check him?” he said, full of wrath and without opening his eyes.
“No,” I said, shrugging.
“Oh, Henry, shit,” he said, rubbing his face.
“You get any sleep out here?”
“No. He’s on suicide watch. Every fifteen minutes, a doctor, a nurse, a fuckin janitor, I don’t know, someone checks.”
“He say anything?”
“No. Not that I could tell. And I was told not to talk to him.”
“Go home and sleep,” I said. “You’re fine.”
Hanluain stood and stretched his back and walked down the hall. I opened the door and stepped inside. Lee Hillendale was asleep in a chair, head back, snuffling, book open on his chest. His head swung forward on my entry. He blinked twice and set his book aside.
They had Kevin on an IV of various dopes, and Hillendale set about waking him up before the nurses came in to drug him again or figure out what else to do with him. After some gentle shaking, Kevin’s eyes raised to half-mast, then three-quarters upon seeing me. Before anything else I Mirandized him.
“You make it to town?” Kevin said.
“Yes.” I told him where I’d been, and what I’d seen and done, leaving out the arrests and anything to do with the ongoing prosecutions. When I’d finished the part about following Dizzy back to the house in the First Ward, Kevin seemed fairly alert, and Hillendale’s eyes were wide.
“Okay,” said Kev. “Back to Stingy Jack’s, though,” he said, his speech slow, his voice full of false pleasure. He spoke around the edges of it.
“So . . . Penny used to tend bar there,” I said.
“Yup. That was during her . . . when she was getting to be full-blown. She got fired for drinking too much, passing out, not cleaning the place.”
“And you’d expect her to show up there?”
“Not exactly.”
“Who is Blaine to you?” I waited for Kevin to answer. “Who is he to Penny, then?”
“Just an upstanding local businessman.” He shifted in his bed. “And yet, there was that charge.”
I waited.
“The story I heard is, some years back he did thirteen months for possession. Crack, I heard. He gets out, they, his friends, throw him a party. And they bring along this stripper, only Blaine doesn’t know, he says, that she’s just sixteen and saving up for a car to get away from whatever fucked-up place she was. Something happened to the kid, I don’t know. But she ended up changing her tune.”
“And nothing stuck to Blaine,” I said.
“Nah. He’s supposed to be a good guy. A good, good guy. He used to be a roofer, if you can believe that.”
“I can.” Of all tradesmen, roofers are the most villainous degenerates in America. Between roofers and quarrymen, a small-town cop can stay busy his entire career.
“Yeah, he was a roofer. And somehow he spun what savings he had into a stake in that bar. How? Hard telling, not knowing. The thing I like about that place?” Kevin continued. “It’s near all the ways in and out of town. So, a drunk like me can get right on 17, west to 35, no problem. Just kind of blend in, getting in and out.” Kevin had a glimmer of conspiracy in his eye. I had the notion he wasn’t really talking about drunk driving. “I’d say set up checkpoints, but those are never really a surprise. Still, who’s to say? You might catch a few. Drunk drivers.”
“Who’s Dizzy Kostis?”
“Another local entrepreneur. No, I don’t know him. Not really. Know him to see him hanging around with Bobby. Penny knows these people. I want a cigarette now.”
“Kostis’s been inside too.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Not surprised, but I don’t know a thing about it.”
“Kev, you got to give me more.”
“Yeah, well. Sooner or later, I’ll be dead over this shit.”
“We’re wasting time,” Hillendale put in.
“Okay,” said Kevin. “Here’s what happened.”
And this is the story that he told me. It took some work getting it all out of him. I needed the details to save his neck.
At 12:40 a.m., May 18, 2009, Kevin kicked in a basement window of Cottage Seven on Maiden’s Grove Lake, slid inside, and dropped to the floor. He was followed by Sage Buckles, of Airy Township, a thirty-five-year-old former thug, new to Holebrook County that spring. Their eyes had just adjusted to the dark when a phone rang upstairs.
It continued to ring.
“Forget it,” said O’Keeffe, “let’s go.”
“Hang on,” said Buckles, clicking off his flashlight and trotting up the stairs. He picked up the phone and answered in as calm and sober a fashion as he could manage, like a home owner. “Do you know what time it is?”
The woman on the other end asked, “To whom am I speaking, please?”
“Prosser,” this being the name o
n the cottage’s mailbox.
After a brief pause, the woman said, “Mr. Prosser, this is Ann with ADT. Your house alarm has been tripped. For security purposes—”
Buckles hung up the phone. “You might come up,” he called down the cellar stairs. “We tripped the alarm.”
“What? Let’s go,” said O’Keeffe. “Come on, man.”
“Look, they call the dispatcher, the dispatcher’s got to send someone here. You know how long that’ll take, out this far?”
“No. Do you?”
“O’Keeffe, if they’re going to get us, they got us. Don’t make any difference now. Get your ass up here.”
In the span of three minutes, they relieved Rhonda Prosser of a thirty-two-inch flat-screen, a DVD player, and some components of a stereo whose brand, McIntosh, they’d never heard of, so it had to be worth something. It was hard to take apart, nervous as they were, and with their fingers in work gloves. O’Keeffe took every liquor bottle that was more than half full, and a loaded 9mm he found in a bedside table. By then he knew Sage Buckles well enough to want the gun. Downstairs, Buckles was about to remove an oil landscape in a gilt frame from where it hung on the wall. Neither man could have known that it was the single most valuable object in the cottage: a Hudson River School painting by an artist named Hollis Rhodes, insured for nine thousand five hundred dollars.
“What are you doing with that? How are we going to sell that?” O’Keeffe said.
“Looking for a safe.”
“A safe? Come on, man, let’s go.”
Buckles stared O’Keeffe down, waiting a teaching moment, and walked out. But something in the painting snagged O’Keeffe. His eyes fuzzed over talking about it, and I let him tell me everything in his head. The painting showed a river meandering through a field, a couple cows, a couple trees, at dusk. He turned on the little brass lamp mounted above the frame and was stunned, rooted to the floor. The clouds above the darkened land were not merely pink, not merely gold, much more than white, and the sky behind was something more alive than the blue of day. Not since his teenage years of weed, mushrooms, and the occasional acid dose had O’Keeffe felt so strong a revelation, a sense of looking up the tube. He had seen sunsets like it in person many times, and looked away without a second thought. But this one made his heart glow even through the cheap vodka that had dulled his spirit for so long. It caught something that couldn’t be sold, some end point worth pursuing. Standing there, O’Keeffe felt a long-forgotten life calling to him. His infant daughter Eo calling to him. Tomorrow morning, there’d be changes.
O’Keeffe walked away, leaving the painting’s lamp on.
They stowed their haul in a plastic barrel on state game land. Then they returned to the gathering where they’d met earlier. O’Keeffe poured the remaining half of a bottle of single-malt into a red cup, joined the party, and smashed the bottle in the fire. Apparently Penny had just left, which was not a rare occurrence, as she often went her own way and it was not too long a walk up the hill. He drank the scotch in gulps, not tasting.
People filtered away. Sage Buckles’s ride had disappeared, which put him in a cold fury. He insisted on a lift home from O’Keeffe, and the two men climbed into the yellow truck once more. Kevin stayed between the lines and just above the speed limit as he rounded Walker Lake, passing a couple of cottages still up and partying, tiki torches flickering on the lake’s mirror surface. As they moved up and into the hills, Kevin produced a bottle of rail Irish from under his seat and the two of them handed it back and forth. Kevin dropped Buckles off at a small house in Airy and stood in the driveway for a minute. Distant thrash music pulsed from Buckles’s house.
Bedeviled by mosquitoes, Kevin opened his fly and pissed under his truck, left rear, where he had replaced some of the frame with pressure-treated two-by-fours attached with bolts and clamps. Nearly everything that kept his life going was stowed back in the bed, under the truck’s cap: circ saws and drills, ammunition boxes full of hand tools, nails, screws, wood oddments, empty tubs of coleslaw and tins of smoked oysters.
He slid behind the wheel and turned the key, and winced as the engine roared to life, exploding through an exhaust system patched with duct tape. His entire being vibrated, and he could almost see the noise, almost trap it in his teeth. His inspection sticker was two months out of date. Every day he drove the truck, it was a dice roll as to whether he’d get where he needed to go, or snake eyes—a cop, a fine. It wasn’t good luck that kept the truck on the road those past two months, but the absence of bad. Some days it got to where he didn’t even care if he woke up in the morning. But something, some sparkle in the night air, told him he could make a change, if only he could remember.
He tried to retrieve and focus on the feeling the painting had given him, the great sense of peace and belonging beyond expression. He could still see the clouds shot through with light, migrating in a different flow of life. In the moment of the painting, O’Keeffe had the odd sensation that he could have slowed down time forever. On another night he might end up by the riverside until the sun woke him, or he might go driving so far that it’d be too much trouble to ever get back. The thought gave him a quiet thrill. But he had to get back.
That night, O’Keeffe was faced with the reality that Penny needed help, and he couldn’t give it to her by robbing houses or getting dragged into her messes. She’d made off with a little bag belonging to Sage Buckles, and since it had already gone up her arm, he had been willing to take payment in other forms. It had become Kevin’s problem very quickly. For the first time, he decided to leave Penny. He’d call her folks and just leave, and she might get better then, without him. First she had put the shit up her nose, and it was manageable. One day he found her works and noticed the marks on her feet. The only thing more painful than watching her nod away was living with her when she was trying to kick. As he bumped up his long driveway, he hoped it was late enough that she’d be dead to the world, passed out on the couch, the floor, or the bed if he was lucky. He might remove a needle from her arm or foot and hide her gear, which she’d find again or replace.
He pulled up beside the trailer and saw that the front door was open, which usually meant she was awake. He thumped up the wooden steps and poked his head in, and found that things were not right. The accordion partition separating the living room from the kitchen was nearly torn off its hinges, and several pictures that had been hanging on the wall were lying on the floor. Proceeding into the kitchen, he found dishes smashed, silverware and pots strewn across the floor. A kitchen chair lay on its back. Kevin didn’t remember if he’d called Penny’s cell phone that night. It turned out he had, 2:18 a.m. He didn’t remember meeting Swales in the woods. By then he was on autopilot, had been since somewhere on the drive home from Buckles’s place.
He awoke the next morning with just enough time to pull on clothes and make it to the work site. On his way out he noticed that a second partition had been torn down, and the hollow door to the bedroom’s half bath was kicked through and busted. It was the same door through which, over the course of a year, he’d heard the effects of her habit as clearly as if he’d been in there with her.
He’d worried, and he’d called, and he’d finished his day and gone home.
It was then, looking down, that he saw the drops of blood leading from the bedroom, speckling the linoleum. The bloody clump of hair on the floor looked like Penny’s.
And here we were.
After Kevin finished talking, I sat quietly, trying to make everything fit. For one, I hadn’t ever heard of Sage Buckles.
“If you boys want to take this case further against Kevin,” Hillendale said, “we can do the alibi defense, give you names of witnesses, notify them. That’s what it’ll take. For obvious reasons, that’s complicated for my client. We’ve been trying to raise Buckles. Right now he’s supposed to be working with Grace Services clearing well pads. Anyway, he won’t return my calls or come to the door.”
“Who is this guy? I me
an . . . who is he?”
Kevin’s eyes flicked to Lee’s and back. “I first met Sage, he was spending time at the tavern here and there. He came around this spring, where from, who knows? He and Penny . . . knew each other.”
“Oh?”
“The first time, I hauled her out of an upstairs room. He’d taken her there . . . he couldn’t stop us in time.”
“Why not?”
“He was, ah, not well. We got downstairs to the bar and out. There was another time where she’d scratched him, scratched his face and neck. Outside a bar in Fitz. People saw him after, covered in blood. You didn’t hear about that?”
“No. So . . .”
“Yeah, so he wanted Penny. He tried what he could to get to her. I tried to be there to stop it, but I was in no shape myself. And I worked days, I couldn’t watch all the time.”
“Help me out, man,” I said. “How could you throw in with him? He forced her?”
“No, he tried. He never got there. Penny owed him. She took a bag and didn’t pay. That’s . . . straight up. He was . . . it was the safest option he gave me, robbing the place. It got to where, that night . . .” Kevin sighed, too drugged to summon the energy for proper regret. “I was going to give up on her. No way she was going to give CPS what they wanted, and I thought maybe I could, on my own. Go through the wringer.”