by James Sallis
"Here's where I bail," he said. "Place you're looking for's just around that bend. Don't be lookin' for the welcome mat to be out. Ain't the kind to be expecting company up in there."
I hoped not.
"Good luck, man."
"Thanks for your help." I'd paid him back at the diner. He had a good night.
"You're welcome. Prob'ly ain't done you no favor, though."
I pulled back onto the road, along the curve, cut the engine to coast into a driveway inhabited by a black BMW and a gussied-up red Ford pickup, chrome pipes, calligraphic squiggle running from front fender to rear wheel well, driver's-side spotlight. Backed out then and parked the Jeep a quarter-mile up the road, at another of those pull-offs.
The house was a castle, all right-like something imagined by Dr. Seuss. Classic middle-American tacky. Once in El Paso I'd seen a huge bedroom unit that looked to be marble but, when you touched it, turned out to be thin plastic. It was like that.
In the front room just off the entryway (as I peered through what I could only think of as eight-foot-tall wing windows) a large-screen TV was on, but there was no evidence of anyone in attendance. Action appeared to be centered in the kitchen-I'd come around to the back by then-where a card game and considerable beer consumption were taking place. Many longnecks had given their all. Bottles of bourbon and Scotch. One guy in a designer suit, two others in department-store distant cousins.
Newly awakened from its slumber in Glad bag and hand towel, the. 38 Police Special felt strangely familiar to my hand.
One of the cheap-suit players was raking in chips as I came through the door. Undistracted, his counterpart pushed to his feet, gun halfway out as I shot. He fell back into his chair, which went over, as though its rear legs were a hinge, onto the floor. I'd tried for a shoulder, but it had been a while, and I hit further in on his chest. There was more blood than I'd have liked, too, but he'd be okay.
Thinking it over for a half-minute or so, the second cheap suit held up both hands, removed his Glock with finger and thumb and laid it on the table, just another poker chip.
Dean Atkison in his designer suit looked at his flunky with histrionic disgust and took a pull off his drink.
"Who the hell are you?" he said.
I was supposed to be watching him at that point, of course-cheap suit's cue. He almost had the Glock in hand when I shot. His arm jerked, knocking the Glock to the floor, then went limp. He stood looking down at the arm that would no longer do what he willed it to do. His fingers kept on scrabbling, the way cat paws will when the cat's asleep and dreaming of prey.
It was all coming back.
Atkison's eyes went from his fallen soldiers to me.
"Be okay if I call for help for my boys here?"
"Go ahead."
I stood by as he punched 911 into a cell phone, asked for paramedics, gave his address, and threatened the dispatcher. Thing about cell phones is you can't slam the receiver down.
"Think we might attend to business now?"
"We don't have any business."
I whacked his knee with the gun, feeling skin tear and hearing something crunch. Blood welled through the expensive fabric. None of that should have happened.
"I live in a small town far away from here," I said. "Not far enough, apparently. A few days ago you brought your garbage to it."
He'd grabbed a hand towel off the table, was wrapping it around his knee.
"Paid some goddamn arrogant surgeon nine thousand to have that thing fixed, not six weeks ago. Now look at it."
"A man named Judd Kurtz came through. He didn't get through fast enough and wound up in jail. Then a couple of others came in his wake. None of them stayed."
"And I should care what happened in Bumfuck?"
I walked to him, helped wrap the towel.
"I need to know who Judd Kurtz is. I need to know if he's alive. And I need to know who the goons were who thought they could come into my town and tear it up."
"That's a lot of need."
Pulling hard at the ends of the towel, I knotted them.
"I was in a state prison for seven years," I told him. "I managed okay in there. There's not much I won't do."
He looked down at his shattered knee. Blood seeped steadily into the towel.
"Looks like a fucking Kotex," he said. "I'm a mess." He shook his head. "I'm a mess-right?"
"It could be worse."
He pulled a napkin towards him. Started to reach under his coat and stopped himself. "I'm just getting a pen, okay?"
I nodded, and he took a bright yellow Mont Blanc out of his coat pocket, wrote, passed the napkin across. Classic penmanship, the kind you don't see anymore, all beautifully formed loops and curls-confounded by the absorbent napkin that blurred and feathered each fine, practiced stroke.
"My life's not all that much, mind you," he said, "but I'd like to know it doesn't end here."
I shook my head. Sirens of fire truck and ambulance were close by now.
Nodding towards the napkin, Atkison said, "You'll find what you need there."
What I needed right then was to go out the back door, and I did.
When first I held it, the gun had felt so familiar. The body has a memory all its own. I started the car, pulled the seat belt across and clicked it home. Slipped into gear. The body remembers where we've been even as the mind turns away. I eased off the clutch and pulled out, hot wires burning again within me, incandescent. Blinding.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My Father's uniform hung in the back of a closet at the front of our house, in an unused bedroom. I found it there one rainy Saturday afternoon. It smelled of mothballs-camphor, as I'd later learn. Again and again I ran my fingers over its scratchy, stiff material. Dad never talked about his army time, what he'd done. In my child's mind I had him traversing deserts in Sherman tanks or diving fighter planes that looked much like Sopwith Camels through air thick with gunfire, smoke, and disintegrating aircraft. Much later, after his death, Mother told me he'd been a supply clerk.
I was, I don't know, twelve or so then. It was a couple of years after that that Al showed up in town.
He'd been in the service, people said, some place called Korea. Before, they added, he'd been the best fiddler in the county, but he'd given that up. He worked at the ice house, swinging fifty-pound blocks of ice off the ramp with huge tongs and all the time looking around, at the sky, at broken windows in the old power plant across the street, as though he wasn't really there, only his body was, doing these same things over and over, like a machine. He always had this half-smile on his face. He rented a room over the ice house but went there only to sleep. The rest of the time he was out walking the streets or sitting on the bench at the end of Main Street. He'd sit there looking off into the woods for hours. Pretty soon after I met him, when the ice house shut down, he lost his job. They let him stay on in the room, but then they tore the building down and he lost that too, so he lived out in the open, sleeping where he could. Later I'd get to know a lot of people like Al, people damaged deep inside, people whom life had abandoned but wouldn't quite let go of.
How did we meet? I honestly can't remember. I just remember everyone at school talking about him, then there's a skip, like on a record, and we're together throwing rocks into the Blue Hole, which everyone said had no bottom and half the world's catfish, or walking through Big Billy Simon's pasture with cows eyeing us, or sitting under a crabapple tree passing a Nehi back and forth.
It wasn't long before my folks heard about it and told me to stay away from him. When I asked why, Mother said: He's just not right, son, that war did something to him.
But I went on seeing him, after school most every day. That was the first time I openly defied my parents, and things got tense for a while before they gave up. Many subsequent defiances took place in stone silence.
I was fourteen when Al and I met; a couple of years later I was getting ready to go off to college, first in New Orleans then in Chicago, little suspecti
ng that but a few years down the line I'd be crawling through trees not unlike the ones Al stared into every day. In the time I'd known him, I'd grown two feet taller and Al had aged twenty years.
I was sitting outside the tent one day taping up my boots when mail came around. I was on my third pair. In that climate, leather rotted fast. The French had tried to tell us, but as usual we didn't listen. They'd tried to tell us a lot of things. Anyway, it was five or six in the morning-you never could sleep much after that, what with all the bird chatter-and Bud chucked a beer my way, giving out the standard call, "Breakfast of champions," as I settled in to read my letter. Mom had written two pages about what was going on back home, who'd just married who, how so many of the stores downtown were boarded up these days, that the old Methodist church burned down. Newsreels from another world. Then there at the end she'd written: I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Al died last week.
I grabbed another warm beer and went out to forest's edge, remembering that final summer.
For as long as I could remember, there'd been an old fiddle tucked away in the back of a closet no one used, in a cracked wood case shaped like a coffin. It had been my grandfather's, who played it along with banjo. I asked Dad if I could have it and after looking oddly at me, since I'd never shown much interest in music before, he shrugged and said he didn't see why not. This was late in his life, after the sawmill shut down, when he mostly just sat at the kitchen table all day.
I put some rubber bands around the case to hold it together and took it to Mr. Cohen, the school band director, who played violin in church some Sundays. Looked to him like a German-made fiddle from the 1800s, he said. He put on new strings and got the old bridge to stand up under them and gave me an extra bow he had. Not a full-size bow, only three-quarters, he said, but it'll do.
That afternoon I walked up to Al with the fiddle behind my back.
He eyed me suspiciously. "Whatchu got there, boy?"
I laid the case down on the bench and opened it. To this day I don't know what to call the expression that came over his face. I think maybe it's one of those things there's no word for.
"It's for you," I told him.
His eyes held mine for some time. He took the bow from under its clip. Al's hands always shook, but when he touched that bow they stopped. He weighed the bow in one hand, felt along its length, tightened the hair and bounced it against his palm, tightened it a little more.
Then he reached out with his left hand for the fiddle.
"It's all tuned up," I said.
He nodded, tucked the fiddle under his chin and sat there a moment with his eyes closed.
I don't remember what he played. Something I'd heard before, from my father or grandfather, one of the old fiddle tunes, "Sally Goodin" or "Blackberry Blossom," maybe. Next he tried a waltz.
He took the fiddle out from under his chin and held it against one leg, looking off at nothing in particular, smiling that half-present smile of his.
"It's just an old, cheap instrument," I said.
"No. The fiddle's fine," he said, putting it back in the case, clipping in the bow, carefully fastening the hooks. His hands were shaking again. "The music's in there. It just ain't in me no more."
We sat a while, hearing cars and trucks pass behind us, looking out into the trees. Towards sundown when I was getting ready to head home, he said, "Reckon we won't be seeing much of each other for a time."
I nodded, too desperately young-soon enough, that would change-to understand good-byes.
After a moment he added: "Appreciate what you did, boy."
I picked up the case. I'd put on a new coat of paint, shiny black. In lowering light it looked like a puddle of ink, a pool of darkness. "Sure you don't want this?"
He shook his head. "Didn't mean about the fiddle, but I appreciate that too." Holding out his hand, he said, "Like you to have something. Got this when I was overseas, what they call in country, and it's been with me ever since. Want you should take it with you. Be your good luck charm."
A tiny cat carved out of sandalwood.
CHAPTER NINE
Dawn beat its proud pink breast as I and Chariot chugged to a stop. International news on the radio, a couple of ads for car dealers, now suddenly Jeremiah was a bullfrog, joy to the world.
Another mansion on the hill. Two cars, Mercedes, Lincoln, in a garage remarkably free of clutter. Ancient weeping willow like a bad sixties haircut outside, smell of fresh-brewed coffee from within. Older man in a terrycloth robe sitting at a table just inside glass doors from the patio. Wineglass of orange juice, possibly a mimosa, before him. Basket of bread, bowl of fruit. Scatter of woven rugs on what looked to be Saltillo tile and spotless. Mexican furniture in the room beyond. Lawn sprinklers went off behind me as I peered in.
Snooping about, I found a breachable window in the utility room and took advantage. Stood just inside listening, then slipped the door and listened some more before stepping through. No footsteps or other sounds of movement. Soft ersatz jazz from a radio out in the room by the patio.
He was tearing the horn from a croissant as I came up behind him and put thumbs to his neck.
"Compress carotids," I said, "and you shut off blood supply to the brain." I told him what I wanted to know. "We can talk when you come back around," I added, adding pressure as well, as his hands fell onto his lap and the others entered the room like silk. One of them facing me, the other one, the one that mattered, behind. Where they were before, I've no idea. I would have sworn he was alone.
Catching a glance from the one in front, I managed a half turn before the one behind closed on me and I joined the older man in darkness. I came awake with a woman's face above me. The guy who had been standing behind me was male, no doubt about it. Not much doubt, either, that I was on the floor. Turning my head to the right, I saw swollen pink feet rising towards bare legs topped with a hem of terrycloth robe that in my confused state put me in mind of Elizabethan ruffled collars. Turned my head to the left and saw a body desperately attempting to drag itself out of harm's way, though at this point most of the harm it was likely to withstand had already befallen it.
"You're okay," the woman above me said. Not a question. Shortish dark hair pulled back. Hazel eyes in which glints of green surfaced and sank. She sounded pretty certain. I'd have to take her word for it.
"Mr. Aleche has agreed to call off his dogs. That right, Mr. Aleche?"
From high above terrycloth and tabletop, out of the clear blue sky up there, came a "Yes."
"One of his dogs seems to have taken bad," I said, glancing left again.
"Other one's a bit the worse for wear, too."
"Terrible shame."
Her face broke into a smile. Before, I'd always believed that to be merely a figure of speech.
"And lest you wonder, Mr. Aleche says these are the two men you're looking for. He seems to be under the impression that I know what's going on and that I am somehow your partner in this enterprise."
She held out her arm at a ninety-degree angle, inviting me to take it and lever myself to a sitting position. We grasped hands thumbs-over and, leaning hard into strong forearm and biceps, I pulled myself up.
"Mr. Aleche has also been kind enough to agree that by way of reparation he'll cover all medical expenses for your fellow officer and dispatcher. And he hopes you'll accept his apologies for his employees' misguided enthusiasm."
It's over, then, is what most people would think. But, even as she helped me up, I saw that she knew better, saw her clearly: the stance, feet planted squarely, center of gravity kept low, eyes taking it all in even as they appeared not to.
"You're a cop."
"That obvious, huh?" Again the smile. "I'm also your daughter." She held out a hand. "J.T. Burke."
Lots of scatlike noise and harrumphing from Sam Hamill back at the station, words to the effect that here was another fine mess I'd gotten him and MPD into, one shouldn't lie down with dogs, and it would be best if I were out of town by
sundown.
"No sign of Judd Kurtz, huh?" Tracy Caulding asked. She'd stayed behind for her own counsel once Sam was done with me, then followed me out to the parking lot.
"Doubt there will be. Hope it didn't go too bad for you in there."
"About as you'd expect. What the hell was I thinking, tuck in the corners, it better not come back to bite his butt. Then he said, 'You need any help with this-stitches show up in the works, anyone whosoever tries giving you grief-you call me, you hear?'"
"Don't guess he added he'd be happy to have me back on the job any time?"
"I don't believe that came up. Take care, Turner."
We surrendered J.T.'s rental Buick at a drop-off on Lamar, grabbing coffee to go at a Greek diner next door. The cups were shaped like Shriner's hats and, inexplicably, had rabbits on them. Not cuddly little bunnies, but huge kangaroo-thighed jackrabbits.
"Obviously they think a lot of you back at the station house," J. T. said as we pulled into traffic.
"I'm a legend here on the frontier."
"Must be nice." She stared silently out the window. "It all starts looking the same after a while, doesn't it? Same streets, same victims, same impossible stories and apologies."
We passed a car with the hood up, driver leaning into it. As we came abreast, he hiked his middle over the rim and slid in further. It looked as though the car were swallowing him piecemeal.
"If that's what you're looking for, an apology, I don't have one."
"Good. I've had enough of those, plenty to last me. And I'm not looking for anything-well, I was looking for you. But I found you, didn't I? So now I'm not."
"And how, exactly, did that come about, the finding me?"
"I talked to some people in town, learned about the cabin, and went out there. There was a woman sitting on the porch."