DeMarco said, “You have somebody on the inside?”
“What I can tell you,” the agent said, and sipped his coffee, “is that the Resurrection Baptist Church is under investigation for several matters not relevant to your own investigation.”
“Our investigation of the good reverend is over,” DeMarco told him. “I don’t anticipate having to speak with him again.”
“That’s good to know,” the agent said. He took another sip of coffee and seemed to relax. “Which leaves you where?”
“In our investigation?” DeMarco said. “Virgil Helm. The last card we have to play. He’s not one of yours, is he?”
Erdesky smiled. “Good luck with that. From what I hear, the man’s a ghost.”
“And you’re sure Royce had nothing to do with turning him into one?”
“Reasonably certain. If you learn otherwise, I’d appreciate hearing from you.” He reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a business card, and handed it to Jayme. As she took it with finger and thumb, a raindrop splashed down on the back of her hand.
“Looks like it’s time to head for the cars,” Erdesky said. “Thanks again for the meet. Enjoy your stay in Kentucky.” With a final smile, he turned and walked away.
DeMarco took a step back and sat on the park bench. A flash of lightning lit the park momentarily, and was followed four seconds later by a long rumbling boom. Jayme said, “Now you sit? That lightning is less than a mile away.”
“The car’s only fifty feet away,” he said. “I like this kind of weather. You notice how it smells now? Fresher. Even in a dog park.”
“You’re sitting there on a wrought-iron bench in front of a chain-link fence. You’re going to get fried.”
DeMarco smiled. “Sometimes you get fried, and sometimes you get magical powers.”
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Before Ryan started school, back when his father still went to his job in the rail yard most days, back before the drinking and violence became more than just a weekend affair, his father would sometimes prop a lawn chair up against the trailer on summer nights to watch the stars and to look at the moon with a pair of old hunting binoculars. If Ryan was especially quiet he could tiptoe up to where his father sat and ease himself down onto the ground without disturbing him and being sent back inside. They would sit there together without talking, and sometimes Ryan would fall asleep and later wake to find himself in bed.
Ryan’s father especially liked summer thunderstorms, when he would move his lawn chair to the rear of the trailer where a short overhang protected him from most of the rain. Many times Ryan sat on his knees on his bed beside his mother as she put her face to the window screen and urged Ryan’s father to come inside before he got hit by lightning. His father would laugh and sip his beer and say, It can hit me just as easily inside as it can out here, and eventually Ryan and his mother would move to the table where they would play Old Maid while the rain hammered the metal roof and the thunder rattled the glass and the lightning filled their little home with a sudden and terrifying brilliance.
One time after a particularly frightening blast when the light and sound simultaneously shook and stunned them, knocking out the power, Ryan in the shivery, pattering darkness asked, Why isn’t Daddy afraid of the lightning? His mother whispered, Because he’s crazy. He thinks if it doesn’t kill him, he’ll come away with magic powers of some kind. Ryan asked, What kind? and his mother said, ESP or something. Like he’ll be able to see into the future. And then Ryan understood why his father sat in silence summer nights staring through binoculars at the moon. He was looking for a future, something better, a different family maybe, a different life, a different son, and he wanted it all so badly, he was willing to risk death to get it.
SEVENTY-NINE
“I’m exhausted,” Jayme said. “Okay if we just pick up a pizza for dinner?”
“Pizza is always okay,” DeMarco said.
She called in the order as he drove slowly through the rain, a downpour the windshield wipers could not cope with even at their fastest speed. The pizza shop was at the end of Aberdeen’s Main Street, a quarter-mile-long strip of mom-and-pop storefronts, all now dark but for dim interior glows barely visible behind the rain sheeting off the edges of the roofs. DeMarco squinted hard through the blurry windshield, and frequently glanced out the side window to make sure he didn’t veer from the proper lane. Fortunately there was little other traffic to contend with.
A block from the pizza shop he slowed even more, then came to a full stop as he leaned close to the side window.
“You’re not there yet,” Jayme said.
He said, “Isn’t that Richie over there?” Three men stood beneath a canvas awning, two of them smoking.
Jayme leaned across him to peer out the window. “Okay,” she said. “And so?”
“We need a lead on where to look for Virgil Helm. He was supposed to come up with one.”
“Supposed to?” she said with a little laugh. “He just told you that to get you off his back.”
“Only one way to find out,” DeMarco said. He slipped the gearshift into Park and cracked open his door. “You want to grab the pizza and pick me up on the way back?”
“It’s only a question if I have a choice,” she told him, then shoved him toward the door. “Go get wet.”
He jumped out, slammed shut the door, and sprinted across the street.
Jayme climbed over the console and settled behind the wheel. All the way to the pizza shop she kept shaking her head back and forth.
EIGHTY
The three men smelled of sweat, beer, tobacco, and marijuana, individually distinctive odors that, dampened by the rain, merged into a wet dog stink DeMarco had smelled a thousand times before, from Youngstown to Panama to Iraq to Pennsylvania and now to Kentucky. Upon his sudden arrival, the three fell out of their short line parallel to the street and reformed in a tight grouping perpendicular to it, with DeMarco alone a yard away.
Richie did not introduce DeMarco to his friends. There were no introductions.
“Gentlemen,” DeMarco said, and wiped the rain from his eyes.
Only Richie managed a tentative smile. “Evening, Sergeant,” he said. Immediately, the two others seemed to shrink within themselves, their shoulders tightening, heads dipping an inch lower. “What’s brought you out on a night like this?”
“Pizza run,” DeMarco said. “Then I spotted you. Thought I’d stop and see what news you have for me.”
“News?” Richie said. “About what exactly?”
DeMarco looked at each of the other men. Hard, wiry, wary. One staring down at his feet, the other out through the rain.
“Local real estate,” DeMarco said. “Don’t you remember we talked about that last night? You said you’d have some suggestions for me.”
“Yeah, well,” Richie said, “I haven’t had much time to give that any thought.”
“I have a minute,” DeMarco said with a wet smile. “Why’n’t you go ahead and think about it now. Meantime, who are your buddies here?”
The nearest one said, “Listen, I shoulda been somewhere a half hour ago. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Richie.” And off he went, loping through the rain.
“Yeah, same here,” the other one said, and then he was gone too.
Richie watched them disappear. DeMarco waited half a minute before he spoke. His voice was pitched low, barely louder than the thrumming rain. “You and me, Richie,” he said, “we’re never going to be best friends. But what you don’t want is an enemy.”
“I don’t know what you want from me,” Richie said. “That guy…all that business with the girls? I heard about it, yeah, but that doesn’t mean I know anything.”
DeMarco took a step closer, faced the street as Richie was doing, but held his hands loosely clasped in front of him whereas Richie’s hands were shoved deep into his pockets.
DeMarco could feel the contempt rising in his chest, the encroaching anger. He knew the feeling well but not the reason for it. He had dealt with men like Richie before, many times before, and had always been able to muster a semblance of compassion for them, individuals not blessed with special talents or ambition, cursed by circumstance, limited by their own imaginations to hardscrabble lives of inevitable misfortune. So why this animus for Richie—this virulent disdain growing more poisonous ever since their very first meeting?
“I’ve known people like you all my life,” DeMarco told him. “You do a little of this, a little of that. You skirt the law whenever you can, but you’re never far outside the line. You tell yourself you’re some kind of outlaw, but you don’t really have the balls for that, do you? You had a little taste of lockup and you know it’s not a picnic. It’s not something you ever want to taste again, not even a month here, a month there. But you always keep your ears open, right? Always looking for something you can use to your advantage someday.”
DeMarco turned, faced him directly. “Well, now’s your chance, my friend. I’m your advantage. Or I’m your enemy. Take your pick.”
He watched Richie swallow. Even imagined he could hear the rocks tumbling in Richie’s head. The rain was slowing now, lapsing into a steady patter. The scent of cooler, newly washed air. The small-town stillness.
Richie kept his head down, looked at DeMarco out the corner of his eye. “From what I hear, there’s a half brother nobody knows about over toward Pottsville. Just across the West Fork.”
“Name?” DeMarco asked.
“Stumpner. First name Walter, I think. He’s Amish or something.”
“I appreciate this, Richie.”
“I ain’t saying he knows anything. But he’s the only person who might. If he’s even still alive. All I know is what people were saying back in the day. I don’t even remember who I heard it from.”
DeMarco laid his hand on Richie’s shoulder. “Now I owe you one,” he said. “You see how this works?”
Richie held his breath for a moment, then released a long breath. “Man,” he said, “I don’t even know why you’re fooling around with this shit. You’re not even from here. If I had a sweet piece waiting for me at home like you got—”
In an instant DeMarco’s hand slid up Richie’s shoulder and around his throat, and he drove Richie hard against the glass, heard Richie’s head bang the glass and felt the vibration down through his arm, heard himself thinking Don’t do this even as his hand was tightening and pushing Richie’s chin up, Richie’s mouth puffing air and his hands pulling at DeMarco’s hand, feet shuffling atop the concrete…
The sound of the car horn seemed to come at DeMarco from a distance but grew louder by the instant until it was there just behind him, steady and shrill and insistent, and he came back to himself and felt the tightness of his hand and arm and shoulder, and he pulled away, released Richie, then turned to face the headlights. Jayme was inside those lights, he knew, though he could not see her. And he realized what he had done.
“It was a compliment!” Richie was saying, coughing between words. “I only meant it as a compliment!”
DeMarco walked head down out into the rain. He opened the passenger side door, picked the pizza box off the seat, climbed in, and held the box atop his lap. Peripherally, he could see her staring wide-eyed at him, could hear the echo of the horn ringing in the stillness.
Finally, she yanked the gearshift into Drive and pulled away with a squeal of tires. The heat from the pizza was burning the tops of his thighs, but he dared not lift the box, dared not so much as flex a hand lest the awful stillness shatter.
EIGHTY-ONE
I’m becoming my father.
The thought horrified him. Why was it happening now? The absence of a uniform? The absence of regimen and routine? He thought he had outlived that possibility, had driven it too deep to ever surface again. Why now?
She meant too much to him.
EIGHTY-TWO
He waited in the car for almost an hour, long after the rain had stopped, pizza box on the driver’s seat. No stars outside the still-streaked window; no moon.
Taking pains to be quiet he climbed out of the car, pizza box in hand, and pushed shut the door. Then onto the porch. Front door unlocked. House silent and dark. She was probably upstairs. He hoped she had eaten something, hadn’t gone to bed hungry. He put the pizza in the refrigerator, shoved in lopsided so it would fit.
Go upstairs or not?
What would he say to her? I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was going to happen. He made a remark.
What kind of remark?
He said it was a compliment. I didn’t think so.
What does it matter what he says? Why does it even matter to you?
I don’t know.
You think I fucked him, that’s why.
It doesn’t matter.
What, you never fucked anybody?
Please don’t.
You think you’re the first man to fuck me? What are you—sixteen?
Please stop saying that word.
You want me to tell you every man I’ve ever fucked? Is that what you want? Sit down, get comfortable; I’ll tell you every single one.
Or maybe it wouldn’t go that way. Maybe she would cry. No, she wouldn’t cry. She had a right to be angry.
I’m afraid I’m becoming my father, he would say.
Oh, for God’s sake, Ryan. Grow up.
The keys to the RV were on the counter. He picked them up, jiggled them in his hand.
Okay, he would go to bed hungry too.
EIGHTY-THREE
Gray light through the window. 5:17 a.m. The RV was already growing hot, the air stuffy. He should have opened the window over the bed, but too late now. Sleep was impossible.
It was almost humorous, that he was afraid to face her. But there was no humor in being ashamed of himself. He’d let her down, that was the thing. He wasn’t the man she’d imagined him to be. He’d always known that truth, and now she knew it too.
He tried to remember something he’d read one time, something about a human’s capacity for self-reflection, our main distinction from the animals. In the heat of an animal response we have the ability to pause, reflect, turn away from a bestial desire or impulse.
He hadn’t done much reflection over the past dozen or so years. Too much reflection in the year prior had burned out the circuitry. He chose a less painful tactic and buried all desire, all impulse deep in the sand of grief. Reflection was permitted only in the line of duty. All business, nothing personal. In the morning he wound himself up with coffee and routine, went to work, then came home. He ate a sandwich, downed a couple of beers, sipped three or four whiskies while the TV numbed him into sleep. The hell with the circuitry. Who needs self-reflection when the motherboard is dead?
Well, that was then. Now he was self-reflecting up a storm. A funhouse mirror in a hurricane.
He needed something to do. Throw a blanket over the mirror before he made himself crazy from squinting and staring into it. Maybe give Jayme time to decide how she felt, whether he was worth the turmoil or not. Give himself time to figure himself out.
Go find Virgil, he thought. Show her you have some value after all. But not just for her. For the seven girls too. And be honest about it: for your own sake as well.
Okay then. Either mop up this mess in Aberdeen or admit failure and walk away knowing you did your best, or tried to anyway. Then one way or the other, alone or with Jayme—please, God, with Jayme—get the hell out of Dodge.
EIGHTY-FOUR
The sun had barely cleared the trees, but was high enough to throw a glare of harsh light slanting into his stinging eyes as he crossed the West Fork Mayfield Creek. A few miles later he turned due east toward Pottsville and had to pull his sunglasses on. Soon his phone’s navigator informed him that he
should make another left in one mile. On both sides of the road lay wide green fields of corn and little else.
“In a quarter mile, turn left,” his navigator said.
Still nothing but corn, acre after acre standing at least as tall as him. Only when he was nearly upon it did a small structure emerge from the glare, a wooden stand with a wide opening, a single glassless window facing the road. Small boxes of fat tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and other vegetables were lined up on a counter below the window. A teenage girl wearing a small blue bonnet stood behind the boxes, arranging them in perfect alignment.
“Turn left,” the navigator said. “Turn left.”
Just beyond the roadside stand, a long, dirt lane ran perpendicular to the highway. DeMarco would not have seen it but for the dark-blue pickup truck parked close to the intersection of lane and highway, its tailgate open. A middle-aged woman in a long blue dress and tight-fitting bonnet was unloading a box of green and red sweet peppers from the bed. A bearded man in baggy jeans, a blue work shirt, and a yellow straw hat stood watching, then slammed the tailgate shut and climbed into the truck. He was driving away, disappearing behind the corn, just as DeMarco pulled onto the shoulder.
DeMarco powered down his window and shouted to the woman. “Would that be Walter Stumpner by any chance?”
She gave him a look, then continued on to the front of the stand, where she hefted the box up onto the counter.
DeMarco climbed out, crossed to her, smiled broadly. “Good morning,” he said. “That man who just now drove away. Was that Walter Stumpner?”
The woman ignored him for a moment; the girl stared.
DeMarco tried a slower approach. “These are great-looking tomatoes,” he said, and picked up one as big as his hand. “How much are they?”
“A dollar fifty for two,” the girl said.
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