Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "Your private investigator? She pushed your gurney into the E.R. and put the fear of God in a couple of people. She's not looking for a job in midlevel management, is she?" he said.

  I got home late that evening, light-headed and dehydrated, the inside of my eyelids like sandpaper. I went out to the barn and removed two vinyl sacks of garbage from the garbage cans and emptied them on a large piece of plywood and used a garden rake to separate out packaged and canned food from any that might have been tampered with.

  Mixed in with the takeout food from a half dozen restaurants and stores were the remains of watermelon, cantaloupes, strawberries, and bananas I had bought at roadside stands. But local merchants and tailgate fruit vendors didn't lie in wait to poison their customers. Maybe Doc Voss just had too many shadows left in his mind from Vietnam, I thought.

  Temple Carrol's car came up the drive and stopped. I raked all the decaying food I had bought in supermarkets into a pile and rebagged it, then leaned over and picked up an empty half-gallon milk carton.

  "I went to the hospital this afternoon and you were asleep. When I came back you were checked out," Temple said.

  "I hear you shook them up in the E.R.," I said, and sat down on the scrolled-iron, white-painted bench under the chinaberry tree, my head dizzy from bending over.

  She wore a pair of soft boots and rust-colored jeans and a checkered tan shirt. Her eyes fixed on mine while she slipped a stick of gum in her mouth.

  "You remember a lot?" she asked.

  "Big blank."

  She nodded, her jaws chewing slowly.

  "The doc says maybe you saved my life," I said.

  "Dull night. A girl has to do something for kicks."

  The sky was lavender and streaked with fire behind her head. She put her hands in her back pockets and lifted her chin slightly.

  "I guess I remember pieces of things," I said.

  "Pieces? Wonderful choice," she said.

  I looked away from her stare. My face was cold and moist in the breeze. I could feel blood veins tightening in my head, my vision slip in and out of focus. "You were there for me. That's what I remember, Temple," I said.

  "There for you? Wow," she said, her face heating.

  I couldn't think of an adequate response. I ran one hand through my hair and stared at the tops of my boots.

  "What are you doing with that milk carton?" she said irritably.

  I rubbed my thumb over a tiny burr on the side, then splayed open the top for Temple to look inside.

  "I have the milk delivered. There's a puncture in it. Like the kind a hypodermic needle would make," I said.

  On Monday morning I met Tobin Voss in his office out by the four-lane. A half dozen books were opened on his desktop. On a glass-covered bookcase behind his chair was a framed color photograph of him and his flight crew in front of a Huey helicopter.

  "Here's a copy of the paperwork from the lab. You ever hear of a World War II Japanese group called Unit 731?" he said.

  "No."

  "They conducted experiments on Chinese prisoners in Manchuria. The subject probably doesn't come up often in out trade negotiations with Tokyo. Traces from your specimens show similarities to a couple of toxins they developed."

  "Are you sure?" I asked.

  "Put it this way. I can't tell you with certainty the toxic element that was in your system. But I can tell what it's not. So that creates an area of speculation. The best I can come up with is this historical stuff." Then he smiled and asked, "You haven't been to Africa lately, have you?"

  "Why?"

  "According to my nifty book here on political intrigue and assassination, Unit 731's gift to biological warfare has been used to murder several democratic leaders in Africa, primarily because its symptoms are like a number of fatal viruses carried by diseased animals."

  "How about Central Africa, the old Belgian Congo?"

  His eyes dropped to an open page in his book, then looked at me again.

  His humorous cynicism was gone. "How'd you know?" he said.

  Tuesday Wesley Rhodes was in my office, wired, shaking, and wrapped so tight his eyes were bulging out of his head. In spite of the temperature outside, he wore two long-sleeve shirts to give his body dimension, and motorcycle boots with two inches of platform glued on the bottoms.

  "You're speeding, Wes," I said.

  "Coke won't hammer out the kinks no more," he said, grabbing one wrist, then the other, raking his cupped palm over the back of the opposite hand as though he were trying to wipe rainwater off it. "Everything's coming apart. I boosted a few places. I peddled my ass. I creeped a funeral home. I never done no real harm."

  "You always took your own fall, too. That's stand-up, bud. How about kicking it into neutral?"

  So he told me about his weekend with the East Enders.

  Hammie Wocheck, Jeff Deitrich's buddy from the University of Texas, cruised by Wesley's paint-peeling, termite-eaten house and sat in his pickup truck with the engine idling until Wesley got up off the porch and walked out to the swale. Hammie's blond hair was wet with gel, his face sunburned, the side of his thick neck still scabbed with the purple and burnt-orange tattoo of a butterfly. His huge upper body seemed to fill up the window of the truck, the way an elephant might look inside a phone booth.

  "Wes, my man, we need you to go with us to Big Dee, call up a couple of mop-heads on their beeper. I'm talking about the Jamaicans who took down Jeff Deitrich. This your house, huh?" Hammie said.

  "I ain't lost nothing in Dallas."

  "Point of honor, Wes. We got spear chuckers tracking monkey shit into our town, selling bad dope to people, messing up little kids. Problem two is you dropped Jeff's name into the bowl. Believe me, that did not float. You need to square it, little buddy. Give your old man this six-pack. Tell him you're doing a righteous deed for the town. He'll relate to it."

  They drove to Val's and met Jeff Deitrich and Warren Costen and two others, one of whom was a fat guy named Chug Rollins, who must have gotten his signals wrong because he was dressed up like queer bait. Then they convoyed in three cars to a little town south of Fort Worth. Wesley had never liked Chug; he was like most big, fat guys-he had a mean dude hiding inside all that blubber, one that liked to push around little guys. But Warren was another matter. Except for his long torso, he looked like a surfer or a movie star, with his big arms and flat-plated chest and sandy hair. Warren kept cracking open Budweisers from the cooler and passing them to Wes, offering him a smoke, even telling him they should shitcan this mop-head gig. But what are you going to tell a guy like Jeff when he's got a telephone pole up his ass?

  "I thought we was going to Dallas," Wesley said.

  "Jeff's got a special place he wants to 'front these dudes. When you get them on the line, read them the directions on this piece of paper," Warren said.

  "To a rock quarry? They ain't gonna come," Wesley said.

  "Hope they do, Wes. Jeff is in a bad mood. I hate to get in his way when he's like that," Warren said. He shook his head profoundly.

  Wesley took two hits of speed and washed them down with his beer.

  He used the pay phone on the side of a shut-down filling station while the others watched him from the heated darkness. Insects thudded against the interior light overhead. His skin felt as though it were wrapped with damp wool.

  The mop-head answered the beeper page but acted like somebody threw easy money in his face every day.

  "Where you get four grand, mon?"

  "It belongs to a fudge packer, the guy I been buying blues for."

  "We give it some thought. We meet you on the highway. You better change your life, mon. Stop hanging with dem AIDS people."

  The mop-head gave Wesley directions to a Dairy Queen and hung up before Wesley could argue. Wesley was terrified when he stared out of the lighted phone booth into Jeff face.

  "I told y'all they wouldn't go to the quarry. It ain't my fault," he said.

  "You did great. They're gonna take you down, l
ittle buddy," Hammie said.

  It didn't make sense. What were they talking about? Wesley's head throbbed.

  All of them were grinning at him now, but in a tolerant, avuncular way, as though they had accepted him as one of their own.

  "You got another beer?" he said.

  A half hour later Wesley sat behind the wheel of Chug's car, with Chug eating a banana split in the passenger seat, ice cream and strawberry juice and chocolate smeared on his mouth. Wesley started to ask him why he was dressed up like a fruit, but he remembered the damage Chug used to do to his opponents when he was a high school varsity lineman.

  So instead he said, "Jeff just wants his stash back? Ain't nothing real bad going down, huh, Chug?"

  Chug adjusted the tweed hat on his head and winked. "You know Jerry Lee Lewis got kicked out of divinity school here?" he said.

  The two mop-heads pulled into the Dairy Queen in a black Mercedes and got out and leaned down on the windowsills on both sides of Chug's car. They smelled of funk and onions and fish and unwashed hair that had been plaited with aloe.

  "We don't go nowhere till we see some money, mon," the one at Chug's window said.

  Chug lifted up a napkin from his lap and exposed a roll of one-hundred-dollar bills crimped together with a rubber band. He smiled, his tongue lolling on his teeth. A tiny green stone gleamed in his earlobe.

  "There it is, hard as a cucumber. You want to touch it?" he said.

  "You can follow us. We got a place to do business. But don't be talking that way to me, mon. We don't got dose kinds of problems in the Islands," the man at Chug's window said, his dreadlocks swinging like dusty snakes on his cheeks.

  "How we know y'all won't beat us up?" Chug said, his face suddenly soft and vulnerable.

  "You too sweet and de little man there too rough," the man at the window said.

  So the mop-heads were smart-asses as well as takedown artists, Wesley thought as he followed the Mercedes down the highway. Just like everybody else, making fun of him because he was short and didn't think fast and his meal ticket was with a fudge packer or two. Well, maybe they needed to get their paint scratched up a little bit. Like Hammie said, point of honor. It made Wesley feel good to know he was on the same wavelength as guys like Hammie and Warren.

  The Mercedes turned off on a dead-end gravel road and drove between rolling pasture, then stopped by the desiccated and paintless shell of a farmhouse that was squeezed to breaking inside a stand of blackjack.

  The mop-heads cut their lights and walked back toward Chug's car. One of them opened Chug's door.

  "Step out here in de road, mon. We need to count your money," he said.

  "Really?" Chug said, standing erect now, the mop-head finally realizing how big Chug actually was.

  "Yeah, 'cause dat's too much money for you. We think maybe you just give it to us," the mop-head said, his hand reaching for the. 25-caliber automatic pushed down in the back of his beltless slacks.

  That's when Chug hit him in the stomach, harder than Wesley had ever seen anyone hit. That was also when Wesley pulled the remote latch on the trunk and heard Hammie climb out on the gravel and saw Warren and Jeff each coming fast down the road in separate vehicles, their headlights so bright they made his eyes water.

  He turned away from what happened next. The blows from fists and knees and feet finally stopped and the dust drifted into the trees and broke apart in the wind, and he thought it was over, that they would be on their way back to Deaf Smith in a few minutes and he would be in his father's house by dawn.

  But Hammie looked down at the mop-heads and said,

  "Hey, you guys got to check out that rock quarry. It's a pretty spot. You'll dig it."

  The quarry looked like a large meteor hole filled with green water, the shale sides tapering down to the surface under a sky that was bursting with stars. The mop-heads were belted into the backseat of their Mercedes, both doors open, their wrists fastened behind them with plastic flex-cuffs. In the darkness their faces were the color of eggplant, welted and glistening with blood.

  But they weren't afraid, Wesley thought. They had proved that when they took their beating without asking for mercy. One of them had even told Chug he'd give him a discount on diet pills.

  But now Jeff was taking a gas can and an emergency flare out of his car. Oh man, this wasn't happening, Wesley thought.

  Hammie, Warren, Chug, and the other guy were sitting on a grass-tufted mound of dirt, eating fried chicken from a plastic bucket and drinking more beer. How could you eat after you pounded the shit out of two guys? Wesley thought. These East End guys were meaner, more unpredictable and dangerous than anyone he'd known inside. Jeff had a crazy light in his eyes, like he'd loaded up on screamers or whites on the half shell melted down in booze. He was squatted down on his haunches now, eating a drumstick not five feet from the Mercedes, with the gas can resting by his foot. He finished chewing and threw the chicken bone at the mop-head who was closer to him.

  "What do you think is about to happen in that insignificant life of yours?" Jeff said.

  "My mother give me over to de spirits when I was born, mon. I don't argue wit' what they do," the mop-head answered.

  Jeff stood up and unscrewed the plastic cap on the flexible hose that was screwed into the top of the gas can. He held the emergency flare under the mop-head's nose like a police baton and pushed his head back on his neck.

  "You ever read about Nero? He used Christians for candles. You guys Christians?" Jeff said.

  When the mop-head didn't reply, Jeff popped him across the nose with the flare, then swung the can idly back and forth, letting the gas slosh against the tin sides.

  Warren and the others had stopped talking now, their faces suddenly tuned in to what Jeff was saying. Warren rose casually to his feet, wiping the grease off his hands on the back of his jeans. He picked up a jack handle that was stuck sharp-end-down in the sand.

  "We already got their stash, Jeff. Maybe we should just remodel their car a little bit. Let them take a visual lesson back home," he said.

  Warren walked in a circle around the Mercedes, breaking head- and taillights as though he were cracking hard-boiled eggs with a spoon.

  "What'd you think I was going to do?" Jeff asked him.

  "What do I know?" Warren said.

  "You guys are too much," Jeff said, and walked to his yellow convertible and unscrewed the cap on his fuel tank and inserted the gas can hose inside.

  A wind smelling of distant rain and watermelon fields seemed to blow out of nowhere. Hammie, Warren, Chug, and the other guy started talking and laughing at once, dipping their hands down into the cooler's melted ice for another Budweiser.

  The mop-head behind the wheel of the Mercedes said something to his friend, then both of them grinned, their teeth pink with blood in the starlight.

  "Say again?" Jeff asked. He tilted the can upward, draining it, and set it on the ground.

  "Hey, mon, you had a nice Mexican wife. Cholo's sister, right? She just don't like white bread."

  "So repeat what you said."

  "You got a thing for wearing her underwear. Dat's what Cholo say. Not me, mon."

  Jeff stuck his hands in his back pockets and studied the ground for a long moment, brushing pebbles and dirt under the sole of one loafer. He combed his hair. He huffed an obstruction out of his nose. He sucked the saliva out of his cheeks and spit it into the darkness.

  The mop-heads stared indifferently into space, occasionally shaking a mosquito out of their faces.

  Jeff walked around the far side of the Mercedes and closed the back door, then returned to the driver's side and closed that door, too.

  "Jeff?" Hammie said.

  But Jeff didn't answer. The Mercedes was pointed downward on a slope that twisted between huge, grass-grown mounds of dirt and stone. Jeff used a beach towel to wipe down the Mercedes's door handles, the steering wheel, and dashboard, then the ignition keys when he started the engine.

  "Hey, we go
t a pair of big eyes here," Warren said, nodding at Wesley. "Listen to me, man. I got a future. I don't want to leave it here tonight."

  "Don't put your hand on me again, Warren," Jeff said, and dropped the Mercedes into gear.

  The mop-heads craned their necks frantically, their bodies straining against the seat belts, like people involuntarily riding in the back of a taxi that had no destination. The Mercedes rolled down the slope toward the water, gathering speed, the front end suspension adjusting for the undulations in the slope. For a moment Wesley thought the car was about to high-center on a pile of rock and swerve into a small hill and stall out but it didn't.

  The mop-heads twisted their heads and looked at him through the back window just as the car bounced hard over a rise in the slope, springing the trunk in the air, and disappeared between two mounds of dirt and sand.

  Then Wesley heard the engine hiss like a molten horseshoe dipped in a trough when the car's front end dropped over the embankment into the water.

  Jeff popped the emergency flare alight and walked up on a rise and held the flare aloft, bathing the crater and its yellow banks and the reeds in the shallows with a red glow. Thirty feet out, water was flowing and channeling like the currents in a river through the opened windows of the car, sliding over the roof now, the green silt obscuring the shapes that fought desperately inside the rear glass.

  Then the car was gone from view and Wesley was running in the darkness, alone, away from the crater and the air ballooning to the water's surface, filled, he was absolutely sure, with the voices of men who called out his name.

  19

  "What did you do next?" I asked Wesley.

  "I run all the way back to the highway. Jeff Deitrich picked me up hitchhiking," he answered. His face was gray, his hair soaked, like a man in mortal terror.

  "We can do the right thing, Wes."

  "Like go across the street and tell your buddy Marvin Pomroy what I just told you?"

  "We get the jump on it. Let the others fall in their own shit."

  "You're old. You ain't got to worry about guys like Jeff Deitrich and Chug Rollins. I hate this town. I hate being dumb and not having no money and not knowing when other people are making fun of me. I'm Jonesing real bad. I got to cop," he said.