I returned to her bag and dug around some more. In a zipper pocket were some letters from her mother I didn’t know about, and I took them out and held them, and even the sight of her handwriting made me wince a bit. The return address was roughly where I figured it’d be, and the paper looked homemade. The fact that they were paper letters in the first place made me think she was some place off the grid, some place where smartphones and computers and the like aren’t tolerated or just don’t work. I don’t think I’m an intrusive parent or much of a snoop, but I admit I thought about reading them. I wondered why I spent so much time searching for the missing. The abandoned are always searching for something, maybe.
Finally, I put the letters away again and zipped shut the pocket. We’d talk about it later, maybe, or I’d wait for Anci to mention it to me. I went back to digging in the bag and was surprised again to find some Nevada Barr novels I didn’t know she had. Anci grunted and rolled over to face me, and I tried to be happy about my discovery to her, but she didn’t want happy and instead said a dirty word at me and threw a shoe. I took Winter Study and the feel of those letters in my hand back to my bed to wait out the dark, which somehow seemed deeper and more lonesome than before.
Sometime around 3:30, Anci woke up screaming. I thought at first it was a nightmare, but she said she’d felt something crawling on her leg.
“Another spider?” I asked.
“Not unless it was a spider as big as your hat.”
I thought it had to be a rodent of some kind, but, sure enough, it was a spider as big as your hat. A real monster. I swatted at it, but it was too quick for me. It skittered off the bed and onto the wall. Anci screamed again, louder this time, and the shitkicker in the next unit pounded on the connecting door and said some pretty raw stuff. Well, I was tired and out of sorts, and pretty soon I was talking back, and then we were in the parking lot face-to-face, like a manager and umpire in a baseball game. The poor dope who lived on-site got dragged into it, and finally someone offered to call the police. Rather than risk another run-in with Wince, I checked us out and got on out of there.
“Lovely,” Anci said, but she was too mad at me to say more.
I offered to take us someplace else, but by then we were both awake and hungry, so we drove up Interstate 57 to a truck stop I knew to be open at that hour and grabbed some food and coffee. Anyway, I had coffee. Anci had juice. We both shoveled down big plates of scrambled eggs covered in Day-Glo cheese and slices of toast that seemed to have been salvaged from a fire. Still, we were grateful and finished our plates.
When the sun finally came up, it broke through the silver sky, and the snow vanished like a passing memory. Anci cleaned up in the truck stop bathroom, and I drove her to school. I kissed her and promised to be waiting when she got out. I watched her go inside. I dialed Jeep Mabry and made our arrangements. Then I started the truck and headed off to find the house that Mays built.
Crainville is just north of Crab Orchard Lake, but Mays’s place was north and east of that a piece, off County Road 16 in a spot near Hurricane Cemetery. It was a lonely plot in a lonely patch near a lonely stretch of road where most of the motor traffic belonged to the little farms down the hill. I drove out that way and found a quiet place to park. I got out and unlocked the case I’d stowed Betsy in and walked the half mile or so to the house. If the cops were still there, I’d stuff Betsy up my shirt and just keep strolling on by. If by some odd chance Wince was there and spotted me, I’d probably get to take a ride in a squad car.
The cops weren’t there. No one was there. Maybe they’d all gotten depressed and gone home. This was a sorrowful sight, though “sorrowful” might not capture the sense of it. Stephen King would have rejected it as implausibly dreary and ominous. The little bungalow nestled down inside a swampy little hollow, like a tick buried in an armpit. It was basically a pile of concrete blocks and dirt. Mostly dirt. Rust had eaten the flashing, and the roof sagged like a wet paper towel. You could have knocked the whole thing over with a dirty look and a hard word. There was a motorcycle there—parts of a motorcycle, anyway—but it had fallen against one of the porch posts and partially collapsed the overhang. There was a dead possum in the yard. Someone had shot him and left him there, and the rains had washed his bloody spot pale pink. I didn’t have the first idea what to make of that. I’d brought along some tools from the Vale—thinking to dismantle a lock, if need be—but I’ve had harder times opening bags of bread, and the door opened easily and let me inside.
Inside . . . oh, boy. The cramped living room stank like a cesspool of stale beer, two troubled lifetimes of cigarette smoke, and almost enough mildew to cover both. Someone had left open the western-facing window for, I don’t know, four or five years, and some brittle-looking vines had grown through and curled up on the floor to die. The short-haired brown carpets were filthy and worn through to the subfloor, and the mismatched furniture was draped with months’ worth of dust. Had I gotten the address wrong? I took out my phone and dialed Temple’s number.
“You’re sure this is the place?” I asked Susan when she answered. I gave her the house number.
“I tried to warn you,” she said. “It’s something, isn’t it?”
“It’s like home design by William Castle.”
“Mays’s ethics were the only spotless thing about him. The man was a pig.”
“Question is, why would Beckett agree to stay in a place like this?”
“Some people could live in anything.”
“There you go with the past tense again.”
“I’m a past-tense kind of person,” she said, and she hung up on me.
I gave the living room a good going-over. I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly, but on television they were always searching rooms for clues. I looked under the throw rug but found only some flattened dust bunnies and tragic palmetto bugs. I searched the pressboard shelves but turned up nothing but porno DVDs and a few trashy thrillers. Finally, in a fit of desperation, I reached under the couch and came out with a handful of dirty underwear. I spent a long moment contemplating amputating that hand.
I screwed up my courage a little and decided to have a go at the kitchen. If this was like most neglected houses, the kitchen would be in worse shape than the living areas, and the bathrooms would be worse than that. I resolved to stay away from the bathrooms. Beckett could be lying helpless in the tub, and I wouldn’t go in after him alone. My insurance wasn’t that good.
But Guy Beckett wasn’t in the kitchen. Or in the refrigerator. There was nothing in the fridge at all, not even food. I kept searching and found what must have been Beckett’s guest room. On the floor was a mattress that looked like a damp sponge, no doubt used for all kinds of illicit acts. But the shelves were overflowing with books—and not just any books, but volumes on the history of photography, collections of work by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and an esoteric-looking survey of something called steganography. The only thing of even slight interest was a signed photograph of the former St. Louis Cardinals quarterback Jim Hart. At the bottom of the action shot was a graphic box with some of Hart’s career stats: pass attempts, completions, touchdowns, like that. The photo was inscribed to Beckett personally; Hart had been athletics director at Southern Illinois University for a while, so maybe he and Beckett had met there. I took apart the framed picture of Hart, wondering if Beckett had stashed anything behind it, but all I found was disappointment. Maybe Wince was right about life not being like the movies. I put the picture and frame back and went back into the living room, and it was then that I heard the bedroom closet slide open.
I’d forgotten to look inside it, I guess. And maybe that was for the best, if someone was squirreled away in there, waiting. I could feel my heart hammering. I nearly peeled myself like a banana and went screaming out of the house, but somehow I kept it together and came up with a plan. I slid along the wall until I made the front door, opened it, breathed once, and closed it again loudly, as if I’d just
left. Then I slipped off my shoes and made my way quietly back to a spot at the edge of the hallway, where I could wait unseen. It wasn’t much of a plan, maybe, but it was what I had. Whoever it was worked quickly. The closet door must have come off its runner because it shut noisily and then banged itself against its frame; then I heard footsteps across the floor and a long moment of silence. When the footsteps came up the hall and walked past me, I cleared my throat, and whoever it was turned around, and I once again found myself looking at Round-Face.
I don’t know which of us was more surprised. Me, probably. My nerves had basically had it. He wasn’t wearing the ridiculous deputy’s costume this time. Or the wide-panel shades. Halloween was over, I guess. Instead, he was wearing a checked sports jacket—glen plaid, I think it was—and dark slacks with a sharp crease. Everything fit just fine. He looked at me. I looked at him. He had the photograph of Jim Hart in his hand. He licked his lips.
He said, “Slim?”
I nodded. I said, “Yup. Slim.”
He said, “Well, this is unfortunate,” and his hand went quickly to the back pocket of his slacks.
I agreed that it was. I raised Betsy and shot him square in the chest.
EIGHT
The beanbag inside the sawed-off twelve gauge moved at a rate of roughly three hundred feet per second, so it was like Round-Face got hit in the sternum by a very small high-speed train. He grunted and left his feet. He pitched over backward and banged his head hard on the coffee table, which split in half with a sickening, mildewy crack. Then he lay there without moving.
I waited a moment for the ringing in my ears to subside, then checked Round-Face’s vitals. He was breathing, and his heartbeat seemed strong and steady. When he came to, he’d feel like he’d gone under the wheels of a convoy of diesel trucks. But he’d be okay. The thing he’d been reaching for in his pocket was a spring-loaded sap. I couldn’t believe it. He was going to sap me, like in an old detective book. I looked for a wallet but found only pocket lint and a folding knife. The lack of ID wasn’t much of a surprise, but after my carelessness with the closet I wanted to be thorough. I went into the kitchen and looked around until I found a bit of rope under the sink, and I used the rope to tie him up. He didn’t so much as fart the whole time. I’d like to have talked to him, asked him what it was all about, but the guy was really out. I tossed the pocketknife into a corner across the room, then used the landline to call the cops and report an intruder. I gave the address and hung up as the operator was asking my name. They could do with him what they wanted, assuming he ever woke up from his nap. On the way out the door, I stopped and picked up the picture of Jim Hart.
A what?” Temple.
“You heard me.”
“A round-faced man?”
“Yup. Mean little bastard, too. He and I have run into one another before. Technically, more than once. And technically, he ran into Betsy. Well, technically, Betsy ran into . . .”
She stopped me. “This is getting complicated,” she said. “Tell me, he wouldn’t be a certain someone responsible for your cuts and bruises you had the other day, would he?”
“He might be,” I admitted. “And I’d like nothing more than to learn his story, but I think finding Guy is more important. For all of us.”
“Agreed,” she said. “But how?”
“Working on it.”
“And you say he was stealing a photograph?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Anyway, that’s what he was doing when I met him. I don’t know what else he might have been after. Any ideas?”
“I honestly don’t know. A friend of Guy’s?”
“Friend?”
“One of Galligan’s men, then.”
“Assuming he really is involved.”
“I told you . . .”
“I know,” I said. “One of the richest men in the downstate is risking dying in a prison hospital to make a few bucks in the local meth trade. I got to be honest, this is making less and less sense to me.”
“All I can tell you is what I know,” she said. The line was quiet for a moment while she thought. “Is it worth anything?”
“The photo? I can’t imagine.”
“Anyway, bring it to me right away,” she said. “As soon as you can. Maybe something will occur to me.”
“Meantime, watch yourself.”
“Believe me, I never stop.”
Well, if Guy Beckett wasn’t at home—any of his homes—maybe he was hiding out with friends. I drove into the little town of Herrin and booked us a new room at the Park Avenue Motel. It was nicer than the Pin Oak—anything was nicer than the Pin Oak—and I was promised that no spiders or other pests lived on the residence. I checked in and went up to the room and put our stuff away. I put the photo of Jim Hart on the bedside table. I didn’t know why I was carrying it around, except that it was my first official clue, and I was proud of it. I put my clothes and socks and stuff in one dresser, Anci’s in the other. There weren’t any bugs or rodent nests in either drawer, and that picked me up a little. I began to feel confident about things again, so confident that I decided I needed taken down a peg or two. I phoned Susan.
“I thought you’d have given up by now,” she said.
“A desire to keep breathing has convinced me to press on with this mess,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Believe me, that’s impossible,” she said. “What is it this time?”
“Beckett’s women.”
“You looking for a date?”
“More like information. I should have asked you the other day, but I left my private eye manual at home. Anyway, I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction.”
“Then you’re sniffing up the wrong tree,” she said.
“I’m sniffing, but I think the tree is just fine,” I said.
“That doesn’t really make any sense.”
We could worry about my private eye patter another time. I said, “I’m guessing that you kept pretty close tabs on Beckett. I think you like to keep on top of things, and one way to do that would be to know what Beckett was doing when he was doing it and who he was doing it with.”
“That’s a lot of knowing.”
“Tell me I’m wrong, though. Go ahead, I dare you.”
I could hear her grit her teeth. She said, “You ever think about doing this kind of thing professionally?”
“Not on your life.”
“Mary-Kay Connor and Carla Shepherd,” she said after a moment. “Guy had an ongoing thing with both of them.”
“Had one going or has one?”
“Don’t know, really. Given recent events, I’ve lost track. I’ll tell you this, though, Guy Beckett would date a warm hole in a motel room pillow, but he wouldn’t date it for long, so I guess they might be history by now.”
“Any chance Temple knows about them?”
“If she does, she doesn’t know about them from me.”
“Saving them for later?”
She sighed. “Two things I’ve learned in life: always having an escape route, and always keep a silver bullet or two lying around.”
“You’re an interesting person.”
“Buddy, it’s a curse.”
I scratched down the names and other info. I thanked her for the help, and she told me where to put my gratitude and hung up on me. Our relationship was as healthy as ever.
Before long, I was on my way to the tiny village of Johnston City. There used to be coal mines and cash in Johnston City, but when the mines went west, toward so-called cleaner coal and a union-free horizon, the cash packed up and followed. There’d been other stuff, too, nice stuff. A movie theater and hotels and fancy nightclubs. There’d been a park and a band shell and rows of fancy houses. The American dream, all that. Bit by bit, though, it’d all gone away. Up and down the country—whatever direction you’re facing—the story’s the same. And there’s always some guy on the TV or in Washington to explain why those jobs aren’t ever coming back
or some such, as though the idea of paying folks a decent wage to make things were some kind of impossible fantasy, like turning the earth inside out. Meanwhile, these little towns watch themselves dwindle away to a few empty streets and a lot of confused faces. These days, fewer than four thousand folks call Johnston City home. The old movie palace is a whiskey den, the band shell collapsed twenty years ago, and the hottest businesses in town are the churches and the jails.
Mary-Kay Connor’s house was a small cottage—modest but neatly kept—but her street had gone outlaw. The house next door was basically a ruin. Its windows had all been busted and its front door was missing. Maybe they’d hocked it. Some skeletal teens lingered on the front porch, sipping bottles of beer and seemingly not bothered by the odor of ammonia so heavy in the air. Meth house, I guess it was. I went up to the door and knocked, and after a moment a young woman answered.
“Mary Connor?”
“Mary-Kay, please,” she replied. “You Slim?”
I’m Slim. I followed her inside. The place was as neatly kept as your grandmama’s Hummel collection, and with all the native domestic trappings, too: a big, ratty armchair from the Ford administration, some right-wing millionaire blowhard blathering away about “regular Americans” on the tube, and a pair of lanky tomcats sleeping near a gun case in the corner. A little boy, seven or eight maybe, was playing with some kid stuff on the floor by the TV. I looked at him a moment and thought I saw something familiar.
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