After that, I dialed Jeep Mabry’s number and told his voicemail about the break-in. Then I went back to where all my troubles had started.
When I rolled into Coulterville, the Knight Hawk’s tipple was catching the sunlight and burning like a beacon. The mine’s flags were out and whipping around noisily in the air, and the afternoon shift-horn blasted over the little town and echoed around and up the wooded slopes and into space. I felt a little like a knight of old, ready to storm some mysterious citadel. I decided I was hungry.
I stopped for a bite of lunch at the town’s only cafeteria. As I was walking in, an old man with bright blond hair was coming out. He was a sight, too—dressed fancy, as though for a funeral he was happy to attend, with a wide-brimmed fedora on his head. A side of beef in an orange ball cap sneered at me as he and the old man made their way toward one of those great old Town Cars that ought to have their own zip codes. The boy opened the back door, and the old man smiled thinly at me and swiped a finger across the tip of his nose twice. He climbed inside, and after a moment they drove away. I didn’t know what in the hell that was all about, so I went in for my chili.
Inside was crowded, and the service was slow—more chatty than slow, really—but the chili was pretty good, and I ate a big bowl with crackers and generous splashes of hot sauce and washed it down with coffee and rumor. Luster wasn’t even in the ground yet, but word was already swirling about the impending sale of the mine. Most of it was idle talk, but when I heard Roy Galligan mentioned as the most likely buyer, I did sit up and take note. Then some dipshit said he’d heard a helicopter full of Chinese businessmen had landed at the mine, intent on inspecting a prospective investment, and I knew we’d arrived at the end of useful information.
“Quite a day in here,” the old man at the cash register said. I recognized him as a fire boss I’d worked with years ago without ever really getting to know. “Sorry about your wait.”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Bit of a fuss, what with old man Galligan stopping in.”
“That was him? The old coot with the blond hair?”
“That was him,” he said. “Kinda think he’s sniffing around that mine over yonder, given the current circumstances. You up to that Knight Hawk mine, aren’t you?”
I said, “I’m up to that Knight Hawk.”
“Few years now, too, I recall.”
“Four this winter,” I said.
He nodded. “I was there twenty-five, myself. You might not remember me. They called me Sappy back then.”
“Of course I remember you, Sappy,” I said. “Slim.”
We shook hands.
“I remember.”
“We lie like helium,” I said, and he laughed.
“We really do,” he said. “I do remember you some now, though. Besides just your face, I mean. I remember some of the guys making a fuss about your daddy.”
“Sure.”
“I guess you heard about Luster.”
“I heard about it.”
He nodded. He had a big burn scar on the left side of his face. Not a pretty sight. The skin was pink and raw and had that pearlescent shine that burned flesh gets. His hair was cropped short—on the burned side, it looked a little like scorched grass—and his left eye was rheumy and a slightly different shade of blue than the other. His left ear was a knot of flesh, like puckered lips, and I noticed him turning his right toward conversation to make up for whatever hearing he’d lost.
“It’s all anyone’s talking about in here.”
“I bet.”
“I’ll be honest, I ain’t shed much tears over it. I guess you noticed my face.”
“I barely noticed,” I said.
“Oh, people always feel a need to lie about it, but I don’t take offense,” he said. “Not anymore, anyway. Folks see something like that, they look. You can’t hardly blame them.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “That’s a good attitude to have about it.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t always like that. Few years back, when it happened, I was mad as hell. Boy, was I mad. Took me a couple years to get over it, too. Hard years. Lost my wife. Started drinking more than was wise. Fell out with my kids. Like that.”
“What happened?” I asked, because I could tell he wanted me to.
“Fire on the line. Coal fire. Somehow, we had combustion on the conveyor right off the longwall pan. So the crew called me and my team in, and we evacuated the area and switched on the fire suppressors, and guess what happened.”
“I’m thinking nothing.”
“Damn things were bust. Or never worked in the first place. Never found out. New units, too. Luster had taken out the old ones and put in these things. Gave the contract to a personal friend. The old ones worked fine. Those new things were just for show, I guess. You could have picked me off the floor. You ever been in a fire down there?”
“I never have.”
He said, “Well, don’t. The walls close in and the smoke fills everything so fast you don’t have time to shit your pants or pray. Coal smoke, too, so this is the real deal. It’s like the world just goes away. Everybody started screaming and running this way and that. I gathered the remainder of my team, and we tried to do it old school, with hoses. They kept them in a metal cabinet right there off the face. They were new, too, replaced at the same time as the suppressors and by the same outfit, and we grabbed those, and guess what happened then.”
“I can’t even begin to.”
“Couplings didn’t match. They had the one spigot and the one hose, and they didn’t fit. We kept trying to screw them together—probably a little longer than good sense dictated, but under those conditions you don’t really trust what you’re seeing. Time we figured out what was going on, the fire was fully out of control, and I’d lost three men and got this new face. When it was all over, they dumped the whole thing on me. I tried to convince them what had happened, but someone had to take the fall, and in the end they went after the guy with the most empty space in his pockets. Luster went right along with it, too. For a while, I crossed the road to work at a Galligan outfit, but his shop made Luster’s look almost civilized when it came to safety. So I lost my job. Both jobs. I lost my family. I had my dark night and found the Lord, and the Lord told me I liked the chili business better than the coal mine business anyway, and here I am today. Listen, Slim, I try to be a good man and a better Christian. I pray every day and ask for guidance, and I try to forgive my enemies and even love them a little, like the Book tells us to, but I confess that when I heard what happened to Matthew J. Luster my dick got a little hard.”
Half an hour later, I arrived at the Knight Hawk. It was still there, and the lot was full of the day shift. No For Sale signs or Chinese investors anywhere in sight. No helicopters. You could have knocked me over with a blown kiss. I crossed the colliery and checked in at the main office. Billy Bear was back from his daughter’s Rock Island wedding, and he heard my voice and rumbled out to see me.
“Hey, Slim. I guess you heard.”
“Even the chili guy up the road knows about it.”
“Sappy?” he said. He waved a hand at me. “Sappy hears everything. Even with just the one ear. Word is, you’re mixed up in it somehow, and I tell you what, I can’t have it. Consider yourself on leave until further notice.”
“That so?”
“As in, not currently an employee at this coal mine.”
“Not an employee?”
“Not until further notice. Least until I’m satisfied no trouble’s going to follow you down in that hole.”
I said, “In that case, as a private citizen I want to tell you that you can go fuck yourself, Bear.”
We nodded at each other. I started out, then turned back around and asked, “By the way, how was your daughter’s wedding?”
He shrugged, “Beautiful. I wept like a baby.”
I nodded at him again and went out. I walked across to the equipment locker, picked up a helmet, a
nd went down into the mine. Bear could come get me, if he wanted. Some reason, the drop felt longer than I remembered, and the blackness blacker. I’d only been away for a couple of days, and already I was starting to forget what it was like. I walked to the eastern-most work section and searched around, but he wasn’t there and no one knew where he was or wouldn’t say. Probably the latter. I crossed back to the other side and looked some more until after a while I found Jump Down hanging around and smoking grass with his crew near the ventilation brattices. He was a pale thing, Jump, tall and as lean as a skinned rabbit, a six-foot-eight redneck shitweed. He had a long face, with cavernous cheeks and a shaved head and what I took to be an expensive set of false teeth bought after his originals had been eaten away by meth-induced bruxism and hyposalivation. Horrible thing they called meth mouth.
As I approached, he spied me, and his eyes brightened, and he used his elbows to press himself off the brattices. His boys shuffled nervously, and one of them starting pacing like a caged gorilla, ready for the door to open, but Jump just showed me his perfect teeth, friendly as you please, and he and they winked at me in the sodium spots screwed to the ribs of the mine.
He said, “Hey, hey, there he is.”
An hour later, the two of us were sitting at a back table at a little place up the road called Steamy’s. Jump Down sucked the glass neck of a light beer. I had coffee. I made the mistake of taking the keys out of my pocket and putting them on the table. No one at the mine cared that we’d left to hit a bar. I was officially on leave until further notice. No one told Jump Down where to go or what to do, not the bosses or the ghost of Matt Luster. We were quite a pair.
It was early yet, but Steamy’s was crowded and noisy. As usual, the ladies were dressed up and the guys were dressed down. Most of these good old boys, the greatest effort they’d put out was scraping off whatever was clinging to the bottom of their boots and making sure the can of chew in their back pocket was still a nice circle. A haze of cigarette smoke floated above the layer of ball caps and heavily sprayed do’s. You weren’t supposed to be able to light up in bars in Illinois anymore, but it was a rule most of these backwoods places just ignored, and it’s a wonder all that hairspray didn’t combust and burn the place to the ground.
Jump Down said, “I’ve been coming to this dump since I was a kid, you know? My old man used to bring me. I’d sit on the floor, by his stool, with my back against the bar, and wait for him to finish his shot. In the day, there was a kind of whorehouse in the back room.”
“A whorehouse?”
“Where whores work,” he explained.
“I know what it is,” I said. “I never heard about it, is all.”
“I don’t think that’s what they called it, but that’s what it was. Cash for pussy, it’s a whorehouse. Anyway, the old man would leave me with Steamy, back when Steamy was alive, and go back and bang some cunt, and then he and she’d come out and she’d give me some kind of little gift—candy or spare change or whatever she had—and we’d head on home to Mom. One time, though, she didn’t have anything. I pestered her, and she ended up giving me a condom. Bright green. I guess she thought I’d blow it up and play with it like a balloon. I don’t know what she thought. Anyway, the old man didn’t notice what she’d done, and when we got home I went into the kitchen with mom and started playing with that green condom, right there in front of her, and that was pretty much the longest night of my life.”
“Sad story.”
“It’s not sad. It’s not anything. It’s just how it was.” He leaned against the back legs of his chair. “I knew you’d be coming to see me, man. Knew it was just a matter of time. Only question is, what you think coming to see me will get you.”
“A truce,” I said.
He just stared at me.
I said, “For me and my family.”
“You got a family?”
“Yeah.”
“A kid?”
“A daughter. Beautiful. Smart as a whip, too. But as long as I’m tied up in this, she’s tied up in it. I got a feeling that everyone involved in this lovely mess thinks I know more than I do. And now I’ve had to leave my home like a fugitive, my woman is watching my every move like a Catholic school sister ready with her ruler, and I’ve basically been fired from my job. And all that in three days. I’ll tell you, I’ve had better stretches.”
“Things can always get worse. Ain’t that what they say?”
“It’s one thing they say. But here’s what I want: you call off your boys. I don’t care what you do or what your deal down there is in the Knight Hawk. I don’t care if you’re tied up in the Mays killing or with this business with Luster or Galligan.”
He smiled at me, but it wasn’t a pleasant look, and I suddenly felt my asshole trying to escape into my body. The boy had cooked enough shit, or done enough of it his own self, that he’d fried his circuits. He had a twitchy feel about him, and when he talked his eyes bulged and his lips overworked his words, like they had too much energy, and his mouth was doing its part to use some of it up.
“Galligan?” he said. “What’s this about Galligan?”
I shrugged and said, “Idle talk, mostly. Just something I’ve heard on the vine. But the main thing is, I don’t care. That’s what I want you to walk out of here with. If nothing else, that. You could be mixed up with the ghost of the czar, or Shoeless Joe, and it’d still make me no never mind whatsoever.”
“What outfit does Shoeless Joe work at, man?”
“Never mind.”
“Wait, you think Mays was working on something to do with business inside the Hawk?”
I said, “I’ve heard that’s one possibility, yes.”
“Well you, or whoever you heard it from, is wrong.”
“They are?”
He sniffed. His eyes wobbled slightly in his head, like out-of-tune television screens. “Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I think that’s what he might have been up to at first. He was sniffing around for weeks, man. Around the edges. Tell the truth, I thought someone was going to have to do something about it, but then all of a sudden he changed course.”
“Changed course? Changed course to what?”
“Someone hit the Hawk’s ammonia tank at the cold-storage shed.”
“And for some reason Mays and Beckett thought it wasn’t you or your crew?”
Jump Down shook his head. “I don’t have a crew, man, and I don’t cook or sell product.”
“Look, I know you’re being careful in what you say, but I’m not wearing a wire.”
“I don’t have a crew, man, and I don’t cook or sell product.”
“Fine,” I said. “Hypothetically.”
Jump looked at me for a long moment and then finally nodded and said, “You don’t shit where you eat. Hypothetically. And you don’t let anyone else shit where you eat, either. So there’s that. Let’s just say that no one who might be engaged in that activity at the Knight Hawk would be so goddamn stupid as to tap the Hawk’s tanks, and if someone was that stupid they’d either get made un-stupid or dead real quick.”
“Okay.”
“Also, the tank.”
“What about it?”
“The ammonia tank. It’s a sixty-one-hundred-gallon capacity,” he said. “You’ve seen it. That’s a lot of cookie dough.”
“More than you . . . than some hypothetical someone might reasonably need?”
“More than that, yeah. Enough to take the entire downstate on one hell of a ride.”
“So someone with big ambitions,” I said.
“Or someone who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing,” he said. “Like I say, that’s a lot of ingredient. You’d need a truck and bobtail to tap it, and you’d need a tank to store it in, and a thing like that will attract attention, Slim. So I hear anyway.”
“I’m not wearing a wire.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “You’re thinking Galligan?”
I didn’t know yet. I didn’t kno
w yet for sure, but a picture was beginning to take shape, too cloudy yet to bring into focus, but it was there and nagging at the darkest parts of my waking mind. I had the Mays and Luster murders and Beckett’s disappearance and Round-Face and Temple Luster Beckett and Tony Pelzer and Roy Galligan. And I had the lake, Crab Orchard Lake, and a group called Friends of Crab Orchard that Guy Beckett and Pelzer had apparently joined to chase tail. I put some money on the table and rose to go. Jump Down smiled and raised his drink and winked again at me, not as meanly this time.
“I can’t go home again yet,” I said, to no one in particular, and saying the words hurt like a kick in the nuts. I looked at the boy. I wasn’t any better disposed to him than before, but I have to admit to being surprised that it hadn’t all ended in gunfire and tears. I asked, “By the way, why in the hell did you ever agree to sit here talking to me?”
He smiled and said, “I used to have a daughter, too.”
TEN
I had a couple hours left in the day. I dialed Jeep Mabry and learned that Peggy and Anci had left school on time and without fuss. Since then he’d gotten the stink-eye from a crow a couple of times, but that was the extent of the day’s activity. I thanked him for the hundredth time and received only an irritated grunt in reply. He was off to his shift at the King Coal. I dialed Peggy next but ended up leaving a message saying I’d come to the hotel as soon as my errands permitted. Then I dialed Tony Pelzer’s number again. Nothing. That nothing was getting a bit nettlesome, I confess.
Then I drove back out to the Crab Orchard preserve. There are three manmade lakes out there, and Devil’s Kitchen is one of them. It covers almost eight hundred acres, is ninety feet deep at its deepest point, and has earned the fealty of local fisherman for some of the best bluegill and trout fishing in the state. Pelzer’s place was just outside the park near Devil’s Kitchen, north a bit of the preserve, in a tiny nothing of a place called Bluegill Point. I stopped in at a shade-tree bait store for a pack of smokes and some snacks, just in case it turned out I was in for a wait.
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