Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209)

by Miller, Jason

  And wait I did, but nothing came of it. I knocked on the door but no one answered, and I hung around for a while but no one ever showed up. A sign in the yard said Pelzer Security. A beat-up red and black GMC van sat in the driveway, its crumpled hood secured with bright yellow bungee cord and a concrete block, but it didn’t go anywhere, either. It didn’t look like it could go anywhere if you hitched it to a team of elephants. When I finally grew bored of listening to the honking of the local geese, I fired up the truck and headed home, or whatever was passing for home that night.

  When I got back to the Park Avenue and went upstairs to the room, I found Anci and Peggy arguing over one of Anci’s video games. Scary thing, set on a zombie island. I didn’t like her playing it, but this was one of those battles I ended up giving ground on. You do that sometimes to keep the peace, and you do it sometimes because it’s okay for a kid to win every now and again, but mostly you do it out of sheer exhaustion. Anyway, the two of them had attached the console to the hotel room TV, and I was in the bathroom over the sink with the water running and a brush in my mouth when I figured out what that meant.

  I swung back into the bedroom and said to Peggy, “You went to the Vale.”

  She glanced up at me briefly over her remote control and then looked back at the set.

  “You’ll have to take that thing out of your mouth and rinse, darling, because otherwise it sounds like you’re drowning in mashed potatoes.”

  I went and rinsed and came back and said it again.

  “That’s better.”

  “Stop avoiding the subject.”

  “Anci needed some things,” Peggy said. “Necessary things. You only packed her one pair of shoes, for one.”

  “We were in a bit of rush, I recall.”

  “She also needed something to keep her from going bananas while her daddy runs around playing Philip Marlowe.”

  “It’s true, I do,” Anci said. She was good enough to kick zombie butt and have a conversation without missing a beat.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said, “I’m not happy about this. You might have run into trouble.”

  “And I’m a big girl.”

  “Me, too,” said Anci.

  My nerves were fried, and I wanted to holler at both of them, but instead I sat on the edge of the other bed and watched them kill zombies for a while. They were pretty good at it, though I noticed Anci saving Peggy’s bacon on more than a couple of occasions. When they were done, we walked up into town and had dinner at a little café that probably didn’t know it was catering to three people on the lam from meth pirates. Despite what should have been our bad nerves, we had an appetite. Peggy ate a giant salad, and Anci and I had burgers so big they nearly filled our plates. We ate without talking much and then I paid our check and we went back out onto the street.

  It was a quiet night in town. I guess every night in that town was quiet, but that one was almost unseemly in its silence. Up the sidewalk, two guys were loading a television as big as a movie screen into the bed of a pickup truck, and the streetlamps were flickering and buzzing. A black sedan moved slowly up the street, turned right against the red light, and disappeared around the corner. The wind pushed around a few candy bar wrappers. That was pretty much the extent of the nightlife. The evening had come on cool, so Anci slipped on her pink gloves, and Peggy shrugged deeper into her jacket. I started wishing I had a hat or a fur-lined turban or something to bottle in the heat.

  Peggy and I were walking side by side, Anci just a pace or two behind us but keeping up, because she was a long-legged critter like her old man.

  Peggy said, “I’ve been thinking. You two really should come stay at my place for a while. You’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable. Anci could have her own room. And frankly, that hotel is kinda low-rung.”

  “It’s better than the last place,” I said.

  “Hard to believe.”

  “It’s better than the last place,” Anci said.

  I said, “I appreciate the offer, but anywhere I go is likely to become a target. I think it’s probably safe to take Anci, though.”

  I knew that would cause a ruckus, and it did. Anci stopped in her tracks. We were next to a storefront Tae Kwon Do school, but the idiot posing on the poster in the window wasn’t nearly as scary as my twelve-year-old. She gave me a look that would have frozen the balls off a bronze statue of Charles Manson and folded her arms across her chest. “Only if you’re going to haul me off, kicking and screaming,” she said.

  “Not a debate,” I said.

  “What does that mean? You don’t just get to decide what’s a debate and what’s not.”

  “The hell I don’t. I’m your father.”

  “Fine, and I’m your daughter. We’re related. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  We kept at it for another moment, arguing on the sidewalk, when another car came by. For an instant, I almost didn’t pay it any mind—it was just a car on the street—but then I recognized it as the black sedan from before. He was circling the block again, and his windows were tinted so black you couldn’t see inside the cabin. As he passed us, he slowed way down, then suddenly sped up again a little as he went by—but not before I noticed the Knight Hawk parking sticker on his bumper, and then it hit me like a ton of frozen bricks.

  “Oh, Sam Hell,” I said aloud. “My keys.”

  Peggy was confused. “Your what?”

  “My keys. I put them on the table. At Steamy’s. It had my hotel key on the chain with the name of the hotel. That sneaky little motherfucker.”

  “Darling, I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  The black sedan slid up the block and again neared the corner. But this time, instead of rounding it, he pulled to the curb and stopped. The brake lights flashed bright red and died.

  I turned to Peggy. “Take Anci, right now, and run back to the café.”

  “Slim . . .”

  “Goddamn it, do it now.”

  Everything froze for one awful instant, and then everything jumped up like a terrified cat and screamed. Peggy grabbed Anci by the arm. She was scared and did it too hard, and Anci cried out a little and fell. The doors of the sedan flew open and two dudes got out, one from either side. One was a fat guy with a beard and a ball cap. His head was like a muck bucket, and I wondered whether he was the man Mary-Kay Connor had seen arguing with Guy Beckett that day in Johnston City. The other was a thin guy in a denim jacket. They were killers. You could tell it by looking at them. That, and the fact that they were both holding guns down by their legs. The fat guy skirted the back of the sedan and stepped up on the sidewalk to join his buddy, and the two of them came toward me in a fast walk. They walked shoulder to shoulder, with just a bit of room between them, in perfect lockstep, and generally gave off an impression of having worked together on this kind of project before.

  For just a second, my feverish brain grabbed hold of some distant idea about chivalry—or maybe it was something I’d picked up watching late-night westerns—and I imagined they might wait for Anci and Peggy to round the corner before opening fire. Then the thin dude raised his pistol and snapped off three quick rounds. So much for Gary Cooper. The sound of the little automatic was a light pop, like a bottle of flat champagne. I felt one of the bullets rip the air beside my head. The others went wild, one of them blowing out the window of the Tae Kwon Do school. Peggy screamed, and when I looked back Anci was struggling to drag her into a doorway and out of sight. That was some kid.

  They came at us. I jumped and hit the curb and street with my shoulder and rolled and came up behind the pickup truck. The dudes with the TV dropped it and ran in two directions, and the big set hit the ground flat-faced and broke with a sound like a cannon shot. Bullets hit the truck and there was a flash of light that blinded me for a second or two. The fat guy fired, and the truck’s passenger-side mirror left its post and went whirling down the street. The front windshield exploded, and then the back, showering me with glass. Suddenly, the truck lurched
forward on one side, and I realized that one of them had shot out the right front tire.

  “You’re wasting ammo, dipshit,” I heard the thin guy say.

  “Well, it’s mine to waste, cock-knocker.”

  “Don’t make me take that thing from you.”

  “I’d like to see you try. Go on.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  It was one thing to be murdered on the street. It was another thing to be murdered by an old married couple. That didn’t sit right at all. Lots of things didn’t sit right. These bastards had fired bullets at my daughter. I should have been frightened—and I was—but my fear had been overtaken by an anger like a whirlwind. I wanted to kill them both and drink their blood. Unfortunately for me, the only thing I had on me was a pocketknife, and against firearms that wasn’t much. I inspected the pickup truck, and found it to be the only one in southern Illinois with an empty gun rack.

  I could feel them coming at me, still fast, from either side of the truck. Their plan was to arrive at the truck bed at the same instant and catch me between them, but the fat guy stepped on something and fell, and the thin guy got a step or two ahead of him. I seized the moment. I pushed left, toward the street side, and met the thin guy head-on. I’d timed it well, and I managed to catch him with his right foot in mid-step, so he was slightly off-balance. His left leg was forward and presenting itself as a target, so I kicked hard at the knee and got lucky. The bone cracked with a sound like wet corn snapping and went the wrong way. Some of it broke through the fabric of his pants. The dude dropped his gun and moaned and went down on his good leg. He reached for his piece, desperate, but I kneed him in the face and lunged for it too and was just a hair quicker.

  He looked up at me and said quietly, “Goddamn.”

  I staggered a half step past him. I meant to shoot him in the shoulder, put him down that way, but he twisted his body at the last moment and tried to stand up. The bullet hit him in the side of the head, and his brains shot out and splattered against the side of the truck.

  The fat guy came around the bed and tailgate, stepping over the busted TV. He saw what had happened, roared a curse at me, and fired off twice, hitting the buildings across the street. He had a bigger gun, and the sound of it echoed around the little downtown. We were on either side of the truck now. I fired back but missed. I’d shot a gun a little, of course—I’m a son of the country, after all—but I’m not much of a marksman, and I missed the fat guy badly and ended up shooting the Tae Kwon Do champion in the head.

  “Motherfucker,” fat dude said. He got impatient and charged. Thinking to bull-rush me, I guess. I backpedaled fast and lost my footing in the other dude’s blood and brains and went over hard on my tailbone. The fat boy loomed over and raised his gun.

  “Motherfucker,” he said again. He couldn’t think of anything else, maybe. He raised the gun and the gun jerked and there was an eruption like a belch of hellfire and some smoke. But then something weird happened: the fat guy’s head blew right off his neck and jumped into the truck bed with a hollow metal bang. The rest of him slumped, smoking, onto the street. Two men down.

  I looked up to find Jeep Mabry standing there with a sawed-off. He said, “I’m thinking now that coming to look in on you was the right call.” Or words to that effect.

  I started puking my guts out, and Peggy kept screaming, and those were the last sounds I heard for a while.

  The cop who took us to the station was named Willard. He was a stump of a guy with a flat nose and some unfortunate pattern baldness that maybe didn’t make him the happiest camper in the world. He arrested me and Jeep, read us our rights, cuffed us, and drove us to the station house, where he put us in separate interrogation rooms. I asked to see Anci and Peggy, and was told I couldn’t, not yet, but that they were okay, badly shaken up but intact. No injuries. They’d seen a medic, and they were together. Then he went away again and left me for about an hour. I sat there twiddling my thumbs and trying not to think too much about the man I’d killed. I didn’t even know his name or his story. I didn’t know whether he’d been paid to do what he tried to do, or whether he did it because he liked it or what. Came down to it, I guess I felt okay about what I’d done. He’d tried to hurt my family, after all. But you were never going to love a thing like that, at least a healthy person wasn’t.

  After a while, some cops came in: Willard and Ben Wince and one of the state cops I’d seen before at Luster’s house. I stood up, and Willard raised a hand and said, “Don’t do that, please. I ain’t a priest, and this ain’t church. You don’t have to stand up when I come in a room. Besides, it makes me nervous.”

  He and the others sat. I sat back down.

  I said, “I’m a little nervous myself.”

  “I would be, too. You just blew a man’s brains out on the streets of my fair city, and that’s nothing to be too relaxed about.”

  “They shot first,” I pointed out. “And I’m guessing that if you check their histories you might find a story of violent crimes and other nefarious doings.”

  Wince grunted and Willard showed his teeth. He said, “That we did. And that they had, but that don’t exactly clear the slate. Dead bodies have a way of complicating matters. You want to tell me your story? I already got a pretty good one from your boy in the other room.”

  I shook my head.

  Willard said, “No? You don’t think I did?”

  “Not unless you cut his tongue out and used it to write a story yourselves,” I said. “I don’t mean to make a fuss. I know how this looks, and I’ll cooperate fully, but this was a case of self-defense, pure and simple. Those bastards shot at my daughter. You worked some kind of miracle, brought them back to life, I’d shoot them again right here. Twice.”

  Willard sucked that around for a moment. His eyes lost their hard glint and he traced a shape on the tabletop with a finger.

  “Well, there is that,” he said. “The fact that the ladies were there goes a long way to corroborate your story. Plus those guys with the TV.”

  “I felt bad about that. It looked like a pretty fancy setup.”

  Willard ignored that. “I’m thinking only a stone lunatic would drag his kid into a firefight like that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t one, though. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here.”

  “Less thanks.”

  He thought some more and finally shrugged. “Again, that isn’t going to open any cell doors, but I admit there’s a few points here in your favor. Your girlfriend tells it that they just came out of nowhere, and started shooting up the place.”

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “You ever seen either of them before?”

  I said, “I’ve been trying to place them. One of them might match a description given me by one of Guy Beckett’s girlfriends. There was a Knight Hawk parking pass on the car, but I guess the car might belong to someone else. I don’t know who the dead guy was, but I don’t think he worked at the Hawk.”

  “So you’re thinking this has something to do with the Beckett disappearance?”

  “I’m thinking it’s likely. I’ve fallen behind a bit on some bills lately, but I don’t think I’m behind enough for anyone to resort to this kind of thing.”

  Willard nodded. “Okay. Let me ask you this then. And I caution you to think carefully before answering.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Any chance you get tangled up with a guy named Clay Reeves earlier today?”

  “Jump Down?”

  “I believe that’s the name he goes by, yeah. Kinda silly, you ask me.”

  “A little.”

  “What is it with you guys and those nicknames, anyway?” Willard said. “I go to the hospital, ain’t everybody calling someone ‘Trauma Ward’ or ‘Crash Cart’ or any such foolishness.”

  “Crash Cart’d be a pretty good nickname.”

  “Now you’re just trying my patience.”

  I said, “Hell, I do
n’t know what it is. Something in the air down there makes people act like dummies, maybe. I’m not a psychologist or a scientist. All I know is, once a miner gets a nickname, it sticks with him . . .”

  “Or her,” Wince said.

  Willard looked at him.

  “You running for office?”

  “As it happens,” Wince said. “Year from now. But this thing, my sister’s a miner.”

  “Or her,” I said, nodding at Wince, “It sticks with him or her pretty much forever. I’ve known people who basically stopped responding to their given names in favor of their mine names. A lot of them even have them on their gravestones.”

  “Now that’s deep.”

  “Sure is.”

  The state cop said, “This is a waste of time.”

  This was a young guy with carefully combed hair and a face like a carnival prize. His shirt was tucked in, and his tie had a knot as tight as a hooker’s fist, so I gathered he was a pretty fancy cop. Willard didn’t appear to think much of him, either.

  He said, “You got somewhere else to be?”

  “As a matter of fact . . .”

  Willard groaned and rubbed his face and said, “I recall correctly, you’re at our disposal for the duration, Dave, so please, dispose.”

  Dave disposed. He sat there like an angry bump. Wince chuckled.

  Willard said to me, “Jump Down.”

  “I saw him earlier today at the Knight Hawk. We had a little chat over beer and coffee. He drank the beer. Surprisingly friendly, he was, actually. He told me the story of the green condom, and I tried to talk him out of killing me and my family.”

  “I don’t known about any green rubber, but it looks like he didn’t really take the rest of it to heart.”

  “Looks that way, yes.”

  “When’d you leave him?”

  “About three this afternoon. Little earlier maybe. We were at Steamy’s.”