Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209)

by Miller, Jason

  Lilac was in the box again, and when he recognized me he smiled a little and waved his hand, but there was worry in his face you wouldn’t miss twenty yards out in a hailstorm.

  “Lot of bustle tonight, Slim,” he said.

  “I had a sense. What happened?”

  “Truck came through here a while back. Yellow K20, I think it was. Came through like a bad man running from the devil. Wanted me to open the arm. I wouldn’t, so they opened it for me. Big guy in an orange hat threatened to throw my ass in the water in case I called the cops.”

  “They still in there?”

  “No. About ten minutes later, the truck flew out of here so fast it nearly went over the culvert. I’m guessing it wasn’t a pizza delivery.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  He sighed and shook his head, sadly, and looked at me and said, “Should do, but I’m having trouble bringing myself to do it. Slim, I’m a sixty-year-old black gate attendant at a mostly white subdivision. I work here for exactly as long as nothing goes wrong during one of my shifts, at which point I’m unemployed.”

  He was probably right about that and I was sorry about it and said so. I said I’d see what I could do to settle things down. I drove through and made my way toward the water. The streets were empty, and the dark woods loomed darker yet as night came on and the moon ducked behind the clouds. As I neared the lake, the sound of the licking water grew louder, and a breeze stirred off the cool ripples.

  It was then I happened to look up, and there above the Estates all lit up and carelessly smearing its warning lights around in the wet air was the King Coal. Across the gap was a dark patch on the hill that I knew to be the Grendel coal mine, and one of the smeared lights from the King Coal seemed to reach from one mine to the other, like a thread of silver, like a straw, and for the first time it was as though I could see the direct line between them, and I knew. I knew like a flash why Roy Galligan needed so much anhydrous ammonia—so much that he needed to steal the Knight Hawk’s supply—and why he would be driven to lie and cheat and even kill to cover up his need. But most of all I thought I might have finally solved the puzzle of what had become of Guy Beckett.

  Pelzer was waiting on the street, in the spotlight of a streetlamp, like he meant to break in to song any time an audience happened by.

  “Took you long enough.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Still nothing on the phone.”

  “You haven’t been inside? I thought you said you were good at moving doors,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you know what I ain’t good at? Getting shot to death by hired killers.”

  I looked at the house. The door stood open, but the house was dark and still, and if Lilac was right whatever happened had happened. It all had an abandoned-house look to it. I remembered what I had found at Luster’s place and I shivered with it.

  I swallowed a breath. I said, “You mind waiting here?”

  “I ain’t minded it yet. Don’t plan on changing my mind about it, either.”

  “I bet you don’t. It looks like the bad guys have come and gone, but someone has to watch the street, make sure no one comes back or sneaks up on me once I go inside.”

  “I’m your man.” He sucked it around a moment. Finally, he said, “You think she’s in there?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Could be dead.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Sure. I’ll stay out here not getting ahead of myself.”

  I nodded and took the 9000S out of my pants and walked up to the house and went inside. I hugged the wall and shadow-hopped, but I needn’t have bothered. I was right about being too late. The painting of Temple and the horse had been knocked off its hooks and rested at an angle against the wall. Someone had used a knife to slice the canvas. That just seemed mean. The marble-top coffee table was on its side and missing a leg; the fashionable broad-backed canvas chairs were overturned and stomped into lightweight matchsticks. Every photograph in the house had been taken from its frame. The kitchen wasn’t an island of order, either. The dinner plates and teacups had been smashed into a bone china geometry lesson. The cabinets had been emptied, and the canned goods rolled around on the floor.

  I searched the kitchen and went quietly through the house and into the living room. I searched the utility room, too, because you want to be thorough about this kind of thing. I went upstairs and found another shambles. The dressers in the bedroom had been emptied and the closets rifled. The fancy clothes were in piles on the floor. I searched the empty guest bedroom and the upstairs bath and found them in similar disarray. I opened the closets and looked inside, and in the last one I found Susan tied and up gagged on the floor.

  “You sonofabitch,” she said when I took the hankie out of her mouth.

  “Me? I didn’t do this.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m just angry.”

  “Where’s Temple?”

  “She’s not in this closet, is she? I don’t know.”

  I finished untying her. She looked frazzled but, all told, not too much the worse for the experience. There was a bruise under her right eye where someone had socked her, but nothing seemed to be broken, and she walked okay. We went downstairs. I tried to help her, but she shrugged my arm away and grunted a bad word at me. I figured she’d be fine.

  “When?” I asked when Pelzer had come in from the street and joined us.

  “Couple of hours ago,” she said. “Maybe longer. It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re stuck in a dark closet. What time is it now?”

  I told her.

  She said, “It’s longer. I must have been in there three hours or so. Some time around four, someone knocked on the door, and I went to open it, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up in the dark.”

  “Did you get a look at anyone before your nap? Even for a second?”

  “Your concern is touching,” she said.

  I said, “I’ll be concerned later, when there’s time. Right now, you look healthy enough, but Temple might not be. So, I’ll ask you again: did you get a look at anyone?”

  She breathed in and shut her eyes and seemed to gather herself a little. She said, “I don’t mean to be a baby.”

  “You’re not. You’ve just had a shock, is all.”

  She nodded at me, and I figured that was the closest thing to gratitude she was capable of. “There was a big guy. In a camo shirt and orange hat. Great fashion sense. Redneck of the year. I didn’t recognize him, though.”

  Pelzer said, “That might have been Sonny.”

  “Who?”

  “Sonny Goines. One of Galligan’s guys. His right-hand guy, in fact. He’s always wearing an orange hat, like a trucker hat. Godawful thing.”

  Susan said, “That’s what it was. I couldn’t think of what to call it. With the high front. I think it said I Hunt White Tail on it.”

  Pelzer sniffed and nodded. “Sonny.”

  “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “Yeah. There used to be a drawing of a girl’s naked behind on it, but the hat’s old, and the girl kinda faded out. Now all that’s left are the words.”

  I said, “You know an awful lot about this hat.”

  Pelzer frowned and threw up his hands. “I just noticed it, is all.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Stop pouting. I think I saw it the other day, and you’re right; it’s an ugly hat. The question is, why take Temple? What’s she got to do with it all?”

  “Could be any number of things, you think about it for half a second. Instead of, say, insulting someone’s powers of observation.”

  “Tony . . .”

  “Like maybe they think she knows something,” Pelzer said. “Maybe they think Beckett talked in his sleep. Or that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut around his wife. A lot of guys can’t, you know. Even guys who don’t like their wives. Or maybe they think she knows where the picture of Jim Hart is.” He looked at me. “You never brough
t it to me, by the way.”

  “Wasn’t time,” I said. “I’ll see that you get it. Meantime, what are we going to do?”

  Susan said, “Are you out of your mind? What do you mean, what are you doing to do? Call the police. Now.”

  “We do that, she’s dead,” Pelzer said. “She’s probably dead anyway.”

  Susan glared at him. “Don’t you dare say that again.”

  Pelzer said, “Hey, I’m not crazy about the idea, either, but that’s where we are. They’ll get what they can out of her. They’ll ask her questions, maybe rough her up a bit, I don’t know. And when they think they’ve got it all, they’ll pop her. You go to the cops, they’ll still be typing up your complaint when Galligan and his men are looking for a place to bury the body.”

  Susan blanched. She said, “I think I need to sit down.”

  We helped her to a chair. She buried her face in her hands.

  “What do you want to do?” Pelzer asked me.

  “I need to check something,” I said. “I know we don’t have a lot of time, but it has to be done. It’s what I’ve been trying to do since I started this business, and doing it might help us in the end. As soon as I’m back, we’re going to get Temple. Tonight.”

  I rode fast, and it only took a little more than twenty minutes to get there. The access road to the Grendel no longer existed, so I had to hike the dense timberland between the new mine and old. What remained of the colliery was a building skeleton here and there and a few pieces of junked equipment, abandoned where they fell and overgrown by grasses and vines. The shower house was still mostly standing, and the noise of the metal clothing hooks clanging and clanking together in the winter wind sent mortal chills through my blood. This was a slope mine, not a shaft, which means it had a walk-in entry, an adit twenty-five feet or so up a curved, stone-clotted slope. When I reached the top, I spied the ragged hole Guy Beckett had chopped in the concrete stopper. That’s the way they did with some of these old mines. They’d abandon the works, and then, to keep out children or fools, they’d clot up the entries with concrete blocks or a steel hatch, whatever made sense for that mine. This one had concrete blocks, and Guy Beckett had used a pickax or a sledge to crack them open and bust his way inside. Despite everything, I’d kinda hoped to be wrong.

  The air in the work area was stale and cold and tasted faintly of rusted metal, kind of like sucking on a dirty nail. You’ve ever had occasion to suck a dirty nail, I mean. And damn, it was dark in there. Dark as an exorcist’s jokes but not as funny. The floors were bottoms—floors caked with deposited coal fine—and the batters had crumbled onto their arches and partially collapsed so that you could barely stand up, and the effect was something like being trapped inside a frozen black coffin. The first thing I did was step on part of an old crib can and damn near puncture my foot.

  That was bad enough, sure, but then I ran into the bats. Literally ran into them, face-first, a colony hanging upside down in a dark corner like a bunch of overripe fruit. That pissed them off something awful, being woke up like that, and suddenly the cave front was filled with the slap of leathery wings and a piercing shriek that sent me diving for the floor, arms over my head, hoping to at least avoid a case of the rabies.

  There are plenty of awful places to work and toil in the world, in many occupations, but man, that old slope mine had to be near the top of the list. Old enough to have remnant wooden beams and cradles and an alligator looked like it’d been built during the Civil War, the Grendel was as low as some scratchback mines I’d seen, and the only fire-prevention devices were in the form of cloth sacks and rock dust. The stopes were slick with slime and bat guano, and the backs winked eerily with some kind of rotting mushroom light that was somehow more disorienting than the dark. I guess it’s no wonder Beckett ran into bad luck. You’d have to know mines pretty well not to, in a place like that.

  I found him twenty minutes later. There was an open spot off the face where the shadows were so thick my spotlight couldn’t flush all of them out. He was facedown in a deep pool, and there wasn’t much left of him. His blue-veined features had been eaten away by liquid poison. Also known as acid mine drainage, the poison created when water comes into contact with sulfides in the rock. It’s known by another name, on account of its color: yellow boy.

  Farther down the tunnel, the sound of water was a restless drip, slowly filling the bowels of the mine. I made my way as far as I dared, farther than Beckett by maybe a hundred yards, until I found the jerry-rigged pipe system and saw the water pouring through it. Around the lip of the pipe, the ribs of the Grendel were broken, cracked through so deeply that in places the top had collapsed around them as though in surrender. It wouldn’t be long before the earth shifted again and the water stored up inside the mine burst out and sluiced its way toward the wildlife preserve, with its trees and wildlife and water plants and good fishing. I got out of there before I froze to death.

  I needed to make a call, but my cell phone was full of water. Or, as it were, the evidence. There was a bar up the road from the wildlife refuge. It wasn’t a good place. It was a fighting place, a roadhouse that changed owners so often they could have used it as the basis for a new series of teenage slasher movies, Camp Crystal Lake with a liquor license. But it would have to do. I went inside and looked around for a pay phone. A guy tried to start a fight with me, but I wouldn’t let him. After a while, he gave it up and stalked off to a table in the corner and had a pout about it. I found the phone at the back of the house, but someone had ripped it off the wall and it hung there from the busted plaster by a few cords. Something about that broke me inside. I flashed angry. I stomped back toward the front of the house. The guy who wanted to fight looked up at me. I kicked him right out of his chair and to the floor. I didn’t want him to lose all hope in his fellow man. I leaned down and took his phone from his pocket and used it to make a call.

  “I’m working,” Jeep said. He was, too. I could barely hear him over the roar of the machines.

  I said, “Might be time to consider a new line. Or at least a new boss.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “Not much,” I said. “You know, murder, kidnapping, an attempt to poison the world.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “My place, soon as you can,” I said, and hung up.

  I gave the angry guy back his phone and thanked him. He seemed better, more centered after his kicking, and seemed not to hold any of it against me. Probably I’d made his night because now he had a story to tell, and that’s the only reason anyone ever did anything anyway. We even shook hands and then I left the bar and went outside.

  I crossed the noisy parking lot and climbed on the bike. The ignition switch on the Triumph is under your left leg, so you have to lean down to insert the key. I’d just done that when something slammed my head hard off the top of the tank, then grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and pulled me off the side of the bike. I was always getting kicked or hit or thrown off of my bike these days. Twenty years without falling off my bike, or putting her down, and now all of a sudden I couldn’t manage to stay in my saddle. This time, though, I had on my helmet, and the pavement jumped up and hit me in the head but didn’t do any lasting damage. I scrambled to my feet and pulled off the helmet and turned just as he materialized out of the shadows.

  There was a pistol in his hand. He pointed it at my heart.

  He said, “You goddamn cocksucker.”

  It was Jump Down.

  FOURTEEN

  He didn’t need them—the gun was probably enough—but he’d brought along two boys: big, meaty things with scars on their awful faces and a frozen dislike in their eyes. They were horrible and they didn’t do anything to hide it. You tried to imagine them having human mothers, but you couldn’t do it. Sharks, maybe. They put me in the backseat of a green maxi-cab. The boys got in front. Jump climbed in with me and we roared quickly away from the parking lot. No one bothered to look up at us as we left. Pr
obably they had abductions there all the time.

  I said, “This is kidnapping.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Well, it is.”

  Jump nodded. He turned his head slightly, as though to look thoughtfully out the window. His eyes wobbled in his head in that way of theirs, and then he suddenly swung with his right arm and shoved me back against the seat.

  He said, “It is. And I said shut up.”

  I shut up. The maxi cruised out of town and south a ways on Spillway Road until we cut back west toward a gated access into the wildlife preserve. The maxi lurched to a stop, throwing us against the backs of the seats in front of us. The big guy who was driving turned around and apologized to Jump Down with a look, and the other guy got out and rustled around in the bed for a moment and then there was the sound of metal snapping. The door opened and the boy got back in and we were underway again. I figured he’d used a pair of bolt-cutters to snip the chain off a barrier arm and take us into the woods.

  You’re about to die like that—and I was pretty sure that’s where we were heading—your mind starts tearing off in all kinds of directions. I thought of Anci and Peggy and of what they’d think when they’d learned I came to harm. I silently asked Peggy to take care of Anci, and I asked Jeep Mabry to keep guarding over them and make it so they were safe. I found myself thinking of my old man and the bad he’d done and how maybe I’d tried to make up for a few of those things in my own way and through my own actions, but I didn’t ask anything of him that didn’t involve regrets and lost chances. When I was young, we’d come to this very preserve every fall to watch the migration of the Canada geese. One year, we found a goose with a badly broken wing, and instead of just leaving it there or killing it like I thought he would he’d wrapped it in his jacket and taken it to the rangers’ station and then driven with the ranger to an animal rehabilitation preserve in Tennessee. Not much later, he’d gone away, and in that first year of loneliness I took my sisters back to see the geese on my own, but it wasn’t the same and we never went again. I thought of Guy Beckett’s body in the Grendel mine, and I wondered whether anyone would ever find him again. That was a lonely place of dying. I thought of how I wish I’d listened to my own good sense and refused to take Matthew Luster up on his devilish bargain, and how taking him up on it meant that Peggy and I would never get to make our life together, assuming we could have salvaged our relationship. I was thinking all that when the truck stopped at last and the engine died. The front doors opened and the big boys got out. One of them opened Jump Down’s side, and allowed him to step out. The other pulled open my side and reached in and pulled me from my seat and to the ground like a sack of flour.