“Told you,” Pelzer said.
I shrugged. “Time well spent, though. I’d hate to run all over the tricounties looking for them only to find out later that they were in the most obvious spot all along.”
“Meanwhile, Temple Beckett is being put in a box.”
“Pelzer,” I said, “you open your mouth again for something like that, I’m going to let Mabry here turn you into a sock puppet.”
Jeep grinned and folded his arms. Pelzer looked at him for a moment, assessing his chances, probably, then lapsed into a sullen quiet. His chances sucked, and he knew it.
Jeep looked at me. “Where to now, Slick?”
“Goines’s place.”
“You know where it is?”
I knew where it was. The place was a rental, and not even in Goines’s name, but you look hard enough, you can always find someone to bribe. It’d taken a bit of doing—and a bit of cash—but eventually I’d come up with an address. The place was a stone-and-wood A-frame somewhere between Pomona and nowhere, in a lonesome spot at the dark edge of the national forest and without a neighbor anywhere in sight. A perfect hideout. We separated again and rolled out that way, our windshield wipers barely keeping up with the storm, and after a bit of knocking around in the dark and the wild rain we managed to find the place. Under the clouds, it looked a little like an Indian cave or some kind of black-magic church, and when the lightning flashed overhead it cast a fearful, peaked shadow on the grass.
Jeep said, “Okay, better. But are you sure they’re inside?”
“Sure enough,” I said. “It’s a little late to be out for a stroll.”
“They could be somewhere else entirely.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Their cars are around back, hoping to avoid anyone noticing. Not that there’s anyone out here to notice, but I guess they’ve elected to be extra cautious. You can’t see the cars, but look there in the grass. Tire marks, and the grass is flattened down. Recently, too.”
“Nice eye, buddy,” Jeep said.
“If you two girls are done complimenting each other,” Pelzer said, “maybe we should go see what there is to see.”
I nodded. Jeep nodded. He looked at Pelzer. For a moment, I thought he might knock his head clean off. He must have decided we’d need Pelzer’s gun, though, because instead of head-knocking he hopped down from his truck and raced off through the rain into the dark. Pelzer and I followed, quickly and quietly. We didn’t really have much more of a plan than that. We ran through the yard, through the howling wind and sheets of rain, straight toward the house. We were tough men on a mission, and we had all kinds of guns. There would probably be murders. We were finally living up to our potential as Americans.
Jeep was fast, but surprisingly, Pelzer was faster. He got in front of us and hit the front porch at a leaping sprint. He caught air and slammed into the door with his shoulder. I guess he had a picture of it in his mind. This was a good door, though. An expensive door. The wood flexed less than a millimeter and spat him out like a wad of gum, and he landed on the concrete with a yelp.
Jeep looked down at him.
“You dumb little peckerwood.” He shook his head. “I don’t guess you thought of trying the knob first?”
Jeep tried the knob. The door clicked open, and Jeep pushed it once gently then reared back and kicked it hard with the bottom of his boot. A big guy with a tattooed face was there to greet us. The door greeted him first, smashed into his mush and drove him over and to the ground. He tried to get up, but Jeep stomped his knee and kicked him in the nuts, and the guy burped a word I’m pretty sure he made up on the spot.
I came in behind Jeep. Pelzer followed me, ducking low and to the left as soon as he was inside. I sort of hoped that they’d be hiding out in small numbers, but the room was full of assholes and firearms. The furniture had been scooted back against the walls and the den turned into a kind of situation room with a table in the center. The lights were on and some candles were lit in case the lights went out. There were bottles of booze everywhere and cigarettes and ashtrays. There were six guys present, too, besides tattoo-face: three rednecks, a mountain man with a big beard who looked like he ate weightlifters for breakfast, a fat boy with a leather jacket and one of those swollen faces looks like it’s about to pop, and Goines, still wearing that silly orange hat. Seriously, he looked ridiculous.
Everything that happened next happened in a jumble. Redneck #1 slid a long-barrel .38 from the crack of his ass. But Jeep was ready. He whipped out his twelve gauge and emptied fire and steel into the room. Redneck #2 got hit and parts of him went down in a pool. The table pretty much disappeared. Everyone else jumped from under their hats and dove for cover.
A gun went off and there was a flash of heat and a spark and I hit the deck. It was like someone had hit me in the chest with a post-hole digger. When I got up, the dude with the beard was charging me. I didn’t have time to get my footing, and he tackled me and down I went again, harder this time, but came up with the bastard’s leg. I tried twisting him to the floor, but he was like a block of lead; he barely moved. He whacked me a good lick in the eye, and I dropped his leg and rolled over and away and came up two-footed and ready to fight. Just then, the storm picked up even more. The wind punched the house, and the wallboards rattled and moaned threateningly, and a window blew out. Rain and some freezing something came pushing in and the power flickered and died and darkness draped the room like a widow’s frown.
I turned again and the Beard was there, like a nightmare. He punched me in the top of the chest, going for my neck maybe, and I fell over and rolled. I came up on the balls of my feet, leapt in. I snatched a small, decorative mirror off the wall and hit him with his own face, and the Beard went down and stayed there.
I looked up and wished I hadn’t. The room was like an operating theater. Pelzer had Redneck #3 and Fatboy by the hair, one in each hand, and he was banging their heads off the coffee table so hard that both their faces were flattened like wet clay. He only stopped when I yelled at him, and the boys slid one way and other, sighing in relief as they slumped onto the smashed furniture.
“You’re spoiling my fun, Hawkshaw,” Pelzer said.
“Fun, hell. That was about to be murder.” I looked around on the floor at the various bodies and parts of bodies. I didn’t see anything orange. I said, “Where’s Goines?”
“Here.”
Back of the room was a kitchen and one of those kitchen cutouts. Goines must have slipped down behind the counter during all the excitement. There was a blur of Day-Glo as he stood and swung into the room and shot Pelzer in the head. Pelzer disappeared behind the sofa, and Goines turned the gun and shot twice at Jeep, who dove for cover. Then he turned his attention to me. I didn’t have any cover available.
What I had was maybe half a second. A sawed-off shotgun rested on the pile of matchsticks that had been the coffee table, and I dove and reached for the pistol-grip gunstock but came up instead with a table leg. Good enough, I guess. I swung it hard at Goines’s wrist and hit it, and he yelped like a calf and dropped his Dan Wesson .45 Bobtail. He tried to pull back and into a football kick, but it was a clumsy effort and I jabbed him between the eyes and swung the table leg at that silly orange hat, going for the home run.
The boy was quick, though. Quick as a greased cougar. He stepped under my swing and cracked me a good one in the ribs and then dropped to the floor and hooked my legs and brought me down with him. On my way, I reached out to arrest my fall and dropped the table leg, but the Bobtail was there beside me, and I grabbed it and fired off two wild ones. The air tore around us and Goines screamed and jumped backward off me and crab-walked toward the kitchen.
“Careful, slick,” Jeep shouted behind me.
But I didn’t listen. I launched myself into the kitchen, and Goines sprung suddenly back into view. He whipped something through the air, and the something hit me in the head, and I realized all at once that it was a toaster swinging by its cord. It was on
e of those old-timey ones, too, the metal ones that are built like bank safes, and I pitched over sideways, and there again was Goines.
“You goddamn troublemaking sonofabitch,” he said. “I’m sending you to hell tonight.”
I still had the Bobtail, but Goines grabbed my wrist and twisted until I dropped the gun. He kicked it away. The kitchen was small, like you usually find in cheap rentals, and there wasn’t much room to maneuver. Goines pressed himself away from me and spun right and hit me with an elbow-strike that sent me staggering against the stove. He moved in and jabbed again but missed, and I picked up a Teflon fry pan and struck him a good one across the chops with it. Blood looped from his nose and mouth and he bent down as though on reflex, and I hit him on the head again and again, like I was driving a rail spike, but the fucker refused to pass out or die. He avoided another hit and swung a right hook into my ear and grabbed me by the throat and sent me crashing into the wall. I hit the wainscot with such a thud that a clock dropped on my head and spat its little wooden bird across the linoleum.
I got to my knees and crawled into the living room and stood quickly. Before I could turn, though, Goines hit me in the back and drove me forward onto my face. He kicked me in the ribs until I rolled over, and he kicked me in the head and then reared back and made like to stomp me through the carpet and into the crawl space, and I rolled to my left and this time came up with the sawed-off and shot him in the foot.
Well, that was a sight. There was a roar and a blast of hellish smoke, and Sonny’s foot just kinda vanished in a puff of suede and boot stuffing. His standing-leg buckled, and he sank down on his butt and grabbed his shoe. He looked up at me, and I looked down at him and suddenly found myself staring down the barrel of the gun, and man, let me tell you, all kinds of things run through your mind in a moment like that. I couldn’t very well leave it lie, couldn’t leave the little shit running around and unleashing hell on me and mine. My brain was going like a wheel, and it wasn’t thinking about whether to add Goines to my Christmas card list. More like how much lye such a thing might require—Fatboy included—or where I might get a hacksaw that time of night.
But I didn’t get to give any of that, or murder or self-defense or whatever it was, much more thought, because just then there was another shot, this one straight up into the ceiling and roaring loud. I looked up to find Roy Galligan, dressed fine in a suit as white as the season’s first snow, coming down the stairs holding an antique Colt Kodiak double. His hair was the same pale blond, and upon his finger was a circle of carved anthracite. He was a fancy one, the kind of guy who made you want to use words like “upon.” His belt buckle was mighty, and his alligator boots winked with silver buckles. The house seemed fairly to creak under his weight.
“That’s enough, if you don’t mind,” he said, voice like a cave-in. He stopped to survey the room. “Holy God. It’s an abattoir. How did it come to this?”
He didn’t bother about my gun. He strode into the room, kicking pieces of this and that—furniture and employees—out of his way with equal disdain. He stepped to the kitchen and rested the Kodiak against a counter. He opened a cabinet and brought out a crystal decanter and a handful of glasses and set them on the bar.
“I saw you the other day up there to Coulterville. Buying chili. You’re Slim, aren’t you?”
“You Roy?”
We agreed we were who we were. Jeep came out and dusted himself off, and Pelzer stirred on the floor. He sat up and rubbed a swipe of blood around the side of his neck.
I said, “Thank God. I thought you were dead.”
“I thought so, too.” His hand went to the side of his head. He glared at Goines on the floor. “For a second anyway. Little shit shot my ear off.”
“Better than your skull.”
“Or my balls. Think they can sew it back on?” he asked.
“If you can find it,” I said. “It might have gone under the couch.”
He fished around until he found his ear under the sofa.
“Good eye. I bet they can sew it back on,” he said.
“It’s a world of medical miracles. Take this.”
Pelzer put his ear in his shirt pocket and climbed to his feet. I handed him the sawed-off, and he stood there holding it and eyeing Galligan like something growing out of his nose.
Galligan looked back at him and smiled sweetly and said, “My opinion, boy, you look better without it. Evens out your head some.”
I said, “You like gambling, don’t you, man?”
“What else is there, boy?”
“A long, healthy life, one.”
He regarded me with pity. “You’re welcome to it. I’ll take my money and my fun,” he said. “I don’t suppose I have to ask what this is about, do I?”
“Foremost, it’s about Temple Beckett. Where is she?”
Galligan sighed. He drank his drink and looked at the loss with sorrow. I bet he always did that. He wanted his pie and to have it, too.
At last, he said, “Upstairs. First door on the left.”
“Anyone else up there we ought to know about?”
“No,” he said. He looked around the floor a little. “It looks like you got them all.”
I nodded at Jeep, and he and Pelzer went upstairs. They took their guns. I had the 9000S to keep an eye on our host. You could only trust a man like Roy Galligan so far, which was to say not at all.
“It’s also about Guy Beckett,” I said when we were alone. I had to raise my voice, the storm was so loud, but the old man seemed not to have noticed it at all. “He’s dead, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said.
“I’m not guessing,” I said. “I found him in the Grendel. Drowned in all the poison water you’ve been funneling into it.”
“I confess, I’d wondered about that. He had to have gone somewhere, after all.”
“He stumbled down there to pick up a water sample, maybe,” I said. “Or to take pictures of your jerry-rigged pipe system. Whichever, he got lost in the dark somehow and couldn’t find his way back out. Eventually, he panicked and got hung up on something and drowned. I found him in a room off the face.”
Goines swore softly under his breath. His face was pasty white, but the boy was rawhide tough, I’ll give him that. He toyed around with taking off his boot but gave it up when the job got too painful, and now he just sat there staring up at us with his crazy eyes.
Galligan looked at him, too, though maybe with less admiration. He said, “Foot full of lead, Sonny? Well, there are worse things. Sit tight, we’ll get you fixed up.” He turned to me again and said, “Did you bring him out? Beckett?”
I shook my head, and Galligan winked meanly at me and grinned like we were sharing diabolical doings.
He said, “Because you want money.”
“Because I want to be left alone,” I said. “Anyway, there wasn’t time to bring him out. I’m not sure I could have done it by myself anyway.”
Galligan nodded. He said, “Probably not. I had the sad fortune of moving some drowned bodies after the flood of ’45, and they were as heavy as granite blocks, even the little ones.”
“Let me ask you this: how much water would you say you’ve funneled from the King Coal into that old coal mine?”
If I’d hoped to surprise him with my brilliant detective work, I’d have gone home and cried into my pillow. His face didn’t even change when he said, “Well, I don’t know precisely. My calculations, the Grendel goes some four hundred acres or so.”
“And it’s full.”
“And it’s full. Well, it’s more or less full, as such things go,” Galligan said. “I’m not the first one to do this sort of thing, you know.”
“You installed a false wet seal,” I said, “from one mine to the other. Real seal directs acid mine drainage to a holding tank where you’d treat it with your supplies of anhydrous ammonia.”
“Is that what I did?”
I ignored him. “But treatment’s expensive a
nd a pain in your ass anyway. You like doing things your own way and don’t want anyone in the state capital or Washington calling the dance, so instead of treating the water you started funneling it to the Grendel.”
“I’m awfully clever then.”
I continued ignoring him. “I’m guessing you’ve been doing it for several years at least, funneling water and falsifying reports to the government. But then things hit a snag. The Grendel’s slowly collapsing, as abandoned mines will, and the acid drainage pooled near some of its structural flaws and started leaking. If it all broke out of the mine—Martin County style—and ended up in the lake, everyone would know what you’ve been up to, and you’d be looking down the barrel. But to clean it up, you had to increase your supply of anhydrous ammonia, which you couldn’t do on the books without attracting attention from the Feds. They’d want to know what you were using it for, so you decided to hit the Knight Hawk’s tanks.”
“What a wily character I am.”
There were noises on the stairs. Jeep and Pelzer were coming down. Temple was in Jeep’s arms, unconscious.
He said, “She’s drugged out of her kettle, but she seems okay.”
I looked at Galligan, “And man, are you lucky.”
He smiled a little, but it wasn’t a happy smile. He didn’t like being under a thumb, and here he was under the biggest thumb of his life maybe, but he was smart enough to let it play out and live to fight another time.
He said, “You were telling my story back to me, I think.”
“I was,” I said. “You used up your own back supplies of ammonia, I guess, and then hit on the idea of tapping the Knight Hawk’s tanks. Chances are, the local meth gangs would catch the blame, and anyway no one would ever think to accuse you of something like that. Only problem was, you didn’t know that you’d been seen by Dwayne Mays and Luster’s son-in-law, who were working on an unrelated news story. That is, you didn’t know until things started getting hot and Beckett panicked and went to Luster for help. Luster must have figured out what you were doing, and he knew he had you. He came to you and told you what he knew and . . . what? . . . asked you for money? Coal mines?”
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