Ferret looked at Gene Handy.
“It’s all about Blagoje. Give me Blagoje. Give me something solid, and I’m not talking meth shit. I’m not talking what the Russells do or don’t do. I’m talking give me proof he is who I know he is.”
“Why? Why the hell does it have to be me? If you know so much already, why me?”
Handy got down to Ferret’s eye level. Got close to his face. “Because you are the piece of shit low-level type that got caught. You were the one too stupid to stay out of it. You are the small fish, but instead of throwing you back, you’re good bait. You’re perfect bait. But here’s the thing about bait.”
Gene Handy laid his thick hand on Ferret’s shoulder. Felt like it weighed ten pounds.
“The thing about bait is that the bigger fish always fucks up the bait real bad.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s what happens. It’s up to the fisherman to decide if the bait can survive for another try, or if the bigger fish swallows it whole. So forget this shit and get me what I want. No proof, no bounty. No bounty means you did it all for nothing.”
“And what if it’s not him? That’s still no bounty! That’s still nothing!”
Gene Handy walked out of the bedroom, down the hall, and hopped out of the door onto the ground. Ferret’s eyes were beginning to burn from all the bleach. Yeah, from the bleach. That’s all it was.
*
He was on time for dinner. Seven thirty, which was late for Violet but early enough that Dee Dee didn’t mind holding off and letting her munch on Goldfish crackers until Daddy came home. It meant having the three of them at the table together the way it was supposed to be. It meant having to scold Violet for playing with her hash browns instead of eating them. When she still wouldn’t, he reached over for the salt shaker, poured a whole bunch of it on her food and said, “Try them now. I bet they’re better.”
But they weren’t, and Ferret shrugged. “Three more bites.”
Dee Dee told Violet her pork chop would taste like a chicken nugget, but once Violet took it off the fork, she lolled it around her lips until it fell down her shirt, and onto the tablecloth, leaving a trail of ketchup and drool. Dee Dee huffed and got up, went to the kitchen. Ferret quickly reached over to Violet’s plate, stabbed some hash browns and ate them.
“Da-aad-ee!”
Ferret winked. “That’s one. Two more.”
He was loving it. It was keeping him from thinking about Gene Handy. All this time, he thought the guy was a burn-out but decent enough to hang out with, not like the young guys who wanted to get smashed every goddamned night, cause some drama. Gene Handy seemed like he’d gotten all his rough shit out of the way a long time ago. This was fucking entrapment was what it was. Handy was using him, and he wasn’t going to come out of it so good. He needed to tell Dee Dee, but, shit. No. He just now got her back. Telling her what had been happening, what he had done, she and Violet would be on the next flight home. And it would be home-home, not here-home. There would never be a “here-home” for Dee Dee again.
What was it going to take? More snooping? Dental records? Learning a new language? Ferret shook his head and thought, I’m just a guy who wanted a good job, that was all.
Violet took a forkful of hash browns and ate them. Made nasty faces while chewing. An exaggerated swallow. Then a gulp of air. “That’s two, Daddy!”
Ferret smiled. Yeah, fuck honesty. He had no intentions of giving this up.
*
After the girl had gone to bed, Ferret and Dee Dee cuddled on the couch watching something funny-ish, but not really. One of those sitcoms where no one laughed, where they talked right at the camera, but not The Office. This was all stuff Dee Dee liked to watch and wanted him to watch with her, but she was dead weight on him, fast asleep. He didn’t want to wake her, but the arm she’d fallen asleep on was now tingly and numb and he had to unwedge it from between them.
Yep, that did it. She snorted and blinked and looked up at him. “I’m not asleep.”
“Not anymore.”
“I wasn’t then, either. I swear.”
“It’s been twenty minutes, you know.”
She sat up and rubbed her face. “No, no, no, you weren’t supposed to let me. We were going to watch this together.”
“It’s okay.”
“I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep falling asleep so early.” She sat straight up. She was in a tight white T-shirt, now a little stained after cleaning Violet’s mess. She wore thin sweatpants, a few runs in them, and was sitting on top of her bare feet. Her hair was a mess. “What do we do now?”
She knew him so well, knew he had a thing for the “harried housewife” look. Something about her not even trying to be sexy was sexy to him. He leaned in for a kiss and said, “I don’t know about you—”
“Oh, I don’t even have the energy.”
“You don’t need energy. You relax, and I’ll do the work.” He moved in for a kiss. She lifted her chin at the last second and he slid his tongue across her neck.
“God, you’re bad.”
“Just saying, I was mighty lonely in the man camp.”
“I can’t even imagine.”
Up her neck to her ear. She shivered. Then her lips, a long one. Slippery.
She pushed him back, smiling. “No means no.”
“Aw, come on.” He put on his bad Sean Connery impression. “Until it means Yesh.”
“Oh, speaking of that—”
Ferret deflated a little. That was okay. He knew he could get some in the morning. She liked it like that, almost a dream. “Speaking of James Bond?”
“I mean, some of these guys...” She shook her head. “So I was at the store today. There was this guy, I don’t think he knew I saw him at first, but he was, like, staring. He had a jar of Texas Pete, I swear. That’s all. Just a big bottle of Texas Pete.”
“Stalking you?”
“Don’t get upset.” Dee Dee wrung her fingers. “Then I remembered I’d seen him before, at the Halloween carnival. The one I told you about. He was with his nephew or something.”
“He was following you? Have you seen him anywhere—”
“Let me tell it, please? Can I tell it? All he did at the carnival was give some tickets to a kid who had run out. He was nice. But this, this was, I didn’t like it. But he was still nice.”
“He talked to you?”
“Yeah, it took a while. It wasn’t like he was hiding. I smiled. He smiled. I said, Hello again. He said, You’re Raggedy Ann, aren’t you? I was wondering.” She shook her head. “I’m just being paranoid again. I’m supposed to be better now.”
Ferret blinked and glanced at her thumbs. Back when she was a prisoner in her own home most of the time, he could tell when Dee Dee was really upset by how bloody or scabbed the skin around her thumbnails was. Picked them until they streamed red. Compulsive. And yeah, he was looking at a raw strip along the side of one thumb right then, picking with her index nail as she spoke.
“I was nice, but I tried to tell him I was in a hurry. He kept asking questions. And I don’t think he meant anything by it, but...it’s stupid.”
“Jesus, babe—”
“No, listen. He put his hand on my cart. Maybe he didn’t know he was doing it. But I didn’t know what to do. Should I have tried to push it? Should I have left it?”
“Who was this? What did he look like? I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill the fucker.”
“Hold on, I know, but hold on. He had a beard. He wore a cap, a Budweiser hat, a race driver, I don’t know.”
Beard. Cap. That narrowed it down to every man on the field, pretty much.
“I think he knew you.”
“How would you...what did he say?”
“Just asked how I was adjusting, because I was new in town. Oh, I think he said, your husband is really happy you’re here. Yeah, like he knew you.”
Ferret ran the faces through his mind. The voices. The beards.
Bad
Russell.
“I’ll fucking kill him.”
Dee Dee cupped his chin in her hand and moved his face left and right. “No, no, no. Don’t. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything. It was, you know, weird. That’s all.”
“He shouldn’t do that sort of thing.”
“But he’s a friend of yours?”
“I know him. He’s not a friend. Goddamn it—”
Tighter grip. “Violet, baby.”
He didn’t realize he was getting loud. His muscles were tight, tight, tight. Bad Russell. Somebody had better put that dog on a leash.
Maybe it was time to tell Dee Dee something. Not sure what, but something. She pointed his face towards hers. He flicked his eyes around, not sure what to say, but she said, “Look at me,” and he did. She said, “Not tonight, okay? I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Leave it alone.”
Then she took his hand, said, “Come on.”
*
In the bedroom.
Quietly. She slipped her shirt over her head on the walk across, no bra, then her sweatpants right before she sat down. She eased onto her back and brought her knees up, panties rolled off in one smooth motion, tossed them at Ferret. He got rid of his shirt and pants, focused on her, and groaned a thick, “Baby—”
“Finn, quiet.”
He nodded. He was a big ball of tension. He wanted to let it out. It had been a hard week. A hard month. A hard year.
His hard cock. He rubbed it a few times.
She spread her legs on the edge of the bed. Warm, hairy, the smell of her like a shot of bourbon. Ferret sank to his knees and licked the inside of her thighs. She flinched like it tickled and slapped at him before his tongue reached her pussy. Dee Dee grabbed his hair, rested her feet on his shoulders.
When she had come, noiselessly gripping the sheets and his hair and squeezing his face in her thighs, he slid his body up and put himself inside her, gave it a deep push. She gasped. She smiled. He stood at the bedside and wanted to tell her how fucking good she felt, how fucking good her pussy was, how the heat of her made him goddamned near crazy, but instead of saying it, he pounded it home and locked his eyes on hers. Like a dare for either one to look away. And they didn’t.
Except for one second, one small moment, when Ferret couldn’t help but glance at the window, a couple of blinds broken, gapped, and wonder if Bad Russell was out there, watching the whole time.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They finally got rid of the girl’s Fiesta.
Russell and Hunter had to do it when the night shifters still had a couple of hours left, and the day shifters were passed out enough to stay that way another half-hour. They had to roll the car out of the Walmart parking lot in neutral with the lights off. They pushed it a couple of blocks before daring to start it up and drive. Drive they did. Drove a long goddamned time. It was a sputtering sort of day, rain and slush, late-November. The wipers didn’t help.
Suppose, right, that the girl’s mom didn’t expect to see her all that often, but would still call on Thanksgiving. Yeah? Mother would get worried and people would finally start looking for her officially. Russell guessed that she wasn’t from around here, and that any friends she had weren’t surprised to have her drop off the map, thinking she must have just upped and gone home or out to Vegas, like all the others. Real Wild West fucking shit up here, even more so than back home.
When Pancrazy had called Russell about “cleaning up” after Stevie in the RV, at first he thought he meant the girl was dead. Cold and done and gone. Not an easy job, like, easy, but easy as in easy to make her disappear. But then he got there and she was still moaning, still moving around, and he thought, drunk. Drunk, or an overdose, or something Pancrazy gave her that went wrong.
And then he saw her head. Good God, that head. No wonder Pancrazy had stood over her wiping the bottom of a cast iron skillet with a very dirty towel.
Pancrazy told them to get rid of her, and to get rid of the tags on her car. He told them to switch the tags. No one would notice for a long time. The tags, that was a snap. But what did he mean get rid of the girl? The girl was still awake, still blinking, still recoiling from the touch of the Russells as they carried her to their truck. While they drove, Hunter tried as best as he could to clean up her face, get some of the grease and gunk out of her hair. The cracks in her skull were oozing, bubbling. You could see it happening beneath the scalp.
Hunter said, “I think she needs a hospital. Drop her off at the door.”
Good Russell didn’t respond, because he had been thinking the same thing. But he knew it wouldn’t work out. Not with both of them knowing, and then what if she made a full recovery and she remembered every second of it? Then what?
Good Russell saw where this was going. He would have to kill her. He hadn’t expected to kill anyone. Not ever. He had talked to a handful of killers in jail. Most had shot clerks during robberies, or killed their wives accidentally, and not one of them was premeditated. Not one was without regret. He had never met someone like Pancrazio before, one of those people who didn’t flinch when he saw other people being hurt. Here he’d thought he was working for a guy who wanted some help selling meth, but it turned out this guy, he was looking for soldiers to carry out orders. Some sick-ass orders.
It was Hunter who said, “We could give her away.”
And that was enough to ease Good Russell’s racing heart and grinding teeth. They talked about it a while. The girl between them had fallen asleep, but still herky-jerky. Her breath was rattling and off-rhythm.
“You know those kids, the ones slinging for us, the ones in the trailer park?”
That was that.
He told himself she’d be okay. They would take care of her. The raping, well, what could he do? But they would take care of her. They would keep her clean and safe. Better than...better than...dying? Being than being killed? Jesus, the things we tell ourselves. The things we makes ourselves believe.
He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since helping her up the bricks and into the trailer. He had explained to the dealers “This is a privilege, not a right. Treat her good.” But he still woke in the night and imagined her standing in the corner of his room, scalp still bubbling, not saying a word. Moving her mouth but saying nothing. Only strangled noise. He would stare and stare and stare and she never did anything different, but by the time the sun had brightened the room nice and gray, she had gone.
Russell didn’t want to know what happened after he left the trailer with Ferret that second time. He had suffocated her with a towel. There was more fight than he expected, but not enough to make it hard. She was gone for good this time. If he’d only had the balls the first time. He’d told the teenagers to bury her, and bury her good, but to never tell him where. He just hoped they weren’t as sick as he imagined.
So now it was the Fiesta’s turn, with Good Russell squeezed into the driver’s seat. Tiny goddamned thing. Hunter was nice and cozy on the passenger side. Seat flat back, dude was almost asleep. The plan was to take it to a strip mall someplace far enough away from Williston. Someplace where no one would pay it the least bit of attention until the wee hours of the morning when someone might try to rip it off or steal its rims.
Ferret trailed behind a few miles in Hunter’s car, out of sight. As soon as they found the right place to dump the car, Russell would call Ferret and he would swing back to pick them up. Ferret wasn’t supposed to know what this was all about, not for real. He was supposed to think it was another dope car to replace another one that had finally given up the ghost. But Russell couldn’t keep it in. He had told Ferret some of it after things went bad at the trailer. Enough for Ferret to know what Pancrazy was capable of, except in Russell’s version, the girl had a gun and was trying to rip off the driller.
Russell hadn’t meant for Ferret to see the girl. Not consciously, anyway. So why had he brought Ferret along to the trailer? Just because Pancrazy had said? Russell could’ve dropped the guy off, told him not to say a word, and
trust him. Ferret was so scared of this mess he’d gotten himself into that you could tell he was broken. He would have kept his mouth shut for damned sure.
They hit a pothole and it bumped Hunter awake. He smacked his lips and said, “I like this car. Let me have it. I’ll spray paint it.”
“It still smells like her. That soap smell.”
Hunter nodded. “She was pretty.”
*
In the end, it was Fargo. Longer drive than they expected. Getting close to sunrise. The strip mall was six stores long. Two stores were empty, big FOR RENT signs in the windows, the same phone number for each. Another was a pizza franchise. The other two—pawn shop and check-cashing joint. The busiest one had blacked-out windows with neon shining through. The dirty plastic bubble of a lit sign by the side of the road told them this was a casino (or what passed for one in Fargo) named Luck Lusters. One of a handful of half-bar half-casinos dotted all over the strip malls and abandoned restaurant chains of the city.
Russell parked and made the call, then he and his passenger walked across the street to a Subway shop. They had to eat before the long drive back. It was Hunter’s turn to drive. They ordered breakfast sandwiches and sat down. Ferret showed up then, got himself one, and joined them. Russell laughed at Hunter’s thirty-two ounce Suicide.
“I bet you even put diet pop in that.”
“Supposed to be all of them.”
“Idiot. You need the sugar more than the caffeine.”
But he sucked it down before he’d finished with the first half of the sandwich. Ferret wasn’t having any of the fun. Didn’t laugh with Russell, didn’t even crack a grin. Like he was fighting it. Like he wanted to punch Hunter square in the mouth. Then Hunter went to get more pop. Russell shouted at his back, “Just the sweet ones this time.”
As soon as he was clear, Ferret asked, “Why here?”
A shrug. “Easier to get lost in plain sight.”
“You know what I think?”
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