“Well, he sort of needed a new home, seeing how Speedy turned himself in last night. So, I volunteered to locate a proper and responsible caretaker.”
Wade stepped up to the driver’s side window and bent low to take another look. As soon as Brute caught a glimpse of Wade, he made a lunge for him. Wade gasped and jumped back a couple of steps.
“Jesus, he’s quick.”
After Brute had finished bashing his head into the window, he shook himself all over and stared down at the Krystal bag. His nose started twitching, and he proceeded to stick his snout in there with all those hamburgers and the joint I’d hidden. I tried to get him away by banging my fist against the window, but he didn’t pay me any attention.
“I hope you know that he’s been hauled in a couple of times, himself,” Wade said. “He pulled a woman off the back of a motorcycle out in front of Speedy’s house. Thirty-seven stitches in the upper thigh. Somebody called Animal Control, and it took five of them to get him in the truck. He almost chewed off a man’s testicles.”
“Yeah, he’s got this thing for the balls. But he’s not a bad dog. Once you throw him a couple of Krystals, he’s pretty loyal.”
Wade turned and looked up at the treetops across the road. The cicadas were up there, throbbing in time with the heat.
“I don’t even wanna know how you ended up with Speedy’s dog,” Wade said. “Just tell me why you’re driving. Why couldn’t Nick drive?”
“Well, he sort of had to go out of town for a couple of days.”
Wade turned from the trees and looked right at me. He had his hands on his hips. “So, where are you staying?”
“Nick’s house. Dewey’s there.”
“Well, did Nick tell you where he was going?”
“Yeah, he told me.”
“Mind if I ask where?”
“It depends. Is this a police question, or a friendly question?”
A speedboat streaked by near the cove, hauling a water-skier behind it. The boat’s wake caused the water to slosh against the shore below us.
“You know, I told Claudia I’d keep an eye on you two. Not to throw you in jail, but just to look after your best interests.”
“Yeah, she told me.”
He gazed down the embankment and watched the waves lapping against the muddy banks. Pretty soon, his face turned serious again.
“I understand you had a conversation with Loyd Muskgrave not too long ago.”
The comment caught me by surprise. But then I figured there were probably few secrets in the Green Lake Police Department.
“Yeah, Sheriff Loco seems to have this idea that me and Nick are the cocaine kings of Green Lake. You know, I’d appreciate it if you could help straighten him out on that. All it’d really take is pulling his head out of his ass.”
Wade smiled. “I don’t have a whole lot of access to the sheriff these days. Ever since the whole jail scandal broke, he only talks to about three people. He’s not the most trusting sort.”
“He’s not the most likeable sort, either. I don’t know how you can stand to work for an asshole like him.”
“I don’t elect the sheriff,” Wade said. “The voters do that.”
“Well, I hope they vote his ass out of office next year.”
“It’s a possibility. That’s why you and Nick need to be about as cool as possible for the time being.”
I held up my hand so he could save his breath. “Muskgrave already read us the riot act.”
Wade frowned. Then he looked down at the dirt and nudged a beer bottle over into the weeds with the toe of his cowboy boot.
“Muskgrave’s got your picture on a bulletin board in his office.”
I felt a tick of concern inside my chest. “For what? Because I mouthed off to him at the T-Bone King?”
Wade shook his head. “He’s got a bunch of pictures up there. Nick’s, too. Muskgrave’s looking to do something big.”
“But I’m clean. And so is Nick, at least as far as this cocaine thing goes.”
“I know you’re not involved,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure Nick is.”
My chest tightened even more. It felt like somebody was holding me against a wall.
“Are you sure?”
Wade looked me right in the eye. He didn’t appear to be happy about passing along the news.
It made perfect sense, though. The crazy hours and the business trip to Florida. Most of all, the way that he changed the subject when I brought it up. He’d never been cagey like that about his pot business.
The only question was why he’d want to take such a risk. It’s not like he was living any better.
“So, is Muskgrave gonna haul him in?”
Wade let out a sigh. “He’d like to. But I don’t think he can. I mean not just yet, anyway. Muskgrave can hardly run any sort of investigation when he’s spending all his time defending himself. But he wants to do something big before next year’s election. He’s already looking down the road to eighty-four. He wants that state senate seat that McHugh is vacating. He’s bending McHugh’s ear. He wants the senator to get the GBI and the FBI involved. Muskgrave says he’s gonna trace it all the way back to the source.”
“The source?”
“Yeah, he keeps saying he wants to nip it in the bud. He’s got this notion in his head that Morley Safer’s gonna come out and interview him for 60 Minutes if he does.”
We stood there under the sun, Wade staring at the ground and me picturing the possible outcomes to all of this. It was hard to imagine a good one.
“You know, he was talking about going into the radio business,” I said.
Wade looked up as though I’d awakened him. “Who? Nick?”
I shrugged. The radio thing didn’t seem very likely right then.
“I’d do anything I could to help Nick,” Wade said. “I’ve tried calling him, but he always puts me off, says he’s gotta go somewhere or that somebody’s waiting for him. It’s just hard for people to change when they’ve been doing things a certain way for so long. That’s the hardest thing about this job: taking people back in. Every time you carry them back to jail, you can see they’ve had a little bit more of the life sucked out of them.”
“I believe they call it recidivism,” I said.
Wade stared at me for a long time, leaving me to feel a little uneasy. I wondered if he was thinking about running me in, or maybe telling Knox about my little excursion.
But I had it all wrong.
“Outside of the Muskgrave thing, I’ve been hearing good stuff about you,” he said. “I hear you’ve been working and sending money to Mrs. Dees. That’s good. Real good.”
What he said felt like a compliment, so strong a compliment that I had a hard time looking him in the eye.
“I guess I never said thank you for what you did. You know, getting rid of the—”
Wade held up his hand before I could let the words out into the air.
“Anybody can change,” he said. “I mean, look at me. Nobody’s born to be a drunk. Or a drug dealer, for that matter. God gives us choices. Not all the ones we want, but plenty enough.”
He was looking at Danny while he said the last part. He waved at his son to let him know he’d be just another minute, then he stuck out his big hand for me to shake. I gave it a firm squeeze.
“Get the dog taken care of,” he said, “then go on home.”
I told him I would, and then I watched him walk back to the truck. Inside, Danny slowly raised the cigarette to the general vicinity of his mouth, then leaned over to take a puff. It was painful watching him move.
Wade opened the door to the truck and looked back one last time. “Tell Claudia hello for me.”
I waved again before I remembered the joint inside the Krystal bag. I stood there by the trunk and waited for Wade to pull away. As soon as he’d driven out of sight, I bolted for the car to see if there was anything left to salvage.
16
Rachel and her mother lived in the Lake
Breezes apartment complex out near the community college. They rented a two-bedroom on the second floor of building 2112—easy to remember, thanks to Dewey’s obsession with the so-dubbed Rush album. It was smaller than Nick’s house, but without the cracks in the ceiling. It also had a tiny balcony that overlooked a murky run-off pond. Rachel said the pond looked like a good place to dump a body.
I took her hand and led her down to the parking lot. She was barefoot, wearing cutoff army fatigues and a tattered gray T-shirt. Her nipples looked like the tips of balloons pressing against the fabric. I got a thrill watching the flex of her leg as she padded down the stairs, the faint outline of a muscle at the back of her leg. Her body looked perfect to me, though I sometimes wondered if she could stand to add a few pounds, just for the sake of good health. She hardly ever ate, and when she did, it was usually gum or M&M’s. She was like a hummingbird, always craving sugar. She also took a lot of Dexatrim. She called it her “go fast.”
“How did you get here?” she asked. “Are you fucking driving again?”
“I’ve got special permission from the police. One day only.”
I led her over to the Fury and pointed inside. She had to cup her hands against the side window because of the glare. Naturally, Brute had a go at her, barking like an idiot and crashing into the glass. Rachel leapt backward, screamed and hid behind me. She had her hands on my shoulders, using me as a shield between herself and Brute.
“Does he bite?” she asked.
“A little.”
“What do you mean, a little?”
“Well, he’s pretty even-tempered if you’ve got Krystal hamburgers. I brought a sackful with me, but he already ate them.”
Rachel peeked over my shoulder. Brute was eyeing us, tongue wagging in a cute sort of way. He actually looked like he was trying to put forth his best self.
“My God,” she said, “he looks like he’s got the fucking mange.”
“He’s a stray. I thought you might like him, since Ebo’s not currently up for adoption.”
“You mean you got him for me?”
I looked back over my shoulder. “He’s for you, if you want him.”
She made a little sound in the back of her throat—sort of like a gasp—and then stepped out from behind me. She slid her hands into her back pockets and looked from me to Brute and then back again.
“His name’s Brute,” I told her.
Her dark eyes widened and flashed with a tenderness I’d never seen in them before. It was quite a sight, like watching murky water turn perfectly clear. It made me feel like Moses. I had this feeling that something had changed forever, in a good way. It was hard to believe I owed it all to Speedy.
“My mother’s going to shit,” she said. “And besides, you can’t have any pets here that weigh over eighteen pounds.”
“You want me to take him back?”
She shook her head in an urgent way. “No. Let’s just get him upstairs.” She looked all around to see if anyone was watching. “We’ll figure something out.”
Rachel’s mother was at the community college, so I led Brute through the small living room on his chain leash. The place was a mess. It looked like they’d just moved in two days ago, rather than three months ago. Cardboard boxes were scattered all around, still packed and marked with labels. And there were no pictures on the walls, just plastered holes from the previous tenants’ stuff. The only two items that didn’t appear ready for a middle-of-the-night getaway were the sofa and the TV. The Zenith lacked a cable box, but I noticed a coaxial outlet on the wall. It provided the room with an instant dose of charm.
After we’d gotten Brute settled into Rachel’s bedroom, I told her all about the shit that had gone down with Speedy.
“I can’t believe you hit somebody with a fucking wrench.” She fell back on her bed, laughing. “You guys are like the Three fucking Stooges or something.”
She was lying on top of a tan comforter, and I was sitting on the floor with Brute. He’d already plopped himself down on the splotchy gray carpet. His eyelids were at half-mast, well on their way to sleepy town. I couldn’t help wondering if the joint that he’d eaten had made him drowsy.
Rachel sat up again. “So Cash paid you fifty dollars for catching the guy?”
“Yeah. He even said he was gonna call me the next time he had to bring somebody in.”
“You mean you’re thinking about this as a career?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Bounty hunting is a legal profession, you know. Plus, you get to work for yourself. That’s the best career to have, according to Cash. You don’t have to answer to anybody. Plus, crime is recession-proof.”
She studied my face for a moment and started laughing. I asked her what the hell was so funny.
“You,” she said. “Already worrying about your career. Most guys could give a shit about that stuff.”
“Well, they probably haven’t met the juvenile magistrate who took my driver’s license. She told me if I ever came back in her office, I’d better bring my toothbrush and clean underwear. That’s enough to get you thinking about a career.”
“Well, don’t be insulted,” she said. “It’s sort of cool that you think about that kind of stuff. Even if you do want to hit people in the head for a living.”
Brute was asleep, snoring quietly but in a hoarse tone, like an old man who’d smoked Pall Malls his whole life. Rachel slid off the bed, got down on her knees, and stroked one of the bald spots on his head.
“Poor little guy,” she said. “He needs to go to the vet.”
Her room was tiny, but with a more permanent feel to it than the living room. It smelled good, too, like the fat vanilla candle burning atop her dresser. She had a New York Dolls poster hanging over her bed and a David Bowie poster stuck to the back of her door. There was also a bookcase sitting against the wall beside her bed. It was crammed with paperbacks, and it harbored a cheap stereo system on the middle shelf.
Everything in the room fit together, except for the clutter of papers tacked to the back wall. There must have been twenty of them, each displaying a charcoal sketch of a frog. They were gawky little creatures with gangly legs and crosses on their backs. They’d been drawn on notebook paper and tacked up with pins.
“What kind of frogs are those?” I pointed to the drawings.
She glanced over her shoulder, still stroking Brute.
“Spring peepers,” she said. “But I didn’t draw them. My father did.”
“Did he draw them for you?”
She crawled over to the bookcase and crouched there, playing with the buttons on the stereo. “Yeah. I used to go frog hunting with him every spring.”
“You mean like frog giggin’?”
She laughed. “No, Jethro. Not frog giggin’. We caught them with our hands. We’d creep around the edge of a pond right after dark. That’s when they come out to breed.”
She studied the drawings for a moment, then turned her attention back to the stereo. “The loudest males are the ones that have the easiest time getting laid ‘cause they let out this god-awful squeal. Anyway, Dad had these helmets with lights on them, and we’d just follow the noise. He collected the frogs for his work. He was a herpetologist.”
I was struck with the vision of Jim Fowler wrestling an anaconda on Wild Kingdom.
“So he studied reptiles?”
Rachel nodded. She had the stereo going now, whipping the tuner around the dial, stations coming in and out so fast it sounded like some strange new instrument.
“And your mother’s an English professor?” I asked.
“When she can get out of bed,” Rachel said.
I scanned the bookcase. The only name I recognized was Anne Frank. Based on the titles, though, I concluded that Rachel was very interested in death.
“So I guess you’re pretty smart?” I asked.
She gave me the sneer.
“I didn’t mean it as an insult. I mean, look at all these fucking books.”
She c
onsidered her collection as though she were looking for one to pull down and offer to me. I would have read it if she had.
“I read what I want to read,” she said, “not what some dumb-shit teacher tells me to read. You think I actually wasted my time on Moby-Dick? Fuck, no. I hated that fucking book. Like the whale represents life, or something. Yeah, right. I refused to read it. I got an F because of it.”
She smiled at the memory of this. “That really pissed off my mother.”
She finally stopped the dial on WPND. It was the clearest station she’d come across. Neil Young was singing “Southern Man” while Rachel pulled a stack of record albums out from the bookcase.
“I bet you I can guess what song they’ll play next,” I told her.
She was thumbing through the albums. “Oh, yeah? Which one?”
“‘Sweet Home Alabama.’”
I told her the whole story, how Skynyrd had recorded the song to tell Neil Young that not everybody in the South was as backward-thinking as George Wallace. I also told her how the late Ronnie Van Zant and Neil Young had become friends after all was said and done. At least that’s how Nick told the story. Personally, I’d always been partial to Neil Young and was never much of a Skynyrd fan. It was a preference that would have gotten my ass kicked by a number of people.
Rachel didn’t appear to be all that impressed with the history lesson. “Yeah, like Neil Young’s gonna be listening to this crappy station, anyway.”
She slipped an album out of its sleeve. She was smiling. “You’re gonna like this,” she said.
“Who is it?”
She clutched the record against her chest. “Just wait. You’ll find out.”
Neil faded out, and the opening notes of “Sweet Home” started thumping. Just as Ronnie grunted, “Turn it up,” Rachel pressed phono and laid the needle on the vinyl. It crackled a little as she slid the volume lever up to eight.
“You need to turn this up, too,” she said.
There wasn’t any kind of intro, or even somebody saying, “One, two, three.” The music just started, like some kind of assault. It had this way-too-fast 4/4 beat, like a mad dash to the bathroom. At first, I thought that she’d played the record at 45 by mistake. But then this guy started singing, telling a girl good-bye, he was glad to see her go. And even though he was keeping up with the tempo, he sounded like he’d swallowed a handful of painkillers.
Drive Like Hell: A Novel Page 17