by Dale Bailey
“Shut up, Nicky, okay?” Finney looked at the detective. “I’m serious, is that some kind of threat? You think you can just barge in here at five in the morning like you own the place?”
Pomeroy reached inside his sport coat. For a single crazy instant, Nick flashed onto that moment in the hall—
—Pomeroy silhouetted against the light—
—half-certain that the detective’s hand would emerge holding a gun. Maybe Sue thought the same thing. He felt her go rigid beside him.
Pomeroy threw a manila envelope on the table.
“Thing maybe you don’t understand, son, is from now on I do own the place. I come and go as I please.”
“Oh, Christ. What’s that supposed to mean?” Finney reached for the envelope, but Pomeroy moved his foot six inches and dropped one of those ornate boots squarely atop it.
“I’m just tellin you how it is.” He pointed at a chair. “Now why don’t you sit down and listen?”
Just like that it was over, Finney bested by a five-foot-five hick in a ten-gallon hat. Nick saw the fight go out of him, an almost visible reduction, and he felt something go out of him as well—a wordless trust that things would work out okay, that Finney would see them through.
You got to take care of number one, Frank Laymon said inside his head, and he thought of the tape, waiting there on the bathroom vanity. He could almost see it.
He turned to study the detective again. Pomeroy’s eyes were as flat and affectless as dull pennies. Nick had seen eyes like that only once in his life, and he could still remember the freezing terror of that moment. He’d been a kid then, fooling around in the swampy woods of the bayou with Alex St. Johns, and they’d stumbled onto a couple of water moccasins, wound together on the shore of a fetid stream like the serpents on a caduceus staff. Mating, he supposed later, or maybe fighting, but in that moment, he hadn’t thought anything at all. He had just reacted, stumbled backward, athrob with stark instinctive terror of the old adversary, those two spade-shaped heads darting toward him, jaws unhinged to show the cotton inside, and withdrawing once again to weave above the woodland floor, vertical pupils icy and remote. Utterly calculating. Pomeroy had those kind of eyes.
“We’re listening,” Sue said.
Pomeroy touched his hat brim, but his chill gaze never deviated from Finney. When he spoke, his voice was flat and hateful; in that moment Nick thought Pomeroy just might be the most dangerous man he’d ever met. “Thing is, you kids cost me a lot of money. I aim to get it back.”
“How much?” Sue said into the silence.
The detective stared at her for a moment. “A hundred grand ought to do it. To start.”
“No way we can afford that,” Nick said.
Pomeroy smiled and winked at Finney. “Maybe you can’t, but I reckon the Senator can raise it to keep his golden boy out of dutch.”
He paused for a moment to let them absorb this new fact—he knew them, he knew this about them and who could say what else he knew—and then he let his eyes drift to the envelope. “Saturday night,” he said quietly, “I was to meet a fellow up the park. He didn’t show. You kids know anythin about that?”
Pomeroy sipped his whiskey, waiting. Nick felt Sue’s hand, like a vise at his thigh.
Finney cleared his throat. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“You’re a pitiful liar, son.”
Pomeroy shot the envelope across the table with the heel of his boot. Finney snatched it up and tore it open with trembling fingers; in the same moment, everything fell into place in Nick’s mind—the black caddy and the Georgia tags.
“Lydia Barrett,” he said. “You’re Barrett’s private eye. You’re the one took those photos—”
But before he could go on, Finney passed him the contents of the envelope. Four photos. A black-and-white still of the dead guy in the copse of pines, a thin runnel of blood at his lip looking black in the stark glare of the flash. A shot of skid marks, dark against gray pavement. And two photos of Finney’s Acura under the clinical, overhead fluorescents of the attached garage: the crumpled fender before Finney had been at it with a hammer, the crumpled fender after.
Nick looked up into Ernie Pomeroy’s crooked, yellow grin.
“You can’t even prove that’s my car—” Finney started, but it wasn’t Pomeroy who interrupted him.
It was Tuck, his hair disheveled and his eyes rheumy. He stood by the fireplace in a pair of sagging jockey shorts and the same rumpled Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt he’d been wearing for days. His round face was creased and tired-looking. Tears stained his cheeks.
“What did you say, son?” Pomeroy asked.
For half a second, Nick hoped he’d misheard Tuck, but when the other boy repeated the words, they came out just the same:
“I said it was an accident.”
In the moment that followed, the room was so still that Nick could hear his own pulse thundering at his temples. Everything seemed abruptly heightened, garish—the ashen smell of the fireplace at Tucker’s back, the overwhelming monotone decor of the room, like he was drowning in a sea of egg whites. For the second time since the accident, a sense of time bifurcated possessed him, immutable law of cause and effect, deed and consequence. He felt it all slipping away from him—the ten thousand dollars in his pocket, graduate school, Sue, everything. Everything slipping away, and not for some pre-ordained return home either, not for Glory and a lifetime on the rigs, but for something worse.
Jail.
“I think you better tell me about it, son,” Pomeroy said, and his voice was almost gentle, like he didn’t much like what he had to do, but he didn’t have much choice either. The detective uncrossed his legs, rose from the couch, took a step toward Tuck.
Reed Tucker’s voice was broken, tearful. “We were out drinking, we’d been to this strip joint in Knoxville. I don’t remember where exactly, just that the place had some stupid name. The Mouse’s Ass or something. And on the way home—”
“Shut up, Tuck!” Finney said.
Tucker wheeled on him, sobs welling up, his face twisted and angry as a colicky child’s. “You shut up, Finney! All the time you’re bossing me around. ‘Tuck do this, Tuck do that’—” His voice mocking, hateful. “—and I’m sick to fucking death of that. Who died and made you God, you and fucking Nick, all the time whispering about me, laughing at me behind my back. You think I’m that fucking stupid? I’m the one found out who she was, wasn’t I? I’m the one said we had to destroy the tape before that stupid cop—”
“Tuck!” Finney stood, striding across the room.
Nick started after him, but Sue’s hand closed around his upper arm. He pried it loose and levered himself out of the couch. “Finney—”
The slap sounded like a thunderclap. Tucker stumbled back a step, his sobs dying. He lifted a hand to touch his cheek, the enflamed ghost of Finney’s palm. Dumb wonder flooded his face.
“You hit me.”
“We’ve got to stay calm, Tuck, we can’t let this get out of control—”
“It’s already out of control, son. I don’t think you have any idea how deep the shit you’re in goes. This cop, he a big motherfucker, Tennessee state John Law named Evans? He the one you’re talking about?”
As in a dream, Nick saw the cockroach skitter across the wall, that hand, lightning-fast.
“Yeah,” Tucker whispered.
Pomeroy shook his head. “Guy’s a fucking lunatic, eats kids like you for breakfast. Thing ya’ll don’t understand is, you need me. You need me more than you can know. So it’s time to lay your hand down, let me see your cards.” He turned to Tucker. “One way or another, I’m gonna find out.”
“You don’t have to hurt him,” Nick said, reaching for the detective’s shoulder. “We can work this out.”
“You don’t wanna lay hands on me, son,” Pomeroy said, turning to stare at Nick. A perfect bubble of silence enclosed them, and in that pause a distant cry rose absurdly from outside, a primal cry of need, a do
g’s howl of desire.
Pomeroy lifted his eyebrows quizzically. “What the fuck is that?”
Finney hesitated, looked quickly at Nick. “The Torkelsons. They live down the street. They—uh—they party a lot.”
“Shit,” Pomeroy said. “Somebody needs to take a stick to the fuckin Torkelsons.” He held Nick’s gaze a moment longer, and then he turned away, closing on Tucker. “I want to know about everything, son. The accident, the tape, the girl. All of it.”
Tucker backed away, his face pinched and frightened. His tongue slid between his lips. His gaze darted between Pomeroy and Finney. With one hand, he tugged at his jockey shorts.
“You’re gonna tell me, one way or the other,” Pomeroy said. “One way or the other, you’re gonna tell me.”
“No, Tuck—”
Pomeroy jabbed a finger at Finney without even looking at him. “You shut the fuck up, son.” He gathered double handfuls of Tucker’s sweatshirt and thrust him backward. A rack of brass fireplace tools went over with a clatter. Nick caught a faint urine odor. Tucker had pissed himself, the sagging jockey shorts yellowing.
“Nick,” Sue said.
He glanced over at her, held her gaze. Then, swallowing hard, he stepped closer.
“Finney …” Tucker whimpered, but Finney only stood there, his hands dangling at his thighs, a faintly puzzled expression on his face, as though he wondered how everything had spun so suddenly and so completely out of control.
“I’m gonna have it out of you, son,” Pomeroy said quietly. “One way or the other, I’m gonna have it out of you. You can just fess up or I can beat it out of you. And you know what I’ll do when I’m finished? I’ll call the cops. How you gonna feel then, huh? How you gonna feel in jail, son, some buck nigger sodomizing your virgin ass? They love to get hold of a tight white sister like you. They’ll pound on you till your asshole dangles to your knees.”
“Hey, now,” Nick said. “Is this necessary? I mean, can’t we talk about it?”
He stepped forward, laid a hand across the detective’s shoulder. Pomeroy spun, so suddenly and so swiftly, with such dangerous and predatory grace, that Nick fell back a pace. “I told you to lay off, son. I’m in control here. Now you just lay off while I—”
Maybe Pomeroy recognized something in Nick’s face—a widening of the eyes, an impulsive twitch of surprise—or maybe he sensed movement behind him, for he broke off abruptly, starting to turn. Halfway through his revolution, the brass poker caught him square in the face, a whistling roundhouse swing that culminated with the sound of a grapefruit dropping on a sidewalk from six floors up. He toppled in a spray of blood and snot, his Stetson flying. He knotted himself into a ball, clutching his shattered nose with both hands. Long wisps of spray-stiffened gray hair peeled away to reveal the bald pate underneath, and something about that struck Nick: the vanity of this sad, little tough guy, more like a prematurely wizened child than a man.
“Oh Gawd,” Pomeroy moaned, and Tuck stepped up to deliver another shot with the poker, this one across the flat of his back. Pomeroy’s breath burst out of him, and he went still, limp.
Nick lifted a hand to wipe moisture from his cheek. He glanced down at his finger—
—blood—
—and his heart shuddered inside him. For a moment he was once again in the back seat of Finney’s Acura, a blur of light and darkness as the car hurtled across the form of a sleeping policeman.
Then he laughed out loud, an awkward blurt of sound. “Christ, Tuck, you’re some kind of maniac.”
Tucker’s mouth worked, but no words came out. The poker slipped from his fingers to clatter against the creamy tile apron of the fireplace. His face seemed to dissolve, his broad sullen features softening into the almost comically startled visage of a frightened child, gazing down in dismay at some irrevocable accident, the shattered vase, the shards of his mother’s Fabergé egg. After a moment he blinked up at Nick, silent tears pouring down his face. Fear came off him in waves, almost visible.
“I don’t want to go to jail,” he whispered, wide-eyed, imploring.
“Is he dead?”
Nick turned to find Sue looking over his shoulder, her face flushed.
“I hope to fuck not,” Finney said.
As though in response, Pomeroy moaned. Sue uttered a startled little shriek and clutched Nick’s arm, dragging him back a step. They watched breathlessly, the four of them, as Pomeroy climbed laboriously to his hands and knees. He wavered unsteadily, his back heaving as he struggled to draw breath. Then he collapsed again, bit by bit, like a bridge giving way in chain reaction, piling by piling bearing its load into the waters below. His arms folded underneath him and he leaned forward on his elbows, his head hanging between his shoulders. One of those spidery strands of gray hair slipped down to dangle over his face, drifting back and forth as he breathed, and then his knees gave out, too. He lurched toward Nick, convulsing, and spewed a stream of yellow bile over Nick’s Keds. Nick could smell it, a malodorous stew of whiskey and stomach acid and something else, something worse, as though Pomeroy had started to rot from the inside out.
He felt his own gorge rising and swallowed hard, blinking away tears. Tucker whined, a helpless, bleating sound, like a lamb in the slaughter-line. Hatred for the other boy, for his weakness, ignited inside Nick like a pilot light, a fierce, gaseous blue ember flickering way down inside his heart, so hot it burned.
“Christ,” Finney muttered.
Nick said nothing, just stood there in amazement as the detective struggled once more to his hands and knees, steadier now, as though he had expelled some poison when he threw up. He shook his head, levered himself to his knees, like he was praying. He looked like a man wearing a fright mask, his wispy hair in a spray-stiffened corona about the crown of his head, his nose a flat, gory mess. A pint-sized scarecrow of a man really, bleary eyes scanning them without recognition until they lit with dull fury on Tucker.
Pomeroy’s lips moved, but when his voice emerged he sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of marbles. “I’m gonna fuckin kill you,” he said, and it took Nick a moment to untangle the words. Pomeroy reached into his jacket again, moving in stunned slow motion, and Nick knew what he had to do.
He’d felt this way in the woods sometimes, crouched motionless in a stand high over a game trail, the stillness so remote and impersonal and vast that after a while you seemed to lose yourself inside it. You didn’t think then, you just were, no longer a man, but something more primitive and maybe superior, the brute sum of ten million years of hunting and being hunted, instinct bred to blood and breath, gristle and bone. He figured that was how animals felt all the time: utterly grounded in the now, patient and hyper-vigilant, unburdened by mere human morality, unafraid to do what they had to do to survive.
Necessity.
So that was what it had come to.
Even as these thoughts flashed through his mind he was moving. Sue screamed as Nick lunged past Finney, sending him spinning toward the center of the room. He came up brandishing the poker just as Pomeroy cleared his jacket with the gun. The first blow fell short, the poker smashing into the carpet with an impact that shivered all along his arms.
“No!” Tucker screamed. He stumbled toward the stairs, his feet tangling. He went down, and maybe that saved him.
The gun kicked with a muffled whump in Pomeroy’s hand, reminding Nick absurdly of that night at the Torkelsons’, beer can after beer can detonating into shrapnel as the firecrackers exploded inside them. A wind seemed to move through the blinds, and the sliding glass door blew out beyond them. A dozen conflicting impressions crashed in upon Nick—the stink of cordite, a glimpse of Finney scrambling toward the sofa, Sue wrapped in his arms, Pomeroy bringing the gun to bear again—and then somehow, without thought—
—necessity—
—he was swinging the poker down again.
It caught Pomeroy in the wrist. Nick saw the gun spin away. He stepped forward, swinging the poker around in a
hissing arc. He felt the impact as it took the detective under the chin, spinning him up and around. Pomeroy staggered to his feet, backpedaling helplessly, and crashed through the coffee table.
He lay there in a bed of glass and twisted chrome, kind of twitching. Nick followed him. He stood over him for a moment, holding the poker like a Neanderthal with a bone club, thinking I have to do this, but knowing somehow that it was something else making him do this, something else throbbing there behind his eyes. He lifted the poker up and brought it crashing down once more, that green pulse pounding away inside his head, drowning everything else out. Then Sue was there. She had her arms around him, she was whispering into his ear.
He felt numb, his fingers nerveless. The poker slipped out of his hand and smashed to a floor somewhere far away. He looked down at Pomeroy, sprawled motionless there in the litter of glass and chrome, looking more than ever like a child, and he thought: He is dead. No man who looks that bad can possibly be alive. But he couldn’t bring himself to kneel down and check. He closed his eyes and it seemed to him that he was flying, way up in the sky, far above everything, and down below him there was nothing, only green, the green and rolling grass from the picture, A. R. Barrett’s sprawling house and the frank, blue eye-wink of the pool beyond, and then the hills of shaven green, rolling endlessly below him, blending one into the other until they became a gray heaving blur of swells, the Gulf, home, the salt tang of the air and the gray water rolling to a far horizon.
He could feel Sue embracing him, but he didn’t lift his arms to her. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything.
He didn’t want to open his eyes.
No one said anything for a while. It was over. Somebody, a neighbor, must surely have called the cops. They just stood there, waiting for the sirens.
Tuesday, 5:48 to 6:44 AM
Somewhere a dog barked four quick yaps. Time stuttered and caught, plunging them back into the moment. Nick felt another runnel of Pomeroy’s blood track down his cheek. As he lifted his hand to wipe it away, he thought of the Torkelsons: the gunshot, the shattering glass—it was all just another party.