by Blake Banner
“You’re losing me.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet. From among his cards, he extracted a photograph and dropped it on the table in front of me. It was a picture of Marni. She was smiling into the camera, squinting slightly because of the sun. All you could see behind her was pine forest. It had been printed out on a computer, and there was a broad white border under the picture, where she had written ‘Lack.’
“It was pinned to her cork notice board in the kitchen.” He gave a small shrug. “Call it a hunch, like in the movies, but my gut told me there was probably only one person in the whole world, besides her, who knew where that picture had been taken. That’s your name written at the bottom, right? She figured you’d turn up before long, asking questions. Maybe she didn’t tell your dad, because she wanted him to worry. Maybe she figured if he worried, he’d call on you. Keep it. I didn’t see it, I didn’t find it and I didn’t give it to you.”
I slipped it into my own wallet. “Thanks, but that still doesn’t explain…”
He was shaking his head. “There is something else. Within an hour of phoning the university, I got a call from the colonel’s office…”
“The colonel?”
“The supreme commander of the Massachusetts State Police. His office called and instructed me to drop any investigation, and not to discuss her disappearance with anybody, under any circumstances. So that made me curious.”
“What reason did they give?”
“The reasons I have given you. Her job was notoriously stressful. She was a young woman. She probably needed to get away. A scandal in the papers could damage her career.” He sat back and spread his hands. “All valid points, but as far as I am aware the colonel’s office does not intervene in that kind of thing. The only way that could have happened was if your father had pulled strings. But I knew he hadn’t, because he was the one asking me to investigate.”
I nodded. “Two gets you twenty, whoever pulled strings at the colonel’s office, drives a large SUV.”
He shrugged. “All I can tell you, Mr. Walker, is that the police cannot investigate unless there is actual evidence of a crime. And at the moment there is none.” He studied my face. “Do you know where it is? Where the photograph was taken?”
I shook my head. “No.”
But he knew I was lying and smiled. “Good.”
I stood. “Thank you, Detective. I guess the best thing I can do now is go back to Wyoming.”
“I guess you’re right.”
We shook hands and I left.
I found my father seated in front of the fire in the drawing room, with his red tartan blanket over his knees. He watched me come in and sit in the burgundy chesterfield armchair opposite him.
“Did you find anything?”
I shook my head. “No.”
Like Mendelson, he knew I was lying. “What are you going to do?”
“Go back to Wyoming.”
He looked troubled. I told myself I didn’t care. “What about Marni?”
I shrugged. “I guess she’ll turn up when you least expect her.”
A spasm of pain flashed across his face. “Lacklan, son…”
I shook my head. “Don’t. It’s too late for that.” I stood. “You made your bed, now you have to lie in it. Remembr?”
In the hall I found Ben coming down the stairs. He smiled without feeling in his pale blue eyes. “Glad you could make it. Will you be staying long?”
I shook my head. “I’m leaving now.”
I went down to the kitchen and said goodbye to Kenny and Rosalia. Rosalia wanted to know when I would come back. I told her soon, but we all three knew that next time I came to that house, it would be for my father’s funeral.
Five
It was a thirty hour drive, back along the I-90 and the I-80; and then the I-76 from Big Springs to Denver. After Denver it was a three-hour, winding climb on Highway 285, up into the remotest part of the Rockies, where there is no blacktop on the roads, and no street view on Google Earth, to a town called Turret.
When we were kids, Turret was a ghost town: a handful of semi-derelict shacks that had once been people’s homes, back in the days when men were men and so were women. Silvia, Marni’s mother, had bought and partly restored a cabin out in the foothills of Green Mountain, a mile or so from the town. She was a sensitive, artistic woman, and liked to go there and paint. For a few years, till we were eleven or twelve, each August during the holidays we would spend a couple of weeks or three playing at Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett among the mountains and forests. Then we stopped going, until the summer before I went to England. Then, aged eighteen, Marni and I had come out here alone. That was when I took the picture.
Now Turret was not a ghost town anymore. It was coming back to life. There was a bar that looked like an old time saloon. Now it was closed because it only opened in the summer months, but there was a diner, a post office, a general store and a whole cluster of new houses. I figured maybe there were a dozen new homes.
It was midday when I parked in front of the diner and stepped inside. It was empty, but there was a pretty girl behind the counter washing glasses. She smiled as I came in.
“Oh, boy!” She said it like I should know what she was talking about. “A new face!”
I smiled. “Your face is new to me, too.” I sat on a stool at the bar. “Can I get a beer and a burger?”
“Fries?”
I nodded. “Are you going to let me smoke?”
“For all I care, you can burst into flames, pal. Last time I seen the sheriff ’round here, I wasn’t even born!”
She cracked me a beer and went into the kitchen. I peeled a pack of Camel, extracted a butt and poked it in my mouth, speaking around the cigarette as I leaned into the flame of my Zippo.
“I guess you don’t get many strangers ’round here.”
“Only people who come here, Mister,” she called over the hiss of the griddle, “are either working on the farm, lost, or they’re crazy.”
I smiled. “Which one are you?”
She peered out and grinned. “I am both lost and crazy. And I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Well, I guess I’m crazy. Used to come out here when I was a kid. We had a cabin out on North Spring Road. Haven’t been there for over ten years. Just had a sudden hankering to see it again.”
She came out and leaned on the bar. “You from New York?” I shook my head. She had an infectious smile. “You talk funny.”
I smiled back. “Y’all do too.”
She winked. “That’s two things we got in common.”
“I’m sure if we looked we could find more.”
She giggled and disappeared back into the kitchen. Five minutes later she returned with a man-sized burger in a bun and enough fries to feed a retreating French army.
“I guess I looked hungry.”
She leaned her ass against the cash register and folded a piece of gum into her mouth. “You look like a man who’d have an appetite.”
“I might be. Speaking of which, where can I get a bed around here?”
“You ain’t shy, I’ll say that.”
I bit into the burger and chewed, watching her. She watched me back with amused insolence in her eyes. I said, “So?”
“We got a couple of rooms upstairs.”
“I’ll take one.”
“Ten bucks a night. Food’s extra.”
I finished my burger, paid her five nights in advance and took the Zombie up North Spring Road.
Like I said, there was no blacktop up here, and as I wound my way deeper into the mountains I was pursued by a vast cloud of billowing dust that never quite seemed to catch me. After about a mile, I came to a rough, dirt track on the right and followed it for half a mile, climbing through dense pine woods. Three or four hundred yards up, a second track branched off through the forest onto a flat glade. That was where the cabin stood. Just beyond it the woods swept down into a deep, dense gorge. Behin
d it, they climbed toward the peak.
There was no car there, but I didn’t expect there to be. She would have concealed it somewhere and come up by foot, staying among the trees, among the shadows. I mounted the steps to the porch and peered through the window. It was dark inside and I couldn’t see much. I tried the door. It was open.
It was one room, neat and clean, with an open fire, an iron range and a sink. A dining table stood in the middle of the floor, and against the far wall there was a sofa, a chair and a TV. In back there was a bedroom and a toilet.
I checked the toilet and found her toothbrush and her tampons. In the bedroom I found her pants and her bras, a couple of pairs of jeans, some sweatshirts and a pair of boots; but not her.
Back in the living room I picked up a notepad and a pen and sat at the table. I thought for a moment, then remembered a hideout we used to go to, near the peak at the back of the house. We’d called it the Hole in the Wall, after Billy the Kid’s hide out. I made a rough sketch of it and signed it Billy. In our games, I was always Billy and she was Pat Garrett. I left it on the table and stepped outside.
I spent the next four hours exploring the woods above the cabin. I found her tracks but nobody else’s, and knew that she’d probably gone to the hideout. I didn’t follow her there. She would tell me when it was OK to meet. Instead, once I knew she was alive, I made my way to the car and drove back to Turret. By the time I got there, the sun was sinking behind the peaks in the west and there were a couple of trucks parked outside the diner.
I pushed in and made my way to the bar. There were maybe a dozen guys sitting at various tables drinking beer and talking about the kind of things guys talk about—things that are roughly spherical: balls, breasts and backsides. I climbed on a stool and my pretty waitress came to me.
“Find what you were looking for, Mr. Crazy?”
“Just right now.”
She narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at me like a gun. “You are a smooth talker, Mister, an’ I don’t trust that in a man.”
“Well now that you mistrust me, why don’t you tell me your name?”
“What’s yours?”
“Lacklan.”
“Lacklan? What kind of name is that?”
“A very ancient one. It means Viking Invader. How about you?”
There was a sparkle of humor in her eyes. “Don’t you laugh, y’hear? It’s Blueberry. Bluberry MacDonald.”
“Well, Blueberry, I guess that makes you edible. So, to stop this Viking invader from going right ahead and eating you, why don’t you give me a beer and make me a steak and fries?”
She squealed a laugh, cracked me a beer and went into the kitchen area. I sensed a hush and looked around. One of the tables had gone quiet and there was a big redneck turned around in his chair to look at me. I’m not small. I’m six-one, but this guy was six-three easy and built like two brick shithouses. I looked back at the bar and took a swig.
I heard Man Mountain McCoy get up and walk slowly to the bar where he leaned beside me.
“Hey! Blueberry! What I godda do to get a beer ’round here?”
Her voice came over the sound of frying meat. “How about wait?”
He leaned on one elbow and looked me over. “Well how come this bozo din’ have to wait?”
She leaned out of the kitchen. “Shut up, Earl. Sit down an’ I’ll bring you your beer when I’m done.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s very nice, Blueberry. I see you laughing with this streak a’piss, giving him most anything he wants, and when I talk to you, you tell me to go sit down an’ wait. That ain’t polite. I think you’re getting a hot pussy for this guy. An’ that makes me kind of jealous.”
“Earl! Go and sit down before I get mad with you!”
Before he could answer I turned on my stool to face him. “Are you trying to pick a fight with me?”
“Oh now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say a fight. But I can see I might have to slap you around some before the night is out.”
“Just you, or are your friends going to help you?”
He grinned. “Hell no. They just gonna watch.”
“That’s a mistake, Earl. You’re going to need help. Because first I’m going to break your right arm, then I am going to break your jaw.” I got up off the stool. “Let’s go outside and do it now, before my steak’s done.” I saw his lip curl and raised a hand. “Outside.”
I stepped out onto the dark, dirt road. Earl and his three pals came out after me. They were all the size of small trucks. The drinkers from the other tables followed and stood on the porch to watch. Rednecks enjoy few things more than a good fight. I didn’t plan to disappoint them. Earl and his friends surrounded me. I looked at them in turn, calibrating them.
“You reckon four of you is going to be enough?”
He snarled. “I’m gonna take you on my own, city boy.” As he said it he did exactly what I knew he was going to do. He swung his huge right fist in an arc aimed roughly at my head. I leaned back as it passed, grabbed his wrist with my right hand and twisted violently forward, locking his elbow. As I did it I slammed my forearm savagely into the joint. I heard it snap and felt his shoulder pop. He screamed like a woman and staggered. I stepped around in front of him and put the fingers of my left hand on his clavicle to line him up. His arm was sticking out at a grotesque angle. His eyes were bulging at me and his mouth was open, gasping. That was what I needed. If you want to break a jaw, you need the mouth open and slack.
The right cross smashed into the left side of his mandible and broke the joint on both sides. His eyes rolled up and his legs folded under him. It took his mates two whole seconds to react. Then it was a disorganized charge. The biggest one was on my left. He was a huge mule of a guy with massive shoulders and a head like a cinderblock. He was the most aggressive too—he was the first to move, roaring that I was a dead motherfucker.
I sidestepped to my left, so he stood between me and the other two. He faltered in his charge and turned to reach for me, which left his legs bent and vulnerable. I palmed his forearm and kicked him hard in the side of the knee. I felt it crunch and snap. His face contracted with pain and he leaned forward instinctively, reaching for the shattered joint with his hands. As he did that I smashed my right elbow into the top of his skull. Maybe I’d killed him. I didn’t know and I didn’t care.
Now his pals had to step over him to reach me. The first was a tall, rangy guy who was fast on his feet. He was the most dangerous. So as he jumped over his fallen friend I snap-kicked him in the balls with my instep. He went down on his knees and I was happy to leave him there for now. The last of the four suddenly realized he was on his own. It was just him and me. He didn’t like the odds and pulled a knife from his pocket.
I shook my head. “You shouldn’t have done that. Now I’m going to kill you.”
I could see in his eyes that he knew it. But he could not back down now. I reached down to my boot for my fighting knife, knowing he would lunge. He did. It was a clumsy rush and he didn’t even see my blade. The first thing he was aware of was that he couldn’t move his hand because the tendons in his wrist had been severed. Then the blood started spraying from the gashed veins. And that was the last thing he was ever aware of, because I had stepped behind him, grabbed his forehead and slipped the blade between the first and second vertebrae in his neck.
The guy with the busted nuts was still kneeling. So I kicked him in the back of the head.
The men on the porch watched in silence as I climbed the steps and went inside. Blueberry was waiting behind the bar. She looked surprised to see me, maybe pleased too. “What the hell did you do?”
My steak was on the bar, next to my beer. I climbed back on my stool.
“Best you don’t know.” I picked up the knife and fork and cut into the meat. It was perfect. “These guys work on the farm?” I asked. She nodded. “Tell me about the farm.”
Six
The diner was empty, so I took my plate to a table
and told Blueberry to get a beer for herself and join me. She sat opposite while I ate and said, “What’s to tell? The farm is the only reason this town ain’t a ghost town anymore. It’s the only employer there is ’round these parts.”
“What kind of farm? This is all mountains, rocks, pine woods. What the hell do they farm up here? Besides, most of it’s national park land.”
She shrugged and swigged. “All I know is, three or four years back some corporation bought up a whole lot of land here and started farming it.”
“What’s this corporation called?”
“Oh…Allied Livestock and Farming. But I hear they use a lot of high tech stuff in giant greenhouses and under big plastic sheets.”
I cut into the steak and speared some fries. “Allied Livestock and Farming, huh? Alfa. Do you know what crops they grow?”
She was looking at me curiously. Outside I heard some trucks pulling away. My guess was they were headed for the nearest town with a hospital. She shook her head. “I have no idea. Why are you so interested?”
I grinned at her. “Because I am a Viking raider, and I want to know if they have anything worth pillaging.”
She sat back and pointed at me with her bottle. “You are trouble. You are big, bad trouble.”
I stuffed the last piece of steak in my mouth and chewed. “You better believe it. Where is this place?”
“About three, four miles north-west of here, East of the Green Mountain. You take the North Spring Road, it’ll lead you there eventually.”
“Well, I won’t be going tonight.” I drained my beer and pulled a packet of Camels from my pocket. I lit up and inhaled deep. As I blew out I watched her through the smoke.
“Any other strangers been in town recently?”
“No.”
“Where do you live, Blueberry?”
“Monday to Friday, right here.”
“Good. Then how about you get us a bottle of tequila and we have a few shots before bed?”
Her cheeks flushed promisingly, she smiled and went to get the tequila.