by Chuck Dixon
“Damn. She’s a pretty one, nephew. A miracle on a level with the loaves and fishes given how ugly your pan is,” Fern said, smiling at her.
“Thank you, sir,” Merry said low, eyes to the heads of the dogs bobbing around her.
“The dogs like you so I guess you’re okay. I got some chili on the stove for lunch. I can always open another can. Come in and have a bowl,” Fern said. He turned to hobble back to the house. Merry followed with the hounds in a train behind her.
Levon raised the hatch and pulled a pair of duffels from the cargo area of the Toyota. He watched Uncle Fern hold the door for Merry, both already chatting away. He pulled up his jacket to remove the Colt automatic from his waistband. He unzipped one of the duffels and dropped the handgun atop the bundles of cash heaped inside. The absence of the weight of it left him feeling light. Levon raised his head and closed his eyes. It felt like a hundred years since he’d done that. He took a deep pull of the cool air through his nostrils. The scent of old timber and woodland funk filled his nostrils. The woods were waking up as the days grew longer. Green sprouts on the tips of the beech limbs. The tang of chili followed along with the smoke from the farm house’s chimney. An aftertaste of machine oil from the low shape under a tarp inside the carport.
He opened his eyes to scan the world around him. Beyond the humble buildings, the forest spread uphill and down in every direction creating a silent curtain, closing the world out to all but what he could see fifty yards in any direction. In his mind, he could see well past the trees to deer trails, springs, washes, promontories and creeks that made up the landscape for miles around. They would be unchanged. They would be as he left them, as he remembered them growing up in these hills and deeps.
Levon Cade was home.
3
Their shifts overlapped so they met at Carmine’s for dinner.
Nancy Valdez dipped the end of a breadstick into a pool of marinara at the edge of his plate.
“I thought you were watching your carbs,” Bill Marquez said, pointing at her salad with a forkful of penne pasta.
“I’ll take a run after work. Besides, now we’ll both smell like garlic,” she said, shrugging.
“But not to each other.”
“Exactly.”
He smiled across the table at her. She returned her attention to her salad. He wasn't happy to be out of the field but he was happy to be assigned to the DC office. For the time being. It allowed him to get to know Nancy better. He spent a couple of nights a week at her place. She spent a few nights at his room at the Marriott Residence in Alexandria. Being stationed in Washington was the Big Show for most Bureau agents. But Bill knew it was purely temporary for him. The Bureau let him know by putting him up at the Marriott the past month and a half. In any case, his desk was a ten-minute cab ride from Nancy's office at Treasury. For now, things were good.
“How’s the task force?” she asked.
“Down to a force of one.”
“Shit.” She put down her fork and raised her eyes to his.
“They sent Piniella back to Dallas and Morgan got orders to join an investigation in Buffalo.”
“You’re alone on this?”
“Even my assistant got reassigned. Carol? The gum chewer?”
“So they’re closing you out?” she said.
“I figure a week or more and they’ll pull me away to something else,” he said, stirring his penne. “You know how it is. New shit hits the fan every day. We’re undermanned.”
“It’s the same at Treasury. We wanted this guy, too, but the feebs hogged lead on it so…”
“Well, Levon Cade has lost his glow. He’s not as sexy as domestic ISIS operatives.”
“He’s probably ten thousand miles away by now. He’s had weeks to fly and all the money to run on.”
Bill put his fork down, his appetite evaporated.
“All I have is a name and a background history that is pure bullshit. He was born. He got a GED. He joined the Marines. He was married. His wife died of cancer. He has a little girl. The rest is so loaded with redactions they should have printed it on black paper.”
“Someone’s covering for him,” Nancy said. She reached across the table to brush the back of his hand with her fingers.
Bill sighed.
“Everybody’s covering for him. That Fenton woman up in Maine won’t give me jack. If I ask her what time it is she stops to think about it. She can’t remember one thing about a guy who was her neighbor for almost a year. I can’t blame her. It looks like this Cade saved her and her kids from being butchered.”
“And the Marine sergeant? Mississippi, was it?”
“The gunny. He won’t give up anything. I know his wife took the Cade kid off the train in Memphis. I know the kid stayed at his cabin. Probably Cade too. I know that old jarhead hid them out. But he won’t give. His wife either. They’re stone silent on the subject of Levon Cade. And I have zero leverage.”
“You need to lean on them by other means.”
"Threaten them with audits? Take away benefits? Is a woman grateful to the man who saved her children? An old, black Marine vet? Old, black, blind Marine vet? I’m not that kind of Fed.”
“Treasury would do it if they were lead. We’d be up to our ass in their financials.” Nancy poked at her salad to spear an olive.
“It’s all financials to you. This Cade might hold the key to billions in untaxed funds. He’s a mile-high dollar sign.”
“Possibly, Bill. He left Maine with more than cash. I feel it.”
"To the Bureau, he's a possible terror threat. He checks all the boxes. That's the only way I've kept the investigation alive this long.”
“You think he’s linked to homegrown terror?”
“No. I’m not sure what he is but he’s not that.”
“You’ll find an angle on him,” she said.
“I’d better find it soon,” he said.
“I still say he’s in Thailand by now.”
“No,” Bill said with conviction. “He’s still here somewhere. He ran but he’s the kind of guy who only runs so long and so far.”
“The daughter?” Nancy said.
“Yeah. She might be the key.”
It was his turn to pick up the check. He walked her to the curb and they shared a garlicky kiss before she stepped into a cab. He walked to where he left his Bureau car in the alley behind Carmine’s. Illegal as hell but the plaque on the dash kept the tickets away.
On the drive back through beep and creep evening traffic, he thought about what Nancy said and what he answered.
Meredith Cade.
It was all about the little girl.
4
"You have a lot of books, Uncle Fern. Daddy's other friend has a lot of books, too," Merry said, returning to the kitchen after her tour of the house. The dogs paced behind her, nails tapping on the plank floor.
“There’s no end to learning, girl,” Fern said, setting two mugs of hot coffee on the table while Levon carried the empty chili bowls to the steel sink.
“Who’s Mickey Spillane?” she said.
“Only the greatest writer who ever lived,” Fern said.
“He only says that because Spillane was a Marine, too,” Levon said from where he ran water in the bowls.
“You were a Marine like Daddy?”
“Damn straight,” Fern said. He rolled up the cuff of his flannel shirt to show Merry a tattoo of a snarling bulldog wearing a drill instructor’s campaign hat. The letters USMC were in bold beneath the dog.
“A long time ago, right?” Merry said, eyes on the fading ink.
“Busted my cherry over Tet. Three tours in ’Nam. And Marine tours were—”
“Thirteen months,” Levon finished for him.
“Smartass,” Fern said, pouring a dollop of honey into his coffee.
“Why don’t you unpack your things, honey? Fix your room the way you like?” Levon said. He joined Fern at the table.
“My room? Which room?” she
said.
“Take the one at the corner back. It’s got the prettiest view come spring. ’Nother month and all you’ll see is dogwood blossoms out the windows,” Fern said.
Merry took off running; the dogs close behind. Sneakered feet and paws charged up the stairs, resounding through the house.
Fern regarded Levon through the steam rising off the dark liquid in the mug raised to his lips.
“What kind of trouble are you in?”
“Can’t a man come home and visit family?”
“Don’t shit a shitter, nephew. You haven’t been back here since before you were shaving regular. Now it’s old home week? Tell me straight or stop drinking my coffee.”
“I have the law looking for me. Merry too.”
“What kind of law?”
“What kind you got? All of them, I guess. I can pay my way.”
“You’re gonna make me get up off this chair and kick your ass.”
“I only want you to know I have money.”
“Your money?”
“Mine now. Nobody’s looking for it.”
"I might know the reason why. So the law wants your ass, not your money."
“It’s not so simple.”
“Never is, nephew.”
They sipped coffee, strong and sweet, in silence for a while. They could hear shuffling feet and pattering paws from the floor above.
“You stay as long as you like or as long as you need to,” Uncle Fern said at last.
Levon nodded then frowned, eyes cast to the table.
“Something wrong with that?” Fern said.
“We’ll stay. But only if I make the coffee from now on,” Levon said.
The floor was barn planks worn bare of varnish at the center of the room. A simple iron frame bed and chipped white dresser were the only furnishings. The walls had faded squares on the plaster where pictures once hung. Merry found sheets, pillows and covers for the bed on a shelf in the closet. She made the bed, shooing the hounds away from climbing atop it. They made a game of it until she chased them from the room and closed the door behind them.
The three hounds were named Woody, Tobey and Tex. She only ever heard her uncle call the ridgeback ‘feller’ but wasn’t sure of the dog’s name or if it even had a name. Feller kept to himself, not a part of the mini-pack formed by the three hounds. He kept close to Uncle Fern mostly and always seemed to be somewhere nearby where he could silently watch over the man.
A rolled carpet leaned in the corner of the room. Merry worked the twine from it and laid it out to cover the bare section of floor. The rug was made of intertwined rags to make up a pattern of diamond shapes in white and blue. The white portion was yellowed in spots but the rug smelled clean. It made the room seem friendlier, less empty.
She unpacked the big duffel of her clothes; all new from a K-mart they passed back in Corinth on the way to Uncle Fern’s. The store was closing so they were able to load up on jeans, socks, t-shirts, panties and two new pairs of sneakers at discount prices. Merry stripped the tags and stickers off. She folded the items and placed them in the drawers. There were a few new paperback books as well. Those she lined up atop the dresser. She didn’t see a television anywhere in the house so expected to do a lot of reading. She’d check out some Mickey Spillane when she was done with the books she brought. Maybe Colby had a library.
From a side pocket of the duffel she pulled the little stuffed gorilla her father had given her. Back in Baltimore, was it? She put it by the books.
The empty duffel stowed under the bed, she lay back on the crisp sheets and watched shadows play across the ceiling by light cast through the windows along two walls of the room. The bare limbs outside the windows made shifting patterns across the cracked plaster. She rolled onto her belly and looked at the walls opposite the windows. The empty squares where pictures once hung. She wondered who might have been in the pictures and why Uncle Fern took them down. Maybe whoever once slept in this room took the pictures with him when they left.
Merry wished she had pictures to put in their place. Of her mother. Of her father, younger, in his blue uniform and hair cut almost bald. Herself as a baby, smiling goofy with little pink clips in her wispy hair. Those pictures were gone now. In the past. Left behind when they left Huntsville. She’d never see them again. There was too much distance between who she was then and who she was now.
Her father called from the foot of the stairs.
“Merry. Come on down here.”
She lay still for a moment, smiling.
Merry.
She could have her own name again.
Merry Cade launched herself from the bed and raced from the room, startling the dogs lying outside the door to await her.
Gunny Leffertz said,
“Everything in this world is always changing. Except people. People don’t know how to change. Or don’t want to.”
5
Haley was a town with two faces. To one side of the interstate and two miles east, the old town sat nestled in trees at the bottom of a broad valley. The old town was mostly boarded up storefronts, a Citgo station and a Legion hall. Four blocks deep either side of Main Street lay old two-bedroom bungalows once occupied by mill workers. The textile mill was closed, torn down years before. An empty lot that served as a weekend flea market was all that was left to mark the spot. The flea was the only going concern in town.
To the other side of the interstate was a golden mile of fast food places, strip malls, a Home Depot and a Walmart. The stores there, built in the '90s and later, served the people living in subdivisions, developments and trailer parks that took root in a ten-mile radius around the cloverleaf where the state road met the raised concrete surface of the interstate. The lower house prices made up for the long commute up to Huntsville or down to Birmingham.
Levon piloted a cart along the aisles of the Winn-Dixie while Merry hunted for the stuff on the list Uncle Fern gave them.
“We’ll do frozen last,” Levon said.
"We might need another cart," Merry said. She tumbled an armload of cellophane-wrapped sandwich cookies on top of the load. The basket was full near to the top and the lower shelf was loaded as well.
“You go on. I’ll grab us another one,” he said.
At the front, he freed a new cart from a long row and turned to reenter the store.
“Goose?”
A broad-shouldered man was entering through the automatic doors — the same height as Levon. Dirty blond hair going thin on top and worn long at the back. Thick wrists and rough hands visible below the cuffs of a canvas farmer's coat. Lower lip bulged with chew. A quart-sized soda cup in his hand.
“That you, Goose?” The man stepped closer; head bent to study Levon’s face with an inquisitive eye.
“Hey, Dale,” Levon said, bringing his cart to a stop in front of the newspaper rack.
“Never thought I’d see you back in the county, brother.” A juicy grin creased his face around the chew. His eyes flashed with a glint of amusement.
“Well, here I am.”
“Heard your wife died. She was pretty. I never met her. Somebody showed me a picture.”
“That was a few years back.”
“You visiting? You ain’t here to stay, are you? Be like back in the day if you’re home for good.”
“Not in such a rush to relive those days, Dale,” Levon said. His hands were fists on the cart handle.
“Some things best left as they are. You know what I mean?” The glint turned to sadness in Dale’s eyes.
Merry pushed the cart to the front of the pet food aisle and stopped to look for her father. The cart was full with no room for the sacks of dog chow on Uncle Fern’s list. She spotted her father on the other side of the checkouts. He was talking to someone. A man who was standing close to her father and gesturing with a hand as he spoke. She didn’t like the man. Something about his face. Something about the way he was talking to her father.
Merry left the cart to join her father.
She stopped by a conveyor when the man put a hand to her father’s arm and gripped it. Levon pulled away, breaking free. Her father pushed the cart away on an empty aisle between two closed registers. The man remained standing where he was, eyes on Levon. He watched awhile, brows lowered, before spitting into a soda cup then turning to leave the store.
She waited until the man was out of sight to rejoin her father. Her sneakers squeaked on the tiles as she worked to heave the loaded cart forward.
“Who was he?” she asked.
“Someone I used to know back when I was growing up,” Levon said. He switched carts with her, taking the loaded cart and parking it in place before an endcap.
“You’re friends?” Merry already knew the answer. Nothing about anything she saw made her think her father and the other man were ever close friends.
“Just someone I used to know. What kind of kibble is it those dogs like?”
“Store brand. Uncle Fern says they’re not picky.”
Levon hefted two forty-pound bags into the cart.
“Last thing to get is the frozen stuff,” Merry said.
He steered the cart into the next aisle with Merry following.
They stopped at a Wendy’s across the lot from a Walgreen’s.
“That order will hold us a while,” Levon said. He took a pull of a soda.
“Until Uncle Fern runs out of cookies,” Merry said. She dumped her fries onto her sandwich wrapper.
The SUV was pulled up to a spot where they could see it from their booth. The contents of two brimming carts were stowed in the rear of the Toyota. The frozen goods down under two big bags of ice.
“He’s always had a sweet tooth. They called him Sugar when he was a kid. I think my daddy gave him that one.”
“You said they called him Fern.”
“No. Fern he picked up when he was in the Corps. They started calling him that in Vietnam. I never asked why. You shouldn’t either.”
“I know. Mom taught me. Never ask soldiers about the past.”