by Chuck Dixon
“Who send someone to Huntsville to find him,” Laura said.
“Who turn up the in-laws,” Tony said.
“And they stop there? Kill the Roths then forget about it?” Chad said.
“And I don’t think they killed Dr. Jordan Roth,” Tony said. The table went silent as he came to his punchline.
24
Merry's face was set hard, her back straight and grip easy on the reins. She matched the rhythm of the horse trotting easy around the broad ring. A press of her right knee set the horse on a course away from the fence line. It amazed her every time it happened. This enormous animal responding to the touch of her leg.
“You ready to give it some gas?” Sandy called. She leaned back on a wooden jump set in the center of the ring.
“Yeah!” Merry said. The quarter horse’s ears flicked back at her voice. Merry pressed her heels against the flanks. The horse sped to a canter. Merry fought the urge to hold the reins tighter. She kept the clutch of her legs firm but not clenched. As she adjusted to the faster pace the ride became smoother, rider and mount moving as one. A feeling welled up from inside. She had no words for it. A simple joy. A sense of accomplishment. It was more than that.
A moment of perfection.
“She’s really taken to it,” Jessie said. She and Levon stood in the grass of the paddock watching Merry ride the ring. Close enough to see her but not enough to distract.
“All little girls love horses,” Levon said.
“They like the idea of horses,” Jessie said. “But your girl loves every single thing about them. She’s been coming here for what? A month or more? Always ready to help with even the dirtiest chores. Most kids get bored.”
“She does sit well.”
Jessie turned to him.
“‘Sit well?’ I never saw you ride and now you’re an expert.”
“Army taught me to ride.”
“I thought you were in the Marines,” she said. Her crooked smile and a tilt of the head.
“I’m going to step away. I don’t want Merry to know I’m watching,” Levon said.
They walked together into the shade of some dogwoods. There was a sagging picnic table covered in white petals from the blooming branches above. Jessie took a seat at the end of a bench.
“She’s asking me to buy her a horse,” he said. He leaned back on the table, eyes still on the ring as Merry reined to a stop.
“Not just any horse. That horse. The one she’s on. Belongs to one of my boarders and he’s looking to sell,” Jessie said.
“I don’t know.”
“You have a barn.”
“My uncle has a barn. I don’t own anything but my car and our clothes.”
“It’s not the horse. You don’t plan on staying.”
“I don’t know what I plan, Jessie.”
“Merry hasn’t said much. But I know from what she has said you two have moved around a lot. I know she hasn’t been in school.”
“I do what I can. She does lessons.”
“Not the same as a home, Levon.”
He said nothing. His eyes were on Merry leading the horse from the ring while Sandy held the gate open. They were laughing. He could see their smiles.
“I don’t mean to sound like I’m her mother,” Jessie said.
“You make a good mother,” he said. He shifted his gaze to her. Jessie’s face reddened.
“If I didn’t know better I’d say that was a compliment,” she said.
“None higher,” he said. He pushed off from the table and offered his hand to help her stand.
“Now, are you going to tell me about why the Army taught you to ride?” Jessie said. They were walking to the stable together, following the girls leading the horse.
“I’ll tell you some of it,” Levon said.
Sandy lounged back on a stack of feed bags to watch Merry cool down the quarter horse. The spaniel leapt up to lay down beside her, driving his head under her fingers for a pet.
“Water warm enough?” she said.
“I tested it on my arm,” Merry said. She played the hose over the animal’s back. The flesh along his ribs trembled as the lukewarm water trickled down his flanks.
“Too cold and Bravo’s muscles cramp.”
“I know, I know.” Merry ran a steel comb over the hair followed by water from the hose. The dried sweat and dust came away from the hair. The water turned muddy ochre in a puddle pooled around a drain in the floor. She washed down the legs, ducking under the cross-ties to rub handfuls of water on the horse’s brow. Bravo playfully nudged her with his muzzle.
“Your dad is here,” Sandy said. She lay back with her head on crossed arms, one leg over the other. The spaniel jumped down to the floor to lap water.
“I didn’t see him,” Merry said. She squirted Bravo’s legs with fly repellent from a spray bottle.
“Him and my mom were watching you in the ring.”
“Uh huh.”
“I think my mom likes your dad. I mean, really likes him. They used to be boyfriend-girlfriend; you know?”
“He told me something about it.” Merry’s brow wrinkled as she sprayed some fly stuff on her hand and rubbed it on Bravo’s twitching ears.
“Long time ago.”
Merry unhooked the cross-ties. She led Bravo back toward his stall. Sandy hopped off her chaise of feed bags to follow.
“Your dad’s a serious guy. Kind of scary.”
“Scary?” Merry said.
“In a sexy way.” Sandy shrugged.
Merry giggled. The skein of freckles across her nose darkened.
25
Beto asked his uncle for a gunfighter. A real badass hombre, a sicario out of Matamoros or Saltillo.
Instead, his tio Fausto sent him Sabio.
Now Beto and his brother Memo had to cart around this viejo with his big choppy sideburns, gray as ash. He looked like an elderly Mexican Elvis impersonator. Even worse, Sabio insisted Beto drive him around Colby in a piece of shit Dodge Ram instead of Beto’s shit-hot Lexus RX. And even worse still, the Ram had a single bench seat so Beto had to drive around with the old man crammed between him and Memo. They looked like a trio of wetbacks running an errand for some gringo contractor.
But Sabio was jefe. And this was not Beto’s plaza. So Beto shut his mouth and concealed his impatience.
“Obey Sabio’s word as if it were my own,” tio Fausto said over the phone from Coahuila. “They do not call him ‘Sabio’ without good reason.”
Sabio. Wise one.
“But we have been fucked in the ass, tio,” Beto said. “Cousin Lalo and his crew are dead. The rock and our money is gone.”
“Whose money?” Fausto said. There was still a smile to be heard in his voice. But Beto had seen that smile dry up like rain on a summer sidewalk.
“Your money, tio,” Beto said.
“You still have two labs going. Money is money. More comes every day.”
“But this is a matter of honor.”
“You are still young, Beto. You have very simple ideas about honor. You confuse honor with pride. It is a mistake of the young.”
Beto was swallowing a lot of pride now. He was thirty-two and yet his uncle still thought of him as a kid.
“This is a matter of business,” Fausto continued. “If we have rivals, they must be dealt with. Show Sabio all over your plaza. Let him see what the big picture is like. Let him decide what is best to do.”
And so, Beto spent week after week driving Sabio all over the county to play detective. Beto wanted to give him a rundown of the crime structure in the county. He knew of only a few of the names of the gabacho operators. Some who ran stills. Some who were cooking meth. A few bringing in heroin and oxy. Where a couple of pot farms were hidden. These rednecks were a secretive bunch to strangers. It came from generations of eluding federal cops. Beto could relate. It was the same down in Mexico.
The difference was the topography. The ridges and valleys cut across the north end of the county
leaving a lot of the gabacho operations deep in inaccessible hollers like the canyons in Chihuahua. Those valleys held their secrets like graves.
Beto was all for striking out at the redneck meth labs he already knew about. Send a message. Take their money. Leave their cousins dead.
“Incluso el tigre caza huele el suelo,” Sabio said in his sleepy voice.
Even the tiger smells the ground when he hunts.
What the fuck did that mean? Beto wanted to ask him.
Instead, he nodded at the old man's sage wisdom and drove him around to any place where campesinos could be found. Beto had to endure hours in the truck listening to long conversations between his brother and Sabio.
Memo was a fat moron that Beto’s mother made him promise to look out for all his days on earth. He made the promise on her deathbed when she was going through the chemo and he was only a little boy. He was a grown man now and his mother’s cancer treatments worked and she was still alive down in Durango with his stepfather.
“But a promise is a promise,” she would remind Beto on the phone each time he bitched about some stupid thing his idiota hermano had done.
Now he drove around in a crappy pickup while his little brother had "deep" conversations with Sabio like some retard Luke Skywalker talking to a drowsy Obi-Wan. Only deep drags of Tamaulipas skunk kept him from driving the Ram into a utility pole sometimes.
They went to fields and orchards to talk to pickers and packers. The Marriott and Motel 8 in Haley to talk to maids. Tire garages and oil changing places to talk to mechanics. The landfill to talk to drivers. Gated communities to the south and north to talk to lawn care workers. And every un congal where whores worked out of trailers to service lonely peons missing a taste of home and horny gringos with a taste for wetback pussy. Early mornings sitting outside the Home Depot and the garden center talking to pick-up workers waiting for day labor jobs.
The peons Sabio talked to had no reason to answer the questions of some nosy old man. But one look at his companions, two young guys in snakeskin boots and rodeo shirts untucked, turned every pinche mojado into a willing font of information. The illegal labor force in the county was an invisible network of informants. They saw all while remaining unseen.
Sabio never shared what he learned. He never wrote anything down. It was impossible to tell from the viejo’s demeanor if he was making any progress at all in finding out who stole the plaza’s drugs and money. He always wore the same half-lidded expression, always spoke in the same sotto voce, rhythmic and hypnotic yet insistent.
Two weeks of their learning tour was wearing on Beto. He wanted to punish someone. He could appreciate the wisdom of taking the time to make certain they killed the correct person. Still, he felt it was long past time that someone, anyone, suffered for the death of his cousins Lalo, Pepe and the others. Not that he gave a shit about his cousins who were dumb enough to let some pinche hillbillies sneak up on them. But the theft of so much product and cash made him, Beto, look like a fool.
Yeah, it was about pride. Why not? Was his pride not worth something?
They were parked at the Creamee-Freez. Sabio wanted soft-serve. Memo sat on the tailgate licking sprinkles from a cone and swinging his legs like a child. Sabio leaned on the hood with his own cone, looking into the sky as though he might find answers in the clouds. Beto was lactose intolerant and so stood watching traffic and picking at a bag of ranch chips.
“When are we going to move, Sabio? Any clue or are you going to play Colombo forever?” Beto asked.
“Que tan rapido crecer el cabello de un hombre?” Sabio said, his tongue white with ice cream.
How fast does a man’s hair grow?
Beto remained silent, munching chips with renewed fury.
26
“They’re building a mosque over in Teeter,” Melvin said close to the heavyset man’s ear.
“Yeah?” Delbert said.
“Oh yeah. A mosque. Big old barn of a place,” Melvin said. He was practically shouting over the buzz of shears he was running around the back and sides of his customer’s head.
He was also speaking to the other three men seated in the sagging leather chairs lined against a wall across from the barber chairs. One of them was actually waiting for a haircut. The others were a pair who only stopped by E&B Barbers to watch Melvin’s cable. The pair nodded at the barber’s remarks but their full attention was on the TV mounted on a high shelf. A lady judge was hectoring a pair of sad sacks from a bench while the audience laughed. She banged her gavel for order and they laughed more.
"What in the hell do they need a damned mosque for? I been to Teeter more times than I can say and never once saw an Arab," Melvin said.
Delbert’s dyed-dark hair fell in a blizzard from the whirring blades, revealing silver roots. A hair cut these days put twenty years on him. Come in with wavy auburn locks, thanks to Clairol, and come out an old man. Never mind, Beth-Ann would give him a rinse tonight. Make Old Man Time back away a step or two.
“Hell, they were always a different bunch over there in Teeter,” Delbert said.
“There is that,” Melvin said. “Hot towel?”
"You know it," Delbert said. The hot towel was what he looked forward to most. And the razor shave afterward. Mostly because Melvin stopped talking during that portion of the grooming process.
He closed his eyes and felt the barber jacking him back into a reclining position. The embrace of the towel cut him off from the world for a few welcome moments. His face covered but for his mouth, he felt the heat from the steaming cloth seep into his face to unwind his whole body.
He was running over the details of today's calendar in his mind. And it was all in Delbert's mind. Nothing was written down. No damn smartphones. No phones of any kind. He did his business in person, face to face, so as to see the other man's eyes, just like his daddy and his daddy before him.
Following his haircut, he'd have Howard drive him back home for lunch. Most of his crew weren't even out of bed much before noon and barely sober before dark again. The afternoon was the best time for his rounds. It was Tuesday and that was collection day. Howard would drive him up Cumberland and hook west across the county visiting hollers and remote farms to take his piece of the business being done there.
He hoped he wouldn’t have trouble with Clay Johnson again this week. The man did not understand the concept of quotas. He had Howard break Clay’s jaw last year, but the lesson didn’t take. The dumb son-bitch came up two hundred dollars short and thought he’d make up for it with promises.
“I can’t spend promises,” Delbert told him.
“Things was off last week,” Clay said.
“Really? I watch the news every day and I didn’t see anything about all the potheads suddenly not wanting to get high,” Delbert said. “Did Jesus come down and clean alla their asses up?”
Delbert made some promises of his own. Clay would either make good this week plus a two hundred dollar bonus or pay in collateral. And the only collateral Clay had was four daughters. He used to have five but Delbert took one in payment during Clay’s default last year. The girl earned for Delbert out of a trailer until he sold her on to a guy from Memphis. Sweet girl. Ugly as sin.
The towel came off and Delbert felt Melvin’s fingers gently applying warm creamy lather to his cheeks and throat. The keen edge of the razor followed to glide over his face leaving only baby-smooth flesh behind.
Out on the street, Delbert kicked the door of the Escalade. Howard woke suddenly where he'd dozed off behind the wheel. He looked at Delbert with an apologetic simper. His big fat face looked childish in contrition.
“You do know you’re supposed to watch my ass, little brother,” Delbert said. He took his seat on the passenger side. The Escalade felt chilly after the crushing humidity outside. The dash dinged until he’d shut the door and belted in.
“Sorry, Del,” Howard said. He snapped on the wipers to remove the condensation from the windshield.
“Take
us home,” Delbert said. “Get a grilled cheese and a Coke then hit the road on our route.”
The dogs didn’t come out to greet him.
Beth-Ann’s schnauzer always came barreling out through the doggie door at the first sound of tires on the drive. His big old Irish wolfhound would be loping after the yapping terrier, snout up and baying.
Delbert’s vintage pickup and Beth-Ann’s BMW were in the circular turnaround in the shade of the spreading willow. He climbed out and raced up the steps to the sun porch. Behind him he heard a stuttering clicking noise. He turned to see Howard tumbling from the cab of the Escalade. Some skinny dude was riding Howard’s bulk to the ground, a stun gun pressed to the big man’s neck.
A boot sole on the floorboards of the porch behind him.
A flash of blinding blue light filled his field of vision before everything swirled away.
27
“Things just got officially fucked up,” Danny Huff said. It was a general announcement to the state highway cops and county forensics geeks working around him on the road surface.
“Yes, sir,” Trooper Durward said.
County and state cars were parked along the shoulder of the road, lights twirling. Cruisers blocked the road leaving a traffic-free mile of backwoods switchback exclusive to investigators. The road generally ran north-south through deep woods following the floor of a holler and connecting a township and county road. Only a few properties along the little-used way. Marked with rusted mailboxes, the houses were invisible at the ends of unpaved driveways running far back into the trees. Not a much-traveled road. The body had been found by a driver heading to work a morning shift at the Home Depot in Haley.
The state bureau agent and the trooper stood in booties watching the bustle of an evidence team photographing, measuring and searching the cracked asphalt for more things to photograph and measure. They moved along, dropping yellow wedge markers behind them like bunny-suited Hansels and Gretels. They were following a trail of drying blood running parallel with the dotted white line in the middle of the road. The trail was thick in places, thin in others, and finally dribbled away to a series of blobs in shrinking sizes over almost a half-mile of road surface.