by Tim Willocks
“You are a good man,” said Grimes.
They left and piled back into the Olds and drove the mile or so to the adjoining airfield, which was used by freight companies and private planes. Grimes slipped the man on the gate fifty dollars and explained that they needed to do some traveling with a dog. The man scratched his head and directed them to a jerry-built cabin to the rear and at the far end of a long row of offices. On the gable end of the cabin was an enameled sheet of aluminum, thick with oily dirt. Beneath the dirt was a painted legend:
Titus Oates
The Last of The Indépendants
The World Is Your Oyster
Grimes left Lenna and Gul in the Olds and walked over to the cabin. There was no sign of life. He banged on the door, which ratded on its hinges. There was no reply. Grimes shrugged and walked back to the car. As he got there the hinges rattled again and the door swung open.
“What the fuck is your problem, man?”
Grimes turned. A large, aggressively bearded man, about Grimes’s age, stared at him from the doorway with bleary eyes. He wore a TEXAS LONGHORNS baseball cap with a deep-curved good-ole-boy peak and a striped flannel nightshirt that reached his knees. The shirt hung beautifully from the dense equator of his belly. Below the shirt his calves were hairy and white, and the approximate size and shape of fire extinguishers. His feet were bare and solidly planted.
“Do you know what time it is?” said the big man.
Grimes looked at his watch. “A little before seven,” he said.
“Hey, buddy, I needed an answer like I need a bullet through my fucking peanut.” He slid a hand under his cap and rubbed his head. “Which, most probably, I do.”
“I’m looking for Mr. Titus Oates,” said Grimes.
“Oates is dead,” said the big man.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Grimes.
“Whaddya want him for, anyway?”
“I’d like to put some business his way.”
The big man pulled his hand from under his cap and ran a pair of shrewd, rapid eyes over Grimes and the Olds 88 behind him.
“What kind of business?”
“The oyster business,” said Grimes. “We want to go on a plane ride.”
“Where to?”
“About six, seven hundred miles’ worth.”
The big man’s eyes narrowed. “Mexico?”
“No,” said Grimes.
“Mmm. What’re you carryin’?”
“Just me and a lady and a dog. I’ll pay cash.”
The big man snorted. “Do I look like I take American Express?”
He peered at the Olds.
“Let me see this dog. I’m particular when it comes to animals.”
Grimes’s heart sank. “Sure,” he said.
He walked over to the Olds, opened the door and stuck his head in.
“Who is that guy?” said Lenna.
“I don’t know,” replied Grimes.
He turned to Gul. Gul opened his jaws and let his tongue loll out.
“Listen, pal, I want you to meet a friend of mine and I want you to be nice to him, okay? Be cool, right? Be good.”
Gul’s tongue lolled out a little further. Grimes felt Lenna looking at him as if he were an idiot.
“Come on then,” said Grimes. “And heel.”
Gul clambered out onto the tarmac and walked beside Grimes toward the cabin. The big man pulled his cap off and slapped it against his thigh.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “That is one full-on fucking pooch, man.”
Gul kept his cool.
“He’s pretty harmless,” said Grimes.
“He’d better fucking not be,” said the big man. He crouched on one knee and grinned and held out his hand. “Here, boy.”
Gul looked up at Grimes.
“One-man dog, eh?” said the big man. “I like that. Yes I do.”
Grimes nodded to Gul. “Go on. Remember what I said.”
Gul trotted over to the big man and sniffed his hand and then his bare feet and the big man laughed.
“You are the original son of a bitch that fucked his mother, are you not?” He noticed the stitched wound on Gul’s scalp. “Mmm. Been gettin’ into trouble, eh, boy?”
The big man looked up at Grimes with his shrewd eyes. Grimes didn’t speak. He heard a car door slam behind him. The big man’s eyes flickered.
“You having another problem, Doctor?” said Lenna’s voice.
“Goddamn,” said the big man. “And a blonde too, in an Olds 88. You know what, Doctor? You have almost made up for waking me at this ungodly hour.”
Gul returned to stand at Grimes’s heel and the big man straightened up.
“Pity it’s not Mexico,” he said. “I could’ve made a stopover, maybe picked up some merchandise and paid my way back. But if your dog wants to go somewheres else I guess we could come to an arrangement.”
“How much?” said Grimes.
The big man squinted thoughtfully. “Five hundred apiece.”
Grimes glanced at Gul. “Does that mean a thousand or fifteen hundred?”
The big man put his fists on his lips and stuck his belly out and grinned.
“Are you tryin’ to haggle with me, Doc?”
“You ought to be on a wanted poster.”
Grimes reached into his pocket and counted off the money. He walked over and pressed it into the big man’s palm.
“What do I call you?”
“I guess Titus will do for now. Or Oates if you prefer.” Titus Oates pointed at the dog. “What do I call him?”
“Gul,” said Grimes.
“Cool name.”
Grimes half turned. “That’s Lenna.”
“Lenna’s cool too.” Oates waved to her. “I got time for breakfast?”
“We didn’t,” said Grimes.
“Mmm,” said Oates. “As bad as that.”
He turned and ambled back into the cabin.
“Put the Olds out back. You’ll find a tarp there if you need it. I’ll be out in five.”
Grimes walked back to the car and smiled at Lenna. “Well, we’ve got our ride,” he said.
Lenna glared at him and said, “I can’t believe you just gave that man our money.”
Lenna climbed into the passenger seat. Grimes shrugged and let Gul jump in the back of the car and got behind the wheel. Without speaking he started the engine, drove around the back of Oates’s office and pulled in next to a sky-blue Cadillac with disastrous bodywork. He turned to Lenna.
“You really own six percent of American Airlines and go skung in Vail with ‘Steve’?” he asked.
“No,” said Lenna. “But I could if I wanted to, that’s the difference. I could also have gotten this guy for eight hundred bucks, max. I mean, you’re pretty good with that dog, but in the future just leave the fine stuff to me, okay?”
Grimes looked at her. Her hair caught the sun and turned to gold. So what if she was sullen and bad-tempered and occasionally insulting? Maybe he liked that. Lenna turned to face him and with the gold hair and her eyes looking the way they did she looked, well, lovely. Lenna looked back at him without smiling. She leaned her face toward him across the gap between them. Grimes looked at her lips, then at her eyes.
“Doctor?” said Lenna. “I, well, I’m not feeling too good about myself at the moment. I mean …” She stopped, rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know what I mean. I just need something, you understand? I’ve no right to ask, I know, but I just need something to make me feel like I’m not the lowest piece of shit in God’s creation.”
“You’re not,” said Grimes.
“You know, when Jack Seed had me tied in that chair last night, I wasn’t scared. Not really. You know why?”
Grimes could have made an educated guess but he had to let her say it.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Because I felt I deserved anything he could do to me.”
Her eyes were steady on his. She waited.
“I ca
n understand that,” said Grimes.
“You can?”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Look, I can’t change your opinion of yourself, but for what mine’s worth I think maybe you deserve a little better.”
Lenna closed her eyes and they kissed. Their lips met lightly and Grimes closed his eyes too. Her breath was sweet and warm on his face. They held the kiss, lightly, for a long moment and Grimes realized from a feeling in his chest of a space filling up that he hadn’t known was empty that he’d needed that something too. He lifted his fingers to her cheek and touched it and stroked her hair. He opened his mouth, just a little, and she opened hers and they held it like that until she dug her fingers into his scalp. He had a hard-on. He opened his eyes and found her eyes open too, the pupils enormous and black, rimmed with green. They looked at each other while they kissed and Grimes found his hand beneath her jacket, sliding up her belly. His fingers took a fold of flesh and he pulled on it and she breathed into his mouth. He moved his hand onto her breast. Its skin, at the edge, was slack, and sweet to the touch. He rolled the slack skin between his finger and thumb and pinched, still looking into the green-rimmed blackness, and she breathed into him again. He cupped her breast and it shifted in his palm, again slack, but also full, and again sweet to his touch as he stretched it tight. Her nipple was caught in the web of his thumb and he found himself pulling on it and wanting to twist it until it hurt her. He stopped. He wanted to hurt her—not badly, but a little—and he knew that something in her was calling that desire from him, and that in that unspoken exchange lurked an intense eroticism. But he knew too much, and too recendy, of the horror she had known in her past. Against his will his mind showed him the bloody interior of the shack—the original Stone House—and he heard her screams. He felt his hard-on starting to fade. Their lips were still touching but lightly now. The doubt that had to be in his eyes was reflected back from hers. The hunger and the violence in them—and maybe in his too—was suddenly chased by bewilderment. Lenna closed her eyes and he was glad. He took his hand from her breast and pulled her face away from his and into his chest.
They sat breathing for a while and Grimes tried not to think of anything at all. Then he was jolted by a great crash on the roof and a savage roar from Gul. As Lenna jerked upright Grimes saw a wide, bearded face grinning at him through the window.
“Drop your cocks and grab your socks,” bellowed Titus Oates.
Grimes turned around. “Gul,” he said.
Gul fell silent but remained vigilant.
“Good boy,” said Grimes.
Until they were airborne Grimes didn’t believe they were going to make it. Titus Oates flew an old single-propeller De Havilland Beaver, which was the aeronautical equivalent of his office: the plane rattled as if a sneeze would blow it apart. Lenna sat in the cockpit, apparently unconcerned, and while she talked and Titus Oates laughed and swore a lot, Grimes sat strapped to a seat in the empty cargo hold and held Gul between his thighs. Gul brought to the raging noise of the engine and the juddering of the fuselage the same steely aplomb that he’d brought to the rest of his odyssey through the outside world. Once they were flying at a steady speed and the noise had become a constant Grimes was sufficiently shattered to fall asleep in his seat belt.
He awoke to the jolt of the undercarriage hitting the ground. Titus Oates seemed to fly his plane as if daring it to kill him. Grimes gave thanks that he didn’t have any breakfast in him to throw up and clung to Gul for reassurance. When they finally stopped Oates leaned into the hold from his seat and grinned.
“How about that, Doc? The Devil went down to Georgia, eh?”
“Where are we?” asked Grimes.
“Well, Lenna here told me your de-sired destination and I got on the waves and found us this little down-home airfield—cropdusting outfit not thirty miles south of where you want to be. Jordan’s Crossroads, right?”
“Well done,” said Grimes.
He unlocked his seat belt and stood up unsteadily. Grimes walked to the loading door and slid it open and jumped down with Gul. The sun was bright and the sky was blue. They were on a short strip of tarmac in the middle of open fields. At varying distances in every direction the fields were hemmed in by green forest. To one side of the tarmac strip was another aircraft that Grimes took to be the cropduster. Beyond it was a small single-story building painted white and, beside it, another the size of a barn, outside of which was a stack of barrels. A man in olive-green overalls came out of the white building and started walking toward them. Oates and Lenna joined Grimes.
“Give me a coupla hundred bucks and I’ll see this guy straight,” said Oates.
“Give him eighty,” said Lenna.
Grimes obediently looked for the right amount and couldn’t find it. He gave Oates a hundred. Oates scribbled something on a card.
“You guys want a return flight, I’ll be hanging around these parts awhile. This part of the country, they make some of the finest sippin’ whiskey money can’t usually buy. I figure to reinvest some of my profits.”
He handed the card over. On it was a number. Grimes looked at Oates, and Oates pointed a thumb at a flexible metal spiral protruding from the breast pocket of his denim jacket.
“Cell phone,” said Oates. “See, if you wanna compete in a modern entrepreneurial culture, you gotta have the technology. By the way, I figure old Gul there would make a good business partner. I could go maybe four hundred bucks, you wanted to sell him to a good home.”
Grimes was no longer surprised by Titus Oates’s gall.
“Gul goes his own way. He isn’t mine to sell,” said Grimes. He turned to Lenna. “Let’s go.”
Oates called after them, “You change your mind, you know how to find me.”
The cropduster’s nephew gave them a ride north in his pickup truck. The town wasn’t much more than a main street and two churches. The nephew told them that the nearest motel was another thirty miles away but that a widow called Stapleton sometimes rented rooms to fishermen during the season. If they could show her a wedding ring they’d like as not be okay, but he couldn’t speak for the dog. Grimes reckoned that they were now at least five hours ahead of his father. Even an hour of decent sleep—in a bed—was something he couldn’t put a price on. They got out of the pickup a mile the other side of town and climbed up onto Mrs. Stapleton’s porch.
Grimes said to Lenna, “I’ll leave this to you.”
While Lenna rang the bell Grimes looked out from the porch with gritty eyes. The house was set a good way back from the road and as the pickup disappeared all he could hear was the song of birds. Within his sight the trees he couldn’t name were blossomed with a dozen different colors. There was a soft, fragrant breeze. Grimes felt his head spin as the burgeoning peace of it suddenly struck him. He felt like he’d arrived on another planet, where danger was far away. And he thought: Holden Daggett had been right. If these were the Ohoopee River bottomlands, in spring they were kind of fine.
SEVENTEEN
THE DAY started badly for Ruftis Atwater. He dragged his ass back into the City and broke into Grimes’s apartment only to find a garbage dump of such proportions that he thought he was in the wrong building. But, no, the place did belong to Dr. Eugene Grimes. What a fucking weirdo. The prospect of searching the place for clues filled Atwater with such despair that when he found a bed in one of the upstairs rooms he threw himself on it with the intention of sobbing and instead fell asleep. He woke up in a panic, then discovered that it wasn’t yet nine A.M. Not good, but not terrible either.
The terrible part came when he pulled out his cell phone and made some calls and discovered that Dusty and Hank, the two operatives he’d hired to shadow George Grimes, had been gunned down by an unknown assailant. Dusty had died on the table after four hours in surgery. What the fuck was going on? Was it possible that the old guy had killed them? Atwater decided that there was nothing to be gained by revealing any of this to Faroe. He pulled himself together and flung hims
elf around Grimes’s apartment, emptying drawers and cupboards, flicking through books and papers, searching the pockets of all the clothes he could find. After an hour of fruidess and destructive rummaging the place didn’t look any worse off than it had before and Atwater was none the wiser.
He cursed Grimes, Faroe and Jefferson, each more bitterly than the last, and stumbled down the staircase to the front door. The Cuban cocksucker Herrera was no doubt at this moment discharging his duties to perfection, insinuating himself deeper into Faroe’s trust and affections while he, Atwater, was moving from one fuckup to the next. Atwater decided to go get some breakfast and work out what to do next. He dragged the front door open, kicking at the unopened junk mail carpeting the hallway door. As the door scraped the mail up into a heap it got jammed.
He hadn’t checked the mail.
Atwater stopped kicking, slammed the door shut again and fell to his knees. In a frenzy he scraped the mail into random stacks and then started sifting through them. The junk stuff and a bunch of medical magazines he threw aside. The bank and credit card statements he placed together unopened, reserving the tedium of going through them until later. Anything on which the address was handwritten he sorted into another pile. There were a few postcards from ex-patients and friends. Atwater read them without illumination and added them to the junk pile. He started opening letters on which the address was typed. Anonymous pitches from insurance companies and financial advisers, invitations to lectures and conferences, some 1RS shit, something from a lawyer in Georgia asking for an appointment in person, utilities bills, a request to submit a paper to an addiction journal on detoxification of opiate addicts … another letter from the lawyer in Georgia.
Atwater’s gut squirmed with hope.
He sat back on the floor and lit one of his Kools and reread the two letters from one Holden Daggett of Jordan’s Crossroads, Georgia. There was no specific reference at all to the nature of Daggett’s business with Grimes, just Daggett’s regret that Grimes had not replied and had proved uncontactable by telephone. The second letter indicated that unless Daggett heard anything to the contrary he planned to call on Grimes in person to try to conclude the matter in hand.