I held the door frame and lowered myself down onto my knees. I regretted it as soon I was down there, but if I'd learned nothing from my poker-playing adolescence, you sometimes had to go all-in.
I clasped my hands together and tried to resemble Oliver Twist. "Please, please, oh holy mother of God, forgive me for my sins and trespasses. For the wrongs I've committed, for the misdeeds of my wanton lifestyle. Can you see it in your heart to find pity on me, a poor, wretched worm of a man—"
The door swung open, and she reached out one hand. "For the love of Pete, get in here before the neighbors talk more than they do already."
We sat in the living room and drank coffee as I told her what had happened. She nodded without speaking and sipped from her cup. When I was done talking, I set my cup on the end table next to me and she rested her cup on the table close to her. She slapped me, picked her coffee back up, and took a drink.
"I wanted to get that out of the way now," she said. "Because you're an asshole."
I rubbed my face. Once the shock wore off, heat and sting rose to the surface. "A lot of people would back you up on that."
"Those people would be right. You need something," she said. "From me, I mean. You didn't show up only to grovel."
"Walters must be involved in the Brotherhood’s meth operation, and I think he’s using resources at the firm for it. What I need is someone with access to McGinley and Kurt case files. Someone who can see what Walters is working on, what he's been up to in the course of the past year, things can help tie him in with the Brotherhood."
"This person you're talking about, you know you're asking a lot of her, right?"
"I don't recall getting gender-specific with the pronouns, but I'd appreciate it, and so would Bobbi Fisher."
Doria’s eyes went slit-thin. The same with her lips. "Know it's getting done for Bobbi, and it sure as fuck isn't getting done for you." She folded her hands in her lap. I'd never seen "forlorn" as an expression until that moment. "I was starting to care about you, Henry. I don't do that shit lightly."
"I don't have an excuse, Doria. I’m sorry."
Her face betrayed emotion, all of it hurting and pain. "Weeks passed by. Holidays passed by, and a year started, and you checked out of the world. Are you so selfish, something didn't go your way, you turn your back on everyone?"
She turned away from me. I reached for her hand. She drew back. Shook her head.
"Call me tomorrow." Her voice was thick and cracked. "On my cell phone. Don't call me on the office line." She swallowed a sob. “I need you to go now."
She didn't show me the way to the door. It was fine since I remembered the way out.
25
Not long after the world discovered Y2K wouldn't turn everything into an apocalyptic wasteland, the West Virginia Legislature passed a bill that outlawed pre-existing video poker machines. Back then, the things were everywhere; you’d go to pay for a tank of gas at the holler convenience store, and there would be your neighbor Bubba, playing video poker between scratching off lottery tickets. I called it was “the Appalachian retirement plan.”
What the legislature did was to allow new machines to be set up in so-called “adult environments,” which ended up being video poker parlors. These fucking things sprung up everywhere, and they all had cute names like “Emma’s” and “Charlotte’s”. They usually sell food—chewy pasta served with canned sauce—and booze—box wine in a paper cup—but the focus is always on the five video poker machines the joint can have.
I spotted Earl Teller’s car in the parking lot of a place called Maggie's as I drove home from Doria’s. I pulled in and went inside.
Porn theaters have more ambience than places like Maggie's. The five machines at Maggie's were lined up against the wall across from the entrance, and all five were busy when I walked in. An old guy with a walker played an end machine while middle-aged women worked the rest. One lady in the middle was snapping green beans into a pot as she picked cards on the touch screen. Country music played; it was something about the singer missing the girl he'd done wrong in high school. George Jones must have been spinning in his grave.
There were a pair of pool tables in the middle of the room, and Teller was shooting at one as I ordered a cup of coffee from the lady behind the counter. She filled a Styrofoam cup from a coffee maker and said, "Four bucks."
The words caught me as I was pulling cash from my wallet. I must have shown it on my face.
"Free refills," she said with a practiced lack of giving a shit. "Don't like it, go to Starbucks."
I handed her four singles, and she pointed me toward the creamer and sugar on the other side of the room. The creamer sounded chunky when I shook the container, and the only sweetener was packets of the pink stuff that caused cancer in lab rats. The coffee itself was lukewarm and old enough to see R-rated films without an adult. I tossed it into a garbage can and walked to the pool tables and took a cue from the rack on the wall, leaning against Teller's table.
"Let's play," I said.
Teller aimed up his final shot on the table, the nine ball into a side pocket. The cue ball tapped with the gentleness of young love and sent it into the darkness.
"I'm done for the night." He broke his cue down and placed it in a carrying case. "I got places to be, if it's all the same to you."
I fished quarters from my pocket and fed them into the coin slots. The balls clattered free and I racked them into the triangle.
"I can appreciate a young man such as yourself, what pressing social engagements you must have." I walked around and aimed up the break. "But understand that I'll be where ever it is you eat, sleep, shit, breathe, and, in the greatest of unlikelihoods, fuck. Get used to seeing my visage in your life, because you won't be able to pinch a loaf without knowing I'm close by. Also, because I know you're curious, 'visage' means 'face.'"
Teller threw his head back. "And what makes you think me and my brothers won't just come by, maybe do a little worse to you than we did before?"
"Because you come at me again, and my friend who water boarded you will take it next level, and once he’s done with you, you’ll wish you'd killed me, because I’ll take you off at the knees with a chain saw. Playtime will be done, and you'll start finding chunks of yourself in your own goddamn stool." I readied my shot. "We playing or what?"
Teller seemed to think about it for a while, because I could smell smoke, or tires burning, or something. He set his carrying case down and took one of the coffee shop's cues from the wall.
"What we playing for?" he said.
"Whatever I wanna know. You good with that?"
"And what happens when I win?"
"I walk into the sunset, never to darken your doorway again. Sound fair to you?"
He rested the cue behind his neck and hung his arms off the ends, like he was on the cross. "Let's do this shit, fucker."
I kicked his ass.
I won't say it was without effort. Teller was good. This was probably the one skill he possessed. But I took him down in three games straight. It was beautiful to see, and it brought me far greater joy than it should have. He got more frustrated as the games progressed, and his shots got sloppier, and I cleaned the table off quicker each time. I never mentioned how I was my academy class’s billiards champion, and in later years I made drinking money in Morgantown hustling tables from asshole law students.
When we finished, he looked like a kid who found out he wasn't getting a puppy for Christmas.
"Let me leave, wait a few minutes, and then you go," I said. "I don't want anyone to think anything undue about our relationship."
"Stop making it sound like we're faggots, you faggot."
Once I was outside, I had a smoke. He followed behind me two minutes later.
"You call anyone in there?" I said. "You better not have, because I don't want to see headlights zooming up from the distance, and a cadre of your cracker-ass brethren trying to swoop in and kick my ass."
"No, I didn’t cal
l no one." He lit a cigarette. "That day, you and that other asshole, that shit wasn't fair. It was two against one."
"Same odds when you and Jeremiah Mayhew came by house."
He exhaled smoke. "I was just doing what I got told to do."
"A good little soldier." I unlocked the Aztek doors. "Get in. And put out that cigarette; no one smokes in my ride."
"Your ride’s a piece of shit."
“It is, but it’s my smoke-free piece of shit.”
Teller looked at the cigarette. "I just fucking lit it."
"Then you can just fucking put it out."
He took a drag. "Know what I think is gonna happen? I’m gonna smoke this, I’m gonna tell you a 'fuck you very much,' and I’m gonna go get in my car and leave. Because you and me both know, you ain’t gonna come running after me."
I scratched at the back of my neck. "Agreed. So what’ll happen then is that I’m going to live on your ass like a painful little zit. I'll bear down on you until either you break, or you do something stupid and the Brotherhood beats you down. The funny thing with all this is, while you're no doubt stupid as hell, I gotta say I'm not sure you're as committed to the cause as you like to act."
He bared his teeth. They weren't good teeth, and it didn't make him look like a tough guy as much as a warning to children for better dental care.
"Never accuse me of betraying my race," he said.
“Implied nothing of the sort. I will say at my house, while your friend was working to put a hurt on me, you tried, in the whitest way possible, to get a groove going to Kanye, and that can’t be something tolerated within your hateful little sewing circle."
Again with Teller and the thinking. It almost broke my heart to watch. You could tell all of those muscles had long since atrophied—not that he would have known what "atrophied" meant.
He crushed the cigarette into the ground and, without a word, walked around to the other side of the Aztek and got in.
26
We found a holler, and I drove until we were past houses and paved roads and there was nothing but the full moon hanging high in the sky. I left the engine running and the heater chugging away.
"You're going to tell me what the Brotherhood's doing," I said.
Teller shook his head. "I picked up supplies. That's it. No one never told me anything."
"Who's selling for you?"
"What part of 'they don't tell me shit' are you not understanding?"
"Then what about where this money is going then?"
"I don't even do the pickups anymore. They sure as fuck never told me what they're doing with the money."
"Who does the money pickups?"
"No idea."
"What about the cookhouse? There's no way they quit after the bust, so where are they cooking now?"
"How many more questions you want to ask me, and me give you the same answer?"
"I'll keep asking until you tell me something useful."
Teller sighed. "You don't give a fuck, I get that, but is all I've fucking got. A lot of that shit they preach at the compound, it’s fucked up, I'll give you that. I don't take it all as gospel. Sure, I like Kanye and Drake and Biggie, and stuff we're not supposed to listen to, but I ain't the only one there into that shit, either. The Brotherhood, those people, they're it for me. My family’s not worth a fuck. I’ve got no job. Didn’t finish high school. Sure as hell not going to dig coal and maybe get myself killed. Only real anything I've got is the Brotherhood, and what you're doing is making me sell it out to you."
There was pain in his voice. Somewhere inside that reptilian brain of his, there was something looking for an explanation of right and wrong, and he was struggling to find the divide between the two.
"Listen, I don't get this thing with you all," I said. "And I don't care, either, so long as you don't hurt people, but the thing is, you are, and I can’t be good with that, so I'm going to do what I can to make it stop."
He gave a little nod. "You were a cop, weren't you?"
"I was."
"Your friend, the one who hosed me down, was he a cop?"
"More like a force of nature."
"He's a fucking lunatic."
"He'd agree with you."
“You were nice, making him stop when you did, though. He would have kept on, wouldn’t he?”
“Most likely. I don’t think he cares for what you guys believe in.”
“What do you think?”
“That life’s too short to judge people on something like skin color, or what side of the border they were born on. You don’t like someone, do it for a good reason, like if they drive with their turn signal on, or they go through self-checkouts with a full cart of groceries, or they like Adam Sandler movies.”
Teller tapped his fingernails steadily against the window.
"You got any paper?" he said.
From the glove box I took an envelope from an unpaid parking ticket and a pencil. Teller wrote out a set of directions on the back of the envelope. His handwriting was terrible, the scrawl of a caffeine- and sugar-fortified eight-year-old. His hand trembled as he wrote. When he finished, he shoved everything toward me and stared out the window.
“Take me back to my car. I want to get away from you before you find some new way to fuck over whatever’s left of my life.”
I put the Aztek in gear, whipped it around, and drove back to Maggie's. He kept his mouth shut the entire drive and slammed the door as he got out. His tires spun out gravel from the parking lot as he pulled out, roaring down the road into the night.
27
Snow spit lazily from the sky as I got to Woody's the next morning, swirling back and forth across my windshield and scattered across the ground like confetti. It wouldn't stick, but it would remind you that it was still indeed winter, the season trying its damnedest to assert itself upon us, and doing so half-assed.
There was gunfire the closer I got to the house. Anywhere else, I would have worried, but this was Woody's, and gunfire almost counted as white noise there.
The roar of dogs barking threatened to blot out the sound of semi-automatic weaponry as I got out of the Aztek. About half of the pack came running toward me, encircling me, nipping at my feet. I followed the clatter of spent cartridges to the back of the house. Woody and Bobbi stood at the shooting range, Bobbi emptying the clip from an AR-15 into a target and Woody staring at his cell phone and holding a 9 mm pistol in my direction. When he saw me, he scanned the perimeter, dropped the gun to his side, and waited for Bobbi to finish shooting.
When she was done, she looked at Woody and smiled. She pulled her headphones off and he said something to her I couldn't hear, and she kissed him on the cheek and loaded a new clip into the weapon, opening fire again as he walked over to me. He took me by the arm and led me around to the side of the house.
Woody kept his eyes focused on Bobbi.
"I keep an eye this way, you keep an eye that way," he said.
"I can't see you then."
"That would be the idea."
"Makes it awkward to make fun of you."
"Again, kind of the idea."
I glanced toward Bobbi, then back at Woody. “Have you two—?”
"A gentleman never tells."
I laughed. "I guess she got over you being a hippie. What were you staring at on your phone while brandishing that weapon in my direction?"
"The security cameras around the house feed into an app on my phone, so I can check any of them from it. I watched you pull up and come around the house."
"You knew it was me and you still kept a gun pointed at me?"
"Check."
"Paranoia much?"
"Paranoia is another way of describing a complete awareness of your surroundings."
The gunfire stopped again.
"Woody!" Bobbi yelled.
"Right here," Woody said to her. "You wanna head on inside, give it a break?"
"Sure thing." She waved at me. "Hey, Henry!"
I made a ha
lf-turn to look at her, and Woody punched my shoulder. I pivoted my view back to the driveway. "Hey, Bobbi!"
"How's it going?"
"Good. We're getting shit done."
"Awesome. What are you staring at?"
"Nothing."
"Awesome," she said again. "I’ll make tea."
"You do that," Woody said. "We'll be right on inside."
The screen door opened and shut.
"How's she doing?" I said.
"Pretty well," Woody said. "You can stop looking in that direction now. Anyway, she misses her girls. She's a nice woman. Decent shot. We've been working on that, make her better than decent should the need arise."
"I'm hoping the need doesn't arise."
"As am I."
My cell phone rang.
Woody headed toward the back door and into the house.
I answered the phone. It was Doria.
"Hey there," I said, silver-tongued devil that I was. "How you doing?"
"I'm the queen of the universe, Henry. Do you wanna know why I called or not?"
So much for foreplay. "Sure. Fire away."
"Walters has been doing damn little, it seems, other than helping this company called Rockwell LLC file paperwork it needs to be street legal, and managing a series of electronic fund transfers to several international businesses."
"How international are we talking?"
"Generally in Mexico, though some cash is going to Eastern European countries. Places with 'stan' in their names."
"Any idea what Rockwell LLC is buying?"
"Doesn't really say. The paperwork is vague as fuck about details. There's a palpable odor of bullshit and the stench of a probable federal investigation if anyone got word of this."
"But there's nothing hinting at what they're buying?"
"I think I said that already, but I'll try to find another way of saying it so maybe you understand this time." Doria's voice turned tired. "The only reason I'm doing this is so Bobbi can have her life back. Otherwise, I'm regretting I ever met you."
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