Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (12 page)

I said, “In that case, as a private citizen I want to tell you that you can go fuck yourself, Bear.”

We nodded at each other. I started out, then turned back around and asked, “By the way, how was your daughter's wedding?”

He shrugged, “Beautiful. I wept like a baby.”

I nodded at him again and went out. I walked across to the equipment locker, picked up a helmet, and went down into the mine. Bear could come get me, if he wanted. Some reason, the drop felt longer than I remembered, and the blackness blacker. I'd only been away for a couple of days, and already I was starting to forget what it was like. I walked to the eastern-most work section and searched around, but he wasn't there and no one knew where he was or wouldn't say. Probably the latter. I crossed back to the other side and looked some more until after a while I found Jump Down hanging around and smoking grass with his crew near the ventilation brattices. He was a pale thing, Jump, tall and as lean as a skinned rabbit, a six-foot-eight redneck shitweed. He had a long face, with cavernous cheeks and a shaved head and what I took to be an expensive set of false teeth bought after his originals had been eaten away by meth-induced bruxism and hyposalivation. Horrible thing they called meth mouth.

As I approached, he spied me, and his eyes brightened, and he used his elbows to press himself off the brattices. His boys shuffled nervously, and one of them starting pacing like a caged gorilla, ready for the door to open, but Jump just showed me his perfect teeth, friendly as you please, and he and they winked at me in the sodium spots screwed to the ribs of the mine.

He said, “Hey, hey, there he is.”

A
n hour later, the two of us were sitting at a back table at a little place up the road called Steamy's. Jump Down sucked the glass neck of a light beer. I had coffee. I made the mistake of taking the keys out of my pocket and putting them on the table. No one at the mine cared that we'd left to hit a bar. I was officially on leave until further notice. No one told Jump Down where to go or what to do, not the bosses or the ghost of Matt Luster. We were quite a pair.

It was early yet, but Steamy's was crowded and noisy. As usual, the ladies were dressed up and the guys were dressed down. Most of these good old boys, the greatest effort they'd put out was scraping off whatever was clinging to the bottom of their boots and making sure the can of chew in their back pocket was still a nice circle. A haze of cigarette smoke floated above the layer of ball caps and heavily sprayed do's. You weren't supposed to be able to light up in bars in Illinois anymore, but it was a rule most of these backwoods places just ignored, and it's a wonder all that hairspray didn't combust and burn the place to the ground.

Jump Down said, “I've been coming to this dump since I was a kid, you know? My old man used to bring me. I'd sit on the floor, by his stool, with my back against the bar, and wait for him to finish his shot. In the day, there was a kind of whorehouse in the back room.”

“A whorehouse?”

“Where whores work,” he explained.

“I know what it is,” I said. “I never heard about it, is all.”

“I don't think that's what they called it, but that's what it was. Cash for pussy, it's a whorehouse. Anyway, the old man
would leave me with Steamy, back when Steamy was alive, and go back and bang some cunt, and then he and she'd come out and she'd give me some kind of little gift—candy or spare change or whatever she had—and we'd head on home to Mom. One time, though, she didn't have anything. I pestered her, and she ended up giving me a condom. Bright green. I guess she thought I'd blow it up and play with it like a balloon. I don't know what she thought. Anyway, the old man didn't notice what she'd done, and when we got home I went into the kitchen with mom and started playing with that green condom, right there in front of her, and that was pretty much the longest night of my life.”

“Sad story.”

“It's not sad. It's not anything. It's just how it was.” He leaned against the back legs of his chair. “I knew you'd be coming to see me, man. Knew it was just a matter of time. Only question is, what you think coming to see me will get you.”

“A truce,” I said.

He just stared at me.

I said, “For me and my family.”

“You got a family?”

“Yeah.”

“A kid?”

“A daughter. Beautiful. Smart as a whip, too. But as long as I'm tied up in this, she's tied up in it. I got a feeling that everyone involved in this lovely mess thinks I know more than I do. And now I've had to leave my home like a fugitive, my woman is watching my every move like a Catholic school sister ready with her ruler, and I've basically been fired from my job. And all that in three days. I'll tell you, I've had better stretches.”

“Things can always get worse. Ain't that what they say?”

“It's one thing they say. But here's what I want: you call off your boys. I don't care what you do or what your deal down there is in the Knight Hawk. I don't care if you're tied up in the Mays killing or with this business with Luster or Galligan.”

He smiled at me, but it wasn't a pleasant look, and I suddenly felt my asshole trying to escape into my body. The boy had cooked enough shit, or done enough of it his own self, that he'd fried his circuits. He had a twitchy feel about him, and when he talked his eyes bulged and his lips overworked his words, like they had too much energy, and his mouth was doing its part to use some of it up.

“Galligan?” he said. “What's this about Galligan?”

I shrugged and said, “Idle talk, mostly. Just something I've heard on the vine. But the main thing is, I don't care. That's what I want you to walk out of here with. If nothing else, that. You could be mixed up with the ghost of the czar, or Shoeless Joe, and it'd still make me no never mind whatsoever.”

“What outfit does Shoeless Joe work at, man?”

“Never mind.”

“Wait, you think Mays was working on something to do with business inside the Hawk?”

I said, “I've heard that's one possibility, yes.”

“Well you, or whoever you heard it from, is wrong.”

“They are?”

He sniffed. His eyes wobbled slightly in his head, like out-of-tune television screens. “Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong,” he said. “I think that's what he might have been up to at first. He was sniffing around for weeks, man. Around
the edges. Tell the truth, I thought someone was going to have to do something about it, but then all of a sudden he changed course.”

“Changed course? Changed course to what?”

“Someone hit the Hawk's ammonia tank at the cold-storage shed.”

“And for some reason Mays and Beckett thought it wasn't you or your crew?”

Jump Down shook his head. “I don't have a crew, man, and I don't cook or sell product.”

“Look, I know you're being careful in what you say, but I'm not wearing a wire.”

“I don't have a crew, man, and I don't cook or sell product.”

“Fine,” I said. “Hypothetically.”

Jump looked at me for a long moment and then finally nodded and said, “You don't shit where you eat. Hypothetically. And you don't let anyone
else
shit where you eat, either. So there's that. Let's just say that no one who might be engaged in that activity at the Knight Hawk would be so goddamn stupid as to tap the Hawk's tanks, and if someone
was
that stupid they'd either get made un-stupid or dead real quick.”

“Okay.”

“Also, the tank.”

“What about it?”

“The ammonia tank. It's a sixty-one-hundred-gallon capacity,” he said. “You've seen it. That's a lot of cookie dough.”

“More than you . . . than some hypothetical someone might reasonably need?”

“More than that, yeah. Enough to take the entire downstate on one hell of a ride.”

“So someone with big ambitions,” I said.

“Or someone who doesn't know what the fuck he's doing,” he said. “Like I say, that's a lot of ingredient. You'd need a truck and bobtail to tap it, and you'd need a tank to store it in, and a thing like that will attract attention, Slim. So I hear anyway.”

“I'm not wearing a wire.”

“I don't care,” he said. “You're thinking Galligan?”

I didn't know yet. I didn't know yet for sure, but a picture was beginning to take shape, too cloudy yet to bring into focus, but it was there and nagging at the darkest parts of my waking mind. I had the Mays and Luster murders and Beckett's disappearance and Round-Face and Temple Luster Beckett and Tony Pelzer and Roy Galligan. And I had the lake, Crab Orchard Lake, and a group called Friends of Crab Orchard that Guy Beckett and Pelzer had apparently joined to chase tail. I put some money on the table and rose to go. Jump Down smiled and raised his drink and winked again at me, not as meanly this time.

“I can't go home again yet,” I said, to no one in particular, and saying the words hurt like a kick in the nuts. I looked at the boy. I wasn't any better disposed to him than before, but I have to admit to being surprised that it hadn't all ended in gunfire and tears. I asked, “By the way, why in the hell did you ever agree to sit here talking to me?”

He smiled and said, “I used to have a daughter, too.”

I
had a couple hours left in the day. I dialed Jeep Mabry and learned that Peggy and Anci had left school on time and without fuss. Since then he'd gotten the stink-eye from a crow a couple of times, but that was the extent of the day's activity. I thanked him for the hundredth time and received only an irritated grunt in reply. He was off to his shift at the King Coal. I dialed Peggy next but ended up leaving a message saying I'd come to the hotel as soon as my errands permitted. Then I dialed Tony Pelzer's number again. Nothing. That nothing was getting a bit nettlesome, I confess.

Then I drove back out to the Crab Orchard preserve. There are three manmade lakes out there, and Devil's Kitchen is one of them. It covers almost eight hundred acres, is ninety feet deep at its deepest point, and has earned the fealty of local fisherman for some of the best bluegill and trout fishing in the state. Pelzer's place was just outside the park near Devil's Kitchen, north a bit of the preserve, in a tiny nothing of a place called Bluegill Point. I stopped in at a shade-tree bait store for a pack of smokes and some snacks, just in case it turned out I was in for a wait.

And wait I did, but nothing came of it. I knocked on the door but no one answered, and I hung around for a while but no one ever showed up. A sign in the yard said
Pelzer Security
. A beat-up red and black GMC van sat in the driveway, its crumpled hood secured with bright yellow bungee cord and a concrete block, but
it didn't go anywhere, either. It didn't look like it could go anywhere if you hitched it to a team of elephants. When I finally grew bored of listening to the honking of the local geese, I fired up the truck and headed home, or whatever was passing for home that night.

W
hen I got back to the Park Avenue and went upstairs to the room, I found Anci and Peggy arguing over one of Anci's video games. Scary thing, set on a zombie island. I didn't like her playing it, but this was one of those battles I ended up giving ground on. You do that sometimes to keep the peace, and you do it sometimes because it's okay for a kid to win every now and again, but mostly you do it out of sheer exhaustion. Anyway, the two of them had attached the console to the hotel room TV, and I was in the bathroom over the sink with the water running and a brush in my mouth when I figured out what that meant.

I swung back into the bedroom and said to Peggy, “You went to the Vale.”

She glanced up at me briefly over her remote control and then looked back at the set.

“You'll have to take that thing out of your mouth and rinse, darling, because otherwise it sounds like you're drowning in mashed potatoes.”

I went and rinsed and came back and said it again.

“That's better.”

“Stop avoiding the subject.”

“Anci needed some things,” Peggy said. “Necessary things. You only packed her one pair of shoes, for one.”

“We were in a bit of rush, I recall.”

“She also needed something to keep her from going bananas while her daddy runs around playing Philip Marlowe.”

“It's true, I do,” Anci said. She was good enough to kick zombie butt and have a conversation without missing a beat.

“I'll tell you,” I said, “I'm not happy about this. You might have run into trouble.”

“And I'm a big girl.”

“Me, too,” said Anci.

My nerves were fried, and I wanted to holler at both of them, but instead I sat on the edge of the other bed and watched them kill zombies for a while. They were pretty good at it, though I noticed Anci saving Peggy's bacon on more than a couple of occasions. When they were done, we walked up into town and had dinner at a little café that probably didn't know it was catering to three people on the lam from meth pirates. Despite what should have been our bad nerves, we had an appetite. Peggy ate a giant salad, and Anci and I had burgers so big they nearly filled our plates. We ate without talking much and then I paid our check and we went back out onto the street.

It was a quiet night in town. I guess every night in that town was quiet, but that one was almost unseemly in its silence. Up the sidewalk, two guys were loading a television as big as a movie screen into the bed of a pickup truck, and the streetlamps were flickering and buzzing. A black sedan moved slowly up the street, turned right against the red light, and disappeared around the corner. The wind pushed around a few candy bar wrappers. That was pretty much the extent of the nightlife. The evening had come on cool, so Anci slipped on her pink gloves, and Peggy shrugged deeper into her jacket. I started wishing I had a hat or a fur-lined turban or something to bottle in the heat.

Peggy and I were walking side by side, Anci just a pace
or two behind us but keeping up, because she was a long-legged critter like her old man.

Peggy said, “I've been thinking. You two really should come stay at my place for a while. You'd be a hell of a lot more comfortable. Anci could have her own room. And frankly, that hotel is kinda low-rung.”

“It's better than the last place,” I said.

“Hard to believe.”

“It's better than the last place,” Anci said.

I said, “I appreciate the offer, but anywhere I go is likely to become a target. I think it's probably safe to take Anci, though.”

I knew that would cause a ruckus, and it did. Anci stopped in her tracks. We were next to a storefront Tae Kwon Do school, but the idiot posing on the poster in the window wasn't nearly as scary as my twelve-year-old. She gave me a look that would have frozen the balls off a bronze statue of Charles Manson and folded her arms across her chest. “Only if you're going to haul me off, kicking and screaming,” she said.

“Not a debate,” I said.

“What does that mean? You don't just get to decide what's a debate and what's not.”

“The hell I don't. I'm your father.”

“Fine, and I'm your daughter. We're related. What's that got to do with anything?”

We kept at it for another moment, arguing on the sidewalk, when another car came by. For an instant, I almost didn't pay it any mind—it was just a car on the street—but then I recognized it as the black sedan from before. He was circling the block again, and his windows were tinted so
black you couldn't see inside the cabin. As he passed us, he slowed way down, then suddenly sped up again a little as he went by—but not before I noticed the Knight Hawk parking sticker on his bumper, and then it hit me like a ton of frozen bricks.

“Oh, Sam Hell,” I said aloud. “My keys.”

Peggy was confused. “Your what?”

“My keys. I put them on the table. At Steamy's. It had my hotel key on the chain with the name of the hotel. That sneaky little motherfucker.”

“Darling, I don't know what you're saying.”

The black sedan slid up the block and again neared the corner. But this time, instead of rounding it, he pulled to the curb and stopped. The brake lights flashed bright red and died.

I turned to Peggy. “Take Anci, right now, and run back to the café.”

“Slim . . .”

“Goddamn it, do it now.”

Everything froze for one awful instant, and then everything jumped up like a terrified cat and screamed. Peggy grabbed Anci by the arm. She was scared and did it too hard, and Anci cried out a little and fell. The doors of the sedan flew open and two dudes got out, one from either side. One was a fat guy with a beard and a ball cap. His head was like a muck bucket, and I wondered whether he was the man Mary-Kay Connor had seen arguing with Guy Beckett that day in Johnston City. The other was a thin guy in a denim jacket. They were killers. You could tell it by looking at them. That, and the fact that they were both holding guns down by their legs. The fat guy skirted the back of the sedan
and stepped up on the sidewalk to join his buddy, and the two of them came toward me in a fast walk. They walked shoulder to shoulder, with just a bit of room between them, in perfect lockstep, and generally gave off an impression of having worked together on this kind of project before.

For just a second, my feverish brain grabbed hold of some distant idea about chivalry—or maybe it was something I'd picked up watching late-night westerns—and I imagined they might wait for Anci and Peggy to round the corner before opening fire. Then the thin dude raised his pistol and snapped off three quick rounds. So much for Gary Cooper. The sound of the little automatic was a light pop, like a bottle of flat champagne. I felt one of the bullets rip the air beside my head. The others went wild, one of them blowing out the window of the Tae Kwon Do school. Peggy screamed, and when I looked back Anci was struggling to drag her into a doorway and out of sight. That was some kid.

They came at us. I jumped and hit the curb and street with my shoulder and rolled and came up behind the pickup truck. The dudes with the TV dropped it and ran in two directions, and the big set hit the ground flat-faced and broke with a sound like a cannon shot. Bullets hit the truck and there was a flash of light that blinded me for a second or two. The fat guy fired, and the truck's passenger-side mirror left its post and went whirling down the street. The front windshield exploded, and then the back, showering me with glass. Suddenly, the truck lurched forward on one side, and I realized that one of them had shot out the right front tire.

“You're wasting ammo, dipshit,” I heard the thin guy say.

“Well, it's mine to waste, cock-knocker.”

“Don't make me take that thing from you.”

“I'd like to see you try. Go on.”

“Oh, shut up.”

It was one thing to be murdered on the street. It was another thing to be murdered by an old married couple. That didn't sit right at all. Lots of things didn't sit right. These bastards had fired bullets at my daughter. I should have been frightened—and I was—but my fear had been overtaken by an anger like a whirlwind. I wanted to kill them both and drink their blood. Unfortunately for me, the only thing I had on me was a pocketknife, and against firearms that wasn't much. I inspected the pickup truck, and found it to be the only one in southern Illinois with an empty gun rack.

I could feel them coming at me, still fast, from either side of the truck. Their plan was to arrive at the truck bed at the same instant and catch me between them, but the fat guy stepped on something and fell, and the thin guy got a step or two ahead of him. I seized the moment. I pushed left, toward the street side, and met the thin guy head-on. I'd timed it well, and I managed to catch him with his right foot in mid-step, so he was slightly off-balance. His left leg was forward and presenting itself as a target, so I kicked hard at the knee and got lucky. The bone cracked with a sound like wet corn snapping and went the wrong way. Some of it broke through the fabric of his pants. The dude dropped his gun and moaned and went down on his good leg. He reached for his piece, desperate, but I kneed him in the face and lunged for it too and was just a hair quicker.

He looked up at me and said quietly, “Goddamn.”

I staggered a half step past him. I meant to shoot him in the shoulder, put him down that way, but he twisted his body at the last moment and tried to stand up. The bullet
hit him in the side of the head, and his brains shot out and splattered against the side of the truck.

The fat guy came around the bed and tailgate, stepping over the busted TV. He saw what had happened, roared a curse at me, and fired off twice, hitting the buildings across the street. He had a bigger gun, and the sound of it echoed around the little downtown. We were on either side of the truck now. I fired back but missed. I'd shot a gun a little, of course—I'm a son of the country, after all—but I'm not much of a marksman, and I missed the fat guy badly and ended up shooting the Tae Kwon Do champion in the head.

“Motherfucker,” fat dude said. He got impatient and charged. Thinking to bull-rush me, I guess. I backpedaled fast and lost my footing in the other dude's blood and brains and went over hard on my tailbone. The fat boy loomed over and raised his gun.

“Motherfucker,” he said again. He couldn't think of anything else, maybe. He raised the gun and the gun jerked and there was an eruption like a belch of hellfire and some smoke. But then something weird happened: the fat guy's head blew right off his neck and jumped into the truck bed with a hollow metal bang. The rest of him slumped, smoking, onto the street. Two men down.

I looked up to find Jeep Mabry standing there with a sawed-off. He said, “I'm thinking now that coming to look in on you was the right call.” Or words to that effect.

I started puking my guts out, and Peggy kept screaming, and those were the last sounds I heard for a while.

T
he cop who took us to the station was named Willard. He was a stump of a guy with a flat nose and some unfortunate
pattern baldness that maybe didn't make him the happiest camper in the world. He arrested me and Jeep, read us our rights, cuffed us, and drove us to the station house, where he put us in separate interrogation rooms. I asked to see Anci and Peggy, and was told I couldn't, not yet, but that they were okay, badly shaken up but intact. No injuries. They'd seen a medic, and they were together. Then he went away again and left me for about an hour. I sat there twiddling my thumbs and trying not to think too much about the man I'd killed. I didn't even know his name or his story. I didn't know whether he'd been paid to do what he tried to do, or whether he did it because he liked it or what. Came down to it, I guess I felt okay about what I'd done. He'd tried to hurt my family, after all. But you were never going to love a thing like that, at least a healthy person wasn't.

After a while, some cops came in: Willard and Ben Wince and one of the state cops I'd seen before at Luster's house. I stood up, and Willard raised a hand and said, “Don't do that, please. I ain't a priest, and this ain't church. You don't have to stand up when I come in a room. Besides, it makes me nervous.”