Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (15 page)

Pelzer nodded. “Steganography. That's right. Guy hated
computers. Almost had a phobia about them, though I think maybe part of it was put on. You know, the old-school artist bit. Doesn't want anything getting between him and his
vision
or whatever. Anyway, Beckett didn't want to keep evidence against Galligan on a machine, and he didn't. Least ways, not on any machine I can find. But he leaves his wife—or gets tossed out—and he doesn't take anything with him, except that photograph.”

“You're thinking there's something encoded on it.”

“I'm thinking it's not outside the realm of possibility.”

“Okay,” I said, “but what?”

“No idea. Best guess, numbers. Money or tonnage or whatever, but numbers. If they started zooming upward around the time Mays thought they would, it might go a ways toward proving their theory. Or maybe it's a photograph. Like a picture hidden inside a picture, something incriminating. Long story short, I need that photograph and I need it yesterday.”

I nodded. I didn't want to give it to him, but there wasn't any reason to further provoke him.

“I'll get it to you, and we can get it looked at together. Maybe the university photo lab?”

“You say so.”

“Okay,” I said. “I got to tell you, though, I've been around and around with this whole clue business, and everyone I talk to says that mysteries don't get solved when the detective discovers a microdot on an autographed picture of a quarterback.”

“Not usually, I guess. But you never know. For example, Mays was found with a notepad in his mouth.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, I know you know. But I bet you didn't know this: Pad was blank, almost blank. There were two words written on it. Buddy with the sheriffs gave me the scoop.”

“What two words?”

He smiled a little. I'd put him back on his heels a while back, but now he was feeling more in charge. He had a superior streak in him. He didn't like being out of the driver's seat, and when he was back in it, he enjoyed it with the subtlety of a bull in a stable of virgin cows. He said, “Funny thing. You seen Galligan lately?”

“I've seen Galligan lately.”

“Yeah, well, then you've seen that blond hair. Had it when he was a boy, and the vain little shit's been dying it blond ever since he hit his silver years. It looks ridiculous, but that's what he does. Behind his back, his guys call him Yellow Boy.”

“And that's what was written on the pad?”

Pelzer said, “Yup. That's what was written on the pad.
Yellow Boy
.”

M
y father came in and sat at the table. He was forty but looked ten years older; I was twelve but felt ten years younger. After months of quiet tension, the old house at Indian Vale had lapsed into a different kind of quiet, the dull exhaustion of a final, sorrowful resignation. It was like the sound of nothing that fills your ears when you sink to the bottom of a lake. He looked across the table at me, then took off his wristwatch and started fiddling with the stem, as he often did when he was choosing his words.

“This is only good-bye for now,” he said at last. “Your mother and I have a few things yet to work out, grownup things, but I won't be around for a few days.”

“Okay.”

“It's for the best,” he said. Somewhere along the line, he'd become a man who told you how to feel instead of asking how you felt or trying to convince you of anything. He just told you, and whether or not you agreed, in his mind that was what it would be until he changed his mind again. “I'll need you to look after your sisters.”

“I'll look after them,” I said. “All of them. Mom included. Someone has to.”

“You taking a tone with me?”

“Yup.”

He put the watch back on his wrist and tied the little buckle.

“I'm still big enough to knock you out of that chair.”

I shrugged. He was.

He drummed the table with his fingers, blew out a breath. “Is there anything you want to ask me?” he said.

“Not really,” I said, but then I asked him some things anyway. “You'll be staying with Cheezie?”

“For a few days, maybe. Maybe a few days longer than that. Then I'm not sure. I've got options.”

“And I can reach you there? At his place?”

“For a few days, yes.”

I said, “You've left us some money?”

He took out his wallet, pulled out some bills, and put them on the table between us. I didn't move to touch them.

“There's more upstairs on the dresser, and I gave your mother a little, too. You think I'd abandon you like that? Leave you penniless?”

I said, “I think you'll do whatever it is you decide to do.”

We sat there a moment. After what seemed a long time, he stood and pushed his chair back neatly under the table and walked to the door and slipped into his coat. It was fall and the air was cool. He opened the door, then stopped and looked back halfway over his shoulder, in my direction but not at me.

“I won't say I'm sorry,” he said. “I'll see you soon.”

Then he was gone. I didn't see him again for nearly three years.

I
separated myself from Pelzer. That wasn't easy—he wanted to tag along—but I promised to call later that evening, and we shook hands and went our separate ways without further damage. There was one more place Beckett might be, at
least one more place that I could think of, and I meant to check it before the day was out.

First, though, I rang Peggy. I caught her at home and in bed.

“Still in your jammies?”

She said, “Jammies and a robe and some slippers from college. Even found an old teddy bear, and I've nearly hugged the stuffing out of him. I feel like I've had the wind ripped right out of me.” She sounded like it, too. Her voice was hollow and kinda weak, like she'd been fighting a crud and the crud was finally getting her down. “I've slept something like fourteen straight hours now, and I still don't feel like I can get out of bed.”

“Sleep fourteen more if you have to,” I said. “Maybe I can come by with some food later.”

“If you're able,” she said. “Bring Anci, too, if she'll come.”

“Of course she'll come.”

“I feel silly,” she said, but she sounded more sad than silly. “Acting this way. I imagined I was tougher.”

“You're plenty tough.”

“I don't know. Few minutes before it happened, there I was, fighting zombies and bragging about what a big girl I am. Now look at me.”

“Everybody has a line,” I said. “I'm betting that a lot of people's involve flying lead.”

She was quiet for a moment, and, not being able to see her face, I couldn't tell how she was registering that. Then she said, “You killed a man last night.”

“Mostly on accident,” I said. “But just between us, I'm not overly upset about how it shook out. I guess he might have
tuckered out and decided he'd had enough. Maybe he'd have put down his guns and taken up a life of good deeds for orphans and war widows, but usually bad men don't go in that direction. Once you have someone in that position, on his knees and at your mercy, chances are he's eventually going to come back at you. Might not be the next day or the next month even, but he'll do it. If only because he can't live with the fact that you had him dead to rights like that and let him off the hook.”

“I don't know,” she said. “I know there's plenty of evil in the world. I know you can't always hold its hand and give it a hanky for its tears. I'm just not sure violence is the best way to solve problems.”

“It's surely not, but sometimes it's the only way we've got lying around.”

“And someone taught you that, Slim.”

“That's a low blow.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “I also can't help thinking how much this looks like you obsessively searching for someone else's runaway spouse instead of your own.”

“That's an even lower blow.”

“Okay, I'll cop to that one. And I'm sorry. Could be I'm not being fair. But you can maybe see how this looks from the outside.”

“I can maybe see it,” I said, “but I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion.”

“I'm in good company then. Sugar, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take. Whatever you have to do to get away from this thing, do it.”

“I'll try,” I said. “Meantime, hang in there.”

“I'm not sure I can,” she said, and for the first time I wasn't so sure she was wrong.

I
still needed to find Guy Beckett, though. Someone had killed Dwayne Mays and Matt Luster. And someone had either killed Beckett or chased him away, whether Jump Down or Roy Galligan or both. They'd done it for money or for jobs and the survival of their way of life, or all of that rolled up in a giant ball. But only Beckett would be able to answer my questions and put the whole thing to bed.

I stopped in at the Herrin library and used one of the computers to search for Carla Shepherd, the other woman Susan had mentioned a day or so ago. Found her on a public list of donors for some environmental project or other, and gave myself a private eye gold star for it, too. She was listed as living in Pomona, a tiny place deep inside the Shawnee National Forest, some forty minutes south of the Crab Orchard Lake and preserve. On my way back through town I stopped in at the school, hoping to catch Anci for lunch, maybe talk her into a slice of pizza and an orange soda, but when I roared up I instead found her standing around outside the school with a bunch of other kids.

Anci said, “There you are.”

“Don't tell me,” I said. “They decided you were unteachable.”

“Maybe after you get done playing around at mystery-solving,” she said, “you can go into comedy. I bet you'd go far.”

“I'll give it some thought. Really, though, what gives?”

“I told you earlier. It's a half-day today. Teachers' conferences, and you're up.”

“You told me all this?”

“I sure did. You don't remember, do you?”

“I do.” I didn't. “When's my appointment?”

“This morning. Right now. I even texted you a reminder,” she said. “Now shoo. I'll wait here for you.”

She waited. I went to park the bike. I checked my phone and, sure enough, there was her reminder. I went inside the school and found Anci's classroom. It was regulation: There was an American flag and a blackboard. There were books piled on a long table beneath a bank of windows and some computers. There was a decorated bulletin board with some student papers pinned to it, some class project about the environment, and I was briefly reminded of the Friends of Crab Orchard. I didn't have time to dwell on it, though. The teacher was waiting for me with a smile on her face you wouldn't break your brain to imagine as impatient. She couldn't have been older than twenty or twenty-one, still just a kid herself, but you could tell she was used to dealing with young bullheads and their ilk, and she took charge immediately and forced me to sit in that little desk. They always make you sit in that thing. I don't know why, but I figure they must have a whole college course about making adult people sit in that tiny desk.

We shook hands, and she smiled a bit more warmly and called me by my given name. I told her to please call me Slim; that other name was what they called my father.

She said, “Well, you can relax . . .”

“I'm relaxed.”

She ignored me and pressed on.

“I've got nothing but praise. Your daughter is an amazing young woman.”

“Ain't she, though?”

“And
smart
.”

“She's a clever little monkey, all right. Sometimes a little too much so. It's vexatious. Example: I'm told she's been talking lately about becoming a lawyer.”

“That's wonderful.”

“The hell it is.”

I laughed a little, but she didn't, and the rest of our meeting wasn't quite as warm and fuzzy as it otherwise might have been. We went over Anci's grades and her recent test results, and then she closed her score books and said, “There's just one little thing I'd like to speak to you about.”

“Do tell.”

“Your daughter—how to put this?” She thought about how to put it. I could tell she'd already thought how to put it, but I didn't want to discourage her professional development, so I just sat there quietly. She said, “Along with acting a bit more like an adult than her classmates, your daughter sometimes . . . talks a bit more like an adult. If you follow my drift.”

“Stock tips?”

“Profanity.”

“Oh.”

“Now, don't be alarmed.”

I wasn't especially alarmed. Or surprised.

“It's not always,” she said. “Just sometimes, but I've noticed some of the other students are starting to pick it up.”

“Well, hell.”

She nodded sternly at this. “I think I'm beginning to see the source of the problem.”

Our meeting ended, and I went out and found Anci. I knew that somewhere nearby Jeep was watching over her like a hell's angel turned loose on earth, and if anyone so
much as took a suspicious step toward her he might just have an instant to contemplate the pretty cloud of red he'd somehow walked into. I waved a hand in what I guessed was his general direction and then turned my attention to Anci. I couldn't leave her to her own devices, of course, and Peggy wasn't in a state to watch over her. She'd have to come with me. With Jump Down either dead or hiding out, and at least two of his men in the morgue, I didn't figure we were in much danger of being shot at again. I hoped that wasn't wishful thinking.

Anci strapped on her helmet and we climbed on the bike and rode out of town toward Pomona. That time of day, traffic was slow moving, so we were able to holler at each other a bit over the noise of the bike. I tried to talk to her about what the teacher had said. She didn't deny the charges—in fact, she owned up to the whole thing—and I was so proud of her honesty that it took me a moment to recognize that she'd managed to get out of trouble without promising she wouldn't do it again, and I knew I'd been had.

Anyway, the day was turning out warmer than it had been lately. Another front was moving in, and the day was rumbly. The sky churned a little, and far away to the west was a dark line of clouds like a slit throat. Eventually, we made our way through the Shawnee and into the empty streets of Pomona, where I managed to get us turned around on North Railroad Street, named that, I guess, after the only moving object in town. Seriously, the atmosphere out here is pretty laid back: even the town mutts could barely be bothered to lift their heads as we rolled by.

Finally, Anci said, “I think we're lost. Maybe we should pull over and ask.”

We did, walking up the way some and taking in the sights, of which there were none. Really, Pomona was more of a village than a town—half a village, even—with most of its folk living in the hills surrounding a little valley. End to end, the main drag might have run all of a hundred yards, but I doubt it. There was a post office that served as the entire town's mail pickup because Pomona was too rural for the mail carrier to do door-to-door delivery. There was a coffee shop that closed a few years back after the proprietor finally figured out that having no client base is a poor business model, and there was a bar that had been there for fifty years, though it never seemed to have more than two customers at a time, one of them a cat. There was a used bookstore that also sold live fishing bait, so that customers were always taking home stowaway crickets with their copies of
The Da Vinci Code
or
The Girl Who Kicked the Shithouse
or whatever. It was a place where the village constable might run you in for smoking grass in public, if the constable wasn't the one smoking grass in public in the first place, which she often was.

It was also a place where everybody knew everybody, so it was a snap getting directions to Carla's place from a dude in the town's hundred-year-old general store, one of those cheerful, pot-bellied hippie bears with more facial hair than head, and who smell like a quarter-ton of smoldering incense.

“Carla lives up the road,” he said—shy or sly, I couldn't tell—as he worked the brass fittings of the countertop with an oily rag. “Split-level cabin. You couldn't miss it double-blindfolded.”

“Any idea if she's up there now?”