Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (9 page)

I said, “I didn't know you knew him.”

“Of course I know him. Know his reputation anyway,” she said. “Anyone who gives a damn about local environmental business knows that.”

“I honestly didn't know you did,” I said. “Give a damn, I mean.”

“It's something I try not to talk about around you, darling. I don't want it to come between us. It's your job, after all, and it was your father's job, too.”

“Could we not mention him, please? Everyone wants to talk about the old man these days. It's like I can't get away from him.”

“Sorry. But, yeah, I do give a damn—a damn about the planet, Slim. A great big hollering damn. You saw what happened down in the Gulf a while back. Or what about Martin County?”

“Martin County? The sludge pen? I'd almost forgotten.”

Peggy looked regretfully at me and shook her head. “One of the worst environmental disasters in the history of this country, and everybody's forgotten.”

I had to give her that one: it was a lulu, more than three hundred million gallons of coal sludge released into the Tug Fork and surrounding area when a Massey Energy impoundment pen failed. And this was no ordinary failure: there was an abandoned coal mine underneath the pen. Somehow they'd missed it during the land survey. Or maybe they hadn't missed it; maybe they just didn't think it would be a problem. It
was
a problem. One fine morning, the ground in the impoundment gave way, and the sludge emptied into the mine, and eventually flowed out the entries and into the world. As disasters go, it
was like Rube Goldberg had started doing gags for hell. And, the thing is, three hundred million gallons was a bargain. The company's Brushy Fork impoundment pond in West Virginia is built to hold between eight and nine
billion
. In a rogues' gallery of reckless industrial actors, it's hard to select a chief villain, but the ratfuckers who ran Massey might just have captured the prize. Even their corporate logo—a black capital letter M, aflame, like a basalt altar—betrayed a satanic worldview. They'd changed their name of late—after the public at large began finally to catch on to their dirty dealings—but the players were more or less the same and the institutionalized contempt for humankind and natural places remained intact.

She looked at me suddenly. “But let's not stray too far off topic.”

“I wasn't trying to.”

“I recall, I was reading you the riot act.”

“Just getting started, probably.”

“Keen as always,” she said. “Let's get the obvious thing out of the way. You lied to me about what happened to you the other day. Your injuries.”

“I did, and I feel bad about it, too. I felt bad while I was doing it. But I didn't want you to worry, and I didn't want you to think I was crazy.”

“And now I'm doing both.”

“Well, it's a fail then.”

“Pretty much,” she said. She sighed and thought a while. Then her head snapped up and her eyes widened.

“Oh my God. Anci.”

“Is safe,” I said. “Jeep's keeping an eye on her.”

She cocked her head. “Jeep?”

“Yes.”

“Jeep
Mabry
?”

“Yes.”

“The
psychopathic
Jeep Mabry?”

“He is not,” I said. I shrugged. “Borderline, maybe . . .”

“And what do you mean, looking after her? You sent him into the school?”

She was aghast, so I said quickly, “No, no. Not inside. He's, you know, outside, watching over everything.”

Well, that just made things worse. Peggy said, “Oh, dear God in merciful heaven. He's outside, lurking in the bushes?”

“I had to guess, I'd say he's in the empty field across the street. Better cover there.”

“Not helping.”

“Right. Sorry.”

She put her face in her hands. “Tell me he's not armed.”

I sat quietly for a spell. At last I said, “I won't tell you.”

“This gets better and better. I don't guess you geniuses gave any thought to what'll happen if he gets caught out there? People are a little paranoid these days about men with guns lurking around schools.”

I shook my head. “He won't get caught.” She was right, of course. Neither of us had thought of it.

Peggy looked at me for a long time. A small change was happening in her eyes, a fleck of dark light, like a flaw in the iris, and it was a change I didn't like. I could almost hear her starting to think of me as another of those adult mistakes we'd been talking about a couple nights earlier. What I was going to do, I'd have to do as quickly as possible.

Peggy was impatient for a resolution, too. She said, “I'm waiting to hear your plan, Bubba. And, for your sake, I hope it's a good one.”

“Maybe not good, but it might be the only way through this mess. Way I see it, if this Temple Beckett is right, and Roy Galligan really has dealt himself into the meth racket in some of these local mines, then none of us is safe until I convince him I'm out of his way and out of it for good. If he's dealt himself in with Jump Down and his team, convincing them is going to be tough and dangerous. These are the kind of people who deal with the discovery of mouse droppings by burning down the house. Measured steps are not their thing.” I paused and drank some coffee. Its general awfulness seemed to fit the occasion. “On the other hand, I can't go to Galligan just yet. There are too many unanswered questions, and Temple's suspicions aren't any kind of proof anyway. Accusing him of being a meth dealer without hard evidence is almost as dangerous as anything else. So basically I'm in the worst position of all. Everyone thinks I know
something
, when the truth is I don't know
anything
. I need more. I need something to trade. What is it you schoolteachers say? Knowledge is power.”

“Now you're just sucking up.”

“I thought it couldn't hurt.”

She said, “You're actually going to do it, aren't you? You are. You're out of your mind, you know that?”

“Maybe I am, but I don't think I have any choice. There's only one person who knows the truth about what's happening here, assuming he's still alive,” I said. “I've got to do what I was hired to do in the first place. I've got to find out what happened to Guy Beckett.”

T
he kitchen door banged open, and the snowbank moonlight came in, followed by men with guns. There were four of them, two big, two smaller. The big guys had shotguns. One of the little guys had a pistol, the other a hunting rifle. Even without the hardware, they looked like they meant business. I was eight years old. I'd had trouble sleeping in my bed of late, and had taken to stuffing myself between the pantry door and the radiator, where there was a warm little cubbyhole, when I couldn't sleep. I happened to be there that night, and it was dark in the kitchen so no one noticed me. The men waited there a moment and someone whispered and someone else shushed and then my father appeared in his robe.

“You're not here,” he told them. His anger was subdued, and I wondered whether the men were even able to hear it in his voice, but it jumped across the room and ran at me like a panther. I felt my knees draw tighter against my chest.

One of the big men moved closer to him, and close enough that I could see: it was my father's work partner, Cheezie Bruzetti. His head was stuffed into a hat too small, and his plump face was red from the bitter cold outside. His mittened hands wrapped thickly around what looked like a .410 bore lever-action with the loop cock, but the barrel of the gun was broken and rested at a lazy angle over his fat right shoulder.

He didn't respond directly to my father. He just said, “He says he's not the one.”

“He says that?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he would, wouldn't he?”

“We kinda believe him, though.”

My father said, “You didn't bring him here.”

There was a silence. One of the men coughed.

Finally, Cheezie said, “Outside.”

“Outside?”

“In the trunk.”

My father watched them a moment. He didn't move and they didn't move, but I could feel their fear swirling in the silver light, and then my father turned suddenly and went out of the room. One of the men farted nervously, and Cheezie snarled at him and said, “Christ, would you get yourself together?”

The man tried to get himself together, I guess. I don't know. I still couldn't see him very well. After a moment, my father came back, still in his robe, wearing rubber boots.

He said, “Okay.”

They went out. I don't know how long they were gone or how long I sat there, and I guess I should have snuck back up to my room, but moving seemed impossible, and so I stayed with my thoughts buzzing in my head until the door opened again and my father and Cheezie came back in with snow clumped on their feet and melting on their heads.

Cheezie said, “See?”

My father shook his head. He replied, “No, I don't see. Someone told them where we'd be and what we were doing, and it was him. You can be sure of it.”

“You're some kind of detective now?”

My father ignored him. “It was him. Probably they
promised him something. Job security. Or his pension. They like to hold that pension out there, see who bites. And he bit. The strike will last another six months because of him. People's children will go hungry. Take him where we talked about and leave him there. Throw your guns in the quarry. It's deep enough it won't be frozen tonight. Make sure they all throw them. I know Sacks won't want to.”

“It was his daddy's gun.”

“I don't care if it was his daddy himself. He throws it in or he goes in.”

Cheezie said, “I'll make sure.”

“Don't ever bring anyone to my home again. Not like that. My daughters are upstairs in their beds. Now get the hell out of here.”

Even after these hard words, they hugged each other briefly. This was war, but they were brothers and always would be. Cheezie turned and went out of the house again, leaving behind little silver pools of melt, and my father waited for him to go, then started back to bed. He paused in the doorway and sighed and, after a moment's reflection, turned and looked directly at me in my cubbyhole, and I was frozen.

He said, “It's a hard old world for some folks, boy. Don't ever forget.”

He went out and I heard his footfalls on the stairs and that's the last thing I remember.

T
he night Anci and I left Indian Vale, the first snow of the new season appeared. The moon showed its bright face over the edge of the cliff, but was quickly overtaken, and the sky soon turned silver and bright. The wind came up and yelped
at the world, and it was so cold even the grass shivered with it. That wind had come from someplace else, I thought, some place where they weren't having a spate of murders and missing photographers. I wanted to go there. Then again, maybe the wind came from the Missouri Bootheel. If that was the choice, I'd take the murders. You have to have standards.

We threw some things in our bags: clothes, shoes, books. Anci packed snacks and a few orange sodas. I packed Betsy. We loaded up the truck as quickly as possible and headed out. It wasn't exactly a full-on retreat, but it felt like sneaking away. I thought again of my father and of how the man named Deaton came to our house and how my father had refused to budge, and I even thought of Temple Beckett and how she'd declined to run. I told myself I was doing it for Anci, and mostly I was, but I'll admit, I was scared. I didn't feel safe until we were on the road and the Vale was being swallowed up by the night behind us.

Along the way, I explained what I could of it to Anci. Leaving her in the dark didn't seem fair, but I wanted to worry her as little as possible, so I trimmed off the sharp edges, at least best I was able.

She sat quietly listening as the dark miles blurred by. She turned it over quietly for a time, then said, “So it's got to do with your work?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“And you did this for me?”

“Well, a lot of it, yeah, but I also did it for me and even for Peggy, too.”

“Because we're family,” she said, with a certainty and determination that made me proud.

“That's right. And family has to stick together when the times get tough.”

She nodded. I could just feel her thinking about family, and I knew where her mind was going even before she spoke again. “You know, if you're in trouble you could always . . .”

“No.”

“Well, you could if you wanted to.”

“Not in this lifetime, sweat pea. Besides, Peggy will help. And your Uncle Jeep and Aunt Opal. There's no need to bring anyone else into it. He wouldn't want to help anyway.”

“How long's it been since you went to see him?”

“Since the last time he told me to stop coming.”

Anci shook her head. She looked at the spider shapes the cold was making on the window glass.

She said, “Some people just don't want to be happy.” But I wasn't sure anymore who she meant.

T
hat was a tough night. We spent the next several hours fighting actual spiders at the Pin Oak Lodge on 13. You'd think the cold would have killed them, but the Pin Oak is a special place—terrible but inside our budget—and apparently the conditions there bred some kind of super bug. Neither of us slept soundly, and after a while I gave up trying. I lay there listening to the sound of my own thoughts as long as I could stand them, then got up quietly and dug around in Anci's bag until I found one of her books. I climbed back into bed to follow the further adventures of the virgin vampire club. Except there were werewolves, too. Everything but a Karloff mummy, but maybe he showed up in the sequel. Anci and I had read a good piece of this one together a while ago. Back then I couldn't stand the thing, but at one
in the morning pretty much anything is entertaining, and I ended up finishing the story and worrying over how the sequel was going to turn out. Maybe Anci had already read it. I couldn't remember.

I returned to her bag and dug around some more. In a zipper pocket were some letters from her mother I didn't know about, and I took them out and held them, and even the sight of her handwriting made me wince a bit. The return address was roughly where I figured it'd be, and the paper looked homemade. The fact that they were paper letters in the first place made me think she was some place off the grid, some place where smartphones and computers and the like aren't tolerated or just don't work. I don't think I'm an intrusive parent or much of a snoop, but I admit I thought about reading them. I wondered why I spent so much time searching for the missing. The abandoned are always searching for something, maybe.

Finally, I put the letters away again and zipped shut the pocket. We'd talk about it later, maybe, or I'd wait for Anci to mention it to me. I went back to digging in the bag and was surprised again to find some Nevada Barr novels I didn't know she had. Anci grunted and rolled over to face me, and I tried to be happy about my discovery to her, but she didn't want happy and instead said a dirty word at me and threw a shoe. I took
Winter Study
and the feel of those letters in my hand back to my bed to wait out the dark, which somehow seemed deeper and more lonesome than before.

Sometime around 3:30, Anci woke up screaming. I thought at first it was a nightmare, but she said she'd felt something crawling on her leg.

“Another spider?” I asked.

“Not unless it was a spider as big as your hat.”

I thought it had to be a rodent of some kind, but, sure enough, it was a spider as big as your hat. A real monster. I swatted at it, but it was too quick for me. It skittered off the bed and onto the wall. Anci screamed again, louder this time, and the shitkicker in the next unit pounded on the connecting door and said some pretty raw stuff. Well, I was tired and out of sorts, and pretty soon I was talking back, and then we were in the parking lot face-to-face, like a manager and umpire in a baseball game. The poor dope who lived on-site got dragged into it, and finally someone offered to call the police. Rather than risk another run-in with Wince, I checked us out and got on out of there.

“Lovely,” Anci said, but she was too mad at me to say more.

I offered to take us someplace else, but by then we were both awake and hungry, so we drove up Interstate 57 to a truck stop I knew to be open at that hour and grabbed some food and coffee. Anyway, I had coffee. Anci had juice. We both shoveled down big plates of scrambled eggs covered in Day-Glo cheese and slices of toast that seemed to have been salvaged from a fire. Still, we were grateful and finished our plates.

When the sun finally came up, it broke through the silver sky, and the snow vanished like a passing memory. Anci cleaned up in the truck stop bathroom, and I drove her to school. I kissed her and promised to be waiting when she got out. I watched her go inside. I dialed Jeep Mabry and made our arrangements. Then I started the truck and headed off to find the house that Mays built.

C
rainville is just north of Crab Orchard Lake, but Mays's place was north and east of that a piece, off County Road 16 in a spot near Hurricane Cemetery. It was a lonely plot in a lonely patch near a lonely stretch of road where most of the motor traffic belonged to the little farms down the hill. I drove out that way and found a quiet place to park. I got out and unlocked the case I'd stowed Betsy in and walked the half mile or so to the house. If the cops were still there, I'd stuff Betsy up my shirt and just keep strolling on by. If by some odd chance Wince was there and spotted me, I'd probably get to take a ride in a squad car.

The cops weren't there. No one was there. Maybe they'd all gotten depressed and gone home. This was a sorrowful sight, though “sorrowful” might not capture the sense of it. Stephen King would have rejected it as implausibly dreary and ominous. The little bungalow nestled down inside a swampy little hollow, like a tick buried in an armpit. It was basically a pile of concrete blocks and dirt. Mostly dirt. Rust had eaten the flashing, and the roof sagged like a wet paper towel. You could have knocked the whole thing over with a dirty look and a hard word. There was a motorcycle there—parts of a motorcycle, anyway—but it had fallen against one of the porch posts and partially collapsed the overhang. There was a dead possum in the yard. Someone had shot him and left him there, and the rains had washed his bloody spot pale pink. I didn't have the first idea what to make of that. I'd brought along some tools from the Vale—thinking to dismantle a lock, if need be—but I've had harder times opening bags of bread, and the door opened easily and let me inside.

Inside . . . oh, boy. The cramped living room stank like a cesspool of stale beer, two troubled lifetimes of cigarette smoke, and almost enough mildew to cover both. Someone had left open the western-facing window for, I don't know, four or five years, and some brittle-looking vines had grown through and curled up on the floor to die. The short-haired brown carpets were filthy and worn through to the subfloor, and the mismatched furniture was draped with months' worth of dust. Had I gotten the address wrong? I took out my phone and dialed Temple's number.

“You're sure this is the place?” I asked Susan when she answered. I gave her the house number.

“I tried to warn you,” she said. “It's something, isn't it?”

“It's like home design by William Castle.”

“Mays's ethics were the only spotless thing about him. The man was a pig.”

“Question is, why would Beckett agree to stay in a place like this?”

“Some people could live in anything.”

“There you go with the past tense again.”

“I'm a past-tense kind of person,” she said, and she hung up on me.

I gave the living room a good going-over. I didn't know what I was looking for, exactly, but on television they were always searching rooms for clues. I looked under the throw rug but found only some flattened dust bunnies and tragic palmetto bugs. I searched the pressboard shelves but turned up nothing but porno DVDs and a few trashy thrillers. Finally, in a fit of desperation, I reached under the couch and came out with a handful of dirty underwear. I spent a long moment contemplating amputating that hand.