“It’s not exactly elegant transportation,” he said.
Wearing a leather coat with a plush rabbit-fur collar, petite and yet somehow seeming taller than Robbie, the sheriff’s wife said, “She sounds like she’s tip-top.”
“She’ll get you to Wisconsin and back easy. So you and Jolie are helping your mom’s sister move in with her?”
“Neither of them should be living alone. Mom refuses to come live with us, says Minnesota is one step removed from the far side of the moon. Of course they would decide they just have to do it now, with Luther driven off for the week in Iowa.”
“Visiting his old college buddies, huh?”
“They hang out every other year, doing guy stuff. Guys gone wild in sleepy Des Moines can’t get into any really big trouble.”
“Roger and Palmer,” Rob said. “He’s talked about them. But it’s usually a summer thing.”
“Palmer’s health isn’t so good. Better not wait till August.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Robbie, you’re a peach. Thank you so much for lending me the station wagon. My Toyota would be no good to move Aunt Tandy.”
He patted the flank of the Buick. “This is a big girl. She’ll get the job done. The radio works but there’s no GPS.”
“I don’t like that robot girl’s voice anyway. Sounds a little snotty.”
She kissed him on the cheek and got behind the wheel, and he closed the door for her. He watched her drive away, clouds of vapor billowing from the tailpipe in the crisp morning air.
He liked the sheriff’s wife and knew she was a good woman, not just good for Luther but good to the bone. Nevertheless, he wondered about the true reason she wanted to borrow the ’61 Buick and where she and her daughter Jolie were really going with it.
3
* * *
The Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas were worn low by millennia of weather. In the cool morning, the undulant road provided vistas of diminished mountains and deep hollows where mist pooled close to the ground and drifted like a memory of snow against slopes of pines and hardwoods, miles and miles of nearly uninhabited land.
Jane had been here once before. The single-lane oiled-dirt entry lay directly across the state route from a steep wall of dark rock veined with quartz that pulsed with early sun. She turned onto that narrow track, surrounded by such a tight arc of forest that she was essentially driving through a tunnel.
The kids had awakened. They sat yawning and blinking at the wilderness, where light penetrated the canopy in shafts of pinched diameter, as if the sun were stilting across the woods on countless poles. Luther followed her in the rental car.
Fifty yards from the paved road, the lane turned sharply right, bringing her to a gate made from three-inch-diameter pipe and fitted between steel posts set in concrete footings. The gate was even stronger than it looked, especially because the short approach prevented any vehicle from achieving enough speed to ram it.
No call box was provided for a visitor. The entrance to Otis Faucheur’s domain was always guarded, if not in an obvious fashion.
They waited at the gate for three minutes before their patience convinced the sentry that they understood the protocols and must have been here previously. Bushy-haired and bearded, he materialized out of shadows and a phosphorescent mist, like some satyr who lived within a tree’s heart but could manifest in the flesh at will.
He carried an automatic shotgun with an extended magazine. Under a roomy, untucked shirt, he would have access to at least a pistol and spare ammo for both weapons.
In addition to this man, there would be two others more heavily armed at other points in the nearby woods.
After openly studying both vehicles for a minute or more, the guard came around the front of the Ford to the driver’s door, as Jane put down the window. Surrounded by the dark mass of hair and beard, his face was sun-browned, his eyes as black and pitiless as those of a falcon.
“Ye ain’t ought to be here, ma’am.” His gaze slid to the girls in the backseat, to Harley, and again to Jane. “Nothin’ here for younguns like ’em.”
“I need to see Otis Faucheur.”
“Ain’t never heard of him.”
“If not for me, his son Dozier would be on death row.”
“Never heard of no Dozier, neither.”
“Call your boss. Tell him the girl with rattlesnake piss in her veins needs to see him. And don’t tell me he’s not up so early. He’s an insomniac, hasn’t slept more than three hours a night in years.”
Bent to the window, the sentry remained eye to eye with her for a long moment, then said, “Ain’t only me round about.”
“I figure I’m under at least two guns, not counting yours,” she said. “I’m not enough of a damn fool to try anything, even if that’s what I was here for, which it isn’t.”
He stepped off the road and out of the lines of fire the other guards maintained. He brought a Talkabout from under his shirt and conversed with someone in a voice too soft for her to hear.
“I think I want to be FBI,” Harley Higgins said.
“I don’t recommend it.”
“Well, I mean, I want to be like you.”
“Sweetie, you already are like me. We’re both on the run.”
The guard opened the gate with a remote and waved them through.
The forest continued lower through the hollow, until trees gave way to meadow. Otis Faucheur’s house stood foremost on the cleared land: a family-crafted two-story cedar residence long weathered to a gray that matched the fur of the English Shorthair cats Otis had kept until his third wife proved allergic to them.
After telling the kids to stay in the car, she got out and closed the door and stood listening to a silence rare in the modern world. Morning birds remarked on the day to one another, but their voices only emphasized the depth of the hush that otherwise lay on the land.
Other cedar houses stood farther back in the meadow, connected by the loop of oiled lane. The family-business buildings were hidden from aerial view, snugged in the woods. This must be the most stable criminal enterprise in the South, if not in the entire country.
The location seemed remote beyond most conveniences. There was electric power, however, because generations of friendly relations with the county’s political structure and key figures at the state level ensured not only that the Faucheurs wouldn’t be molested as they went about earning a living, but also that they would receive no less access to essential utilities than other taxpayers—though they never paid taxes. On the roof were three satellite dishes.
Otis awaited her in a rocking chair on the front porch. Sixty-five with a merry face, he must have paid graft to time as well, because the few soft folds in his countenance made it more pleasant than it otherwise might have been, and there was nothing in it to suggest he’d ever known a worry. He wore Hush Puppies, khakis, a white shirt buttoned to the throat, a black string tie, and a straw hat set square on his head. He rose partway from his chair and half bowed as she came up the porch steps.
There were only two chairs, a table between them, a glider at the farther end of the porch, and a couple pots of ivy hanging on chains from the ceiling.
Otis sat again when she settled in the chair beside his. “Girl, you sure done thrown yourself down a long stair of trouble.”
“I didn’t know you kept up with current events.”
“Keepin’ up with your events is like to wear a man my age down to a nub. I just dip in and out from your ongoin’ story.”
“Nothing’s what they say it is,” she assured him.
“Nothin’ never is. I’m wonderin’ why here, why me, why now?”
“I saved your son from life in prison, the death penalty.”
“Dozier never was no serial killer. They wronged him, you righted him by indirection. You never done it out of Christian love for Dozier. You was just doin’ what you do.”
“When he brought me here that time to meet you, he asked you to help me
like I was kin if ever the time came.”
“I got myself eleven sons and seven daughters. You go around savin’ ’em all, I can’t be spendin’ my life doin’ payback favors.”
“I’ll spare you that burden if we can do business just once.”
He picked up a tin of snuff from the little table between the chairs. “Take a peck?” When she declined, he tucked a pinch in one cheek. “You was here that time, I seen how you are. Remember how I says to you, whatever you done for Dozier, you’d like nothin’ more than squashin’ our pitiful little business.”
“Do you remember what I said to that?” she asked.
“Maybe if I think some on it.”
“I said you’re right. You make whatever drugs the market wants. You deal in bulk across the South. You ruin lives. You should be taken down hard. But I’m not a quarterback for lost causes. Say I referred you to the Drug Enforcement Agency, which I never did. But if I had, they would’ve come up against politicians who’d whack-a-mole for you until everyone gave up, and I’d be tagged as a crusader with no judgment about what can and can’t get done. That’s when you said I had rattlesnake piss for blood. I think it was a compliment.”
He had not been rocking in the rocking chair. Now he started. He stared out at the cars, where the faces of children pressed to the windows to get a look at him.
In time he said, “Who might be the big feller in the coupe?”
“He’s a sheriff up in Minnesota.”
“Sheriff, is he? The buyable kind?”
“You opening a northern branch?”
“Just wonderin’ how he is.”
“I don’t think there’s any price you could pay that he’d stoop low to pick up.”
“Yet here he be, off the rails with you.”
“Some of his friends and neighbors were killed in this event up there. He took it very hard. Even a lot harder than he realizes.”
Otis continued rocking.
The gathered pools of mist reached for the ascending sun with vaporous hands that withered away in the reaching.
“You mean the crazy woman done blowed up the gov’nor.”
“She wasn’t crazy the way you think.”
“I don’t think one way or t’other. It’s just what the news called her. They flang words around till nothin’ means anythin’.”
A small busy beetle scurried across the porch planks on some mission in its microworld.
“Fools what chop off heads, shoot up crowds in nightclubs. You ever think how maybe some in the gov’ment don’t mind a bit?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Keeps us little people distracted.”
Otis didn’t seem to be looking at the floor, but he abruptly brought the chair to a halt until the tiny beetle passed safely under the curved rocker rail, and then he began to move again.
“Distracted from what?” Jane asked.
He had not been looking at her since she’d sat down. Now he favored her with a twinkling glance and a half smile. “Like you don’t know from what. From they’s schemes and depravities.”
Otis turned his attention to the cars once more, and after a silence, Jane said, “What I need is some vehicle, old and beat up and pokey-looking, but white-lightning fast and reliable. No GPS.”
“You got to have yourself an outrunner. But they’s no car peddler in these parts.”
“Like you don’t have a fleet of them tarped among the trees.”
He shook his head, and a green-winged fly flew from the brim of his straw hat. “Girl, you tickle me.”
“I also need one of your people to drive that rental car back to the Louisville airport and drop it off.”
“That be where the sheriff rented it?”
“Yes.”
“Long way to Louisville.”
“It does me no good if the car disappears. And I need you to turn back the odometer so it looks as if he only drove it in and around Louisville.”
“You reckon I should fit her some new tires, change her oil, give her a washin’, slap on an I-love-Jesus bumper sticker?”
“Getting it back to Louisville is good enough. And there’s one more thing.”
“Just the one more, is it?”
“When your various children come of age, are you still sending them off to college?”
“Them that wants it. They’s a few don’t, no matter how hard you push ’em towards it.”
“Dozier writes software. He mentioned an older sister who’s a cardiologist, a brother who’s a clinical psychologist.”
“Don’t have no problem what a child wants to be, ’cept they got to swear a Lord’s oath never to go in politics. I don’t raise ’em up to get soiled with that.”
“Might one of your children be an architect?”
“That there’d be somethin’, wouldn’t it? A Faucheur spinnin’ places out his mind, then made real. Closest we come is a builder.”
“What kind of builder?”
“The kind what builds things.”
“By any chance is he in San Francisco?”
“By no chance. He’s down to San Diego, got a city by the tail there. Though he done work other places, including Frisco.”
“I’d like an address for him, a number.”
His blue-gray eyes seemed to have gone more gray than blue when he turned his head to study her. “So then you can pull him in your trouble with you?”
“You know I never would.”
“How come would I know that?”
“I could have gone to Dozier and asked about an architect. That way, I’d have found out about your builder. But that might have put two of them at risk.”
He made her meet his eyes for a long spell, and then he returned his attention to the cars. “Smart the way you come with them children in tow.”
“I didn’t have any choice.”
“What’s they’s story?”
“They’re orphans.”
“You make ’em that way?”
“No. I’m trying to get them to a place where they’ll be safe.”
He regarded her again, his stare like a flensing knife. “They wasn’t here, you’d be cold in the woods, a bullet in your pretty head, waitin’ for a grave to be dug. They’s a dead-shot rifleman got you in his sights since you come out the car.”
“That’s not who you are.”
“So now you know me better’n I know myself?”
“Not better. Just well enough. You’ll do this for me, but you want to scare me off ever coming back.”
“You need to think that way, you will. But it don’t say much for your common sense.”
“In payment for the outrunner and for taking the rental to Louisville, I can pay you twelve thousand dollars.”
Earlier, she had taken twenty thousand from the tote bag in the car and separated it into five packets.
“Twelve thousand?” He laughed and shook his head. “I don’t spit for twelve thousand.”
“I’m not asking you to spit. Fourteen thousand is my limit.”
“Twenty.”
“I have eight kids to take care of. It’s not all about you, Mr. Faucheur.”
He rolled his eyes and looked at the porch ceiling. “All sudden now, it’s Mr. Faucheur. If I told ’em how you are, they’s a world of people won’t believe a word. Eighteen thousand.”
”Fifteen thousand, five hundred. That’s it. No more.”
“For the outrunner and takin’ the rental to Louisville. So how much you have for my builder boy’s number?”
“You’ll need to throw that in as a courtesy.”
“A courtesy.”
“Yes.”
He took off his straw hat and smoothed his white hair and put the hat on again, which proved to be a prearranged signal.
A rifle shot cracked, and the nearer hanging pot shattered. Shards of terra-cotta and potting soil and tangles of ivy spilled onto the porch floor.
Jane sat staring at the mess, listening to echoes of the shot wash b
ack and forth in the hollow and reverberate in the surrounding forest.
When silence returned, she said, “You’ll still have to throw it in as a courtesy.”
“That there wasn’t part of negotiations. Just makin’ a point.”
She said, “All right, then.” She took four packets of hundred-dollar bills from the five that she’d stashed in her sport-coat pockets. She peeled five hundred off one packet and kept that and put the rest on the table between them.
He got up from his chair and looked down at her. “Dozier never should’ve brung you here that time. He knowed better. But he’s just that way.”
“He was grateful, that’s all. And proud of you.”
“You be quiet now, let me say my piece. They’s two reasons a blessed-pretty girl’s not waitin’ graveside in the woods. First, them children. But you come here again, children won’t count for nothin’. You’ll get put down for a long sleep with worms.”
He paused, and she said nothing, and her silence seemed to please him.
“They’s the other reason. You do so tickle me, I admit. Never knowed a one like you. But next time, bein’ who you are won’t buy you two minutes. Now, you go wait out the rental car. About half an hour, a young man gonna bring round your outrunner with paperwork says it’s yours. What name you want on that?”
“I’m not reaching for anything but a driver’s license with the information.”
“Go ahead, then.”
She took half a dozen driver’s licenses from an inner jacket pocket and stripped the rubber band off them and sorted through them and gave him one in the name of Melinda June Garlock of Riverside, California.
Leaving the money on the table, he went into the house.
As Jane got up from her rocking chair, a pretty woman of about forty came out of the front door.
Jane had met her a few years earlier, when Dozier had brought her to visit: Margot Faucheur, third wife and mother of the youngest generation that had not yet gone away to college.
“You all right, dear?” Margot asked.
“I’ve been better.”
Picking up the cash from the table, Margot said, “Oh, don’t go lettin’ that old bear scrape your nerves. He grumps but don’t bite.”