“This was not a nice place for us yesterday,” I said as we sat in the car in front of the café. “We ordered food and ended up getting snookered.”
Johnny sat behind the wheel of the cruiser and grinned across the seat at me.
“Wasn’t that bad a day,” Johnny said. “Your dog ate a bad guy. Really, he ate a bad guy’s head. And you got to sleep in a nice comfortable room, and you aren’t being arrested or detained, and you’re getting your dog back, and you’re about to buy me a nice breakfast, so how bad could it be?”
“When you put it like that,” I said, “not bad.”
Johnny nodded at the café.
“Place is all right, it’s the owner that sucks shit through a straw.”
“Professor,” I said.
“Yep. He’s not the actual on-paper owner, but he’s the owner. Got money invested, got a deal made with the lady who owns it on paper. He could sink her anytime he wants, so she toes the line. Deal he has with her pretty much goes like a lot of deals he has in town. You get to do what you want until he don’t want you to do it anymore.”
“What we heard,” I said.
“A hungry black man like myself comes through, they’ll feed him at the café, but a black man won’t work here, and he won’t own businesses in town or buy property. No new ones, anyway. And Professor prefers you not be supportive of the black people already here, most of them living in what we can politely call a collective spot on the far side of town. Plan is, Professor is going to gradually lily-white this place. Which is why Delf hired black officers on the force, to not have the town completely in his sweaty palm.”
“That’s also how we heard it,” Leonard said.
“People here, hell, most of them moved on from all that real hard-core racist shit years ago. Thing is, they got to live in this town, so they are sometimes what I like to refer to as overly cooperative with Professor. They like black people individually, it’s when they start thinking of them as a group that things get shitty. They seem to think all black folks are on welfare except the ones they know and like. Or they’re doping it up or committing crimes. Let’s go inside. I want Professor to hear that two brothers were in here today along with one white asshole, and who knows, tomorrow there may be four, then eight brothers. I like to think that kind of stuff keeps Professor pissed.”
“Good enough reason to eat here,” Leonard said.
“By the way,” Johnny said, “Sharon will not be serving today. She has a few things to answer for, and maybe for some time, and she’ll be answering at the jail. We are not being as nice to her as we were to you. She’s still in a cell and she will be having a very cheap breakfast. Has all the nutrients necessary, though. We are not savages.”
“What about Professor and George?” I said.
“Chief is talking to them, plans to talk to his own brothers as well. Chief’s all right. Full of shit a lot of the time, but aren’t we all?”
“And the twins?” I said.
“Nothing to talk to them about right now,” he said.
Johnny got out of the car, and we followed.
Inside, a couple folks gave us the look, but most went about their business, filling their bellies before they headed to work. Johnny smiled and nodded at a few of them. No one called him names or burned a cross.
We found a booth at the side, the one Sharon claimed Jackrabbit occupied when she came in and ordered tea and a salad and left small tips.
A very tired-looking older lady with dyed-black hair who walked like a pirate with a peg leg waited on us. She wasn’t chatty, but she was efficient. She took our orders and went away.
“That lady right there,” Johnny said, referring to our waitress. “She works two jobs to take care of her kids. Husband ran off with some floozy and actually got run over by a bus, him and the floozy both. He had signed his insurance over to the floozy, and it ended up somehow that the floozy’s drunk-ass mother got it. Fifty thousand dollars to that piece of shit, an old hag that hadn’t worked at anything more than fifteen minutes in her life, and that fifteen minutes she was most likely trying to con some poor retard out of a dollar. And his wife, the waitress here, she didn’t even get his best wishes or a finger up the ass. Woman like that works hard to take care of her family. She’s like most of this town. Basically good.”
“Basically ain’t always enough,” Leonard said.
“I think this place can be as good as any,” Johnny said.
“Ain’t you the little optimist,” Leonard said. “You and Hap should get together for a sing-along.”
“I got hope,” Johnny said. “But I’m not foolish. Professor doesn’t get dug in too deep, there’s a chance. He does, it’s like a seed tick gets in your balls and you try to pull it out, and the head breaks off in you. That’s hard to get rid of.”
“Damn, now I’m really hungry,” Leonard said.
Actually, he was, and so was I. We ate and were on another round of coffee when Delf came in. He came over and sat by Johnny. He looked like he had been up all night.
“You want something to eat, Chief,” Johnny said, “they’re buying.”
“I’ll just have coffee…wait. You two are buying?”
“Looks like it,” I said.
“All right, then,” Delf said and summoned the waitress, gave her his order. “I’ll have coffee, steak and eggs, a side of toast.”
“You talk to Professor?” I asked.
“Him and George. They got nothing, of course. Said they talked to you two, that you were looking for Jackie and they didn’t have any information and that’s all there was to it. George said his dog is missing.”
“He ought to put out some flyers,” Leonard said, “maybe run a missing-doggy ad in the paper.”
“What I told him,” Delf said. “Johnny here explain our position on you two sticking your noses into our business?”
“I haven’t yet,” Johnny said. “Not really. But here it is in a nutshell. Don’t get caught. Otherwise, do what you have to do.”
“And if we do get caught?” I asked.
“Sucks to be you,” Delf said.
“It’s like that, is it?” Leonard said.
“That makes me nervous,” I said. “It has…how shall I say it? A scapegoat sound. What if we decide this job isn’t for us and we just get our dog and leave town?”
“That’s fine too, but if you decide to come back, and you will, remember the ground rules,” Delf said.
“What makes you think we’ll come back?” I said. “Folks who hired us, we’ve used their time and money up.”
“I don’t think the money matters all that much to you. You leave, you’ll be back.”
“How could you know?” I said.
“Because I remember how you were in high school, Hap. How you crossed the color line when it was obvious it would cause you grief. I didn’t do that, and I’m ashamed I didn’t. Saying you’re not a racist is not the same thing as living like you aren’t one. You leave, you’ll come back. Neither of you strike me as easy to get rid of, and I think now this is about more than finding a missing girl.”
“Don’t give us too much credit,” I said.
“Yeah, I start to think I’m being worked,” Leonard said, “all this highfalutin talk makes my nuts shrivel up. It has a bit too much of King Arthur and the Round Table to it. Like you think you’ll pull us in deeper than we are just so we can feel noble.”
“Is it working?” Delf said.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“By the way, called Chief Hanson in LaBorde,” Delf said. “Told him I knew you two, asked how you guys were back home, how you acted, asked about your character. He confirmed you both are assholes and hardheads but said he would trust you with his life but not to tell you.”
“But you just did,” I said.
“I can’t keep a secret,” Delf said.
27
We picked up Rex and drove back to LaBorde. Screw all that macho shit from Delf about how we’d be back
. We got paid for two days and we did two days. It wasn’t all that wonderful a couple days either, least not as far as our case went.
We arrived in LaBorde close to noon, parked in our office lot, opened up the car trunk where our luggage was. As Leonard prowled around in there, I saw the bicycle lady through the plate-glass window at the front of her business. She was still blond and pretty and she still liked to wear shorts. Really short shorts. She looked up and saw me and smiled.
I should add that I am noble of heart.
Leonard got the thumb drive out of his luggage and put it in his pocket. Rex stood with us, watching things carefully, as if he might be thinking about coming back to steal the car when we weren’t looking.
The three of us climbed the stairs to the office, and when we came in, Brett was behind the desk with her laptop open.
“Porn?” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “Well, almost. I been reading up on guys like Sebastian, people with his kind of inclinations. People who want to witness their own deaths. It’s fucked up. You boys seem to have brought a friend.”
“Yeah, he’s just hanging,” Leonard said.
There is a foldout couch in the office, and right then it was folded up and was just a couch. Leonard made a beeline for that, sat down. Rex jumped up on the couch beside him and put his head in Leonard’s lap.
“Cute,” Brett said. “Poor baby. He another rescue?”
“He is at that,” Leonard said. “Last night he ate a bad guy, chewed his head up like a Tootsie Roll.”
Brett stood up then and we embraced. I sat in a client chair and told her the entire story.
“Jesus,” she said. “You boys have had a couple of bad days. And the police chief thinks you’re coming back?”
“But we aren’t,” I said.
“Our lovely clients actually brought in some more money,” Brett said. “I feel guilty taking it if you aren’t going back.”
“They’re doing all right,” I said. “Got a nice truck. They could do with paying a little extra. I got hit by a chair.”
“I see the bruise on your noggin,” Brett said.
“Will this allow me sympathy sex later?” I said.
“One never knows,” she said. “Guys, I went to the address the Mulhaneys gave us and checked out where they lived. Patch of weeds outside of town with a trailer on it, and the trailer has one end burned off. Kitchen fire is my guess. They’ve put a tarp on that end to patch it, used lots of duct tape to hold it in place. The truck they have is better than that trailer.”
“Duct tape is underrated even by those who love it,” Leonard said. “Like a friend of mine, Eugene Frizzell, once said, you got duct tape, you can get to the moon. You know what, maybe the trailer burned up on one end because someone had one of those intense religious moments and burst into flames.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Brett said.
“It means don’t underrate duct tape,” Leonard said, scratching Rex’s hard head.
“So, we got more money, and you can afford to go back, or we can return their dough,” Brett said, “just claim the two days we got paid for. Tell them what you found out and call it a day. It’s nothing definitive, but it’s what you know.”
“I don’t like them,” Leonard said. “They’re not the first folks who’ve lived in bad trailers. I lived in a ragged one, right out of the military. I’ve lived in houses with walls so thin the wind stayed inside instead of out.”
“What do you think, Hap?” Brett said.
“Well, we did find something,” I said.
Leonard stretched out a bit on the couch so he could get his hand in his pocket and pull out the thumb drive. “We got this.”
I leaned out of my chair, took it from him, and gave it to Brett.
“That’s the one thing I hadn’t told you about yet,” I said, and then I told her how we had come by it.
“Damn, you boys have certainly cracked a few eggs,” she said.
She put the thumb drive in the laptop, and we waited.
“Nope,” she said. “Not happening. It’s coded.”
“Not surprised,” I said. “It may be nothing but personal porn or a pie recipe, but it may also be something more important, and it’s maybe what got Ace killed.”
“Still don’t think the people killed him were looking for that,” Leonard said. “Think their beef was with Ace himself. Followed him there, gave him the ax.”
We heard footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and Chance came in. She had her hair tied back and was wearing a loose shirt and jeans and slip-on tennis shoes. I thought she looked cute as the proverbial bug.
I got up and hugged her, and she went around behind the desk and hugged Brett.
“Don’t forget old Uncle Leonard,” Leonard said.
Chance went to the couch and hugged him. She gave the dog a pat.
“What’s his story?” she said, nodding at the dog.
“He’s a client,” Leonard said. “He lost his cat.”
“Ha-ha,” Chance said.
Leonard told the whole thing over again about how the dog was rescued, and then he told her about the case, all we had discovered.
“Oh yeah. Brett told me about the case,” Chance said. “I wish I could have been more involved, but I’ve been taking a couple of college courses, so I’ve only been working part part-time. And I’ve been taking care of Reba a lot.”
“That really shouldn’t be your job,” I said.
“Then whose job would it be?” Chance said. “She doesn’t have anyone. I’ve been making sure she goes to school. She’s smart as a whip, so she should go. She worries me, though. She said there was a little honky there she was going to pop a good one. I suggested she not do that.”
“Probably has it coming,” Leonard said.
“Agreed, but in time we may be hearing from child protective services,” Brett said. “Honky-popping could certainly get them called in.”
“She needs someone,” Chance said. “She’s like a little sister to me. She cusses worse than Dad and Leonard, though.”
By this time Chance had taken a seat in the other swivel client chair. She spun in a circle and came back around to face us.
“You go back, you going to push until something blows?” Chance said.
“If we were to go back,” I said, “that’s exactly what we’d do. It’s really all we know. But we don’t know we’re going back.”
“They’ll go back,” Brett said.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “We’re getting a little long in the tooth for the tough stuff. Divorce cases, sneaking around taking photos of some wife or husband doing the two-bear mambo, that’s starting to be more our style.”
“Damn right,” I said.
“They’ll go back,” Brett said.
28
That night, at home, getting ready for bed, Brett said, “So Jackie thought she could move between dimensions?”
“According to some,” I said. “I don’t know if she thought that or not. Sounds to me like she was speaking theoretically. Of course, maybe we can’t find her because she really did move into another dimension. She could be dead. She could be in Australia training kangaroos to dance the jitterbug.”
“They would be good at that,” Brett said.
“Thing is, everyone we talked to thought she was a little on the odd side, so maybe something to it, about her thinking something like that, thinking she could do it. And maybe she’s merely talking quantum physics to a bunch of knot heads who have a hard time believing in a calorie because they can’t see it.”
Brett was beside the bed, pulling a nightgown over her head. When she had it on, she slapped her ass. “I believe in calories, unfortunately.”
“You wear them beautifully,” I said.
We got in bed and covered up.
“Jamesway, he might have been able to at least carry on a conversation with her,” I said. “He seems like a bright guy.”
“What was
your take on him besides being bright?”
“Seemed all right, maybe someone using the bullshit of religion for good. To be honest, I liked him quite a bit, but man, he makes terrible coffee.”
I turned off the light.
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“You know.”
“I do?” Brett said.
“Yeah. You know. I decided to face it just now.”
“You and Leonard are going back,” she said.
“I know I am.”
“Then you know he is too.”
“Pretty much. Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t want you to go without him.”
“He wouldn’t want me to either,” I said.
29
Next morning I got dressed and called Leonard. Officer Carroll, aka Curt, picked up the phone.
“Hap,” he said.
“Leonard there?”
“I stole his phone. I’m in Puerto Rico.”
“I know better than that. Leonard can’t afford the roaming, and you can’t afford the trip.”
“Okay, he’s in the shower, which is a polite way of saying he’s taking a shit.”
“Have him call me, but wait until he’s good and finished. I don’t want him doing a half ass-wipe to hurry up and answer the phone.”
Officer Carroll chuckled.
About twenty minutes later Leonard called me back.
“That was one hell of a shit,” I said.
“Championship. I had burritos last night. We’re going back to Marvel Creek, aren’t we?”
“We are.”
“Good. I was going to call you and suggest just the same thing. I already got Rex boarded with some friends of Curt’s. I knew this was coming even when I said I didn’t know it was coming.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“I don’t like being ran out of a town, or ran out of most anywhere, for that matter, unless I’m ready to go. Hey. Curt is off for a couple of days. He’s going with us.”
“Him being LaBorde law, could that cause him problems?”
“I’m only going to let him get involved so far, but I think he could be a help. I think you’re slowing down a little, so I want some backup.”