Cripple Creek (11 page)

THE CICADAS WERE GONE. Val lost two cases, won another, went on the Internet to pull down tablatures of "Eighth of January"
and "Cluck Old Hen." The reek of magnolia was everywhere, and single-winged maple seeds coptered down on our heads—or was
that earlier? Lonnie resigned. "Thing is, Turner, I don't do it now, I'm never going to." Eldon had a new guitar, a Stella
with a pearloid fingerboard from the thirties in which someone had installed a pickup. "Not collectible anymore, but it still
has that great old sound." J. T. sat on the porch tapping feet, drinking ice tea, and saying maybe this time-off thing wasn't
so bad after all. Don Lee was out of the hospital, making the two-hour drive to Bentonville three days a week for rehab. He'd
tried coming back to work a few hours a day. Second week of it, June pulled me aside. He and I had a talk that afternoon.
I told him he was one of the best I'd ever worked with. But you don't have to do this anymore, I said. You know that, right?
He sat looking out the window, shaking his head. It's not that I don't want to, Turner, he said. With all that's happened,
I want to more than ever. I just don't know if I can.

No further foul winds came blowing down out of Memphis.

Patently, I was an alarmist.

Everyone in town knew what happened up there in the hills, of course, and reactions were mixed, long-bred suspicion of outsiders,
youth, and those demonstrably different tripping tight on the heels of declarations of What a shame about that boy! When the
funeral came round, Isaiah Stillman and his group filed down from their camp, sat quietly through the ceremony, then got up
quietly and left. More than a dozen townspeople also attended.

When Val told me she was thinking about quitting her job, I said she was too damned young for a midlife crisis.

"Eldon's asked me to go on the road with him."

"What, covering the latest pap out of Nashville? How proud I am to be a redneck, God bless the U.S.A.?"

"Quite the opposite, actually. He's bought a trailer, plans on living in it, travelling from one folk or bluegrass festival
to the next, playing traditional music."

Buy an eighty-year-old guitar, that's the sort of thing that can happen to you, I guess. Suddenly you're no longer satisfied
working roadhouses for a living.

"You've no idea how many there are," Val said. "I know I didn't. Hundreds of them, all across the country. We'd be doing old-time.
Ballads, mountain music, Carter Family songs."

No doubt they'd be an arresting act. Black R&B man out of the inner city, white banjo player with a law degree from Tulane.
Joined to remind America of its heritage.

"I wouldn't expect to take the Whyte Laydie, of course."

"You should, it's yours. My grandfather would be pleased to know that it's still being played."

"And how very much it's revered?"

"He might have some trouble getting his head around that. Back then, he most likely ordered it from the local general store,
paid a dollar or two a week on it. Instruments were tools, like spades or frying pans. Something to help people get by."

We were out on the porch, me leaning against the wall, Val with feet hanging off the side. Bright white moon above. Insects
beating away at screens and exposed skin.

Val said, "I'd never have come to this place in my life without you, you know."

"Right."

"I mean it."

I sat beside her. She took my hand.

"You have no idea how well you fit in here, do you? Or how many people love you?"

"This is not just something you're thinking about, then."

She shook her head.

"I'll miss you."

Leaning against me there in the moonlight, she asked, "Do I really need to say anything about that?"

No.

She stood. "I'm going to spend the last few days at the house shutting it down. Who knows, maybe someday I'll actually complete
the restoration."

I saw her to the Volvo and returned to my vigil on the porch, soon became aware of a presence close by. The screen door banged
gently shut behind her as J. T. stepped out.

"She told you, huh?"

"A heads-up would have been good."

"Val asked me not to say anything. I don't think she was sure, herself, right up till now. Amazing moon." She had a bottle
of Corona and passed it to me. I took a swig. "Talked to my lieutenant today."

Hardly a surprise. The department was calling daily in its effort to lure her back. Demands had given way to entreaty, appeals
to her loyalty, barely disguised bribes, promises of promotion.

"Be leaving soon, then?"

"Not exactly." She finished the beer and set the bottle on the floorboards. "You didn't want the sheriff's position, right?"

"Lonnie's job? No way."

"Good. Because I met with Mayor Sims today, and I took it."

OBVIOUSLY IT WAS MY TIME for surprises. And for mixed feelings. Wounded at the thought of Val's departure, nonetheless I was
pleased that she'd be doing what she most loved. The two emotions rode a teeter-totter, one rising, the other touching feet
to earth—before they reversed.

And J. T.? As my boss? Well . . .

I gave some thought to how she, city-bred and a city-trained officer, would fit in here. But then I remembered the way she
and Moira had sat together up in the hills and decided she'd do okay. It goes without saying how pleased I was that she'd
be around.

I was considerably less pleased when Miss Emily chewed a hole in the screen above the sink and took her brood out through
it.

Because I considered it a betrayal? Because it was yet another loss? Or simply because I would miss them?

I was standing in the kitchen, staring at the hole in the screen, when J. T. swung by to see if I wanted to grab some dinner.
She had moved into a house on Mulberry, or, more precisely, into one room. The house had been empty a long time, and the rest
would take a while. But the price was right. Her monthly rent was about what a couple in the city might spend on a good dinner
out.

"They're wild animals, Dad, not pets. What, you expected her to leave a note?"

"You think she moved in just to be sure her offspring would be safe? Knowing all along she'd leave afterwards?"

"Somehow I doubt possums very often overplan things."

"I thought . . ." Shaking myself out of it: "I don't know what I thought."

"So. Dinner?"

"Not tonight. You mind?"

"Of course not."

Some time after she left, second bourbon slammed down and coffee brewing, the perfect response came to me: But we slept together,
you know, Miss Emily and I.

Rooting through stacks of CDs and tapes on shelves in the front room, I found what I was looking for.

It had been one of those drawling, seemingly endless Sunday afternoons in May. We'd grilled chicken and burgers earlier and
were dipping liberally, ad lib as Val kept insisting, into the cooler for beers, bolstering such excursions with chips, dip,
carrot sticks, and potato salad scooped finger-style from the bowl. Eldon sprang open the case on his Gibson, Val went inside
to get the Whyte Laydie, and they started playing. I'd recently had the cassette recorder out for something or another and
set it up on the windowsill in the kitchen. Just about where Miss Emily and crew went through.

"Keep on the Sunny Side," "White House Blues," "Frankie and Albert." No matter that lyrics got scrambled, faked, or lost completely,
the music kept its power.

"We should do this more often," Val said as they took a break. I'd left the recorder running.

"We should do this all the time." Eldon held up his jelly glass, half cranberry juice, half club soda, in salute. Only Val
and I were dipping into the cooler.

Soon enough they were back at it.

"Banks of the Ohio," "Soldier's Joy," "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels."

I left the tape going and went back out onto the porch. Just days ago I'd been thinking how full the house was. Now suddenly
everyone was gone. Even Miss Emily. Val and Eldon shifted into "Home on the Range," Eldon, playing slide on standard guitar,
doing the best he could to approximate Bob Kaai's Hawaiian steel.

Diving forward, I kicked the legs out from under the chair and he, positioned behind with the steel-wire garrote not quite
in place yet, went along, splayed across the chair's back. An awkward position. Before he had the chance to correct it, I
pivoted over and had an arm locked around his neck, alert to any further sound or signs of intrusion. The garrote, piano wire
with tape-wound wood handles, sat at porch's edge looking like a garden implement.

"Simple asphyxiation," Doc Oldham said an hour later.

I do remember pulling the arm in hard, asking if he was alone, getting no answer and asking again. Was he contract? Who sent
him? No response to those questions either. Then the awareness of his body limp beneath me.

"Man obviously didn't care to carry on a conversation with you," Doc Oldham said, grabbing hold of the windowsill to pull
himself erect with difficulty, tottering all the way up and tottering still once there. '"S that coffee I smell?"

"Used to be, anyway. Near dead as this guy by now's my guess."

"Hey, it's late at night and I'm a doctor. You think I'm so old I forgot my intern days? Bad burned coffee's diesel fuel for
us— what I love most. Next to a healthy slug of bourbon."

Meanwhile J. T. waited, coming to the realization that further black-and-whites would not be barreling up, that there were
no fingerprint people or crime lab investigators to call in, no watch commander to pass things off to. It was all on her.

She sat at the kitchen table. Doc nodded to her and said "Asphyxiation," poured his coffee and took the glass of bourbon I
handed him.

"Tough first day," I said.

"Technically I haven't even started."

"Hope you had a good dinner at least."

"Smothered chicken special."

"Guess homemaking only goes so far."

"Give me a break, I'm still trying to find the kitchen. Speaking of which, this coffee really sucks."

"Don't pay her any mind, Turner," Doc Oldham said, helping himself to a second cup. "It's delicious."

"I'm assuming there's no identification," J. T. said.

"These guys don't exactly carry passports. There's better than a thousand dollars in a money clip in his left pants pocket,
another thousand under a false insole in his shoe. A driver's license that looks like it was made yesterday."

"Which it probably was. So, we have no way to track where he might have been staying because there isn't any place to stay.
And with no bus terminals or airports—"

"No airports? What about Stanley Municipal? Crop duster to the stars."

"—there's no paper trail." She sipped coffee and made a face. "Nothing I know is of any help here."

"Something you learned in psychology classes?"

"From Eldon, actually. Spend hours practicing scales and learning songs, he said, then you get up there to play and none of
it matters. Where you begin and where you wind up have little to do with one another. Meanwhile we," I said, passing it over,
"do have this."

I gave her a moment.

"Thing you have to ask is, this is a pro, right? First to last he covers his tracks. That's what he does, how he lives. No
wallet, false ID if any at all, he's a ghost, a glimmer. So why does a stub from an airline ticket show up in his inside coat
pocket?"

"Carelessness?"

"Possible, sure. But how likely?"

I was, after all, patently an alarmist, possibly paranoid, a man known to have accused a possum of overplanning.

It was only the torn-off stub of a boarding pass and easily enough could have been overlooked. You glance at aisle and seat
number, stick it in your pocket just in case, find it there the next time you wear that coat.

But I wasn't running scales, I was up there on stage, playing. And judging from the light in J. T.'s eyes, she was too.

HIS NAME, or at least one of his names, was Marc Bruhn, and he'd come in on the redeye, nonstop, from Newark to Little Rock.
Ticket paid in cash, round trip, no flags, whistles, or bells. These guys play everything close to the vest. Extrapolating
arrival to service-desk time, despite false identification and despite Oxford, Mississippi, having been given as destination,
J. T. was able to track a car rental.

"That's the ringer, what got me onto him. Who the hell, if he's heading for Oxford, would fly into Little Rock rather than
Memphis?"

"Hey, he's from New Jersey, remember?"

We'd found the car under a copse of trees across the lake. There was a half-depleted six-pack of bottled water on the floorboard,
an untouched carton of Little Debbie cakes on the passenger seat, and a self-improvement tape in the player.

June was able to pull out previous transactions in the name of Marc Bruhn, Mark Brown, Matt Browen, and other likely cognates.
Newark International, JFK, and La Guardia; Gary, Indiana, and nearby Detroit; Oklahoma City, Dallas, Phoenix; Seattle, St.
Louis, L.A.

"That's it, that's as far as my reach goes."

But good as J. T. and June proved to be, Isaiah Stillman was better.

"You told me you managed a conservatorship via the Internet," I said on a visit that evening. "And that's how you put all
this together."

I told him about Bruhn, about the killings. We were dancing in place, I said, painting by numbers, since we were pretty sure
who sent him. But we hadn't been able to get past a handful of basic facts and suspicions.

"We take the individual's right to privacy and autonomy very seriously, Mr. Turner."

"I know."

"On the other hand, we're in your debt. And however we insist upon holding ourselves apart from it, this community is one
we've chosen to live in, which implies certain responsibilities."

Our eyes held, then his went to the trees about us: the rough ladder, the treehouse built for children to come.

"Excuse me."

Entering one of the lean-tos, he emerged with a laptop.

"Moira tells me Miss Emily left," he said.

"And Val."

"I don't see a printer."

"No problem, I can just zap it to your office, right?"

Could he? I had no idea.

"Now for the real fun. I'm putting in the name . . . commercial transactions we know about . . . the Jersey-New York list
. . . and a bunch of question marks. Like fishhooks." His fingers stopped. "Let's see what we catch."

Lines of what I assumed to be code snaked steadily down the screen. Nothing I could make any sense of.

"Here we go." Stillman hit a few more keys. "Looks as though your man advertises in a number of niche publications. Gun magazines,
adventure publications and the like. Not too smart of him."

"The smart criminals are all CEOs."

"No Internet presence that I can—" Stillman's hands flashed to the keyboard. "There's a watcher."

I shook my head.

"A sentinel, a special kind of firewall. The question marks I put in, the fishhooks—that was like opening up a gallery of
doors. We were entering one when the alarm triggered. I hit the panic button pretty quickly, so chances are good the watcher
never got a fix on me. Probably be best if I stayed offline a while, all the same." He shut the computer off and lowered the
lid. "Sorry. Have a cup of tea before you go?"

"I've been meaning to ask you about that."

"It went up the moment we moved in." He sipped his tea with that strange intensity he gave most everything—as though this
might be the last cup of tea he'd ever drink. "From my grandmother's life, like so much else."

Bending to lift the teapot off the ground (ceramic, thrown by Moira, lavender-glazed), he refilled our mugs.

Mind tumbling with thoughts of kindness and cruelty and the ravage of ideas, I struck out for my newly empty house, fully
confident of finding the way without a guide now, though once I could have sworn I saw Nathan off in the trees watching to
be sure I made it out all right. Imagined, of course. That same night I also thought I saw Miss Emily in the yard, which could
have been only the shadow of a limb: wind and moonlight in uneasy alliance to take on substance.