Cripple Creek (8 page)

WE WERE SITTING to dinner the next night when the beeper went off and I went Shit! I'd forgotten I had the thing. Dropped
it on the little table inside the door when I got home the night before and hadn't thought of it since. There it sat as I'd
gone in to pull the day shift. There it still sat.

One of Miss Emily's babies was doing poorly when I got home. Seemed to be having difficulty breathing, muscle tone not good,
floppy head, dark muzzle. Miss Emily kept carrying it away from the shoebox and leaving it on the floor. I'd pick it up and
put it back, she'd carry it off again. Val came in and immediately scooped it up, rummaged through the medicine cabinet until
she found an old eyedropper, cleaned out its mouth and throat, blew gently into its nose. Then she put it in her shirt pocket
"to warm." When she pulled it out a half hour later, it looked ready to take over the shoebox and take on all comers.

"Hmmm. Well, world peace for one. And I'm still working on bringing justice to the Justice Department." She smiled. "Possums
are easy. They're what I had for pets when I was growing up. You named these guys yet?"

It hadn't even occurred to me.

"Okay, then. That's Lonnie, that one's Bo, that one's Sam."

"The Chatmons."

"You have any idea how few people there are alive on this earth who would know that?"

"And the fourth one, odd man out, has to be Walter Vinson."

"Right again."

Wearing one of my T-shirts, J. T. emerged from the back room. "There's the problem with all you old folks," she said, "forever
going on about the great used-to-be."

"Old folks, huh?" Val said.

"Well, you have to admit he weighs down the demographics." The two of them hugged. "Good to see you again."

"Me too. Glad you found him—and in the nick of time, from what he tells me."

"Pure chance. Seems I'm always blundering into things without knowing what's going on."

"May be a family trait."

J. T. laughed. "We were just talking about that. . . . Came out all right in the end, anyway."

We'd assembled, quite naturally, in the kitchen, where Miss Emily watched us warily from her shoebox. Southerners are known
to dine sumptuously on possum.

I pulled a dish of cornbread out of the oven, along with a casserole of grits, cheese, and sausage. Turned the fire off under
a pot of greens after dropping in a dollop of bacon fat. Miss Emily and her brood were safe, for the moment.

"This food looks, I don't know," J. T. said, "weird?"

Val took the challenge. "This? This is nothing! Wait till he does the pig tails for you, or squirrels fried whole, with hollow
eye sockets staring up at you."

"Maybe I'll just have a beer."

But after a while her fork found its way into the mound of grits on her plate, then into the greens, just reconnoitering mind
you. Next thing you know, she's at the stove spooning up seconds.

"Plus most of chain-of-command is home asleep."

On the edge, yes. "And night's when the cockroaches come out." It was an old homily among lawmen, probably been around since
the praetorian guards. Hail Caesar, they say behind their lanterns. And here come the cockroaches.

"Right. So, like them, that's when I usually eat. Great steaming mounds of indigestible food at two in the morning. Rib-eye
steaks like shoe soles, potatoes with chemical gravy, caramelized burgers, vulcanized eggs."

"Food that sticks to your ribs," Val said, invoking a homily every bit as ancient.

"Blue flowers on the side?"

"That's the one."

"And it still turns out drinkable coffee?"

"Following a few rounds of bleach and baking soda, yeah—it was in storage a long time."

That's when the beeper went off.

Most phone service these days is automated, but in small towns like ours, operators are still in the thick of it. They dial
for the elderly or disadvantaged, do directory work, take emergency calls.

The number from the beeper was answered on the first ring.

"Sorry to disturb you, Deputy."

"That you, Mabel? Its what? eleven o'clock at night? You don't ever get off?"

"We don't have anyone on the switchboard after six, no money for it, they say. So emergency calls get routed to my home phone.
I tried the office first, just in case. No one there."

There wouldn't be. With my return, the retired boys from the barracks had flown. Lonnie and I were doing broken runs down
the field of days, passing the ball back and forth.

"It's Miss June. Called in saying there was trouble out to her place."

"I thought she was living with her parents."

"Nope. Moved into a little house out on Oriole, belonged to Steve and Dolly Warwick when they were alive. Now it's rented
out by their son."

"What kind of trouble are we talking, Mabel?"

"Break-in, I'd say, from the sound of it."

"Why didn't June call her father? He's still the sheriff."

"Can't say. They've had problems in the past—everyone knows that. But she specifically asked for you."

I took down the address such as it was, offered apologies to Val and J. T., Miss Emily and her progeny. I reminded J. T. that,
if a strange man showed up at the door, one who looked like he belonged here, then it was probably just my neighbor Nathan.

"You mean like one of the trees trying to fake its way inside?"

"He won't come inside, but yeah, that's Nathan."

June was sitting on the porch, bare feet hanging over and almost touching ground, as I pulled in. House was built in the thirties.
Floods being a regular part of life back then, houses were built high.

I climbed down from the Chariot but didn't advance, eyes from old habit sweeping windows, porch, and nearby trees, looking
for anything that didn't fit.

"You okay, June?"

"Fine." She dropped the few inches to the ground and stood. "Thanks for coming."

"You're welcome."

"Permission to come aboard."

"What?"

"That's what they're always saying in old movies, old books. Permission to come aboard."

As I started towards her she turned, went up the steps through the door and into the house. I found her just inside, surveying
the wreckage. Every drawer had been pulled and upended, cushions sliced into, chairs and tables and shelves broken apart,
lamps and appliances overturned.

"Funny thing about violation," she said. "Once it happens, somehow you expect it to keep on happening, you know? Like that's
how the world's going to work from now on." She turned to me. "Of course you know. Would you like a drink? I keep a bottle
of Scotch here for Dad."

I said sure, and she went off to the kitchen to get it.

"Mind if we go back outside?"

Nothing had changed out there. I sat beside her at the edge of the porch.

"When you were injured," I said after a while. "You were carrying a handgun."

"And you never asked why."

"Not till now."

Before, I'd never seen much of Lonnie in her. Now, as she ducked her head and looked off into the distance, I did.

"I had a teacher back in twelfth grade. Mr. Sacher. He'd lost both arms in the Korean war. He'd pick up the textbook between
the heels of the hands of stiff prosthetic arms and place it gently on the desk. We're all good at one thing, he told us over
and over. The problem lies in finding out what that one thing is.

"Mr. Sacher's thing was comedy. He'd get a bunch of us in the car and, eyes rolling in mock terror, throw up his hands. But
he'd be steering with his knees on the wheel. He'd bring in a guitar and make terrible efforts to play it.

"Mr. Sacher may have been right. The one thing J seem to be good at is picking bad men."

"This," I said, remembering the black eye she had tried to conceal, "wouldn't be the work of the guy you were with a year
or so back, would it?"

"No way. But thereVe been others."

"Any of them likely to have done this?"

"I don't think so."

"So maybe it was random."

We sat silently.

"Maybe you should give some thought to coming back to work."

"I don't . . . " I saw the change in her eyes. "You're right. Give me tomorrow to clean up this mess. I'll be in the day after.
Do me good to have something else to concentrate on."

"Great." Finishing my Scotch, I set the glass on the warped boards of the porch. Those boards looked as old and as untamed
as the trees about us. "Mabel said you asked for me."

"I did."

"How do you want to handle this?"

"There's not much to handle, is there?"

"There's Lonnie."

She nodded. "I thought you could talk to him, tell him what happened. I go to him with this, it'll be my fault. The losers
I hang out with. When am I going to learn. My misspent life."

"I'll talk to him, first thing in the morning."

"I appreciate it."

"Be good to have you back, June."

J. T. was sitting out on the porch when I got home. I settled beside her. Frogs called to one another down in the cypress
grove.

"Val gone?"

"Hour or so back."

"Feel up to helping a friend clean house?" I asked.

BACK WHEN I WORKED as a therapist, having acquired something of a reputation around Memphis, I tended to get the hard cases,
the ones no one else wanted. Referrals, they're called, like what Ambrose Bierce said about good advice—best thing you can
do is give it to someone else, quick. And for the most part these referrals proved a surly, deeply damaged lot, none of them
with much skill at or inclination towards communication, all of them leaning hard into the adaptive mechanisms that had kept
them going for so long but that were now, often in rather spectacular fashion, breaking down.

I was therefore somewhat surprised at Stan Bellison's calm demeanor. I knew little of him. He was, or had been, a prison guard,
and had suffered severe job-related trauma. The appointment came from the state authority.

Why are you here? is the usual, hoary first question, but this time I needn't ask it. Stan entered, sat in the chair across
from me, and, after introducing himself, said: "I'm here because I was held hostage."

Two inmates had, during workshop, dislodged a saw blade from its housing and, holding it against one guard's throat, taken
another—Stan, who tried to come to his fellow guard's aid— hostage. Sending everyone else away, the inmates had blockaded
themselves in the workshop and, when contacted, announced they would only speak to the governor. The first guard they released
as a gesture of goodwill. Stan, whom they referred to as Mr. Good Boy, they kept.

"You were a cop," Bellison said. Once again I remarked his ease.

"Not a very good one, I'm afraid."

"Then let's hope you're better as a therapist," he said, and laughed. "I don't want to be here, you know."

"Few do."

His eyes, meeting mine, were clear and steady.

Each day the inmates cut off a finger. The crisis went on eight days.

On the last, the lead inmate, one Billy Basil, stepped through the door to pick up a pizza left just outside, only to meet
a sniper's bullet. The governor hadn't come down from the capitol to parlay, but he had sent instructions.

"So then it was over, at least," I said. "The trauma, what they did to you, that'll be with you for a long time, of course."

"You don't understand," Stan Bellison told me. "The other inmate? His name was Kyle Beck. That last day, as he stood staring
at Billy's body in the open door, I came up behind him and gouged out his eyes with my thumbs."

He held up his hands. I saw the ragged stumps of what had been fingers. And the thumbs that remained.

" SHE'LL NEVER LEARN, will she?"

"That's what she said you'd say."

We were sitting on the bench outside Manny's Dollar $tore, where almost exactly a year ago Sarah Hazelwood and I had sat,
when her brother was murdered. Lonnie took a sip of coffee. A car passed down Main Street. Another car. A truck. He sipped
again. A light breeze stirred, nosing plastic bags, leaves, and food wrappers against our feet. "You still have that possum
you told me about?"

"Miss Emily. Yeah. Got a family now. Ugliest little things you can imagine."

Brett Davis came out of the store buttoning a new flannel shirt, deeply creased from being folded, over the one he already
wore.

"Lonnie. Mr. Turner."

"First purchase of the millennium, Brett?"

"Last one just plumb fell apart when Betty washed it. Says to me, Brett, you better come on out here, and she's holding up
a tangle of wet rags. Damn shame."

"For sure." Lonnie touched forefinger to forehead by way of saying good-bye. Brett climbed into his truck that always looked
to me like something that had been smashed flat and pumped back out, maybe with powerful magnets.

"June's right," Lonnie said after a while. "I've always blamed her, always turned things around in my mind so that they got
to be her fault. I don't know why."

"Disappointment, maybe. You expect as much from her as you do from yourself—and expect much the same things. We construct
these scenarios in our minds, how we want the world to be, then we kick at the traces when the world's not like that. We're
all different, Lonnie. Different strengths, different weaknesses."

"Don't know as I ever told you this before, but there's times I feel flat-out stupid around you. We talk, and you tell me
what I already know. Which has got to be the worst kind of stupid."

"It's all the training I've had."

"The hell it is."

With her there to hold down the fort, I decided to go visit Don Lee. He'd been transferred to the county hospital an hour
or so away.

He was off the respirator now. An oxygen cannula snaked across the bed to his nose. Water bubbled in the humidifier. IV bags,
some bloated, others near collapse, hung from poles. One of the poles held a barometer-like gadget that did double duty, registering
intercranial pressure and draining off fluid.

"He's intermittently conscious," a nurse told me, "about what we'd expect at this point. He's family? A friend?"

"My boss, actually." There was no reason to show her the badge but I did anyway. She said she was sorry, she'd be right outside
the door catching up on her charting, and left us alone.

I put my hand against Don Lee's there on the bed. His eyes opened, staring up at the ceiling's blankness.

"Turner?"

"I'm here, Don Lee."

"This is hard."

"I know."

I told him what went down in Memphis.

"Kind of let the beast out of the cage there, didn't you?"

"Guess I did, at that."

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I'm tired, really tired. . . . Why did someone stick an icepick in my head, Turner?"

"It's a monitor."

"Man-eater?"

"No, monitor."

"Big lizard you mean."

"Not really."

He seemed to be thinking that over.

"They keep telling me and I keep forgetting: June's okay, right?"

"She's fine. Back at work as of today."

I thought he'd fallen off again when he suddenly said, "You sure you don't want to be sheriff?"

"I'm sure."

"Smart move," he said.

I was backing the Chariot out of a visitor's space when the beeper went off. I sat looking at the number while a car and an
SUV roughly the size of a tank blared horns at me.

June.

I pulled back into the space, earning a middle-finger salute from the tank driver, and went to use the phone in the hospital
lobby.

"How's Don Lee?" June asked.

"Looking good. Still gonna be a while. So what's up?"

"Maybe nothing. Thelma called. From the diner? Said some guy was in there early this morning. Waiting in his car when they
came in to open, actually. Just ordered coffee. Then a little later—she and Gillie and Jay were setting up, of course, but
she swung by a time or two to check on him—he asked after you. Said he was an old friend."

Any old friends I was supposed to have, I probably didn't want to see.

"When Thelma said he should check in at the sheriff's office, he said well, he was just passing through, pressed for time.
Maybe he'd come back."

"Thelma say what he looked like?"

"Slight, dark skin and hair, wearing a suit, that was dark too, over a yellow knit shirt buttoned all the way up. Good shoes.
Thing was, Thelma said, he didn't ask the kind of questions you'd expect. Where you lived, what you did for a living, all
that. What he wanted to know was did you have a family, who your friends were."

"Thanks, June. He still around?"

"Got back in his car, Thelma said—a dark blue Mustang, I have the license number for you—and drove off in the direction of
the interstate."

"I'm on my way in. See you soon."

Half an hour later I pulled off the road onto the bluff just above Val's house. The old Ames place, as everyone still called
it. Val was up at the state police barracks doing her job, of course, but a dark blue Mustang sat in her drive.

I went down through stands of oak and pecan trees trellised with honeysuckle, through ankle-deep tides of kudzu, to the back
door opening onto the kitchen. No one locked doors here, and the kitchen would have no interest for him.

I also had the advantage of knowing the house and its wood floors. Focusing on creaks above, I followed his progress: master
bedroom, hallway, second and third bedrooms, bath. Then the tiny tucked-wing room probably meant for servants, and the hallway
again.

"You'd be Turner," he said from the top of the stairs.

One cool guy. Sure of himself and waiting to see which way the wind blew.

I put a round through one knee. He came tumbling down the stairs with left hand and drawn weapon bumping behind him, to the
base, where my foot pinned his wrist.

"Apologies first," I said. "You're obviously not one of the thick-neck boys. They wouldn't know subtlety if it ran over them,
then backed up and had another go."

"Contract," he said.

"Who's paying?"

"You know how it works. I can't tell you that."

I moved the snout of the Police Special vaguely in his direction, a sweeping motion. "Ankle or knee?"

I used Val's phone to call and tell June I was going to be a little later than I'd thought. Then I drove back to the hospital,
one of Val's sheets wrapped tight around my passenger's leg. There wasn't much vessel damage, but joints do get bloody. Ask
any orthopedic surgeon.

I was doing just that ("Case like this, we can rebuild the joint from the fragments, adding a bit of plastic here and there—
sometimes that's best, staying with the original—or we can replace the whole thing. The newest titanium appliances are remarkable")
when Val walked through the double doors.

"June called me."

I thanked the doctor and said I'd get back to him about cost, responsibility, and so on.

"Not a problem," he said. "Mr. Millikin had proof of insurance with him. He's fully covered. Says he wants to be the man of
steel. I've got to go finish a procedure up in OR—got interrupted to check him out. Then we'll have him brought up." Nodding
his leave-taking: "Sheriff. Ma'am."

In the basement we found a place to get coffee, not really a cafeteria, more a kind of commissary, and I walked her through
what had happened.

"So, what? He was going to hold me hostage?"

"Or worse. Beyond saying it's a contract, he won't talk."

"This ties in with what went down in Memphis."

I nodded.

"Going back in turn to Don Lee's arrest of what's-his-name— Judd Kurtz?"

"Right again."

"From what little I know about it, farming out enforcement work's not the way these people usually handle things."

"True enough. What I'm thinking is, given how it went down last time, they've elected for a low profile. Set it up so nothing
can be traced back to them."

Blowing across her coffee cup—absolutely superfluous, since the coffee was at best lukewarm—Val tracked a young woman's progress
down the line. An elaborate tattoo scored the nape of her neck. She wore studded boots and sniffed at everything she took
from narrow, glass-shuttered shelves. Most of it, she set back.

"These guys have the longest memories of all," Val said. "They've got wars that have been going on for centuries. Sooner or
later, they don't hear from their scout, they'll figure out it went wrong."

"We could send them his head."

Having reached the register, the tattooed young woman stood beaming at the cashier as he spoke, waited, and spoke again. Then
the smile went away and she came back into motion.

"Just kidding," I said. "You're right. They'll wait a while, but they'll be back. Someone will."