Drift (3 page)

I like to think that deep down I’m not one of the true assholes in the world, but nothing brings it out in me like someone who is. So when he blasted me with his horn and pulled into the oncoming lane to pass me, I accelerated, too. And I smiled as I did it.

He accelerated even more, and so did I, laughing now. We were approaching a blind rise, and this guy started gunning it; so I did, too, probably doing seventy-five now. Sure, there might have been an eighteen-wheeler barreling up the other side of the hill, but probably not on my side of the road.

Twenty yards from the top of the hill, the Ford surged alongside me, but before he could pull ahead, he hit his brakes and swerved off the road to the left. As he bounced over a dirt field, kicking up a cloud of dust, the high suspension suddenly made sense. I took my foot off the accelerator, but still crested the hill with enough speed that my tires left the asphalt.

As it turned out, there was no eighteen-wheeler coming the other way. There was a police cruiser. And as I flew past it six inches off the ground, its lights began to flash. The driver’s side door said
DUNSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT
, and I thought, “At least I’m in the right town.”

The truck kept going, lurching back onto the road up ahead and roaring over the next rise.

I considered high-tailing it out of there, too, but I figured a high-speed chase with another police department wouldn’t be the smartest way to start my official suspension.

As I pulled over, I savored the moment of peace before the flashing lights on the cruiser reappeared over the hill behind me. The cruiser approached slowly, and even though I was already pulled over, the guy let his siren whoop once. Just to be a dick.

He looked close to sixty and he got out of the car slowly, like he was trying to look cool but was probably stiff from sitting on his butt all day. His mirrored aviators looked like they came from the Bad Cliché factory outlet.

As he approached the car, I took out my badge and lowered my window.

He looked down at me through his badass shades. “License and registration, please.” His nametag said
POLICE CHIEF PRUITT
.

I got the registration out of the glove compartment and pulled the license out of my wallet, making sure he saw my badge as I handed it to him.

“You know why I pulled you over?” he asked.

I figured it was for going airborne at three times the speed limit, but I didn’t want to get it wrong by being overly specific. “To give me a ticket?” I held my badge a little higher.

He looked down at it, taking his time and moving his tongue around in his mouth, like maybe part of his lunch was stuck in his teeth.

“Am I under arrest?” he asked dryly, nodding at the badge.

I laughed a little and shrugged. “No, I just—”

“Then put that away, and don’t let me see it in this town again.”

As he spoke, the black Ford reappeared slowly over the next hill and coasted toward us at a respectful fifteen miles an hour. Chief Pruitt waved for him to pass us and turned back to look at me as the truck crept by behind him with the windows down. The driver had a sweaty forehead, a piggish nose, and a big ugly grin on his big ugly face. He made sure I got a good look at his middle finger.

Chief Pruitt was still busy writing out the ticket. He seemed to be writing a lot. I gave the guy in the pickup a smile and a nod.

“You know,” I told Pruitt, “the reason I was driving the way I was, the guy in that pickup was trying to run me off the road. You probably saw him. Surprised you’re not giving him a ticket, too.”

He was quiet for a second as he finished writing the ticket. “I deal with assholes on a case-by-case basis,” he said as he tore off the ticket and handed it to me. “You drive safe now, you hear?”

5

The sun was sinking low by the time I found my parents’ street—Bayberry Road, not Burberry Lane. A few minutes later I pulled into the driveway next to their big old wooden farmhouse. The house sat on top of a small hill, and I paused on the wide front porch and looked around at the farmland spreading out around it. Split-rail fences on either side separated the property from a rolling mass of wild grasses on one side and rows of small, conical evergreen trees on the other. I smiled as the name came to me: Meade’s Christmas Tree Farm. I couldn’t remember anything about it, but I could hear my mom’s voice saying, “Something, something, something, Meade’s Christmas Tree Farm.”

Across the street was a smaller farmhouse. Behind it and to the left were fields with rows of vegetables, to the right a wash line ran across the yard, a pair of butterflies dancing with a bra and a few other scraps of clothing fluttering in the breeze. A wall of tall, dense trees seemed to mark the property line then turned abruptly and followed the road to the west.

Off to the east was a small mountain, hazy and green in the distance.

My face went hot as I put my key into the lock. Frank had given me the key after my mom’s funeral, and I remembered thinking that if he was planning on locking himself out, he might want a key buddy who lived a little closer. I had also thought that with my mom gone, it might be a while before I was out there again.

The house probably appeared the way it always did; I had never looked that closely. The feeling, though, was totally different. Even after my mother’s funeral, her warm presence had still been strong in the house. With Frank gone, too, the place just felt empty.

I put my bag on the living-room floor and walked through the dining room, the kitchen, Frank’s little office in the back. The steps creaked when I went upstairs, a couple of them loudly. On the second floor was a master bedroom, then another bedroom that was nominally my room, although it was full of boxes. In the back was a guest room that seemed somehow more lived-in than my room.

It all seemed tidy and neat and very, very strange. I hadn’t been there enough times to feel comfortable getting myself a glass of water. Now I owned the place.

Back in the living room, I sat on the sofa and listened to the quiet. My breath grew softer as the stillness of the house became part of me. I hadn’t thought about how I would spend the next twenty days, but it occurred to me then that maybe I’d just sit on that sofa.

I thought about finding a nearby watering hole, but it was Saturday night, and I didn’t need that. Instead, I grabbed a glass and a dusty half-full bottle of Irish whiskey from the liquor cabinet in the dining room, and went out onto the small back porch. Sitting on one of the weathered wooden rocking chairs, with my feet on the other one, I poured a couple of inches of whiskey.

The vegetable patch was dense and green, but the lowering sun threw an orange tinge over everything. The shade from the house looked bluish in comparison. A warm breeze slid by, then slid back, the air gently sloshing from side to side.

I closed my eyes and relaxed, enjoying the warmth of the booze on the inside and the air outside. When I opened my eyes, the shadow from the house had crept across the garden and was halfway up the side of the small, barnlike garage. I closed my eyes again, listening as the buzz and whine of the flying insects were replaced by the chirping of crickets. By the time I emptied the last of the bottle into my glass, it was nighttime.

Frank and my mom had said they loved it out here, but they were always complaining about something—Frank going on about the neighbors’ hedges, or my mom upset about some crazy Mexicans. She didn’t used to be like that, but I guess people change when they get old. I could never understand why they had moved out here in the first place—other than that Frank was crazy and my mom wanted him to be happy. Sitting here on the back porch, though, drinking into the night, for the first time, I could see the appeal.

6

When I woke up, the late afternoon sun was streaming full-strength into my room. It was the kind of sunlight that penetrates blankets and pillows and eyelids and skulls. Between the overindulgence the night before and exhaustion built up over several weeks, I wasn’t quite done with sleep, and I didn’t feel like I would ever be. But it was late afternoon, my stomach was growling, and apparently sleep was done with me.

I took four Advil from a bottle in the bathroom cabinet. I’d read that taking too much ibuprofen could kill you, but if my head stopped hurting, I was okay with it.

I found an empty can of coffee behind the boxes of herbal tea, but my panic faded into depression when I discovered a jar of instant coffee with a quarter-inch of brown crystals stuck to the bottom. I poured a couple inches of hot water into the jar and took it into the shower with me.

Ten minutes later I was feeling almost human, but as I was pulling on my pants, I sensed something was wrong. The quiet was gone. I grabbed my gun from the nightstand and listened from the top of the stairs to the ambient rustle of movement on the first floor. I crept down the stairs, keeping to the side and stepping over the seventh step and the eleventh; somehow I remembered that they were the loud ones.

The sound was coming from the dining room—a soft
whoosh
I knew but couldn’t place. As I crossed the living room, it stopped. After a silent count to three, I yelled, “Freeze,” and burst into the dining room with my gun two-handed in front of me.

The kid in the dining room let out a screech, but he froze. He was barely twenty, skinny, with a scraggly beard, wearing a T-shirt and jeans with sandals. He had a broom in one hand and an empty dustpan in the other. A cloud of dust was settling out of the air in a circle around him.

“Who are you?” I barked.

“Moose,” he whispered. “I work for your parents.”

I vaguely remembered them saying something about a guy named Moose helping out around the place, but this guy looked more like a mouse than a moose. “Bullshit,” I said, keeping my gun up and taking a step closer. “Who are you?”

“It’s Moose, Doyle,” he said, a little annoyed now. “We met at your mom’s funeral. I didn’t have the beard then.” He barely had a beard now, but he did look vaguely familiar.

When he realized I probably wasn’t going to shoot him, he seemed to relax. “Wow, Frank said you were wound tight.”

He leaned the broom against a wall. “Moose,” he said, holding out his hand.

I tucked the gun into the back of my pants and shook his hand.

“Doyle. Nice to meet you.”

“We met, remember?”

“Right.”

“Sorry about your loss. Your losses. Your folks were really nice people. I can’t believe they’re gone.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything.

“I was in Vermont, at a pest management workshop. I didn’t want to go, you know? This time of year, and so soon after your mom and all? But I got a scholarship. Frank insisted I go.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, I’m back now, so I can take care of the crops and everything.” He stooped to resweep up the dirt on the floor without making any sudden moves or taking his eyes off me.

“Crops?”

“I farm your folks’ garden, give them plenty of fresh produce. Mostly I work across the road, on Miss Watkins’s farm.”

“Oh.”

“You know, Miss Watkins, the lady across the road?”

I tried to remember a Miss Watkins from my mom’s funeral. No one stood out, but there’d been plenty of white-haired old ladies. I shook my head.

“You’ll like her,” he said. “She’s great. She’s got this organic farm business, growing all sorts of fancy stuff for restaurants and caterers and stuff. Purple this and miniature that. Heirloom stuff, not like the supermarket shelf-stable-for-two-years-but-tastes-like-Styrofoam stuff. It’s pretty cool.”

“Right.”

“She’s the one who called to tell me about Frank.” He looked at the floor as he said it, his eyes welling up. Then he fished a set of keys out of his pocket. “Um, here’s the key to Frank’s truck. There’s another key hanging in the kitchen. Your folks let me drive it …
used to
let me drive it.”

I raised my hands. “No, you can hold on to it for now.”

He nodded. “Thanks.”

We stood there awkwardly as he wiped each eye and snorted. I didn’t know if I was supposed to hug him or make a funny face or punch him in the arm. I had just met the guy, despite what he said, and I kind of wanted to be alone.

“So,” I said loudly after a couple of moments. “I was about to go into town, maybe get something to eat.”

“Sure,” he said, pulling up his T-shirt to wipe his eyes. “That would be great.”

7

As we drove through the cornfields toward town, Moose shared a torrent of details about the place, but he neglected to mention the massive dip in the middle of an intersection that nearly destroyed the undercarriage of my car.

“Oh, yeah,” he said after the fact. “Watch out for that.”

I slowed almost to a stop, and was glad I did, because a black Lincoln Escalade blew through the stop sign to our left and pulled out in front of us.

It was a big shiny thing, with lots of chrome, spinning rims, and a heavy bass beat. The passenger window was open and a face looked out at me with dead-looking pale gray eyes and an impressive collection of facial piercings. Our eyes met and he stared. I didn’t like him.

In my sternum, I could feel the thrum of the music. I assumed it was hip hop, but it was so distorted, it sounded like something you’d hear downstairs from a Greek wedding.

As the Escalade sped away, I resumed driving at a responsible speed, but I also took out my cell phone and punched in a number. Almost immediately, Danny Tennison answered.

“Hello, Detective Tennison,” I said.

“Hello, private citizen,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t take personal calls right now, but if you want to call back after six, I’d be happy to talk to you.”

“Fuck you.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“How’s it going?”

“Strangely quiet at work. And I’m already getting along better with my wife.”

“I knew you missed me.”

“How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay. Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Of course you do.”