Lake Charles (25 page)
I shook off Herzog offensive hand.
“I just bet you do.” The hulking Mr. Kuzawa had sealed off the driver side door, pincering Herzog between us.
“Kuzawa, do you mind?”
“Matter of fact, I do mind. A lot.”
Herzog sighed. “We’re holding a privileged attorney-client discussion.”
“No, I fired you.” The snarl coarsened my voice.
“Uh, Brendan. Will this turn nasty?”
Her simple question startled me. I swiveled my head to her. I’d never seen a person turn so ashen. “You better go wait behind the pump house because our picnic is almost finished.”
Mr. Kuzawa added his instructions. “Watch for the corn snake and stick your fingers in your ears.”
“Snakes don’t scare me,” said Alicia, doddering off down the slate chip footpath. “But hearing loud noises do.”
“Say, what is this?” Herzog heeled up his doughy palms at me. “You can’t just dismiss me as your attorney. Your trial is too soon for a different one to get up to speed on your case.”
“My trial is a sham. How many jurors have Sizemore bought off like he did you?”
“What? Do you think I’d accept a bribe to throw your case? That’s an outrageous insult.”
I let the cold silence stretching out speak for me.
After a bit, Mr. Kuzawa, his eyes on the footpath, said, “Alicia has made it to behind the pump house.”
“What’s gotten into you, Brendan?” said Herzog.
“You’re Sizemore’s boy,” I replied.
“That’s why he laid the lumber on us at the mansion,” said Mr. Kuzawa. “He knew we were en route since you tipped him off at the store while getting your gloves.”
“Untrue.” Herzog grabbed at a straw. “The shots were fired at me, too.”
“Really? You were a straggler,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“You told me to stay behind you.”
“You’ve never been behind us,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“How much? What is nailing my ass worth?” I asked.
“Thirty ducats of silver, eh, Judas?” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“Judas? Me? You’re off base. I’ve never took one dime.”
Mr. Kuzawa snorted in bitter derision. “Business is bad. You’re hard up to take anybody’s dime, dirty or not.”
“Some cash flow difficulties have hit my office.”
How had he clued in Sizemore from the store? Snap. The way occurred to me. “Give me that damn thing.” I stripped the game pouch off Herzog’s shoulder and his grabby fingers. I dug under the flap, and an expensive handheld radio came out from it. The pilot lights behind my eyes whiffed out as my temper ran ice-cold. “Who did you blab to on this?”
“Dr. Smith now knows when to run his red ticks at Lake Charles.”
“Lame,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“This explains the tail job on us.” I rattled the handheld radio inches from Herzog’s nose. “Secret phone calls placed in motel rooms. Gloves fumbled in the woods. Snipers perched in mansions. The guilt wafts off you like stink off a skunk.”
“You’d better come clean with us, lawyer.”
“I deny it all,” said Herzog in a huff. “Ridiculous.”
I didn’t think twice. The .44 blammed. Its recoil snapped my wrist. Herzog squawked, and his hands clutched his uninjured knee. I’d missed him on purpose—a scare tactic. My slug lay embedded in the cab seat, just nicking him like the round had grazed my ribs. The acrid gun smoke replaced his Aqua Velva smell. I hoped he didn’t go into shock—I still had to ask my harder questions.
“Spill your guts.” Mr. Kuzawa’s .44 lifted like a chalice. “Or I’ll do it for you.”
The horror to our violence trumped any loyalty in Herzog left for Sizemore. Herzog gargled out his half-intelligible words. “What do you want to know?”
“You’re a spy. Sizemore bribed you after I made bail.”
“Okay, yeah … sort of.”
“Sizemore framed me for Ashleigh’s murder.”
“I don’t know … really, I don’t.”
“Plausible enough, Brendan.” The bore to Mr. Kuzawa’s .44 speared Herzog’s stubbly chin. “You better press on.”
“Sizemore grows the pot at Lake Charles.”
“Yeah, okay, he does that.”
“Edna saw it, and Sizemore grabbed her.”
“He told me as much.”
“Where is Edna? She better be okay.”
“Now that I don’t know.”
The growers’ campsite emerged from my dervish of thoughts, and I made a link. After Cobb died from the shot arrow, I hadn’t outfoxed myself. The spy I thought was hiding from me hadn’t been a phantom conjured by my grief-stricken mind. The spy was real, and I was looking at him.
“I get it now. You were the second man. I got a glimpse of you at the growers’ campsite spying on me. You bunked there when you arrived at Lake Charles, waiting for us to show at Lang’s Teahouse. You knew we were coming because I told you at Pete’s shop.”
“No, I never did that.”
Mr. Kuzawa gave Herzog a shove. “Can you turn any slimier?
“You bet he can. He watched the archer kill Cobb, I said.
Herzog wagged his head in emphatic denial. “No-no. I was never there.”
Mr. Kuzawa’s face contorted. “It’s curtains for the crooked lawyer.”
“Where is Edna?” I asked.
A hapless shrug was all Herzog could muster.
Anxiety over Edna’s strife diverted me as my sore gaze traveled out to the state road. Cat-quick, Mr. Kuzawa seized the screeching Herzog. When my eyes sliced back, Mr. Kuzawa had spilled Herzog on the turf, manhandled him to his knees, and stoved the .44’s stubby muzzle between his teeth clinking on the steel like fragile china.
“See you in the fires below, Judas.”
Herzog squawked, begging for mercy. “Don’t, don’t. Please—”
“Wasted breath, lawyer.”
Hollering, I lunged into the cab and clawed to grapple over the seat. “Wait! Quit!”
Too late. Mr. Kuzawa’s .44 thundered—
blam!
—and the expiring Herzog flumped over, sprawled like a sack of rice. Stepping away, Mr. Kuzawa chuckled as an escapee sprung from the lobotomy ward.
“Suicide. Damn. We lose more lawyers that way.”
“Are you fucking nuts?” The gunshot had left my ears ringing.
“Get a grip, Brendan. What’s done is done.”
I swallowed. Twice. “Christ … I guess it is then. Doctor it like it was a suicide. We’ll pick up Alicia and go on.”
“I’d deal him another slug, Cobb, but it’d jeopardize the fake suicide.”
Doubled over by the tailpipe, a supporting hand on the cab truck, I vomited the deviled eggs and rest. The taste of death—bitter as quinine pills—fouled my tongue and mouth. I hocked to spit but it was an indelible taste. Mr. Kuzawa strode around the cab truck’s front, and pawed my shoulder in a parental way.
“This isn’t so bad. Keep the faith.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Keep the faith.”
The experienced assassin marched back and staged the corpse just so, and we loaded into my cab truck. The horror tingled to the roots of my teeth. After hammering the gears into first, I edged out from the holly trees, stopped to collect Alicia quivering by the pump house, and we hit our stride again.
The cars stood stranded along the two-laner taking us to Umpire. The flaps to their empty gas tanks wedged out. There was a gas shortage on. I passed the bedraggled hitchhikers, but with no spare time, I couldn’t play the Good Samaritan and pick them up to fetch their gas.
Our conversation ran thin. The stoic Mr. Kuzawa showed no compunction or contriteness over his mobster-style execution of Herzog in the holly grove. I still heard the fatal gunshot and couldn’t believe what’d happened. My hands ached. Dirt track racers said they gripped the steering wheel hard enough to leave their palms bleeding. I didn’t want to see what the oily dampness was on mine. My eyes kept grazing the rearview mirror, but no demons hounded us, and Alicia’s cargo held fast. The risible irony of our safeguarding her new life while strewing the corpses throughout the Tennessee hill country wasn’t lost on me. Any end to this dementedness lay nowhere ahead in my view.
I put on the radio for background noise. A man with a cheesy British accent advertised his proven system to make you a real estate mogul. After all, his system had enriched him. I mulled over why then he had to plug his book if he already lived as a king. Mr. Kuzawa reached over and killed the radio. Alicia shifted between us. Every mile registered on my odometer was a tenser and closer one to Umpire.
* * *
On the outskirts of Umpire, the rumbling earthmovers and scurrying hardhats rushed to build our new shopping plaza across from the trailer park. Edna’s disappearance and Cobb’s murder cast a sullen pall over my homecoming. My stomach wall lurched, but I swallowed the upsurges of bile. By the next curve, I drew in a lungful of the greasy smoke—the fires now ravaged our wind-scoured ridges. Every eastern Tennessee hamlet, it seemed, was burning. Was Armageddon’s promised havoc at hand? If so, it suited my dark mood.
Alicia strained to clear her throat. “My grandparents just retired and moved to Umpire.”
Mr. Kuzawa kept his surly quiet, and I nodded at her. “Did they now?”
“They just rave at how soul-stirring these mountains can be.”
Mr. Kuzawa cared nothing of the local scenery. “Who’s the daddy of your kid, Alicia?”
“Oh. Him. The last I heard, Kyle sold tires in Talladega,” she replied in a bleak monotone. “I haven’t seen him in months. It’s just as well. He and I weren’t in love.”
Mr. Kuzawa grunted his disapproval and hearing that irritated me. Before I could say anything, she went on.
“Dad threw me out, and the Arbogasts took me in. Strict Catholics, they don’t hold with abortion and help girls like me. Dad is still livid. I told him mistakes happen, but I sure won’t make a second one. My baby girl will go up for adoption.”
I felt Alicia’s shudder as she went on.
“Mr. Herzog said he was worried about me.”
“Uh-huh.” Mr. Kuzawa glared out the windshield. “That Judas sold us out. He’d stab anybody in the back if it made him an extra nickel.”
“Is Mr. Sizemore really that dangerous?”
Her avid eyes spurred me to nod. “He’s bad news. Stick near home until this thing can blow over. I’d give it a week or more.”
“Something else. Expunge us from your memory. If the cops ask, just play dumb with them,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“Got it. I never saw Mr. Herzog. My grandparents moved me in with them. They’ll go along with the story, I’m sure.”
“Dandy. Here’s something else. How you decide to lead your life is your business, but I’d ponder your unborn’s future. Then put yourself not in it. You’ll never get to enjoy any Kodak moments together like first communion, proms, and graduations. Do you follow what I’m saying? Over the long haul, you might come to regret and resent your decision if you make it without due thought.”
My clenched teeth pained my jaws. Here the hypocrite preached to her after we’d asked her to ignore Herzog’s brutish death at the wayside. I made a throat sound.
“Alicia isn’t a kid. She knows what’s best for her.”
“Just my two cents,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“Yeah and mine, too,” I said, testier.
“Hey, you both have given me good things to mull over.”
“Alicia, isn’t our turn just up ahead?” I asked.
It was. Her grandparent’s scaled-down cedar cabin with a slate roof anchored the end of a windy, gravel lane. As soon as I keyed off the engine, a tall, spare man still energetic in his late sixties, bounded out the front door. Mr. Kuzawa lifted her down, and she ran into the man’s embrace. Her grandfather, whose name I missed, lugged away the bassinet, and we made short order of unpacking her stuff. Her grandfather tried to reimburse me for the gas, a thoughtful gesture but I refused his money. He asked me if I was sure.
“Please don’t ruin our good deed.”
“Thanks for everything. Drive safe in all this smoke.”
“Did Alicia tell you about our situation?”
