Last Night in Twisted River (49 page)

“I know,” Danny told him.

“It’s hard to imagine anyone out to get your dad,” Jimmy ventured. “I can’t conceive of someone having a score to settle with the cook. You want to tell me about that, Danny?” the cop asked.

Here was another intersection in the road, the writer thought. What were these junctions, where making a sharp-left or sharp-right turn from the previously chosen path presented a tempting possibility? Hadn’t there been an opportunity for Danny and his dad to go back to Twisted River, as if nothing had ever happened to Injun Jane? And of course there was the case of putting Paul Polcari back in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli with Ketchum’s single-shot 20-gauge—instead of putting someone back there who might have pulled the fucking trigger!

Well, wasn’t this another opportunity to escape the conundrum? Just tell Jimmy
everything!
About Injun Jane, about Carl and Six-Pack Pam—about the retired deputy with his long-barreled Colt .45, that fucking cowboy! Short of asking Ketchum to kill the bastard, what other way out was there? And Danny knew that if he or his dad asked Ketchum outright, Ketchum would kill the cowboy. The old logger hadn’t murdered Lucky Pinette in his bed with a stamping hammer; Lucky was probably asleep at the time, but the killer couldn’t have been Ketchum, or there would be nothing holding Ketchum back from killing Carl.

But all Danny said to his state-trooper friend was, “It’s about a woman. A long time ago, my dad was sleeping with a logging-camp constable’s girlfriend. Later, the camp constable became a county deputy sheriff—and when he found out what had happened to his girlfriend, he came looking for my dad. The deputy is retired now, but we have reason to believe he might still be looking—he’s crazy.”

“A crazy ex-cop … that’s not good,” Jimmy said.

“The former deputy sheriff is getting old—that’s the good part. He can’t keep looking much longer,” Danny told the trooper, who looked thoughtful; Jimmy also seemed suspicious.

There was more to the story, of course, and the state trooper probably could discern this in the writer’s atypically vague telling of the tale. (And what trouble could Danny have gotten into for killing a woman he mistook for a bear when he’d been a twelve-year-old?) But Danny didn’t say more about it, and Jimmy could tell that his friend was content to keep the matter to himself and his dad. Besides, there was a dead dog to deal with; the business at hand, giving Roland Drake a good talking-to, must have seemed more pressing to the state trooper.

“Have you got some of those large green garbage bags?” Jimmy asked. “I’ll take care of that dog for you. Why don’t you get a little sleep, Danny? We can talk more about the crazy old ex-cop when you want to.”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” Danny told his friend. Just like that, the writer was thinking, he’d driven past the intersection in the road. It hadn’t even been in the category of a decision, but now the cook and his son could only keep driving. And how old was the cowboy, anyway? Carl was the same age as Ketchum, who was the same age as Six-Pack Pam. The retired deputy sheriff was sixty-six, not too old to squeeze a trigger—not yet.

From his driveway, Danny watched the taillights of the state-police patrol car as Jimmy drove off on Hickory Ridge Road. It wouldn’t take the trooper long to get to Roland Drake’s driveway of abandoned vehicles, and Drake’s surviving husky-shepherd mix. Suddenly, it meant a lot to Danny to know what was going to happen when Jimmy brought the dead dog back to the asshole hippie. Would that really be the end of it? Was enough
ever
enough, or did the violence just perpetuate—that is, whenever something began violently?

Danny had to know. He got in his car and drove up Hickory Ridge Road until he spotted the trooper’s taillights flickering ahead of him; then Danny slowed down. He could no longer keep the squad car’s taillights in sight, but he kept following at a distance. Jimmy had probably seen Danny’s headlights, albeit briefly. Surely the state policeman would have known he was being followed; knowing Jimmy, he would have guessed it was Danny, too. But Danny knew that he didn’t need to
see
what happened when the trooper pulled into Roland Drake’s salvage yard of a driveway. The writer knew he needed only to be near enough to hear the shot, if there was a shot.

IT TURNED OUT THAT
Danny and his dad had more time than they knew, but they were wise not to count on it. They listened to Ketchum this time. For hadn’t Ketchum been right the last time? Vermont
wasn’t
far enough away from New Hampshire, as the old woodsman had told them. Would Dot and May have wandered into Mao’s, in Iowa City? Not likely. For that matter, Danny wondered whether anyone from Coos County ever would have found the cook and his son in Boulder, Colorado, where Joe would soon be going to school. Also unlikely, but the writer was persuaded not to take that chance, though leaving the country wouldn’t be easy—not the way Ketchum meant it, because the logger had something
permanent
in mind. (Ketchum also had an idea about
where.)

Ketchum had called the cook and his son, in the logger’s hungover or fragile sobriety of the morning following Dot and May’s calamitous visit to Avellino. Of course Ketchum phoned them individually, but it was irritating how the woodsman spoke to each of them as if both Danny and his dad were there.

“For thirteen years, the cowboy believed you two were in Toronto—because Carl thought that was where Angel was from, right? You
bet
I’m right!” Ketchum bellowed.

Dear God, the cook was thinking in his beloved kitchen at Avellino, where he’d made himself a very strong espresso and was wondering why Ketchum couldn’t resist shouting to make himself heard. According to Ketchum, Dot and May had sizably less imagination than a pinch of coon shit; while “the gossip-feeding bitches” would definitely tell the cowboy what they knew, they wouldn’t agree with each other about how to tell him, or when. Dot would be in favor of waiting until the retired deputy did something particularly obnoxious, or he was behaving in a superior fashion, whereas May would want to
insinuate
that she knew something—until Carl was crazy to know what it was. In short, the old broads’ habits of mean-spirited manipulation might buy Danny and his dad a little time.

On the phone to Danny, Ketchum was more exact: “Here’s the point, you two. Now that Carl knows you went to Boston, not Toronto—and he’ll know soon enough that you then went to Vermont—the cowboy would never believe that you’re in Toronto. That’s the last place he’d look—that’s where you should go! They speak English in Toronto. You’ve got a publisher there, don’t you, Danny? And I imagine there’s lots of jobs for a cook—something not Italian, Cookie, or I swear I’ll come shoot you myself!”

I’m not Cookie
, Danny almost said, but he just held the phone.

Toronto wasn’t such a bad idea, the writer Danny Angel was thinking, as he waited out the mounting hysteria of Ketchum’s phone call. Danny had been there on a book tour or two. It was a good city, he was thinking—to the degree that Danny thought about cities at all. (The cook was more of a city guy than his son.) Canada was a foreign country, thus satisfying Ketchum’s criterion, but Toronto was near enough to the States to make keeping in touch with Joe possible; Colorado would be easy to get to from Toronto. Of course, Danny wanted to know what Joe might think of the idea—not to mention what the cook thought of Ketchum’s suggestion.

After Ketchum ended his call to Danny, the writer’s telephone rang almost immediately. Naturally, it was Danny’s dad.

“There will be no peace while that lunatic has his own phone, Daniel,” the cook said to his son. “And if he ever gets a fax machine, we will be doomed to be addressed in capital letters and exclamation points for the rest of our lives.”

“But what do you think of Ketchum’s idea, Dad? What about Toronto?” Danny asked.

“I don’t care where we go—I’m just sorry to have dragged you into this. I was only trying to keep you
safe!”
his father said; then the cook started to cry. “I don’t want to go
anywhere,”
Tony Angel said. “I love it
here!”

“I know you do—I’m sorry, Pop. But we’ll be okay in Toronto—I know we will,” the writer told his father.

“I can’t ask Ketchum to kill Carl, Daniel—I just can’t do it,” the cook told his son.

“I know—I can’t ask him, either,” Danny said.

“You
do
have a publisher in Canada, don’t you, Daniel?” his dad asked. For the first time, Danny could hear something old—something approaching
elderly—
in his father’s voice. The cook was almost sixty, but what Danny had heard in his dad’s voice sounded older than that; he’d heard something more than anxious, something almost frail. “If you have a publisher in Toronto,” his father was saying, “I’m sure he’ll help us get settled in there, won’t he?”

“She—
my Canadian publisher is a
she,”
Danny told his dad. “I know she’ll help us, Pop—it’ll be easy there. And we’ll get a place in Colorado, where we can visit Joe—and Joe can come visit us. We don’t have to think of this move as necessarily
permanent—
not for a while, anyway. We’ll just see how we like it in Canada, okay?”

“Okay,” the cook said, but he was still crying.

I could leave Vermont
today
, the writer was thinking. Danny did not feel an attachment to his Putney property that nearly approximated his dad’s love of Avellino in Brattleboro, or his father’s life there. After Dot and May’s appearance in the restaurant—not to mention Roland Drake’s visit, and Drake’s dead dog on the dining-room table—Danny felt that he could leave Vermont forever, and never look back.

When Carl eventually encountered those bad old broads Dot and May, the cowboy would get to Vermont too late. With Armando and Mary DeSimone’s help, Danny had sold the Putney property by then; there was no writer’s compound remaining on Hickory Ridge Road. And Windham College, where the writer Danny Angel had taught, was a college with a different name (and purpose) now—Landmark College, a leading institution for learning-disabled students. By the time the cowboy showed up in Brattleboro, Avellino itself would be gone—and wherever Greg, the sous chef, went, Carl wouldn’t find him. At the cook’s urging, Celeste and her daughter, Loretta (and Loretta’s kid), left town. The cowboy would come up empty, once again, but there was no question that Dot and May had blabbed their best to him.

Was it possible that Carl was as much of an imbecile as Ketchum had, at times, maintained? Did the cowboy possess no better detective skills than those of Ketchum’s much-maligned pinch of coon shit? Or was it simply that, throughout the retired deputy’s investigations in Vermont, the
Angel
name had not come up? In Brattleboro, evidently, the cowboy had not inquired about the cook and his son at The Book Cellar!

“You knew Cookie was in Vermont—you knew it all along, didn’t you, Ketchum?” Carl would one day ask the old logger.

“Cookie? Is
he
still around?” Ketchum said to the cowboy. “I wouldn’t have figured that a little fella with a limp like his would be so long-lasting—would you, Carl?”

“Keep it up, Ketchum—you just keep it up,” Carl said.

“Oh, I will—I’ll keep it up, all right,” Ketchum told the cowboy.

But Danny couldn’t wait to leave Vermont; after the night he and Jimmy found the dead dog on the writer’s dining-room table, Danny Angel wanted to be gone.

That night he’d driven no farther out the back road to Westminster West than the bottom of Barrett’s long, uphill driveway. He had backed his car onto the animal lover’s property. Danny knew that Barrett went to bed early, and that she wouldn’t be aware of a car parked in her driveway—so far away from her horse farm that not even her horses would be disturbed by its presence. Besides, Danny had turned off the engine and his headlights. He just sat in the car, which was facing Westminster West with all the windows open.

It was a warm, windless night. Danny knew he could hear a gunshot for a couple of miles on such a night. What he didn’t know at first was: Did he really want to hear it? And what would hearing or not hearing that gunshot signify, exactly? It was more than the survival or the death of Roland Drake’s bite-you-from-behind husky-shepherd mix that the writer was listening for.

At forty-one, Danny felt like a twelve-year-old all over again; it didn’t help that it had started to rain. He remembered the misty night he and his dad had left Twisted River in the Pontiac Chieftain—how he’d sat waiting in the station wagon, which was parked near Six-Pack Pam’s. Danny had been listening for the discharge of Carl’s Colt .45, which would mean his dad was dead. Upon the sound of that shot, the boy would have run up the stairs to Six-Pack’s place; he would have begged her to let him in, and then Ketchum would have taken care of him. That had been the plan, and Danny had done his part; he’d sat in the car, in the falling rain, waiting to hear the gunshot that never came, though there were times when Danny felt he was still waiting to hear it.

On the back road to Westminster West—at the foot of his former lover’s driveway—the writer Danny Angel was listening as alertly as he could. He was hoping he would never hear
that
shot—the earsplitting discharge of the cowboy’s Colt .45—but it was with that shot in mind that the writer began to indulge the dangerous,
what-if
side of his imagination.
What if
the state trooper didn’t have to shoot Roland Drake’s other dog
—what if
, somehow, Jimmy could persuade the writer carpenter
and
his shepherd-husky mix that, truly, enough was enough? Might that signify an end to the violence, or to the threat of violence?

It was then that the writer was aware of what he was listening for: nothing. It was nothing that he hoped he would hear. It was the
no-shot
that might mean his dad would be safe—that the cowboy, like Paul Polcari, might never pull the trigger.

Danny was trying not to think about what Jimmy had told him—this was concerning the tube of toothpaste and the toothbrush in Joe’s car. Possibly, they’d not been put there by Roland Drake; maybe the toothpaste and the toothbrush hadn’t been part of Drake’s mischief.