Short Money (16 page)

“He look like he been gut-shot, bro,” Ricky shouted over the pop and buzz of his Thundercat. He twisted the key, shut down the snowmobile, and walked back to the sled. The spotlight above the lodge entrance draped a cone of yellow light over the scene.

George Murphy stared down at the dead elk. The frozen body of Number One was strapped to the plywood game sled. He and Ricky had hauled in bison, whitetail, antelope, and more than a few elk, but somehow George was not quite prepared for the demise of Number One. The eight-by-eight monarch had been a symbol, a figurehead, a living testament to Talking Lake’s status as a world-class operation.

Number One had also been a sort of living savings account. An easy twenty-five thousand—maybe even more, to the right party—plus whatever other services he could add on. Most important, the elk’s mythic reputation had brought in a lot of business over the past few years. But in its current condition—dead—the beast was just a few thousand bucks’ worth of antler, meat, and hide. The caked blood looked black under the yellow yard light.

“Look at that rack, would you?” Ricky grabbed one of the elk’s sixteen spikes. “I bet you shit to gold brick he runs over four twenty points. Record book for sure.”

George squatted and pressed his finger to the small entrance wound just in front of the elk’s left rear leg. If not for the frozen river of blood that caked the animal’s flank, the wound might have been hard to find. Such a small hole. A gut shot. Probably took it hours, maybe even days, to die. He asked, pointing at the wound, “Is this all?”

Ricky shook his head. “He’s got one more hole on his leg; couldn’t see nothin’ else. Looks like somebody shot him with a twenny-two or somethin’. Slug’s prob’ly still in there. I suppose it could be he speared hisself somehow, only I don’t know on what, bro.”

George did not know either. He was certain the wound had been caused by a lead slug. He experienced an unwelcome image of his son Shawn’s little single-shot .22 rifle. Where was that boy? It was almost suppertime, and he hadn’t seen the kid since he’d interrupted the poker game.

“You had any groups out that way? Some asshole packing a little handgun, maybe?”

“Nope. I ain’t run a hunt up that way in three weeks.”

A thin, jangling sound of metal on metal came from the direction of the house.

“Dinnertime,” George said.

“What you want to do with him?”

George opened his mouth to tell Ricky to just butcher the damn thing. Cut it up for meat and send the head off to Ollie Aamold to have it mounted. Since it was sure to be a record-book elk, he might get a few thousand for the mount alone. Old Number One would pay for his feed if nothing else. But a partially formed idea floated into his mind, and he hesitated, not quite sure that what he was thinking was possible. The idea persisted. He said, “Hey, you remember Rudolph?”

Ricky said, “Huh?”

“You remember that stuffed deer the game wardens were using last fall? They were setting it up, this stuffed deer they called Rudolph, setting it out in a field at night, using it to catch shiners. End of the season, Rudolph had so damn many holes in him they had to tie boards to his legs to get him to stand up straight. Shiners didn’t know the difference. They just kept shooting the thing. Coulda been a cardboard cutout, they’d still have shot it up.”

Ricky looked puzzled.

George smiled. Yes, he was definitely having an idea. It was getting more solid by the minute. “What say we get this guy into the barn, keep him nice and clean. I’m having an idea.”

The hot dish was ready. Hot and ready and sitting on the cast-iron trivet in the middle of the table. Four plates on the table, and four glasses. One glass filled with milk, two with apple cider, the fourth with Pepsi. Alone, Amanda Murphy sat at one end of the table. She had said her prayers; now she was doing a slow burn. She took a sip of her Pepsi. The double shot of Jim Beam she had added improved its flavor immensely. She could hear the rumble of a snowmobile outside. They would say they hadn’t heard the bell. Sooner or later they would get hungry, and they would sit down with her, and the hot dish would be cold, but God bless it if she was going to eat alone.

She was on her second Pepsi when George and Ricky came in through the kitchen door, talking and laughing. When they caught sight of her sitting alone at the table, their grins faded away.

“You ring that bell?” Ricky asked, peeling down his black nylon snowmobile suit.

“I ranged it,” Amanda said darkly.

George and Ricky arranged themselves at the table.

“Where’s that boy?” George asked.

“I thought he was with you.”

George shook his head. “I ain’t seen him since this afternoon. You seen him, Ricky?”

Ricky, loading his plate with hot dish, shook his head. George frowned and stood up. “I’ll go see if he’s in his room.” He clomped up the stairs. A minute later, he was back, holding Shawn Murphy’s single-shot .22 rifle in his fist. He pushed the gun at Ricky, who opened the breech and sniffed, then made a sour face.

“He’s not up there?” Amanda asked.

George shook his head. Ricky set the rifle on the floor and pushed a forkful of hot dish into his mouth. George remained standing.

Ricky said, his mouth full, “Prob’ly hidin’ out in the barns, bro.”

“Either that or he’s been taken,” Amanda said.

“Taken?” George said.

“That stranger this afternoon. He was up to no good, I could tell.”

George stood up. “I’m going to check the barns.” He started for the door.

“What stranger, Mandy?” Ricky asked.

“That Crow,” Amanda said.

“Crow?” Ricky looked wildly at George. “You hear that?”

“I heard it,” said George. “I talked to him. He didn’t take the boy.”

“You talked to him? Christ, why didn’t you keep him around till I got back? I owe him, goddammit.”

George’s face darkened. “Don’t you ‘goddammit’ me, goddammit.”

Amanda said, “Language, boys.”

“Just ’cause you didn’t see him take Shawn don’t mean it didn’t happen,” Ricky said. “He’s working for Bellweather.”

“I know that.” George opened the door. “I’m going to look in the barns.”

“It won’t do any good,” Amanda said. “I can feel it in my bones. The boy has been taken.”

George closed the door behind him.

“That son-of-a-bitch!” Ricky slapped his hand on the tabletop. Amanda Murphy brought a serving spoon down sharply on his knuckles. “Oww!”

“Watch that mouth! Don’t you be talking about your brother that way.”

Ricky brought both hands under the table and glared. “I was talking about Crow.”

“He’s gone.” Amanda swallowed the last of her drink, then coughed. “Can’t you feel it?” Her eyes watered. “The boy is gone.”

The Minnetonka cokeheads were more subdued, more suburban than the Golden Valley crowd, but it was the only meeting he could find on Saturday night. The old Minnetonka Mills Middle School, now abandoned by its faculty and students, provided space to a wide range of community groups, from the various twelve-step programs to the Beautiful Boulevards Floral Club. Crow didn’t know anybody there, and when it was his turn to introduce himself, he smiled and shook his head. He knew he wasn’t doing himself any good by sitting there silently, feeling superior to the young white male upper-middle-class drug addicts that made up the rest of the participants, but it was the best he could do. It beat tossing and turning in bed, beset by flickering Murphys and Melindas.

A man who looked like he sold BMWs for a living was talking about step eleven. Crow had long since decided that he would never make it to step eleven. He wished he hadn’t come. When they broke down into smaller groups, Crow left the room, went out into the hallway, sat on a bench, and listened to the building. Other groups, in other rooms, produced a low, throbbing sound. To Crow, it sounded like a prolonged moan. He knew he should go back to his apartment and try again to sleep, but he didn’t feel like moving.

A door opened down the hall, and a group of people trickled out, moved slowly toward him, toward the front entrance. Mostly men, a little older than the group he had just abandoned. Juicers, Crow decided. AA. Again he felt superior. As if it was somehow smarter for him to have destroyed his life with cocaine. Never mind that he had nearly always begun his cocaine binges with a drink and invariably had drunk himself to a stupor when the coke was gone. Intellectually, Crow knew that he was as much a drunk as he was a cokehead, but he identified more readily with the CA people. The myth that cocaine was a civilized, refined, and exclusive pleasure still had power over him.

He clasped his hands together and stared at the worn linoleum floor, waiting for the AA crowd to pass by.

A pair of leather jeans tucked into motorcycle boots stopped directly in front of him.

“Hey, what do you know? The shoe salesman.” A cloud of smoke drifted toward the floor.

Crow lifted his head, his eyes passing a metal-encrusted black leather jacket, landing on a small, heavily made-up face framed by a spiky halo of pale hair. Debrowski, the wild card from last night’s meeting, grinned and took another drag off her cigarette.

Crow said, “What do you know, it’s the bitch with the attitude. You missed the CA meeting.”

Debrowski fired two jets of smoke from her small nostrils, looked down at the black-and-red button on her jacket, removed it, and put it in one of her numerous zipper pockets. “I’m in AA mode tonight, Shoe. I do the whole show. AA, NA, CA, Triple A. Sort of a holistic approach to installing clean mental software. I got to tell you, though, this recovery routine gets old.”

Crow nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“I bet you do.” She sat down beside him on the bench. “So how come you’re sitting out here? You in a zone or something?”

“I couldn’t handle the scene.” Crow gestured toward the room where the CA meeting was still in progress.

“Let me guess.” Debrowski put a forefinger to her chin. Her nails were short but not bitten. “Too suburban for a big-city boy like you, right?”

Crow grinned and shook his head. “Actually, I’m a smalltown boy.”

“Yeah? They still talk about you back in Lake Podunk, I bet. Local boy makes it big in the shoe business. How am I doing, Shoe?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” Crow said. “You quit calling me Shoe, and I’ll buy you a slice of pie.”

“This a date, or are you just hungry?”

“Hungry,” Crow said.

Debrowski nodded. “So what am I supposed to call you?”

“Call me Crow.”

“Like the bird?”

“Yes. Crow like the bird.”

BioStellar GameTech President, CFO Indicted—SEC Investigators Allege Massive Fraud

—WALL STREET JOURNAL

T
AKING CALLS AT HOME
was part of the job, and for the most part Anderson didn’t mind. With all the trading happening on the overseas exchanges, a lot of his customers had gone on-line with their home computers, numbers junkies sitting in front of the screen all night, watching their digits flicker. He’d lost a few clients to the automated trading systems, but a lot of them stayed with him for the hand-holding, which was turning out to be a twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week job. He just wished they wouldn’t call during
Seinfeld
.

“Let the machine get it,” he said to Patty as she moved to answer the phone. Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine were fighting over a piece of cheesecake. He heard his answering machine pick up, heard his own recorded message, a beep, then a familiar and most unwelcome voice.

“Stevie? This is Dr. Bellweather. You home? I have to talk to you. I’m going to have to sell a chunk of that BioStellar a little ahead of schedule. I need a little cash, you know? Call me … ahh …
soon
, okay? Bye.”

Anderson groaned and let his head flop back.

“What’s the matter?” Patty asked, hitting the mute button on the remote.

“I’m going to have a very unhappy client. You remember that Dr. Bellweather?”

Patty frowned and looked up over the mantel at the enormous mounted bison head that had invaded their household. “What about him?”

“Remember I told you he took this huge position with BioStellar?”

She shrugged. Patty didn’t have much interest in shoptalk. Aside from the money, which she liked, and the bison head, which she did not, her husband’s activities were not of great interest to her.

“Well, he did. I don’t think he knows yet what happened. I couldn’t bring myself to call him when the news broke this afternoon. They stopped trading it this afternoon, you know. Dickie got all his guys out of it yesterday and this morning, but I didn’t hear about it till it was too late. I never got around to calling the doctor.” He shook his head. “He’s not going to be a happy camper.”

“That’s too bad.”

“He’s a child molester, you know. It serves him right.”

“How do you know he’s a child molester?” Patty was interested in scandal.

“George Murphy told me. Remember last month, I was telling you that our guide at the hunt club attacked the doctor?”

Patty nodded.

“George called me up a few days later and apologized, offered me a free duck hunt. He told me that Bellweather had tried some funny business with his kid. I always had a funny feeling about that doctor.”

“So he lost a lot of money?”

“He lost it all. And then some.”

“It’s inspirational,” Debrowski said, puffing on her Camel between bites of cherry pie. “I see these young guys, want to make it big in the music biz, killing themselves every way they know how. I’ve had two bands flame out on me in the past six months.”

“Drugs?”

“Drugs, egos, and girlfriends—the three death knells for a rock band. Most of ’em use and abuse all three. I know I did. Damn near lost my business.” Debrowski was in process of rebuilding her one-woman business, organizing tours for up-and-coming rock bands.

“You abused your girlfriend?”

“Don’t take me so goddamn literally, Crow-like-the-bird. Let’s talk about you a minute. So you don’t sell shoes? How do you survive?”

“I’m … ah … I’m working for this doctor.” This child-abusing liposuctionist, he thought.