Short Money (32 page)

“What do you guys want? I keep telling you, I had nothing to do with it.” Getter was limping from the blast of rock salt that had abraded his thigh.

“That’s right, you keep telling us.” Ricky shoved him into a chair. “Now shut the fuck up.”

The tiger rose to her feet and walked toward them, her yellow eyes unblinking, until she was stopped by the chain. “You stay real still now,” Ricky said. “She can snap that chain anytime she wants, you know?”

Getter closed his eyes and shuddered miserably.

Ricky followed George into the hallway. “I got to tell you, bro, I don’t think he knows nothing.”

George said, “Yeah, well, we got a whole ’nother problem now on account of he saw you center-shoot old Berdette. He starts screaming bloody murder, old Orlan ain’t gonna be able to smooth things over.”

“So we just feed him to the tiger.”

George shook his head. “You’ll make her sick. Keep an eye on him, would ya?” He opened the door leading into the kitchen.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

Shawn Murphy, sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, looked up.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned to hell and back.” A wide smile split George’s face. “Where did you come from, boy?”

“I just got home,” Shawn said. “That guy gave me a ride home.”

“What guy?”

“He’s gone now.”

“Nelly Bell?”

Shawn shook his head. “A different guy. I think his name is Crow or something.”

“Crow?”

“Something like that.”

George let his head bob slowly, digesting this new bit of information. He reached out toward his son, let a hand fall on the boy’s shoulder, covering it. “Crow,” he muttered. “I’ll be goddamned.”

“He said for me to tell you he’d send you a bill.”

Murphy nodded. “So where you been, boy?”

Shawn stirred his Frosted Flakes.

“Were you with that Nelly Bell?”

“I was for a while. Ow!”

George relaxed his grip, let his hand slide off the boy’s shoulder.

“I got away from him,” Shawn said. “He was gonna take me home, but then he didn’t, and so I ran away. He’s sort of weird, y’know?”

George pulled a chair away from the table, lowered himself into it. “Did he do anything to you? Like you were telling me before?”

Shawn shook his head.

George pushed his face forward, getting it between Shawn and the bowl of cereal. “He do anything to you?”

Shawn’s face went blank. “He didn’t do nothing.”

George sat back. He wanted to ask more, but he could tell the kid was shutting down, and besides, he didn’t really want to know. His son was back, and that would have to be enough for now. He filled his lungs with air, let it out, looked around the kitchen. Something was missing.

“Where’s Mandy?” he asked.

Shawn shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t think she’s around.”

Bronson’s On/Off Sale Liquors had a sale on Old Milwaukee. Crow nodded to the woman at the cash register, walked through the store, grabbed a case of cans from the cooler. On his way back to the front of the store, he lifted a bottle of Old Crow from the shelf, set it alongside the beer on the front counter. The woman looked up from her TV Guide, smiled briefly, rang up his purchase. Eighteen ninety-two. Crow handed her his last twenty-dollar bill, wordlessly accepted his change, carried his new possessions out to the jeep, headed east. When he reached his upended Rabbit, he pulled over, unloaded the Old Milwaukee at the head of Harley and Puss’s driveway, leaned on the horn. Harley opened the door to his house trailer a moment later. Crow waved and pulled back out onto the highway. He heard Harley shout something.

As he passed Birdy’s, he noticed a silver Mercedes parked there. It looked a lot like Dave Getter’s.

“Old Crow, he don’t care,” he muttered.

For the next seventy miles, Crow’s mind stumbled through the wreckage of the past week. The days played back like a nightmare, a directionless, purposeless, painful journey. Melinda was missing? That was her problem. He no longer believed that Orlan Johnson or the Murphys had anything to do with it. Bellweather had skipped town? So what? It had been a lousy job anyway. Debrowski? Just another ex-doper in a motorcycle jacket. No matter how he diced and re-formed events, he was still broke and adrift. The nearest he would get to happiness lay within the unopened bottle between his legs. He could almost feel the promising burn of raw bourbon flowing over his tonsils. He rubbed his thumb on the smooth glass bottle, felt its square shape, picked with his fingernail at the edge of the label, gripped the knurled screw top, felt the hollowness inside his body grow. Unlike the people in his life, bourbon could be relied upon. He would drink it; he would feel better.

He kept going. The bottle remained sealed, but he was getting drunk, absorbing the alcohol right through the glass. The barrage of unwanted thoughts slowed; he had to concentrate to keep the jeep traveling in a straight line. His feet were getting numb. He hunched his shoulders to hold in the warmth and squeezed the steering wheel hard, forcing sensation through his gloves, into his fingers. The image of his apartment beckoned. He would let himself in, pour himself a civilized drink, sit down, and douse his mind. As the snowy countryside flashed by, he blotted recent memories with thoughts of anticipated pleasures. Passing through the small town of Clara City, he counted three liquor stores and seven bars. A nice little town. He could stop in at any one of those businesses, have a few drinks, talk about the Vikings, and see not a single familiar face. It would be warm, and friendly, and easy. Warmer and friendlier than his empty apartment—but not as easy. He continued on through the town.

By the time he reached the outer suburbs of Minneapolis, a new headache had formed at the base of his skull, and the bouncing and yawing of the jeep was making him acutely aware of his knotted, empty stomach. He frowned and swallowed. The Murphys appeared in his mind again. A smiling George, arm around his prodigal son. The ache rolled over the top of his head and began to throb in rhythm with the jeep’s laboring engine.

“It’s not fair.” His words were sucked out of the jeep by the wind. It really wasn’t fair. He hadn’t even opened the bottle, and already he was suffering from a hangover. What kind of world is this, he wondered, where a man has to suffer for sins he has yet to commit? An angry impulse urged him to fling the bottle out onto the highway, but another voice told him that as long as he was already having the hangover, he might as well get loaded. A third Crow, the one driving the jeep, observed this dialogue with sour amusement.

“Too many Crows,” he muttered.

“I agree.”

A road sign became legible, CTY RD 40. For a moment, Crow rode alone in silence. That exit would lead him to Bellweather’s house—actually, Bellweather’s former house, since it now seemed to belong to the U.S. Government. It was not an exit he had any reason or desire to take, yet he found the jeep edging toward the ramp. Apparently, one Crow still cared about the whereabouts of the missing liposuctionist. The curious Crow. The one who was always getting him in trouble.

Another Crow retained control of the vehicle, passed the exit, and continued on toward his apartment, the bottle of Old Crow warm between his legs. The bottle was real. You could say a lot of bad things about alcohol, but one fact remained: It worked every time. Just thinking about it made him feel solid. He could fall apart again later.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

O
RLAN JOHNSON WAS HAVING
a lousy day off. His belly ached where Crow had hit him, he’d tossed and turned all night, and first thing he gets up, Hill wants him to go out and snowblow the driveway. He’d managed to stay in his bathrobe and grumble around the house all morning. All he really wanted to do was sit in front of the tube and have a few beers, let her bitch. It wasn’t until she threatened not to cook him lunch that he put on his insulated bib overalls and fluorescent orange down vest, went out to the garage to fire up the Toro. He’d just gotten the snowblower moving, started his first sweep down the driveway, when Hillary started shouting and waving to him from the house.

Now what? He shut down the blower and glared at his wife.

“What’s that?”

“You’ve got to get out to Birdy’s, Orlan. Somebody’s shot old Berdette.”

Sure enough, when he arrived at Birdy’s he found two of his officers—Nelson and Fleener—standing over old Berdette Williams. Arlene, who’d found her dead husband, was crumpled in one of the booths, looking about half her usual size. First thing he did, he took Nelson aside and asked him what in the got-damn hell was going on.

“Found him just like you see, Chief. His wife called it in.”

“She shoot him?”

“I dunno. There’s that Mercedes out front, and nobody to go with it. Hasn’t been there too long. Windows aren’t even frosted up yet. And we found him with that old shotgun still in his hands, one shell fired. Looks to me like he took a shot at somebody and got his self shot instead.”

“That don’t mean she wasn’t the one shot the poor bastard.” The idea that a guy’s wife would shoot him made sense to him.

“No, it don’t,” Nelson agreed. “Only I got a feeling it wasn’t her that did it.”

Johnson was disappointed. He liked crimes where he didn’t have to go chasing people all over the countryside. He liked the ones where a guy knew right away who did it.

“Yeah, well, you and Fleener take her the hell out of there. Take her home. We can talk to her later. And run the plates on that krautmobile. You call the M.E. yet?”

“Just after we called you.”

As soon as they left him alone with the dead man, Johnson got hit with a case of the creeps and figured out that what he needed was a good stiff drink. Even under such gruesome circumstances, he enjoyed playing bartender, figuring out where Berdette kept the limes and how to get tonic out of the soda shooter. He walked the drink back to his usual booth, slid in, put his Sorels up on the seat, took a look around the place.

It made him feel sad, like it was the end of an era. The Berdette Williams era. “Yeah, I knew old Berdette real well. Berdette was a friend of mine,” he imagined himself saying.

Of course, Berdette might not’ve agreed with that.

The coroner finally showed up, asked a few stupid questions, took some notes. Johnson watched her go through her routine, which seemed to take forever. She and her assistant got the body on the gurney, raised it up, wheeled it toward the door.

Now that Berdette was gone, Johnson felt himself relaxing. He had never been all alone in a bar before. It was peaceful.

Feeling the need to do something coplike, Johnson considered the facts of the case.

One, Berdette was dead, shot in the chest.

Two, a mysterious Mercedes-Benz was parked outside.

Three, his glass was empty, and no one was there to fill it.

He slid out of the booth, walked around the end of the bar, made himself another v.t.—this one a double, for poor old Berdette.

Crow stood in the lobby of his apartment building, staring at the notice taped to the wall above the mailboxes. The illustration, done with felt-tip markers on a sheet of typewriter paper, looked a lot like Milo. Big and black, with yellow eyes. Above the illustration, large block letters spelled out
LOST CAT
. Below, in smaller print, it said: “Big black cat with yellow eyes. Answers to Milo.” Two phone numbers were printed at the bottom of the page. One of them was his. The other one he didn’t recognize.

He let himself into his apartment, put the bottle of bourbon on the kitchen counter, picked up the phone, and punched in the unfamiliar number. An answering machine picked up. He listened to twenty seconds of distorted rock and roll, then Debrowski’s recorded voice instructed him to leave a message. He said, “This is Crow. Just calling to thank you for the sign.” He hung up, feeling uncomfortable, as if he didn’t deserve the favor, as if now that she had done this nice thing for him, he couldn’t drink his bottle of bourbon.

He dropped his coat on a chair, turned up the thermostat, and stood over the heat register by the door. His hands were cold and stiff from gripping the steering wheel. The phone began to ring as he clenched and unclenched his hands, forcing fresh blood into the capillaries.

“Should I answer it?” he asked.

Okay, I’ll answer it, he thought, and if it’s not about Milo, I’ll hang up and I’ll pour myself a drink about eight inches deep.

He picked up the phone and listened.

“Officer Crow?”

Crow made an unpleasant sound in his throat.

“I want to thank you for returning my son to me.” Murphy’s voice sounded strained, as if he were talking with his jaw wired shut.

Crow shrugged. “No problem,” he said.

“Do you know where I am, Crow?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’m at the hospital in Alexandria.”

“Oh?”

“I’m with my mother.”

Crow waited.

“Someone hurt her, Crow. Beat her unconscious. Broke her ribs, beat her head, left her for dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Crow said. “I know how she feels.”

“I doubt you do, Officer Crow. When you are nearly eighty years old, you do not take a beating as well as you do when you are a young man.” Murphy was speaking oddly, spacing his words, holding himself back. “Do you know who did this thing to my mother?”

Crow said, “Are you asking, or are you going to tell me?”

“I am going to tell you. Your Dr. Bellweather did it.”

Crow was surprised. It didn’t seem like Bellweather’s style.

“Yes, he did,” said Murphy, answering the unspoken objection. “She is awake now, and she remembers.”

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Crow.

“I want you to understand how serious I am. I want you to find that doctor, and I want you to bring him to me.”

“Sorry. I already delivered your kid. That’s it for me. Why don’t you send your psychopathic brother after him?”

Crow listened to Murphy’s breath whistling in and out of his nose. It took him several seconds to reply.