Crow's Landing (14 page)

“What's a little buddy Mudcat?”

“It ain't much, I can tell you that.”

Dusty frowned but let the subject pass. “So—you always know when people are lying to you?”

“I've been right on the money with you so far.”

“You're kinda fucking rude, you know that?” Dusty said. “I told you—the less I tell you, the better off you are. I'm trying to protect you, man. You should be grateful.”

“Gee, thanks,” Virgil said. “So you going to tell me what's in the cylinder?”

“I don't think so,” Dusty said. “But I'll tell you this—I'm not all that interested in the contents, I'm just interested in who has it. My life would be much better if you'd never hooked the thing.”

“And why is that?”

“Long story. I don't want to bore you.”

“That's one thing you haven't done.”

She took a moment, as if she might tell him more, but then shook her head. “Let's just say that I have to find it.”

“Before the bad guys do?”

“Maybe,” she said. She looked at the beer bottle in her hand. “Maybe I need to find it before the good guys do.”

“Which side you on?”

The woman tipped the bottle back, finishing it. “I guess I'm somewhere in between. Thanks for the beer.” She put the empty on top of the fridge. There was a notepad there from the vet, dust-covered, with a couple of pens alongside. She thought for a moment, then scribbled on the paper until she got one of the pens to work and wrote down her name and a number. “Here's my cell. If the guy decides to return your boat, give me a call, will you?”

Virgil took the slip of paper from her and looked at it before putting it in his shirt pocket. “I have a feeling he won't be bringing my boat back.”

“You never know,” Dusty said. “Maybe I should get your number too.”

“You know where I live,” Virgil said. “Where you going now?”

“Find out who it was that Brownie called that day.”

“And who do you figure is going to tell you that?”

“Who do you think?” she asked and she left.

 * * *

Driving back to Kimball's Point, Dusty called home to check on Travis. The sitter, a teenager from across the hall, said he was sleeping, and that she was doing her homework. Dusty told her she wouldn't be late, and hoped it was true.

It was after nine o'clock and fully dark when she got back to the marina. The carnival she'd seen setting up across the road earlier was now in full swing. There was a small Ferris wheel and a tilt-a-whirl and a midway featuring various other rides and roadside attractions. A bingo game was in progress on the infield of the old fairgrounds, with a man in a tuxedo and top hat calling out the numbers. Dusty could hear the familiar loop of the calliope as she drove past.

The farmer named Virgil Cain wasn't at all what she'd expected. Growing up in the city, she and her friends had always looked down on people living out in the country, as if their rural upbringing somehow meant they lacked intelligence. It was a generalization and, like most generalizations, it didn't hold up very well as Dusty got older. Living in Kimball's Point, she'd gotten to know a lot of the locals and she'd soon discovered that they were just as smart or stupid, or together or fucked up, or honest or deceitful, as everybody else she'd ever known. Not only that, but Dusty was the one who spent three years in Albion Correctional because of some pretty stupid decisions of her own. Who was she to pass judgment on anybody else?

Virgil Cain was no rube. He actually had mocked her when she claimed to be a cop, although she probably deserved that. For somebody who was obviously pissed off about losing his boat, he was getting a kick out of the whole situation, at least to a certain extent. There was something about him she couldn't put her finger on. She thought about him, how relaxed he was in spite of her showing up under rather
odd circumstances. She pictured him, leaning back in the old kitchen chair, Budweiser in hand, wearing brown twill pants and a blue cotton shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal large ropy forearms, deeply tanned. The toes of his work boots were worn through, the steel showing.

Maybe it was that he was an ordinary guy, she decided, and the only one in the whole scenario who might fit that description. She'd been surrounded of late by people like Nick Santiago, with his leather coat and his two-hundred-dollar fedora. She doubted Virgil Cain owned a hat like that and, even if he did, she doubted he would do anything that might result in someone nailing it to a table. She found herself liking him, although he'd made it quite obvious that he didn't trust her as far as he could throw his tractor.

The lights were still on in the tackle shop when Dusty pulled up. She parked on the far side of the lot and walked over. When she entered, a sandy-haired man with a ruddy complexion and a humongous gut overhanging his belt was busy emptying out the till. Dusty could tell at a glance that the man was drunk. When he looked up at her, it seemed he needed a moment to focus. There was a glass with liquor and ice on the counter beside the till.

“Hey,” Dusty said.

The man looked her up and down quickly and went back to his till.

“What do you need?”

Dusty took a couple of steps toward a display of Rapala lures. “Looking at some tackle.”

“Well, I'm closing,” Brownie told her. He gave her the judgmental look again. “This is pretty high-end stuff anyway.”

Dusty stopped at the display and glanced over at him. “What does that mean?”

“It means I'm closed. They got tackle at Walmart.”

Dusty smiled and moved away from the lures, toward him now. “You giving me a shopping tip—or is that, like, a sociological observation?”

“You take it any way you want. I'm tired and I'm going home. You carnival people been in and out of here all day and never bought shit.”

Dusty stopped at another wall display and picked up a chain-link fish stringer. “You Brownie?” she asked.

“That's what the sign says.”

“Brownie—used to be a cop?”

“What of it?” Brownie finished his counting and took a drink from the glass. His speech was thick with liquor.

Dusty held onto the stringer as she moved on to an array of filleting knives. She picked one up, slid it out of its sheath, and ran her thumb across the edge of the blade. “Word I'm hearing—you're the guy made the phone call about the dude finding the cylinder.”

Brownie set the glass down. “Who the fuck are you?”

Dusty held the knife to the light, sighted along its edge. “Just a carny, like you said. So who took the cylinder, Brownie?”

Brownie squinted through his little pig eyes, and she could sense his whisky-laden brain putting the pieces together. “Shit—I know who you are now. You're no carny. That'd be a step up for you. So they let you out, did they?” He began to mumble as he turned away. “Problem with the prison system in this country. We can lock the scum up, we just can't keep them locked up.”

He continued to mutter as he knelt down to open a small safe encased in the concrete wall above the baseboard. He fumbled with the code a moment, entering it twice before
swinging the door open. He put the money inside and closed the safe, tugging at the door to make sure it was locked, and was turning his head when Dusty slammed him from behind, hammering the side of his face into the concrete. She jerked his right arm behind him and wound the stringer around his wrist. He pulled back from the wall and she drove him forward again, this time smashing his nose into the cement block. While he was off-balance, with all his considerable weight forward, she got hold of his other wrist and wrapped it tight with the stringer, hog-tying him.

“Jesus!” he yelled.

Dusty pulled hard on the chain link, jerking his arms up behind him. “You know, for somebody in retail, you have a pretty surly attitude,” she told him.

Brownie's nose was gushing blood. He tried to struggle to his feet and when he did, she yanked on the stringer and pushed him down. “I don't know anything about it!” he screamed.

“Try again,” Dusty said.

Brownie went limp, gasping for breath. The blood from his nose was running into his mouth, and he spit it out onto the carpet. “The guy brings the cylinder in and then the cop shows,” he said. “That's all I know.”

“Really?” Dusty said. “That's what you want to tell me? I mean, if that's all you got for me I just might tie you off and leave you here for the night, you fat drunken fuck. You saying you're okay with that?”

“It's the truth!”

“The truth,” Dusty said. She held the stringer with one hand and glanced behind her. The filleting knife was where she'd left it on the counter. “I heard somewhere recently that art is truth.”

“What?” Brownie's face was an inch from the concrete wall. He was sweating heavily, his hair already soaked.

“What do you know about art?”

“Art who?”

“Art, you fucking idiot,” Dusty said. “Like paintings and stuff.”

“What are you talking about? Let me go!”

“Who's your favorite painter?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I like van Gogh. He was friends with Gaugin, you know. They both suffered from depression.”

“Let me up, you fucking bitch!” Brownie attempted to break free and Dusty pulled on the stringer with one hand and drove her palm into the back of his head with the other. “Okay!” he whimpered.

“But you know, van Gogh was crazy,” she said. “Maybe that's why I like him. I've always been attracted to crazy people. Works against me, often as not. You're not crazy, are you, Brownie?”

Brownie shook his head, the blood dripping from his nose.

“Didn't think so. Because I'm not attracted to you in the least. Drunks and liars don't really do it for me.” Dusty reached for the filleting knife. “But van Gogh—dude was nuts. Cut off his own ear, you know that? Cut off his own fucking ear.”

She leaned forward and, holding onto the stringer with her left hand, she showed Brownie the knife in her right. “I'm glad to hear that you're not crazy,” she said. “Only a crazy man would lose an ear rather than tell me what I want to know. So who took the cylinder?”

“I don't know!”

“Okay,” Dusty said, and she pulled the knife back, sliding
the razor edge back along the fat man's temple and stopping it in the ridge above his right ear. “Let me know when you remember.”

The blade went through the skin and into the hard cartilage and Brownie began to scream.

Hoffman knew the place from years earlier, but just vaguely, when it had been known as Filbert's Pool Hall, even though he didn't recall there ever being anything out front identifying it by that name, just a large green generic sign,
Billiards.
The kids and the local wiseguys had called it Filbert's; maybe that had been the name of a past owner. Hoffman had probably been in the place at one time or another—he'd been in most of the dives in the city—but he couldn't remember anything specific about the interior. It was on Third Avenue, a half dozen blocks from Jefferson Park, and smack in the middle of what the locals called the C Zone, the C standing for crack, the zone standing for either what zone usually stands for or the fact that the dopers in the area were usually zonked into another zone of one kind or another.

Hoffman was driving his sedan and Soup was in the passenger seat, giving directions. Soup was still acting sullen about the whole thing and Hoffman had feared that he might bail on him, but he'd been there at the coffee shop that morning, as arranged. Soup's brain was still functional, when he wasn't high, and he would know that he really had no choice but to cooperate. He could leave the city but Hoffman knew he would never do that. Where the hell would he go?

Soup told him to park in the alley behind the pool hall. There was a small space there, just long enough and wide enough for two vehicles. There was a black Dodge Ram 4×4
backed into the one spot and Hoffman parked beside it. The pickup truck had a pair of steer horns fastened to the hood, reaching across the full width of the truck.

“This better be good,” Hoffman said, looking at the horns as he and Soup got out.

They made their way to a steel-barred door, propped open, and a second door, made of wood, that was locked. They had to wait a few moments after Soup knocked. Then the wooden door was opened by a huge cowboy. At least he looked like a cowboy—he wore a Stetson, pushed back to reveal blond curly hair and blue jeans with black cowboy boots, along with a fancy white shirt with piping stitched diagonally toward each shoulder and a belt with a large buckle with a rearing bronco etched inside a rope corral. The man's shoulders were nearly as wide as the doorway. He showed them a wide smile, revealing perfect white teeth, in fact too perfect and too white to be his own.

Hoffman turned to Soup. “This is the guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus, you found me a white guy,” Hoffman said. He stuck his hand out and the cowboy took it and shook it like he was working an old pump.

“This Hoffman,” Soup said to the cowboy. “Yuri.”

Soup hadn't mentioned a name before, and Hoffman hadn't asked. Thinking about it now, he would have preferred not to know it at all. Too late for that; he should have told Soup up front. But the cowboy was named Yuri. It didn't sound like a cowboy name, and the man who owned it didn't sound like a cowboy either.

“I am happy to meet you, Mr. Hoffman,” he said in a thick accent. “Come into office.”

Hoffman glanced into the poolroom out front as he passed
down the narrow hallway. There were only a half dozen tables, with maybe twice that many video machines. An old man sat at the counter by the till up front, reading a magazine or maybe a racing form. There were seven or eight kids scattered about the room, playing the machines. Nobody was shooting pool. The place was a front if Hoffman ever saw one.