Damaged Goods (24 page)

Hershel pulled up to several people sitting in their cars, waiting for someone to open the sale barn so they could preview the upcoming sale. It was almost noon. Where was Carl? He parked next to Silvie’s defunct Rabbit, wondering if she’d let him sell the damn thing tomorrow night. It had been a week since he found
her walking up the highway. In some ways, some of them wonderful ways, it almost seemed like years.

He slid three keys from the silver ring that held them together and stepped out of the truck. As he strode across the parking lot, the men got out of their cars and trucks, and followed him to the door like a flock of gangly sheep. He gripped the three keys in his right hand, hoping that one of them would open the door and spare him the embarrassment of trying them all. As he shoved the first one into the lock and jiggled it, a line of onlookers formed behind him.

“Late opening up today,” someone said.

Hershel ignored the comment, pocketing the first key and moving to the second. It worked, and he shoved the door open and stepped inside. Where the hell was Carl?

“This is Castor.”

“Sheriff, I have something that belongs to you.” Kyrellis waited through a long silence.

“Who is this?”

“In time, Sheriff.”

“What is this? A prank?”

“I can call another time.” He waited a beat, took a deep breath. “In the meantime, I can occupy myself with these photographs.”

Castor went silent. The pause was drawn so long that Kyrellis thought perhaps the line had gone dead.

“Who is this?”

Kyrellis knew he had the right man now. There had been little doubt, though. He’d found an election photo of Jacob Castor on the county’s website. Castor was the twelfth sheriff he’d researched in the past two days. When Castor’s image popped onto his screen, his large white teeth bared at the camera, a jolt had rocketed through Kyrellis’s center. There was no question that he was the one.

“I said, who is this?”

“In due time,” Kyrellis repeated. “I’ve got these sorted out. I think we’ll start with the bondage shots.”

“What makes you think these … things you have … are mine?”

“Come now, Sheriff. How careless does a man have to be?”

The sheriff drew an audible breath, hissed it out through his teeth. “What do you want?”

“A million dollars.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“I bet Wilbur Huntington does.” He flipped through the pictures loud enough that Castor might hear. “The Cheyenne
Tribune
?”

“You fucker.”

“I’m a reasonable man. Let’s talk this out.”

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” Castor said. No wonder the girl was afraid of this man, Kyrellis thought. He had a voice that would silence songbirds. Nearly a minute passed. “Are you still there?” Castor said.

“I am.”

“Where are you?”

“I’ll be in touch,” Kyrellis said.

“Is …? Is she okay?”

“That’s touching,” Kyrellis said, and hung up. He stared down at the phone, his heart in his throat, hammering like a woodpecker. His fingers had turned to rubber and he pressed his quaking hands to his temples.

Hershel had a vague sense that he’d squirreled away information about Albert Darling somewhere, but he knew that he wouldn’t have put it in the obvious places. All the same, he sifted every file drawer, reviewed every sale list and bank log. Carl’s presence was there in the neatly organized papers, bringing a sense of normalcy to the afternoon. Occasionally a firearm appeared, accompanied by a copy of the federal paperwork. These were dark thorns that tore at his psyche, opening glimpses into his past one ragged inch at a time.

The faces of various gun dealers began returning through the
haze of his broken memory. Most were quiet, unremarkable men. These were family men, middle-aged men, working men. Hershel had never paused long to imagine what they did with the guns they purchased; to him, it was a victimless crime.

He now wished for the confidence he’d felt when he made that declaration. But disturbing signs to the contrary had begun to surface long before the accident. The crowd at his weekly auctions had shifted. Word about his practices had spread, and a younger, edgier group had begun to appear on Tuesday nights, standing alongside the farmers seeking used tractors and haybines. These newcomers carried an inner-city toughness.

This, in fact, had been his most pressing business concern in those past few months. He’d stood in the parking lot one evening before a sale, talking with a local man, when a large group of twentysomethings roared up in a 1970s Lincoln Continental with a refitted muffler. They blared their horn at another group nearby, then raucously poured from the car, red bandannas pulled tightly over their heads. Helen Cooper and her elderly mother, two women who sold antiques and collectibles in Hillsboro and had been attending Hershel’s sales for several years, sat apprehensively behind the dashboard of their Toyota Tercel. They conversed quietly, their eyes crisscrossing the parking lot to the building and back. Then Helen started the engine and pulled away.

The man Hershel was talking with scanned the newcomers, and said pointedly, “You can’t afford to lose good business. Can you, Swift?”

“Depends on what you consider good business,” Hershel said, and walked away. No one told Hershel Swift how to run his business. The money he made on the sale of firearms was significant. But in private he’d begun to puzzle over the situation.

The narrow lane into the migrant camp was rutted and overgrown. Tree branches scraped the sides of Hershel’s truck, and he tried to remember if he’d ever driven all the way back to where Carl lived.
He had fuzzy impressions of dropping Carl off at the highway where this road emerged, unnamed, from the brambles.

The camp was farther back into the woods than Hershel had imagined, but suddenly he came into a small parking lot with a handful of battered cars. He pulled in next to a late-seventies Pinto and sat with the engine idling. Which of the tiny, dilapidated buildings was Carl’s? Doors cracked open, but only briefly, as suspicious faces peered out before disappearing again. A light, steady rain misted the scene, feeding the green fungus that crept up the exterior walls of the dozen or so run-down cabins. A wet rooster stood on the picnic table in the center of the yard, as if guarding the place against intruders. Hershel looked from one identical hut to the next, finally noticing the satellite dishes. Carl wouldn’t pay for television; that he was sure of. He struggled with the urge to simply assume that the man no longer wanted employment or he would show up for work. Call it good. Hire someone else. But, as much as Hershel gravitated toward saying “To hell with him,” he didn’t believe that was the case. Carl had been too consistent, too loyal, especially through these tumultuous past few months. And Hershel had decided that afternoon as he searched his papers that he would set aside his pride and ask Carl about all these things. Ask him directly—what he knew about the guns, about Albert Darling. About all of it.

Hershel had the eerie sense that eyes were on him as he stood in the yard, a foreboding in his belly. He yearned for a six-shooter. The place felt deserted in the way Old West movie sets do as the loner rides into town. He glanced between the two shacks without satellite dishes, sitting directly across from each other. Exactly the same in every way, down to the rotting T1-11 siding. He chose the one on the right, which was backed up to a blackberry thicket protecting the muddy river beyond. He knocked twice, and as he waited he mulled over the declaration made by Albert Darling’s girlfriend. He simply couldn’t get it out of his mind.
We figured you killed him
.

Just then the door opened and a short round woman peered up at him. She looked frightened. “Can I help you?”

“I’m, uh, looking for Carl Abernathy. Do you know him?”

She stared suspiciously, as if trying to decide whether to answer.

“I’m Hershel Swift. He works for me.”

Her eyes widened. “He’s at your business. Where he works.”

“I haven’t seen him.”

She crossed herself and mumbled something in Spanish that Hershel didn’t understand.

“Can you tell me which cabin is his?”

She pointed at the one across the yard. “But he’s not there. He tells me that he goes to stay at your business, where he works.”

Hershel looked at Carl’s cabin, wondering if the man had been in the upstairs apartment all the while. And why he wouldn’t have come down to see to business. Something was wrong.

“He’s not here,” she said. Her face was creased with worry, and she watched him expectantly. Finally, she asked, “He is not there?”

“I didn’t see him. I just came from there.”

She sucked air audibly through the gap in her front teeth.

Hershel dug in his shirt pocket for a business card and handed it to her. “Here’s my number.”

She studied it.

“If you see him, would you tell him to call me?” He realized it was silly to give her the card; for all he knew she didn’t have a phone. Carl knew how to reach him. But maybe she would call if she heard something.

“Yes, I will tell him.”

Hershel thought of Carl’s battered face, and suspected that there were things she knew but wasn’t saying. He walked across the wet yard, past the rooster that was eyeing him with malice, and knocked loudly on Carl’s door, but there was no answer. The woman didn’t go inside, but watched. Hershel tried the knob; the place was locked. He wondered if he should ask her about the
fight. He didn’t know this woman. He had no idea how well Carl did, either. The interchange felt odd and unresolved, and she remained in the doorway, holding his business card as he turned his truck around and pulled out.

Kyrellis suffered a hard little knot at his core. Something he wanted to reach in and yank out, or massage until it relaxed and let go the tendons that ran up through his neck. He stacked the photos into piles, pulling down the ones he’d decorated his bedroom mirror with and returning them to their metal coffin. He still hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours and his mind had begun to play tricks on him.

He reasoned that a sheriff could probably trace his call. He considered that Castor could find and kill him. Perhaps he’d been foolish and underestimated the kind of man this was—a man who could beat a child, then bind her up like that and take pictures. Why wouldn’t someone capable of that also be a killer? And where were the other girls? He had the ominous feeling they lay in shallow graves along scenic Wyoming back roads.

He calmed himself in his greenhouse. A new rose with a spectacular saffron hue had finally come into bloom.

It was for the roses. Even as he loved them, he knew that his obsession had led him to this. Things never turn out the way one imagines they will. He’d set out to hybridize fungus-resistant roses. It would make him a millionaire. But he could not have foreseen the myriad obstacles. He could not have fathomed the true cost. A hundred thousand for this. Two hundred thousand for that. And not many willing to loan him the money, with his poor track record. For roses. To possess something of beauty.

It was Monday, and he wanted to go down to Swift’s to see what would be in tomorrow’s sale. In so many piles of junk, hidden in the bottom of a box, or the back of a drawer, there might
be something wonderful. Something rare. Beautiful. Winona Freehauf, the antiques dealer with the reserved seat next to his, once bought a battered old leather suitcase for seven dollars. Once she got it home, she found sixty five-dollar silver certificates from the 1950s carefully sewn into the lining. The bunch was worth more than a thousand dollars. It was that sort of intoxicating possibility that he and his fellow auction junkies craved. They were no better than gambling addicts, except that they always had
something
to show for their efforts.