Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (14 page)

“Fine. But don't dawdle. Forty-five and I'm gone. And for the love of Mike, don't bring a piece.”

I rolled again toward Bluegill Point. Along the way, I stopped by the Vale and swapped the truck for the bike, because I'd promised to give Anci a ride on it later. I checked the kitchen window lock, but it was the same as before, and I went inside and looked at Anci's computer, but all I saw on the makeshift security feed was Peggy stopping by to pick up some of the Anci's things. I collected my helmet and Anci's and my jacket and gloves and went out again. The weather
was still cool, but the clouds had pushed off, and the sky was clear and blue and beautiful. You'd never think all this strife was going on under that sky. I strapped Anci's helmet to the rack on the back of the bike and took off.

It was just after nine o'clock when I found myself back on Tony Pelzer's doorstep. The GMC was still there, but in a different spot, so either Pelzer had gotten it running or gotten that team of elephants. The sign with his name was still there, so the elephants hadn't stepped on it. I went up on the porch and knocked and after a short moment there he was, shirtless, with a soft belly and a bruise the size of a grapefruit on his furry chest. I felt a shock of recognition and a few things sliding into place. I remembered the weird things he'd said on the phone, and I remembered what Mary-Kay Connor had told me about him and his job. I'd thought maybe the badge and police uniform were pieces of a costume. That they might have been part of a security job hadn't occurred to me. I tried to be cool, but he was right, being cool wasn't easy.

Tony Pelzer was Round-Face.

I
've never been shot with one of those things before,” he said. He touched the bruise gently but winced and sucked a stuttering breath. “Got tased once. No, twice. And maced unconscious. That ain't my favorite memory. And this one time, I got hit with a cattle prod pretty good.”

“A cattle prod?”

“It's a long story,” he said and nipped at his can of beer. We were sitting on his back deck not far from the banks of Grassy Creek. “But I ain't never been shot with one of them beanbag guns.”

“Betsy.”

“That what you call her?”

“Yup.”

“I got my heart broken by a Betsy once, so that hurts double.”

“I bet.”

“I kinda thought you'd say you're sorry.”

“You were kinda wrong. You kicked me so hard I thought I'd wake up surrounded by a gang of bowling munchkins.”

“I actually am a little regretful about that. I'm a tough guy, and I tend to overdo it sometimes. I wouldn't have been after you at all, except Beckett's wife asked me to back you off.”

“Temple?”

“She does love to hear her own name. What's with that anyway? Who in the hell names their kid Temple?”

“Redneck
telenovela
,” I said.

“What?”

“A flair for the dramatic married to a certain kind of taste. She pretended not to recognize your description, by the way.”

Pelzer said, “Can you blame her? At first, she's thinking you're just the old man's crazy idea. She wants you gone, but she's afraid to tell her father no, so she calls me. Then a couple of days later, shit gets real, and suddenly she starts to need you. Not exactly a great time to admit she had you roughed up. 'Nother beer?”

“Sure.”

He left the deck and went inside for a pair of fresh ones. I didn't figure he planned to murder me in his own house—the deck furniture looked new, for one thing, and murder would probably risk staining it—but I sat in my chair with the hand in my right jacket pocket around the grip of the unregistered Beretta 9000S I'd borrowed from Jeep Mabry. Came to it, I could shoot Pelzer out of his chest hair before he cleared the sliding door. Least I hoped I could. Probably the shot would go wild and clip a gas main and blow us both to Terre Haute. If I was going to keep at this business, I was going to have to find a weapon I was more comfortable with. Alligator on a leash, maybe.

It didn't come to that, though. Guns or gas mains or angry reptiles. Pelzer came back with two fresh ones. I'd had one, and didn't want the second, but having it in front of me might calm him down some, so I accepted the cold can and set it on the patio table.

“This is a little awkward,” he said, slugging his.

“Putting it mildly,” I said. “Last twenty minutes or so,
I've been trying to think up a polite way to ask you for my co-pay back.”

“Mine was bigger, probably. That is, if I had a co-pay, which I don't, being self-employed. I woke up on the floor feeling like I'd been run over by a football team. You didn't tie me so tight, but I gave myself some pretty good burns wiggling free of the ropes, and by the time I got out of there I could hear sirens on their way. You called the cops?”

“Seemed like the best thing to do at the time.”

He shrugged. “I don't blame you. I guess I might have done the same. I mean, I blame you a little. I might have been willing to talk, but you didn't give me a chance.”

“You didn't give the chance before. Plus, you were reaching for a weapon.”

“That's fair. I'm a fair person, and that sounds fair to me. So where are we here?”

I said, “I'm more interested in where Guy Beckett is.”

“Wish I knew. Truly. I've been running all over the place for days looking for him. I even looked in Texas, believe it or not. He and Temple have a place there. Well, Temple has a place there, and Beckett was allowed a room. I got a buddy down that way. He looked in for me. Nada. Beckett and I spoke the night before Dwayne Mays got pulled off the count, and I've not heard a peep from him since.”

“He asked you to look after him?”

Pelzer shrugged. “He asked me to babysit, yeah. Couple weeks earlier. We're buds from way back, and I do this kind of work these days, so it seemed like a good fit. Dwayne was against me coming in, though. He thought I'd step on this story he and Beckett were working on. Serious shit. Meth dealers in the mine. I'm sure you know. The two of them
were haunting the Knight Hawk for weeks. It has a rep. Lot of shit moves in and out of there. Then one night, they staked-out the whatdoyoucallit tanks.”

“The ammonia tanks.”

“That's the stuff. I can never remember,” he said. He shook his head. “Ammonia. Jesus God. How in the hell do people use that shit?”

“It makes them feel good for a while,” I said. “People like to feel good.”

“Yeah, but this kind of feeling good rots their teeth and boils their brain. It turns them into the walking dead. I knew a lady once carried a kid to term in a meth house, and when the thing was born it came out looking like a melted candle. I'm not guessing that felt too good.”

“Probably not.”

“Anyway, after that night, Dwayne had a flash, and he and Beckett stopped pestering the small fries and started working on something else.”

“Galligan.”

Pelzer raised his eyebrows. His soft face moved around a little like when you're working wet bread dough.

“Not bad, Hawkshaw. Galligan. Least that's what I figured. Dwayne was pretty tight about the whole thing, and I think Beckett was scared out of his wits. That wife of his had tossed him out during one of their frequent bouts of marital distress, and Guy was living with Mays and feeling like a bird on a wire.”

“He could have run,” I said.

“From Galligan? And gone where? The moon?”

“Good point,” I said. Money had long arms. “So Dwayne thought Galligan had dealt himself into the local meth business?
I got to tell you, I've heard this one a couple times now, and it just doesn't sit right with me.”

“Me, neither. He's an old guy, for one, and kind of an old-school hard-ass. It's hard to imagine him getting in bed with these young dirtbags. Two, add it up, it's a lot of risk for not much reward. At least that's what I told Beckett.”

“What'd he say?”

“Well, the night of the stakeout, they were watching that tank, the big one, way down the hill at the cold-storage hut.”

“I know the one.”

Pelzer said, “I think Beckett expected some kids to show up with gas cans or something, but instead it was a tanker truck and bobtail. The entire tank got tapped. More than six thousand gallons of whatdoyoucallit.”

“Ammonia.”

He shook his head. “Got a mental block about that. Nasty shit. Beckett said they'd painted the sides of the tanker, but someone had done a shitty job, and you could still make out some of the letters. It was a Galligan mine truck, all right.”

“Which one?”

“King Coal. One up the hill above the lake.”

“Next to the Grendel.”

“What?”

I said, “It's an abandoned coal mine across the gap from the King Coal. Not important.”

“I don't like being left in the dark.”

“You're in the wrong story then,” I said.

“Brother, you said it. Anyway, from what I gather, Dwayne got this flash. He started thinking Galligan wasn't selling the shit. He started thinking maybe Galligan was actually giving the shit away.”

“Giving it away? Why?”

Pelzer said, “Juice the mine's numbers. Dwayne read it in a book somewhere, I think. Mines in Africa or Asia, some godawful place, they used to juice the workers secretly, or against their will, or whatever. Gives the guys a serious buzz and keeps them working harder and longer. Production goes up, tonnage goes up, mine stays open longer. The money flows.”

“That sounds more far-fetched than the first idea.”

“What I told Beckett,” he said. “But you got to admit, these are desperate times. A lot of these old guys are watching their fortunes disappear. They're watching their
fathers'
fortunes disappear. And now they got to think about what they're leaving behind for their kids and grandkids or whatever. A lot of them are just egotistical assholes, too, and willing to do almost anything not to lose the game. So I guess you never know.”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “You'd think a thing like that would be hard to keep a lid on. They might get lucky for a while, but eventually something would go wrong. Even if they kept the dose super light, someone would notice. They'd give someone a heart attack, or guys would start tearing out their own eyeballs down there. You never know how someone's going to react to amphetamine use.”

Pelzer said, “I'm not saying it's perfect. I ain't even saying I bought it, though knowing what I know about Roy Galligan I wouldn't automatically rule it out. I'm just saying it's what Mays was starting to believe.”

“What about Beckett?”

“I think he just wanted off the roller coaster,” Pelzer said. “Mays was one of these guys gets hold of something, he
hangs on like a pit bull. I admit, this wasn't my favorite guy, but you had to admire that in him anyway. He led with his dick a lot, but he was a pro and completely unafraid to be hated. Impressive shit for a puffer.”

“So Beckett felt like he was just along for the ride?”

“More or less, yeah. I mean, the guy's a fucking shutterbug. It's not even really his thing. Galligan gets busted, he's there popping his flash in the old man's face, then it's his thing. Until then, he's just someone for Mays to bounce ideas off.”

“Mays's Dr. Watson,” I said. I still didn't like it, but it made a kind of sense. And it might explain Beckett's disappearance. He thought he was just a tagalong to catch stray bullets, he might have made a break for it. And that was to say nothing of his relationship with his wife. Or his kid in Johnston City. Add it up, he might feel like he was running away from a world of headaches. The bastard.

I said, “Okay. So who killed Luster? I'm thinking we're down to Galligan. Mays starts working Galligan. Galligan starts feeling heat and starts working back on Mays.”

Pelzer nodded. “At which point, Beckett is beginning to feel like the only whore in camp on payday. Repeatedly fucked. He goes to his father-in-law, Luster, and asks for help. The old man sends him packing—this is not his favorite relative—but then starts digging on his own. Maybe at a certain point he goes to Galligan and starts making accusations.”

“I hate to say it,” I said, “but it's not completely far-fetched. At least that part. No one ever mentioned any of this to me. Luster included.”

“Yeah, but why would he? See, he gets you looking for
Beckett. He's got Galligan sweating it out on the other side. Dead body in the coal mine, private eye looking for his missing son-in-law. There's no reason to tell you more than he did, because if he tells you too much and things go south then he's got to decide whether to pay you off or pop you.”

“Nice.”

“These ain't nice people, Slim.”

I said, “So what's the story on the picture?”

“The picture?”

“The picture of Jim Hart. You were taking it from Mays's house when I introduced you to Betsy.”

Pelzer leaned back in his chair and showed me his teeth. He sucked on his can some more, but it was mostly empty sound now, very little liquid. He was really pounding them.

“I don't know as I like that,” he said. “You bringing that up over and over.”

“I don't know as I care,” I said.

He smiled some more and said, “You looking to start something?”

“Not really. But I'm okay with it if you are. I guess we're one to one, so maybe we need that tiebreaker. Other hand, I don't think there's a reason for this to turn confrontational, if you don't want it to.”

He thought about that some. Maybe he wanted it to, maybe he didn't. His face had this way of eating his expressions and making him hard to get a read on. At last, he sighed and got up and went into the house. I took the 9000S out of my pocket and put it on the table next to my beer. After a moment, Pelzer came back out with a fresh can. None for me. He sat down and took a long pull and put his beer down in front of him and only then noticed the pistol.

“Goddamn it, I asked you not to bring one of those,” he said.

“And then neglected to pat me down before you let me in,” I said. “Damn, man, how long have you been in security work? 'Cause to me that's an easy one.”

He actually looked a little ashamed.

“What can I say? I'm an earthmover. Sometimes I let things slide. Sometimes I forget to do things, but you need a door opened I'm your guy.” He took a long drink. It must have been about half the can. He wiped his mouth with his arm and belched loudly and said, “So what now? You shoot me?”

“Hell, no. I just wanted you to know where we stand,” I said. “Now about Jim Hart.”

I could see his wheels turning, and not quickly, either. He could let me shove him around on his own patio deck or he could get shot. It wasn't clear which one he was going to choose. After another moment's reflection, he let it go.

He said, “You ever heard of steganography?”

“Some kind of dinosaur?”

“Cute. No. It's a process of hiding pictures inside of pictures. Like in spy books or whatever.”

“Like microdots?”

“Yeah, like that, but with lots of detail. Way I understand it, you can hide all kinds of things inside a simple photograph.”

Something in my brain started buzzing. A hazy memory from the other day.

“Wait a minute. Beckett had a book about it in his room at Mays's place. Stega-whatever.”