Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (18 page)

“You sonofabitch,” she said when I took the hankie out of her mouth.

“Me? I didn't do this.”

“I know,” she said. “I'm just angry.”

“Where's Temple?”

“She's not in this closet, is she? I don't know.”

I finished untying her. She looked frazzled but, all told, not too much the worse for the experience. There was a bruise under her right eye where someone had socked her, but nothing seemed to be broken, and she walked okay. We went downstairs. I tried to help her, but she shrugged my arm away and grunted a bad word at me. I figured she'd be fine.

“When?” I asked when Pelzer had come in from the street and joined us.

“Couple of hours ago,” she said. “Maybe longer. It's easy to lose track of time when you're stuck in a dark closet. What time is it now?”

I told her.

She said, “It's longer. I must have been in there three hours or so. Some time around four, someone knocked on the door, and I went to open it, and that's the last thing I remember until I woke up in the dark.”

“Did you get a look at anyone before your nap? Even for a second?”

“Your concern is touching,” she said.

I said, “I'll be concerned later, when there's time. Right
now, you look healthy enough, but Temple might not be. So, I'll ask you again: did you get a look at anyone?”

She breathed in and shut her eyes and seemed to gather herself a little. She said, “I don't mean to be a baby.”

“You're not. You've just had a shock, is all.”

She nodded at me, and I figured that was the closest thing to gratitude she was capable of. “There was a big guy. In a camo shirt and orange hat. Great fashion sense. Redneck of the year. I didn't recognize him, though.”

Pelzer said, “That might have been Sonny.”

“Who?”

“Sonny Goines. One of Galligan's guys. His right-hand guy, in fact. He's always wearing an orange hat, like a trucker hat. Godawful thing.”

Susan said, “That's what it was. I couldn't think of what to call it. With the high front. I think it said
I Hunt White Tail
on it.”

Pelzer sniffed and nodded. “Sonny.”

“Does that mean what I think it means?”

“Yeah. There used to be a drawing of a girl's naked behind on it, but the hat's old, and the girl kinda faded out. Now all that's left are the words.”

I said, “You know an awful lot about this hat.”

Pelzer frowned and threw up his hands. “I just noticed it, is all.”

“Okay,” I said. “Stop pouting. I think I saw it the other day, and you're right; it's an ugly hat. The question is, why take Temple? What's she got to do with it all?”

“Could be any number of things, you think about it for half a second. Instead of, say, insulting someone's powers of observation.”

“Tony . . .”

“Like maybe they think she knows something,” Pelzer said. “Maybe they think Beckett talked in his sleep. Or that he couldn't keep his mouth shut around his wife. A lot of guys can't, you know. Even guys who don't like their wives. Or maybe they think she knows where the picture of Jim Hart is.” He looked at me. “You never brought it to me, by the way.”

“Wasn't time,” I said. “I'll see that you get it. Meantime, what are we going to do?”

Susan said, “Are you out of your mind? What do you mean, what are you doing to do? Call the police. Now.”

“We do that, she's dead,” Pelzer said. “She's probably dead anyway.”

Susan glared at him. “Don't you dare say that again.”

Pelzer said, “Hey, I'm not crazy about the idea, either, but that's where we are. They'll get what they can out of her. They'll ask her questions, maybe rough her up a bit, I don't know. And when they think they've got it all, they'll pop her. You go to the cops, they'll still be typing up your complaint when Galligan and his men are looking for a place to bury the body.”

Susan blanched. She said, “I think I need to sit down.”

We helped her to a chair. She buried her face in her hands.

“What do you want to do?” Pelzer asked me.

“I need to check something,” I said. “I know we don't have a lot of time, but it has to be done. It's what I've been trying to do since I started this business, and doing it might help us in the end. As soon as I'm back, we're going to get Temple. Tonight.”

I
rode fast, and it only took a little more than twenty minutes to get there. The access road to the Grendel no longer existed, so I had to hike the dense timberland between the new mine and old. What remained of the colliery was a building skeleton here and there and a few pieces of junked equipment, abandoned where they fell and overgrown by grasses and vines. The shower house was still mostly standing, and the noise of the metal clothing hooks clanging and clanking together in the winter wind sent mortal chills through my blood. This was a slope mine, not a shaft, which means it had a walk-in entry, an adit twenty-five feet or so up a curved, stone-clotted slope. When I reached the top, I spied the ragged hole Guy Beckett had chopped in the concrete stopper. That's the way they did with some of these old mines. They'd abandon the works, and then, to keep out children or fools, they'd clot up the entries with concrete blocks or a steel hatch, whatever made sense for that mine. This one had concrete blocks, and Guy Beckett had used a pickax or a sledge to crack them open and bust his way inside. Despite everything, I'd kinda hoped to be wrong.

The air in the work area was stale and cold and tasted faintly of rusted metal, kind of like sucking on a dirty nail. You've ever had occasion to suck a dirty nail, I mean. And damn, it was dark in there. Dark as an exorcist's jokes but not as funny. The floors were bottoms—floors caked with deposited coal fine—and the batters had crumbled onto their arches and partially collapsed so that you could barely stand up, and the effect was something like being trapped inside a frozen black coffin. The first thing I did was step on part of an old crib can and damn near puncture my foot.

That was bad enough, sure, but then I ran into the bats. Literally ran into them, face-first, a colony hanging upside down in a dark corner like a bunch of overripe fruit. That pissed them off something awful, being woke up like that, and suddenly the cave front was filled with the slap of leathery wings and a piercing shriek that sent me diving for the floor, arms over my head, hoping to at least avoid a case of the rabies.

There are plenty of awful places to work and toil in the world, in many occupations, but man, that old slope mine had to be near the top of the list. Old enough to have remnant wooden beams and cradles and an alligator looked like it'd been built during the Civil War, the Grendel was as low as some scratchback mines I'd seen, and the only fire-prevention devices were in the form of cloth sacks and rock dust. The stopes were slick with slime and bat guano, and the backs winked eerily with some kind of rotting mushroom light that was somehow more disorienting than the dark. I guess it's no wonder Beckett ran into bad luck. You'd have to know mines pretty well not to, in a place like that.

I found him twenty minutes later. There was an open spot off the face where the shadows were so thick my spotlight couldn't flush all of them out. He was facedown in a deep pool, and there wasn't much left of him. His blue-veined features had been eaten away by liquid poison. Also known as acid mine drainage, the poison created when water comes into contact with sulfides in the rock. It's known by another name, on account of its color: yellow boy.

Farther down the tunnel, the sound of water was a restless drip, slowly filling the bowels of the mine. I made my way as far as I dared, farther than Beckett by maybe a hundred
yards, until I found the jerry-rigged pipe system and saw the water pouring through it. Around the lip of the pipe, the ribs of the Grendel were broken, cracked through so deeply that in places the top had collapsed around them as though in surrender. It wouldn't be long before the earth shifted again and the water stored up inside the mine burst out and sluiced its way toward the wildlife preserve, with its trees and wildlife and water plants and good fishing. I got out of there before I froze to death.

I needed to make a call, but my cell phone was full of water. Or, as it were, the evidence. There was a bar up the road from the wildlife refuge. It wasn't a good place. It was a fighting place, a roadhouse that changed owners so often they could have used it as the basis for a new series of teenage slasher movies, Camp Crystal Lake with a liquor license. But it would have to do. I went inside and looked around for a pay phone. A guy tried to start a fight with me, but I wouldn't let him. After a while, he gave it up and stalked off to a table in the corner and had a pout about it. I found the phone at the back of the house, but someone had ripped it off the wall and it hung there from the busted plaster by a few cords. Something about that broke me inside. I flashed angry. I stomped back toward the front of the house. The guy who wanted to fight looked up at me. I kicked him right out of his chair and to the floor. I didn't want him to lose all hope in his fellow man. I leaned down and took his phone from his pocket and used it to make a call.

“I'm working,” Jeep said. He was, too. I could barely hear him over the roar of the machines.

I said, “Might be time to consider a new line. Or at least a new boss.”

“What's he done now?”

“Not much,” I said. “You know, murder, kidnapping, an attempt to poison the world.”

“I wouldn't put it past him.”

“My place, soon as you can,” I said, and hung up.

I gave the angry guy back his phone and thanked him. He seemed better, more centered after his kicking, and seemed not to hold any of it against me. Probably I'd made his night because now he had a story to tell, and that's the only reason anyone ever did anything anyway. We even shook hands and then I left the bar and went outside.

I crossed the noisy parking lot and climbed on the bike. The ignition switch on the Triumph is under your left leg, so you have to lean down to insert the key. I'd just done that when something slammed my head hard off the top of the tank, then grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and pulled me off the side of the bike. I was always getting kicked or hit or thrown off of my bike these days. Twenty years without falling off my bike, or putting her down, and now all of a sudden I couldn't manage to stay in my saddle. This time, though, I had on my helmet, and the pavement jumped up and hit me in the head but didn't do any lasting damage. I scrambled to my feet and pulled off the helmet and turned just as he materialized out of the shadows.

There was a pistol in his hand. He pointed it at my heart.

He said, “You goddamn cocksucker.”

It was Jump Down.

H
e didn't need them—the gun was probably enough—but he'd brought along two boys: big, meaty things with scars on their awful faces and a frozen dislike in their eyes. They were horrible and they didn't do anything to hide it. You tried to imagine them having human mothers, but you couldn't do it. Sharks, maybe. They put me in the backseat of a green maxi-cab. The boys got in front. Jump climbed in with me and we roared quickly away from the parking lot. No one bothered to look up at us as we left. Probably they had abductions there all the time.

I said, “This is kidnapping.”

“Shut up.”

“Well, it is.”

Jump nodded. He turned his head slightly, as though to look thoughtfully out the window. His eyes wobbled in his head in that way of theirs, and then he suddenly swung with his right arm and shoved me back against the seat.

He said, “It is. And I said shut up.”

I shut up. The maxi cruised out of town and south a ways on Spillway Road until we cut back west toward a gated access into the wildlife preserve. The maxi lurched to a stop, throwing us against the backs of the seats in front of us. The big guy who was driving turned around and apologized to Jump Down with a look, and the other guy got out and rustled around in the bed for a moment and then there was the sound of metal snapping. The door opened and the boy got
back in and we were underway again. I figured he'd used a pair of bolt-cutters to snip the chain off a barrier arm and take us into the woods.

You're about to die like that—and I was pretty sure that's where we were heading—your mind starts tearing off in all kinds of directions. I thought of Anci and Peggy and of what they'd think when they'd learned I came to harm. I silently asked Peggy to take care of Anci, and I asked Jeep Mabry to keep guarding over them and make it so they were safe. I found myself thinking of my old man and the bad he'd done and how maybe I'd tried to make up for a few of those things in my own way and through my own actions, but I didn't ask anything of him that didn't involve regrets and lost chances. When I was young, we'd come to this very preserve every fall to watch the migration of the Canada geese. One year, we found a goose with a badly broken wing, and instead of just leaving it there or killing it like I thought he would he'd wrapped it in his jacket and taken it to the rangers' station and then driven with the ranger to an animal rehabilitation preserve in Tennessee. Not much later, he'd gone away, and in that first year of loneliness I took my sisters back to see the geese on my own, but it wasn't the same and we never went again. I thought of Guy Beckett's body in the Grendel mine, and I wondered whether anyone would ever find him again. That was a lonely place of dying. I thought of how I wish I'd listened to my own good sense and refused to take Matthew Luster up on his devilish bargain, and how taking him up on it meant that Peggy and I would never get to make our life together, assuming we could have salvaged our relationship. I was thinking all that when the truck stopped at last and the engine died. The front doors opened and the big boys got
out. One of them opened Jump Down's side, and allowed him to step out. The other pulled open my side and reached in and pulled me from my seat and to the ground like a sack of flour.

Jump came around the truck and over to me and squatted down. He rested his hand on his knee, and the big revolver filled his fist. I could feel the sweat trickling down my face. Jump said, “Shit just got real. You don't look so good, Slim.”

“Don't feel so good, either.”

“Yeah, and you shouldn't. Here I let you off the hook, and look what I get in return for my generosity. You've made a lot of trouble for me, cousin.”

I said, “Not me, but I guess I understand why you think that way.”

He nodded at that, more thoughtfully than I imagined him able. He scratched his head and spat into the dirt and said, “The cops are after me, man. They came to my place the other day and talked to my mother.”

“You live with your mother?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. So what?”

“It's just kinda weird, don't you think? I mean, given your . . . occupation.”

“I'm a coal miner, man. Nothing else. And the old lady was upset, and when she gets upset her phlebitis acts up. You think that's funny?”

I didn't realize I'd been smiling. “It's kind of funny,” I said.

“It's not funny,” he said, shaking his head. “You are wrong. It is a very painful and frustrating condition.”

“Okay, I apologize. It just wasn't what I expected you to say.”

“Top of that, the meds she needs to control it aren't exactly cheap, you know.”

“I said I was sorry.”

He wasn't listening. “So she gets mad and she's already in discomfort. She has to dip into her bingo money, and that makes her even madder, and she takes it all out on me. Guess who I'm blaming.”

“Me?”

“Good guess.”

“Or Galligan.”

“There you go with that Galligan business again,” he said. “We're talking about Roy Galligan here, right?”

“Less you know some Galligans I don't.”

“How you figure?”

I shook my head and said, “Look, if you're going to shoot me, I'd just as soon as you get on it, save me the headache of trying to ram information into that bank vault between your ears.”

“You're trying to piss me off,” he said. “Get me to do you quickly. I get that. I'm not a zombie, man.”

“You're close.”

“There you go again,” he said. He laughed quietly under his breath. The piles of meat shuffled nervously. One of them scraped a foot on the gravel path. He was like a horse scraping out the last ticks of my life with his hoof. “You should be careful, though. Guns have a way of just going off. At this range, the Commander here would rip a hole through your throat, and you'd bleed out in under a minute.”

“Pretty thought.”

“I told you the other day I'd hold my fire, and I did, but then someone told the cops that I'd sent some men to shoot
you and your daughter, and now I'm on the hook for it. I'm living in one of the mobile labs, and I have to sleep in a gas mask, so if I wanted you dead, Slim, there'd be plenty of reason already to put a hole in your brain.”

“So why not?”

“Why not is, I haven't built myself into something by going off half-cocked. You deserve shooting, but I know who your old man was and I know who you're butt buddies with, and I'm not crazy about the idea of any more of my men going missing. Or me.”

“Wait,” I said. “Who went missing?”

“You're pissing me off, man. You know your boy Mabry pulled one of my men off the count in revenge for the other night.”

“He didn't.”

“Bullshit.”

“He wouldn't,” I said. “Tell the hard truth, I'm thinking he wouldn't need to.”

“What? You think my guys can't look after themselves?”

I shrugged.

Jump Down said, “You think all that muscle's just for show, or what?”

I shrugged.

Jump Down said, “You think you could take them? You think you could take even one of them?”

“It's not my policy to piss off the guy holding the gun, but, yeah, I think I could. Without much trouble, either. Certainly I wouldn't need to turn Jeep Mabry loose on them. C'mon, look at those two. They're like something you won throwing baseballs at milk bottles. They're adorable.”

He said, “So what you're saying is, you think you could
take, say, Lonnie there?” He waved vaguely in the direction of his boys. Both of them showed me mouthfuls of rotted teeth. I didn't know which teeth in which mouth belonged to Lonnie.

“Tell you what, let's make a deal,” I said.

“I'm not sure you're in a deal-making position.”

“Probably not, but here's one anyway: Let Lonnie and me go a round. He beats me, it's anything goes. I won't squawk. Put holes in me if you like. Whatever other wickedness you have in mind. But if I beat him, you give me twenty-four hours so I can go after Roy Galligan and put our troubles to rest. Yours and mine.”

Jump Down thought about that some. He looked at his boys, but neither of them said anything or revealed how they might have felt about my idea. Probably they liked it fine. I didn't look like much. I was wet and cold and scared and had a bump on my head. My courage was as phony as a three-dollar bill. I'd laughed at an old woman and her phlebitis. Jump Down turned back to me and said, “Why on earth do you think I'd go along with something like this?”

“I don't know. Meanness maybe. Or boredom. And then there's always the off chance that I'm telling the truth. You can kill me, but tomorrow your problem is still the same.”

“Galligan?”

“Galligan.”

“Okay, maybe. But you got to put up more. Just not squawking isn't too much for me to win, and I plan to win anyway. I got the gun, after all.”

“You'll win,” one of the boys said. Lonnie, I guess. He studied me, and I studied him back. He was the larger of the two, which I found disappointing. Besides being smaller, the other guy moved with just the slightest limp, so I'd kinda
hoped Lonnie was him. Lonnie was something else, though. He had arms like tree limbs and a head like a concrete block. His chest was as big around as a Hula-Hoop, and his hands looked like they could palm a Thanksgiving turkey. Fighting him wasn't my favorite idea.

I said, “What more can I put up?”

“Yourself, one,” he said. “Mabry, two. In other words, after Lonnie there kicks your ass, you're both on my payroll for, say, a year. Except I ain't actually paying you, get it?”

“I get it,” I said. “We'll be errand boys.”

“Errand boys, or whatever else I need.”

“Muscle?”

“Mabry, maybe. You, I ain't so sure. You're kinda wiry.”

“Pot, kettle,” I said. “Besides, Mabry won't ever agree to any such foolishness.”

“He will if you tell him to. Everybody knows he'd strangle his mother for you. Anyway, it's either this or you don't walk away from here. So what do you say?”

There was just the one thing to say. I agreed. I figured that if I died, Jeep would murder the boy for killing me, and if I lived, Jeep would murder the boy for being such a lunkhead and hatching such a dim-witted scheme. Either way, he was in a world of hurt. That made things seem slightly cheerier.

Lonnie didn't do anything to help my mood, though. Jump Down and the other boy stepped back and Lonnie came over to me, cracking his knuckles and shaking a hitch out of his neck and making a noise in his throat like snot boiling. He went maybe six foot seven or so and was basically built like a Sherman tank. I figured him for a solid 325 at least. I'd seen plenty of big guys in my time, but that motherfucker was big enough to project a Charlton Heston
movie on. I stood off the ground and got into something resembling a fight stance, and Jump Down barked something, and Lonnie lunged in with a jab that hit me in the top of the chest and sent me over backward.

That hurt like hell, but I'll tell you, I immediately felt better about my chances. A single punch can tell a story, and Lonnie's told me plenty. He'd done some bouncing work and probably some other kind of hard physical labor—mine or farm work, probably—but he'd gotten by mostly on body mass and bad looks, and his fighting style seemed more haphazard than anything. His footwork was a series of stomps, and when he advanced on me he did it with his hands low and his head forward.

I clambered to my feet, and the boy came in again and tossed off a painfully slow right hook. I cut inside the shadow of his big body and kicked him in the gut. I rolled right and went outside and hit him on the left ear so hard he went down on a knee. He looked up and swiped at me with one of his mitts, and I tried to get out of his way but he grabbed the top of my leg and flung me across the road like a rag doll. He laughed. He liked that one okay. I got up and we circled one another. His buddy shouted some encouragement, and the kid got cocky and lunged in again, swiping at my head. This time I got lucky and he missed badly and overextended himself right into my jump front kick. That was a good hit, but not my best, and it sent him spilling slightly sideways but not down. He was stronger even than he looked, though, and he came right back at me, lunging all his weight off his back leg. He hit me a stunner in the left shoulder, and I felt the arm go dead, but the boy's momentum was too strong and he chased his own punch and lurched forward on his toes. I moved slightly left and turned back into him. I stuck out
my foot and tripped him, then grabbed hold of his hair and bounced his face off the side of the maxi-cab so hard he left a shallow dent. He dropped to the ground and stayed there.

Jump Down looked at me and at his boy. He turned his head and spat again and looked at the gun in his hand and did some thinking. His eyes wobbled and shook like boiling eggs and finally I could see him make his decision. He shrugged. He said, “Okay. Like we agreed, twenty-four hours. Then we got to take care of this for good.”

I stood there. Jump Down stared at me. He said, “Goddamn it, I said you got your twenty-four. What the fuck else do you want?”

I said, “I need a lift back to my bike.”

I
reached Indian Vale just as the first barks of thunder rattled overhead. That big front was pushing through, and this one was going to be a boomer. The sky darkened some more, and the stars ducked away and hid their bright heads. I got off the Triumph and walked up to the house just as a violent wind stirred and the weather cut loose. Rain slammed the house and rattled the windowpanes and a crack of lightning cut through the sky west of the valley.

Jeep Mabry and Pelzer were waiting for me under the overhang of my front porch.

“I'll say this for you, Slick,” Jeep said, “you know how to make an entrance.”