Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (20 page)

“Careful, slick,” Jeep shouted behind me.

But I didn't listen. I launched myself into the kitchen, and Goines sprung suddenly back into view. He whipped something through the air, and the something hit me in the head, and I realized all at once that it was a toaster swinging by its cord. It was one of those old-timey ones, too, the metal ones that are built like bank safes, and I pitched over sideways, and there again was Goines.

“You goddamn troublemaking sonofabitch,” he said. “I'm sending you to hell tonight.”

I still had the Bobtail, but Goines grabbed my wrist and
twisted until I dropped the gun. He kicked it away. The kitchen was small, like you usually find in cheap rentals, and there wasn't much room to maneuver. Goines pressed himself away from me and spun right and hit me with an elbow-strike that sent me staggering against the stove. He moved in and jabbed again but missed, and I picked up a Teflon fry pan and struck him a good one across the chops with it. Blood looped from his nose and mouth and he bent down as though on reflex, and I hit him on the head again and again, like I was driving a rail spike, but the fucker refused to pass out or die. He avoided another hit and swung a right hook into my ear and grabbed me by the throat and sent me crashing into the wall. I hit the wainscot with such a thud that a clock dropped on my head and spat its little wooden bird across the linoleum.

I got to my knees and crawled into the living room and stood quickly. Before I could turn, though, Goines hit me in the back and drove me forward onto my face. He kicked me in the ribs until I rolled over, and he kicked me in the head and then reared back and made like to stomp me through the carpet and into the crawl space, and I rolled to my left and this time came up with the sawed-off and shot him in the foot.

Well, that was a sight. There was a roar and a blast of hellish smoke, and Sonny's foot just kinda vanished in a puff of suede and boot stuffing. His standing-leg buckled, and he sank down on his butt and grabbed his shoe. He looked up at me, and I looked down at him and suddenly found myself staring down the barrel of the gun, and man, let me tell you, all kinds of things run through your mind in a moment like that. I couldn't very well leave it lie, couldn't leave the little
shit running around and unleashing hell on me and mine. My brain was going like a wheel, and it wasn't thinking about whether to add Goines to my Christmas card list. More like how much lye such a thing might require—Fatboy included—or where I might get a hacksaw that time of night.

But I didn't get to give any of that, or murder or self-defense or whatever it was, much more thought, because just then there was another shot, this one straight up into the ceiling and roaring loud. I looked up to find Roy Galligan, dressed fine in a suit as white as the season's first snow, coming down the stairs holding an antique Colt Kodiak double. His hair was the same pale blond, and upon his finger was a circle of carved anthracite. He was a fancy one, the kind of guy who made you want to use words like “upon.” His belt buckle was mighty, and his alligator boots winked with silver buckles. The house seemed fairly to creak under his weight.

“That's enough, if you don't mind,” he said, voice like a cave-in. He stopped to survey the room. “Holy God. It's an abattoir. How did it come to this?”

He didn't bother about my gun. He strode into the room, kicking pieces of this and that—furniture and employees—out of his way with equal disdain. He stepped to the kitchen and rested the Kodiak against a counter. He opened a cabinet and brought out a crystal decanter and a handful of glasses and set them on the bar.

“I saw you the other day up there to Coulterville. Buying chili. You're Slim, aren't you?”

“You Roy?”

We agreed we were who we were. Jeep came out and dusted himself off, and Pelzer stirred on the floor. He sat up and rubbed a swipe of blood around the side of his neck.

I said, “Thank God. I thought you were dead.”

“I thought so, too.” His hand went to the side of his head. He glared at Goines on the floor. “For a second anyway. Little shit shot my ear off.”

“Better than your skull.”

“Or my balls. Think they can sew it back on?” he asked.

“If you can find it,” I said. “It might have gone under the couch.”

He fished around until he found his ear under the sofa.

“Good eye. I bet they can sew it back on,” he said.

“It's a world of medical miracles. Take this.”

Pelzer put his ear in his shirt pocket and climbed to his feet. I handed him the sawed-off, and he stood there holding it and eyeing Galligan like something growing out of his nose.

Galligan looked back at him and smiled sweetly and said, “My opinion, boy, you look better without it. Evens out your head some.”

I said, “You like gambling, don't you, man?”

“What else is there, boy?”

“A long, healthy life, one.”

He regarded me with pity. “You're welcome to it. I'll take my money and my fun,” he said. “I don't suppose I have to ask what this is about, do I?”

“Foremost, it's about Temple Beckett. Where is she?”

Galligan sighed. He drank his drink and looked at the loss with sorrow. I bet he always did that. He wanted his pie and to have it, too.

At last, he said, “Upstairs. First door on the left.”

“Anyone else up there we ought to know about?”

“No,” he said. He looked around the floor a little. “It looks like you got them all.”

I nodded at Jeep, and he and Pelzer went upstairs. They took their guns. I had the 9000S to keep an eye on our host. You could only trust a man like Roy Galligan so far, which was to say not at all.

“It's also about Guy Beckett,” I said when we were alone. I had to raise my voice, the storm was so loud, but the old man seemed not to have noticed it at all. “He's dead, you know.”

“I wouldn't know about that,” he said.

“I'm not guessing,” I said. “I found him in the Grendel. Drowned in all the poison water you've been funneling into it.”

“I confess, I'd wondered about that. He had to have gone somewhere, after all.”

“He stumbled down there to pick up a water sample, maybe,” I said. “Or to take pictures of your jerry-rigged pipe system. Whichever, he got lost in the dark somehow and couldn't find his way back out. Eventually, he panicked and got hung up on something and drowned. I found him in a room off the face.”

Goines swore softly under his breath. His face was pasty white, but the boy was rawhide tough, I'll give him that. He toyed around with taking off his boot but gave it up when the job got too painful, and now he just sat there staring up at us with his crazy eyes.

Galligan looked at him, too, though maybe with less admiration. He said, “Foot full of lead, Sonny? Well, there are worse things. Sit tight, we'll get you fixed up.” He turned to me again and said, “Did you bring him out? Beckett?”

I shook my head, and Galligan winked meanly at me and grinned like we were sharing diabolical doings.

He said, “Because you want money.”

“Because I want to be left alone,” I said. “Anyway, there wasn't time to bring him out. I'm not sure I could have done it by myself anyway.”

Galligan nodded. He said, “Probably not. I had the sad fortune of moving some drowned bodies after the flood of '45, and they were as heavy as granite blocks, even the little ones.”

“Let me ask you this: how much water would you say you've funneled from the King Coal into that old coal mine?”

If I'd hoped to surprise him with my brilliant detective work, I'd have gone home and cried into my pillow. His face didn't even change when he said, “Well, I don't know precisely. My calculations, the Grendel goes some four hundred acres or so.”

“And it's full.”

“And it's full. Well, it's more or less full, as such things go,” Galligan said. “I'm not the first one to do this sort of thing, you know.”

“You installed a false wet seal,” I said, “from one mine to the other. Real seal directs acid mine drainage to a holding tank where you'd treat it with your supplies of anhydrous ammonia.”

“Is that what I did?”

I ignored him. “But treatment's expensive and a pain in your ass anyway. You like doing things your own way and don't want anyone in the state capital or Washington calling the dance, so instead of treating the water you started funneling it to the Grendel.”

“I'm awfully clever then.”

I continued ignoring him. “I'm guessing you've been doing it for several years at least, funneling water and falsifying reports to the government. But then things hit a snag. The Grendel's slowly collapsing, as abandoned mines will, and the acid drainage pooled near some of its structural flaws and started leaking. If it all broke out of the mine—Martin County style—and ended up in the lake, everyone would know what you've been up to, and you'd be looking down the barrel. But to clean it up, you had to increase your supply of anhydrous ammonia, which you couldn't do on the books without attracting attention from the Feds. They'd want to know what you were using it for, so you decided to hit the Knight Hawk's tanks.”

“What a wily character I am.”

There were noises on the stairs. Jeep and Pelzer were coming down. Temple was in Jeep's arms, unconscious.

He said, “She's drugged out of her kettle, but she seems okay.”

I looked at Galligan, “And man, are you lucky.”

He smiled a little, but it wasn't a happy smile. He didn't like being under a thumb, and here he was under the biggest thumb of his life maybe, but he was smart enough to let it play out and live to fight another time.

He said, “You were telling my story back to me, I think.”

“I was,” I said. “You used up your own back supplies of ammonia, I guess, and then hit on the idea of tapping the Knight Hawk's tanks. Chances are, the local meth gangs would catch the blame, and anyway no one would ever think to accuse you of something like that. Only problem was, you didn't know that you'd been seen by Dwayne Mays and Luster's son-in-law, who were working on an unrelated
news story. That is, you didn't know until things started getting hot and Beckett panicked and went to Luster for help. Luster must have figured out what you were doing, and he knew he had you. He came to you and told you what he knew and . . . what? . . . asked you for money? Coal mines?”

Galligan didn't say anything.

I shrugged and said, “Maybe both. Maybe magical fairy dust. Don't matter, really. Whatever it was, you weren't about to be outmaneuvered by him, so you killed him and you killed Mays. You would have killed Beckett, too, but he took care of that business all by himself. Then you learned about Beckett's environmental club and went after them, and Temple, too, fearing he'd told them too much. That's a lot of bodies to leave on the ground, man.”

“I'm not saying anything,” he said, then quickly held up a hand when I started to speak. “Let me finish. I'm not saying anything, except that we didn't do anything to Dwayne Mays.”

Pelzer threw up his hands and said, “Oh, steaming bullshit.”

Galligan looked at me. “Believe what you want. Believe that earless fool there. I'm just saying that no one in this room did anything to that reporter on my orders. That's a promise.”

“Not sure I believe that,” I said.

Galligan shrugged. “Like I said, believe what you want. I don't care. But what I will say is this: that sonofabitch Luster and I go way back. In a way, we were like brothers. Brothers who despised each other, but brothers nevertheless. We fought with each other during the fat times, and banded together against the unions during the lean. We did some
things together that maybe you'd have a hard time believing, things that ought to have tied us together forever with blood. But when he came to me with his hand out and threats in his mouth, he broke our covenant. He broke the bond that our fathers took so seriously and the only thing that keeps this part of the world from drying up and blowing away.”

“So you sent Sonny here to deal with him.”

“If I did—and you understand that I'm not saying I did—it would have been a mercy, like putting an animal out of its misery. The man I knew was already dead, and all that was left was an old fool whose desperation threatened to bring down everything we'd both built up over the years.”

I said, “Dwayne Mays threatened you, too.”

“It's not the same,” he said. “Any story about my mines would never have left his computer. Certainly it never would have been published. His boss and I are old friends. Besides, there are better ways to take care of nettlesome reporters. One thing, they think almost any amount of money is a fortune. Plus, Dwayne made noises about being a man of principle, and there's never anyone easier to bribe than that.”

“That's a mighty cynical view of things, old man.”

He said, “I'd say it's more realistic than cynical, but you have it any way you want.”

“This doesn't leave us in a good place.”

He said, “You've got the gun, boy. When you have the gun, you're supposed to use it, or use the threat of it to get what you want. A long time in this part of the world, I've managed to get what I want. Mostly, it's with money, but sometimes it's through threats and sometimes it's through other kinds of actions, some of them less wholesome than others. After a time, you can rely on reputation. People do
what you want them to do because they're afraid of what you'll do otherwise, but that only lasts for so long. Sooner or later, all of this will be gone. Eventually the Grendel will let go of its hold on all that water, and my secret will be out, and I'll probably lose a few dollars here and there, either in court or by feathering the pockets of our noble civil servants. Maybe I'll get out of the business entirely, and a few more hundred or a thousand men will lose their jobs. But what's any of that mean in the grand scheme? You know I'll never be arrested, and you know I'll never see the inside of a cell. Son, this is the United fucking States of America. Land of the free market, home of the despoiler, where the only kings are citizen kings. When the hell is the last time you ever heard of a well-off white man going to jail for befouling the goddamn land? So I suggest you either use your gun or threaten to use it and tell me what you want.”