The private-plane offices and hangars were across the parking lot from the public terminal. There was no check-in or metal detector. The Challenger jet was due in thirty-seven minutes. The Closer chose to wait for it out on the tarmac in the broiling midday sun, as if serving some kind of penance.
It landed five minutes early, taxied smartly to a stop, and let its engines idle. The door opened and Payton descended, a hamlike hand shielding his eyes from the brightness. He wore a cheap, grease-spotted raincoat in spite of the heat, the better to conceal the friend he had brought along with him—a Mossberg pistol-grip pump action 12-gauge shotgun. The Mossberg could be concealed along the leg but whipped out like a pistol, which made it extremely popular with gangbangers. It cut an extremely intimidation profile. Personally, the Closer didn’t care for the weapon. Or for intimidation. The Closer believed in quick, surgical execution, not in bullying. But a Mossberg was definitely Payton’s style.
Smirking, he waddled across the tarmac toward the Closer, who handed him the keys to the Suburban without greeting or commend and got an unpleasant sneer in return. This was to be expected. Payton resented the Closer’s youth, good looks, and tax bracket. He especially resented that the Closer had never pounded a beat.
“So you let ’em get away, huh, kid?” he jeered unpleasantly over the noise of the jet’s engines. The man smelled like a barnyard animal—a pig or possibly a goat. And his breath was positively rancid. “Not gonna happen now, is it? Now that I’m on the job. When the Man needs it done right, he sends for a pro, you know what I mean?”
The Closer said nothing. There were too many thoughts about jabbing a length of piano wire into Payton’s eyeball and driving it deep into his brain—such as it was.
“Don’t let it get you down,” Payton added nastily. “I’m happy to clean up your mess for you. In fact, I kinda like it.” And with that he sniffed in a huge amount of air and snot, hitched up his trousers, and started across the tarmac to the parking lot, limping slightly.
The Closer watched him go, wondering why Augmon bothered with him. An utter failure as a street cop, he was angry, bitter, clueless. A racist. Most certainly an alcoholic. Why keep him on the payroll?
The Closer shook off the image of Payton lumbering across the airstrip and climbing on board. There was a flight attendant, a pretty young black woman who was in the process of tidying up. She seemed relieved to be rid of Payton. No doubt he had made a series of crude sexual advances toward her.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked, smiling brightly.
The Closer thought how nice it would be to sink into her arms, to have her clothes off, to make this black woman moan and groan in ecstasy. But now was not the time. So the Closer took a seat and said, “A tape player and headphones, please. And some mineral water.”
The door was promptly shut now. The Challenger began to taxi back toward a runway.
The attendant returned a moment later with a Walkman and a tall glass of Perrier. Also the nine-by-twelve manila envelope that contained the details of the new assignment. The Closer popped the Dick Dale tape into the player and took a sip of the cold sparkling water. Then the Closer opened the envelope and began to read.
Carl and Amanda pulled into Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the early evening.
They had a new felony to add to their long list of crimes: car theft.
They had wandered, dazed but determined, for perhaps three miles after the Subaru had exploded. The delta countryside was flat and fertile farmland, the contour broken only by occasional unpaved roads, stands of old trees, and a few swampy bayous. Doing their best to keep heading south, they had passed through a grove of pecan trees. In the middle of the grove was a rickety old truck, used to drive amidst the grove to gather the nuts. The cab was sturdy enough; the back, which was still piled high with pecans, was dented and rusted and fenced in with chicken wire. It didn’t look as if it had much more power than a golf cart, but it did have one absolute essential—a key dangling from the ignition.
“Carl,” Amanda said, “this belongs to some poor farmer, some guy who probably can’t even afford insurance.”
“Amanda,” he said, “here’s the rule from now on. We can’t stop and think about what we’re doing. We’ve just got to think about what has to get done.”
She sighed, nodded dubiously, but climbed into the dusty passenger seat. The shifting was heavy-handed, the shocks were basically gone, and there was a strong aroma of beer permeating every inch, but it started and it moved, and before long they were back on a real road heading toward Clarksdale.
Although neither of them had said so aloud, they were both counting on some kind of major revelation there. The LaRues had been killed because of what they told them. And one of the things they’d told them was to go to Clarksdale. It tied together; it seemed right. Nothing could bring that poor strange couple back to life. But maybe, if Clarksdale turned out to be the mystery town of Simms, their deaths would not have been in vain.
The downtown area was mostly old, the structures dating from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The Sunflower River cut through the main business district, dividing it up clearly between rich and poor, black and white. They crossed the muddy, slow-moving river to explore the more upscale white neighborhoods first. There was no obvious main street. That seemed to have been usurped by Highway 49, the major thoroughfare that skirted downtown. On the highway were a string of businesses—mostly farm supplies—and fast-food restaurants, the Chamber of Commerce and an industrial park. The courthouse was an unimpressive new building with no personality of its own. It could have been a school or a factory or a prison. The residential areas were nice—neatly kept, quiet, and bland. The yards were landscaped with azaleas, magnolias, and assorted hardwood trees. The architecture ran the gamut from Victorian farmhouses to tile-roofed Italianate villas to reproductions of old southern plantations. None of the houses could be called grand. The word that came to mind was
clean
.
Crossing back across the Sunflower, they wandered through the black side of Clarksdale. They passed by the shanties and the Riverside Hotel—the hospital where Bessie Smith had died after a car accident because they refused to treat her. The stores were seedy, housed in two to four story brick houses. There was no particular style, even less ornamentation. They meandered in and out of the various blues bars and barbecue stands, too. The bars were dark and dingy, not meant to be viewed in the daytime. Some of them had small stages, platforms, really, and a couple of ancient-looking music stands. They all smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke and better days.
There were pieces of this town that could have been the town in which Danny and Rayette had lived. There were hints of what life must have been like half a century ago, elements that jarred Carl’s memory and caused an exciting moment of recognition. But the town had been reshaped and redefined and moved into the present. The town had changed, and Carl realized they had no real way of knowing if what they were looking for still existed. Or had ever existed.
“I think we’ve been kidding ourselves,” Carl admitted.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we’re trying to do the impossible.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t realize we ever thought otherwise.”
But they knew they couldn’t stop. They had to keep going. So, as twilight started tinting the sky above, they headed off in their rickety, stolen pickup truck to the next few small towns on their route through the delta. Hill House seemed to exist only because of the Buckshot Holler Restaurant and a hunting and fishing camp manned by sneering men in camouflage suits. Rena Lara was a tiny farming community with a country store, a Pentecostal church, and perhaps fifteen or twenty houses. Sherard had a defunct cotton gin, and Farrell had the first post office they’d seen in miles—built out of cinder blocks, with a permanent looking sign out in front of it that said “Closed.”
The last town they were going to hit that day was called Warren. Warren, Mississippi, seemed to be a town divided in two by the snaking, rusted railroad tracks. The black half was noticeably poorer. The houses were small, gray, and built on the cheap. The roads were not fully paved. There was a palpable sense of loss and defeat. The white half was almost Disneylandish in its orderliness and neatness. The lawns were all cut to the same length, and the houses were all freshly painted and shiny white. Basically it was a town like all the others. Near the river an old, abandoned factory had once produced tires and rubber products. Carl made a note of the existence of the factory. It fit the profile of the Simms factory. And Warren had a town square. The one in Clarksdale had long been replaced, covered over by an ugly new courthouse building. Some of the other town squares had retained some of their charm; the one in Warren was a little more than a concrete slab, broken into thousands of cracks out of which grew clusters of grass and weeds. A rickety bench, its green paint cracked and dry, wobbled on the edge of the square. The rotted stump of a tree stood a foot to the right.
They stepped out of the pickup, knocked on the door of the town hall, but it was closed. Carl thought he heard a rustling noise from within, so he knocked a second time. The rustling noise stopped. Walking through town, they averted their eyes whenever they passed someone. They strolled for half an hour, looking, hoping to divine some sense of purpose, some miraculous answer—neither of which they found in the town of Warren, Mississippi.
They got back into the rickety pickup truck. Carl drove for five minutes, maybe ten. Then he saw something, and abandoned and overgrown field, and without knowing why, he slowed down. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Amanda turn her head and look at him curiously. He stopped the truck now. Didn’t even pull over to the side of the road, just stopped and stared.
And started to remember.
It had been gnawing at him since they’d left Corinth. The signs. The casinos. The come-ons for the football betting. Football …
Now he was remembering.
“Carl?”
He barely heard her. Couldn’t respond. Not when it was starting to come to him.
“Come on, Carl, what’s going on?”
He didn’t answer. He closed his eyes, blocking out the image off to his left, closing off everything except what he needed to find somewhere deep in his brain.
“Carl?” Amanda said again.
He opened the door and jumped onto the road. Leaving the door open, he started to cross to the other side, slowly at first, then faster, and then he started to run. The heat was forgotten; his exhaustion was irrelevant. He ran the couple of hundred yards to the splintered bleachers by the side of what had once been a high-school football field. And that’s when he really poured it on, sprinting half the length of the field to a goalpost to his left. It was almost totally uprooted from the ground and barely standing. But when he reached it, he wanted to kiss it—it was the most beautiful object he’d ever seen.
He could hear Amanda now. She’d gotten out of the truck and raced after him.
“Carl, tell me what’s going on. Please.”
He took a deep breath, moved one step closer to the old goalpost, peered down at the base. Yes, there it was. Carved deeply into the side.
A heart. And inside the heart was carved a long-ago paean to teenage romance:
JD + SE = LOVE
.
Yes. Yes, he was remembering. Images were floating by. He could see the pages he had soaked up. The woman’s near-illegible scrawl.
He could see Danny running …
“Carl!” Amanda said impatient now, frustrated. But when he turned to her, her eyes widened. She hadn’t seen this kind of expression on his face in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
“We found it,” he said. It came out quietly. Almost unemotionally. But then he threw his head back and laughed and screamed it as loud as he could. “We found it!” he yelled. And then helled it again, and one more time for good measure.
“Wait,” she said, confused, wanting to believe him, not quite able to. “How do you know? What are you looking at?”
He kept laughing and pointed to the carved heart.
“Amanda,” he said, now gasping for air, “this was in the diary. A football field! Rayette wrote about how Danny used to run back and forth from goalpost to goalpost. He was obsessed with the carving, with this heart! With this goddamn heart that’s right here. Right here in front of us!”
“Are you sure? I mean—”
He grabbed her now and shook her joyously.
“We found it! It was a throwaway, just a paragraph in the diary about this football field and the carving on the goalpost. The kid used to talk about it to his mother—it was some kind of romantic symbol to him. Jesus, I forgot all about it. Danny used to run here! Right here! Back and forth between the goalposts. We’re standing right where he used to stand!”
He thrust his fist into the air and yelled again, not words this time, just a triumphant yell, and then he fell to his knees and took a deep breath, the first clear breath he’d taken in he couldn’t remember how long. Amanda fell to her knees, too. She was smiling, a wonderful smile, a beautiful smile, and she started laughing along with him. And that’s when he kissed her. Just grabbed her and kissed her. Hard and passionately. He didn’t think about it, just did what felt right. And she kissed him back. They drew away from each other suddenly, as if a wall had instantly appeared between them. Then she yelped and flung herself at him and there they were, on their knees, kissing hungrily and holding each other tight, until they fell backward against the goalpost, knocking it over once and for all. They tumbled to the brown and brittle grass, holding each other, sweating and dusty, and kissing each other and laughing again.
“We found it,” he said quietly, awe creeping into his voice.
He grinned at her, a full-fledged, whole hearted Granville grin. For a moment it was as if they were back in the past, as if they had never separated, as if the terrible events of this past week had never happened.