The Hunt Club (14 page)

Still Tabitha motioned, eyes right on Unc: she made a fist, slapped it twice into the palm of her other hand. She crossed her arms, sat back.

“She say somebody find her.” She paused. “Somebody know she in there monkeying round.” Miss Dinah paused again, and now she looked down, shook her head. “Whoever it be cut her off. Just now.”

Unc stopped with the hat.

I said, “Why is it everybody knows more about what’s going on than me?”

Unc looked at me, then Tabitha. He said, “Do they know who you are?”

She moved her hands, all the while shaking her head. Miss Dinah said, “She had to break down seven baffles to get in, but she loaded in ten of her own on the way.”

Unc gave a small smile at this. “You get anything?”

She quick moved the papers on the table, shuffled them, lay them back down again.

Unc set the hat on the table, touched the papers. “Just like I figured. Like every overeducated clod I ever run into, he’s kept records of everything. Like someday somebody’d make a book out of it.”

He looked at me. He said, “Here’s your chance. Read these to me.” He pushed the papers toward me until they touched the plate. He picked up his hat, started with it again.

Tabitha finally looked at me. She leaned back again, crossed her arms again.

I glanced at Miss Dinah, saw her arms crossed, too, waiting, like everybody else, for me.

I pushed the plate away, picked up the papers. They were printouts, at the top and bottom all kinds of garbage codes and whatnot. Stuff Tabitha’d done to get in wherever she’d gotten in.

She had a modem, of course, not to mention a computer, a laser printer.

I had an alarm clock at home whose hands glowed in the dark: about the extent of the technology I had going for me. But I’d worked with computers at school, had read enough magazines, and a couple books, to know it wasn’t easy to steal mail. Or lawful.

“Read,” Unc said.

“This is somebody’s e-mail?” I said. “You stole this?”

Tabitha let out a hard sigh:
Get on with it!

I took a breath, said, “There’s the stuff at the top. All this first page says is, ‘Meet with Pigboy Wednesday. Got the goods, good to go.” ’ I stopped, the rest of this page blank.

“Next,” Unc said.

I turned the page, more codes at the top. This one was a little longer. “ ‘Turn left at CR221, follow to Pigboy roost, thirteen miles, for pickup. Maersk Line at Chucktown Terminal, container 1118, will wait for you. Crate up goods, lots of popcorn. Next parcel to the boss man. We be seeing you.’ ”

Tabitha was watching me. Both she and her momma had their arms crossed, heads tilted the exact same way.

“This making any sense to anybody here?” I said, and both of them quick cut their eyes to Unc.

“Next,” Unc said.

I looked at the next page, read, “ ‘CMS fucking pain—’ ” and stopped, looked up.

Miss Dinah slowly shook her head, eyes narrowed down to nothing. “They be evil people,” she whispered. “ ‘The tongue also is a
fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.’ James three: sixteen, King James Bible.” She paused. “You read they words. You go ahead, and let evil reveal itself.”

I looked at Tabitha. She hadn’t moved.

“ ‘Pain in the ass,’ ” I went on. “ ‘Gone maverick on us. All measures must be taken. Pigboy and Fatback notified, sent packing. Must be voided by 11/24. And? LD put away, of course, if he gets in the way.’ ”

“LD,” Unc said. “One guess who that is.”

Miss Dinah said, “Leland Dillard.”

He whispered, “None other.”

“CMS?” I said, though I thought I already knew.

“You saw the man day before yesterday,” Unc said. “There between stand seventeen and eighteen.” He paused. “Dr. Charles Middleton Simons.”

We sat there, no sound at all, for a long time, that hat twirling slow as ever.

Finally, I said, “Whose files are these? Whose mail?”

Unc stood, took his stick from the bookshelves behind him. He said, “Your friend and mine, Dr. Cleve Ravenel.”

Cleve Ravenel, I thought. Cleve Ravenel. The cherry-red Ram 2500 with the black bed liner. The red-faced and white-haired club member with a beer gut that made his belt buckle disappear.

The one who’d turned too quick, scared when Unc called out his name, asked him to meet with whoever was responding to our call about a body with not much of a head left.

And look who’d responded: Yandle, Thigpen.

Pigboy and Fatback?

Unc started for the door. We were on. Going.

I said, “And who sent this stuff? Who did these come from?”

“That’s a fine question,” he said, and pulled the door open. “You just fold these up and keep them in your back pocket.” He stopped, turned from the door to us. “If I know anything at all about the way
these things work, it’s easier to find out what the message is than who’s the messenger.” He looked past me, smiled. “Ain’t that right, Missy Dorcas?”

I heard her chair scrape against the kitchen floor, turned, saw her standing, smiling at him. Then her eyes were on me, and she handed me the papers, already folded square, and it seemed for a second she was looking me over.

Cold air fell in from the open door, and I think I shivered.

Tabitha made a quick move with her hands.

“You watch your mouth, child,” Miss Dinah said. “Who taught you to talk like that?”

Tabitha grinned, pointed to Unc, nodded hard.

“What’d she say?” I asked Miss Dinah, but it was Unc to answer.

“I’ll wager her turn of phrase was a short and simple ‘Damn straight,” ’ Unc said. He was grinning now, too.

I looked back at Tabitha. She had a hand over her mouth, shoulders moving up and down, the same laugh she’d given me when I’d fallen in the ditch last night. Only now it was at her momma, scowling down at her from there at the kitchen counter. “I appreciate you don’t corrupt my only child any more than she already is,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Unc said, and nodded. “Missy Dorcas’s next assignment is, if you can make sure you ain’t going to get yourself identified, to try and poke around, get hold somehow of who the bad boy sent these might be.”

She motioned, shrugged. Miss Dinah said, “She say she try but can’t promise nothing.”

“All I can ask for,” Unc said, and Tabitha turned, headed back down that hallway crammed with bookshelves.

But at the last second, just before she disappeared, she looked back over her shoulder. She gave me the smallest wave, just her fingertips.

I smiled, nodded.

“Lose whatever idea you got in your head right now, you hear?” Miss Dinah said. She missed even less than Tabitha. “You hear?”

“What do you mean, Miss Dinah?” I said. “I was just saying goodbye.”

“Lose it,” she said, and crossed her arms.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Unc looked from me to where Miss Dinah stood to me, puzzled. But it wasn’t enough to make him stop what he was working on in his head. He said, “I believe these boys we’re dealing with will play by their own rules. They told Huger last night we have forty-eight hours before they’re going to do whatever it is they’re going to do. I believe you have nothing to worry about.” He paused. “For another thirty-six hours or so, I guess.”

“You guess,” she said. “What happens then?”

Unc took in a breath, said, “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

He turned, went out onto the porch, and started down the cinder blocks, while I stood there in a shanty flooded with books, just watching him. Then he was off into the woods behind the house, on the trail back to the shed.

“You be careful, child,” Miss Dinah said from behind me, right there at my back. “That man dangerous if he want to be. But you the one he really counting on. You the only one can feel what he feel about what you both stand to lose in all this.” She patted me on the back. “You the one he counting on, but he be the last one to let you know.”

Then for some reason I looked up, above the door, and saw up there about the only other bit of wall not covered over with bookshelves.

Here was their picture of Jesus, but it was a picture like none I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t one of those prefab things, Him here with his robe open and heart bleeding, all wild and sharp colors made to make you wince. This one was just a penciled Jesus, pretty poorly drawn, looking down on us. No smile, no sorrow. Just a man in a robe looking down, watching, like all he had to do was wait and see what each of us chose to do with our lives. Like it was up to us what was going to happen, one way or the other.

It seemed about the truest painting of the man I’d ever seen.

“Benjamin drew that for us,” Miss Dinah said. “Bless his heart.”

“It’s beautiful, ma’am,” was all I could think to say, and I looked at it a moment longer before I stepped outside, started after Unc, already disappeared back inside the woods.

We made it to the Luv, buried there in the high weeds off the road, and once I was actually onto the blacktop, out here in the world again and in my own truck, it seemed that world was watching one more time, could see exactly what we were up to.

Even if I had no idea what we were up to.

“Is this a good idea?” I said. “Just hauling around in the truck so’s anybody could spot us?”

Unc looked straight ahead. “You told me Thigpen said nobody cares where we’re hiding. So we’re going to take him at his word. Testing the waters.” He nodded at the road. “So you just drive on over to the trailer. We need to shower, get some clean clothes on.”

“Unc,” I nearly shouted now, “we need to shower? Unc, there’s no time for this. We got to do something. We got to—”

“Drive,” he snapped. “Now. To the trailer.”

I looked at him a second longer, then jammed it into gear, hit the gas.

“You settle down now, boy, or you and I both will be dead,” he
said. He turned to me, put his hand on my arm, gripped it until the pain started in on me too much, and I let my foot off the gas a bit.

“You got to know,” he said, “that unless we keep our heads on straight, we’ll both be dead. Do you understand this?” Still he hadn’t let go my arm, and finally I jerked it free of him.

“Do you understand?” he said again.

I could feel my eyes going hot, the back of my neck.

“Huger?” he said, calm now.

“Yes,” I said.

“We keep our heads on straight longer than they can, and we’ll win this thing.” He looked out his window, then back to me. “You blink, you lose. They already made one mistake. Cleve Ravenel did.”

I was quiet, knew he was waiting for me to ask after what that mistake might be. And of course I bit, but only once I’d let a full minute or so of silence go by.

I said, “What mistake was that?”

He held up his hand, the index finger. “Cleve Ravenel took too long coming back with Yandle and Thigpen Saturday. He comes back, says he got lost. But he’s been a member of the club over thirty years now. Since before I made sergeant on the force. He shoots turkey out here, knows every parcel near well as I do. I know this, so when he says he got lost, just for fun I let this finger drag along his front quarter panel.”

“And you come up with mud.”

He turned to me. He smiled. “You were paying attention. A boy after my own heart. Now if you were really paying attention, Huger, you’ll tell me the rest of what happened.”

I thought about what I saw, then gave the steering wheel a slap. “Then you dragged it on the front quarter panel of Yandle’s cruiser. You wiped it off.”

“And?” he said.

“And he didn’t have any mud. So Cleve Ravenel went somewheres Yandle and Thigpen didn’t.”

“Who gives a damn about fifteen-twenty on the SAT when you
figure out something like that?” he said, and put his hand down on his leg.

I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that funny.

“So Cleve Ravenel slipped somehow,” he went on. “For some reason. He went somewhere he ought not to have gone, because if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been late. Mistake one. And hence why I figured to get Missy Dorcas to scour his garbage can. I never met a pompous ass who didn’t keep all proof of his pomposity. And now we know something about CMS and about Charleston Terminal and about goods.”

“And about LD,” I said.

“None other.”

I looked at him, his mouth straight, a thin line.

I said, “You think Pigboy and Fatback are Yandle and Thigpen?”

“Possibility,” he said. “We’ll find out once we hit mile thirteen on County Road 221. A detail out of the electronic trash heap: CR221, thirteen miles to Pigboy roost. Our first stop after we hit the showers. I don’t know where either of them live, Yandle or Thigpen. But we’ll find out.”

“Are goods drugs, you think?”

“Possibility, too. Whatever it is, it’s crated up in popcorn and sent out by container ship. Maersk Line.” He paused. “But why pack it in popcorn? Why crate it up? You want drugs out of here, you do like everybody else: hire a Puerto Rican out of Miami and load up his Pinto, send him on his way up I-95. Charleston Terminal.” He shrugged, slowly turned to me. “So what was this between you and Miss Dinah? What’s this about you losing an idea?”