Bluff City Pawn (33 page)

“Lately it ain’t been but one. It’s probably peaked, though, don’t you think?”

“Every time I think so, it notches up.”

“If it goes down, if it
stays
down, I guess I just branch off to something else. But the next thing, it ain’t gonna be like this, is it?”

“Be different,” Huddy says.

“Worth less, I bet. I wouldn’t even care what the next thing was, if this one lasted long.” He taps his hand on the counter, and Huddy hears the wedding band clink.

“The golden age,” Huddy says, and they exchange smiles.

“You get some gold, I’ll give you ninety-two,” Del says. “Bank on that.” And he collects his bag, and Huddy watches him measure his goodness against the point he gave away, and then he walks but stops, as if he were second-guessing his value judgment. “You wouldn’t happen to know what boom’s coming next?”

Huddy shrugs.

“Listen, you ever wanna go to auctions with me. I sell stuff there, too. You’ll be my ghost bidder. Drive the price up. Heck, we’ll both be each other’s plant. Bait everybody else, get them hyped up.”

But Huddy won’t play any more games with Del.

“You do this buy/sell, we should partner up.” But then Del waves off co-ownership. “Thing is, I don’t want nothing with a front door, or a roof on it. I hate paying taxes. I just as soon not exist. Who’s the guy with the black bag? I ain’t real nothing.Who was that masked man? Don’t know, but he had cash. Goes by the name of Buyer Number 473. Ha!”

“You’re parked the wrong way,” Huddy says. He directs him outside, and Del looks but doesn’t see it. “Quick exit. Turn your car around. And you ought switch places. You be the driver.”

“Lose my chauffeur?”

“I’m serious. You drive, the shooter shoots. A lot harder to drive and shoot at the same time. And you might want to get a better bodyguard.”

Del studies the tilted gunman, weighs what’s necessary. “Yeah—he rode the short bus to school. I don’t know, Huddy, I gotta pay for better. Maybe I just stick with him, but he’s gotta pay for gas. That way I’m getting what I paid for. Don’t worry about me. Shots fired, he’ll be my bullet sponge. Give me time to fire back. I’m always a breath ahead.”

He continues toward the door, his steps short and anxious, and the gunman is still wired and asleep, and the two of them look like easy pickings. And then Del, as if he were pushing back at Huddy’s thoughts, gives a quick vigilant check of the vicinity, and the gunman jumps to attention, his back straightens, his eyes on Del and then shifting left and right. An alert tandem, but Huddy’s thoughts linger on the prior watchless moment, enough to wonder if Harlan’s target may be bolder than a house. Del’s just told Huddy what Joe’s been doing, and maybe he’s signaled Harlan’s next attempt. It’s time to find a fugitive brother.

Fifteen

He phones Harlan, but
there’s no answer, no rings, just silence and then a beep without Harlan’s recorded voice, and Huddy hangs up. He recalls that KayKay pawned items years back, right after Harlan departed for Florida. Harlan can remember Del’s name and Huddy will track down KayKay’s. He types in KayKay but gets nothing, and then he realizes that KayKay isn’t her real name, or the echoing of her first, but the sounding out of her first two initials, Kaley or Kaylie, and another K. He tries them both, gets no records. He pronounces her nickname again and hears Caitlin, and he types Katelin and Kaitlyn, and draws blanks, and tries other spellings and gets one for Katelynne but the middle name is Lee, and then he thinks of Kelly and tries it, gets two hits, but the middle name for both is a man’s. Tries Krystal and one name appears with no middle name, and he’s about to dial it anyway when a last name pops up in his head—Stokes—and he types it, and up comes Kaylee Karly Stokes. He looks at the full name. It feels like he’s found a missing person, and that he knows her better than Harlan does. He calls the phone number, and the computerized operator tells him the number is not in service, and he searches the white pages online, and KayKay’s name comes up. One result, and Huddy stares at the screen, at the last column:
Associated people: unknown
. He clicks on her, expecting unlisted or the disconnected one he’s just called, but there’s a different number, and he dials it and it rings. A pickup on the fourth, and then finally a real voice on the line saying, “Yeah,” and it’s hers.

“It’s Huddy. I’m looking for Harlan.”

But she doesn’t answer and he doubts the voice he recognized—maybe he’s dialed a wrong number—until she says, “Me, too.”

“He ain’t there?” Which he knew, but he thought she might know elsewhere.

“Not no more. Last time he called, I was asleep.”

“He say where he was?”

“Ain’t said nothing. Just hello on the machine. You talk to him, tell him to call me when I’m awake.” Her voice is slow and smothered, as if she were again asleep.

He won’t call Joe to get to Harlan. If Harlan isn’t staying with KayKay, and he can’t be at Joe’s, there’s only one place left, which isn’t a place at all. He drives back to the trouble spot, through the double entrance, past the retention basin with the dead fountain, past the common island. In the daylight, Huddy sees more upmarket features, bay windows, Palladian windows, double turrets and copper cupolas, bird boxes in the gables. Every driveway hooks and curves. One-of-a-kind homes, customized, but patterns emerge in the layout, the same houses but turned at angles so it isn’t box after box. Different façades, varied elevations and colors, but maybe the floor plans are identical and flipped. Costless tricks to make a house look custom.

There’s no car in the driveway of the previous meeting, and the three-car garage is windowless. Huddy parks, walks and knocks, but there’s no answer. He’ll go door to door to all the pockets of finished and framed houses. He drives and knocks and peers through windows and waits in doorways, returns to his car and reverses and pulls in elsewhere and backs out again, up and down driveways like a deliveryman bringing phone books to new addresses, to unarrived residents, like a salesman who can’t drum up business, like a disoriented messenger, until he tires of searching one by one, and he speeds past trenched land and onto the next built pocket, where he stops in the middle of the empty street.

He climbs out and he’s about to call to a half-dozen houses within shouting distance when he hears gunfire, the sound of a .22, popping again a few seconds later, and again. Too quiet for a nail gun, Huddy thinks, and no compressed air escaping, and then he remembers the stolen compressors, and maybe Joe owns a battery-powered gun. Maybe the electrical isn’t switched on inside, or maybe Joe just wants no engines, and to keep the work quiet, even with no one living next door. More firing inside, and no other noise outside, and Huddy listens and follows the noise in a diagonal, and he knows who’s holding the gun. He approaches the filmed window, clouded by sun and work suspension, and he presses his face but Harlan isn’t visible. A ladder and the sound of shooting right inside the room, but there’s no body materializing. It feels like some deception, as if Harlan is there but vanished, as if Huddy were staring into a dark well, except the room is lit by an overhead light. He steps from the windowpane to the front door and turns the knob and enters and looks sidelong to the right and in the oversize room is Harlan, his back turned, crouched down on the floor, under the window that Huddy just gazed through. The shooting is louder, and Huddy waits for him to clip the gun to his belt and rough-measure the wall, and then Huddy identifies himself. “Harlan,” he says.

Harlan scrambles, tool belt clanging, but he turns enough to the naming, and halts. He faces Huddy, relieved and suspicious, unsure if he’s still scared that it’s only him.

“You think I was someone else?” Huddy says, and he walks through the warm air and across the plywood.

“Didn’t know,” and Harlan studies him, as if he still doesn’t. “What you doing here?”

“Ask you the same.”

“What, I look different, ’cause I’m working?”

The same, Huddy thinks—as Joe, with his gold dust in your face and eyes, the dust all over you. Whenever Huddy sees his brothers here, they always look different, younger, older, the same. “Thought those were warning shots,” Huddy says, nodding at the gun. “First ones. You camping out here?”

Harlan nods. “Got my bedroll in the master. You know why nobody can’t live in these houses? Because they’re already occupied. This is the family plot. I’m the night watchman, walk the grounds, and everybody’s here. Mama’s in one, and daddy’s in another. I been over to them’s houses. You ’member daddy telling us how he’d go up in the attic? When he was a kid, he’d go up there at night and kill pigeons. For food.”

“No.”

“Whatcha mean
no
? You was there!” And what looks different is his eyes.

“Wasn’t,” Huddy says, but he remembers he was, but not right now—that time isn’t in him.

“We talked about it after. Dad the Pigeon Eater.”

“Okay.”

“Bet you don’t remember rats in the pantry, either.”

“Is that dad, too?”

“That was us! We’d hear ’em knocking over pans.”

“Guess I dropped it somewhere along the way.”

“You as bad as Joe.”

Huddy stares at a floor wrapper, a few sandwich bites uneaten, a thick bread end, along with a soda bottle almost dry. “He bring you that?”

“Why you here?” Harlan says, and Huddy says he tried calling and then he asks the question back. “Keeping busy with housework,” Harlan says.

More like house arrest, Huddy thinks, his eyes swiping top to bottom. The drywall and doors are up. Harlan’s run the crown molding and hung the door casing, and now he’s shooting base clockwise. An A-frame ladder is pushed in a corner. A battery-run chop box is dead center on the floor, with a bundle of wood trim stacked nearby.

“That ain’t all you doing,” Huddy says.

But Harlan doesn’t show the smallest of double takes on his guiltless face. He pushes the tape out toward the next wall and pulls it toward the cut. Transfers the tape measurement to the board. Goes over to the chop saw, feeds the wood in, sets the other end on a wooden block he’s rigged, the saw and the block both on the ground so Harlan can stay at floor level and work faster. He swings the blade to make a forty-five cut, and Huddy watches him cut it on the line without pausing, not slightly long but trusting the tape, trusting his skill. Every time Huddy comes into these houses, he admires a brother’s craft. The saw grinds and whirs to a stop.

“Buddy of mine in Florida,” Harlan says. “Worked with him. He lost his thumb bad on the saw. Cut it way down and they couldn’t salvage it. And you can’t work with no thumb, so the doctors—they took the pointer finger off and moved it over to the thumb. He’s got this four-fingered hand, but it’s like five fingers ’cause he’s got his thumb back, even if that thumb was his pointer. That thumb has learned how to become a thumb. When you see that hand—that pointer sticking up where the thumb should be, and the stub where the pointer ain’t—it’ll freak you out.”

“So he can still do sheds,” Huddy says, “if he’s your work buddy.”

“Well, I’ve done a little of this and that. I’m mostly ex-something.”

“Joe told me about his backwards plan. Working off the bail.”

“I’m already looking at jail. Get busted, it’ll all be the same time. They’ll just run ’em together. What’s that word?”

“Who told you this?”

“Joe. Said his lawyer would make that happen. Money equals justice.”

“Except he’s broke.”

“That’s just on paper. Out in the world, he’s still rich. Thing is, it would’ve been better if my charges were state. Lawyer says. He’s still gonna whittle it down, but—so much for get-out-of-jail-free. And I’m not built for prison.”

“Yes you are. I hope you pushed that AK hard. I hope you killed that trigger, for the time you’re getting.”

“I ran the hell out of it. And when the cops came and grilled me, they told me that I was looking at five years versus six months. Six months—that’s
your
life, on the dotted line, they was wanting me to sign away.”

Huddy looks back at the wrapper and sees it as a tray slid beneath a door. Harlan lines up the board and holds it in place and shoots the nail into the stud and the board pulls tight. He slides and shoots again, and releases his hand, and eyes the board and frowns. He takes a knuckle and knocks the wall, and hears the stud and reshoots it. Releases his hand again and sees a better fit. He keeps going across the floor, flowing with the studs, shooting the base. When he finishes, he turns to Huddy and sets the gun on its head. “It was stupid, what I done.”

Not as stupid as what I done after you. And before. Huddy nods at his own mistakes.

“Joe says I do enough for him, he’ll give me this house.”

“That right?” All these houses in the bargain.

“Think I’d work on it if it ain’t gonna be mine? Pride in ownership. I’ll say this, Joe knows how to incentivize.”

Must be what Joe meant by multiple offers. And we would’ve been almost neighbors.

“I don’t know, Huddy, never thought I’d live in Germantown. Side by side with the Cotton Carnival crowd. I told Joe, I want all the fancy features. All the trappings. I want a froufrou house.”

“Lying.”