Damaged Goods (30 page)

“I’m a killer,” he said aloud. His words ricocheted around the quiet office, bouncing from metal file cabinet to cement floor to bare wall. “I am a killer,” he repeated, louder. The words shocked
him, setting his arms and legs tingling in a crawly, unpleasant way. Like thousands of spiders, the word danced across his skin.
Killer
. “So I’m going to kill
you
, Jacob Castor.”

The pain eased and, oddly, the first thing that occurred to him was that his mother had known this about him. She could see exactly who he was, and now Hershel did, too.

Silvie’s mind was hazy, and her eyes stung when she awoke on Thursday morning. The smell of bacon swirled through the house, making her stomach growl before she realized she was hungry. Dust motes floated in the golden air, and she lay in bed listening to the sound of Hershel cooking in the kitchen below her as she pieced together the events of the previous day. Carl gone. Why was she so certain Kyrellis had killed him? She told herself that it might not be true, but she wasn’t convinced. Some things you just know, and the empty days ahead, she believed, would confirm it.

Downstairs, Hershel was hunched over the stove. He didn’t hear her.

“May I use your truck?” she asked. “I’m working today.”

He turned and looked at her, his face grayish, a stubbly beard beginning to show. His hair was uncombed.

“No.” He turned back to the food.

She hesitated, then approached and stood next to him at the stove.

“I’ll drop you off at work. I need the truck today.” He pressed his lips together tightly and scowled. “Call me when your shift is done and I’ll pick you up.”

“When do you think you’ll get that orange car running?”

He stared down into the pan, lost to his own thoughts, working through something.

“I want to go see where Carl lived. Will you take me there?”

He thought on it a long moment. “Get ready to go. You can eat this on the way.” He laid the strips of bacon on a paper towel.

“I’m not going to eat. I can’t.”

He didn’t argue, but wrapped the meat in the paper and set it next to his keys.

Silvie found Hershel outside next to the pickup, placing a box of canned food from the pantry in the bed. On top of that he laid several worn blankets and coats.

“What’s that for?”

He got in and started the truck, waiting for Silvie to follow.

From Scholls Ferry Road they turned onto an unmarked and poorly maintained lane—just a pair of ruts, really. The truck bounced from side to side as Hershel dodged potholes, and the low-hanging branches scraped the roof. Silvie was beginning to regret her request when they suddenly emerged from the trees into a small parking lot. Sprawled out before them were several shed-like buildings in bright aqua-blue, running in two parallel rows. In the muddy common area between them was a picnic table, barely discernible beneath a mound of clutter. The two of them sat in the truck a moment, gazing out on the dilapidated community.

Hershel pointed at the first shack on the left. “That’s Carl’s.”

Silvie slid out, stepped over a log, and waded through the wet grass and mud. The smell of fried tortillas drifted through the still air. She found his door covered with handwritten notes, most in Spanish. All addressed to Carl or Carlos. Many included hearts. Almost all had some form of the Madonna depicted, either with stickers or crude drawings. Silvie traced her fingers over the words
“Gracias, Carlos.”
A door creaked open behind her and a woman peered out, then closed it again.

Hershel, still ominously silent, joined Silvie.

“Look at this,” she whispered. “They’re thank-you notes. There must be a hundred of them here.”

He sniffed hard, and she realized that he was trying to hold back tears. He returned to the truck, pulled out the things he’d brought, and carried them to the table. The woman opened the door again and, seeing Hershel there, stepped outside.

The picnic table was covered with spent candles, and wax had dripped over its surface, giving it an eerie shine. Tendrils of hardened paraffin were frozen down its sides like icicles, and in the center stood a cross made of thin wood. The name Carlos was carefully spelled out in ornate lettering on the crossbeam. Silvie ran her finger over it, and the woman stiffened. These people—Carl’s neighbors—believed he was dead.

Silvie listened to Hershel’s deliberate articulation of what he’d brought as he unloaded the items onto the bench of the picnic table. “Food. Blankets. Coats.”

“Come inside,” the woman said.

The woman motioned Silvie in also. The interior of her cabin was cramped and warm. It couldn’t have been wider than twelve feet in either direction. Someone had painted it yellow, and put down a square of deep-blue shag carpet, now matted and muddy. Her dishes and cookery were lined up on open shelves above a small freestanding range, next to which stood a tiny table with three wooden chairs. One side of the room housed a twin-size bed, the other a pair of bunks.

“Sit,” the woman said, motioning them to the table, and they obeyed. She then pulled down an old mixer and set it between them. “This is from Carlos. A gift.”

Hershel smiled at it and nodded.

“He brings us many gifts.” Next, she took out a serving plate and set it by the mixer. “From Carlos.” And a stack of pretty dishes. “From Carlos.”

“He was very generous,” Silvie said.

Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. “My sons go to find his killer.”

“Tell them to leave it alone,” Hershel warned.

“There were bad men here. But immigration took them away. We do not know who has done this.” She wiped her face with the hem of her apron and stared longingly at the mixer. “Last night we have a memory gathering for Carlos with candles. People came from far away—people who lived here before. Some from Yakima and Medford. We wrote our thank-you notes and put them on his door in case by some miracle he comes home again.”

Silvie found herself struggling against tears.

Hershel stood. “We can’t stay.”

The woman nodded, and Silvie realized that she had simply wanted them to understand who Carl was to them. When they stepped outside, she tipped her head up at the sky, its pale blue stinging deep in her retinas.

People had gathered around the table and were sifting through the things Hershel had brought. Yolanda said something in Spanish and gestured at Hershel, and they paused to look at him with awe. They smiled and exchanged comments.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I tell them that Carlos worked for you. They know about your sale. It is where he got the things he gave to the people.”

Hershel seemed disturbed by this and pressed his hand against Silvie’s shoulder, guiding her back to the truck. But before he climbed in he said to the woman, “Send your sons to see me.”

She neither agreed nor disagreed, but stood watching as they pulled away.

Kyrellis settled into his overstuffed chair and sipped a glass of Polish vodka. It wasn’t particularly smooth; in fact, the first sip always elicited a hard shiver, but that’s what he liked about it. He enjoyed the sensation of drinking something near caustic. It was early for liquor, but it always helped him think.

He had a little more time, though not a lot. He’d agreed to let
Silvie call the shots when they met tomorrow. That wouldn’t do if he was going to capture her for Jacob Castor, though. The timing needed to be just right. Perhaps this first visit would be as she wanted it, and he would hand over five of the photos. Then he’d cut a new deal. The balance of the stash if she let him tie her up? A girl like that would agree. She’d had practice. And the pictures were of monumental importance to her. That was all he needed, an opportunity to restrain her, then give her to Castor in exchange for a million dollars. Even half of that would solve all his problems.

Back to the details. How would the transaction go down? He couldn’t bring her with him to the meeting or Castor might simply kill him and leave with the money and the girl. No, Kyrellis needed to plan this out carefully. The pictures he’d keep. If Castor could raise a million dollars for his sweetheart, he could raise more for the photos.

Kyrellis took a long pull on his drink and studied the white rosebush through the foyer window. Then again, maybe it was best to let this one go. A million dollars was much more than he needed to repay his creditor, and he still had Hershel’s Charger sitting in a heap behind the greenhouse.

He considered Hershel—a man who had cheated his way through life. A man whose business was bought and paid for with stolen guns, shady practices, and raw greed. In some ways they had traded places, he and Hershel. Kyrellis had never set out to get involved in gun sales. He had only ever wanted to be a horticulturist and a collector. Somehow he’d gotten sidetracked after a string of bad business deals no more sinister than a failed lemonade stand. Nonetheless, failures add up. They begin to eat at the core of a man. And a man desperate to prove his worth is indeed a man at risk. Kyrellis understood this; he knew the path he’d taken, and he knew why. It was Swift who’d first suggested that a person could make a nice profit on a piece if there was no federal paperwork. It was after Kyrellis had confided that business was poor, and he couldn’t support his gun-collecting habit. Swift was
all greed in those days. Kyrellis believed he would have sold his own mother if she’d have brought a decent price.

The details were flooding back at Hershel so rapidly now that he wished he could retreat into his unknowing state once again. He drove out toward the coastal range, away from French Prairie, hoping to quell the onslaught. But still it came. Albert Darling’s storage unit had been mostly packed with worthless garbage: old clothes, a mouse-infested sofa, a particleboard bedroom set that had been badly warped in a flood, a sack of putrid tennis shoes. The odor that issued from the room when they opened it caused them to stand back and look at each other, wondering if a dead body lay beneath the filth. It turned out to be an entire family of the mice decomposing inside the couch. Nothing was salvageable. Except for that one most unexpected item. It was a Winchester rifle in mint condition, well over a hundred years old. A Henry lever-action, .44-caliber rimfire. From the 1860s. Only thirteen thousand had been made, and this one looked as if it had never been fired. They almost missed it—almost sent it to the dump—because the idiot had wrapped it in a ratty old electric blanket the color of vomit.

Woody had gone back to the office for some trash bags when Carl unsheathed the beautiful gun. He and Hershel both stared openmouthed at the piece, a knowing glance passed between them, and Carl shunted it away to Hershel’s truck.

When Woody returned, he was sweaty. “Why do people hold on to shit like this? Can you imagine wasting forty dollars a month just to keep this crap dry?”

“Apparently Darling can’t, either,” Hershel remarked. “Or he would’ve paid his bill.”

A new name came to him now, as he neared McMinnville and turned back. Pauline Rainwater. She was a county clerk, and a
woman who was overtly in love with Hershel. He took her out from time to time, but not because he liked her. She was homely, carrying thirty pounds more than her small frame could gracefully support. Her sallow skin bore the scars of teenage acne, and she wore tiny glasses that were neither in style nor flattering, perched above crooked teeth on a thick nose. Hershel strung her along just enough that she’d do him favors. He’d called her up that afternoon, in fact, cooing that she was his sweetheart and asking if she’d run an FBI check on his new Winchester. He didn’t really have to use her, but the near-reachable promise of love that he held out as a carrot ensured that she didn’t tell anyone which guns he’d checked over the years. Upon his request, she never kept a paper trail.

It struck him with absurd irony that not even
she
had visited him after his accident. Not even Pauline Rainwater would date a brain-damaged man.

And what of Carl Abernathy? The man his neighbors eulogized in hand-drawn notes commemorating his simple gifts. How had he justified his willing part in all of this? Hershel had been humbled that morning at the migrant camp. And he couldn’t bear the faces that looked at him as if he were some good soul, like Carl. If they only knew the truth.