Final Notice (15 page)

Norris Reaves Auto Repair Shop, which looked like a big, white slat barn, was located on the western fringe of the small commercial strip along Harrison Pike. It probably had been a barn at one time, because Dent marked the edge of farm country. The little township itself had been farm country not too many years before. Cornfields and blackberry patches and jagged stands of oak and maple that looked like puzzle pieces set out on a broad, dusty tabletop. The yard around the garage was littered with automobile parts, rusting axles, bald outsized truck tires, and old radiators lying like spent canteens on the hard dirt driveway that led up to the garage doors. I parked the Pinto behind a Harley-Davidson Electraglide that was propped beneath an oak tree, took a quick look at the sky, which was threatening rain, and walked up to the Reaves repair shop.

The big barn doors were open, but nobody seemed to be around. I stepped inside. There weren't any cars being serviced, but there were plenty of tools and parts lying about. Big workbenches full of them. Black hoses dangling on the walls like sausages. A portable hydraulic lift sitting in the center of the dirt floor. A big, gun-metal chest sitting beside it, with a couple of drawers pulled open and the tools inside shining like scalpels on a hospital tray. Chrome-plated reversible wrenches, lug nuts of every shape and size, screw drivers, ratchets, power drills. I picked up one of the wrenches and looked it over. It still had the price sticker on its shank.

Whoever had bought those tools must have liked the way they sparkled. Either that or he had a lot of extra cash to spend. I dropped the wrench back in the chest and walked out into the yard and around the side of the building to the rear lot. Something was making a"noise back there. A huffing sound that got louder as I rounded the corner. It wasn't until I was almost on top of him that I realized the sound wasn't comingg from a piece of machinery but from a huge, red-haired man doing bench presses inside a little caged-off area behind the barn.

"Ouf-ouf-ouf." He grunted every time he lifted the bar. Which was Olympic size and loaded with three forty-five pound Hack iron disks on each end. That made two-hundred and seventy pounds, plus the bar, the man was pressing, which was cnough to make Arnold Schwarzenegger groan. He was barerhested and his abdomen looked like the carapace of a lobster -all rock-hard, etched, and segmented musculature.

"Jus' leave me finish this set," he called out to me. "Got three more reps to go."

He lifted the bar three more times and with each lift the muscles in his chest knotted up like wet, twisted towels and his biceps bulged as if there were grapefruits rolling beneath his flesh.

"Ouf !" the red-haired man grunted and lowered the bar into the prongs of the bench.

"Jus' working on my pecs," he said, poking one long finger into his chest. He moved up on the bench, his huge legs straddling either side, and continued to prod at the red swollen muscles, as if he'd lost feeling there and was trying to restore the circulation. He looked up at me and smiled cheerfully. His front two teeth were broken off at the gum; but, aside from that, his face had the gentle bovine look of a country boy. Long Mid dewy-eyed and easygoing.

"Just pumping up," he said as he worked on his pecs. "Going to do some dumbbell flyes next. Then bomb out on my lats. That is, if you don't have a problem that keeps me from it."

He got up from the bench and pulled a gray sweatshirt from where it was hung on the chicken wire cage. Property Of O..S. U. Athletic Department, it said on the front. The red-haired man did a check pose to impress me, laughed a little when I looked impressed, then slipped the shirt on.

"What kin I do for you?" he said as he walked from the cige.

Now I'm a pretty good-sized man. Six three, two-fifteen. No muscle-builder, but I stay in shape. Yet old Red, standing there in front of me, made me look the way Jake Lord had looked standing beside his brother, Haskell. I mean he dwarfed me. It couldn't have been a coincidence that he was a bodybuilder. Not after the picture I'd seen of Hack. So I figured this giant was Norris Reaves, Effie's brother. And judging from the quantity of equipment in the cage-bench press and barbells and flye-pulls and all of it relatively new -I figured that it was just possible that old Hack worked out there, too. "Your car broke down?" he said. "I kin getchu a wrecker. But it's going to cost some."

"Looks like business is booming," I said, pointing at the equipment in the cage.

"I do all right," Norris said and frowned. "You got a car you want me to look at or what?"

"No car, Red. But I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"You kin ask," he said, flexing his right arm as if he were working out a cramp.

"I'm looking for a friend of yours."

"Yeah?" Reaves said. "Who might that be?"

"Haskell Lord."

He didn't say anything for a couple of seconds. Just chewed it over solemnly. Then he smiled as if to say it wasn't that big a deal. Only he'd thought it over a second too long for my liking. Besides he had a face like a mirror and anything as rare as a worrisome thought smoked it up like a dying man's breath. When a man that big and strong starts calculating, I wonder what he's toting up.

"Ain't seen Hack around here for a while," Reaves said. "How about your sister? Have you seen her?"

"Oh, sure. I see Effie all the time."

"I understand that she and Hack are friends."

"Could be," he said. "Where'd you hear all that?"

"From Hack's brother."

He mulled it over again. "You ain't a cop, are you?"

"Private investigator."

"Looking for Hack, huh?" I nodded.

"Well, I can't tell you where he is, 'cause I don't know. But if you want to talk to Effie, I kin point her out to you."

"That would be a help," I told him.

"You know where Turkey Run Ridge is?" he said.

"I can find it."

He laughed, a big robust laugh of amusement at the city-slicker. "You can, huh? Well, I don't doubt you, mister, but, it's a might tricky getting there." He sighed and looked back at the cage, as if he wished he were inside doing flye-pulls.

"I guess I kin take a few minutes off to show you. Only I ain't got a car here. Just a cycle."

"My car's out front," I said. "You can ride with me or I can follow you."

He looked back one last time, over his enormous shoulder, at the cage where the dumbbells and weight disks, were standing like cast-iron animals, and said, "All right then. Just let me close up here. And I'll take you on over."
 

IF YOU'VE ever seen a growling man straddling a Shetland pony, you have some idea of what big Norris Reaves looked like hunched on the Harley. I followed that hulking figure as he burbled west down Harrison, past the I-275 interchange, and up into the autumn hills along the Whitewater River. About three miles out, he veered north onto an S-shaped, two-lane road that climbed through stands of maple and pine to a broad plateau dotted with farm houses. Farmland rolled and tumbled on either side of the roadbed, then the highway jogged east and started climbing again. I began to see Reaves's point about finding my way. The roads were like coils of rope tossed haphazardly on the hillsides. And I probably wouldn't have had a bit of trouble getting lost.

Two miles farther on, we came to an interchange. The main road continued eastward, while a gravel road ran north up the side of a hill. A street sign stuck in the dirt read Turkey Run Ridge. Reaves turned off on the side road. And up we went. The lane ran high above a huge forested valley, which lay beneath us on the west side of the road. A few ramshackle farmhouses were set on the east side, old frame houses and outbuildings weathered black by the wind. It was a ruggedlooking spot for a lady to be living in. Rugged and remote as a Tennessee mountain road. But if what I'd heard about Effie Reaves were true, she was as tough as the landscape.

About a half mile farther on, Reaves pulled off the lane into a dirt yard in front of one of those ramshackle farmhouses. I slid in behind him. It was a one-story frame house with a roofed veranda in front and what looked like an old tobacco-colored barn set about a hundred yards behind it, at the foot of a gentle hill. A dirt path led down the hillside to the barn and another path led up to the front steps of the house. A porch swing dangling from the veranda roof was creaking in the wind.

As I got out of the car, Reaves walked up to the porch and bellowed, "Effie!"

A spatter of cold rain kicked at the dust in the front yard and peppered the Pinto's roof like a handful of shot. I pulled my coat lapels around my neck and waited by the car while Reaves searched the house. I heard him holler "Effie!" a couple more times, then he came back out the door and stood on the porch, with his 11ig hands on his hips and a look of blank perplexity on his farmboy's face.

"Now where the hell's she got to?" he said in a voice that was probably meant to be a thoughtful whisper but which boomed out across the desolate yard like a thunderclap. He walked down the steps and looked around the house, as if he thought she might be hiding, like a sleepy dog, behind the latticework under the porch. The cold rain was coming down pretty heavily. It had soaked Reaves's sweatshirt as soon as he stepped beyond the overhang, plastering it against his massive chest and torso. I had given up trying to keep dry and started to worry about keeping warm. The wind was so cold it made my teeth chatter and my breath hang in white clouds in the rainy air.

"Maybe she's gone down to the barn to look after the goats," Reaves said without much conviction. "We can take a look."

He walked across the yard, taking big, bear-like strides, and down the hard dirt pathway to the barn. I followed him down a hillside that was littered with stones and choked with weeds. A single sunflower fluttered in the wind like a pennant. The ground flattened out in front of the barn; I could hear the goats bleating noisily inside. Reaves pulled one of,the big slat doors open and shouted, "My's well come in out of the rain."

I walked into the barn, which smelled of hay and goat turds mid wood dust. There were a couple of horse stalls on my right, just empty bins half-filled with feed, a big hay loft overhead dripping with straw and rain water, and a goat shed on my left where two barrel-chested nanny goats were sitting out the storm. A shovel and a pitchfork were hung neatly on the unopened barn door behind me.

Reaves looked around the empty barn and shrugged. "Hell if I know where she's got to," he said crankily.

He walked across the packed dirt floor and looked out the open door at the rain. Then he reached to his right and pulled the shovel from its hook. He turned back to me and said, "What do you want to find Hack for, anyway?"

"I told you. I want to ask him some questions. The fact is he could be in some trouble with the law."

For the second time since I'd met him, Norris Reaves paused to think things out. And for the second time since I'd met him, I wondered why. Wondered and worried a bit, because I wasn't armed and he was as big as they come. You're getting pretty paranoid, Harry, I said to myself. But it didn't feel like paranoia. Men like Reaves shouldn't have to think about questions or answers. Not unless those questions or answers could get them into trouble.

He propped his arm on the shovel handle, like a bizarre version of American Gothic, and took a deep breath.

"Maybe he don't want to answer your questions," he said.

"Why don't we ask him and see?"

"Like I said. I don't know where he is."

"But your sister does."

Reaves took another deep breath and his chest heaved. "What you want to go making trouble for, mister?" he said almost sulkily. "What do you want to bring the law down on us for?"

I'd had enough of that barn and of Norris Reaves. I started toward the door.

"No," he said and held the shovel out to block my way. "I can't take the chance. That fucking speed freak could get the lot of us busted if he starts talking to the law."

I stared blankly at the shovel and felt the fear start up in the pit of my stomach. "You're kidding, aren't you?" I said to him.
He shook his head very slowly and motioned with the shovel head toward the rear of the barn. It was one of those nightmare moments when you know things are getting out of hand and you don't know why.

"I don't know what you think's going on here, Red," I said, and the smile I made felt pasty even to me. "But I'm investigating a girl's murder and all I want to do is ask Haskell a few questions." I pointed at the shovel. "There's no need for that. Why don't we just call this whole thing off before somebody gets hurt."

"Ain't nobody going to get hurt but you," he said placidly. He poked the shovel at me and I stepped back toward the goat shed. "I don't like people snooping around. That's one thing I don't like." He jabbed at me again with the shovel and I almost lost my footing as I backed away from him. "I'm going to fix you first, then I'm going to scare up that no-good sonof-a-bitch Hack and fix him, too. If I fix things right, there won't be nobody else coming around here and messing with my business."

He'd backed me up a good twenty feet from the door, and the look on his long, country boy's face was absolutely vicious, as if I'd said something against him or his family-pure, feuding mean. I didn't understand the look and I didn't understand the spot I was in, but that didn't make it any less frightening.