Low Red Moon (17 page)

“Well, tonight you’re going to have to make an exception,” Scarborough Pentecost replied.

“Look, asshole, we’re gonna do this my way, or I hang up right this minute and call the cops.”

“No you won’t,” Scarborough Pentecost said confidently.

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because I’m not your enemy. Maybe I’m not exactly your friend, either, but for the moment, I’m the best you’ve got.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. You’ve seen her, Mr. Silvey. Do you really think the police can protect you and your family from
that?
”

Deacon didn’t answer, and for a moment there was only strained silence on the line while he tried not to remember the face from his nightmare, those blazing eyes, and wished he’d taken the piece of paper straight to Detective Downs.

“You still there?” Scarborough Pentecost asked.

“Yeah,” Deacon said and looked across the room at Chance standing at the window, her back turned to him. “I’m here.”

“So, do we do this or not?”

“Just tell me where,” Deacon replied, so now he’s sitting in a booth at Cheese’s, listening to Screaming Jay Hawkins blaring from the jukebox and watching the front door. Every now and then, the fat, white-haired bartender or one of the customers gives him a suspicious look, and he smiles his best
Don’t mind me, I’m just a crazy white man having himself a glass of ginger ale and a few smokes
smile, and they frown and turn back to the bar.

And then the door swings open, and the pair that steps into the bar, the boy and girl like rejects from a Tarantino film, have to be the ones he’s waiting for because they’re white, and the bartender glares at them the same way he’s been glaring at Deacon. The boy is tall and thin as a pole, his leather biker jacket hanging loose on his bony shoulders. He’s wearing tattered jeans and black biker boots, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail. The girl is pale and pretty, and she must be at least five years too young to be hanging out in bars. She stands very close behind the boy, her arms crossed self-consciously and her eyes on the floor; all her clothes look secondhand. The bartender nods his head and points to Deacon’s booth.

He finishes his drink while they walk towards him down the long, narrow aisle between the row of booths and the bar. Someone whistles at the girl, and she looks embarrassed and buttons her purple cardigan.

“You two come here often?” Deacon asks as the girl slides into the booth across from him.

“You know, I saw this place in the phone book and couldn’t resist,” the boy says and slides in after her. “You think that guy behind the counter is Cheese?”

“Maybe you should ask him,” Deacon replies and crunches on a melting ice cube.

“Maybe I will. Maybe that’s just what I’ll do.” Then the boy in the baggy leather jacket holds out his left hand to Deacon. “I’m Scarborough Pentecost, by the way,” he says.

Deacon stares at his slender hand, the long, tapered fingers, the symbol like a rune or Chinese character tattooed onto the center of his palm, but he doesn’t shake it.

“No shit. Now, tell me why I’m here,” Deacon says. “While you’re at it, you can tell me why you broke into our building and scared the hell out of my pregnant wife.”

Scarborough sighs, pulls his hand away, and glances sidewise at the girl; she shrugs and smiles sheepishly at Deacon.

“I wasn’t trying to scare her,” Scarborough says. “I am sorry about that.”

“Is that a fact? And I’m just supposed to sit here and believe you because—?”

“Because, right now, Mr. Silvey, your options are somewhat limited.”

Deacon takes a deep drag off his cigarette, exhales and squints at Scarborough Pentecost through the smoke.

“We don’t have the
time
to argue, Deacon,” the girl says, the words spilling out of her in a nervous, urgent gush. “If you really care about your wife, you need to listen to him.”

Deacon stares at her for a moment and then stubs what’s left of his cigarette out in the cut-glass ashtray on the table. Smoke rises slow and coils from the butt like a question mark or the ghost of a fakir’s cobra.

“You’ve got twenty minutes,” Deacon says, and he checks the glowing Schlitz clock on the wall behind the bar. In five minutes, it’ll be midnight.

Scarborough nods, then reaches into his jacket and pulls out a large manila envelope. It’s bent at the corners and has what looks like a coffee stain on one side; he places it on the table between them.

“All right,” he says and smiles, wide and ugly smile that’s almost a threat, and Deacon lights another Camel. “So much for the bullshit prefatory chitchat. When you were working with Vincent Hammond in Atlanta, you solved a missing-persons case.”

“I solved a lot of missing-persons cases.”

“Not like this one,” Scarborough says and taps at the envelope with an index finger. “Fifteen children, mostly infants, boys and girls, taken from their homes over a period of seven years. The last one was a four-year-old girl named—”

“Jessica Hartwell,” Deacon says so he won’t have to hear her name from someone else. His mouth so dry he wouldn’t be surprised if sand started dribbling from his lips and he raises a hand to get the bartender’s attention. “Yeah, I remember.”

“The Hartwell girl was the one who tied them all together, but she was also the only one they ever found. You saved her life, Mr. Silvey.”

“Well, whatever was left of it,” Deacon mutters around the filter of his cigarette, his eyes on the envelope.

“She just started high school,” the girl says, and when Deacon glances up at her, her eyes dart nervously towards the ceiling. “She still has nightmares, sometimes, but she’s alive. And she’s happy.”

“How the fuck do you know that?” but then the bartender’s standing beside the booth, wiping his big hands on his apron and frowning down at them, no-bullshit frown to say whatever the three of them are up to, it better not start any trouble on his watch.

“What you want now?” he says.

“Do you have Jack Daniel’s?” Deacon asks, and the bartender shakes his head.

“You want bourbon, all we got’s Wild Turkey.”

“Wild Turkey will do just fine, straight.”

The bartender points at Scarborough. “What about you two. Those things you’re sitting on ain’t park benches, you know.”

“I’ll have a Coke,” the girl says.

“No you won’t, ’cause we ain’t got no Coke,” the bartender replies. “We got Pepsi.”

“I like Pepsi, too,” she says and smiles her shy, sheepish smile again. “Pepsi will be fine.”

“That’s good, ’cause that’s what we got.”

Scarborough orders a beer, and the bartender goes away again, still wiping his hands. “I thought you’d given up the hooch, Mr. Silvey,” he says, and Deacon ignores him and picks up the manila envelope. It isn’t sealed, and he pulls out a sheaf of newspaper clippings and black-and-white photographs, police reports and several pages photocopied from a handwritten diary. There’s a photo of a small and dilapidated old house on top of the stack, the wide front porch draped with crime-scene tape.

“Where’d you get these?” he asks.

“We’re not police, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Scarborough says. “And we don’t work for the police.”

“Great, but that still doesn’t answer my question.”

“It doesn’t matter
where
we got them, Mr. Silvey.”

Deacon lays the photo of the house facedown on the table, and under it is a close-up of the front door. The wood looks dry and rotten, the paint peeling in ragged strips and patches like dead skin sloughing off the belly of a snake; there’s a sign nailed to the door—
BEWARE OF DOG
.

He swallows, no spit, but he swallows anyway, and “What does the Hartwell case have to do with Soda’s murder?” he asks and lays the photo of the door facedown on top of the photo of the house. The next picture is almost identical, except the
BEWARE OF DOG
sign has been removed and there’s a symbol carved deep into the wood it was covering.

“The people we work for, well, let’s just say they had a vested interest in those children in Atlanta,” and then Scarborough nods at the papers in Deacon’s hands. “Same thing with the murder of your friend Soda.”

“Who is she?” Deacon asks without bothering to look up, and the next photograph is from inside the old house, the intricate arch at the door leading down to the cellar, woven from human bones and dried creeper and kudzu vines. Three skulls nailed above the arch and each one wearing a crown of rusted barbed wire, the words
LAND OF DREAMS
printed in neat black letters on the door underneath.

“You were the first person to go into the house, weren’t you?” Scarborough asks, pointing at the photograph.

Deacon licks his parched lips and eyes the bar desperately, the thirst grown so big and the memory of the horrors from that day at the house almost enough to swallow him whole, enough to leave him as bare as the bones in the police photos. But now the bartender is busy talking to a skinny man in a Panama hat and shows no sign of getting their drinks.

“You’re the one who
found
Jessica Hartwell.”

“Hammond was right behind me,” Deacon says and lays the picture of the arch and the doorway down on the table with the others he’s already seen. Now he’s looking at one of the photocopied pages from the journal of a dead woman, her sloppy cursive filling up the whole page from top to bottom.

“But you saved her life, Deacon,” the girl sitting next to Scarborough Pentecost says again. “Mary English would have killed the child if you hadn’t stopped her when you did.”

“I opened the cage,” Deacon replies, hardly speaking above a whisper now. “But Hammond, he came in right behind me.”

“Yes,” Scarborough says. “But
you
opened the cage. Policeman or no policeman, you’re the one who saved Jessica Hartwell’s life that day.”

Deacon drops the remaining contents of the envelope on the table and takes a drag from his cigarette, but the smoke only makes him thirstier, and he crushes it out in the ashtray. Scarborough’s still talking, his voice as smooth and dark as molasses.

“Hammond gave you a drawing they’d found in the girl’s bedroom, and when you held it you saw a vision of the house where she was being kept, Mary English’s house in the woods. You saw the door leading down to her cellar, her ‘Land of Dreams.’ Did you know she took that from William Blake?”

“No,” Deacon says. “I never knew what it meant.”

“It was all right there in her journal—‘Dear Child, I also by pleasant streams, Have wander’d all Night in the Land of Dreams; But tho calm and warm the waters wide, I could not get to the other side.’ You held the drawing, Mr. Silvey, and saw that doorway to the Land of Dreams, and you led Detective Hammond to it.”

“What are you getting at? I don’t see what any of this has to do with Soda’s murder.”

Scarborough leans a little ways across the table, and Deacon catches a whiff of something sweet and rotten on his breath. “Have you ever paused to consider the relativity of heroism?” he asks. “How one man’s David is inevitably another man’s Goliath?”

“I didn’t come here to listen to riddles.”

“It’s not a riddle, Deacon,” the girl says. “It’s not even a secret, anymore.”

“She’s right, Mr. Silvey. These days it’s almost a truism. A goddamned fact of life.”

And then the fat, white-haired bartender is standing over them again with a tray in his hands, two glasses and a bottle of Bud, and he sets the shot of bourbon down in front of Deacon. “That’ll be six-fifty,” the bartender says gruffly, and Scarborough hands him a ten and tells him to keep the change. Deacon doesn’t argue, too busy staring into the perfect pool of amber liquor to tell the creep on the other side of the booth that he can buy his own damned drinks. For a second or two, there’s nothing else in the world but that one precious glass of whiskey, the universe collapsing down to a single wet point, a decision as simple as swallowing.

“You still with us, Mr. Silvey?” Scarborough asks, snaps his fingers, and when Deacon looks up the bartender has gone and the girl is sipping at her Pepsi.

“I’m right here,” Deacon replies. “And if you don’t stop calling me ‘Mr. Silvey,’ I’m going to punch you in the face,
Mr.
Pentecost.”

“Told you,” the girl says.

Scarborough picks up the photograph of the arch of bones and the cellar door, examines it for a moment, then turns it around so Deacon can see it again.

“Okay,
Deacon
. As I was saying—”

“I hope you were about to get to the fucking point, because you’ve only got about five minutes left,” and then Deacon lifts the shot glass and a few drops of the whiskey slosh out onto his fingertips. He quickly sets the glass down again, his hand shaking so badly he almost drops it.

“That summer day you walked through this door, you might have become a hero, but you
also
became a villain. Now, are you following me, or are you too busy trying to decide whether or not to lick the Wild Turkey off your fingers?”