What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (54 page)

The tree house was completed late Saturday afternoon. I’d even built in benches along two sides, and a tiny porch out front. I sat on that porch most of the rest of Saturday and Sunday.

After that I rarely went back. From time to time I’d idly climb the hill and check, watching as it slowly came apart. Years later, back from jungles half across the world and on a rare visit, I wandered up there after dinner and came upon it, surprised. I’d forgotten my tree house. Little was left, a few floorboards and fragments of wall, rusted nails in the trees. On one of the remaining boards a mockingbird had built its nest.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THEY’D STABILIZED MILLY,
sent her on up to Memphis, Doc said. Out of our hands now. He’d been sitting on the bench outside the office when I returned. We watched as lights went off and stores got locked up and cars pulled out toward home. Except for the diner now, everything was deserted. Framed in its front windows, anonymous heads bent over burgers, steak platters, pie and coffee.

“But
damn
, that felt good. Can’t tell you how I miss it, Turner.”

“Saving lives?”

Mind caught in memories, he was quiet a moment.

“Not really. It’s more about knowing exactly what to do—the branching decisions you make, the way each decision, each change, calls up a sequence of actions—and doing it almost without conscious thought. Not much in the world that compares.”

Doc would have gone on, possibly for hours, but it was right about then that Jed Baxter pulled up in his Camry. I met him at the street.

“Back so soon? And please tell me that the passenger in your backseat is merely sleeping.”

“Damnedest thing,” Baxter said. “Got a late start, so I figure what the hell, I’ll grab lunch before heading out. And I stop at this mom-and-pop-looking place—out there right before you hit the highway?”

“Ko-Z Inn.”

“Right. Nasty food.”

“But filling.”

“Ought to be their motto . . . So, after five or six coffees at the café and half an hour on the road, naturally I gotta pee, so I pull over. Do my thing, and when I look up, this guy’s come out of the trees and is climbing in my car. Time I get there, he’s got his head down under the dash poking around at wires.” Baxter opened the back door. “Figured I’d bring him to you.”

“Kind of a going-away present.”

“For the one that’s staying, right. Hope he’s okay. Had to thump the sucker twice to put him down.”

“Cuffs, huh?” Plastic, but police issue.

“Always carry some with me. Hey, you never know.”

“That right arm’s not looking too good.”

“What can I say? Man didn’t care to be cuffed. Laying there on the ground with his lights out, but he’s still fighting at me.”

“And you had to thump him again.”

“Maybe. A little. You want the sonofabitch or not?”

Baxter and I hauled him in and laid him on the bunk in one of the cells. Doc sauntered in complaining that this didn’t look to be much of a challenge, checked reflexes and pupils and the like, and said that in his hardly-ever-humble opinion the man was fit to be jailed.

Which left a couple of things hanging.

First off, since we had a prisoner, someone was going to have to hold down the fort tonight, which probably meant me.

Then there was the fact that this guy matched the description I’d got from Burl: medium height but looking taller because of being so thin, maybe 150, and what there was, muscle; hair light brown, long on the sides and back, not much left on top; blue-green Hawaiian shirt, heavy oxfords, khaki slacks.

So in all likelihood I had one of Milly’s kidnappers (if that’s what they were) and a killer (assuming that he shot his partner), all dressed up nice with his lights out, back in my cell. An enforcer of some kind? Runner? Or just hired help? I couldn’t help but think how it turned out the last time something like this came along. I’d walked into the office to find June and Don on the floor unconscious, our prisoner gone. The fallout from that had rung in the air for some time, leaving behind a number of bodies, Val’s included.

I called Don Lee to tell him what was going on, and that I’d take the night watch if he’d come in first thing in the morning. I sat there all night in the dead quiet drinking pot after pot of coffee, staring at the black window, and thinking about prison, how it was never quiet, how, surrounded by hundreds of others, you were as alone as it was possible to be.

But before that, I said good-bye again to Jed Baxter and rejoined Doc Oldham on the bench outside. The diner was closing for the night, Jay and Margie and Cook (the only name he’d admit to) making their final runs to the trash barrels in back. Pale rainbows shelled the few lights along the street, cyclones of flying insects pouring inexhaustibly into them.

“Sit here some days,” Doc said, “and I half expect tumbleweed to come rolling down that street. Audie Murphy to ride in on his goddamn white horse. You know who Audie Murphy was?”

I did. Some of the first movies I remember seeing. Audie Murphy mugging and mumbling, Sergeant York doing turkey calls. All those grand films about war from a much younger, far more innocent nation, innocent not in the sense of guiltlessness but in that of immaturity, of callowness.

“We want so badly to believe things are simple, Turner. That good and evil are in constant battle and by Tuesday of next week one or the other will win. You’ve said the same yourself.”

“Many times.”

“And still—” He laughed, and had to catch his breath. “And still we are not exempt.”

“No.”

We sat there quietly, beset by mosquitoes and the occasional errant moth. Cook emerged from the alley with his bicycle, mounted it, and rode off into darkness. Jay’s truck pulled out and turned in the other direction. Once-bright red and yellow flames on the bicycle were mostly shadow. The truck’s patches and layers of paint resembled, more than anything, fish scales; some were thick as artichoke leaves.

After a time, Doc said, “You haven’t told anyone, have you, Turner?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should.”

I was silent. Who would I tell? And why?

“Yeah,” Doc said, “you’re right. It’s none of their damned business.”

Two months back, on the routine physical he’d been hounding me about for ages, Doc found something he didn’t like. Probably nothing to it, he said, just those damn fool kids up at the lab with their e-pods. But we’d best repeat it. Then he showed up at the cabin late one night with a bottle of single malt. As usual, I’d heard his banger coming three miles down the road.

“Greeks bearing gifts—” I began.

“Are as nothing compared to an old man with a bottle of old whiskey. The old man is tired. The whiskey isn’t. So we’ll put it to work.”

We didn’t talk much more for a while after that. Then, along about the third pour, Doc told me, just flat out and plain, like he’d mention the weather or a dog he used to have. We drank some more, and as he was leaving he started to say something, then just looked into my eyes and shook his head.

I remember how warm and quiet it was that night, and how bright the stars.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SOME YEARS BACK
I attended a wedding, one of the guys I was in the service with, and the last contact I had, I think, with any of them. We’d been through a lot together, and his take on it was close to my own:
getting through
meant we were now somewhere else. But his wife-to-be insisted that he have one of his “army buddies” there, so I became token grunt.

And it wasn’t bad. He was marrying up, with a high-pay job awaiting him at the family firm. Even the house they’d be living in had been prepaid, so clean and white it looked as though it had been dipped in Clorox. The food was good and ample, the champagne excellent, the people, especially the women, attractive.

Barely into the ceremony, the preacher took a detour, leaving behind such commonalities as marriage vows and the couple standing there at the altar patiently waiting, to head off, instead, in praise of “the most important union of their lives,” i.e., when they accepted Jesus Christ—a commercial announcement that went on for some time. But wind had been rising steadily, and as the preacher continued in his diversion, a powerful gust came up. It snapped the tableclothes, blew leaves sideways on the trees, and raised a twenty-foot dust devil into the air directly behind him.

A great moment.

Not that I have ever believed in portents, a belief that can only follow from the belief that there’s direction at work behind the randomness of our world and lives. There are only patterns, and we make of them what we will. But sometimes, as with the preacher and the dust devil, events come together in a crazy, wonderful order.

I was thinking about that the following morning as I watched the storm build. Clouds with heavy bellies moved sluggishly about; far off I could see black pillars of rain, stabs of lightning.

Those were not the only storms building.

The guy back in the cell roused from his Van Winkle but had nothing to say, about the fake New Jersey driver’s license we found on him, for instance, or about anything else except that he’d like his phone call now, thank you. He did accept a cup of coffee as he made the call, his end of the conversation consisting of
Mr. Herman, please
, the name of the town, and the word
sheriff
.

Within the hour Marty was in my office.

Before retiring here, Martin Baumann had been a big-city lawyer in Chicago, corporate accounts, three-hour lunches, the works. To this day he only smiled when asked how or why, of all places, he picked this town, but once here, he soon discovered how desperately unsuited he was for leisure time and started taking the odd case. He and Val had worked together on more than one occasion, going from colleagues to friends in short order.

Marty just kind of
appeared
in the office, without fanfare, in that way he has. As though he’d been there for hours and was just now speaking up. “You have a guest, I understand, here at the B and B. Who has, of course, been advised of his rights, blah, blah.”

Marty poured a coffee for himself and settled into Don’s chair. Don was out on patrol. I’d been expecting to head to the cabin once he got back but now wondered if I might want to wait out the storm.

“What’d he do, anyway?”

I filled Marty in, and he shook his head. Took a slug or two of coffee. “Suckers wired money, you believe that? Right into my account, damn near by the time we got off the phone.”

“Whatever’s going on, these people do seem to be used to getting their way.”

“Don’t seem to be much up on how things work in small towns though, do they?”

“Neither were you, as I recall.”

He shrugged. “Fast learner. What do we know about your sleepover?”

“That he’s connected to someone who can wire money—”

“A lot of money.”

“—fast.”

“That’s it? Okay. Guy I spoke to was an attorney—”

“Honor among thieves?”

“An associate out of Crafft and Bailey, in St. Louis.

Basically a messenger boy, but with a hardball firm.”

“Not to mention confidentiality.”

“What confidentiality? I haven’t even spoken with my client. How could confidentiality possibly apply?”

“Point taken.”

“I’ll ask, if I need it back.” Marty did a quick rim shot on the desk edge. “I went looking. Amazing what you can find out these days with a sidelong glance. Crafft & Bailey takes up a full two floors in a downtown high-rise, one of those places full of hardwood panels and polished mahogany rails that serve no purpose. You go in, and there’ll be this huge room full of desks and cabinetry and down at the far end of it, on the horizon, a single human being.”

“You’ve been there.”

“More times than I care to think about. Cities are full of them. Places you could put up four or five extended families and most of the city’s homeless. Empty—except, of course, for the fine appointments.”

Unsure whether or not that was a pun, I remained silent.

“Good old C&B’s what the boys in the club like to call a full-service firm. One thumb in the insurance pie, defending corporations, another in plaintiff’s litigation, raking it in on contingency fees. List of clients as long as the building is tall. That’s the public face, and one wing of the thing. The other wing has maybe five, six clients.”

“One of them being Mr. Herman.”

He tilted his head in question.

“That’s the name our . . . guest, as you call him . . . brought up when he made his call.”

“Of course.” Marty refilled his cup, tasted, then poured the coffee out and set to making a fresh pot. “Not one of them—all of them. In some guise or another. And not Herman, but Harmon. Larry, born Lorenzo, Harmon. Owns huge portions of St. Louis, Chicago, and points between.”

“We talking Monopoly?”

“We’re talking numbers, off-book gambling, unsecured loans, escort services, strong-arm security. Anything on the borderline between legal and otherwise, he runs it. Or his crew does. Man himself doesn’t go near the action. Golfs, drinks coffee, visits his mother every morning. Two children, son about thirty, owns a ring of low-end apartments, furniture-rental stores, and the like—a very big ring. Named Harm, if you can believe it. Hard to say if the man’s got a weird sense of humor or if he’s just plain stupid oblivious. Daughter’s—get this—Harmony. Word is she’s so ugly everyone calls her Hominy.”