Slow Fall, Page 3

  #

  The drive was easy compared to the one that morning. The bronze Chrysler would have been hard to miss even without the blue vapor trail. Pickett stayed well behind it, changing lanes frequently to avoid the Chrysler's rear-view mirror. He only caught an occasional glance of Amy's VW.

  He followed the Chrysler through town past the 5-and-10, DeLeon Building, and Otley's Rexall. The beetle turned right onto Magnolia, and the Chrysler pulled up at the corner. Pickett drove past, averting his head.

  The man from the Chrysler loped down Magnolia on foot.

  Pickett took the next right, and then the next; he pulled to the curb before reaching Magnolia. A concrete pillar on the corner said, HIBISCUS DRIVE.

  Pickett walked to the corner of Hibiscus and Magnolia, and turned right toward Main.

  Large oaks grew at regular intervals on both sides of the street. Their branches met, creating a cave-like channel from which depended stalactites of Spanish moss. Magnolia Drive flowed beneath like a slow black river.

  The street was empty. Pickett continued toward Main.

  There was no curb, only a shoulder of sandy grey dirt that merged into the front lawn of small stucco bungalows. Vaguely Spanish, with arched windows and red tile roofs, they rose behind the elephant ears, Spanish bayonets, and hibiscus shrubs that surrounded them like parts of the landscape. Fresh paint couldn't hide their rotting sashes and sagging porches. Mission Revival the architects called it; Boom Day Bungalows was the local's term—from the twenties, when land and labor were cheap, and when everyone North and East of Virginia was going to be a millionaire by thirty, buy a Sunshine State dream home, and retire. Developers were ready for them, but they never came—at least not for another thirty years, and none were millionaires.

  The sharp slap of a screen door broke the silence. An engine spluttered to life. The blue VW pulled out of a driveway on the next block and swerved down Magnolia in the opposite direction.

  Pickett stepped quickly around a large oak back towards his car. His foot caught. He fell face first into the dirt. He scrambled to his feet with a mouth full of sand, and whirled around into the muzzle of a small black automatic.

  The man from the bronze Chrysler held it. He was a head shorter than Pickett, but twice as wide and better armed.

  “This jus aint your day is it, pal?” He flashed a smile made to sell toothpaste.

  The scars of adolescence pitted his face. He dusted off Pickett's jacket with his free hand, and patted Pickett's lapel. Then, still smiling, he grabbed Pickett's jacket, jerked him forward, and stuck the automatic under Pickett's chin. The smile disappeared.

  “Now, pal—” The man thrust his face toward Pickett's. “-- who the hell are you and what the fuck you think you're doing?”

  Tiny blue veins latticed his red nose.

  “Gas company. Florida Gas and Electric.” Pickett smiled. “I read meters.”

  The man pushed the pistol deeper into Pickett's neck.

  “All right, I lied. I'm not with the gas company. I'm a nuclear physicist.”

  The man's eyes narrowed, and he peered at Pickett's, as if trying to read his mind.

  Pickett shrugged, still smiling. “I split atoms.”

  The man from the Chrysler frowned; then his eyes flickered nervously, and he almost smiled. “Yeah?”

  Bodie Picket smiled blandly back at him.

  Releasing Pickett's lapel and making a show of smoothing it, the man from the Chrysler relaxed, and laughed. The gun moved to Pickett's stomach.

  “Shit, that's pretty good.” He laughed again at what he took to be the other man's joke. But the smile froze on his face. “You say your name was what, funny man?”

  “Bohr, Niels Bohr.”

  “Yeah?” He loosened up again. “Well, Bohr, since you's a nuculer whachamacallit, you aint got no business with this here girl, do you?”

  Pickett smiled broadly, his lips tightly closed. He raised his eyebrows in response.

  The man from the Chrysler set his chin and leaned forward, jamming the gun deeper into Pickett's stomach. “Right?”

  Pickett coughed then said: “Would you repeat the question?”

  And the man from the Chrysler buried a heavy fist into Pickett's abdomen. Pickett dropped to his knees, his mouth and eyes open wide, unable to suck in air. The man grabbed the shoulder of Pickett's jacket and pulled him to his feet.

  “Now, you don't have to worry none bout that girl, do you?” There was real humor in his face now, and not the slightest trace of nervousness in his eyes. “Do you?”

  Pickett's long face swung to the side and back in answer.

  The man from the Chrysler released his jacket. “There, you see? We aint got no problem.” He chuckled.

  Pickett's legs buckled. The man from the Chrysler put the cold metal to Pickett's temple, bent over to pat Pickett's pockets.

  “Now Bohr—boring Bohr—I don't expect to see you again anyplace. Ever. Got me?” He pulled car keys from Pickett's coat pocket. “Got it, Bohr?”

  Pickett's head swung from side to side again. He coughed up dirt and blood. A string of pink spittle hung from his mouth.

  The man from the Chrysler laughed—from the belly this time.

  “Jus aint your day.” He dropped the automatic into his pocket and walked away from Pickett. “Boring Bohr…” He laughed at his joke, and headed back to Main. The man from the Chrysler reached the corner and tossed Pickett's car keys into a clump of Spanish bayonets, then disappeared around the corner. He was whistling.

  Pickett coughed up more sandy blood. He felt his ribs, stood up, and fell back against the trunk of a live oak, his face crumpled in pain. He closed his eyes, and opened his mouth, breathing deeply. When he stood the next time, his legs held. He walked slowly to the Nova. He leaned against the door, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out a soft leather wallet. From it he pulled an ignition key.

  Pickett drove slowly back to Main, and as slowly the three miles to Belle Haven Memorial. He turned into the parking lot, and stopped mid-lane. He closed his eyes, lips pursed, and exhaled. When his chin rose, however, it was set forward; when his eyes opened, they were narrow and hard, their hazel centers glowing yellow in the dusky light. Pickett dropped the transmission into reverse, and the Nova curved back out onto the street, leaning into the curve, dragging its tires, screaming, across the asphalt. He swung back onto main. He drove back into town.

  The Nova lurched to a stop in front of the 5-and-10. The suspension creaked as Pickett wrenched at the parking brake. He remained before the wheel, his lips bunched, his brow knit; then he pushed himself into the street and walked, shoulders slightly hunched over his damaged stomach, to the glass door that said, J. B. PICKETT/ATTORNEY AT LAW, and up the stairs of the DeLeon Building, and to his father's office. And the pint of Jim Beam 90 proof that he found, without a search, behind volume 2 of Mackelson's Florida Tort.

  6

  The window was dark when the phone rang. Bodie Pickett, his chest bare, lay on the waiting room sofa, a bruise the size of a softball emblazoned on his stomach. Two fingers of whiskey balanced there in a Dixie cup.

  He reached the desk and the phone after six rings.

  “Yeah, who is it?… Oh, hi. How are—. . . No. No, it's okay, I should've called first.… Well, sorry I missed you anyway.… Uh-huh, yeah. Some other time maybe.… Yeah? Well… Uh-uh.… Sure, if you think so, that'd be just fine.… Eight-thirty'd be fine too.… Sure.… Uh-huh, yeah, me too.… Right. See you then.”

  He hung up.

  A fresh shirt, a cup of Otley's coffee, and 30 minutes later, the white Nova rumbled over the short one lane bridge that spanned the Lake Anna canal, and turned right at a sign that said, PRIVATE DRIVE. It went for another hundred yards through a tangle of tropical foliage before it pulled into the circular drive of a pink stucco mansion. It rolled to a stop before a pair of massive mahogany doors.

  A white-coated Cuban appeared from the shadows and slid into the front seat as Pickett
climbed out. The Nova and the white-coated Cuban disappeared through an opening in the profuse plantings that surrounded the house.

  Pickett stood in the middle of the drive for a moment, looking at the Spanish stone work that framed the windows on each of the three stories. Wrought iron filigree covered the windows. He put a set of long fingers to his stomach, and pressed gently against the white shirt. In response, he squinted with his left eye, bringing the left corner of his mouth up toward it. Pickett brushed at the sleeve of his blue-grey seersucker suit, pulled his open-necked shirt collar over the lapel of his jacket, and, with a sigh, launched himself toward the door before him, his shadow lengthening over the gravel drive as he approached it.

  He climbed the steps and raised his hand to the knocker. He paused looked at his watch, put the watch to his ear, then struck the door once with the wrought iron knocker.

  The door immediately opened.

  “Bo, old friend!” The Reverend Edmund Ayers lit his whole-life smile and pumped Pickett's right hand with both of his own. “It's so good to see you again.”

  Pickett smiled in return, and, after four pumps, tried to retrieve his hand. Edmund held on.

  He pulled Pickett through the front door and into a formal entryway. The murmur of a room full of people drifted down the hall.

  “I'm so sorry about this morning.” Deep concern etched Brother Ed's face.Pickett smiled: “Yeah?”

  “Yes, well, that is, I mean that I hope Tom didn't, well, put you off too much. He can do that.”

  The Reverend Edmund Ayers laughed a hearty laugh. It sounded forced.

  “He's, well, a man of few words, as they say.” He looked at Pickett, the good humor became wariness. “And a bit… Over protective sometimes.”

  Pickett said nothing.

  “I mean he… protects my time, you know, makes sure I get places, that my car's ready… That sort of thing. You know.”

  Pickett looked at Brother Ed as if he hadn't the slightest idea what the Reverend was talking about, but that it was okay by him. Edmund still looked concerned.

  “Look,” said Pickett, “it's okay. Don't worry about it.”

  Brother Ed apparently wanted to:

  “Tom works for Matt, really. Matt Cheatham, our business manager.”

  “Ah.” Pickett said it as if the name meant something to him.

  Brother Ed seemed encouraged: “He's the real financial brains behind all this—Matt is, I mean. The Lord provides, my boy, he provides, but you need to take care of it.”

  Brother Ed laughed. It was supposed to be good-hearted, but sounded embarrassed.

  “Matt's done amazing things, made it all possible in many ways.”

  Pickett waited, but Edmund didn't count the ways. Edmund seemed to find the silence awkward. His smile drooped.

  “We're all so sorry about your father—” His blue eyes became liquid. “-- so very sorry.” He looked mournfully at the bridge of Pickett's nose. “I didn't know him well, of course, but I understand he was a troubled man.”

  “He was a drunk, Ed.”

  “Huh? Well, yes, and we shall all miss him. Very, very much. There are travails and temptations for all souls in this world, but—”

  “Ed, he's dead.”

  “Uh—what? Oh, yes, I know—I know he's dead. I just wanted to say… Well, `the Lord giveth—'“

  “Look, he was a drunk for twenty years, and if he didn't shoot himself, he would've eventually.” Pickett closed the door, deliberately not slamming it. “He's dead, that's it. And to tell you the truth, I don't know if I'm sorry or glad—but I don't believe for a minute that anybody else is too broken up over it. So cut the crap, Ed, I've had a rough day.”

  The Reverend Edmund Ayers looked hurt, the fat little rich kid nobody liked, but who was put up with for his toys. A second later Brother Ed had rearranged his face, a grownup again.

  “Ah, Bo,” he laughed, “Bo, Bo, Bo. . . You're pulling my leg aren't you? You never were one for sentiment.”

  He slapped Pickett on the back again—not as though he wanted to, but as though one were supposed to. Pickett winced; Brother Ed pretended not to notice and smiled, sagely.

  “Still the cynic, huh? Some day, Bo—some day you'll see. There's more under God's blue sky than doom and gloom.”

  He hung an arm over Pickett's shoulder and guided him down the large paneled hall, past an arrangement of multicolored cut flowers and a black maid with a doily on her head.

  The maid was apparently awaiting Pickett's coat. Pickett didn't have one. The maid smiled, as if to say that no sane man would carry one in this climate anyway, but it was a living. Brother Ed smiled back.

  “Thank you, Annie.”

  “Yessir, Mister Edmund.” Then she curtsied.

  Pickett nodded his head in appreciation. Brother Ed urged Pickett toward the door at the end of the hall.

  “Come on in. There're some people I want you to meet.”

  Pickett pressed gently at his stomach as Edmund ushered him into a large rectangular room filled with people. One side of the room was glass, revealing an illumined flagstone patio and an impressive expansive of lawn. Stepping stones, like the footprints of some great amphibian, meandered down the lawn to a large dock and bathes silhouetted against a grey-blue lake.

  From the far side of the room and a small congregation that included Fenton Carrithers and Seymour Blotz, a woman detached herself and swept toward the two men who had just entered. She was striking in a full floor length brocade skirt and a flouncey blouse that ended in lace high on her neck. The skirt was a deep purple, almost black; the blouse, scarlet. A velvet ribbon of the same purple as the skirt held a large cameo at he neck. Her green eyes found Bodie Picket's.

  Edmund watched her too.

  “Mister Pickett, may I present—”

  “Bo,” she said, as if addressing an old friend, “may I call you Bo?”

  “—my wife, Jan.”

  The woman ignored Edmund's introduction.

  “It is so nice to meet you, Bo. Edmund's told me so much about you.”

  Without the wig, and with her still blonde hair pulled back off her face to a delicately formed bun in the back, she was a different woman. There remained only the slightest trace of the evangelist in her drawl—the ivory tones of magnolia, now, all peaches and cream.

  She extended her hand, and Pickett bowed as he took it, feigning a kiss. Jan received the gesture as her due.

  Edmund nodded to Pickett.

  “I'll, uh, see to the other guests.”

  He touched his wife's arm and, noticeably embarrassed, disappeared into the crowd. Jan appeared neither to notice nor to care.

  “I was simply devastated by the news of your father's death. Such a horrible thing. He must have been very unhappy. So many endure so much for lack of faith, don't you think?”

  Pickett said nothing. Jan smiled.

  “Do you have Faith, Bo?”

  Pickett leaned his head to the side and crumpled his brow. “No, I suppose not.”

  “Oh?” Jan Ayers cocked her head at the same angle and in the same direction.

  “Some things, maybe. I dunno. Truth, honesty… That sort of thing, maybe. Simple things.”

  Jan Ayers dropped her gaze and took Pickett's arm, gently guiding him toward the long window.

  “And are those things truly so simple?”

  She released his arm and settled back against the glass, her hands limply folded in the shadows of her brocade skirt, her face glowing against the evening sky like the moon itself. It was as if the pose had been prepared.

  Pickett was silent. Jan's voice grew softer.

  “Are you true then, Bodie Pickett? Are you honest?”

  “Sometimes, I hope. I try anyway.” Pickett laughed. “The truth is that I try to avoid pain. I dunno, maybe I try at the other too.”

  They both were silent for a moment, as thought reading the other's mind. Pickett spoke first:

  “Trying isn't so bad, is it?”
r />   “Try, yes. Try we must. But it's faith alone that makes it possible, isn't it? Only through faith can we be true and honest and—”

  “Maybe with ourselves.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Perhaps we can still be honest with ourselves…”

  “Can we? Can you be honest with yourself, Bo? Can any of us?”

  Oh, you foolish child, said her smile.

  “We are miserable creatures,” she continued, smiling incongruously, “—weak and willfully evil. It's the Blood of the Redeemer that can show us the way.”

  “The way to Ed's Temple, you mean?”

  Jan smiled indulgently.

  “The Lord's Temple, yes. To salvation, to the New Jerusalem…” Her eyes glazed, the face tightened though the smile held. Jan placed her hand on Pickett's forearm. “Will you be there, Bodie Pickett?”

  She seemed to expect an answer. Pickett paused, his eyes hooded, lost in thought. Finally, he looked up, smiling sheepishly.

  “I don't know where I am half the time, much less where I'll be when it's all over.”

  Jan raised her chin without moving her eyes from Pickett's. After a moment, the eyes softened, and she laughed.

  “Yes, I do know what you mean. We keep ourselves so busy, don't we? Too busy.” She paused and turned to the window. “It is lovely though—don't you think?”

  Pickett nodded, smiling; but he was still looking at Jan. She smiled to herself as if reading Pickett's mind, then continued:

  “The lake is always beautiful; but as you can see—” She gestured toward the crowd. “-- even here we can't always get away. The shepherd must sleep too, you know.”

  Jan turned and leaned toward Pickett conspiratorially.

  “We have a place on the St. John's. It belonged to Edmund's parents—God rest their souls. We keep it a secret. We get out there every so often to renew the spirit. Lord knows, it needs renewin' every now an' then.”

  The twang was a joke that came too easily. Jan took Pickett's arm again.

  “You know, your father meant a great deal to Edmund. Edmund was lost, truly lost. A little like you, I hear. When his parents died, your father helped him back on track. He couldn't bring him all the way, of course: he wasn't a Believer. You understand…”

  “Do I ever.”

  “. . . But he made it possible for Edmund to return to life. And eventually to Jesus. If only your father let Edmund return the favor. Perhaps, this—this tragedy could have been avoided.”

  She seemed genuinely distraught.

  “No one could have helped—except whoever pulled that trigger.”

  Jan's eyes flew to his.

  “Surely you don't mean to imply—” She paused, trying to read his mind again.

  Pickett said nothing. Jan started over:

  “You don't mean that—that it was someone else? I mean, that your father didn't—”

  “I'm not sure what I mean.” Pickett looked away irritably.

  “But who would want to do… That to J.B.?”

  “I don't know.” Pickett looked up, his face hard and cold. “Do you?”

  Jan's mouth dropped open, astonishment in her eyes. The very notion seemed to set off some interior struggle.

  “What a horrid, evil idea. You can't possibly think that—” She seemed to find the idea unspeakable as well.

  Pickett laughed awkwardly.

  “Look, don't worry about it. If it hadn't been this way, it would've been some other—the drink most likely.”

  Jan Ayers struggled for meaning in the tall man's words. Puzzlement blended with astonishment. “I don't—I mean…”

  Clearly, Jan Ayers didn't. In any event, she'd had enough. She found salvation over Pickett's shoulder.

  “Mark—oh Mark,” she called. “Yes.… I want you to meet someone.”

  Mark stepped around Pickett and extended his hand, his eyes avoiding the taller man's.

  “This is Bo Pickett, Mark, one of your father's oldest and dearest friends.”

  Mark glanced up from his mother's face to that of his father's oldest and dearest friend. The disdain that pulled at one corner of his mouth evaporated as a question dimpled the flesh between his brows.

  “I've seen you before, haven't I? You were at the T-t-temple.”

  “Uh-huh. Quite a show.”

  Mark looked to his mother, then more sheepishly to Pickett.

  “Well, the shows are a little… el-l-laborate.”

  “Nonsense!” Jan patted her son's cheek playfully. “No more so than necessary, dear. We strive for professionalism, that's all.”

  With obvious embarrassment, Mark's eyes darted around the room. They caught and clung to something behind Pickett.

  “Yes, well, nice to meet you, Mister P-p-pickett. Excuse me, please,” and he was off.

  Jan leaned after him, raising one arm as if to catch him. She didn't.

  “Just a moment. Mark? Mark, I'd like a word with you.” Jan turned to Pickett dismissively. “So nice to have met you, Bo. I hope that we can talk again.”

  Though Jan smiled as she swept off in Mark's wake, her expression suggested that she would be just as happy never to see Pickett ever again.

  Pickett turned, following Jan with his eyes.

  Jan spoke earnestly, but Mark's attention focused on Amy Mooring. She sat in the far corner, bolt upright on a white modular sofa—legs tucked beneath her, a black sleeveless dress pulled down over her knees, her eyes rapt upon the long cherubic face of Mark's father.

  Edmund no longer looked embarrassed; he was in his element.

  7

  “I don't believe that we've met.”

  Bodie Pickett turned to a well groomed man of medium height, close cropped hair, and horn-rimmed glasses. The man smiled; he appeared to know when charm was needed, but not what it was. His suit was expensive.

  “Matthew Cheatham.” He put a pink, well manicured hand to his breast as if to introduce his suit. “I am Edmund's financial advisor. And you are…”

  “Pickett. Bodie Pickett.”

  “Ah…” Matt extending a limp hand. “So nice to meet you.”

  “Edmund was just telling me about you—”

  “You know, Mister Pickett the greater the witness, the greater the need for financial responsibility. No penny should be wasted.”

  Matt Cheatham continued to look at Pickett; although, at the same time, he seemed virtually unaware of Pickett's presence. The warmth of the other man's body had loaded and executed some infinitely repeatable program.

  “When Edmund and I left Princeton…”

  Matt Cheatham paused as if awaiting applause.

  “. . . we realized that the gospel must be spread to the modern world in modern ways. And modern ways require modern means—vast resources, great financial sacrifice…”

  Matt Cheatham gently turned Pickett toward the crowded room.

  “But just as Brother Edmund has given over his wealth to the great witness that he bears, so too have the great supporters of this mission done their share. The great work has been carried forth, but much still is to be done—”

  “How much?”

  “Uh—what? Oh.”

  Matt Cheatham slowly turned back to Pickett. His eyes focused on the other slowly, as if coming out of a deep sleep. Confusion fled as something behind them clicked.

  “Well, the need is ever present. We ask no more than you can afford nor less than you feel—”

  He'd switched to a sub-routine.

  “Mister Cheatham—”

  “Matt, please.”

  “Well, Matt, you got the wrong guy.” He tapped his chest with a long forefinger. “. . . friend of the family.”

  “But Mister Carrithers said… Ah, oh, I see. I am sorry. Mister Carrithers thought you were with the Millennium Club.”

  Matt turned toward the other side of the room. Carrithers waved; Blotz looked at Pickett, sneered, then said something to Carrithers. He laughed. Matt knit his brow.

  “A
nd, well, we are in the midst of a drive. You understand.…”

  “Sure. It's okay.” Pickett turned to leave.

  “It's going quite well, actually.”

  Matt, still smiling toward Carrithers and Blotz, was oblivious of Pickett's attempted escape.

  “Edmund has quite a following, and with the success of the TV show…” Matt finished the sentence by raising his eyebrows and showing Pickett his palms. “We're syndicated now. Did you know that? Fifteen local channels. Mostly Florida—and a few in Georgia. We have one in Louisiana, too…”

  Suddenly, his aspect was earnest. Pickett sighed, and closed his eyes.

  “But, Mister Pickett—Bo, if I might… As I was saying, the need is ever present, and we must keep our shoulders to the wheel.”

  “Looks to me like you got an awfully big wheel.”

  “Wha—? Oh, yes, I see what you mean.” He smiled at the tall man next to him, half closed his eyes, and bobbed his head slightly from side to side. “We do quite well, actually; but, mind you,” he added quickly, “the need is—”“Cheatham—” The face that followed the voice was as blunt as the intrusion. “-- we got business.”

  A foot shorter than Matt Cheatham and at least as much wider, the man tossed a square head of iron-grey stubble toward the door.

  “Now.”

  “Oh—Ralph. Yes, of course, in a minute. Ralph Kemp, this is, uh, Bodie… Pickett. Pickett's a dear old friend of Edmund's.”

  “Yeah? Well, good luck, Pickett.” Kemp ignored Pickett's hand, and leaned toward Matt Cheatham. “Look, we gotta go somewhere and talk.”

  “Of course.” Matt smiled his thin-lipped smile once again. He took the hand Kemp refused. “You'll excuse us Mister Pickett?”

  “Pickett?” Kemp's eyes narrowed. “You related to that clown who shot hisself the other day?”

  “Yeah—” Pickett's face was wood. “-- son of clown.”

  “Oh, my…” Matt looked nervously at Kemp. “I-I-I didn't make the connection. I'm so sorry to hear about your—your loss, Mister Pickett.”

  “It was more my father's.”

  Matt pulled in his chin in puzzlement.

  “The loss, I mean.”

  “Yes, of course it was. I only meant to say… well, that he was a fine man.”

  Bodie Picket released a short burst of air something like a laugh. “It doesn't sound like you knew him too well.”

  Kemp sighed, looked at the ceiling, then at his watch, as though he had a train to catch.

  “Well, I didn't really know him,” Matt continued. “Edmund retained him as his personal lawyer, you understand. He—your father, that is—had been with Edmund's mother and father, I believe. Edmund didn't really require much of him. We have—that is to say—Edmund has several lawyers connected with the Temple; but Edmund felt it—your father, that is—he felt that your father was his, well, responsibility. Of sorts. That is, your father was generally in no condition—too ill, that is, to undertake legal work of any degree of, well, complication.”

  Matt breathed a sigh of relief. “I'm sure you understand.”

  “Yeah, I understand. He was a drunk.”

  Kemp laughed. Matt winced.

  “Well, I wouldn't have put it that way myself—”

  “That's real nice, but we gotta go.” Kemp turned Matt toward the door, then looked back over his shoulder. “Sorry bout your ol man, Pickett.”

  “You and Jim Beam,” Pickett muttered.

  Matt looked back as Kemp drew him across the room. He shrugged apologetically.

  Pickett took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly through pursed lips; he allowed his gaze to wander from one side of the crowded room to the other, until it reached the glass wall behind him. A handle fitted to the section of glass he leaned against opened, and Pickett slipped out into the damp night air.

  He stood in the middle of a flag stone patio surrounded by a waist high hedge. Three stone steps led down to the lawn. Pickett went down the steps and to the left, out of view of the glass wall, and onto another patio. The limbs of a large oak swept over the flag stones like an awning. Moss melted from the limbs into the half light below, turning in the warm air like ragged pennants. The air was thick with the sweet-sour smell of the water's edge.

  Pickett barked his shin on a cast iron lawn chair, swore under his breath, and then sat on it.

  The lake was grey with the full moon. In an easy syncopated rhythm, waves slapped at the dock pylons. The party's hum disappeared beneath the thrum of tree frogs, crickets, and the occasional cry of a coot.

  “Lake Anna…”

  At the sound of his own words, Pickett smiled—as if this were the name of an old friend, one he'd not seen for a very long time. His eyes followed the shoreline into the tangle of bougainvillaea and palmetto palms that bordered the lawn on the right. A tunnel of moonlight passed through, glinting off the surface of a canal. In Belle Haven, one was never much more than a hundred yards from a lake or one of the canals that connected them.

  “It is lovely, isn't it,” Jan's words echoed, though not her voice.

  Pickett started and looked to his left.

  Deeper in the shadows, the darkness moved. A voice, light and weary, continued: “But it's not real, you know. It couldn't be.”

  Amy Mooring sat on a cast iron two-seater at the foot of the oak, arms around her knees. Pickett stepped farther into the shadows and sat down beside her. Her eyes glinted as she glanced at him. Bringing her knees up to her chin, she turned back to the lake. Her black dress fell down around her thighs revealing long, womanly legs covered in black.

  “It couldn't be real, could it?”

  “Why not?” Pickett whispered; still, it was as though he were yelling, as though his voice were coming from some other world than Amy's.

  “Good things are never real.”

  Pickett wrinkled his brow. He said nothing in reply.

  Amy looked at him, then away. “You were at the Temple today, weren't you?”

  Pickett nodded.

  “And the donut shop.” Amy paused. “Are you following me?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  Pickett looked down at his feet, then to the lake, and back again to Amy. The air had picked up a trace of magnolia. His brow knit above a nervous mouth. “Should I be following you, Amy? Are you in—”

  “How do you know my name?” Amy's voice shook, slightly.

  “I'm a friend of your father's.”

  “My father…” She tested the words, how they sounded. Her face blank, naked, she looked from the lake to the man next to her. “I have no mother, you know. Did he tell you that? No mother and no father.”

  “Amy, if you're in some sort of trouble…”

  “Did you know that I was born again? Well, I am. Born again… washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”

  She put her feet back to the flag stones, and she turned. As if asking the time of day:

  “Do you think I'll go to heaven?”

  Pickett stared at Amy in silence, his brow twisted. His tongue ran quickly over his lower lip, and he opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Amy answered.

  “I don't. Do you want to know what I do think? I think that I'll rot in hell.” She spoke as though she knew the place. “Know why?”

  Pickett shook his head.

  “Because I'm real. Real.” Amy put clinched fists to her breast. “I'm flesh and bone a-a-and—”

  The quiver in her voice blocked the words. She squeezed her eyes closed, smiling grotesquely; then she swallowed hard.

  “The good, and peaceful, and… kind is a—” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand—quickly, not wanting the other to see. “—is a lie.”She pointed to the lake, her hand trembling.

  “It sits out there calm and beautiful and… it wants you to think that it's real, you know, that it's really there. But when you reach for it, when you try to grab it… it's worse than—than nothing. It's foul. It's foul and filthy and—”

  A shriek broke the li
tany.

  Amy froze, her mouth open.

  The shriek became a wail, then hysterical sobs. It came from the canal. Pickett rose. Amy grabbed his arm.

  “What is it?”

  “I don't know.”

  “I told you.” Amy's voice rose with her body. “It's evil, filth, I told you, I told you, I—”

  “Stop it!” Pickett took Amy by the shoulders and pushed her back down into the chair. “Wait here.”

  He sprinted across the lawn toward the canal and stumbled into the palmettos and ferns that bordered it, heading for the sound. He broke through the scrub to the canal, skidded on the mud. He was ankle deep in mud and water plants before he stopped.

  The wail was a whimper now, steady and low, farther down the creek. A bulky figure shuddered on the opposite bank.

  “Help!”—a male voice this time—”Over here.”

  Pickett scrambled out of the water. He slogged through the vegetation toward the voice. His wet socks kept slipping from his shoes. By the time he breasted the figure on the opposite bank, he'd lost the left one.

  Two teenagers embraced in terror. The girl, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, whimpered into the boy's chest. The boy pointed down into the dark water.

  “There. There!”

  The limbs of a sweet-bay magnolia swept the top of the canal just below where he was standing. It was in bloom, its scent overpowering. The kid pointed into the shadow cast by its bulk.

  Pickett kicked off his remaining shoe and stepped down into the warm water. It was waist high in the middle. As he reached the shadow near the opposite bank, the girl, who'd been watching him, began to wail. Pickett reached down into the darkness and pulled.

  A face emerged from the black water. Its small eyes stared into the twisted foliage above, dull and unseeing. The left eye glinted red in the reflected light, beside it and underneath, a small ragged hole.

  Pickett looked past the cowering lovers. Their green Ford hulked in the shadows of the bank above them. The dead man's bronze Chrysler was no where in sight.

  Abruptly, the girl's whimpering stopped. She gasped, Pickett wheeled around.

  On the opposite bank, one arm rigid, pointing at the white face bobbing in the black water, stood Amy Mooring. Her face was as white.

  “Filth,” she whispered, her voice rising. “Filth—evil. I told you… I told you…”

  It was too much for the girl in the jeans. She made a sound half way between a cough and a gasp and slid senseless through her boyfriend's arms, curling into a fetal ball on the mud.

  8

  “I dunno, Homer, looks like suicide to me…”

  Sheriff Homer Beane swung the beam of his flashlight to Bodie Pickett's face. “Goddammit, boy, you best watch your mouth.”

  He splashed toward the bank on which Pickett sat, nearly losing his balance in the murky canal. His wake glittered through the circles of his deputies flashlights; the rays danced in the cavernous foliage of the canal as the deputies scattered before his onslaught.

  Pickett hunkered on the wet grass watching the sheriff lumber out of the inky water like the title creature in a low budget monster movie.

  “I ought a throw you in a cell right—”

  “Come off it, Homer. You got nothing on me but thirty years and a hundred pounds.”

  “I'll tell you what I got on you, boy. I got obstruction of justice, accessory after the fact—”

  “That's bullshit, and you know it. What you got is two corpses with their damn heads blown off and not one goddamn idea what to do about it, that's what you got.”

  “When I get hold a you I'm gone—”

  He lunged at Pickett as if he meant to increase the number of corpses by one. But by the time he hauled his wet bulk and sloshing waders up the short incline to where the other sat, Sheriff Homer Beane was spent. He dropped to the grass next to the taller man, the fight gone out of him with the wind. He motioned vaguely to his men, who stood knee deep in the black water grinning, and between great gulps of air he shouted:

  “What the hell you ladies gawking at?”

  And they began their random milling again, poking at the bank and canal bottom in an aimless search for nothing in particular.

  “They've been at it for at least an hour, Homer. What the hell you think they'll find down there?”

  “Murder weapon, maybe. Something. Anything. Hell, I won't know what they're gone find down there till they find it, now will I?”

  Homer Beane whipped out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “Nobody's gone know squat till we get that medical report anyways.”

  “You send him to Memorial?”

  “Whataya think that ambulance was for, smart ass? Take him to the airport?”

  Pickett laughed and shook his head.

  “What the hell was the siren for? You think maybe they could wake him up before they got there? Not that it'd matter much if they did.”

  “And whataya mean by that?”

  “What I mean is that the quack you got doing the butchering down there couldn't tell the difference anyhow. Look, Homer, you thought about calling in the Florida Bureau? They got the resources for this sort—”

  “No I aint thought about calling in the Florida Bureau, smart ass, because I aint gone call in the Florida Bureau. This happened in my county, and I'm gone get the sumbitch that done it.”

  He spat eloquently at the canal.

  He missed.

  One of the deputies—a skinny kid no more than 18—watched the spittle slide off the flat black housing of his state of the art Mag-Lite Adjustable Beam Flashlight. He looked up at Homer sheepishly:

  “Sorry, Sheriff.”

  “I'm gone get that sucker.” Apparently, Homer didn't mean the deputy. “And don't you worry none about that.”

  And that, said Homer's expression, was that.

  Pickett sighed and stared down into the grass. “How's the girl?”

  “Which?”

  “Amy.”

  “Aw, she's okay, I guess. Ed called her father, and he come and took her home.”

  Homer chuckled; it became a cough, then a wheeze. He pulled out the handkerchief again and mopped his brow.

  “Roger and Ed never did get along too good. Hell, I member when those two was just—”

  “How about the other two?”

  “The kids? They're okay I spose. The boy still didn't seem to know what was going on—white as a frog's belly when we had him look at the body again. Higher than hell.”

  Homer snorted and shook his head.

  “Just don't know where they get that stuff.” He scratched his belly thoughtfully. “The girl weren't worth much. In shock the doc said. No wonder—hell, drops by the creek for a little snort a coke and some grab-ass and prac'ly steps on a corpse.”

  Homer hawked, then spat at the canal again.

  This time the young deputy saw it coming. He stepped back out of the way, caught his boot on a cypress knee and went over backwards into the canal.

  A few half stifled laughs spluttered from the darkness.

  “Je-sus—” said Homer.

  “S-s-sorry, Sheriff,” said the deputy, pulling at his wet shirt.

  Homer looked down and shook his head. He spit on the wet earth between his legs.

  “Anyways, I spose we got all there's to get from the boy. They'd just got there, seen the body, and the girl'd started hollering. Then you show up like the Lone Ranger, and…”

  The rest's history, Homer said with his hands. He stared at the canal for moment.

  “What was that Mooring kid doing down here anyway?”

  “She must've followed me from the party. She seemed pretty shook up herself.”

  “That gal's never been anything but. Hell, why Roger lets that kid run loose I don't—”

  “Anyone make the body?”

  “Naw… I'll get some pitures, show them around tomorrow. Don't expect nothing, though.”

  “How you figure that?”

  “
Look, whoever dumped him cleaned him out—no wallet, nothing in his pockets… didn't want nobody knowing who he was. Would he a done that if anybody round here was likely to know him in the first place?”

  Pickett opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Homer continued.

  “Hell no. This here's a city job. Some greaser gets knocked off in Orlando, or maybe Daytona, they drive him to Belle Haven, and dump him in the first lonely spot they come to.”

  “What about the car?”

  Homer shot to his feet and stuck a stubby forefinger at Pickett's face.

  “What the hell you know bout any car, boy?”

  “The car that dumped the guy here. Did anyone see the car?”

  “Look, boy, if you got something—”

  “Christ, Homer, would you get off my—”

  “If you're holding something back on me, boy, I'm gone jam an accessory rap so far up your shaggy ass you're gone think you had hard time for breakfast!”

  “Gimme a break. I just thought maybe the two kids had seen a car or something.”

  “You see a car, boy?”

  “I got here after the corpse, remember?”

  Pickett's voice was calm, but his eyes moved nervously under active brows.”If your two kids didn't see a car coming or going when they drove up, you're going to have one helluva time getting anywhere with that theory of yours. Anyway, why'd anyone drive a corpse from Orlando—or anywhere—through twenty miles of scrub with nobody around for miles just so they could dump it in Ed's backyard?”

  Homer bridled.

  “I don't know what you was doing up there at Ed's place—and I don't believe for a second you're in with that money crowd—but I don't wanna hear no more bout Ed's backyard. There aint nothing to connect this with Edmund Ayers or anyone else in this town, and less you know something I don't, which damn sure aint likely, get out a here. I got work to do.”

  He straightened, and headed back toward the canal, brushing at the seat of his pants. As he got to the edge, he turned.

  “But not too far.” He turned back to the canal, folding his arms. “I want you round for awhile.”

  Pickett stood and shook out the tightness in his legs. He walked back to the road past half a dozen county police cars, down it a couple hundred yards, then right onto Lake Drive. Ed's house was only a block farther down, across the one lane concrete bridge that spanned the canal. The moon had set long before, and down the canal to the right the deputies' flashlights cut a ghostly shadow dance out of the black air. Pickett walked the block to Ed's house and his car.

  The house was dark save for a blue glow in one upstairs window. As Pickett glanced up, a white face bobbed to the center of the blue rectangle. This one was alive; it belonged to Mark Ayers.

  The Nova again sat before the front door. Pickett sat with one hand on the wheel and the other on the ignition key, staring at his lap. He looked up, his eyes closed, took a deep breath, and turned the switch.

  The engine caught on the first try.

  Pickett smiled, draped a long arm over the seat, and guided the Nova back through Ed's artificial rain forest, and back to the street.

  He drove back across the canal bridge and turned off Lake back onto the canal road and towards town. He was following the slow curve of the road when his headlights flashed bronze in the scrub to the right of the road.

  The Nova slowed and turned onto the shoulder. The dead man's Chrysler was just visible, parked off the shoulder behind a copse of pine and sumac.

  Pickett drove on another fifty yards to the next intersection, took a left, and parked in the shadow of a cinder block sign that read in peeling white on pink, BELLE AIRE ESTATES/`WHERE A HOUSE IS A HOME'. He sprinted back to Lake past two rundown cinder block boxes that had given up trying to be homes 30 years before, and back along the shoulder toward the Chrysler.

  He opened the driver's door with a handkerchief and let the ceiling light burn. The keys were gone, and there was nothing in the front or back seat. In the glove compartment was an owner's manual and a rental agreement between Reasonable Rentals of Umatila and Herbert Purdy.

  He snapped the glove compartment shut and looked up to see headlight beams swinging around the curve from the lake. He pulled the door shut, cutting off the ceiling light, and lay down on the front seat.

  The lights passed, flashing across the dashboard above him.

  As he sat up again, another pair of lights began their sweep around the same curve. He quickly ran his hand inside the front seat, pulling out a nickel and two pennies, something sticky that smelled of mint, and a wad of paper. He stuffed the paper into his pocket, wiped the minty stuff on the dash, and climbed through the front window to the ground.

  Headlights flashed across the top of the car just as Pickett scrambled to his feet. He crouched in the Chrysler's shadow and waited.

  The engine revved down. The backup lights went on; blue lettering said: WEKIWA COUNTY SHERIFF. The Wekiwa County Sheriff said:

  “Back there, ass hole. You blind?” He was between Pickett and the Nova.

  Pickett rolled away from the Chrysler and into the foliage that bordered the canal. As he reached the water, the Wekiwa County Sheriff bellowed:

  “Use your gloves, for Chrissake. Jeez—”

  Pickett doubled back along the canal to the intersection where he'd left his car, then crept back to the road and sprinted across.

  The Nova ignited on the second try. Pickett drove off in the direction it was pointed. He didn't look back.

  9

  Bodie Pickett drove around Lake Anna then for another half mile on a dirt road that paralleled the Lake Faun canal. He slowed, squinting into the headlights and the wild growth on either side of the Nova.

  Banana trees appeared on the left. They dusted the top of a tin mailbox. “J. B. PICKETT” decorated the box in rough hand painted letters. Pickett turned the Nova down a muddy track on the other side of the mailbox and the banana trees.

  A moment later, the Nova rolled to a stop beneath the second story overhang of a small, two story garage-like structure. It was well off the road and hidden by thick vegetation that grew on and around the trunks of the large hickories and water oaks that shaded it. In the dark it looked abandoned.

  Cinder block pillars sunk into the gravel drive supported the overhang. Both stories jutted out slightly into the canal that tunneled through the dense foliage behind. A small screened-in porch above the canal mimicked the overhang above the carport. The floor below comprised a boat house whose walls descended to within six inches of the canal. Green clapboard sheathed the whole. It leaned comfortably against an ancient water oak on the right. It had probably been the chauffeur's quarters on an estate long since subdivided and lost to memory.

  Pickett unbent his long body and pushed himself from the Nova toward the door in front of him. He ran his hand along the top of the door frame, producing a key. He put it to the rusty padlock on the door and, after two tugs, pulled it open. Inside the door Pickett waved his hand around in the dark until he felt a string. He pulled it.

  He stood on a narrow dock that ran round three sides of the room, framing a slip that ran to two drooping wooden doors; if required to, they would open onto the canal. The chain and padlock that held them closed was orange with neglect. Dust and the refuse of fishermen and drunks littered the decking. Slowly, he shuffled up a narrow stair to the left of the door.

  The one at the top of the stairs was unlocked.

  The upstairs room showed little to indicate that anyone had lived there. It was a long room with a kitchenette and small bath at the carport end, and a bed, small table, and a few chairs next to the porch door. Most of the windows faced the canal.

  Pickett lit a small table lamp next to the bed, then one of his black cigars.

  The cupboards were empty except for a few staples—and another pint of Jim Beam 90-proof. An inch of amber liquid remained in the bottom. The refrigerator yielded a couple of eggs and two potatoes, limp but unspoiled.<
br />
  He fried them up in some margarine from the freezer, and washed them down with the whiskey. He tossed the stub of his cigar into the sink, switched out the light, and undressed down to his jockey shorts.

  He lay down on the unmade bed. He breathed deeply several times, his lips pursed, then sighed, placing his hands behind his head, relaxing his mouth and closing his eyes.

  The headlights of a car flashed across the room and as suddenly went out. He sat bolt upright.

  Gravel popped beneath rolling tires; then nothing.

  Pickett crept to the window. The dark form of a sports car crouched behind his Nova.

  The stairs creaked.

  Pickett's eyes moved hurriedly over the table and kitchen counter. He picked up the empty bourbon bottle by the neck and flattened himself against the wall next to the door.

  The creaking stopped.

  Pickett braced himself.

  The tap of knuckle against wood broke the silence. After a moment, another tap; then a voice: “Mister P-p-pickett?”

  “Oh, for Chrissake—” Pickett threw the whiskey bottle into the sink and grabbed up his pants from the foot of the bed. “Who the hell is it?”

  “It's M-m-mark. Mark Ayers. Could I talk to you for a m-m-moment?”

  Pickett threw open the door. Mark jumped.

  “Oh! S-s-sorry to bother you but I have… I wanted to t-t-talk to you.”

  He was dressed as he'd been at the party—except that his tie was hanging loose at his neck, and the tailored grey suit looked as if it had been wrestling alligators. He caught Pickett's eye.

  “I went down to the canal.”

  He smiled self-consciously.

  “I sort of s-s-slipped. Sheriff Beane had a deputy take a few of us down to see if we could—could identify the body. No one could.” He looked down at the dusty floor. “L-l-least no one did.”

  “What the hell time is it anyway?” Pickett pulled up his fly.

  “I dunno—two-thirty, maybe three. I'm sorry to bother you but… “

  Pickett motioned him in and walked to the table lamp. Mark dropped into a straight back chair as if he carried the weight of more years than he'd lived on his shoulders.

  He avoided Pickett's eyes.

  The older man drew some water from the tap and placed it on the burner. “Want anything?”

  “What? Oh, no. No thank you. I… “

  Mark didn't finish that either.

  Pickett chipped a teaspoon of brown crystals from the stuff cemented to the bottom of a small jar. “For someone who drops by at three a. m. to talk, you sure as hell don't have much to say.” The water kettle began to smoke and the room filled with the odor of stale grease. Pickett switched off the burner and poured the tepid water into a cup. He added the brown crystals and stirred optimistically.

  Mark looked down, took a deep breath.

  “I need to tell someone b-b-but… Damn!” Mark pounded a clinched fist against his knee.”

  Suddenly Mark looked up.

  “Can I trust you? I mean—”

  “Goddammit boy, don't you start up with that now.” Pickett tossed the black liquid into the sink. “Christ, what is it with you people? I don't know if I'm true or honest or good or… Jesus!” He slammed a cabinet door shut and slumped back against the refrigerator. “And if that means you can trust me, boy, then you can trust me.”

  Mark buried his face in his hands.

  Pickett glowered at him for awhile, then at the cracked linoleum under his feet. Finally, he closed his eyes, put a hand to his forehead and took a deep breath.

  “Look, boy, I'm sorry. I don't know if you can trust me, I don't even know what you've got to tell me. But I can tell you that there's something strange going on and more than one person's been hurt—”

  Mark suddenly looked up.

  “-- and if you know something, anything, then you might as well tell me as anyone. Then the two of us can decide if we should tell anyone else.”

  “No, please, no. No one else. You can't tell anyone. Or…”

  “Or what, for Chrissake? What are you talking about?”

  Mark grimaced and hit his knee again.

  “I've seen him before. Before today—I mean ton-n-night.”

  “Him who?”

  “The dead man.”

  “Did you tell the sheriff?”

  “I—” Mark looked down at his muddy shoes. “No. No, I d-d-didn't.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…”

  Mark froze.

  “Look, Mark, I'm beat. Now, you see him before or not?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. I mean the day before yesterday. The day before… b-b-before he was found.”

  “Where?”

  “That's just it. I saw him driving away from our house.”

  “Your house?”

  “Y-y-yes.”

  Pickett stared at him for a moment, then said:

  “What kind of car?”

  “Big—sort of copper colored. I remember because he honked at me. I was just pulling in, sort of blocking his way, and he cut loose with this big horn. Like he owned the place and I was a tr-r-respasser or something. Then he l-l-laughed.”

  “That's the fella, all right. What was he doing there?”

  “I dunno. I mean, I didn't ask. Lots of different people come to the house—especially during one of their drives.” He said it with contempt. “I don't ask about them. I try to stay away from them. I'm only on the sh-sh-show because—”

  “Seen him there before?”

  “No. I don't think so anyways. I'm pretty sure I hadn't.”

  “What did your parents say? You asked them about it?”

  “They… I don't think that they knew I'd seen him. And when they told Sheriff Beane they hadn't s-s-seen him before…” Mark smiled feebly and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Why didn't you tell Beane?”

  “I dunno. Scared, I guess. I thought—I didn't think they'd had anything to do with it, with the murder, but I was conf-f-fused. I didn't know why they'd lied.”

  “You'll have to go to the police with this, son. It's murder, and there's no way around it. You can get into a lot of trouble—the type that sends you to prison—for withholding evidence.”

  “I know, I know…”

  Mark put a hand to his forehead and looked down, shaking his head from side to side. Then, hesitantly, he looked up to Pickett.

  “But you could—I mean, would you talk to my f-f-folks? First, I mean? See if you can find out why they didn't say anything? I don't think I could. You've got to promise not to t-t-tell anyone—till you talk to my folks anyway. P-p-please.”

  “Puts me in a spot, son. With the Sheriff and your folks.”

  “I know. I'm sorry…” He sank down and began working at his brow again.

  “Why come to me anyway?”

  “I knew J.B.—your f-f-father, I mean.” Mark paused, looked up. “He used to talk about you. A lot. He came to the house once when Mom… Dad was buying the Temple property. We sorta hit it off.” Pride shown from beneath the fatigue. “I used to come here now and again. Just to t-t-talk. You know. Dad and I don't—well, can't talk about a lot of th-th-things. He—J.B., I mean—he told me you were coming. He said he'd written and that you'd be coming any day now. That was bef-f-fore—” He choked on the word, hiding it behind a cough. “That was a week ago. He used to… he used to say I reminded him of you before… uh… when you still l-l-lived here. In town, I mean. I would've talked to him I guess, but he's…”

  “Can't help that, son.”

  Mark shook silently, his face in his hands.

  Pickett placed a hand on Mark's shoulder. “I'll talk to your folks tomorrow. They'll talk to Beane. If not, well then… you and me will go talk to him. Okay?”

  “That's great. Th-th-thanks, Bo—Mister Pickett.”

  “Bo's fine.”

  “Thanks. Bo.” Mark made a brav
e show of tightening his tie and brushing at his trousers. He rose from the chair with a halfhearted smile, walked to the door, then stopped. There was something else on his mind. “When you brought Amy b-b-back. And after you called Sheriff Beane—even before you called—I knew something horrible was the matter. I thought it was Amy—that she'd done something, I mean.” Mark fidgeted with the doorknob. “Whatever it was. She—Amy's been so upset and con-f-f-fused.” He looked back at Pickett. “I was almost relieved when I saw the body. That's terrible, isn't it? But I was relieved because Amy—she couldn't have done that.” The last was almost a question. He looked up at Pickett as if for the answer. When Pickett looked the question back, Mark lowered his head and continued: “I dunno what I expected, but I expected something.”

  “Why's that, son?

  “I've been waiting for Amy to explode. She's keeping something in. I thought, at first…” Mark scrunched up his face, closing his eyes.

  “What did you think?”

  “That—well, there've been a lot drugs around. I don't just mean grass, but just—all of sudden—there's this super coke—”

  “Crack?”

  “T-t-that's what they call it. And all of a sudden a lot of different people are really, I dunno, messed over. A-a-and…”

  “And you thought Amy was doing crack?”

  Mark seemed encouraged by the puzzled tone.

  “N-n-no, not really. But she was acting so strange, and until I—” Mark paused as if the rest of the sentence were caught some where in the back of his throat.

  “Until… ?”

  Mark looked away and rubbed at his eyes with both hands.

  “Nothing, really. It's just that, well, then I thought she was having an a-a-a… that she was s-s-seeing someone. S-s-someone else. You know, that all those weekends she was g-g-gone, that she… I thought…”

  “You don't know where she goes then?”

  “Me?” He seemed shocked. “No. No, I don't know where she goes. She wouldn't tell me. She will hardly even s-s-speaks to me now. If I could just find some way to help. If—if I'd just never taken her there—”

  “Where?”

  “The T-t-temple. Everything was fine until then. We were going to get m-m-married. She hadn't actually said yes yet, but I knew. Then I took her there and everything ch-ch-changed.” Mark leaned his head against the door, hanging on to the doorknob now. “What a terrible place. Good people go there because they—they n-n-need something and…” He closed his eyes hard, as though crushing something between his lids. “Good people, too. And they come out all twisted and… h-h-hard, and…”

  Pickett rested a narrow hand gently on the boy's shoulder.

  “Go home, son. Get some rest. I'll call you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah?” Mark straightened under Pickett's hand, then he relaxed. “Y-y-yeah, thanks, Mister—I mean, Bo. Thanks. You'll call me to-m-m-morrow.”

  Mark disappeared behind the door. A moment later his sports car roared to life, the high performance rumble dissolving gradually into the sounds of the night, like the passing of a storm, replaced by the crackle of crickets and the hollow call of tree frogs.

  Pickett clicked off the light and, for a moment, sat on the edge of his father's unmade bed, listening. The wet slap of a bass brought a smile to his lips.

  He lay down on his father's bed and slept.

  10

  “Watch here! Here! Here! Here!”

  Bodie Pickett sat bolt upright with his hands to his eyes.

  The sun beat full on his face.

  He rolled to a sitting position, opened his eyes, and stood, watching his shadow fly across the dusty floor as if to escape his dreams.

  “What cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer!” came the cry again. A cardinal fluttered impatiently at the window screen, trying in vain to light on the narrow sill. An open bag of birdseed lay beneath the window.

  Pickett took a handful of seeds and unhooked the screen. The morning was bright, and half gone. Half a beer can littered with seed hulls hung from the clapboards beneath the window. He dropped the seeds into it. The cardinal settled gratefully to his breakfast.

  Pickett placed some water on the stove and went to the porch to escape the fumes. A folding lawn chair and an aluminum TV table were its only furnishings. The screen hung loose in several spots. Seed hulls littered the floor.

  The sun was already high, and the day would be another hot one. But, for the moment, morning still clung to the shaded canal.

  Pickett went back to the stove, and poured the boiling water into the jar with the brown crystals. He swirled it around until it was the color of mud, then poured it into a cup. He took the cup and the birdseeds to the porch and settled into the lawn chair. A handful of seeds tossed on the floor attracted three sparrows and a red-wing blackbird. Pickett looked away from the bird's scarlet wing to the canal that tunneled through the tropical growth below. Suddenly, gesturing grandly toward the canal, and in a voice low and theatrical—Orson Wells selling ancient wines—he said:

  “Death, random and impartial as life itself, the product of chance, necessity…”

  He paused, as if awaiting a reply. The canal, unimpressed, gave none.

  “And another senseless killing tonight in Belle Haven…”—his voice mellower now, and taking on the random cadence of the nightly newscast.

  Still nothing.

  “Death,” he boomed, Orson Wells again.

  The blackbird cocked its head, shat on the floor and took off for the other side of the canal.

  Pickett lifted his cup in a silent toast to the departed bird and drank, cringing as he sucked it in. He stared down into the murky water of the canal below. Then suddenly, in a stage whisper:

  “Murder!”

  Just as suddenly, a blue jay flashed through a hole in the screen. His squawk scattered the sparrows, and he settled down to the abandoned feast.

  Pickett stood and stretched.

  The jay took off for a cypress across the canal. The sparrows returned. Below, a black water turkey stalked brim, its long legs easing through stands of tiny elephant-ears as though crossing thin ice on stilts.

  Pickett drew a small black cigar from his breast pocket, hung it from his lower lip, and rifled the pockets of his trousers. His right hand emerged with the sticky wad of paper he'd pulled from the bronze Chrysler the night before.

  He sat back, smoothed the paper on his knee. It smelled of spearmint. It said—in Xerox grey:

  GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!

  Below this floated a grainy photo of a skinny hipped, large breasted woman whose grin suggested that she'd just impaled herself on a cattle prod. Tiny rectangles like parts missing from a puzzle blacked the woman's crotch and nipples—mouth and eyes of a face infinitely more obscene than the original nude.

  EXPERT MASSAGE! BY TRAINED PROFESSIONALS!, it said beneath, giving an address off I-4. It ended with a flourish:

  TRUCKERS WELCOME!

  Pickett grinned at the sparrows. “Some clue, huh?” He crumpled the flyer and tossed it to them. One pecked at it, cocked its head, pecked again, then went back to a black sunflower seed.

  Knuckles rattled against the door.

  The birds scattered.

  Pickett opened the door to Jan Ayers, busy brushing cobwebs from her dress. She looked up, smiling, then down at his bare chest. She frowned.

  “I'm sorry. I should have called first.” She slipped past Pickett into the middle of the room. “May I come in? Just for a moment?”

  Pickett looked at the empty doorway, then Jan Ayers. He smiled, raising his eyebrows. “Yeah, sure.” He shut the door. “Just let me find…”

  And he found his shirt draped over the refrigerator.

  Jan Ayers wandered around the room while Pickett slipped into it. She selected a straight back chair as the least filthy, then settled down into it as if afraid that she might break it. In a cotton print dress colored in blues and greens she neither looked like the woman at the Temple nor the one Pickett had met the nig
ht before. She set a straw handbag down by her side, crossed her pale, rounded legs, and smiled:

  “Nice place you've got here.” Her drawl was playful.

  “Yeah, well the maid's been sick.”

  She raised her chin in a silent laugh.

  Pickett worried with another button or two on his shirt, then gestured to the stove. “Can I get you any—”

  “I understand that you had a visitor last night.”

  Pickett turned his back, drew water from the tap.

  “You shouldn't take Mark too seriously. He's just a child. With a child's imagination. He—well, he imagines things. He's not sure in his faith.” She sighed. “He's a troubled child, I'm afraid.”

  Pickett hovered over the stove, saying nothing, watching the water not boil.

  “What—if you don't mind my asking—do you intend to do with the… information that Mark provided?”

  Pickett turned, counterfeiting her tense smile. “Talk to you.”

  Jan Ayers still smiled, but the ease with which she'd nestled into the hard wooden chair had become forced. Her crossed leg pumped up and down nervously. “And what would you like to talk about?”

  “Herbert Purdy for starters.”

  The movement of her leg had exposed an expanse of white thigh. Her eye caught Pickett's, and, without looking down, she smoothed the crisp material back down to her knee. “And who is Herbert Purdy?”

  “Was. Herbert Purdy was a nasty little fella who drove a great big ugly car. Last time I saw him he had an extra hole in his head and was under three feet of water in a creek not fifty yards from your house. Now, last time Mark saw him, he was walking out your front door.”

  Her leg stopped. The smile remained, but the lips had grown thin. “And what do you suppose I or my husband would have in common with a man like that?”

  “I'm sure I wouldn't know, Mrs. Ayers,” Pickett ponced irritably. “Perhaps you could tell me.”

  She stood. Smoothing the dress down over her hips, she walked out onto the porch. She stopped, arms folded, and stared through the screen.

  Pickett switched off the burner and dumped the lukewarm water into the sink. When he turned, she stood in the middle of the room.

  “Can I trust you, Bo?”

  Pickett stared at her blankly for a moment. Then he exploded into laughter. He leaned back against the refrigerator covering his laughing face with both hands. He wiped his eyes, looking at the woman across from him, and, with an effort, began the process of straightening his face. His mouth, though, remained crooked.

  “Yeah, sure—” He waved both hands, loose at the wrists. “-- why not?”

  Her face had hardened during this.

  “None of this can get out, you understand. My husband is a public figure, and, well…”

  “Tell me about Herbert Purdy.”

  Jan Ayers hesitated. She wet her lightly rouged lips, then, suddenly, said:

  “It's quite simple, really. Though it could be, well, troublesome. You see, that man Purdy came to me for money. He said that he had, well, certain information—information about Edmund—that he would make public unless I paid him.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  Pickett's brow rose. “Did you pay him?”

  “Certainly not. I told him that I wouldn't pay him a cent. And,” she added self-consciously, “to get out of my house or—or I would call the police. He did. Get out, I mean.”

  “Did you?”

  “What?”

  “Call the police.”

  “No! I mean I couldn't—you can't—” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You must try to understand. Anyone in Edmund's position can be destroyed utterly by no more than—than rumor. No matter how base, no matter how disreputable the source, only the slightest tinge of scandal can, well, destroy him—his work, everything. Can you understand that?”

  “I understand what you're saying, yeah. But if your husband's image is so fragile, why didn't you pay Purdy?”

  “What he was selling was so patently absurd that I—”

  “What was he selling?”

  She looked away. “Information.”

  “What sort of information?”

  “I don't think we need go into that.”

  “I think we do. Sheriff Beane will insist.”

  “You won't—but you wouldn't—you can't go to the police!”

  She grabbed Pickett's arm, then as suddenly she released it. Embarrassed, she turned and fled across the room to the unmade bed. She sank down on to it only to realize where she was, jump up and stride quickly toward the door. She placed her hand on the knob, stared at it for a moment, then turned.

  The softness was gone from her face. All its bone and muscle strained as if struggling to hold itself together—or keep something from coming out. The eyes had sunk deep into the skull, yet they stared wide and glassy. The voice came from somewhere beyond the mouth.

  “If he could, the he would destroy us.”

  Pickett's mouth came open, but nothing came out.

  Jan Ayers leaned towards him, her body straining toward his. “He works silently. Corrupting, tempting…” She raised an open hand before her face and slowly made a fist. “He insinuates himself. He creeps in. Not even the Righteous are safe. Slowly, relentlessly, he insinuates himself. When suddenly we realize that we're his, it's too late. Too late…”

  She glared at Pickett as if it were already too late—for him anyway. Then she leaned back against the door, closing her eyes. Slowly she relaxed. With the softness returned the traces of a smile. She'd just explained something difficult; her performance pleased her.

  Pickett looked as though he were missing a page from the script. “And—” He coughed uneasily. “Herbert Purdy is, uh, was like that? Is that it?”

  Her smile became somehow patronizing.

  “It's Satan I'm talking about, Mr. Pickett. And yes, Herbert Purdy did his work, whether he knew it or not. And whether or not you believe it, it's true just the same. It's no simple truth, like the ones you like, but it is true nonetheless. One seldom knows Satan for what”—she gestured vaguely—”or who he is.”

  As if to comfort the tall man across from her, she smiled.

  Pickett appeared far from comforted.

  “And what Satanic message was the evil Mr. Purdy purveying?”

  “Oh, now you're laughing at me. But I'll tell you anyway because I—and Edmund's flock—know it to be untrue. And I'll rely on your faith in… simple truths.” She straightened and took a deep breath. Her voice was as grave as her aspect. “We are to believe that Edmund was seeing another woman. “She paused.

  “No, we are to believe that he was meeting another woman for the purpose of intercourse. Sexual intercourse, Mister Pickett.”

  It was as if Edmund had taken an ax to a Brownie troop, and Pickett laughed loud and long.

  “Yes, you see how ridiculous it is.” Her breast rose like armor plating. “However, I find little to laugh at in the… situation.”

  “Look, I'm sorry.” Pickett wiped at his eyes with a dish towel, not looking particularly sorry. “It's just hard for me to imagine anyone thinking that kind of information worth anything to begin with.”

  “It's not information. It's an out and out lie.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I will not have this lie repeated.”

  “Fine, but I'm afraid you'll have to repeat it—to the Sheriff at least. If this clown's been running around Belle Haven playing badger games with himself, it oughta give Homer some clue as to a motive; though”—Pickett chuckled again into the towel—”I wouldn't bet on it myself.”

  Color rose suddenly to Jan Ayers's cheeks. “If you mean to imply—”

  “I'm not implying anything. I simply mean that unless you want a real scandal on your hands, you best go to the sheriff with it now. Look, if Mark saw him at your house, anyone might've. Better to tell the sheriff yourself, than… well—”

  �
��Oh!” Her hands went to her mouth. “Y-yes. Yes, I begin to see what you mean.” Her mind was racing away from that meaning. “I… I appreciate your advice. And—and I will think about it. I'm out of my depth here, I'm afraid.”

  She lingered over the doorknob, then turned back towards him, smiling.

  “I hope that you'll forgive me for troubling you with all this.” Her voice was soft and animated, that of the woman Pickett had met the night before. “It's just that, well, Mark was so worried.” She brightened incongruously. “A mother worries, too, you know.” Then she stepped toward Pickett and extended a small white hand. “Thank you again. I hope that Mark and I haven't inconvenienced you with our… intrusions.”

  Pickett took her hand, but he didn't kiss it. He held it for a moment, then released it. “It not just the dead man, you know. That Mark's worried about, I mean.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. No, he's worried about Amy—Amy Mooring.”

  “Yes, I know who you mean.” Jan's face was expressionless.

  “Is he in love with her, do you think?”

  The fullness drained away. The lips flattened against her teeth.

  “Love?”

  Jan Ayers released a harsh laughed. She bit it off as quickly. Chin raised, eyes narrowed, she stared at him for a moment, then, softly, said:

  “And what do you think, Mister Pickett?”

  The tall man shrugged. “One seldom knows Satan…” Pickett paused, smiling benignly. “How does it go?… for what or who he is—is that it?”

  Jan Ayers looked at Pickett defiantly.

  “Or she?” Pickett pressed.

  “She?” Mock amazement lit Jan's face.

  But before the other could reply, her face darkened, and in a voice cold and thin, she said:

  “Good day, Mister Pickett,” and smoothly slipped through the door into the dark of the landing, closing the door softly behind her.

  The tap of her heels faded into the natural sounds that floated up from the canal. A moment later, an engine sputtered to life, and the canal birds scattered.

  Pickett stood where Jan had left him. He ran long fingers through his hair. His puzzlement appeared genuine.

  11

  It sat off to the right on a patch of sandy land reclaimed from the pine scrub that surrounded it. The exit said, IDDO SPRINGS and Bodie Pickett took it.

  Three cars rested next to a white mobile home that looked neither mobile nor homey. Pickett's car made a fourth. A heavy traffic that materialized much later in the day had churned and pitted the dirt beneath them. At the far end of the trailer a door flanked an open window—weathered grey plywood covered the others. A simple sign, black on white, leaned against the side next to the door. MASSAGE, it said in foot high letters.

  Pickett, squinting in the glare of the midmorning sun, climbed from the Nova. He wore a light blue work shirt, khaki jacket and trousers, and once white deck shoes. He yawned, shook his head as if to clear it and shuffled across the dusty lot to the trailer's single door.

  Just inside the door an old man sat at a card table reading a newspaper, like a desk clerk come down in the world. To his left a kitchenette flanked a narrow door that led into a dark hall. Behind him, three 8-by-10 glossies hung by duct tape from the wall. Remnants of a fourth still clung to the cheap paneling. A name tag depended from each of the three still there—from the woman on the flyer, “Mandy.”

  “Massage, twenty-five bucks.”

  The old man hadn't looked up. Pickett laid two tens and a 5 on the newspaper in front of him.

  “Sheila.” The old man spoke as if to the bills before him.

  The three of them sprawled on a cheap red plush sofa to Pickett's left, each stoned senseless—apparently by the Phil Donahue Show which burbled from a small color set behind the old man. One of them looked up when the old man spoke, then back to Phil who was discussing child pornography with a convicted child molester and a lawyer from the A.C.L.U. She looked reluctantly then, at Bodie Pickett.

  “Pshhhh,” and she pushed past the tall man into the kitchenette. This was Sheila—although about the only resemblance between her and the photo on the wall were the two prodigious lumps beneath her T-shirt.

  Pickett followed the three of them to the refrigerator. “What now?”

  “Like, you laid out the two bits, honey.” Sheila slammed the refrigerator door shut with a roll of her ample hips, bringing up a can of Colt 45 Malt Liquor. “Whatever”—(“Pwoosh!” said the can)—”turns you on.”

  Sheila poured the contents down her throat in one go, looked at the can, and belched. Her heavy breasts swung wildly at the explosion, colliding with one another several times before coming to an uneasy repose beneath her pink T-shirt. Her eyes went blank for a moment with whatever visions a shotgunned can of malt liquor conjured, then slowly focused on the space between herself and her client. She appeared surprised that he was still there. Or, rather, disappointed.

  She sighed, pulled a smile as fresh as the handbill he'd pulled from Purdy's Chrysler, and jiggled down the narrow passageway to Pickett's right, balancing precariously on a pair of gold lam‚ spikes. Two crescents of white flesh winked from under her cutoffs. She led Pickett through a narrow curtained door into what looked like a discount store dressing room.

  Thin mahogany look-alike paneling covered three narrow walls; a full length mirror covered the third. A bench draped with dirty white towels made pink by the single red Christmas bulb that lit the cubicle ran along the mirror. A small shelf high to the left of the door held an assortment of bottles and rubber utensils. The odor of stale sex scented the room.

  Before Pickett could say anything, Sheila wiggled out of her T-shirt. “Hokay, honey… She cocked her hip, a red eye bobbing in the center of each breast. “Two bits gets you the hand job. Anything extra, like, costs extra. Price depends.”

  “Uh-huh.” Pickett seemed unable to decide where to look. He settled for the eyes in her face. Behind the green, they were red, too. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You got fifteen minutes, honey, and, like… it's your bread.”

  “I'm looking for a guy, and I was wondering…”

  She looked at Pickett skeptically for moment, then fished a pack of Virginia Slims out from behind a bottle of baby oil on the shelf. She dropped to the bench.

  Pickett said: “Herb Purdy, you know him?”

  Sheila struck a match, setting the tobacco on fire and two of her red eyes in motion. From behind a cloud of smoke made pink from the reflected light, she said: “You a cop?”

  “Nope.”

  “You look like a cop.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I just wondered if you knew him, was all.”

  She emptied her lungs of pink smoke. “Yeah, I know him. What of it?”

  “Nothing at all. Just wondering what he was up to.”

  Sheila rose, dropped the cigarette to the floor, and ground it out with one lam‚'ed foot. “You got the wrong gal, honey. You want Millie. But she aint here no more.” Sheila pulled down the zipper on her cut-offs, releasing an impressive mass of doughy white flesh. “Now, honey, if you got anything tween those long legs of yours, you'd best, like, get it out. Know what I mean? Aint got all day.”

  Pickett smiled and expelled air through his nose as if to say that all day was about all she had. But what he said was: “Millie who?”

  Sheila stopped, her cut-offs rolled about half way down her massive thighs. “Millie Millie. How the hell I know?”

  “What's she to Herb?”

  “Jesus!” Sheila yanked the pants back up over her bottom. “Like, what are you? Taking a poll or something?”

  She leaned over, sucking in her stomach, trying to fasten the snap on her jeans.

  “It's worth another twenty.”

  Sheila dropped back to the bench exhausted, her jeans still unfastened. “Show.” She stuck out her hand.

  Pickett placed a ten in it. Sheila raised her eyeb
rows.

  “You answer, then the rest.”

  Sheila got up, holding her pants together with both hands, and peeked through the curtain and down the hall. She stuffed the ten in her pocket and sighed. “Herb, he works for the guy who runs this place. He come by every now and again to, like, pick up the cash and stuff, y'know?”

  “And he used to get it on with this Millie?”

  “Herb?” Sheila laughed out loud, red eyes jiggling in unison. “Are you kidding? Ralph would a cut it off and made him eat it. Like, Ralph don't let none of his boys fool around with the help. Strictly business.”

  “Who's Ralph?”

  “Who's Ralph?” she mimicked. “Ralph—the guy who, like, runs this dump.”

  “Ralph Kemp?”

  “You know him?”

  “Uh-huh, we've met. So what did Herb want with this Millie?”

  “It's what she want with him. She used to, like, give him money, y'know? She told me he was doing a job for her or something.”

  “What kind of job?”

  Sheila shrugged.

  “Know where I could find her?”

  Sheila opened her mouth to answer, but paused. Her eyes narrowed, she smiled. “I know… You work for Ralph.”

  Pickett said nothing.

  Sheila leaned forward, leveling an index finger at him. “I knew you weren't straight. Look, it's just like I told Ralph last week. I just work here, I don't, like, tell any of the other girls my life story, and they don't tell me none of theirs. If Ralph wants to find Millie, I mean, like, I can't help him. I only seen her when she come to work. If she's took off…” Sheila finished it with another shrug.

  “Did she have family hereabout?

  “How'd I know?”

  “Know where she lives then?”

  “I told you, I don't know nothing about her. Why's Ralph pickin on me… ?” Sheila picked up the T-shirt, covered her breasts—the part the T-shirt could cover—and whined: “I hardly even, like, talked to her.”

  “What did you talk about when you did?”

  “Nothing. Stuff… Her eyes brightened. “She asked me to mail a letter for her once. Is that important?”

  “Could be. Who to?”

  “Just a sec.” Sheila scrunched up her face. “Yeah, it was funny, y'know—Herb had just come round with our money. And Millie, like, gave some back to Herb, and… and, stuffed the rest in an envelope and asked Herb to mail it cause she had somebody coming. Yeah, and Herb, like, laughed at her and told her to have her John mail it. I was going home and she asked me to drop it in the mail. So I did.”

  “Who to?”

  “What?”

  “The letter—who was it addressed to?”

  Sheila looked down at her toes and scratched at her head. “To someplace out State forty-six… Something, like, outta the Bible.”

  “The Bible?”

  “Yeah, like, you know, outta the—”

  “Canaan?”

  “Huh?”

  “Canaan?”

  “Yeah, now I remember. Addressed to somebody Moses—in Canaan. Moses in Canaan—I thought that was funny, y'know? Like outta the Bible and all?”

  Pickett admitted that it was funny and asked her how long this Millie had been gone.

  “A couple of weeks, maybe.”

  “Why'd she leave?”

  “She didn't, like, leave, really. She just never shows up one morning. Matter of fact, the last I saw her was the day I mailed the letter.”

  “The same day she paid Herb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he say anything to her—scare her off or something?”

  “Nah. Matter a fact, she seemed pretty up after she talked to him. Said things was gonna, like, change or something. I didn't think anything of it then, but I guess she meant that she was gonna leave.” Sheila didn't need to explain the assumption.

  Pickett asked if she could think of anything else. Sheila couldn't.

  “But that's something aint it?”

  Pickett told her that it was.

  “Well you tell Ralph that I, like, helped, okay?” Sheila grabbed Pickett's arm. “You tell him, now.”

  Pickett told her he would, gave her the other ten, and left her struggling with the snap on her jeans.

  The old man had taken Sheila's place on the couch. Phil Donahue fielded questions from the studio audience. A fat middle-aged woman asked if the guest didn't think being a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. contrary to the Judeo-Christian Ethic; she admitted that the other guest couldn't be held responsible for being a convicted child molester since the National Enquirer had recently reported that such things were probably due to fluoridated water. Phil seemed relieved. Pickett glanced up from the TV to the glossies on the wall, then to the floor. A photo lay face down next to the card table. The missing corners matched those still taped to the wall. He dropped his car keys, knelt and picked them up while sticking the photo into his coat.

  One of the other two girls giggled as Pickett stood. The old man grinned at her and removed his hand. He threw a smug look Pickett's way. “Come again, son.”

  It sounded as much a question as an invitation.

  12

  Bodie Pickett took I-4 east to the Sanford exit, and then route 17-92 back south along the St. John's. The sun was high and hot, but something in the glitter of the river made up for the heat.

  He turned east on route 46 toward Canaan, then pulled up near the Osteen cutoff at a place called the Crab Shack. If they sold crabs, the name was apt.

  Inside, it was cool and dark. Half a dozen tables covered in red checked plastic filled the small square room; windows covered three sides. A plump young woman emerged from the double doors on the fourth side with a menu typed and decorated with copious notes and emendations in pencil.

  Pickett took one look at it, then at a chalk board above the kitchen door marked “Specials.”

  He ordered “Shrimp 'n Beer.” While he waited, the plump waitress brought him a half gallon plastic pitcher of sweetened iced tea. Soon the heady aroma of beer, shrimp, Tabasco, and Zatarin's Crab Boil turned through the room, steaming the windows.

  Pickett pulled the ragged 8-by-10 from his jacket, and smoothed it out on the checkered tablecloth.

  Standard cheese-cake—knees bent, one hand on the hip, the other behind the head, a seductively startled expression in the eyes and mouth. The image was generic, interchangeable with any thousand others of the sort; still, something—in the face, perhaps, or the black hair pushed high on the head—something wrinkled Pickett's brow.

  The kitchen door swung open and Pickett turned the photo face down.

  Round faced, plump and pretty, his waitress returned, setting before him a bowel of shrimp that billowed steam both white and yeasty. Next, came a bowl of dip—ketchup, tabasco, and horseradish blended; then an empty bowel for the shells, and a hot platter of sweet yellow hush puppies. She stepped back from the table, surveyed her handiwork and grinned.

  “Y'enjoy it now, y'hear?”

  Pickett did. And when he finished the waitress returned and they talked: Yes, she liked her job, liked Canaan; someday she'd like to open a place of her own, but closer to the city. (She called Sanford “the city.”) Her name was Liza. “You know, like the movie star?”

  Pickett asked her if she knew anybody by the name of Moses—like in the Bible.

  Liza laughed. When he didn't join in, she thought a minute, pursing her round red lips. “You must mean the newsstand downtown, by the bus station. The old man died, but it's still open, I think. His wife runs it, I suppose.” Liza took a deep breath, unselfconsciously inflating her ample chest, and sighed. She settled into the chair next to Pickett, put her elbow to the checkered table cloth, and rested her chin in her hand. She rested a frown on her chin. “Sort a sad, y'know, what some people have to go through. Just aint fair. Some people—well, everything goes their way. Others…” She raised her brow and plump shoulders. “They just can't get a break.”

  Pickett relaxed
back into his chair.

  “. . . I mean, take that Moses woman… Losing her husband like that… And he weren't all that old neither. Though she was a good bit younger than him now's I think of it. Losing him after losing her daughter and all.… It just—well, it just don't seem right, that's all. Y'know what I mean?”

  Pickett nodded, smiling the while, basking in Liza as if in the sun. Then he frowned a second in thought. “What happened to the daughter?”

  “It was a while back. Well, she just up and disappeared. One spring, I think. Hit Miss Moses hard—the old man too; but, as I remember, it weren't his daughter, y'know? By another marriage or something.”

  “Anybody find out what happened to her?”

  Liza shook her head. “Nope. There was a lot a talk, but nothing, you know, official.”

  “What sort of talk?”

  “Well…” Liza leaned toward Pickett, checking the empty corners as if for eavesdroppers. “There was this family that come in the summers. Had this big spread up near Osteen, y'know? Lots a money. Lots. The son, he hung around Pugh's Inn—down by the river. That's where the kids used to get together on the weekends. You know, hang out and what not?”

  Pickett nodded.

  “Anyways, he—the son—he used to hang out around Millie and her kid sister—”

  “What was her name?”

  “Nettie.”

  “The one that disappeared?”

  “Uh-uh. Millie's the one that disappeared. Nettie's her sister. Millie and Nettie Moses. Anyways, this rich kid—the one I was telling you about—used to hang around them a lot. That's in the summers, y'know, when his folks were at their place up near Osteen? Anyways, he shows up in town that spring and takes Millie out once or twice… Then, fore you know it, she's gone.” Liza looked at Pickett, one eyebrow raised, the other eye half closed. “What do you think?”

  Pickett smiled and shrugged.

  “Well, what I think is that she up and run off with that kid. Anyways, that's the way it looks to me. Miss Moses, why she was all over the city police and the county sheriff… Boy, she raised a real stink. But there weren't nothing anybody could do. Didn't know where she went. Didn't have nothing on the boy, really—excepting he was hanging around and all. Don't really matter in the end, I guess.… It was hell for Miss Moses, though—and the old man too. I dunno what happened to the sister, Nettie. I aint seen her for years. Liza looked up at Pickett, her chin lowered, and her cheeks coloring. “Course I was just a kid then.”

  Pickett smiled. The colored remained in Liza's face.

  “Where you from?” she said, “round here?”

  “Miami.”

  “Up here on business?”

  “No. Personal.”

  “Yeah?” And Liza looked at him, as if waiting for more.

  Pickett looked up nervously, then at his fingers spread tensely before him on the checkered plastic. “My Daddy died.”

  Liza's face fell.

  “Oh, gee. I'm sorry to hear that.” She looked down at Pickett's fingers pressed white against the red and white checks, then slowly up again to Bodie Picket. “Was he… I mean, well, he been sick for long?”

  Pickett sighed, leaned back, thrust his narrow hands into his pockets and cast a stony glare toward the window. “Yeah, I suppose in a way he had.”

  Liza brightened slightly. “I mean, you know, sometimes its a blessing. In disguise, I mean. The ways some a those strokes and cancers and things can just go on and on—”

  “Nah, he was shot. Killed himself…”

  “Oh, god—”

  “. . . least that's what the police say.”

  The color drained from Liza's face. “That's horrible. You must feel like… Oh, god, I'm sure sorry.” She looked away.

  Pickett's absent expression softened; he smiled and patted Liza's plump forearm.

  “No need to fret. You're probably right anyway. He was a drunk and had a whole heap on his conscience. However it happened he's probably better off.”

  “But… why? I mean, what sort a guilt could make someone wanna go and do that? To himself.”

  Pickett's expression tensed slightly then, as he glanced into Liza's baby-doll eyes, it fell. And he sighed. “Well, for all practical purposes, he killed my mama. She caught him with another woman. Two months later, she was dead. Dead as he is now.”

  “Lord…” She cocked her head to the side and laid a plump hand hesitantly on his forearm.

  Pickett smiled at her, then shrugged. “Happened right there in the DeLeon building, in Belle Haven, you know? That's where J.B.'s—Daddy's—office was. Little two story building. He had the second floor. Had an office there to let next to his own. It'd always been `to let.' No one ever moved in. Anyway, he was, well…” Pickett exhaled sharply and shook his head. The smile that disfigured half his mouth dissolved slowly back into blankness as his head stilled and his eyes drifted from Liza's expectant gaze to the window. “Mama and I been shopping—first day of high school or something. Anyway, Mama decides to drop in on J.B.—you know, bring him an egg-salad sandwich. He wasn't there. I was wandering around out in the hall while Mama went into his office to write him a note. I heard something in the vacant office at the top of the stairs. Just curious more than anything…”

  Liza raised her head as if to speak, but closed her mouth again when the words failed to come. Pickett spoke as if to no one.

  “. . . and there was old J.B., his trousers down around his ankles, and ol' Betty Hudgins flat on her back. She worked at Otley's Drug Store downstairs. Cosmetics, I think.” Pickett laughed an unpleasant laugh. “Least that's where she usually worked. It's funny, Mama never had liked her. Rude, she said. I can't remember J.B. ever even noticing her. Anyway, he was sure as hell full of her that morning.” Pickett laughed the laugh again. “Or the other way around…”

  Liza bunched her lips, moving her head from side to side. She seemed to notice, for the first time, her hand on Pickett's arm. Embarrassed, she gently removed it. She said nothing.

  “Well, I didn't know what the hell to do. J.B. hadn't even noticed me. But Betty sure had. She started beating on J.B.'s chest—you know, like trying to get his attention. Christ—he just seemed to think she was enjoying herself. Anyhow, I decided to get out. But when I turned around, I ran right smack into Dad's thirty-eight, the one that he—” Pickett paused, his mouth open. His eyes flickered as if to clear the image that was before them. He closed his mouth and glared down at the red checked table. “Mama had it. She just stood there, pointing that thing at J.B. Like something out of a Joan Crawford movie. Christ, I hardly recognized her…” Pickett exhaled slowly, sat back in his chair. “I'll tell you though, when that revolver went off into the plaster next to J.B.'s head, it got his attention all right. Betty let out a scream that scared the living shit out of me. Sent J.B. over backwards flat on his ass. Christ—” He looked as if he wanted to laugh, but couldn't. “I took off down the stairs, Mama right behind me.”

  Pickett reached casually into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small, flat box. He opened it and took out a thin black cigar. His narrow hand shook slightly. He fired the tobacco, looked up, and, in a billow of white smoke, said:

  “I never heard Mama say another word to J.B. as long as she lived.” He exhaled sharply through a thin-lipped smile. “She was dead by Christmas.”

  “That why he did it? Killed himself, I mean?”

  “He didn't.”

  “Well, the guilt and all…”

  Pickett turned his head away with an embarrassed shrug. His expression hardened. “He didn't do it. No matter what that hayseed Sheriff says. He couldn't have. Not without…”

  Liza stared at the tall man for a moment, puzzled. Then she sighed; wetness glistened round her eyes. She moved her plump hand toward Pickett's, then slowly pulled it away. “I'm sorry, Mister, I truly am.”

  Pickett turned toward her. She smiled, her face as white and soft as a magnolia petal. Pickett leaned toward her and smiled ba
ck. “Liza, Liza, Liza…”

  She stared into his hazel eyes, her eyes glistening, her mouth red and ripe as a berry. He took her hand in both of his and grinned, like a kid.

  “You wouldn't consider marrying me, would you?”

  Her jaw dropped. Pickett chuckled, still clinging to her hand. “Didn't think so.”

  Liza bunched her chin gleefully and slapped Pickett's hand, withdrawing her own. She laughed. “Well now Mister, I'll tell you what—y'all pay your bill then maybe we'll talk about it… Maybe y'all come back another time. We got great blues.” She stood, her cheeks the same color as her mouth. “You come on back sometime and we'll talk about it.”

  Pickett said he would if he could and paid the bill. He left her a five, picked up the photo and shuffled back out into the afternoon heat and to his super-heated Nova.

  He stood for a long interval at the open car door looking at the photo, his brow knitting as it had before. He took a deep breath, tossed the photo onto the front seat, then dropped in after it. He looked up from turning the ignition to see Liza at the Crab Shack door.

  She leaned one rounded hip against the door frame and waved. “See y'around.”

  Pickett smiled, nodded, then threw the Nova into reverse. He looked down at the seat next to him and slammed on the brakes. The photo slid to the floor, landing face up; he retrieved it and stared. Tearing away all below the woman's neck, he looked again. He tore off the hair piled high on the woman's head and looked again. Then Pickett pulled back out onto route 46.

  The light turned red.

  Liza waved lazily from the doorway, her face flushed, and ripe with some private cheer. Pickett smiled back, then went straight out of Canaan, back towards I-4 and Belle Haven, the remains of the photo still in his hand.

  13

  “Just coffee. Thanks.”

  Without a word, the woman in the photograph dropped a spoon and napkin in front of Bodie Pickett. She wiped the front of a menu with her apron and handed it to him.

  “Anything to eat?” She pulled a pencil and pad from her apron pocket.

  Pickett glanced at the green cardboard, then back at the woman. She stared absently into the dusk over Pickett's shoulder, her cheek bones high and fine, softened by skin of porcelain pallor that became pale blue in half moons below dark eyes. Her black hair parted in the middle and hung down her back in a ponytail. A loose strand played on her forehead. She brushed it away. “No. Thanks. Maybe later.”

  Her lips twitched a smile, and she turned to the coffee pot. She returned with a heavy white ceramic cup labeled KRISPY KRUNCH in hospital green. It matched the hat she wore. And the plastic tag on her collar which, in white lettering on the same green, said: MILLIE.

  She walked as though her feet hurt.

  Pickett sipped at his coffee. “You new here?”

  “Guess so. I been here a week, anyway.”

  Millie put an elbow on the counter and looked over her shoulder at the line of empty stools as if, any moment, one might ask for a refill. “You regular?”

  “Nah.” Pickett sipped at his coffee. “How's it going? The job, I mean…”

  Millie sighed. “Okay, I guess. It's hard on the feet. But… I'll get used to it.” The tone suggested that she'd had experience getting used to things. Millie glanced over at Pickett. She smiled a little more warmly, and the porcelain skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes and her youth fled: she teetered for the duration of that smile on the brink of middle-age. “You from outta town?”

  “Uh-huh. Miami.”

  “Yeah? What's your business?”

  Two men in suits walked in before Pickett could answer.

  Millie sighed, stretched, and said: “Later, maybe.”

  Pickett stared down into the coffee cup. He raised it to his lips, grimaced as he had at Otley's, then drained it.

  “Get the fuck outta here!” Pickett turned toward Millie's cry—and the two men that had just entered.

  Neither man was sitting. One, the shortest, had both hands on the counter and spoke to Millie in a voice almost too soft for Pickett to hear. Standing behind him and facing Pickett was the suit he'd met at the Temple—Tom, the hairless protector of Ed's time who really worked for Matt. He worked at looking tough now; he was doing a good job. It was the same suit.

  Millie cried: “I don't have to go nowhere.” But she didn't sound convinced.

  The soft man spoke again.

  Millie's face crumpled in rage—or fear. She backed away. “The hell I do!” She pressed back against the wall. “He aint got nothing on me!”

  Pickett put a foot to the floor.

  Tom took a step toward him, his face blank.

  But the soft man stood in his way. He turned to Pickett and smiled. He no longer looked soft. “This here's a private discussion, Mister,” he said in a very public voice. “Maybe you oughta wait outside.”

  “May be. But then—” Pickett swung his other leg over the stool and stood facing the man who no longer looked soft. “—I'd like to finish my coffee.”

  The soft man, still smiling, looked at Pickett's empty coffee cup, then back at Pickett. He moved toward him. “That right?”

  And Pickett moved, as if reading the other's mind. His left forearm blocked the soft man's looping right, and his own right fist caught the man on the jaw while he was still moving in. Something gave under the blow, and Pickett's face twisted in pain. The soft man fell back against the counter and slid down over the stool onto the floor, awake, but not conscious.

  When Pickett looked up again, Tom held a revolver. Tom smiled and stepped over his companion.

  Pickett held his useless right hand in his left.

  Tom's smile broadened.

  Pickett stepped backward.

  “Better late then never,” chimed a cheerful voice from the kitchen door.

  Millie yelped.

  Tom wheeled around.

  Pickett lunged for his back. But his right hand wouldn't hold. Tom threw an elbow into his rib cage and Pickett fell back onto the stool he'd been sitting on. His coffee cup and saucer skittered over the counter and to the floor, shattering.

  “What kind a party you throwing, Millie honey?”

  Tom looked hurriedly from Pickett to the fat, white-uniformed woman who'd just rolled in. He looked confused.

  She looked mad as hell. Her grey-brown hair coiled in tight curls held close to her scalp by a net. Her face reddened. Millie held onto her fleshy arm and followed her to the counter opposite Tom. “Put that thing away, skin head,” the fat woman barked, “and you and your boyfriend get out a here before I call the police. There aint nothing here to rip-off—less you want a couple dozen donuts.” Her fleshy cheeks continued to jiggle after the words stopped.

  Tom raised the gun menacingly, but there was confusion in his eyes.

  The fat woman snorted. “I wouldn't if I was you.”

  Tom froze.

  “I tried em once, and they aren't for shit.”

  Tom was clearly unused to thinking; taking orders, however, he understood. He stuck the gun into his pocket and lifted the other from the floor. The soft man's legs pistoned up and down in slow motion as if climbing imaginary stairs. The two slow-danced to the door.

  “Next time you jerk-offs go out,” the fat lady roared, “pick someplace got something worth lifting.”

  Tom pushed sheepishly through the door.

  “Damn de-fects…” The fat lady threw an arm around Millie, patted her shoulder. “Now. How bout you, fella?”

  Tires squealed onto the highway.

  “Like another cup a coffee?” Suddenly, her cheerful face wrinkled. “Jeez, fella, wha'happened to your hand?”

  14

  Millie had no car, so he'd offered to drive her home.

  She laughed.

  Millie drove; Bodie Pickett sat shotgun, cradling his right hand. At Belle Haven Memorial a smart aleck intern wrapped his hand in plaster. Millie drove them both to her place.

  For Millie, home was an old
motor court, a string of square one room stucco cottages arranged around a semicircular drive. The neon sign at the head of the drive had been painted out.

  “Manager had to close down when I-four opened. Nobody'd come this far off for a room. So she opened them up for permanents. They're sort a small…”

  Millie got out, and Pickett scooted over into the driver's seat. She caught the door before he could pull it closed.

  “You wanna come in for a minute?” Her eyes held his for a second then moved nervously away.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  She opened the cottage door and turned on the light—a furnished efficiency, cheap and anonymous. Pantyhose hung over the bedstead, and on the floor beneath, a crumpled terry robe. That and dirty dishes were all to indicate that someone lived there. Millie dropped to the creaky bed, kicked off her shoes, and lay back. She sighed, then pushed up on one elbow. She crossed her legs, slowly and theatrically.

  “Get you anything?”

  “An answer or two maybe.”

  Millie's brow tensed slightly, then, with an effort, relaxed. She reached behind her head and loosed her hair. She shook it, still looking at Pickett. The hair was long. “What sort of answers would you like? Mister… ?”

  Pickett ignored both questions. “You wanna tell me about it?”

  “Nothing to tell.” Millie drew limp fingers up and down the bare skin at the base of her neck. She looked at Pickett from the corner of her eyes. “My hero,” she crooned in a Betty Boop voice. She tried to giggle—it sounded obscene; she tried to flutter her lashes but her brow was to tense to allow it. Millie pushed up to a sitting position, pulled her crossed leg over the other thigh and onto the bed, and looked down. She drew languid designs on the spread with her finger. “How can I possibly repay you?” she pouted in her cartoon voice; but her face froze. In her own voice she added: “That's what I say now, right?”

  Her legs, pale and bare, were almost blue in the artificial light. Pickett shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What's the matter, mister?” Her lips curled. “You won the prize. You ran off the other bulls. The cow's yours.”

  “Come off it, will you? I just wanna talk—”

  “Sure, Mister. And your wife don't understand you, right?”

  “Look—”

  “Well come and get your understanding, Mister.” Millie yanked open her Krispy Krunch dress. Buttons clattered to the linoleum like coins in the bottom of a tin cup. Her heavy breasts pushed at a dingy beige brassiere, the elastic frayed in the center, an appliqué‚ rosette hanging lose to the side. “It's yours mister.” She yanked off her belt. “Come and get it.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Ooo… Like it rough, huh, want me to beg…” She climbed onto the bed on all fours and crawled toward Pickett. “Come on, now…” The dingy green uniform slipped down off her hips; frazzled elastic dangled from her cotton panties. “Come an get it…”

  “Stop it, for Chrissake!” Pickett took the step to the end of the bed and cocked his left hand to hit her. He didn't.

  But Millie stopped anyway. She fell back on her haunches and glared at him through a curtain of straight black hair. “ Pickett picked the robe from the floor and threw it at her.

  “Just talk to me, will you?”

  The robe landed in Millie's lap. Drawing the hair off her face and to the back of her head, she held it there with both hands. Then she looked at the ceiling. She sighed.

  Pickett seemed to relax. “You can start by telling me what those two back there at the donut shop wanted.”

  “What is this—you a cop?”

  “I know, I look like one. But I'm not. Private.”

  “Private?” Millie pushed up from the bed and slid into the terry robe. “I need a drink. You?” She limped on tender feet to the kitchenette. “It'll have to be vodka cause that's all I got.” She handed him his drink and took a slug of hers. “Look, mister…” She paused to wipe her mouth with her finger tips. “I appreciate you stepping in tonight, but…” She gestured vaguely with one hand, then took a drink from the other.

  “But what?”

  “But I got nothing to say to you, that's all. If you aint no cop, then…” She bobbed her head back and fourth. “Well, then drink your drink and thanks for helping tonight and all, but, well… So long. There aint nothing to talk about.”

  “We could always talk about Herb Purdy.”

  “Look, I don't have to…”

  “Know him by any chance?”

  “I don't have to—” But her heart wasn't in it. She put her drink on the nightstand and dropped back onto her bed. “Yeah…” She took a deep breath, braced her left ankle on her right knee and began massaging her foot. “Maybe I know him. So what?”

  Pickett shrugged. “So he's dead.”

  “Dead? You're kidding.”

  “Not hardly.”

  “What from?”

  “A bullet in the face best I could tell.”

  “God—the guy in the paper…” She froze, narrowed her eyes. “You sure you're not a cop or something?”

  “Not a cop. Something. I'm trying to help a girl. She isn't mixed up in this yet, but if I don't get some help from you—”

  “Well this girl didn't have nothing to do with it. Not no bullet in nobody's face, I can tell you that, Mister Something or whatever you are.”

  “I wasn't talking about you. But if I can track you down you can bet the Sheriff can. And will. You'll be telling one of us about Herb Purdy eventually.”

  “I don't have to tell you nothing, mister.” Millie walked across the room, shoulders hunched, sloshing her drink onto the dirty linoleum.

  Pickett still hadn't touched his.

  She opened her purse, her hands shaking. She produced a pack of Kools.

  “Why—” He took a long drink. “Why was Purdy following Amy Mooring?”

  Millie froze, her back to Pickett, an unlighted Kool hanging from her lips.

  “What did you and Amy Mooring talk about yesterday afternoon, then?”

  Millie's eyes glazed. “I need a match.” She pulled a book from her purse. The first folded as she struck; she broke a nail trying to strike the second. “Dammit!” She threw the matchbook against the wall and spun around to face Pickett. “I don't have to—” She stopped and took the cigarette from her mouth. Her brow wrinkled. “You don't work for Kemp. Who the hell are you?”

  “Those guys in the donut shop, they were Kemp's men, weren't they?”

  “Kemp's got nothing over me.”

  “What is it? Does he want you back?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about, Mister.”

  “He doesn't like his employ-ees running off without permission, right? Anymore than he likes them fooling around with his bag men.”

  “Jesus, I wouldn't of fooled around with Herb if… God.”

  “Is that why you shot him? He was trying to make time?”

  “You better just get out of here or I'll… I'll—”

  “Or you'll give it to me the way you gave it to Purdy?”

  “God dammit, I told you—”

  “Where's the gun?”

  “I don't have it. I mean… I don't know nothing about it.”

  She paused, looked at the floor, her face pink.

  “Look, I worked for Kemp. So what? Girl's gotta make a living. And I knew Herb. Last time I heard there wasn't no law against that.”

  “There's one against blackmail.”

  Millie blanched. “That wasn't my idea. I just asked Herb to… I should've known I couldn't trust that asshole. God. I didn't tell him anything. He just put it together from—” She stopped, her mouth still open.

  “What did he put together?”

  “Nothing. It was nothing.”

  “What did you two have on Ayers?”

  “It was Herb, not me.”

  “That why you shot him?”

  “I told
you—”

  “Was he cutting you out?”

  “I told you—”

  “Were you the badger, is that it?”

  “God damn you!” Millie lunged toward him, swinging wildly with both fists. Pickett grabbed a wrist and pulled. She spun around and he pinned her arms to her side, crushing her breasts beneath his forearms.

  “Get out!” Millie screamed. She kicked at Pickett's shins with bare heels. “Leave me alone! You've got no right—no right, you goddamn son of a—” Her voice broke, and Millie went limp in Pickett's arms. “Just leave me alone. Please.”

  Pickett let her go.

  But she remained where she was, her back to him, her shoulders quivering. She crossed her arms, holding herself, as if to still the shaking. “Whataya want from me?”

  “The truth, Millie, that's all.”

  “The truth?” Millie laughed a very unfunny laugh. She shuffled back to the bed. “You don't want the truth, mister, you want a piece of the action. That's what everone wants. You may not know it yet, but that's what you want.”

  Pickett stared at Millie, his features soft, but blank. “You hired Purdy to follow Amy, didn't you?”

  Millie smiled and shook her head. She watched her big toe draw conclusions on the linoleum.

  “Didn't you.”

  Millie looked up, amused. “No, I didn't. I hired him to find Amy.”

  “Why would you want to find Amy Mooring?”

  “You wouldn't understand.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know, mister—believe me—you wouldn't understand. I know men,” she said as if she did.

  “You knew Herb Purdy anyway. He's dead.”

  Anger darkened Millie's face like a cloud the moon, then was as quickly gone. “Why you wanna mess in my life, huh? Aint got enough problems of your own? Or you working on a merit badge or something?”

  “No merit badge. I just wanna help Amy. She's in some kind of trouble.”

  “And you think I don't wanna help her? You think I wouldn't—wouldn't walk over live coals to help her?” Millie's face flushed. “I'm her mother aint I? Aint she my fuckin kid!” Millie glared at Pickett defiantly, then laughed: “Yeah, I know. That was just about Amy's reaction too.” She stood, weary and suddenly very old. “Now, will you get outta here, huh? This got nothing to do with you.”

  Pickett simply stared at her. She grew nervous, and her eyes shifted from under his gaze.

  “You're Roger Mooring's wife?”

  “Look, Mister, I don't need this—”

  “Tell me.”

  “Get out!”

  Pickett stayed where he was, in the same attitude of amazement. “What's this got to do with Ayers—Amy being your daughter?”

  “That bastard Ayers, he done nothing but fuck-up my life, and now… Look, what the hell you think it's got to do with him, you're so goddamn smart?”

  Pickett remained, staring; but said nothing.

  “Now, get out.”

  Pickett opened his mouth.

  “Get out. Before I—”

  “Before you what?”

  The color bled from Millie's face. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Softly, she said: “Please. Just. Go.”

  And Pickett went. The door slammed almost before he was through it.

  15

  The crack of the door echoed from the bungalows across the drive. Bodie Pickett looked up at the sky and let the close, hot air of the evening into his lungs. Low clouds covered the moon.

  He dropped into the Nova's front seat and stared into the street. The traffic was light. Putting both hands to his eyes, he rubbed vigorously. Then he blinked into the street light that hung above the drive.

  “Right,” he said aloud. He fired the engine and turned left out of the motor court in the direction of Belle Haven. He hadn't gone a block when he slowed before a dark Exxon station on the corner. He turned at the intersection, parked, and walked back past the pumps to a dark phone booth next to the vending machines.

  When he closed the door behind him, the booth remained dark. Pickett angled the phone book toward the street light, then dropped 2 dimes into the phone and dialed 7 numbers.

  “County Sheriff.”

  “Yeah—” Pickett glanced toward Millie's place. Her door opened, and Millie emerged from the light and closed the door.

  “Whataya want?”

  “Uh… the Sheriff—Sheriff Beane.” Millie had changed into jeans and a t-shirt. She was walking toward the street with a large leather handbag over her shoulder.

  “He aint here, he's out on a case,” the telephone said, the tone adding, he aint got time for you. “Who wants to talk to him?”

  “What?” Pickett watched a man—the one with the soft voice—step out of the shadows behind Millie.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Yeah, sorry, I—” And an engine started across the street. “Yeah, tell Homer that Pickett called.” A dark Buick drove past, and Pickett could just make out Tom's pink head behind the wheel, before it turned into the motor court.

  “Yeah? Well the Sheriff's been trying to get you, Pickett—”

  “Look, I gotta go. I'll see Homer tomorrow.”

  “Wha—”

  Pickett let it fall to the end of its cord, and pressed himself against the door. It wouldn't open. Millie suddenly turned to the man on foot, saw the car coming, and ran for the street. Pickett pulled, and the door gave. He sprinted into the street.

  The soft man caught hold of Millie's arm; she swung the bag and caught him in the face. He yelled in pain, his jaw still tender from Pickett's punch. Tom got out of the car, leaving it running, and circled the front of it toward Millie.

  Pickett reached the other side of the street just as the soft man recovered and blocked her retreat. Pickett hollered. Tom turned. Millie pushed past him around the car. Tom went after her. They were in front of the headlights when Pickett caught Tom square in the nose with a left jab. Tom fell back out of the lights into the path of the soft man. The car door slammed, the engine roared. Pickett leaped back as Millie skidded into the street and squealed around the corner in Tom's Buick.

  Pickett watched a moment too long.

  A large hand spun him around in time for him to catch a blow at his belt buckle. A knee flew to his face as he doubled over; his head snapped back and over, his eyes blankly scanning the moonlit sky. Pickett landed on his back, his eyes showing white before they closed.