Vengeance (18 page)

“Going out?” I said as the rest of her statement sank in.

I heard her blow the way she did, biting her lower lip, phone swung away from her mouth to suppress the effect.

“I shouldn’t have put it like that,” she said.

“You’ve got a date?”

“Ethan, could we not?”

“It’s fine. I’m fine. Just asking because you said it.”

“I’m going out with some people from the department, all right?” she said. She didn’t say it wasn’t a date.

“Have a good time,” I said. I thought I sounded convincing.

We hung up in short order. I really was adjusting to her not being central to my life anymore. I just wanted to do it at my own pace. I wasn’t ready for her to let someone else take over that privileged role. It was an awful place to be, still relying on someone who was showing patience with you but who was clearly eager to trot away.

The flop was remarkably more dismal than before. I set my watch alarm for 9:00 P.M., lay my head against the sofa arm, and wished for the background noise of a TV. Luckily, fatigue and the peace of knowing there was nothing for me to do until D-Bag got off work put me to sleep in a hurry. 

Chapter 20

“Do I know you?” he asked, bracing the door with his lanky frame.

“How’s business tonight, D-Bag?” I asked. That hint helped him deduce I was connected to the sudden hitch in his livelihood. I had watched him turn away a handful of customers in the twenty minutes I had been parked down the street. That was more people than I had seen on the sidewalks since I got to town. Rush hour for a drug dealer.

“You a cop?” he asked, looking me over. “If you are, you have to tell me.”

“Not sure that’s really how that works. But I’m not a cop.”

“How can I believe you when you tell me that?”

“Because a cop wouldn’t break into your house and take your stash.”

“Shit!” he said. “You don’t know many cops!”

He left the door open and went inside. He sensed a conversation was forthcoming and didn’t want to have it where it might be overheard. Or maybe he was just cold in his wife beater and sweat pants.

“You owe me a new window,” he said as I closed the door.

“No. I don’t.”

I sat in the same spot on the sofa as I had earlier with a perfectly earnest expression. When he saw I was serious, he dropped the matter.

“So where’s my shit?”

“In the trunk of my car,” I said.

“So why don’t I just go out there and get it?”

“You know what I drive?” I asked. “Where I parked? No? Then sit the fuck down.”

He was standing close to the dining room, next to the console TV. He hesitated, but then crossed the room and sat in an armchair.

“I need some information about some of your customers. The ledger.”

“No can do, man. Confidentiality is important in my business.”

“Staying in business is more important, isn’t it? I bet I’ve already cost you a hundred dollars’ profit tonight. And how many people are on their way here right now? You’re going to turn them away? And let word get out? Or maybe you can call your supplier and tell him you ran out of product already. I’m sure he’ll believe you sold out. Yeah. No way he’ll think you got robbed and lost your product. Again.”

D-Bag lit up with a smirk. “Yeah, yeah. You know a bit about me. All you want is information?”

“Yep.”

“And I get my shit back?”

“I’d hate to go to the trouble of throwing it in the river.”

“All right. But one condition. This never happened.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it, man! We never talked! The way it went down, if anyone asks, is you jumped me from behind to get the ledger. But I put up a fight and kicked your ass.”

He was a few inches taller than me, but probably forty pounds lighter. And he didn’t look like he did any more exercise than carrying pizza boxes. I’m no brawler, but I could have put him down with a single punch. That much I knew.

“Be serious. I’ll say there was a scuffle and you got in a lucky shot and took off. That’s believable.”

He chewed on the concept. I didn’t know what his estimation of his own physical prowess was, but it seemed hard for him to swallow enough ego to agree to my version.

“Deal,” he said. “But it’s gotta sound like I really fought. You can’t make me look like a bitch. I need some cred outta this.”

“I understand.”

“So what do you need to know?”

“Aiden Tanner. He bought from you?”

His eyes bulged with realization. “Shit! Aw, shit! Shit, man! You’re his brother!”

If we had been playing coy before, this revelation sobered D-Bag to how sincere I was. I think that impressed upon him the need to cooperate.

“I’m real sorry about Aiden, man. He was good people.”

“Just get out the ledger. Show me what you have in there about Aiden.”

He obeyed promptly, bouncing out of the chair and marching into the dining room and back so quickly I presumed he only had to snatch the book from the table at that point.

“You carry it with you?” I asked. I wanted to know if I had given up searching too easily earlier.

“Always.”

He sat next to me on the sofa and spread the ledger open on the coffee table. He paged through it for a moment, then stopped and placed his index finger below an entry at the top of a page. It began with the letters “A.T.” Aiden’s initials. Then it said “Golden Boy.” I asked about the latter.

“Nickname. No one’s real name is in here. Just initials and nicknames. I keep a separate list that tells who’s who.”

“That’s what you called Aiden? Golden Boy?” Aiden had a few nicknames from high school, but this one was new to me.

“First time I met him,” D-Bag said. “If I don’t know someone, I don’t sell. I get customers through referrals and introductions. But no one gets my address and just shows up like you did.”

“But why the nickname?”

“For the ledger. I told you,” he said, and made me wonder if his circular logic was a symptom of sampling his own product. “When I met your brother, he was just all… all fucking golden, man. Like a surfer right off a righteous ride. Most the people I meet are sketchy. Keep their eyes down. They look drained. Hard. Your brother kept smiling. And not one of those weasel smiles like his friend always has on. A real smile.”

I took in the image of Aiden standing a few feet away, just inside the door, glowing. But someone had brought him here. Someone with a duplicitous grin. I guess it was obvious who from how D-Bag had described him.

“Casey introduced you two?” I said.

“Yeah. Casey Porter. I don’t trust the fucker, but he brings me business now and then.”

I had come for information. And I had learned more than I counted on. But I would have to put that bit of information away for the moment and focus on the ledger.

“Why is Aiden’s name highlighted?” I asked.

“It means the customer gets credit,” he said, then flipped through the page corners to show that only a handful of the names in the book were highlighted.

“I would’ve thought this to be a cash only business.”

“Used to be. Times are tough. Boss is looking for ways to move more product. And then he makes interest on the load. So it’s a win-win for him.”

“Who decides which customers get credit?” I asked.

“That’s the boss. He meets me over the ledger every month. Asks me who’s steady. All that.”

“And you feed him names.”

“Man, I just answer his questions. He could look the shit up himself in the ledger. Anyway, he makes the decisions.”

I picked up the ledger and scanned down the page. There was a red “X” after Aiden’s last entry. “What’s this stand for?”

“That’s the cut-off. Your brother was maxed out.”

“You wrote this in here?” My voice quivered with my suppressed fury. That fucking mark looked like a death sentence. Whoever had put that ink on the page was as responsible for Aiden’s death as the people who beat the life out of him.

“I
wrote
it,” D-Bag said, trying to allay my anger. “It’s just math. He used up all his credit and it was time for him to pay it down. Sterling has a clear system. You hit your line, you get cut-off until you pay it down twenty percent. It motivates cash flow.”

Sterling. The supplier. D-Bag had saved me the trouble of asking for a name. I stared at the page and tried to calm down. It was all just numbers. D-Bag was a goddam pizza boy. He wasn’t marking people for death. But as I scanned the page and told myself it was just numbers, I discovered a question in the arithmetic that transcended a balance sheet.

“What was Aiden’s limit?” I asked.

“What?”

“How much did he owe?”

D-Bag took the ledger and ran his finger down the page.

“Two grand.”

“He maxed out at two thousand dollars? And twenty percent of that is all he had to pay to keep your boss happy, right? So… four hundred dollars?”

“That’s – yeah, I mean, that’s twenty percent.”

It’s like D-Bag had said. Just math. Pretty simple. My brother was killed over four hundred dollars. A tornado ripped through me. If I let it loose I didn’t know if I’d scream or cry. So I suppressed the swell and thought only about the task at hand.

“Who else got cut off?” I asked.

D-Bag sensed the precipitous decline in my humor and consulted the pages without further banter. I looked on as he paused at each highlighted name.

“I need those pages,” I said.

He hesitated, dreading how I would react. “I can’t. I can’t give you the pages, man.”

I gripped the TASER in my coat pocket. If he stopped cooperating I was fine with coercion.

“Names, then.”

“This guy,” he said. “But he got paid up.”

“Just show me the ones who got behind and didn’t keep up with their payments right away.”

He flipped through the book, stopping on a page marked with the initials “F. L.” and the nickname “Flash.”

“What’s his real name?” I asked.

“Fitz Leonard.” Each syllable hung heavy as he spoke. “Goofy kid. Called him Flash because he was a track star in high school. Lived out in Anamosa. Had a wife.”

His use of the past tense was revealing.

“Something happened to him?” I asked.

“Over the holidays. Drowned in the river.”

Footsteps on the porch interrupted us. When they knocked on the door, D-Bag said, “Man, I need my shit. I’m giving you what you need. I can’t lose any more business.”

He had a point. And if I did need more information from him, I was confident I could coerce him to talk. It felt presumptuous even thinking of myself as some kind of tough guy, but it was all relative.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go get it.”

D-Bag let in the two men as I retrieved the box from the car. When I got back to his porch, I knocked, handed the box inside to D-Bag, and waited on the porch for them to do their business. When the customers left, D-Bag waited in the doorway for me to join him inside.

“You took my cash, man!”

“Trust me,” I said, “you don’t want to talk to me about who owes who.”

He didn’t like the answer, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“One more thing before I leave,” I said.

As he opened his mouth to ask what that was, I let a haymaker fly and knocked him tumbling over the coffee table.

Chapter 21

I had trouble sleeping that night. I was anxious to track down Flash’s family, but there was nothing I could do until morning. I woke late, feeling ragged from the tattered sleep. I made quick work of getting out the door, only taking a minute to wet my fingers and run them through my hair to make myself moderately presentable.

I figured the car could warm up as I drove and I found myself shifting it into neutral and revving the engines at the first few stoplights, all while rubbing my hands together and shivering behind my half-frosted windows. I crossed the river and left the car running while I dashed into a convenience store to get a bite and some hot coffee. My diet had gone to hell since I had been in town. I could count the balanced meals I had eaten on one hand and have room left over to flip the bird. My blood sugar was probably on a par with corn syrup.

The car was blowing warm when I turned up 19th street. I had been out to Anamosa years ago and remembered 19th would take me to Mt. Vernon Road, which would take me into the cornfields, where I would eventually turn left onto another highway. There may have been a faster route, but that was the one I remembered. Or, at least I remembered enough and trusted highway signs would take over the navigation when I was close.

The drive was longer than I remembered. About forty minutes. I cranked the stereo to amplify the effect of the caffeine. And from out of nowhere, I was hit with a memory like being t-boned by a farm truck.

One summer, about six or seven years back, Aiden had formed his own detasseling crew. He had worked for a professional service the year before and figured we’d make more money contracting on our own. So he gathered me and two of his friends to pile into his Monte Carlo at five in the morning five days a week to strip tassels from a few dozen rows of corn. It took half the morning to complete a single row, which seemed a mile long. And since the fourth member of our crew punked out on the third day, that made more work, but also a larger share of the contract for each of us. I don’t remember those other guys’ names. I mostly remember how thick the mud in the field was and how quickly the sun perched high enough to bake us. There would be a car or two parked a few hundred feet away from where we parked at the head of our section. But if there had been anyone else out in those fields, they might as well have been a continent away.

Aiden was no morning person, nor a motivational leader at that hour. But he quickly established a routine of driving seventy-five down the empty highway, swerving unexpectedly just to keep the rest of us on edge, braking suddenly then accelerating to keep our blood racing, windows all the way down, stereo all the way up, yelling along with Guns N’ Roses, Van Halen, and Bon Jovi. If we hadn’t been jostled or frightened awake by the time we arrived at the fields, we left the car doors wide open and the tunes blasting past the speakers’ limits as we ritualistically chugged cans of Mountain Dew before donning our gloves and heading into the rows. Even there, Aiden strapped his boom box across his back with a length of yellow braided twine, which must have rubbed him raw at the base of his neck. But it let him take his music with him. Our own work cadence. If you heard the music get too far ahead of you in the jungle of cornstalks, you knew to pick up your pace. And if you heard it fall behind, you might work faster still, relishing your lead on Aiden, the more experienced detasseler.

Still, we all seemed to emerge at the other end around the same time. We’d sit on the rut of hardened dirt that bordered the field, knock the three pounds of mud off each boot, then strap them back to our feet, lick our blisters, and stuff our hands back into our gloves for the return pass.

It was harder work than you’d think. It taught you to respect farmers, if nothing else. We paced ourselves to finish the work in three weeks, leaving a fourth week for tidying up any rows that were not approved by the folks who would hold our pay until the work was done to their satisfaction. We’d knock off around lunch time and often trudged into a nearby barn, lie back on unkempt mounds of hay, and just shoot the shit as we ate and gathered enough energy to make the drive home.

Aiden was in and out of the house back then. He’d live with friends or get his own place for months at a time. But that summer he was back in the house, even though he was nineteen. We’d done more fighting than talking as teenagers, and I didn’t always appreciate his stints at the house. It seemed to turn him against me as he sought our dad’s approval. It was always two against one, and never all for one. But that summer Aiden was a man, and he started to treat me on equal terms. The stories I heard about the life he had away from our dad’s house in those sessions in the barn were not just fascinating. They were trust. They were part of the rite of passage those three weeks in the corn fields represented.

In my mind, the scene was exactly as things had been. But in that winter morning, it was hard to imagine anything would grow again in those rolling hectares of dirt as impervious as stone. Yet, I knew, little by little, the season would ease the ground open until light and sustenance could awaken the fallow heartland. And this land that seemed no more fertile than the moon would soon be abundant with life.

But in that moment, the fields were just barren swaths of scars.

The highway signs guided me faithfully, and I soon pulled into a gas station in Anamosa. There was no phone booth outside, so I asked the clerk if she had a phone book behind the counter. I could only find one Leonard in the white pages, and the first name was Walter, not Fitz.

“Not in there, Hon?” the clerk asked. Her name was Alice, according to her name tag. “Who you looking for?”

“Old friend,” I lied. The odds she would know someone so young seemed thin, but I fed her the name just in case. “Fitz Leonard.”

“Oh, that poor boy!” Alice said. “You were his friend?”

“Yeah. I hadn’t seen him for a while. I moved out west after school. But I was in town and some friends told me. I don’t know. I guess I wanted to say something to his family.”

“Oh, you’re a good kid!” she said. I felt almost sinful lying to someone so gullible. She was a small-town cliché, but it was serving me well. “You didn’t see his daddy’s name in there? Walt?”

“Well, I guess I had second thoughts,” I said.

“Nonsense! You ever been out to their farm? He built right on his daddy’s land.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I mostly knew him through track meets.”

“Oh! And he was so good. Didn’t he take state for the… I don’t remember if it was a dash or a relay,” she said, obviously embarrassed to have let such a detail slip.

“Four hundred meter,” I said.

“That’s it!” she said. I had been outright lying, but she wanted to have an answer, and she trusted mine because she already believed Fitz and I had been tight.

She proceeded to point out the front window and provided an animated set of directions. Within five minutes, I was pulling into a gravel drive. There was an older farm house off to the right and a newer, smaller home to the left, down a slight slope, near a tree line where I assumed a stream ran. There was a pickup in front of the farmhouse. A man in his early fifties was at the back, getting a grip under a large bag of dog food. He paused and looked over his shoulder as I pulled in. When I parked across the drive from his truck, he let the bag slump back on the lowered tailgate.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning. Something I can help you with?” His courtesy was tempered with apprehension.

I was confident I was in the right place, and I almost asked directly where I could find Fitz’s widow. But I was sure I was already speaking to his father, and I thought just saying the word widow would sound at once presumptuous coming from a stranger and harsh being said to his father. Instead, I said, “I’m an old friend of Fitz’s. I was hoping to talk to you for a minute.”

His steady stare said he didn’t believe I had been his son’s friend. But I also could tell he was trying to discern just what my intentions might be, and he seemed to arrive at the conclusion that I wasn’t there to cause any harm.

“I don’t mean to sound rude, son, but I’d just as soon put all that behind me.”

“I understand,” I said. “I’d like to do the same with some similar business of my own.”

His chin rose up a bit, as if surprised by the revelation that he now also recognized in my face. He nodded as if to sympathize with a grief he was familiar with.

“How can I help you?” he said.

“Thank you. I’m sorry to talk about this, but I heard your son drowned in the river—”

“That’s what everyone read in the paper. But I think you know better.”

He shook his head, stared at the ground a moment.

“We had a mild winter,” he continued. “But the ice on that river was still inches thick. You think someone breaks through all that ice to take a swim?”

I thought about how obvious it should have been to police or a coroner that this made no sense. But I also knew better than to try to make sense out of the details they published.

“His body washed up two days after he went missing. Down on a sandbar where some of the ice had thawed. His bones were broken so bad they could barely pick up the body. Told me he must have been smashed up pretty bad by the current. But I know that river and it’s nothing but silt on the bottom all the way to that sandbar, and a slow current in winter. Fitz might have drowned. But if he did it’s because someone beat him so bad he couldn’t lift a limb to fight for his own life, and then they dropped him in that water.”

“Do you know who killed him?” I asked.

“I don’t know names, but I know their faces,” he said. “They came out here, after they killed him. Told me they were going to collect what he owed out of his life insurance.”

Flash was killed because he was worth more to them dead. And Aiden? He didn’t have any life insurance. I’m not even sure how my dad could afford the burial lot. I decided not to share that insight with Flash’s dad. It would only make his son’s death seem more pointless.

“I heard Fitz was married,” I said. “Any chance of speaking to his wife?”

“She stayed in their house a few weeks, but couldn’t manage. She moved in with her parents,” he said. “I’d ask you to leave her alone.”

“I understand,” I said. “Sir, if I had pictures of those men, could you identify them?”

He stepped back on his heel and torqued one side of his jaw.

“Son, I talked to the police. They’re not going to look into this. You need to make your peace. Don’t go causing your loved ones more grief by getting yourself killed.”

I didn’t bother telling him I had no loved ones left. No one would care if there was an “X” under my name in some ledger. Not now that Aiden was gone. He always watched over me. Maybe he still did. I considered how our duties were reciprocal. How a little brother was just as much his older brother’s keeper.

“I’m just trying to do right by my brother,” I said.

“I know,” he said. His voice was a slow rasp on soft wood. He bit his lip and tears welled in his eyes. “I didn’t do right by my boy. I let him get mixed in with the wrong folks.” He hung his head to hide his wilting face. “He was my only son. My seed. He’s all I had. I took for granted the man he’d become. But now—” he said. His voice constricted to a painful strand of broken syllables. “I didn’t protect him.”

I looked to the ground as he excused himself and went inside. He had given me something to think about, but I was more focused on the answers I had come for. Flash was definitely killed for his debt. I still couldn’t connect his death to someone above D-Bag, though. So I needed another name from the ledger.