A Killing Rain (23 page)

Wednesday, January 20

Adam Vargas set the last of the little plastic cowboys on the windowsill and looked at them. They all had different poses. Some with lassos. Some with guns. There was one with bowed legs that was meant to sit on a horse and it couldn’t stand up by itself, but he had set it there anyway, laying it on its back. He’d have to get him a horse.

He heard footsteps and turned to see Ellis coming down the hall, bare chested, his jeans low on his waist. He had slept late, like he always did.

Ellis went into the kitchenette of the single-wide trailer, and opened the Styrofoam cooler, bending to peer inside.

Vargas could see the bird tattoo on his back, wings spread, beak tilted up toward a sun. There was a naked woman on his left arm and that stupid one on his hand, but Vargas liked the bird best. The bird meant something -- escaping, flying to a better place, Aruba.

Vargas looked down at the smooth white skin of his own arms, holding them out in front. His whole body was like
that -- pale, almost hairless, unmarked by the black ink of prison artists. Just the way Byron liked it.

“Are we out of Pepsi?” Ellis asked.

“Sorry.”

Ellis grabbed a can of beer instead and leaned on
the short bar that separated the kitchenette from the living room. He was shivering.

“You look
like shit,” Vargas said. “You feeling okay?”

“I’m tired. I’m tired of running. I’m tired of this shit-hole place. I’m tired of
the cold. I’m just tired, Adam.”

Vargas was quiet
. He spotted a sweatshirt draped on a chair and went to get it, holding it out to Ellis.

“I’m sorry I screwed it up,” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t finish it while I was in there.”

Ellis gave him a weary look. “You did good. You found out what we needed to know.” He took the sweatshirt and pulled it on.

“Yeah, but now what?” Vargas asked. “We can’t get back in
there and Outlaw sure as hell ain’t coming out any time soon. What we going to do now, Byron?”

Ellis came around the bar and sank into a tilted three- legged chair, one of the few pieces of furniture left in the trailer. “I don’t know,” he said.

Vargas was quiet. He never heard him say that. He always knew what to do. He watched Ellis, watched him staring at the wall. Vargas knew he was thinking about getting warm on some beach on Aruba. Thinking maybe that they were never going to be able to fly off to the sun.

Vargas went back to the windowsill, bending the broken blinds to look out through the dirty window at the gray day. He picked up one of
the cowboys, rubbing it gently with his thumb.

“Hey, By?”

Ellis glanced at him. “What?”

“I was just thinking.”

Ellis waited patiently.

“I was thinking, you know, about on the TV yesterday at the motel when they said Outlaw was dead?”

Ellis nodded slowly.

“Well, you and
me know that ain’t true. But I bet Uncle Leo doesn’t.”

Ellis just stared at him for a second, thinking. “What are you saying?”

Vargas shrugged. “Just that Uncle Leo doesn’t know we didn’t get the job done and that maybe he doesn’t need to.”

Ellis sat forward. “You’d lie to your uncle about something like that? You’d take his money knowing you hadn’t done the
job?”

Vargas hesitated, staring at the little cowboy. He’d never lied to Uncle Leo before, but things were different now. Everything was fucked up. They had killed too many people, the cops had Byron’s name and they were on the run, having to hide out in this shit-hole abandoned trailer with no food, no heat,
no electric. If they didn’t do something quick, they were never going to get out of this.

Vargas looked at Ellis. “Yeah, I’d lie to him.”

Ellis didn’t say anything, and for several minutes they just sat there, listening to the rattle of loose aluminum on the roof.

Finally, Ellis rose and paced slowly around the tiny room. “You’d have to go there alone,” he said softly, turning back toward Vargas.

“I know.”

“You’d have to go today.”

“I know.”

“And once we leave, you’ll never be able to come back,” Ellis said.

Vargas set the cowboy in the window. “I know that, too.”

Again, they were quiet.

“Okay,” Ellis said, nodding. “Okay. Let’s do it. Let’s do it now.”

Vargas stood up and started toward the back of the trailer for his jacket and keys. He stopped and turned back.

“Are you sure about this?” Vargas asked.

“It was your idea, Adam. And it’s a good idea.”

Vargas shifted from one foot to another.

“Look, there’s no other way,” Ellis said “Don’t worry about Leo. He’s got money, Adam. Guys with money can get out of things. And
maybe if the cops go after him, he’ll be so busy trying to get out of this mess he’ll leave us alone.”

Vargas stared at his shoes.

“What’s the matter now?” Ellis pressed.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just tell Uncle Leo we blew it
. Maybe I shouldn’t lie to him. I owe him a lot.”

“You owe him? Jesus, Adam, what did he ever give you?”

“He took me in.”

“Adam, you grew up alone, watching movies. That’s not how family treats family, don’t you understand?”

Vargas was staring at the thread-bare green shag carpet. He had heard this before. They had argued about this before.

Ellis put a hand behind Vargas’s neck and pulled him close, chest against chest
, cheek against cheek. Byron’s fingers were icy against his neck.

“You can do this, Adam. I know you can do this.”

Vargas leaned into him. Ellis’s arms were around him, strong, like that first night in Raiford. He’d been terrified then but it had been all right. He was terrified now. But he knew it would be all right this time, too.

“Okay,” Va
rgas whispered.

“Good boy,” Ellis said. “Tomorrow at this time, we’ll be sitting on a beach somewhere.”

“How are we going to get out?” Vargas asked.

“We’ll head straight to Everglades City. We can get a boat down there. When you got money, you can get anything you want
.”

Va
rgas went to the small bedroom to get his jacket, grabbing it off the doorknob. He started to leave, but stopped. His eyes moving slowly across the tiny room. There was no furniture left, except for the mattress they had dragged in from the other bedroom. Just the mattress and that small broken headboard.

Vargas’s eyes locked on the broken headboard.

They had come here late last night after they had seen the TV report. That had been his idea, too, because he had known the trailer was empty from other times he had snuck back. Times when he wanted to remember things that had happened before Uncle Leo. Before Raiford. Before Byron.

But he had never been back inside until now.

As his eyes wandered over the thin bleached paneling, the dirty green shag rug, and the broken headboard, he thought about the cowboy bedroom at the old people’s house.

There had been no cowboys here. No good guys. There had been shadows and shame. Footsteps in the hall. The creak of the
bedroom door. And his stepfather’s drunken grunts as Adam’s small hands worked to satisfy him.

Y
ou tell anybody, boy, I’ll hang you on a hook just like them hogs.

But it stopped one hot day when Vargas was twelve. His mother was gone and he had been alone in the trailer with his stepfather. It was the first time he had come at him in the daytime. It was the first time he told him to drop his pants.

Vargas’s eyes came back to the broken headboard.

He had been bent over his own bed, his jeans at his knees, his stepfather’s thick fingers digging into his hips. The knife was in a sheath, hanging on a belt that was looped over the headboard. It was a boar skinning knife his stepfather had given to him only a week before. He was planning to take him out the next day to learn how to use it.

Gonna teach you how to be a man, boy, gonna teach you how to kill.

The knife had gone into his stepfather’s belly so smoothly at first Vargas hadn’t been sure he
’d really stabbed him. So he twisted it before he pulled it out. And when he still didn’t fall, he had slit his throat.

Vargas’s gaze moved from the headboard to the window and the land beyond.

He had buried him out there somewhere. After he used the knife to practice the skinning his stepfather had so badly wanted him to learn.

When Mama
asked about the big stain in the carpet, he told her what he had done. She
wiped his tears and said, “Some things just need killing.” And she’d been right.

“Adam,” Ellis called. “What the hell’s taking you so long?”

Vargas turned and left the bedroom. Ellis was standing at the kitchen counter.

“Be careful,” Ellis said.

“It’s just Uncle Leo.”

Byron was standing there in the empty room, shivering. “Like I said, be careful.”

It was only a photocopy, but it was clear and detailed. The man’s hair was light, just long enough to part and comb. His boyish mouth tipped up at the edges and his eyes held a playfulness that would have been out of place in a police sketch, except for the fact that the artist had been trying to capture what Jewell had struggled to describe as friendliness.

But as Louis looked at the sketch now, he didn’t see friendliness. He saw the same look his cat had when she had cornered a bird.

Joe was driving the Bronco. Under her leather jacket, she wore a cinnamon-colored sweater. Her hair was yanked back in a messy ponytail and her cheeks were brushed with a hint of pink that Louis knew had to have come from the wind. She had abandoned makeup days ago.

Louis looked back at the road. The sky was a blend of grays and purples, claw-like clouds scratching their way over the scrub lands. He wasn’t sure why they were going back to Copeland. Even with a sketch of a new suspect, a man they believed to be from this area, they would likely be met with more closed doors. But it was better than sitting back at Susan’s, waiting while Wainwright, the sheriff, and now the state guys waged their battle of power and blame.

Joe slowed as they made the turn off 29 into Copeland.

“Did you tell the chief we were coming back out here?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Probably just as well.”

Joe parked the Bronco near a trio of trailers and they got out. Even with the wind, it was incredibly quiet out here. Louis remembered hearing somewhere that Copeland had once been a thriving town, built on cypress logging. Now it seemed lifeless and forgotten.

“You’d think there’d be a store or something out here,” Joe said. “How do these people survive?”

Louis didn’t know and didn’t care. He folded the sketch and followed Joe to the first trailer, waiting while she knocked. There was no answer, even though they could see movement beyond the blue curtain. No one answered at the second trailer, and at the third trailer the old man they had talked to on their first trip didn’t recognize the sketch.

They walked on, across the asphalt street to a cluster of Kleenex-box houses. Rusted bicycles, dented trash cans, and old furniture cluttered the yards. A child’s face peered at them from behind a cracked window. Joe tried that house first.

Louis waited out near the gate while she talked to the owner, a middle-aged guy with a ragged beard, bulbous eyes, and baggy blue jeans. His eyes stayed on the sketch a long time, but when he looked up at Joe, he was shaking his head. It was the same at the other houses they tried.

They came to the house at the end of the street, this time Louis taking the lead up the plywood porch. Joe waited at the bottom, her gaze moving out across the landscape.

“We didn’t hit that place over there the first time,” she said, pointing.

Louis followed her finger to a rusted green and white trailer listing in waist-high weeds. It was set apart from the others at the far end of the street.

“It looks abandoned,” Louis said, knocking on the door of the house.

The aluminum door opened and a woman peered out. She was old, her face leathered and lined, her eyes strangely unfocused. She wore a man’s cardigan over her nightgown. “Who's there?” she asked.

“My name is Kincaid and we’re police officers,” he said, lying for simplicity. “We’re looking for a man.”

“Who’d you say you are?”

“Police officers. We’re looking for a man. Can you take a look at this picture
--?”

“I can’t take a look at anything. I’m blind. Go away.”

She started to close the door but Louis put up a hand. “Ma’am, that trailer at the end of the street...anyone living there?”

“The green one? Nah.
Ain’t nobody been there for years.” She slammed the door.

Ba
ck in the Bronco, Joe started to turn around so they could head back to 29.

“Wait,” Louis said.
“Let’s check out that abandoned trailer while we’re here.”

Joe pulled the Bronco up and killed
the engine. They trudged through the weeds up to the trailer. The rusted mail-box had fallen off its post and was lying in the weeds. Louis kicked it over. It read: Raif & Janice Fletcher. Joe had gone on ahead and had mounted the cement blocks that served as steps. As she pounded on the door, Louis went to the side of the trailer, straining to see in
the high window. It was covered with aluminum foil.

Joe was still pounding on the door.
Louis waited, leaning against the trailer. He felt the trailer shift, but he knew it was more likely from the wind rather than from the weight of someone moving around inside.

“It’
s empty,” Joe called out “Let’s get out of here.”

She jumped off the cement blocks and started back through the weeds to the Bronco. Louis looked back at the front window of
the trailer, half-expecting to see some curious face peering back at him through the blinds. There was no one there.

But
something else had caught his eye – a flash of color. On the inside window sill stood four small plastic figurines.

He stepped closer. Cowboys.

Louis felt a kick in his gut. Someone was inside, someone now watching them. He suddenly had a feeling that if he didn’t keep walking, they could be shot where they stood.

Joe had paused by the mailbox.

“Joe,” Louis said, “get in the truck.”

She didn’t question him.

“Drive,” he said, once inside.

She put the truck
in gear. “What did you see?” she asked.

“
Toy cowboys,” Louis said. “Just like the one in the old people’s house. Find a place to pull in, some place we can’t be seen from the trailer.”

She headed back to the main road. She stopped the Bronco behind an empty cinder block building and turned to face him.

“That Gene Autry cowboy in the McAllister place? Ben didn’t leave it,” Louis said, jabbing a finger at the sketch. “He did.”

He sat, hand at his brow, staring at the green and white trailer.

“We need to call this in,” Joe said. “My radio is no good here. How far back was that pay phone?”

“Ben could be in there. I’m not leaving,” Louis said tightly.

“Then I will. I can run back to the phone in a few minutes.”

“They’ll see you.”

“We can’t just sit here. We have no choice.”

She rummaged in her console for change and got out, sprinting away from the car.

A sudden
varoom-varoom
split the silence, the clamor of an unmufflered car engine. Louis’s head shot up.

He looked out the open window of the Bronco in time to see a spray of gravel and dirt coming from around the back of the green and white trailer.
Then what looked like a Jeep with no top and huge tires took off down the road, moving away from them fast.

“Joe!” Louis shouted out the window. But she was already running back to the Bronco.

She jumped in, slammed the Bronco into drive, and took off, flattening Louis against the passenger seat.