Absolute Rage (50 page)

“Yessir, that was me. I wanted to talk to you. Startin' off, I want to say I'm sorry for your trouble. I hope your son's all right. I lost two of mine, so I know what that's like.”

“We have hopes for a recovery, but he's not out of the woods yet.”

The man nodded. “Since I heard, I been considerin' what to do, and I come up with this. I been hiding for a long time, with Darryl here. In an old shaller mine on Belo. Afeared every minute the Cades were gonna send someone to get me, or Darryl. And I got to thinkin', here's this feller comes from away, to help get those Cades, all legal, like nobody ever tried to do before, not since eighteen and fity-six anyways. And then they shoot down his little boy. I considered and I contemplated and I said to myself, ‘Amos Jonson, are you still a man, or are you a slug worm crawlin' in the dark?' It got so I couldn't hardly stand myself. So I come here tonight.”

“What have you got to tell me, Mr. Jonson?” said Karp out of a cracker-dry throat.

“I seen it all. Me and Darryl here. We was frog-jiggin' under the green bridge. Two cars come over the bridge and stop on the crown of it. We hid oursels. I seen it was George Floyd's big Chrysler car and a Ford pickup. George gets out of the car and goes over to the pickup. He has words with a man in the pickup. The man gets out. I see it's Wayne Cade. They have more words, cussin' and arguin'. Finally, I seen Wayne give George a pistol. Then George goes over to the winder of the pickup and talks some to whoever's in there. I couldn't see that feller at all. But the feller passes out a pair of yeller boots. George throws the boots and the pistol into the river. The pistol goes in the water, but the boots land on a little spit that's there when it's low water. Well, sir, then they go off. Me and Darryl look at the boots, but we don't touch 'em, 'cause we can see they're covered in blood. Then Darryl goes in and feels around with his bar feet and fishes out the pistol. We seen where it fell by the splash. Then I thought, well, George dropped his gun in the river, we ought to do him the favor of giving it back to him.”

“So you hid it under the birdbath.”

“Darryl done it,” said the man. “Tell him, Darryl.”

Darryl bobbed his head. “Uhn-huh. Next night I went down to his house. I got me a Bi-Lo bag from the trash and put the gun in it, and then I calculated, where should I lay it? I saw that old birdbath he got there, and I said, that's the place, 'cause I'd alus know where it was, do you see? And then I stopped and said, I should ought to have a memorial in it.”

“A memorial?”

“Yessir. So no man could say, no, that ain't the gun he throwed in the river, it was some other gun look jest the same. So, I took my clasp knife and screwed the handle plate off'n it, and I took this small piece of paper that was in the bag, like the Bi-Lo gives out when you trade?”

“A receipt.”

“Uhn-huh. Well, sir, I wrote it with a pencil on that little small piece of paper: ‘This gun throwed in the river at the green bridge by George Floyd and I pulled it out,' and under I put my name, Darryl Mark Jonson, and what the date was, which I got from a newspaper that was in the trash, too, and then I screed it up small as small and put it in the handle and screwed the plate back on. And then I buried it under the birdbath.”

Karp said, “Darryl, would you like me to give you a great big kiss?”

“Nosir,” said Darryl coolly, “but thank you kindly anyhow.”

“T
ELL ME AGAIN WHY THIS
isn't an entrapment,” said Stan Hawes.

“Because we're not entrapping him into the commission of a crime,” said Karp. “We have no legal interest in any crimes he may be contemplating or conspiring to commit. We're only using the contemplated crime as a predicate to get him to admit to our agent the details of a crime that he actually did arrange, to wit, the murders of the Heeney family.”

“I don't know. It sounds kind of complicated. I especially don't like using my office to engage in a . . . I guess it's a fraud, isn't it?”

“It's no different from what we did to bring the Cades into town.”

“Yes,” snapped Hawes, “and look at how great that turned out!”

Then Hawes recalled what had happened to Karp's son and his face colored. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . . okay, let's start over here. You say we have a much better case against Floyd now, with the gun and the Jonson testimony, and I agree. Seward and Floyd will want to deal, but you don't want me to make a formal offer.”

“No, no deal with Floyd. I want him to take the full hit. We won't need his testimony against Weames if this works. That's the whole
point,
Stan. But Lester has to believe that a deal is imminent, which is why you have to leak it to him and spread it widely around the courthouse.”

“And then Lester calls George, and George says, ‘What deal? Ain't no deal, Lester.' ”

“And will Lester believe him? Why should he? Do you really think that there's so much love and loyalty between these two crook bastards that Lester Weames will credit that Floyd would be willing to spend his whole life in prison to keep his dear friend Lester safe from harm?”

“Okay, okay, let's say you're right. Lester now believes he's going to get the shaft from his good buddy. Why should he go to New York City and hire a killer, like you say? Why should he go and try to hire
your
killer?”

“He's not
my
killer, Stan,” said Karp, trying for patience. “But I have it on reliable information that there are very few people at the top of this profession. A number of these people based in New York have been questioned by people you don't want to know who they are: Did a guy answering Lester's description come by last June, July, and ask about doing a hit and backed out when he heard the price?”

“Why would a professional hit man give out that kind of information?”

“He might if the people who asked him were good and regular customers.” Karp's statement hung in the air for several long seconds.

“Oh,” said Hawes, his face wrinkling with distaste. “And you think that explains why Lester went to New York then and pulled ten grand out of the union account and put it back in again?”

“It's the only explanation that makes sense. He went to hire a pro. It was too expensive, so he figured he'd save some dough and get it done locally. So he brings George into it. George, get someone to whack Heeney. George says, okay, boss, but we got to be careful with the payoff. We'll use the giveback money. Lester didn't think of that himself when he pulled out the ten grand. George is the moneyman, after all. Now Lester needs to get rid of George.”

“And you assume he's going to go back to the same guy?”

“Yeah. It's not like there're four columns of these guys in the yellow pages. Besides, I plan on having him sent a flyer in the mail.”

“A flyer?”

“Yeah,” said Karp. “A bunch of clips about the Heeney murders and the arrests with a friendly note: ‘Hey, next time, hire the best, regards, Mr. Ballantine.' ”

“This is the hit man?”

“More like a hit-man broker, according to my sources,” said Karp. “There'll be a number for Lester to call.”

*  *  *

Karp went from Hawes's office to the hospital. They had moved Giancarlo to a sunny room on the second floor. As Karp passed the nurse's desk, he saw that the piles of toys and cards and flowers had grown. The townspeople had adopted the boy as a symbol of their current travail and, perhaps, their guilt. People had tied yellow ribbons around their trees. Deputies were wearing little yellow ribbons on their badges. Marlene wouldn't let any of the material into the child's room.

She was there, sitting side by side on straight chairs with Zak. She rose when she saw Karp enter.

“Are you going to stay? I have to go out.” She had a frantic look on her face. Zak didn't stir; Karp saw that his lips were moving.

She moved past him into the hall. He turned and followed her, putting his arm across her shoulders. It was like grabbing a phone pole.

“Marlene, what's wrong?”

“What's wrong? What's
wrong?
Excuse me . . . ?”

“I mean what's going on? We haven't talked in days, it seems like.”

“Okay, let's talk. Nice weather but we could sure use some more rain. How about those Mets!”

“Marlene, don't be like this.” She had her hands clutched together. He felt her trembling.

“No, I'm sorry. I don't know how I should be. I keep replaying it in my mind. If only I . . . if only you . . . if only Lucy. I started this. I am the
cause
of this.”

“That's stupid, Marlene.”

“Right, stupid Marlene.” She looked into his eyes. Her realie was teary and red-rimmed, but the other seemed full of pain, too, a familiar hallucination.

“I stare at him all these hours,” she said, “and I think what if this goes on for ten, twenty years? It happens. I can't deal with it, Butch. And he talks, Zak, he talks to Giancarlo, and it's like he's listening, too. He's going crazy like his mother. Lucy walks around like a zombie. . . . I don't know. Do you remember, whenever we'd have a fight, you and me or me and Lucy, Gianni would make us stop, he'd jolly us out of it, or throw a phony tantrum? How he always wanted us to be ‘regular'? We're flying apart.” Her voice choked. “I need some air.”

She broke away and ran down the hall. Karp went in and sat down next to his son.

“How're you doing, kid?”

“Okay. He's still here, Dad.” Zak's face was pinched and his tan had gone yellow, like old newspapers. “He's still here. He wants to come back but there are these nets, like in fishing. I'm helping him.”

The fear sweat popped out on Karp's face. He patted the boy's shoulder. “I'm sure you are.”

*  *  *

Lucy drove. She drove most hours that she wasn't sleeping or at the hospital, with Magog beside her in the shotgun seat, the dog's head lolling out the window, tongue flapping in the breeze. Driving passed the unbearable hours, presenting a pathetic illusion of freedom. Once she took the road up to Aaron's Throne, but shied at climbing to the vista itself. She thought she might throw herself off, and was afraid. Mostly she frequented the bleaker parts of Robbens County, parts with which it was unusually well supplied: yards full of rusting machinery, deserted coal patches, dreary villages of fallen-down miners' shacks, the great pit of Majestic Number Two itself. She would stroll along the lip of the workings, dodging from time to time immense coal trucks roaring by that showered her with grit. She watched the dragline scoop away the mountain, and the monstrous D11 Cats shove the spoil over the lip into the defenseless hollows, obliterating streams and deserted settlements, sterilizing the country under a pall of rubble. During these hours she thought often of a famous
New Yorker
cartoon, the one showing a featureless waste studded with trash and old tires, under the caption “Life without Mozart.” She had a copy pinned to a corkboard in her room in the City. It did not seem as amusing as it once had.

Gradually over a week or so, the first sharp pangs of utter despair scabbed over. She began to consider how she would spend her life, deprived as it now was of something greater than Mozart. She had no experience of living without God. The question of what else to worship arose, for she understood that everyone worshiped something, the usual gods in her society being power, money, sex, fame, and the sacred Me. She had good models: her father worshiped the law and the family; her mother the same, plus justice, minus the law. They seemed to have done all right in life. Not for her, though. The usual secular gods had little appeal, except sex, and she cringed with shame at the memory of how she had tormented that poor boy. She certainly did not believe in justice. Or mercy. A line from Weil flickered through her mind, the one about there being four proofs of the mercy of God here below: the consolations of the saints; the radiance of these and their compassion; the beauty of the world; and the complete absence of mercy.

How to live, then, on the endless, trashy plain. Usefulness still appealed to her. She could use her gifts. Be a humble lab rat for a while, she owed Shadkin that much. After that, what? Some distant place helping the hopelessly miserable, a Graham Greene sort of burnt-out life. Thinking of what was owed, she found her wheels turning back toward the town, and once there, toward a house she knew on Walnut Street, where Emmett Heeney lived with his girlfriend, and recently, with his brother, Dan.

The house was small, wooden, red-painted, shaded by maples. Dan had been put up in a room above the garage. She climbed the creaky outside stairway and knocked.

“I'm surprised to see you.” Dan was wearing a grubby T-shirt and cutoff jeans. He hadn't shaved in a while, and his face was wary.

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.” He stepped aside. “I wasn't expecting company.”

Obviously. The room was littered with take-out cartons, cups, and wrappers and smelled of unwashed clothes, man, and fast-food greases. She sat down in a rocking chair, on matted clothing. It was the same rocker that had stood on the Heeney porch.

Besides the rocker, the room contained an iron bed, unmade, with flowered sheets bunched in the center, a straight chair, an overflowing trash basket, and a deal table on which stood Dan's computer. The computer had a paused game showing on its screen—a gunsight pointed down a dark corridor.

“I called you at the lodge a bunch of times,” he said. “Then I gave up.”

“What've you been doing?”

“Oh, having a ball. Reading astro for next year. Playing Doom. Hanging around on the Net. You know, the usual nerd stuff. How's your brother?”

“The same. It's driving all of us crazy. I'm sorry. I mean about not calling. That was mean.”