Sleeping Policemen (11 page)

But the thing that really haunted Nick was the way he felt about that. He kept hearing her voice—he could almost
see
her anonymous grave, the first spadeful of dirt falling into her frozen china gaze—but somehow the money kept sweeping all that out of his mind. It was like a tidal wave, sweeping him away from everything he had ever hated about his life—from the ripe, oily stench that blew in from the Gulf, from the burn in his muscles after a ten-hour shift in the warehouse, from Glory and the curse of a dead-end future like his father's.

Before he left the library, Nick paused to glance through the bound periodicals for a '96 profile of Barrett in
Atlanta
magazine. HE'S BACK!, the headline announced, the subhead—
After a decade of seclusion, A. R. Barrett makes a splash on the local scene
—apparently keyed to the facing photograph, a full-page shot of Barrett hipshot against the ladder of a swimming pool, his jacket flung carelessly over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled back for the hard work ahead. But what really caught Nick's eye was the photo on the next page, an aerial shot of “the palatial Barrett estate outside Atlanta.” For once, the breathless copy had it just right. Barrett's home
was
palatial, an enormous manor that might have sprung whole-cloth from some fevered dream of the Old South: a sprawling three-story mansion of white brick, thrice-columned, set in the midst of a lawn that extended as far as the eye could see. A pool—perhaps the very one where A. R. Barrett had posed—glimmered beyond the house, there in the midst of all that shaven green.

He stared down into that picture for the longest time, but all he could think about was the bright blue flyer Tuck had slapped onto the table at Donner's: that fuzzy photograph of Casey Barrett in some lost moment of joy, the big, black letters stamped above it—

—
REWARD
—

—and the phone number printed neatly below.

And then, with trembling fingers, he tore the photo out.

The phone woke him.

Nick sat up, sheathed in perspiration. A nightmare sheared apart around him, half-remembered shards of Casey Barrett's bloodied face, the smaller of the two men looking up to meet his eyes, a hand reaching up to tear the bondage mask aside and reveal the face beneath—

His face.

Nick swallowed, remembering. Sue curled beside him, fathoms-deep in sleep, a strand of saliva suspended between her lips and the pillow.

The phone went off again, like an air-raid siren. Like a bomb.

Nick fumbled for the receiver.

“Get over here,” Finney said.

“What? What's going on?”

“Now, Nicky. We don't have time to waste.”

“Finney—”

The phone went dead in his hand. Nick threw back the covers, and walked across the room. The bedroom was chill, heavy with early-morning stillness, but as he cracked the shades and peeked out into the street, the goose bumps shivering erect the fine hair along his arms had nothing to do with temperature.

A behemoth, black Cadillac was parked outside Finney's apartment.

“What's going on?” Sue said.

And suddenly he was wide awake.

Tuesday, 4:57 to 5:45 AM

High above the street, a thin crescent moon cradled the old moon in its arms. The air was crystalline, chill. A whisper would have shattered the night like glass. Outside Finney's townhouse the enormous caddy waited like death, black quarter panels cancerous with Bondo and rust. Something about the plates—white with black lettering, a ripe Georgia peach poised over the word
Fulton
—tugged at Nick's memory, but before he could catch the thought, a wedge of light fell across his face. Finney stood in the doorway.

“What took you so long?” he said.

Nick stepped inside. Finney was right there, his breath rank with sleep, his voice a whisper.

“We're in deep shit. It's a detective, Nicky.”

“A
cop
?” Sue whispered at Nick's shoulder.

“A fucking private eye.”

Nick swallowed, a sense of doomed certainty stealing into his heart. “You didn't leave Tuck alone in there, did you?”

“Don't worry about Tuck.” Finney tapped Nick's chest. “Don't even tell me that's the tape, Nicky.”

“What the fuck was I supposed to do with it?”

“You were supposed to get rid of it.”

“Well, I didn't. And I'm not about to leave it lying around.”

“Christ.”

“Where's Tuck?” Sue asked.

“Tuck was up drinking half the night. He's out cold.” He stepped past Nick, opened the bathroom door, adding in an off-hand way, like his mind was somewhere else, “Don't worry about Tuck.”

He turned to Nick. “Here, give me the tape.”

Nick hesitated, thinking of Casey, scarlet blood and white, white flesh—

“Now!” Finney hissed, not angry, just urgent. And almost without thought Nick was reaching for it, fumbling it out of his jacket and into Finney's hands.

For half a second he regretted surrendering it, then Sue cleared her throat.

Nick turned, half-aware of the tape clattering onto the bathroom vanity, and then Finney was at his shoulder, the door closed behind him. A man stood at the far end of the hall, silhouetted against the bright aperture leading into the living room. His hand was half-inside his jacket, and when he spoke, his voice came out high-pitched, laden with this shit-kicking hillbilly accent.

“Well, then,” he said, “since you kids were kind enough to drop by, why don't you come in and join me for a drink?”

“Thing you don't wanna do,” the detective said, “is fuck with me.”

His name was Pomeroy—“Ernie Pomeroy,” he had announced when Nick stepped into Finney's ivory-toned living room—and he stood maybe five-five in a pair of spit-shined snakeskin boots with almost an inch of heel.

But he wasn't standing now.

He sat in the neutral, overstuffed chair, cradling a glass of Tucker's Evan Williams, those boots propped carelessly on the glass coffee table. Watching him make the drink—deft and economical, a double shot mixed with the ice-melt in Tuck's leftover glass—Nick had marveled at the detective's outfit: a suede Stetson the color of creamed milk, an unstructured, tan sport coat, a white shirt with a bolo tie, hip-hugging, pre-faded Wranglers creased sharp enough to slice bread.

“Know what I'm sayin?” Pomeroy said. “People got a way of underestimating a little guy. It could get you hurt.”

He eyed them over the rim of his glass.

Finney, pacing, seemed only half-aware of them, Pomeroy in the chair, Nick and Sue on the sofa. He seemed alert, restless, and when he turned to face Pomeroy, Nick wasn't surprised. He had seen Finney like this in class—pure alpha male, aggressive under pressure, relying on instinct to see him through. Like he was channeling the Senator.

“Look,” he said. “I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm not going to listen to you threaten us. You have two more minutes and I'm calling the cops.”

“You wanna call the cops, go head. We'll wait for em together.”

“Is that a threat?” Finney said.

Pomeroy glanced at Nick. “You wanna talk some sense into your friend, son?”

Nick lifted his hands. “Hey, let's just talk abou—”

“Shut up, Nicky, okay?” Finney looked at the detective. “I'm serious, is that some kind of threat? You think you can just barge in here at five in the morning like you own the place?”

Pomeroy reached inside his sport coat. For a single crazy instant, Nick flashed onto that moment in the hall—

—
Pomeroy silhouetted against the light
—

—half-certain that the detective's hand would emerge holding a gun. Maybe Sue thought the same thing. He felt her go rigid beside him.

Pomeroy threw a manila envelope on the table.

“Thing maybe you don't understand, son, is from now on I
do
own the place. I come and go as I please.”

“Oh, Christ. What's that supposed to mean?” Finney reached for the envelope, but Pomeroy moved his foot six inches and dropped one of those ornate boots squarely atop it.

“I'm just tellin you how it is.” He pointed at a chair. “Now why don't you sit down and listen?”

Just like that it was over, Finney bested by a five-foot-five hick in a ten-gallon hat. Nick saw the fight go out of him, an almost visible reduction, and he felt something go out of him as well—a wordless trust that things would work out okay, that Finney would see them through.

You got to take care of number one
, Frank Laymon said inside his head, and he thought of the tape, waiting there on the bathroom vanity. He could almost see it.

He turned to study the detective again. Pomeroy's eyes were as flat and affectless as dull pennies. Nick had seen eyes like that only once in his life, and he could still remember the freezing terror of that moment. He'd been a kid then, fooling around in the swampy woods of the bayou with Alex St. Johns, and they'd stumbled onto a couple of water moccasins, wound together on the shore of a fetid stream like the serpents on a caduceus staff. Mating, he supposed later, or maybe fighting, but in that moment, he hadn't thought anything at all. He had just reacted, stumbled backward, athrob with stark instinctive terror of the old adversary, those two spade-shaped heads darting toward him, jaws unhinged to show the cotton inside, and withdrawing once again to weave above the woodland floor, vertical pupils icy and remote. Utterly calculating. Pomeroy had those kind of eyes.

“We're listening,” Sue said.

Pomeroy touched his hat brim, but his chill gaze never deviated from Finney. When he spoke, his voice was flat and hateful; in that moment Nick thought Pomeroy just might be the most dangerous man he'd ever met. “Thing is, you kids cost me a lot of money. I aim to get it back.”

“How much?” Sue said into the silence.

The detective stared at her for a moment. “A hundred grand ought to do it. To start.”

“No way we can afford that,” Nick said.

Pomeroy smiled and winked at Finney. “Maybe you can't, but I reckon the Senator can raise it to keep his golden boy out of dutch.”

He paused for a moment to let them absorb this new fact—he knew them, he knew this about them and who could say what else he knew—and then he let his eyes drift to the envelope. “Saturday night,” he said quietly, “I was to meet a fellow up the park. He didn't show. You kids know anythin about that?”

Pomeroy sipped his whiskey, waiting. Nick felt Sue's hand, like a vise at his thigh.

Finney cleared his throat. “I don't know what you're—”

“You're a pitiful liar, son.”

Pomeroy shot the envelope across the table with the heel of his boot. Finney snatched it up and tore it open with trembling fingers; in the same moment, everything fell into place in Nick's mind—the black caddy and the Georgia tags.

“Lydia Barrett,” he said. “You're Barrett's private eye. You're the one took those photos—”

But before he could go on, Finney passed him the contents of the envelope. Four photos. A black-and-white still of the dead guy in the copse of pines, a thin runnel of blood at his lip looking black in the stark glare of the flash. A shot of skid marks, dark against gray pavement. And two photos of Finney's Acura under the clinical, overhead fluorescents of the attached garage: the crumpled fender before Finney had been at it with a hammer, the crumpled fender after.

Nick looked up into Ernie Pomeroy's crooked, yellow grin.

“You can't even prove that's my car—” Finney started, but it wasn't Pomeroy who interrupted him.

It was Tuck, his hair disheveled and his eyes rheumy. He stood by the fireplace in a pair of sagging jockey shorts and the same rumpled Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt he'd been wearing for days. His round face was creased and tired-looking. Tears stained his cheeks.

“What did you say, son?” Pomeroy asked.

For half a second, Nick hoped he'd misheard Tuck, but when the other boy repeated the words, they came out just the same:

“I said it was an accident.”

In the moment that followed, the room was so still that Nick could hear his own pulse thundering at his temples. Everything seemed abruptly heightened, garish—the ashen smell of the fireplace at Tucker's back, the overwhelming monotone decor of the room, like he was drowning in a sea of egg whites. For the second time since the accident, a sense of time bifurcated possessed him, immutable law of cause and effect, deed and consequence. He felt it all slipping away from him—the ten thousand dollars in his pocket, graduate school, Sue, everything. Everything slipping away, and not for some pre-ordained return home either, not for Glory and a lifetime on the rigs, but for something worse.

Jail.

“I think you better tell me about it, son,” Pomeroy said, and his voice was almost gentle, like he didn't much like what he had to do, but he didn't have much choice either. The detective uncrossed his legs, rose from the couch, took a step toward Tuck.

Reed Tucker's voice was broken, tearful. “We were out drinking, we'd been to this strip joint in Knoxville. I don't remember where exactly, just that the place had some stupid name. The Mouse's Ass or something. And on the way home—”

“Shut up, Tuck!” Finney said.

Tucker wheeled on him, sobs welling up, his face twisted and angry as a colicky child's. “
You
shut up, Finney! All the time you're bossing me around. ‘Tuck do this, Tuck do that'—” His voice mocking, hateful. “—and I'm sick to fucking death of that. Who died and made you God, you and fucking Nick, all the time whispering about me, laughing at me behind my back. You think I'm that fucking stupid? I'm the one found out who she was, wasn't I? I'm the one said we had to destroy the tape before that stupid cop—”