You Believers (45 page)

He stood there looking at his granny, watching the cops help her up from the floor and get her to her favorite chair, as if they knew which was her favorite. He was afraid she might die from crying, and it was then he realized just what he had done when he’d carried that screwdriver to Jesse, not wanting to, but his mind saying the lady was already dead. Jesse had done it. Mike had only been the driver. He told his granny that, but that only made her cry harder, him trying to make some kind of sense of what he had done.

And now they’d offered him a deal. “You’re one lucky fuck,” the detective said. “You’re lucky Katy’s mother wants her daughter’s remains more than she wants you dead.”

He hadn’t thought of the blue-truck lady as having a mother. Her name was Katy. He could still feel the touch of her hand on his arm.
I’m sorry
, he thought. It was Jesse, he had told the cops. He’d told them that Jesse had a way of making you do things. The detective had just stared at him, eyes fierce, body clenched like he was just waiting for a reason to slam Mike against the wall.

The detective kicked his chair. “You ain’t talking. We brought you in here to tell us where we can find that poor girl you bastards killed.”

“I didn’t do it,” Mike said.

The detective kicked his chair again. “No, you just stood and watched. You knew what he was gonna do to that girl. Why didn’t you just get in your car and drive off, go to the cops? You had your keys!”

“I couldn’t leave,” Mike said. He hadn’t even thought of leaving. “The girl’s truck was parked behind me. There was no way I could get out.”

“You couldn’t go to that farmhouse just on the other side of the trees, could you? No, you couldn’t move your goddamned feet. You had to stand there and watch.”

“I didn’t watch,” Mike said.

“Then you went home to your granny’s house, ate fried chicken. Let that monster sleep in your granny’s house. I guess you don’t give a shit who gets left dead somewhere as long as you can go eat the last of your granny’s fried chicken.”

Mike looked up. “I turned him in. I told what he did to the Land Fall girl.”

“For the money.” The detective sneered. “But you didn’t get the money, did you? Because there was something else you didn’t tell. Like a blue truck out of gas? There was a lot you didn’t tell, but you gave us enough to bust your ass. You and Jesse Hollowfield eating fried chicken at your granny’s house. Yeah, you knew about the Land Fall girl, but there were two things you didn’t know when you called that number. Like your granny, she ain’t as deaf as you think.”

“I know,” Mike said.

The detective poked him in the chest. “And that blue truck you two were so hot to jack and had to dump because the gauge was sitting
on empty.” The detective sat back a little, smiled. “That blue truck with the Tennessee plates, it had a tank full of gas. You boys only thought it was empty. You left a truck all tuned up and a tank full of gas just sitting on the side of the road.”

Mike closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see that laughing sneer on the face of the detective. They’d walked away from the truck full of gas. They could have made the pawnshop easy, ahead of time, in that truck. They could have grabbed enough cash, guns, any shit they wanted and had plenty of money for Jesse to get out of town the way he aimed to and for Mike to buy a kitchen full of groceries and maybe fix his car. That was the plan before the blue-truck girl. They’d listened to the engine, and Jesse had said, “She’ll ride all right.” But the blue-truck girl . . . her name was Katy. That lady named Katy, well, she’d still be dead even if they’d made the pawnshop in the blue truck. The detective moved close. Mike felt his breath, could even feel the sneer on his face the same way he could always feel a look from Jesse. “It doesn’t matter,” Mike said. “That lady, she’d still be dead. Jesse never meant to leave her alive.”

The hard little woman stood. “Goddamn it! I’ve heard enough of this! Tell where she is, you little shit!” The room went still as she came at him the way a cat watches a mouse in a corner, nibbling, not even thinking about the big cat that jerks up its head and leaps at the mouse, snapping its neck in one swift move. Her eyes were flashing, and she was coming straight at him. The guard took her arm, and Mike jumped up, his heart pounding while her eyes stayed right on him. The guard pulled her back, and the detective slammed Mike back into his chair. Mike looked at the detective. “Damn, man. Who is she?”

“She wants answers.” The detective spread a map on the table, pointed at a circled spot. “Here’s where you fuckers grabbed Katy Connor.” Mike studied the map, caught the other circle stamped on the tangled lines for roads. “And here’s where you left her truck.
You were in the city. You headed north. Now, you look at this and show me exactly where you went.”

“I can’t read maps,” Mike said. “It’s all a tangle to me. I can barely read.”

The detective’s breath started up again, hard and fast. “All right, let’s say I believe your dumb ass. Is it that you’re half blind or just too dumb to read?”

“I can read,” Mike said, thinking most things he could read. But maps, he just got confused by all those lines that ran together.

The detective glanced at the chick, now sitting again across the room. The sheriff, he had his hand on her knee, not soft but firm, like he was making her sit in that chair. The detective knocked the back of Mike’s head, not too hard, but not soft either. “Let’s see if we can stir up any memories in there. You know, like a general sense of direction. Where did you last see Katy Connor alive?”

He remembered how she’d looked walking out of that store, not happy, really, not the way most chicks look when they’d just bought something. “I didn’t want to do it,” Mike said. His voice, it didn’t sound like him. It sounded like a little boy’s.

The detective kicked his chair. “Where did you last see Katy Connor alive?”

“Up near Whitwell.”

“Near Whitwell, where your granny lives,” the detective said.

“Not that far up. We took the exit right before Whitwell. There’s some little back roads there, nothing much else. It was a good place to hide. The farms out there, nobody grows much out there no more. The school, it’s closed.”

“What school?”

“I don’t know. It’s some brick building. You can tell by looking at it, it was a school sometime.”

“I need names of something. I need route numbers!”

“I never pay attention to the route numbers. It’s all just roads.”

The detective punched his arm again. “You need to think a little harder, you dumb shit. You need to tell me something that was on those roads.”

Mike shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut. He was driving, and Jesse was right on his ass. He thought to try to outrun Jesse, but Jesse would still kill the girl and then come to kill him. So he kept driving. “There was some old power station. It was all fenced in with razor wire. It was closed. Looked like it’d been closed a long time. It was on one of the roads. I remember that. Then we turned west.”

“West. How the fuck’s a dumb-ass like you know east from west?”

“ ’Cause the sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t hardly see where I was going, and I had to keep going ’cause I was leading the way.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where the fuck were you going if you were leading the way?”

“I didn’t know for sure. I just knew there were these abandoned farms out there. There used to be a trailer out there. That’s where I used to go when I bought my weed. Then I went one day and they were gone. I didn’t know if they got busted or just moved off.”

“Okay, abandoned farms. Someone used to sell weed in a trailer. You have any idea how many empty farms and trailers there are out there? I need numbers, routes, street names!”

“I told you I don’t know.” The detective glared into his eyes as if he could pull a number out of them if he stared hard enough. Mike thought about that night. “I saw a field of blown-down trees. Like a whole bunch of trees had just been blown over, like dominoes. Must have been a storm. Something blew down all those trees. I remember driving past that.”

“On your right or left?” the lady said.

“What?”

“The blown-down trees, were they on your right or left when you were driving?”

Mike thought a minute. “On my right.”

The chick nodded and wrote something down.

The detective sighed. He shook the back of Mike’s chair. “You got any idea how many fields of blown-down trees we have around here? This is hurricane country, you shit.”

“I’m just saying what I saw.” He wouldn’t say he was stoned and he didn’t know where the hell he was. He didn’t say he was so scared of pissing Jesse off that he just kept driving, hoping some good spot would turn up. “I’m just saying I drove past those blown-down trees for a little way. Then I turned down a little dirt road, a road I didn’t know.”

“Right or left?”

“I don’t know. I thought I was supposed to turn right, but nothing looked familiar, so I thought maybe I took the wrong right. Or maybe I took a left. I was trying to get to that road that had the trailer, but maybe they moved the trailer. Nothing was looking right to me. And then I got on this road, and I thought it would take us somewhere, and we kept going in circles. I kept driving, looking for a way out of the circle, and I just kept coming back to the same clump of trees.”

“How the fuck do you know one clump of trees from another clump of trees?”

Mike closed his eyes, worked to see it. “This one, it had some old tire near it. Some old tire leaning against a tree. And there was this purple stuff growing in the field.”

“Purple stuff?”

“Like weeds maybe. It didn’t look planted, looked more like a clump of weeds. I’d drive forward, think I was going somewhere, but I’d keep circling back to this clump of trees.”

“A circle road,” the detective said. “You were fucking fucked up, weren’t you? They don’t have circle roads in fucking farm country. It’s always left or right on those farm roads.”

“I know,” Mike said. “And yeah, I was fucked up. Just a little bit stoned, and when you’re high anything can look like anything. So I was lost, and I knew Jesse was getting more pissed off every minute, so when I saw this little gap between the trees, I took it. I thought it might lead to some other road, and it was another little road. A road so fucked up and old you could barely get through it, but it was a road, and it led to a field. When we were leaving, I saw a little brick house back up behind a line of trees.”

The detective looked at the floor, sighed. Mike hoped he was a little pleased with something he’d said. Then he jerked up, got in Mike’s face. “A lot of fucking roads lead to fields in farmland. And little brick houses everywhere.” He stood, and Mike braced for a hit to the back of the head just the way he did whenever Jesse made a sudden move.

But the room stayed still. The detective settled back in his chair. The guard stood, his face blank. And the chick and the sheriff were texting on their cell phones.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said.

“I know you’re sorry,” the detective said. “Sorry as hell.”

Hell, he thought. His granny was always praying he wouldn’t go to hell. And he let her go on praying because that gave her some kind of comfort. He never told her that he didn’t believe in a heaven or a hell. He thought we died and that was it, like a candle burned out. Or maybe it was like they showed in the movies; spirits just hung around because for some reason or another they didn’t want to leave this world. He thought about the blue-truck lady. Katy. He knew she was still hanging around. He could still feel her sometimes, her hand on his arm, saying, “You need to know my name.” Mike looked
up at the detective. “Tell her momma I’m sorry. Tell her I’d do anything in the world to change what happened that day.”

The woman across the room straightened in her chair. Mike thought she might jump up and come at him again, but she just said, “That’s not good enough, saying you’d like to go back and change a thing. That’s just some lie you say to comfort yourself because you know damn well nobody gets to go back and change a thing.” She stood, and the sheriff stood with her. She glanced at the sheriff, then gave a quick look to Mike as if she could barely stand the sight of him. “I’ve had enough,” she said. “I’ve got all I need.”

She turned toward the door, and everybody jumped up fast to let her out all quick and easy, as if she were the boss, as if she were the woman really calling the shots here. Mike watched until he saw the back of her head go out the door, the sheriff following, nobody looking back. Then the door was shut, and the detective leaned close into him. “Think you’ve had enough?” he said.

“Yeah.”

The detective grinned, punched his arm just the way Jesse did. “Well, I’m just getting started here. There’s something I think you left out. Like how was it, looking at the dead girl in a field, leaving her there, and getting back in your car? How was it to park her truck with a tank full of gas on a road that led to that poor dead girl’s favorite place to be? How was it to know what your screwdriver, or maybe it was your granny’s screwdriver, what it did to the dead girl? My guess is it was your granny’s screwdriver because we all know you don’t really have a damn thing she didn’t give you.”

Mike was thinking how it was his granny’s screwdriver—he’d taken it from her junk drawer to keep in his car. But he wouldn’t say that. He just let the detective keep on going because there was no other choice.

“How was it to drive to your granny’s house and eat the last of
her fried chicken, make an egg sandwich for that son of a bitch? How was it to mooch all you could from your granny’s kitchen while you were thinking she was too deaf, too stupid to know a thing about what was going on in her house? She knew you two fucks were up to no good, but she didn’t say anything because the poor old thing loved her Mikey, didn’t she? She had no idea of the truth of what her little Mikey could do. She thought her little Mikey was really a good boy, thought he’d just been led down the wrong path by some hoodlum. That’s what she called him, ‘some hoodlum.’ She couldn’t dream up what kind of monster he could be. She didn’t say he was the devil like you keep saying he is.” The detective punched him again, as if he needed to punch to get Mike’s attention. “If he is the devil, Mikey boy, if he really is the devil, then my guess is he ain’t done with you yet. You never gonna be free from the reach of Jesse Hollowfield. That is, if he is the devil like you believe.” He sat smiling. Then he looked up at the guard. “You believe this shit?”