Down River Part 36

"I know nothing about that. I concern myself with those that owe, which brings us to your brother. Are you here to pay off his debt?"

"His debt?"

"Of course."

"How much?" I asked.

"Three hundred thousand."

"No," I said, as cold twisted through me. "I'm not here to pay off his debt."

He waved a hand. "Then get the h.e.l.l out."

The guard moved behind me, so close I could feel his heat. The old man turned away.

"Wait," I said. "You pulled Danny Faith out of a hole. What hole?"

He turned back, a twist of displeasure on his thin lips. "What are you talking about?"

"You said that you pulled Danny out of a hole. I'm looking for his father. Maybe he's hiding in the same hole."

He shook his head, frowning. "Get him out of here."

"I'll pay for the information."

"Fine. Three hundred thousand dollars is the price. You got that on you? Thought not. Now, get lost." A hand fell on my shoulder. The young men behind the counter rose to their feet.

Outside, the sun seared down, tar smell everywhere. The black guy still propped up the wall. The other shoved me toward my car, following two steps behind. "Just keep walking," he said. Then, five feet from the car, in a quiet hiss, "Five hundred bucks."

I turned, put my back against hot metal. His eyebrows pulled together. He turned his head fractionally, casting a glance at the man against the wall. "Yes or no?"

"Five hundred for what?"

He positioned himself so that he stood between me and the other man, s.h.i.+elded me. "Your boy, Danny, was late on thirty large. We spent most of a week looking for him. When we found him, we beat the c.r.a.p out of him. Not just because he owed, because we had to look so d.a.m.n hard to find him. We were p.i.s.sed." He tilted his head again. "You put five hundred dollars in my hand right now and I'll tell you where we found him. Maybe it's the hole you're looking for."

"Tell me first."

"It's about to go up to a grand. One more word out of your mouth and it's fifteen hundred."

I pulled the wallet out of my back pocket.

"Hurry up," he said.

I thumbed five bills out of the wallet, folded them, handed them over. He hunched his shoulders and shoved them in the front pocket of his jeans. He gave me an address. "It's a s.h.i.+t-box skinny out in the middle of nowhere. The address is good, but it's a b.i.t.c.h to find."

He started to turn. "How did he manage to pay off thirty thousand dollars?" I asked.

"What do you care?" His voice was mostly sneer.

I held out one more bill. "Another hundred," I said.

He rolled back, s.n.a.t.c.hed the bill, and leaned in close. "We track him down. We mess him up a bit. Eight days later he shows up with thirty thousand in cash. Brand-new bills, still in the sleeves. He tells us that's it, he's done gambling. We never hear from him again. Not a whiff. Not a peep. All cleaned-up and proper."

The drive out of Charlotte was a sunbaked nightmare. I kept the windows down because I needed wind on my face, eighty miles an hour of hard North Carolina air. It kept me sane as heat devils twisted the horizon and my insides roiled with the cold hard fact of my brother's deceit. He was a gambler, a drunk, and a stone-faced liar. Three hundred thousand dollars was a mint of money and there was only one way he could hope to put his hands on it. That was if my father sold. Jamie's stake would be ten percent, call it a million five.

Coin to spare.

And he had to be desperate. Not just to save himself a beating like Danny's, but also to keep the truth from my father, who'd already bailed him out once. But how desperate was he?

Just how black was his soul?

I tried to stay calm, but could not escape one simple fact. Somebody attacked Grace, beat her half to death to make a point. Tell the old man to sell. That's what the note said. It was Jamie or Zebulon Faith who did it. One or the other. Had to be. Please, I prayed. Don't let it be Jamie.

We would not survive it.

CHAPTER 27.

The address for Zeb Faith's "s.h.i.+t-box skinny" was two counties over in an area bedridden by two decades of a failed blue-collar economy. A hundred years ago, it was some of the most productive farmland in the state. Now it was wild and overgrown, littered with shuttered plants, crumble-down mill houses, and single-wides on dirt tracks. Fields lay fallow and the forest pushed out scrub. Chimneys rose from piled debris. Kudzu slung long arms over phone lines as if to pull them down.

That's where Faith's hideaway was, deep in the ruined green.

It took two hours to find it. I stopped three times for directions, and the closer I got, the more the countryside seemed to sweat poverty and despair. The road twisted. Single-lane and cracked, it slipped between low hills and thick-smelling bogs, ended in a two-mile loop that wrapped the edges of a dead-end hollow with more cold shade than most.

I was forty miles from Salisbury, one of the richest towns in the state, less than sixty from the silver towers of Charlotte, and I could have been in a different country. Goats stood hock-deep in wire pens full of s.h.i.+t. Chicken coops settled on bare dirt yards in front of houses with plastic bag windows and unpainted, plywood siding. Cars bled rust. Slat-sided dogs lolled in the shade while barefoot kids tempted fleas and worms with blank-eyed disregard. In all my life, I'd never seen anything like it. Black or white, it didn't matter.

The drain emptied here.

The hollow was a mile across, maybe two dozen shacks, some by the road, others no more than mildewed hints behind hooked brambles and trees that waged stiff-armed war for precious light. The road was a loop through h.e.l.l. I followed it until it spit me out at the beginning. Then I started again, more slowly, and felt eyes in the dark places behind torn screens. I heard a door slam, saw a milk-eyed woman with a dead rabbit, and drove on, looking for a number.

I rounded a bend and found a little boy with skin so black it was purple. He had no s.h.i.+rt, a round belly, and a sharp stick in one hand. Beside him, a dusty brown girl in a faded yellow print pushed a doll on a tire swing. They stared at my car with lowered lids and slack, parted lips. I slowed to a stop, and a giant woman avalanched through the tarpaper door. She had thick, rolled ankles and was clearly naked beneath a parchment dress devoid of shape or color. In one hand, she held a wooden spoon dripping sauce as red as uncooked meat. She scooped the little boy under one arm, and raised the spoon as if she might flick sauce at me. Her eyes were tucked into deep flesh.

"You get on out of here," she said. "Don't you be botherin' these children."

"Ma'am," I said. "I don't intend to bother anybody. I'm looking for number seventy-nine. Maybe you can help me."

She thought about it, eyelids puckered, lips pushed together. The boy still hung from her arm, bent at the waist, arms and legs dangling straight down. "Numbers don't mean much around here," she finally said. "Who you looking for?"

"Zebulon Faith."

Her head rolled on the stump of her neck. "Name don't mean a thing."

"White guy. Sixties. Thin."

"Nope." She started to turn away.

"His son has red hair. Mid-twenties. Big guy."

She pivoted on one foot, lowered the boy by a wrist. He picked up his stick and stole the doll off the tire swing. The girl raised an arm and cried muddy tears.

"That red one," she said. "Pure trouble."

"Trouble?"

"Drinking. Howling at the moon. Got a ten-foot pile of shot-up bottles back there. What you want him for?"

"He's dead. I'm looking for his father." It did not answer her question, but seemed to satisfy her. She sucked on a gap in her teeth and pointed up the road. "'Round that bend you'll see a track off to the right. Got a pie plate nailed to a tree. That's what you want."

"Thanks," I said.

"Just stay away from these children."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed the doll from the boy and handed it back to the little girl, who smeared tears with a forearm, kissed the plastic face, and smoothed her small hand over plugs of ragged, vinyl hair.

The pie plate had seven bullet holes in it. The track was almost invisible, guarded by two things: the ma.s.sive tree to which the plate was nailed, and the knee-high gra.s.s that grew between the wheel ruts. Whatever was down there, I doubted anyone used it very often. I drove my car around the tree and parked it out of sight of the road. Once out of the car, the smell of the place intensified, the fecund reek of stagnant water, still air, and damp earth. The track curved left, disappeared around a shoulder bone of wood and granite. Suddenly, I doubted the wisdom of coming here. It was the silence. The sense of hushed expectancy. A raptor called in the distance, and I shrugged the feeling off.

The ground was spongy, tire tracks recent. Gra.s.s stems were broken and bent. Within the last day or two, I guessed.

I hugged the left side until I came to the bend and pressed against the granite outcrop. The track cut hard left, back into the trees. I risked a glance, pulled back, then looked again and studied Zebulon Faith's s.h.i.+t-box skinny. The trailer was old, probably thirty, which is about three hundred in trailer years. It canted to the right on cinder-block legs. No phone line. No power line. A lifeless sh.e.l.l.

There was no car, either, which made it unlikely that anyone was here. Nevertheless, I approached cautiously. The trailer was hard-used. Somebody brought it in new a lifetime ago or hauled it off a junk heap last year. Six one way, half dozen the other. Whatever the case, here it would linger until the earth managed to consume it. It sat in the middle of a jagged gash in the trees. Vines grew over the back corner. The pile of shot-up bottles was more two feet tall than ten.

I could see, in the gra.s.s, where a car had been parked.

Slick steps led onto a sagging square of wood at the front door. There was a single plastic chair, more bottles in the gra.s.s, and a lot of give under my feet as I stepped up. I peered in the window, got the vague impression of peeled vinyl floors and Dumpster furniture. Beer bottles ringed the kitchen table, fast-food wrappers and lottery tickets on the counter.

I tried the door-locked-then circled the trailer, stepping over discarded furniture and other refuse. The back looked like the front with one exception, a generator under a limp tarp weighted with bricks. I checked all the windows. Two bedrooms, one empty, the other with a box spring and mattress on the floor. There was one bathroom. It had toothpaste on the counter and dirty magazines on a stool. I checked the main room again and saw a rabbit ear television with a VCR and a stack of tapes, ashtrays on the floor, couple bottles of vodka.

It was a flophouse, a place to hide from the world, which made sense if you were a man like Zebulon Faith. I wanted to break in and tear it down. I wanted to burn it.

But I knew that I'd be coming back, so I left it.

No point in scaring him off.

I drove toward the farm, sun low and in my face. I called Robin, talked about a lot of nothing, and said I'd see her tomorrow. No mention of Zebulon Faith. Some things are best done in the dark, and I did not want her involved. Period. I turned off the phone and pushed harder into the scorching orange. The day was dying, and I wondered what it would take with it.

I saw my father's truck from a distance, parked across the drive from Dolf's house. I pulled in behind him and got out. He was in old clothes bleached by the sun. Miriam sat next to him, looking exhausted.

I leaned in the window. "You okay?" I asked.

"She won't talk to us," he said.

I followed the direction of his nod and saw Grace in the side yard. She was barefoot in faded jeans and a white tank top. In the soft light, she looked very hard, very lean. She'd put the archery target a hundred feet out. The compound bow looked huge in her hands. I watched her draw back and release. The arrow moved like thought, buried its head in the target's center. Six arrows nested there, a thick knot of fibergla.s.s, steel, and bright, feathered flights. She nocked another shaft, steel head winking. When it flew, I thought I could hear it.

"She's good," I said.

"She's flawless," my father corrected me. "She's been at this for an hour. Hasn't missed yet."

"You've been here that whole time?"

"We tried twice to speak to her. She won't have it."

"What's the problem?"

His face worked. "Dolf made his first appearance in court today."

"She was there?"

"They brought him in wearing full chains. Waist, ankle, wrists. He could barely walk in all that. Reporters everywhere. That d.i.c.khead sheriff. The D.A. Half dozen bailiffs, like he was a threat. G.o.dd.a.m.n. It was intolerable. He wouldn't look at any of us. Not at me, not at Grace, not even when she tried to get his attention. She was jumping up and down..."

He paused. Miriam s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably.

"They offered him the chance for counsel and he turned it down again. Grace left in tears. We came out here to check on her." He nodded again. "This is what we found."

My eyes swung back to Grace. Nock and release. Smack of hardened steel on stuffed canvas. The feel of split air. "Grantham has been looking for you," I said. "He seems to think there are still things to discuss."

I studied him closely. He continued to watch Grace and his face did not change. "I have nothing to say to Grantham. He tried to talk after court, but I refused."

"Why?"

"Look what he's done to us."

"Do you know what he wants to talk about?"

His lips barely moved. "Does it matter?"

"So, what's going to happen with Dolf? What's next?"

"I talked to Parks about that. The district attorney will go for an indictment. Unfortunately for Dolf, the grand jury is sitting this week. The D.A. won't waste time. He'll get the indictment. The dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d confessed. Once the grand jury returns the indictment, he'll be arraigned. Then they'll figure out whether or not the death penalty is on the table."

I felt a familiar chill. "Rule twenty-four hearing," I said flatly. "To determine if a capital charge is appropriate."

"You remember."

He couldn't meet my gaze. I knew the steps from the inside. It had been one of the worst days of my life, listening for long hours as the lawyers argued over whether or not I'd get the needle if convicted. I shook the memory off, looked down, and saw my father's hand settle on a sheaf of pages on the seat next to him. "What's that?" I gestured.

He picked up the pages, made a sound in his throat, and handed them to me. "It's a pet.i.tion," he said. "Sponsored by the chamber of commerce. They gave it to me today. Four of them. Representatives, they called themselves, like I haven't known them all for thirty years and more."

I riffled the pages, saw hundreds of names, most of which I knew. "People that want you to sell?"

"Six hundred and seventy-seven names. Friends and neighbors."

I handed the pages back. "Any thoughts on that?"