Cripple Creek Read online

  "She will be. Just some gashes and the like. Looked worse than it is. This happened out on State Road 419. Woman driving behind her saw the whole thing, called it in on a cell phone."

  "Okay."

  "Woman's from up Seattle way, just passing through. I thanked her, naturally, took her statement. Then she says, 'You're the sheriff?' and when I say, 'Right now I am,' she asks does a man named Turner work with me."

  "Say what she wanted?"

  "Not a word. Sat there smiling at her and waiting, all she did was smile back."

  "What's she look like?"

  "Late twenties, early thirties, light brown hair cut short, five-eight, one-thirty. Easy on the eye, as my old man would of said. Jeans and sweatshirt, kind with a hood, ankle-high black Reeboks."

  "Name?"

  "J.T. Burke. That's Burke with an e, and just the initials."

  No one I knew. Maybe a patient from my days as a counselor, was my first thought. Though it was doubtful any patient could have traced me here, or would have reason to.

  "Don't suppose she said where she was headed."

  "Gave me that same smile when I asked."

  "That it, then?"

  "Pretty much."

  "So give Gladys back her phone already."

  In exchange I gave him the name and location of my motel and my phone number, told him to call if he had any updates on Don Lee or happened to hear again from Ms. Burke.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  COULDN'T SLEEP.

  Out on the streets at 2 a.m. looking for an open restaurant. Back to city habits that quickly. Had my book, just needed light, coffee, maybe a sandwich. Do the Edward Hopper thing.

  Dino's Diner, half a mile in towards the city proper. "Open 24 hours" painted on the glass in foot-high blue letters. Also "Daily Specials" and "Hearty Breakfasts." These in yellow.

  "Getchu?" the waitress, Jaynie, said, handing over a muchsplattered menu. "T'drink?"

  Coffee. Definitely.

  And received a reasonable facsimile of same, though it took some time. Peak hour, after all. Had to be three or four other patrons at least.

  "Two scrambled, bacon, grits, biscuit," I told Jaynie when my coffee came.

  Eggs were rubber—no surprise there—bacon greasy and underdone, biscuit from a can. Here I am in the Deep South and I get a canned biscuit? On the other hand, the grits were amazing.

  The book also disappointed. Three refills and I was done with it, wide margins, large type, pages read almost as quickly as I turned them. Novels tend to be short these days. Probably most of them should be even shorter. This one was about a doctor, child of the sixties and long a peace activist, who goes after the men who raped and killed his wife and disposes of them one by one. Title: Elective Surgery.

  I took out my wallet, unfolded the notebook page Tracy Caulding had given me. Three addresses, none of which meant much to me. A lot of Lanes and Places, bird names the rage. Meadowlark Drive, Oriole Circle, like that. But just then a cab pulled up out front and the driver came in. Jaynie slapped a cup of coffee down before him without being asked. He was two stools away. One of those in-betweens you find all over the South, darkish skin, could be of Italian descent, Mediterranean, Caribbean, Creole. Fine features, a broad nose, gold eyes—like a cat's. Wearing pleated khakis with enough starch to have held on to their crease though now well crumpled about the crotch, navy blue polo shirt, corduroy sport coat.

  I caught his eye, asked "How's it going?"

  "Been better. Been worse, too."

  "And will be again."

  "Believe it."

  He pulled out a pack of Winstons, shook one loose and got it going. Then as an afterthought glanced my way, took the pack out again and offered me one. When I declined, he put the cigarettes back, held out his hand. We shook.

  "Danel. Like Daniel without the i."

  "Turner. . . . Any chance you could help me with these?"

  I slid the paper across. After a moment he looked up.

  "From out of town, are you."

  I pled guilty.

  "But you have business here." He tapped at the paper.

  Yes.

  "Well, sir, this here ain't part of Memphis at all, it's another country. Birdland, some of us call it. Bunch of whitebread castles's what it is. Some Johnny-come-lately builds him a house, next Johnny comes along and has to outdo him, build a bigger one. Kind of business that gets transacted out there, most people'd do best to stay away from. I'm guessing you're not most people."

  "Can you give me directions?"

  "Yeah, sure, I could do that. Or—" He threw back his coffee. "What the hell, it's a slow night, I'll run you out there."

  We struck a deal, I picked up the Chariot as he sat idling in the Nu-Way Motel parking lot, then pulled in behind and followed him to city's edge. Here be dragons. We'd been cruising for close to thirty minutes, I figured, six or seven classics on whatever station I'd found by stabbing the Seek button—Buffalo Springfield ("There's some-thing hap-pen-ing here . . ."), Bob Seger's "Night Moves"—when Danel pulled his Checker cab onto the shoulder, a wide spot intended for rest stops, repairs, tire changes. I came alongside and we wound down windows.

  "Here's where I bail," he said. "Place you're looking for's just around that bend. Don't be lookin' for the welcome mat to be out. Ain't the kind to be expecting company up in there."

  I hoped not.

  "Good luck, man."

  "Thanks for your help." I'd paid him back at the diner. He had a good night.

  "You're welcome. Prob'ly ain't done you no favor, though."

  I pulled back onto the road, along the curve, cut the engine to coast into a driveway inhabited by a black BMW and a gussied-up red Ford pickup, chrome pipes, calligraphic squiggle running from front fender to rear wheel well, driver's-side spotlight. Backed out then and parked the Jeep a quarter-mile up the road, at another of those pull-offs.

  The house was a castle, all right—like something imagined by Dr. Seuss. Classic middle-American tacky. Once in El Paso I'd seen a huge bedroom unit that looked to be marble but, when you touched it, turned out to be thin plastic. It was like that.

  In the front room just off the entryway (as I peered through what I could only think of as eight-foot-tall wing windows) a large-screen TV was on, but there was no evidence of anyone in attendance. Action appeared to be centered in the kitchen—I'd come around to the back by then—where a card game and considerable beer consumption were taking place. Many longnecks had given their all. Bottles of bourbon and Scotch. One guy in a designer suit, two others in department-store distant cousins.

  Newly awakened from its slumber in Glad bag and hand towel, the .38 Police Special felt strangely familiar to my hand.

  One of the cheap-suit players was raking in chips as I came through the door. Undistracted, his counterpart pushed to his feet, gun halfway out as I shot. He fell back into his chair, which went over, as though its rear legs were a hinge, onto the floor. I'd tried for a shoulder, but it had been a while, and I hit further in on his chest. There was more blood than I'd have liked, too, but he'd be okay.

  Thinking it over for a half-minute or so, the second cheap suit held up both hands, removed his Glock with finger and thumb and laid it on the table, just another poker chip.

  Dean Atkison in his designer suit looked at his flunky with histrionic disgust and took a pull off his drink.

  "Who the hell are you?" he said.

  I was supposed to be watching him at that point, of course—cheap suit's cue. He almost had the Glock in hand when I shot. His arm jerked, knocking the Glock to the floor, then went limp. He stood looking down at the arm that would no longer do what he willed it to do. His fingers kept on scrabbling, the way cat paws will when the cat's asleep and dreaming of prey.

  It was all coming back.

  Atkison's eyes went from his fallen soldiers to me.

  "Be okay if I call for help for my boys here?"

  "Go ahead."

  I stood by as he p
unched 911 into a cell phone, asked for paramedics, gave his address, and threatened the dispatcher. Thing about cell phones is you can't slam the receiver down.

  "Think we might attend to business now?"

  "We don't have any business."

  I whacked his knee with the gun, feeling skin tear and hearing something crunch. Blood welled through the expensive fabric. None of that should have happened.

  "I live in a small town far away from here," I said. "Not far enough, apparently. A few days ago you brought your garbage to it."

  He'd grabbed a hand towel off the table, was wrapping it around his knee.

  "Paid some goddamn arrogant surgeon nine thousand to have that thing fixed, not six weeks ago. Now look at it."

  "A man named Judd Kurtz came through. He didn't get through fast enough and wound up in jail. Then a couple of others came in his wake. None of them stayed."

  "And I should care what happened in Bumfuck?"

  I walked to him, helped wrap the towel.

  "I need to know who Judd Kurtz is. I need to know if he's alive. And I need to know who the goons were who thought they could come into my town and tear it up."

  "That's a lot of need."

  Pulling hard at the ends of the towel, I knotted them.

  "I was in a state prison for seven years," I told him. "I managed okay in there. There's not much I won't do."

  He looked down at his shattered knee. Blood seeped steadily into the towel.

  "Looks like a fucking Kotex," he said. "I'm a mess." He shook his head. "I'm a mess—right?"

  "It could be worse."

  He pulled a napkin towards him. Started to reach under his coat and stopped himself. "I'm just getting a pen, okay?"

  I nodded, and he took a bright yellow Mont Blanc out of his coat pocket, wrote, passed the napkin across. Classic penmanship, the kind you don't see anymore, all beautifully formed loops and curls—confounded by the absorbent napkin that blurred and feathered each fine, practiced stroke.

  "My life's not all that much, mind you," he said, "but I'd like to know it doesn't end here."

  I shook my head. Sirens of fire truck and ambulance were close by now.

  Nodding towards the napkin, Atkison said, "You'll find what you need there."

  What I needed right then was to go out the back door, and I did.

  When first I held it, the gun had felt so familiar. The body has a memory all its own. I started the car, pulled the seat belt across and clicked it home. Slipped into gear. The body remembers where we've been even as the mind turns away. I eased off the clutch and pulled out, hot wires burning again within me, incandescent. Blinding.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MY FATHER'S UNIFORM hung in the back of a closet at the front of our house, in an unused bedroom. I found it there one rainy Saturday afternoon. It smelled of mothballs—camphor, as I'd later learn. Again and again I ran my fingers over its scratchy, stiff material. Dad never talked about his army time, what he'd done. In my child's mind I had him traversing deserts in Sherman tanks or diving fighter planes that looked much like Sopwith Camels through air thick with gunfire, smoke, and disintegrating aircraft. Much later, after his death, Mother told me he'd been a supply clerk.

  I was, I don't know, twelve or so then. It was a couple of years after that that Al showed up in town.

  He'd been in the service, people said, some place called Korea. Before, they added, he'd been the best fiddler in the county, but he'd given that up. He worked at the ice house, swinging fifty-pound blocks of ice off the ramp with huge tongs and all the time looking around, at the sky, at broken windows in the old power plant across the street, as though he wasn't really there, only his body was, doing these same things over and over, like a machine. He always had this half-smile on his face. He rented a room over the ice house but went there only to sleep. The rest of the time he was out walking the streets or sitting on the bench at the end of Main Street. He'd sit there looking off into the woods for hours. Pretty soon after I met him, when the ice house shut down, he lost his job. They let him stay on in the room, but then they tore the building down and he lost that too, so he lived out in the open, sleeping where he could. Later I'd get to know a lot of people like Al, people damaged deep inside, people whom life had abandoned but wouldn't quite let go of.

  How did we meet? I honestly can't remember. I just remember everyone at school talking about him, then there's a skip, like on a record, and we're together throwing rocks into the Blue Hole, which everyone said had no bottom and half the world's catfish, or walking through Big Billy Simon's pasture with cows eyeing us, or sitting under a crabapple tree passing a Nehi back and forth.

  It wasn't long before my folks heard about it and told me to stay away from him. When I asked why, Mother said: He's just not right, son, that war did something to him.

  But I went on seeing him, after school most every day. That was the first time I openly defied my parents, and things got tense for a while before they gave up. Many subsequent defiances took place in stone silence.

  I was fourteen when Al and I met; a couple of years later I was getting ready to go off to college, first in New Orleans then in Chicago, little suspecting that but a few years down the line I'd be crawling through trees not unlike the ones Al stared into every day. In the time I'd known him, I'd grown two feet taller and Al had aged twenty years.

  I was sitting outside the tent one day taping up my boots when mail came around. I was on my third pair. In that climate, leather rotted fast. The French had tried to tell us, but as usual we didn't listen. They'd tried to tell us a lot of things. Anyway, it was five or six in the morning—you never could sleep much after that, what with all the bird chatter—and Bud chucked a beer my way, giving out the standard call, "Breakfast of champions," as I settled in to read my letter. Mom had written two pages about what was going on back home, who'd just married who, how so many of the stores downtown were boarded up these days, that the old Methodist church burned down. Newsreels from another world. Then there at the end she'd written: I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Al died last week.

  I grabbed another warm beer and went out to forest's edge, remembering that final summer.

  For as long as I could remember, there'd been an old fiddle tucked away in the back of a closet no one used, in a cracked wood case shaped like a coffin. It had been my grandfather's, who played it along with banjo. I asked Dad if I could have it and after looking oddly at me, since I'd never shown much interest in music before, he shrugged and said he didn't see why not. This was late in his life, after the sawmill shut down, when he mostly just sat at the kitchen table all day.

  I put some rubber bands around the case to hold it together and took it to Mr. Cohen, the school band director, who played violin in church some Sundays. Looked to him like a German-made fiddle from the 1800s, he said. He put on new strings and got the old bridge to stand up under them and gave me an extra bow he had. Not a full-size bow, only three-quarters, he said, but it'll do.

  That afternoon I walked up to Al with the fiddle behind my back.

  He eyed me suspiciously. "Whatchu got there, boy?"

  I laid the case down on the bench and opened it. To this day I don't know what to call the expression that came over his face. I think maybe it's one of those things there's no word for.

  "It's for you," I told him.

  His eyes held mine for some time. He took the bow from under its clip. Al's hands always shook, but when he touched that bow they stopped. He weighed the bow in one hand, felt along its length, tightened the hair and bounced it against his palm, tightened it a little more.

  Then he reached out with his left hand for the fiddle.

  "It's all tuned up," I said.

  He nodded, tucked the fiddle under his chin and sat there a moment with his eyes closed.

  I don't remember what he played. Something I'd heard before, from my father or grandfather, one of the old fiddle tunes, "Sally Goodin" or "Blackberry Blossom," maybe. Next h
e tried a waltz.

  He took the fiddle out from under his chin and held it against one leg, looking off at nothing in particular, smiling that half-present smile of his.

  "It's just an old, cheap instrument," I said.

  "No. The fiddle's fine," he said, putting it back in the case, clipping in the bow, carefully fastening the hooks. His hands were shaking again. "The music's in there. It just ain't in me no more."

  We sat a while, hearing cars and trucks pass behind us, looking out into the trees. Towards sundown when I was getting ready to head home, he said, "Reckon we won't be seeing much of each other for a time."

  I nodded, too desperately young—soon enough, that would change—to understand good-byes.

  After a moment he added: "Appreciate what you did, boy."

  I picked up the case. I'd put on a new coat of paint, shiny black. In lowering light it looked like a puddle of ink, a pool of darkness. "Sure you don't want this?"

  He shook his head. "Didn't mean about the fiddle, but I appreciate that too." Holding out his hand, he said, "Like you to have something. Got this when I was overseas, what they call in country, and it's been with me ever since. Want you should take it with you. Be your good luck charm."

  A tiny cat carved out of sandalwood.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DAWN BEAT ITS PROUD pink breast as I and Chariot chugged to a stop. International news on the radio, a couple of ads for car dealers, now suddenly Jeremiah was a bullfrog, joy to the world.

  Another mansion on the hill. Two cars, Mercedes, Lincoln, in a garage remarkably free of clutter. Ancient weeping willow like a bad sixties haircut outside, smell of fresh-brewed coffee from within. Older man in a terrycloth robe sitting at a table just inside glass doors from the patio. Wineglass of orange juice, possibly a mimosa, before him. Basket of bread, bowl of fruit. Scatter of woven rugs on what looked to be Saltillo tile and spotless. Mexican furniture in the room beyond. Lawn sprinklers went off behind me as I peered in.