“Where am I?” he asked.
“You’re still in the shack where the others left you. You have a wound to your head-a big bump. Do you remember anything about what happened?”
“Yeah. Bitch kicked me in the head.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the man said.
Dawkins listened to the man laughing softly and he felt his anger rise. “I really need a cigarette. Unless you’re planning to free me you’ll find them in my front pocket.”
“Fair enough, Sheriff. But I think we should leave your hands as they are for now.”
Rough fingers that smelled of liver found his pack and lighter and fumbled a cigarette into his mouth. When it thumbed the lighter he saw the face of Cyclops flash before him and his heart skipped. What the hell is happening? I know I was hard on those hippies I caught sleeping on the beach, but I never thought it would come to this. Whatever you do, don’t show this one-eyed Manson wannabe you’re afraid.
“Who are you?” the sheriff asked. He was distracted by music lifting out from somewhere deep inside his head, as if coming from a radio lying at the sticky bottom of a drying well. For a moment he dared himself to bring the sound into focus, and to his surprise he heard a scrotum-tightening chorus of all the women who’d ever told him to go to hell.
This was not the end Dawkins had repeatedly dreamed of. He’d dreamt of being ambushed by men totting AK47’s — assault rifles that the Mexican cartels fondly called their ‘goat horns’. The dream played out like an action sequence from a 1970’s grind house film, the kind his older brother would sometimes take him to see at a rundown theater in Portland instead of the latest Disney flick their parents had given them money for. A prickly keyboard and a creeping bass guitar provided the tension as the assassins moved in closer. Filmed behind a smoked lens. . you were supposed to believe that it was night although moonlight would never ping off gunmetal that brightly. When the muzzles began to explode he’d sit up in his bed and scream, reach out to a bottle for a couple of hits.
“My name is of no matter, Sheriff.”
“Have we met?”
“Not in person, no. But I know all about you.”
“And how’s that?”
“You helped with my business. That is until you decided to steal from me.”
“I’m sorry but you’ve got the wrong person. It was some other guy that ran off with your love beads, man.”
“I don’t have all morning, Sheriff. There are a couple of men waiting outside that you’ve come to know. Please don’t make me have them come in here. I’d hate to let it come to that, I really would. I just need you to answer a few questions. Once I have what I need, we’ll leave you and your sleepy little town be.”
“What do you want to know?” the sheriff asked. It finally dawned on him that the man was another Russian. He’d thought the guy’s accent sounded off. He wished now that he were dealing with a pissed off hippie. At least we’d still have music in common. Skynyrd. Creedence. Eddie Van Halen. And if they wanted some pot he still had some stashed in a footlocker back at the station. But these Russians-they’re from another world. He’d smoked the cigarette down to the butt and it was burning his lips. Cyclops gently took it from his mouth and crushed it out between his fingers.
“I’m only trying to clear up a little misunderstanding, Sheriff. If it hadn’t been for Duane Campbel, we probably wouldn’t even be talking right now. But now that he’s dead you’ve mistakenly come to the conclusion that your contract with me and my people in Portland has changed. Is that right Sheriff?”
“I guess so.”
“And instead of talking to me about renegotiating our contract, you chose to steal from me? Why?”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’ve got problems.”
“Do you still have the money?”
“Every bit of it. You’ll find it stashed under the old doghouse in my backyard…”
“And the product? What happened to it?”
“It fell into the bay.”
“And why is that?”
“I shot the trafficker who was carrying it. I thought they were going to try and rip us off.”
“And you’re instincts were right, Sheriff. I apologize. Those two turned out to be nothing but trouble for me. But what can you do? It’s just never enough for some people. They go and ruin a good thing for everyone. I understand an arm washed up on the beach?”
“It’s stashed in the freezer in my garage. Beneath last year’s elk steaks.”
“I’d like to see it before I go.”
“No problem, you can swing by and look after you get the money. I guess this is it then?”
“Pardon me Sheriff?”
“Now that I’ve told you everything, aren’t you going to kill me?”
“Come on, Sheriff. You must not have been listening. You’re too important to me to let go so easily. In the past, of course, it would have been different. Back then I would have had horrible things done to men like you so as to set an example. But it never works in the long term. No matter how many times you try to wipe it out it still comes back, until you learn to live with it, like learning that there will always be mice in the cupboards. The fact is that we all must struggle with temptation, and sometimes we get so intoxicated by it we make serious mistakes. This is the nature of our blood. Am I making myself clear, Sheriff?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. Now there is just one more thing before I go. Please tell me everything you know about a woman named Ann Foster.”
“You just missed her.”
Chapter 23
The warmth of the pineapple express had caused curling trunks of fog to begin lifting off the bay. Ann had always imagined them as phantasms freeing themselves from their watery graves. They were an unlucky confederacy of the drowned, and all they desired was to feel the certainty of earth below their feet, of moving amongst the living again. Most hunched cautiously across the bay in slow frothy masses, while the more daring spirits glided solo, hurrying to reach the shore before the threat of sun burned them away. She noticed a few that had made it as far as the road into town, anxious to return to their homes or back to a favorite bar. Many individuals weren’t so lucky, having burst apart into cotton balls of vapor before they could make it to land while still others were forced to spend precious time tapering around the hulls of boats in the marina.
Electricity had not been restored to Traitor Bay, and only roving fingers of moonlight kept it from appearing totally abandoned. Parked cars glimmered in the distance, wood smoke spooled from rooftops. Even with daylight not far away there would not be a significant change in the level of darkness, as if the night itself had refused eviction. Ann knew today would be such a time, when everything was half-lit and the sun was a drifting sheet of gray steel, a lost wreckage, and many fog specters would visit far up country roads and into forgotten glades where the remains of chimneys stood wrapped in thick-fingered ivy and blackberry vine. It would be the kind of day when your instincts told you to light a fire and stay close to it.
Tammy opened her hand and showed her the bloody tooth. It had taken Ann a moment to realize what it was.
“Do you think they can still save it?” she asked.
“They might,” Ann said, handing her a paper napkin from her jacket. She was always taking the extra ones the waitresses left on the table. “Here, soak this in some water and wrap it up. You can’t let it dry out.”
Tammy did as Ann told her and wetted the napkin in the bay. She spread it out on her knees and set the tooth in the middle, then folded the napkin over and over until it was in the rounded shape of a white stone with threads of red in it. The napkin had left a damp rectangle on her jeans. She touched the tooth to her lips and sobbed.
Ann squeezed Tammy’s hand and watched James at the back of the boat. He lit a cigarette off the dying cherry of another. In the time it had taken for him to smoke five, they’d traveled up from the bay and into the river that fed it. They were relieved to find no lights coming off the dark bridge they had to pass under, no bullets boiling up the water next to them. James thought he’d heard voices, but it turned out to be crows raiding a swallow’s nest beneath the darkened steel beams.