I ignored them. “You said she talked shit. What’d she say?”
“Nothing, man.”
I came to the bars. I looked through them into his face. “What did she say?”
“Said she needed the car.” He looked down again and nodded several times to himself. “Said she needed that car. How’s anyone need a car that much?”
“You know any bus lines run at three in the morning, Bigs?”
He shook his head.
“The woman you killed? She worked two jobs. One in Lewiston, one in Auburn. Her shift in Lewiston ended half an hour before her shift in Auburn began. You seeing it now?”
He nodded, the tears coming off him in strings, shoulders quaking.
“Peri Pyper,” I said. “That was her name.”
He kept his head down.
I turned to Coach Mayfield. “I’m done.”
I stood by the door while Coach Mayfield conferred with his client for a few minutes, their voices never rising above whispers, and then he picked his briefcase up off the bench and headed toward me and the guard.
As the door opened, Bigs yelled, “It was just a fucking car .”
“Not to her.”
“I’m not going to give you a bunch of bleeding-heart bullshit about Bigs being a great kid and all,” Coach Mayfield said. “He was always high-strung, always shortsighted when it came to the big picture. Always had a hair-trigger temper and when he wanted something, he wanted it now. But he wasn’t this .” He waved out the window of his Chrysler 300 as we drove through the streets with their white-steeple churches, broad green commons, and quaint B &Bs. “You look behind the face this town puts up, you find a lot of cracks. Unemployment’s double-digits and those who are hiring ain’t paying shit. Benefits?” He laughed. “Not a chance. Insurance?” He shook his head. “All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That’s all gone around here, my friend.”
“Gone in Boston, too,” I said.
“Gone all over, I bet.”
We drove in silence for a bit. While we’d been inside the jail, the blue sky had turned gray. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. The air felt like it was made of wet tin foil. No question-snow was coming.
“Bigs had a shot at going to Colby. They told him if he spent a year at community college getting his grades up just north of acceptable, they’d hold him a place on next year’s baseball team. So, he buckled down.” He looked over at me with eyebrows raised in confirmation. “He did. Went to school days, worked nights.”
“So what happened?”
“Company he worked for shitcanned everyone. Then after a month, they offered them their jobs back. It’s that cannery right over there.” As we rolled over a small bridge, he pointed to a beige brick building along the banks of the Androscoggin River. “Only the unskilled labor got the offer; the skilled labor just got dumped. But the company offered the unskilled their jobs back at half their previous hourly wage. No bennies, no insurance, no nothing. But plenty of overtime if they wanted it, long as they didn’t expect time and a half or any of that commie bullshit. So he takes the job back, Bigs. To make his rent and pay for school? He’s working seventy-hour weeks. And going to school full-time. So guess how he stays awake?”
“Crank.”
He nodded as he turned into the parking lot of his law firm. “The shit that cannery pulled? Companies pulling that all over town, all over the state. And the meth business? Well, that’s booming.”
We got out of his car and stood in the cold parking lot. I thanked him and he shrugged it off, a guy far more comfortable with criticism than praise.
“He did a piece-of-shit thing, Bigs did, but until he started tweeking, he was not a piece of shit.”
I nodded.
“Don’t make it right what he did,” he said, “but it didn’t come from a vacuum.”
I shook his hand. “I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him.”
He shrugged that compliment off, too. “Over a fucking car.”
“Over a fucking car,” I said and got into my own car and drove off.
At a rest stop just over the Massachusetts border, I stopped for something to eat and sat in my car with it and opened my laptop on the front seat. I tapped my keyboard to bring it out of sleep mode. A pleasant tingle coursed over my scalp. When I reached the home page for IntelSearchABS, I entered my user name and password and clicked my way to the Individual Search Records page. A little green box waited there for me. It asked for a name or alias. I clicked on NAME.
Angie would kill me. I was supposed to be done with this rogue shit. I’d gotten my laptop back. I’d gotten my laptop bag and my picture of Gabby. I’d gotten my answers about Peri Pyper. It was over and done with. I could walk away.
I remembered Peri and myself having drinks at the Chili’s in Lewiston and the T.G.I. Friday’s in Auburn. Less than a year ago. We’d traded childhood anecdotes, argued over sports teams, jabbed each other for our political differences, quoted movies we both loved. There was zero connection between her whistle-blowing and her getting shot by some dumb, fucked-up kid in a parking lot at three in the morning. No connection whatsoever.
But it’s all connected.
This should not be about that, a voice said. You’re just pissed off. And when you’re pissed off, you lash out.
I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes. I saw Beatrice McCready’s face-pained and prematurely aged and possibly crazed.
Another voice said, Don’t do this .
That voice sounded uncomfortably like my daughter’s.
Leave it be .
I opened my eyes. The voices were right.
I saw Amanda from my morning dream, the envelopes she’d tossed in the bushes.
It’s all connected.
No, it’s not .
What had I said in the dream?
I’m just the mailman .
I leaned forward to shut down my computer. Instead, I typed in the box:
Kenneth Hendricks
I hit RETURN and sat back.
Part II. Mordovian Rhythm & Blues
Chapter Nine
Kenneth James Hendricks had several aliases. He’d been known, at various times, as KJ, K Boy, Richard James Stark, Edward Toshen, and Kenny B. He was born in 1969 in Warrensburg, Missouri, the son of an aircraft mechanic stationed with the 340th Bombardment Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base. From there, he’d bounced all over the United States – Biloxi, Tampa, Montgomery, Great Falls. First juvenile arrest occurred in King Salmon, Alaska; the second in Lompoc, California. At eighteen, he was arrested in Lompoc on charges of assault and battery and charged as an adult. The victim was his father. Charges dropped by alleged victim. Second arrest as an adult, two days later. Assault and battery again, same victim. This time his father pressed charges, maybe because his son had tried to cut off his ear. Kenny had been halfway through the job when his father’s shrieks alerted a neighbor. Hendricks did eighteen months for the assault, plus three years’ probation. His father died while he was in prison. Next arrested in Sacramento for loitering in an area known to be popular among male prostitutes. Six weeks later, still in Sacramento, his third assault arrest. This one for pummeling a man at the Come On Inn along I-80. The victim, a Pentecostal deacon and prominent political fund-raiser, had a hard time explaining how he’d come to be naked in a motel room with a male prostitute, so he refused to press charges. The State of California revoked Kenny’s parole anyway, for being under the influence of alcohol and cocaine during his arrest.