Morgan thought that over. He was smiling already at the thought. Sharks circling, trying to take what they could from him. “If I was I’d be yelling at the heavens.” He laughed, snorting a bit and trying to catch his breath. He felt relief. He felt like he’d held the money for so long without anyone to tell about it. And now he had and he felt good about it all.
“Still,” Drake said, “I’d feel better if you stayed away from this place for a day or two. Go into town. Spend a few nights with that friend from the post office.”
Morgan thought about that. He knelt and set the last snare. When he was done he rose and watched the hills again. Lost at sea. He looked up at the sky again. When night came there would be stars thick as buttermilk.
Chapter 12
JOHN WESLEY HELD SHERI by an arm and rapped a knuckle against the door. Through a side window he saw Maurice rise from his seat on the couch and turn his head toward the window. He looked the big man over for a second, then turned and ran for the back. Twenty seconds later Maurice was at the front door again with Bean standing there behind him and the Walther pressed to Maurice’s skull, just behind the ear. The door came open and Maurice stepped aside to let John Wesley and Sheri through. As he passed John Wesley thanked him and then came into the house and stood looking at all the magazines stacked in piles around the living room.
He sat Sheri on the couch and then turned to take in what he could of the house. Messy and unkempt, the room had spiderwebs in the corners and some of the magazines showed a thin filament of dust over their glossy covers. He picked one up and thumbed the pages. A good-natured smile across his face as he came to the pictures he liked.
Bean pushed Maurice into the living room and told him to sit. “I’m guessing Patrick isn’t here,” Bean said.
“Why’s that?” Maurice said.
“Because someone called us from your phone and it wasn’t you.”
“How do you know it wasn’t me?”
“You’re wasting time,” Bean said. He gave the gun to John Wesley and left the room. John Wesley looked at Maurice and then looked toward the direction Bean had gone. There was the sound of the closet in Maurice’s bedroom being opened and the lamp on his nightstand being flipped; a dresser went over next.
“Come on,” Maurice said. “This is my grandma’s place.”
Bean came out of the back hallway breathing hard. He looked around the room. “Your grandma like you? Likes looking at whatever the fuck this is?” He bent and picked a magazine off the closest pile. He put it down without comment. “Where’s Patrick, Maurice?”
“He’s not in the closet back there?” A smile on Maurice’s face and his white teeth showing.
In less than a second Bean was on top of him. He beat him three or four times across the face in quick succession and then remained where he was, one knee into Maurice’s belly. “Where’s Patrick?”
There was blood on Maurice’s teeth now, he was looking up at Bean and he was smiling a big grin. “You mean he wasn’t behind the dresser, either?”
Bean beat Maurice with a savage intensity while John Wesley went into the kitchen and came back with some spray cheese and a package of crackers beneath his arm. The Walther now tucked in the back of his waistband. In his other hand John Wesley carried a bottle of water and when Bean rose from the couch, he used both hands to push his blond hair into place, smoothing his palms over it several times before John Wesley handed him the water.
John Wesley ate a cracker and watched Bean. He offered one to Sheri but she was too traumatized to move, all the way against the opposite side of the couch.
“He’s not here,” Maurice said, propping himself up on one hand to wipe at the blood on his lips with the other. “Don’t you think I’d tell you if he was?”
“I don’t know what you’d do,” Bean said. “You tried to sell out your old friend for a cut of his money. I don’t know what that is.”
“I tried to help us out.”
“So where is he now?”
“Shit if I know,” Maurice said. “He took off with my truck, though, took it right out from under me while I was asleep. We did six years together and that’s how he does me.”
“You see the humor in this, Maurice?” Bean said. “You here on the couch saying how Patrick screwed you over.”
“Shit, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. You feel me, Bean?”
“But you don’t know where he is now and you don’t know where the money is?” Bean looked to John Wesley and John Wesley placed the crackers and cheese spread down next to the television and started going through the room closing all the shades.
“He could show back up here,” Maurice said. His eyes tracked John Wesley as he made his way through the room, then they went back to Bean. “He doesn’t have anywhere to go. He told me that.”
Bean bent to the coffee table and shifted his hand through the mess there, searching through magazines and old fast-food wrappers. Maurice watched him and John Wesley continued to work his way through the room closing the blinds. He was at the window by the front door when Bean found what he was looking for and stabbed Maurice three times in the side with a ballpoint pen and then stepped back. A gasp was audible from Sheri but nothing more. She had risen up off the couch and stood now looking down at Maurice while Bean hovered over him, the pen held in his fist with his thumb pressed down over the blunt end. Maurice was crying and looking at his side where the blood was beginning to show.
“He’s not coming back here,” Bean said.
“He doesn’t have anywhere to go,” Maurice said, but even his voice sounded like it didn’t believe him. He was shaking his head and holding a hand tight to his side. “Okay,” he said, his other hand held prostrate in the air.
Bean moved toward him again and Maurice pushed himself off the couch and faltered a bit as he tried to get his feet beneath him. He was holding one hand to his side and when he turned away from Bean, John Wesley was there.
There was a brief sob and John Wesley felt the weight of Maurice’s body fall against him, but there was little else for John Wesley to do but stand there. Bean drawn up behind Maurice and the blood now on the floor at John Wesley’s feet as Maurice collapsed into him and Bean went to work with the ballpoint.
When it was done Bean rose and let the pen roll off his fingers and fall to the floor. Blood was on Bean’s face and in his hair. He ran one hand through the loose blond strands that had come out of place but it only helped to smear the blood farther along through his hair.
John Wesley looked away and then went back to the television, where he’d left the cheese and crackers. He sat on the edge of the coffee table and ate them one at a time. Bean was in the bathroom and John Wesley listened to the water come on as Bean cleaned the blood from his hands and face.
Sheri had moved to one corner of the room, where John Wesley—eating crackers, making an effort to put cheese spread on each—watched her slide down the wall till she crumpled into herself on the floor, her knees pulled to her chest and her eyes buried in her bare arms. “He tried to hurt Patrick,” was all John Wesley could think to say.
Sheri looked up at him. “What do you think Bean will do when he finds Patrick?”
“That’s up to Patrick,” John Wesley said. He looked away, running his eyes over the room, listening to the splash of water from the bathroom sink.
On the floor Maurice was still alive—just barely so. And when he started to pull himself little by little across the floor, John Wesley paused, his eyes oscillating between Bean in the bathroom and Sheri in the corner, then he looked to where Maurice had managed to cover a few inches of ground on his way to the door.