“Talking about what?” I asked.
“About stuff she shouldn’t be, is what, about you and me and George Beck and she needs to shut her mouth.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t have anything to do with you guys, you know that, and she’s all over town with it. She’s loud wrong, is what she is.”
I knew that I had been right not to touch that gun Beck had offered me. “Where is she now?” I asked.
“I thought she was here,” he said. “Open the door, will you?”
“Ships, I’m busy,” I said.
“If she’s here, you better talk to her,” he said. “And if not, I’m going to find her. She knows the whole story, I don’t know why she’s lying, unless she’s just scared of George.” He crunched gravel back to the car. The car sat there for a minute and then started again and spun out on the road.
I turned to talk to Penny, but she was already unbuttoning her shirt, standing up and pulling off her jeans. The plan I’d been following vanished and we barely made it to the bedroom. She straddled me and her whole body was smooth and tight.
The sex was fast and terrible. We sort of mutually stopped after a while. Just lay there. She was already pregnant, she said, which is the best birth control there is. She said it was why she was so horny. But both of us had other things on our minds. It really hadn’t been worth it.
She sat on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair. “All this trouble is because Tim gave me a watch. That watch creeped me out. It was a present because I was always late. It was a man’s watch, okay, but it was weird because every time I looked at it, it showed the same time. Twenty to six. It wasn’t that the watch had stopped or anything, it just happened to be twenty to six when I looked at it.”
She was fixing her makeup now. “Well, one month I came up short and pawned the watch. Tim and I were broken up, so what did I care? I had to write my address on the pawn slip and I bet it was a week later and two detectives and an officer came to my apartment about that watch. It belonged to an old man named Elmer Cooley from way up in the Panhandle. He’d been missing for about a month and they wanted to know how I got that watch. Cooley, they told me, had a grandson in prison who was head of a group of militiamen that live in the mountains and did I know a George Beck, they wanted to talk to him about a murder and where was my brother? So I told them the watch came from Tim Shipman and I didn’t know anything else.”
I had just half-fucked a woman who was involved in a possible murder, who was lying to me and lying to the cops and being actively questioned by them. She stood up to put her jeans on and I couldn’t believe her body was that good, but now the whole thing was gone south. “I’d try not to worry about it,” I said. “Bad coincidence.” I was enough of a liar to know when I was being lied to. I’d leave at the first possible chance.
“It’s on my mind all the time,” she said. “What do you think Tim did?”
“I have no idea,” I said. The room was much darker than the moonlit field.
“I tell people I’m married so they won’t hit on me,” she said.
“Does it work?” I asked. I shifted around to lean on my elbow.
“No,” she said. She paused. “Men used to sit around and talk about me when I was gone. I used to be beautiful.”
“You still are,” I said.
“George Beck was the only man who could keep them off.” She looked out to the black field. “I just didn’t like some of the things he did.”
It popped in my head that George Beck had been involved somehow in the disappearance of the guy named Cooley and that was what the cops were after. The watch probably came from him, not Shipman, who was trying to save his own hide.
“I’m going back to Lewiston,” she said. “Tell George that’s where I am and don’t tell him we screwed.”
“There’s not much to tell,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It just didn’t click. We’ll have to try again. I’d like to.” She showed me a fake smile. “We just have to make sure George doesn’t find out.”
I knew she’d tell him the instant she saw him. I had half-fucked myself into a real problem. “Sure,” I said. “Keep George in the dark.”
“You bet,” she said. “Count on it. Trust me.”
When I woke in the morning, she was gone.
The next day I met Carl Larson. There was a knock and the door opened. I was sitting on the couch, having coffee, thinking about leaving.
“Hey,” the man said. “I’m Carl. You must be Ed.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” I said. “I didn’t expect you back.”
“There were some problems.” He waved his hand.
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Is that your truck by the garage, the black one?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How did that happen?” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I think you’ve got four flat tires,” he said.
I stepped onto the porch. My truck sat lopsided by the garage and the rims rested right on the ground. I wouldn’t be running anywhere too soon. I went back in.
Carl walked around the place. I suppose he wanted to see if I’d moved anything. I hadn’t. Then he came out to the living room and sat in the chair by the door.
“George Beck called me and said my sister Penny was in trouble.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“How come you didn’t call me? Or write?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t my place to do that, George said he was taking care of it. It only came about the other day.”
Carl shook his head. “Don’t do that again,” he said. “If my sister comes to you for something, let me know right away.”
“Okay,” I said. “From now on I will.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I didn’t even know you had a sister.”
“No offense taken,” he said. “Now I’m going down to Lewiston to visit her and see if I can straighten this out.”
“Okay.”
“I should be back in a couple days and we’ll work out some sort of arrangement when I get back.”
“The garage is fine for me,” I said. “As long as I can cut my rent in half.”
“Go ahead,” Carl said. “While I’m here sleeping in the house, just pay half. That should give you about a month at half rent.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll pay it now, cash.” I pulled a roll of bills out of my front pocket and counted two hundred fifty dollars in front of him and handed it to him.
“See you in a couple days.”
As soon as he was gone down the road, I went out to patch my tires. It was no use. They’d never hold air again. Someone had taken a jagged blade and ripped each tire completely around the sidewall. Whoever it was had to have been a very big, strong man.
The next day the phone rang and I let the machine answer and it was Carl from Lewiston.
“Pick up,” he said. “It’s Carl.”
I picked up the phone and he went on. “Is my sister there?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you fuck her?” he said.
“No,” I said. It sounded wrong.
“George Beck says you did. We’ll talk about that when I get back. Go check the mail for me.”
Sure enough, there was a letter from Penny. The postmark showed Portland, Oregon, and I told him that. He asked me to read it to him over the phone. And I did. It was a story about Tim Shipman, but completely different than the one she had told me. She’d been telling everyone that Tim Shipman might have murdered someone. She was doing that, she said in the letter, because George Beck had given her that watch and she knew damn well what was going on. George Beck was killing people in some rival gang, George Beck was moving speed. George Beck killed some old man Cooley in the woods near the Columbia River. George Beck had better pay her for keeping his name out of it, but if the cops caught Ships, he’d spill the whole thing. Ships knew about the watch and George Beck and Elmer Cooley.