“That’s it?” Carl asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ll be back in a while,” he said. “Sit tight.” He hung up.
An hour later, George Beck showed up. Two other guys pulled in, too. My truck just sat there, completely useless to me on flat tires. Mac, one of the gas customers, also pulled in with his rig. He eyed George Beck.
“Just come back tomorrow.” I said. “I’ll take care of you then, if you can wait.”
He lowered his voice. “Never certain if tomorrow’s going to show, with people like that around,” he said. “You take care and I’ll see you when you don’t have company.” He pulled back onto the toad.
“Why don’t you close up now?” George Beck said. “You’re going with us.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Carl didn’t say anything about this.”
“You can go with us,” he said, “or never go anywhere again.”
“Fine,” I said.
We drove to a truck stop in Montana, seven miles over the Idaho border. George Beck and his two buddies sat in a booth drinking coffee and ordered food and Carl showed up and we sat there eating.
George waved to a trucker at the counter. “That’s Speedy,” he said. “You ride in his rig and we’ll be behind you.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We’re going to talk to Tim Shipman and straighten this out. He’s hiding in a motel over here, but we found him.”
“What’s Speedy got to do with it?”
George Beck got bigger in the booth. “I don’t know, you see, because I’m dumb,” he said. “People expect me to do dumb things. For instance, you fucked Penny and I’m so dumb I just found out about it, just now, this instant. So we can all drag you out in the parking lot and in the middle of things, a gun goes off and dumb local boy George Beck shot the man who was fucking his woman behind his back and the jury comes in, local folks, and they see me, and they know what I’m about and who I’m friends with, and I go do two years. You think two years is going to bother me? I’ll come out of prison with more friends than I’ve got now.” He pulled his coat back a little to show me a shoulder holster with a stainless steel pistol. “It makes little holes going in, big holes coming out, and all I asked you to do was ride with Speedy.”
I was trapped. We got up and I walked outside with the trucker who was hauling logs. I got in the passenger’s side of the sleeper King Cab. It was an older rig. Speedy cranked it through the gears and we headed out of the parking lot.
“That George, he’s a son-of-a-bitch, ain’t he?” Speedy said.
I didn’t say anything.
We curved through the mountain roads and in the side mirror I could see Beck and Carl and the others behind us. Speedy pulled over at a small cabin-unit motel. The big engine kept rolling as he put the brakes on.
“Lucky number seven,” Speedy said. “Give Shipman a good talking-to.”
I got out of the rig. George Beck and Carl Larson were sitting on the road in their trucks. I decided to try one last attempt at getting the hell out.
“I don’t even have a gun,” I said.
Speedy shrugged. “There’s a pistol under the seat, take it if you need it,” he said.
I reached under the seat and came out with a nine-millimeter and snapped the trigger twice at Speedy before the weight of the gun told my hand it wasn’t loaded. He blinked hard, then relaxed. He smiled. It was the gun Beck had tried to hand me that night at Carl’s house. I had screwed myself even tighter.
I got down out of the rig and I knew the security cameras were catching me doing it, walking with a pistol into room number seven. The door was open — I pushed it with my foot — and saw Shipman on the bed, the side of his head gone from gunshot wounds. He’d been shot less than an hour earlier. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, trying to draw them into the room, or within camera range. Don’t throw up, I told myself, you always throw up. But nobody came, and eventually I just walked out. Speedy was gone. George Beck and Carl Larson had pulled down the road a ways. I walked and got in the back of Carl’s truck and we rode all the way to Potlatch. This time I kept the gun.
After that George moved in with Penny and they were considered married by everybody. Shipman’s body was found in a Dumpster ten miles from the motel, but the paper said the cops knew the body had been moved. Then I heard George Beck was being held in Boise on a federal warrant and was also wanted by the Mounties in Lethbridge on a gun charge and possible murder of a witness in a homicide case in Washington State. This just made me anxious. Penny had the baby, a girl, late the following spring. Soon there was another man living there with her, and I tried not to think about it.
Carl went back to Alaska and nobody really came to the shop after that, except the gas customers. I was in Moscow picking up a case of oil one day and saw Mac, the old logger, in the parking lot. He was talking to some men. He nodded at me.
“I could use some work,” I said. “Maybe you could get me a job as a fire spotter. With the park service or private. Like you talked about that one time, that private association of landowners in Montana.”
“No,” he answered. “No thanks. The woods are all full. It’ll burn with or without you. You should ask George Beck for work, he probably needs somebody to clean his cell or something.”
I came back to the garage and Dan must have seen me pull in, because he came out of his trailer and over to the garage.
“Some men stopped by here looking for you. Knocked on my door. Frightened Rose.” He handed me a business card. It was from an attorney in Spokane.
“What’s this?”
“What is it?” he said. “It’s fucking yours, that’s what it is, but it ended up on my doorstep, how is that?” He didn’t raise his voice, but he was clear. “Just because I don’t believe in heaven and angels doesn’t mean I don’t believe in hell and demons. You need to get that shit straight in your head. Realize what you’re involved in. Separate the concepts.” He pointed at his trailer. “I’ve got a purpose here on Earth, which is to provide for and protect Rose. You seem to be about to sign on as a short-order man in the devil’s butcher shop. You’re on a bad path, with bad men. Those two things put us at odds. There might be a time when someone with a badge comes around asking questions about you and George Beck and Carl.”
“And you’d rat?”
He shook his head. “Never. It’s not the law that concerns me, not a single bit. I want to make sure you and I have an understanding. The law doesn’t stop a thing. Consequences only come after and after is too late, far as I’m concerned.” He pointed at the pen behind his house. “My brother’s bringing me up a good dog from his farm and everything in my place is loaded with the safety off. Whoever buys the ticket will get an express trip if I can help it and I’m here to tell you, although she was a lot of trouble different times, I love my Rose and I love my job of protecting her. Knock on my door and I’ll let Remington answer it. Both barrels.”
“I understand,” I said.
“See that you do,” Dan said. “Or there will be pieces of you they’ll never find.” He started to walk back to his trailer. “We’re not all hicks and cousin-fuckers up here,” he said over his shoulder. “Do your business somewhere else. You mistook kind for simple,” he finished. He shut the trailer door.
I called the Spokane lawyer from a pay phone and once I got past the secretary the first thing he asked me was did I still have that gun. Sure, I said, and it’s keeping me alive. Because that’s the gun that killed Elmer Cooley. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, he said, and if I wanted to rely on that, put my whole life on the line for one ballistics test, then I could go right ahead. And I knew he was right, although I hoped otherwise.