The Feds were leaning on George Beck hard and he was going to inform on me, said the lawyer. His buddy at the motel had a videotape of me walking into Tim Shipman’s room with a pistol and coming out and a Polaroid shot of Shipman lying dead on the bed. My name was going to be tied to all this, unless I could get Beck’s lawyer some good information on the remaining members of the Cooley family who still lived in the Panhandle. The Cooleys ranked high on the Feds’ most wanted list and usable information about them would loosen pressure on George Beck, would reduce his charges.
What Beck and his lawyer didn’t know was that if the Feds got hold of my prints, my days as Ed Snider were over.
I wasn’t going to take the rap Beck was ready to hand me. I’d get the information and be gone. I hid George Beck’s nine-millimeter up underneath the dashboard of my truck, held by electrical tape to the fire wall. The truck stayed locked. That gun was the only thing that connected Beck to the murder of Elmer Cooley and I kept it for no reason other than desperation. I drove north into the Panhandle, past Priest Lake and further, headed to the Cooleys’ house to do the best rat work I could.
I liked the Cooleys right off, which was tough on my brain. Over those first two winter months, I tried to adjust. It was them or me. They bought my cover without a question, just a guy up to log some adjacent land. No big deal. Pop Cooley and I ate dinner together a couple of times. One working man talking to another in the mountains. Talking about making a living in a place where that was real tough work. I liked him and I liked the kid. After sixty days, I had them on a talking basis.
The kid sat in a green plastic lawn chair in the snow behind my three-room cabin. Light was just corning. The kid propped his feet on an empty propane cylinder. He wore a dark bluejacket against the cold. Under his watch cap he had a home haircut. He was whittling a stick with the new pocketknife his father gave him for Christmas. I knew he was whittling weird little smiley faces, even though I couldn’t see that far. I found the sticks everywhere; the kid did it to every piece of wood he came across. Small, crooked smiley faces and the word Peeler, his nickname. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. As soon as he heard me awake, banging and emptying ash from under the woodstove, he was at the back kitchen door. He was skinny, but tall with a man-size head.
“Well if it isn’t Kid Cooley,” I said, “bantamweight champion of the Pacific Northwest. How do you feel before the big fight, Kid, say something for the fans? Are you still single, the girls have been asking.”
The kid half-smiled and then got serious. “No power, right, you got no power, no juice?”
I snapped the light switch back and forth. The kitchen ceiling light stayed off. “No juice,” I said. I had rented the cabin from the Cooleys for two months now and the power was always steady, which is rare in the mountains and deep woods. It tends to flicker. A single light came from the Cooleys’ house, further above me on the hill. “You got lights, though.”
“Jap generator,” the kid said. “Pop put it in a year ago, hard-wired it from out in back, so they couldn’t cut power on us.”
I sat on a folding chair at the card table in the kitchen. “How am I going to have coffee, Kid?”
The kid pointed at the rusted set of blue, white, and black camp pots hung behind the stove on what used to be the fireplace. “Pop says you got to give us a ride today. Pop says we’re the soldiers and he’s the general.”
His father was standing right outside the kitchen door and raised his voice from there. “I did not say that, I most certainly did not, nobody has to give us a ride anywhere. I said catch him before he left for work if he was working today and see what he said. That’s what I said.” He cleared his throat as he came into the kitchen. “Seems we were vandalized in the night, somebody cut the tires on the Jeep and the power’s out.” The Cooleys used an old Jeep with its stick on the column to get around. The back fender was rusted except for a bumper sticker, MARINE SNIPER: YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU’LL JUST DIE TIRED. Pop had been in the Corps, with Vietnam action under his belt. He mentioned it when I first moved in and saw the sticker. Pop’s father, Elmer Cooley, had been involved in the white gangs that live in the Pacific Northwest. Elmer had been murdered, he said, in the woods of Eastern Washington, near the Columbia River. Elmer was buried up the hill, in the family plot near the house. Elmer had lived in the cabin I was renting and I knew Pop kept alert.
“Did you hear anything in the night?” I asked. “Did the dog go after anything?”
“I had the dog inside with me because of those big bears coming around lately, too close to the house,” Pop said. “I didn’t want Cannon getting mauled.”
“Sure,” I said. “Where do you need to go today?”
“Spokane,” he said. “To the train station.”
“What’s going on there?” I asked.
“My younger brother’s coming home,” he said. “He just got done doing ten years of federal time. He maxed out.”
“That’s a long time,” I said.
“I don’t think they could give Jack enough time to beat him,” he said. “When he was a kid, eighteen really, he did five years here state time for some shit. Now he’s done ten more and he won’t be forty until August. You’ll see when we pick him up. Jack’s a stone house, inside and out. Always has been, always will be.”
“Hey, Snider,” the kid said. “Let me wear your bulletproof, since we’re going into the big city.”
He had tried on my vest before and loved it. “Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t want anybody to mess with you. Big city of Spokane, tough town.” I tightened it on him, made sure he was comfortable.
We climbed in my truck, heading south through the woods and mountains, under the eyes of hawks and eagles, two hours to Spokane.
The lines were down because I’d dropped a limb on them. The tires were flat because I’d cut them. I wondered if Pop, somewhere in his mind, didn’t suspect this. He wasn’t a stupid man, when it came to hunting and fishing and fields of fire and decoy interest. All manner of blinds, lures, and smoke to fool the enemy. He talked hunting to Peeler as we drove. If he suspected, he never let on. He needed to get to Spokane and I was the only man available for the job, I had made myself that way, cut myself to fit. Purposefully become a piece of the puzzle. Cold sweat ran down over my ribs and bled into my T-shirt all the way to the train station. Jack Cooley wasn’t a Girl Scout, He’d started out with the Hammerskins and moved up to the elite Eighty-eight Dragoons. Federal law enforcement blamed the Dragoons for a host of crimes, but most recently tied them to a shoot-out in Wyoming where five officers died raiding a meth lab and supposed Dragoon safe house. I knew any information I got out of Jack Cooley would be all George Beck needed to loosen his own state-held noose. George Beck had been in the woods of Eastern Washington the day Elmer Cooley died, and although they couldn’t prove he pulled the trigger, they were applying pressure. When it comes to law enforcement, they prosecute deaths of their own kind hardest. Everybody else is just a scumbag to them anyway, or was involved in stuff that they deserved to die for. We didn’t catch you at it, but you’ve got to be guilty of something, something you did before or something we don’t know about.
The train station in Spokane is brick, a mix of new and old. Jack Cooley wasn’t there yet; his train was late. The kid rode up and down on the escalators and had a soda. Pop sat on the wood benches and watched the people with their luggage, buying tickets. When I went to sit next to Pop, there on the bench was a small smiley face and Peeler written underneath. The kid went down the escalator again, back up. Then the train arrived.