“Don’t close your eyes,” Catherine said.
“I think I should try again.”
Ashley clicked open the cylinder and dropped the spent shells on the pine-needle floor. She slowly took another half dozen bullets and loaded them into the weapon. “Only going to use this thing one time.”
“Yes. True enough. And only then if you really have to.”
“That’s right.” Ashley turned and took aim at the tree trunk once again. “Only if I really have to.”
“If you have no choice.”
“If I have no choice.”
Both of them had much to say about that, but didn’t actually want to use the words out loud, not even in the silent anonymity of the forest.
Scott moved slowly up the half-gravel, half-dirt driveway that led to O’Connell’s house, a distance of perhaps thirty yards from the quiet street. It was a single-story, white-framed building, with a battered television antenna hanging from the roof like a bird’s broken wing, next to a newer, gray satellite dish. In the front yard, a faded red Toyota was missing one door, one wheel up on a cinder block. Large brown rust stains marred the sheet-metal surface. There was also a newer black pickup truck, parked by a side door, partway beneath a flat roof constructed out of a single sheet of corrugated plastic. The roof made the space into a carport, but it was littered with a beaten red snowblower and a snowmobile missing its treadmill. As Scott walked past the pickup, he noticed an aluminum ladder, a wooden tool kit, and some roofing materials had been thrown haphazardly in the bed. O’Connell was pointing him toward the side door, but Scott noted a main entrance in the front. He doubted it was used much.
Probably a back entrance, he thought. Check to make sure.
“Through there. Don’t mind the mess. I wasn’t expecting company,” O’Connell’s father said gruffly.
Scott let himself in the aluminum screen door, then through a second, solid-wood door, into a small kitchen. Mess was an accurate description. Pizza boxes. Microwavable dinners. Three cases of Coors Light in silver boxes. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label on the table to accompany the array of cans.
“Let’s go into the living room. We can have a seat, Mr.-okay, Mr. whatever your name is. What should I call you?”
“Smith works,” Scott said. “And if you have trouble keeping that straight, Jones will do just as well.”
O’Connell’s father snorted a small laugh.
“Okay, Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones. Now that I’ve invited you in here, why don’t you sit right over there where I can keep an eye on you, and you can explain yourself nice and quick, so that I don’t go back to thinking that my friend the ax handle is the better way of dealing with you. And you might get to the how-I-make-some-money part real quick. You want a beer?”
Scott walked into a small living room. There was a threadbare sofa, a recliner with a large red-and-white cooler next to it that served as a table, across from an oversize television set. Newspapers and pornographic magazines littered the floor, along with piles of grocery-store circulars and catalogs from various hunting stores. On one wall there was a stuffed deer head, which stared out blankly from behind glass eyes. A T-shirt hung from one of its antlers. He tried to imagine the house when O’Connell had been growing up here, and he could see in its bones the potential for a kind of normalcy. Get the debris out of the yard. Remove the interior clutter, fix up the couch. Replace the chairs. Hang a couple of posters on the walls, and spruce everything up with paint, and it would have been almost acceptable. The random piles of litter told him much about the father and little about the son; O’Connell’s father had probably replaced his dead wife and absent son with much of the mess.
Scott slid into a chair that creaked and threatened to give way and turned toward O’Connell’s father.
“I’ve been asking questions because your son has something that belongs to the person I represent. My client would like it back.”
“You a lawyer, then?”
Scott shrugged.
O’Connell slipped into the lounge chair, but kept the ax handle in his lap. “Who might this boss of yours be?”
Scott shook his head. “Names are really irrelevant to this conversation.”
“Okay, then, Mr. Smith. Then tell me what he does for a living.”
Scott smiled, as evil a grin as he could muster. “My client makes a great deal of money.”
“Legally or illegally?”
“I’m unsure whether you want to ask that question, Mr. O’Connell. And I would probably lie anyway, if I were going to respond.” Scott listened to the words tumbling out of his mouth, almost shocked at the ease he felt in inventing a character, a situation, and leading the older O’Connell on. Greed, he thought, is a powerful drug.
O’Connell smiled. “So, you’d like to get in touch with my wayward kid, huh? Can’t find him in the city?”
“No. He seems to have disappeared.”
“And you come snooping around here.”
“Just one of a number of possibilities.”
“My kid don’t like it here.”
Scott raised his hand, cutting O’Connell’s father off. “Let’s get past the obvious,” he said stiffly. “Can you help us find your son?”
“How much?”
“How much can you help?”
“Not sure. He and I don’t talk much.”
“When did you see him last?”
“A couple of years. We don’t get along too good.”
“What about at holidays?”
O’Connell shook his head. “I told you, we don’t get along too good. What’s he taken?”
Scott smiled. “Again, Mr. O’Connell, information like that would render your position, shall I say, precarious? Do you know what that means?”
“I’m not stupid. Of course. And how precarious, Mr. Jones?”
“Speculation is useless.”
“Just how much goddamn trouble is he in? The type of trouble that gets you beat up? Or the type of trouble that gets you killed?”
Scott took a breath, wondering just how far to push the fiction.
“Let’s just say that he can repair the damage he’s done. But it will require cooperation. It is a sensitive matter, Mr. O’Connell. And much more delay could prove problematic.” Scott felt utterly cold inside.
“What, drugs? He steal some drugs from somebody? Or money?”
Scott smiled. “Mr. O’Connell, let me put it to you this way. Should your son try to get in touch with you, and you were to advise us of that action, there would be a reward.”
“How much?”