The mound of brown gauze contrasts with his big white, red-haired leg, which rests on his wadded-up denim vest on the black fabric of the Explorer’s back seat.
Mendez drives, Gale riding shotgun, manning the video camera and a digital voice recorder propped up in a drink holder, its voracious mic aimed into the gap between the front seats.
Gale watches as Jeffs’s head bobs and his lips move to some inner soundtrack, his Rx fentanyl, coffee, and two IHOP breakfasts making him painlessly chipper and talkative.
They pull into a parking space behind the Bear Cave.
“A white Lincoln Navigator was right exactly there after work that night,” says Jeffs, pointing. “Not far from my hog. About two o’clock. The back left door was open and the driver’s window was down halfway. The driver had a Covid mask and a ball cap on. Angels. He said, ‘Get in. We’re friends of Vic Klavic and we have something for you. I knew Klavic from jail, years back.’”
“So you can’t describe the driver?” asks Mendez.
“With a mask, cap, and no interior lights, could you?”
“His tone of voice, attitude?” asks Gale.
“Businesslike. No accent or nothing. By the sound of it I’d say young. A young white guy, probably.”
“Where was the other guy?” asks Gale.
“Don’t get ahead! I didn’t see no other guy but I had this hunch he was there. Just black in there. So I went closer and looked in the open door. Nobody in the back and I couldn’t see in front because of the privacy glass. Plexiglass probably. Full blackout, man. With a round grille on each side so you could hear and talk, like in a taxi.
“I got in the Navigator. Closed the door and rapped my knuckles on the glass. I said, ‘I’m right here if you need me, you assholes.’ And you know what the guy says back? The guy on the right, who I couldn’t see? He says, ‘Well, Vern, we do need a man like you. Someone brave, smart, honest, and dependable. We’ve got a job that will put fifty thousand dollars in your pocket. Half before, half after.’ ‘What’s the job,’ I ask him. And he says, ‘We need some noise cancellation.’ I said, ‘Oh that’s cute.’ And he says, ‘We want you to silence a guy. He’s making bad decisions. Decisions that hurt our business, to the tune of many, many dollars.’”
Gale checks the voice recorder, sees the green light blinking. Consider Jeffs in the back seat, who blinks his tan, mountain-lion eyes at the detective.
“What?” says the big man. “Vern going too fast for you? Every word I say is a word that was actually said. On account of my photographic memory. You’re getting perfect facts on that recorder.”
“Keep talking,” says Gale.
“The medicos said I get one of these every six hours, as needed,” says Jeffs, twisting off the top of a round brown bottle. He chases out a gray pill with a fingertip that barely fits.
“That fent can hook you,” says Mendez. “And kill you cold if you take too much.”
“Vern’s got self-control,” he says.
“Don’t forget to use it,” says Mendez.
“Daniela,” says Jeffs. “You’re a pretty one but you’ve got a sharp tongue.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“What did you take ‘noise cancellation’ to mean?” asks Gale.
“I wasn’t sure at first. But when he said silence a guy that’s making some bad decisions, I mean, ‘silence’ is a heavy word. Kind of final, like. I figure they wanted someone to give this guy the new look.”
“Referring to Capstick, the hunter,” says Gale.
“Right on,” says Jeffs. “He was the greatest hunter ever. And a good writer, too. Wrote about killing animals the right way. The moral way. You give the animal the ‘new look.’ I wanted to be him and I hunted and fished some with Dad in Idaho before I joined up. After the Marines did some mercenary work in Congo. Ugly stuff but I was good with my Barrett. Came home, got a Harley, and hit the road. Did a lot of different shit, Montana to Louisiana to California. Colstrip coal mining, good pay. Fishing guide down on Bayou La Loutre, Saint Bernard Parish. Hard to find a swamp boat big enough to float me. Dope grows up in the Humboldt mountains, before the legalization. Best weed in the world, good pay. Now, thirty years later, I’m a bartender in Huntington Beach, California, and my wife rides a pink chopper. I got it boxed. Thanks for not making Mindy crash her bike or throwing her in jail. Vern’s had lots of girls and Mindy’s the best.”
“What made these two guys think you’d do something like that?” asks Mendez. “Give someone the new look.”
“I figured Klavic, since they brought him up. Me and Klavic were in the same car in jail — the wood car. That’s peckerwoods, white men, some with Aryan ideas. Being Idaho boys, we fit right in. So we kind of ran the car, bullshitted a lot. Cellmates. What else you going to do?”
“Bullshit about killing people for money?” asks Gale.
“Probably. Long time ago, man.”
“You told Klavic you killed a woman for two thousand dollars,” says Gale. “Shot her in the head in a dollar store parking lot. You said it was a disgusting thing to do for the two grand.”
A beat. Gale points the video camera at Vernon’s face.
“Just jailhouse bullshit.”
Watching Jeffs’s face now, point-blank through the eyepiece, Gale’s back in Sangin, scoping the enemy with his Barrett.50 caliber. The old man with his bird gun and his opium stash in the abandoned granary. His worn-out Cheetahs. The new look for the wrong guy, thanks to Gale. Remembers shooting pictures and video of him. The young boy asking if he could come home with Gale when he left Sangin.
Point-blank like this, Jeffs briefly looks stymied and uncertain. Like he did that night at the Bear Cave, when he said he’d fought in Congo, a mercenary gig, no doubt.
Now with a deep breath, Vern’s expression hardens, and he blinks, once and slowly, recovering something.
“If I said that, it was just bullshit from a long time ago.”
“It didn’t sound like bullshit to Klavic,” says Mendez.
“I don’t recall that specific story about the drugstore.”
“So, your photographic memory wears out over time?” asks Gale.
“Doesn’t everybody’s?” asks Jeffs.
“Seems to me killing a person would be pretty hard to forget,” says Mendez.
Gale lowers the camera. “Once you realized that they were trying to hire you to kill someone, what did you say?”
“I said no, I don’t do that kind of shit.”
“And?” asks Mendez.
“The guy on the right said, ‘Have you ever made twenty-five grand in cash, off the books and tax-free?’ I said sure, when I robbed a bank, put thirty-six thousand, five hundred dollars in a backpack, and got away on my Harley. Wore a helmet for the holdup and the getaway. Two blocks down I ran my ride up a ramp and into a U-Haul van. Mindy pulled the door down and drove us away. Cops passing us, sirens blazing, looking for a guy on a motorcycle. Fuck, it was great. Really a high point in my life. Don’t worry that I’m just giving you detectives more work to do — fed and state statutes on bank robbery is only ten years. Long expired.”
“Did you try it again?” asks Mendez.
“Never. I did a six-month bounce for battery, then got a job in Colstrip and went more or less straight for a while. Mindy thought it was a dumb thing to do, that we’re better than that. Vern wasn’t so sure.”
“So what did the guy do when you told him no?” asks Gale.
“The driver got out of the car, cracked open the door, and dropped a Halliburton on my lap. That was when I saw his hair under the Angels cap was blond. Put that in your notebook. Blond hair. And the case was aluminum. Clean stacks of twenties inside, lined up perfectly straight, all the way to the edges. Smelled good. The guy in the passenger seat must have seen me. One-way window maybe, like when you cops interrogate. He said, ‘Yes, Mr. Jeffs, that money on your lap can be yours. And the other twenty-five, when you’re done.’ He said, ‘We think you should give this offer some serious thought.’ I said I’ll think about it, but tell me more about this guy. What did he do to deserve the new look? He said he’s about to cost his partners billions of future dollars. Due to his bad decisions. ‘What company is that?’ I asked. ‘Better you don’t know,’ he says. ‘Better you don’t know anything more about him.’ I said I’d need to know where he works and lives, just for starters. He said, ‘We’ll make sure you have everything you need, Vernon. Call me Steve, by the way. This is Curtis up here driving.’