Buck wouldn’t recognize that name, Brandon Williams, one of the three hardcases that had just bust out of Stoneveldt outside town, leaving behind them one dead inmate and a lot of aching heads. Buck wouldn’t know it, what had all those police dispatchers talking so fast, ordering this car that way, that car this way, but Goody would. And where else would old Brandon go now, when he had to lay as low as a footprint, except to his sister Maryenne? And where else would Goody go, to see the boy?
Maryenne lived in a third floor back with her grandmother and her sister and her sister’s boyfriend and her baby Vernon and her sister’s two babies. Maryenne didn’t have a boyfriend right now that Goody knew of, so he thought he might move in for a while, see how that would play, make life easy while he waited for old Brandon.
When he got there and knocked on the door — the street door downstairs wasn’t locked because the pushbuttons in the apartments hadn’t worked for thirty years — it was opened by a short heavy girl with a baby on her hip. “I’m Goody,” he told her. “Maryenne’s expecting me.”
She gave him the look she probably gave every man since she got the baby — I know your type, keep your distance — and said, “If she’s expecting you, come on in.”
He went on in, and the living room was full of them, young mamas and their babies. It looked as though Maryenne had brought her whole reading group from the family center, and maybe that was supposed to be a hint to Goody that she wasn’t of a mood for romance, but that was okay. He could be the friend of the family, work just as well, be there in moments of need, like when old Brandon showed his face.
It wasn’t only that Maryenne had her whole reading group here, they’d all brought their books, too, and there they were, all over the room, on the couch and the chairs and the floor, babies in their laps, books in their hands, reading out loud. They were all quiet about it, but there sure were a lot of them, and it reminded him of the sound of the pigeons on the roof, in a big cage room that had been on top of one of the buildings where he’d lived when he was a kid, ten or eleven years ago. The guy that owned the pigeons was a bus driver, and he didn’t mind if Goody or some of the other kids came up there with him sometimes, hang out with the pigeons. He and his wife didn’t have any kids of their own, Goody remembered.
Huh; maybe that was why he had the pigeons.
Maryenne was in a chair by the switched-off TV set, Vernon in her lap. Vernon was about a year old now, and Goody couldn’t for the life of him see what the point was in mamas reading to babies that little that they didn’t know anything yet, but it was supposed to do some kind of good or another and everybody believed in it, so maybe so. Vernon was going to need all the help he could get anyway; his papa was Eldon, who’d got himself killed in that bank he was in with old Brandon. The one thing Goody definitely didn’t ever want Maryenne to know was that he’d been Eldon’s dealer, including on that final day.
“Say there,” Goody said, and walked around a lot of mamas and babies to grin at Maryenne up close. She was a nice girl, a lot younger than old Brandon, he being their mama’s first and Maryenne being her last.
She was nice, and she was young, but she also had that same look on her face as the one that had opened the door to him. “You got some kind of news, Goody?” she asked him.
The news was going to be known by everybody in this room, and in this city, soon enough, but Goody wanted it to start off a special secret just between the two of them; the beginning of that closeness he’d need until old Brandon showed up. So he said, “Come on in the kitchen, Maryenne, let me tell you just you.”
“There’s nothing you can’t tell me here,” she said. She still held the book up — thin, bright colors, called The Very Red Butterfly — like she wanted Goody done and gone so she could get back to reading, like she was in a hurry to know how the story would come out.
He put a solemn face on and said, “I think you’d want me to tell this to just you, Maryenne.”
So then she treated him a little more seriously, becoming worried, saying, “Is it something bad?”
“You tell me. Come on, girl.”
Fretful, she got to her feet, dropping the book on her chair, moving Vernon over onto her hip. He would have preferred to talk with her without Vernon, but he realized it would be pushing his luck to try for that, so he just led the way through the cooing mamas out the door, down the hall, and on down to the kitchen doorway, where he stopped, because the grandmother was in there, seated at the kitchen table, reading an astrology magazine.
Goody turned back. “We’ll talk here,” he said, keeping his voice low, and moving so he’d be out of the grandmother’s sight, away from the doorway.
Maryenne was burning with curiosity and worry: “What is it, Goody? Come on.”
“Brandon,” he said. “Him and two other guys, they just bust outa the jail.”
She stared at him. She didn’t seem to know how to react, except to stare at his face, as though to memorize it. Even Vernon stopped his usual gnawing on his fist to look at Goody, his expression thoughtful and a little skeptical.
“Maryenne? You hear what I said?”
“It was that man,” she said. She sounded awed.
He frowned at her. “What man?”
“Chili Greebs brought him around,” she said. Chili Greebs owned a bar not far from here, was in and out of different kinds of businesses. She said, “A white man. Chili said he was all right, and I was supposed to pass on a message to Brandon when I visited, that there was a white man in there with him named Kasper that he could trust.”
“Huh,” Goody said.
“But I thought it was just to help each other in there,” she said. “I didn’t know they meant this.”
Goody said, “You know what it means, don’t you?”
“They’re gonna kill him.” she whispered.
“Waddaya mean, kill him?” Goody demanded. “That’s not what’s gonna happen.”
“They’re gonna hunt him down,” she whispered, “and they’re gonna kill him.” Her eyes were filling.
“No, but that’s why I come here,” Goody told her. “Cause we can help. You and me, with you and me on the case, they’re never gonna find him.”
Finally he had her attention. Frowning, she said, “What do you mean, you and me?”
“Where’s he gonna come?” Goody asked her. “He’s gonna need help now, lie low, get out of this state, probly get outa the whole country, get to Mexico, South America, somewhere. He can’t do that on his own, and who’s he gonna turn to? His favorite sister, that’s who. There’s no place else he’s gonna turn.”
She thought about it. “He’ll call,” she decided. “He won’t come here, because they’d catch him, but he’ll call.”
“And that’s when,” Goody said, “you send him to me.”
“To you? Why to you?”
“Don’t you think the cops’re gonna be keepin an eye on you? Don’t you think they know who you are, where you are? But you’re right, Brandon’s gonna call, and when he does, you send him to me, cause the cops don’t know about me, and we can work it out together.”
She was frowning again. She said, “Why you wanna do that?”
“Cause I always liked old Brandon,” he told her. “And I always liked you. And I was playing with my police scanners, and I heard the first report, so I know I’m ahead of the news here, and you and me can plot and plan before anybody else even knows anything.”
She nodded, thinking about it. Then she said, “It’s for sure, now. He broke out.”
“It’ll be on the news,” he told her, “the first anybody else knows about it. It’ll be on the news. What time is it? Half an hour, it’ll be on the news.”