“We square?” I ask, after a few moments in which nothing needed to be said.
“I guess we are,” she says dreamily. “Too bad you’ve got to go runnin’ off though. I like talkin’ to you. You ain’t nothin’ like your boy.”
That’s hardly a revelation.
“Maybe when this is over,” she says. “If it ever is, and if you don’t end right along with it.”
“Where did he go?”
“The Reverend’s house,” she says.
“Why there?”
“Beats me.”
This puzzles me. I can’t figure out what he’d want up there, unless Hill had something he needs. Or something Cadaver instructed him to get. But what?
“I’m sorry.”
She raises her eyebrows. “What for?”
“For…” I don’t know how to apologize for thinking her nothing but a common whore. Don’t know how to apologize for a scar I didn’t give her, or for my son’s casual and tactless confessions. Or for the fact that this whole town’s gone to seed and I never once tried to stop it. And the only reason I’m saying a goddamn thing at all is because I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to say it again.
“Sheriff?”
But there are no words, and if there are, I don’t know them, so I do what any man does when what he feels he has to say gets lodged like a chicken bone in his throat.
I tip my hat and leave.
Chapter Eleven
Hendricks opens the door to a scarecrow in a top hat.
“What?” he asks, unwilling to extend even the pretense of courtesy to a man he once caught urinating on his doorstep.
“Doc,” Kirk Vess says, crossed eyes wide. “You’re awake, good. That’s good.” As he searches for words that seem to be dangling just beyond his grasp, he snatches his hat from his head, revealing a greasy nest of hair that resembles a mound of limp noodles heaped atop a dirty upended bowl. Beneath the pallid brow and contradictory eyes, a single drop of clear snot, sweat, or water dangles from the tip of a fishhook nose, which in turn presides over an impossibly wide mouth, packed to capacity with thin black teeth. Hendricks has often wondered, judging by his scars and the man’s erratic behavior, if Vess, at some point in his unremarkable life, donated his brain to science. It summons the comical image of a bunch of perplexed medical students clustered around a stainless steel pan wherein stews Vess’s brain. Good lord, it shouldn’t be that shape should it? one might inquire, while another asks, Where’s the rest of it?
Of Vess, he knows very little, except that the man is homeless and given to outbursts of violence, and that come autumn, he will disappear, to reappear in the first week of winter. What he does during this absence is unknown, but there are few, if any, folks in Milestone who care enough to ask.
“Good, good,” Vess says again, fingering with pale tapered fingers the brim of a hat as flaccid as the man himself. He wears a coat torn at the elbows and frayed at the hem, the lapels encrusted with a substance of some indeterminate origin. He reeks of urine, alcohol and vomit, from his scabrous scalp to his sole-less boots.
“What are you doing here?” Hendricks snaps. “If you’ve come to beg…”
Vess squints, leans in a little as if unsure of what’s been said, then gasps and raises his hands, the hat flopping wildly as he protests. “No sir, no sir. Not money. What am I doing here? Big question. Keep asking it and no one has an answer. Course, they couldn’t really.” He shakes his head, dismissing a thought that perhaps didn’t even make sense to him. “I didn’t want to bother you for nothing, truth be told. But I had to ask someone who’d know where it might have come from or who might own it.”
Annoyed, and loath to waste any more time on this odious creature, Hendricks takes a step back, intending to close to door. Vess’s pleas stop him. “No, wait! Sorry, sir. Just a tick. A sweep of sixty, please. I’ll show it to you.” He starts to rummage around in his pockets, which look flat and empty. “I kept it safe as I could, but it looks dead a long time.”
Intrigued despite himself, yet fully expecting the man will produce a dead rodent from one of those pockets, Hendricks only closes the door half way, just enough to let Vess know if this is some ridiculous scheme, it will be revealed to the morning breeze and a quiet street, but not a gullible doctor.
Frustrated, Vess begins to chastise himself in what sounds like an alien dialect. “Fffteck! Shlassen shlack!” Then with an apologetic look, he calms himself and reaches into the inside pocket of his coat. “Yes, yes. I knew it. I’m a fool,” he says and slaps a grubby palm against his forehead hard enough to make Hendricks jump. “Yes, hidden and safe,” Vess tells him and withdraws from the pocket a small brown bundle, which Hendricks mistakes for a stubby cigar. But as he prepares a suitably bemused tone with which to deliver his verdict, Vess, pale worm-like tongue poking from between his teeth, reverently unwraps the small parcel and holds it up, inches from the doctor’s face.
“I found more, but I wasn’t sure whether disturbing it was a good idea. I don’t need no ghosts on my tail. Isn’t that right? Not when I’m out of place.”
Hendricks doesn’t answer. Instead, ignoring the smell from the man, he adjusts his spectacles and steps closer.
“Told her I’d bring it back before she even know’d it was gone. Have to respect women you know. Even I know that and I’ve forgotten a lot.”
Hendricks raises his eyes and appraises the man anew, not because he has developed any kind of respect or admiration for his guest, but because he is now as suspicious and wary of Vess as he would be toward any man who showed up at his door with the remains of a human finger in his pocket.
Iris is on my mind as I steer the truck out of Winter Street. Woman like that makes me think of the future, no matter what she does for a living or how screwed up she may be because of it. Makes me want to help her, to fix her somehow, and in the process maybe fix myself. And that doesn’t make a lick of sense. I don’t know a damn thing about her except that she’s a whore, that she’s been with any number of men, including my son, and I’m not sure that’s something I wouldn’t see in her every time she smiled at me.
I can’t shake the feel of her lips on mine, though. It’s enough to distract me, take me away from the cruelty I’ve brought down on myself, to a place where everything isn’t sharp edges and pain, death and ruin. A place I’d like to stay, and might have, if Brody hadn’t just jerked me out of my thoughts.
“Check that out,” he says, sounding amused. “There’s someone out there.”
I check the rearview to see where he’s looking and then I spot it.
I’m a little ways past Hendricks’ place when I slam down hard enough on the brakes to make the truck shudder into a fishtail. The smoke from scalded rubber sweeps past my window.
“Jesus,” Brody groans, grunting as he shifts himself back onto the seat.
Bloodshot dawn glares at me from over the hills.
Between this road and the river, there’s a field. Dan Cannon, the previous occupant of the house Doc Hendricks now calls home, used to grow corn there. Now it’s barren and yields only a harvest of rocks. Tonight, someone has lit a fire in there a few feet from an oak tree with spindly branches that was the bane of Cannon’s prematurely short existence, and from here, I can see a figure moving sluggishly around it, the flames revealing a craggy ruined face I’m too afraid to admit I know, disfigurement and all.