I watched a middle-aged couple come out of the store and make their way toward a dusty sedan, pushing a cart filled with plastic sacks-out grocery shopping late on a Saturday night. There was something odd and yet sweetly sensible about it.
"I'm starting to realize that I was wrong about you," Balcomb finally said, with the weariness in his voice again. "Your real problem is not that you're a petty criminal. You're completely unhinged. But I have far too much on my plate to be mired down in something like this. What is it you want?"
See which way he jumps.
"You drop all charges first thing Monday and pay my bail," I said. "We'll call the lumber a wash. Maybe it wasn't mine, but you'd have just thrown it away."
"What guarantee do I have that you won't stir up more trouble?"
"I never stirred up any trouble to start with. And I don't ever want any fucking thing to do with you again. You can believe that."
Another blast of that frozen stillness came across the phone, as clear as if it had turned my ear blue.
"Consider it done," he said.
The connection ended.
18
I got into my truck, shaking like I had after mixing it up with Doug Wills. As I drove, I tried to balance off the plays in this nasty little game. I'd shown my hole card, but so had Balcomb. The fact that he'd given in was as good as an admission. I didn't have the photos I'd claimed, but he hadn't asked to see them-another sign that his denial was a bullshit show. It was going to cost him a couple of thousand dollars, but that was nothing to him. I'd lost the lumber, but it wasn't coming out of my pocket.
I wasn't naive enough to trust Balcomb, like I would have when I was younger. I'd grown up with the dinosaur ethic of somebody's word being everything. It was the way you lived, how you were judged by other people-who you were. Eventually, I'd wised up enough to realize how differently a lot of the world saw it. Promises were empty, lures with sucker punches behind them, to be chuckled about later in a boardroom or four-star restaurant. He was powerful, rich, cunning in a way I could never touch. I hadn't forgotten his threat about my being out of my league. And whatever the reasons might have been for that butchery, the chill factor was off the charts.
I just hoped that Madbird's bluff would prove out, and the risk of exposure would spook Balcomb enough, in turn, to get off my case.
I didn't know if Sarah Lynn would still be awake, but I was carrying the wad of cash I'd brought from my place and I wanted to pay her back. She lived not far away, in the hills east of the capital, so I figured I'd drive by and see. I could have waited for Monday-Bill LaTray would refund her twenty-five hundred after Balcomb paid him. But my sense of honor had taken a serious pounding, and I was going to feel a little better if I made a point of settling the debt right away.
I stopped at an ATM to clean out the seven hundred bucks in my bank account, and learned something I'd never known-I had a daily limit of two hundred, and that was all the son of a bitch would give me. I decided it was the thought that counted, and drove on to Sarah Lynn's.
Her house was modern and expensive, two-level, with a rock facade on the lower one. I knew that she and her ex had owned it together until they'd split the sheets. She'd married the kind of guy she wanted-the son of the local John Deere dealer, who had a cosmetic job working for his father. They had plenty of money and they lived well. But he was a small-town playboy, content to collect his easy checks and spend them on golf, skiing, and other women. Sarah Lynn put up with all that for a long time and probably would have kept on, except that she'd wanted children and they didn't come. Her doctors assured her that she was fine, biologically. She'd pushed her ex to get tested, but after a lot of hedging, he finally flat refused, unwilling to allow the possibility that there might be any trouble with his manhood.
"There were half a dozen problems all the time-like cats in a sack, fighting to get out," she'd told me once. "It took all I had to handle them, but I could. Then that one more came along, and everything blew up."
Now she'd been single for several years-had gone through the shock of divorce, the first acute loneliness, the period of getting used to it, and then the realization that this was how things were likely to stay. There weren't many eligible men around, and she was choosy.
The front picture window was dimly lit. Behind the curtains I could see the flicker of a TV screen. I rang the bell. A few seconds later, she turned on the porch light and opened the door cautiously, just the few inches that the chain allowed.
"Candygram," I said, and held up the sheaf of bills.
She smiled and closed the door to release the chain.
When she opened it again, I could see that she hadn't been kidding about her plans for a big Saturday night. She was wearing a white terry-cloth robe. The TV was showing an old movie, the couch was a nest of pillows and comforters, and a half-full glass of wine was sitting on the coffee table.
"It's a little short of two thousand," I said, handing her the money. "I'll get you the rest Monday."
"I told you not to worry about it."
"I want to keep my credit good, in case I have to hit you up again."
Her gaze sharpened. "I hope that's a joke."
"Me, too."
"You still owe me that story."
"Any time," I said.
There was an awkward little pause.
"I'd ask you in, Huey, but it wouldn't be a good idea," she said.
"I know."
She smiled again, a trace sadly this time, and touched a fingertip to the scar under my eye.
"You ever going to forgive me for this?" she said.
"I never blamed you."
"You did in a way-you just wouldn't admit it. And in a way, it was my fault."
"You didn't have anything to do with it, Slo. I dodged left when I should have dodged right. That's all there is to it."
"I was being a selfish little girl."
"That's the best kind of selfish I've ever run across," I said.
For a second, I thought she might change her mind and invite me to stay. Instead, her smile turned wry.
"You've still got the blarney, Davoren," she said, and closed the door, politely but definitely.
The reason I'd come here was to give her the money, and that was the truth. But I admitted that there'd been a fantasy in the depths of my mind that we'd end up in bed. I'd been subsisting for the past years on occasional one-nighters and even rarer connections that lasted a while longer, but never held. That had worn thin to the point where it was almost more trouble than it was worth. Something in me understood that no longer caring about getting laid was a bad sign.
Tonight, with her, it would have been natural and easy-and I knew that was why she hadn't gone for it. It wasn't just that I looked like a goat and smelled worse. She was in the same situation as me, only more vulnerable, and this would have been a dangerous step toward another heartache.
I walked back to my truck, filled with morose admiration for her good sense.
19
As I started the pickup's engine, I couldn't help glancing across the seat at a dent in the passenger door panel. It had come into being the same night as my scar, and Sarah Lynn was right-irrational though it was, I couldn't help connecting the two things.
Toward the end of Christmas break my junior year in college, she and I had driven this truck to the town of Rocky Boy, on the Chippewa-Cree reservation up near the Canadian border. They were hosting an AAU boxing tournament and I was on my way to face another light heavyweight, Harold Good Gun.
It was a Saturday afternoon in early January. A chinook had sprung up two days earlier, a freak warm wind that stripped snow from the fields, leaving streaks of dark earth through the cover of winter. The sky was the color of frost, with no visible horizon. From Wolf Creek to Fort Benton, the highway followed the Missouri northeast. We could see it most of the way, winding through the bleak landscape, thawing in stretches that shone metallic gray in the flat afternoon light. Small white crosses marked the roadsides where people had died in car wrecks. Sometimes there'd be several of them in a cluster.