I nodded to Becky to get up and she did, then walked her through the boxcar room layout.
In the kitchen, I dangled the keys and said, “You know what wheels these go to?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you drive me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you believe I’ll shoot you if you try anything smart?”
“...Uh-huh.”
“Even try anything dumb, Becky, I’ll shoot you. I’ll be sorry. I’ll feel terrible about it in the morning. But you’ll be fucking dead, understood?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No tears! I like you. I know our relationship will probably not recover from this hiccup, but I do not want to hurt your pretty ass, even if I’ve lost access to it. Ready?”
“Uh-huh.”
Six
We went out the back onto the shallow wooden deck with stairs down to where several cars were parked on the gravel inset. One was my cobalt Chevy Impala, and we could have taken that, but I preferred arriving in a vehicle that was expected.
What Becky led me to was a piece of shit tan mid-’60s Ford Falcon. The best you could say for it was that it was recently washed and not beat up. I unlocked it, opened the driver’s door and she climbed in, then I got in on the other side and handed her the keys. The gun was in my front waistband now, windbreaker unzipped.
“Take me where we’re going,” I said.
She tried nothing smart or dumb on the half-hour ride. For fifteen minutes, we didn’t speak.
Finally I asked her, “Why did you call your friends in? Besides seeing me go in the apartment downstairs from you.”
“You know why,” she said, poutily, driving carefully. Traffic was light but it was a drunk time of night.
“Maybe I do. Give me a hint, though.”
“...Way you handled them numbnuts last night.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean,” she said, shrugging behind the wheel, “you really hurt ’em. Bigger than you, and you left ’em there... bleedin’ and shit.”
“I didn’t like the way they put their hands on you.”
“Thanks for that much.” She gave me a little smile, though her expression remained hurt, like she hadn’t forgiven me yet for not trusting her.
I said, “You figured I wasn’t just anybody.”
“Right. It took somebody to handle them two like that.”
“So who did you report it to?”
“You’ll see.”
No need to try to pry it out of her. She was right — I soon would see.
In a suburb called Ferguson, on a four-lane main drag mixing residential and commercial, she stopped at a light as we approached a little chapel-like church on the corner.
Out front was an old-fashioned black-with-white-letters message board:
Catercorner was a used-car lot and directly across an all-night Deep Rock station, then residential, houses built in the twenties and thirties that had seen better days. The light changed and then we were pulling into a little paved drive between the church and a slumbering Dairy Queen.
Behind the church she slowed to a stop in a gravel lot. Only one other car was parked back here, a white recent-model Lincoln with a Confederate flag decal in the back window and a WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT bumper sticker.
I said to her, “A fucking church?”
She nodded. “You shouldn’t say it that way. It’s sacrilegious.”
“Sorry. I meant to say goddamn church. This explains the two choir boys you brought to see me.”
She glared at me. “You said bring you here. And he is a Christian leader.”
The only thing remotely Christian about this girl was that I’d screwed her in the missionary position.
I came around and opened her door, collected the keys from her, and walked her by the arm to the church’s back door, which was unlocked. Then we were in a little entry area lighted by a small bare bulb with a pull chain. A few uncarpeted stairs led up into a dark sanctuary, some street light entering through stained-glass windows, revealing empty pews. Down to our right were more uncarpeted stairs, a flight of them. She nodded that way.
Hell, not heaven, then.
We went down together, squeezed a bit as we shared the steps, which emptied into a linoleum-floored basement with folding banquet tables that had no doubt seen more than its share of potluck suppers. The fluorescent-light panels in the drop ceiling were off, but small rectangular windows let in enough street-level light to make things out.
At the far end, a wood-paneled wall had various framed Sunday school-type prints and also two doors; under the one at right, light seeped out.
She pointed to that door.
Someone behind it was waiting for me to be brought to him. But no other bully boys in tan work shirts and chinos were waiting here for me, unless they were back there with my would-be host. Or were a bunch of them sitting in the dark upstairs, crouched down in the pews where I hadn’t seen them?
I led her down the central aisle between banquet tables and when we stood at the light-seeping door, I whispered, “Knock.”
She gave it three short raps. “Mr. Starkweather? It’s Becky. I have him right here, sir.”
“Bring him!” came a radio announcer baritone. “Bring him right in.”
She reached for the knob, her eyes querying me and I nodded for her to go ahead. She did and we went in.
It was a decent-sized office, with more rec-room-type paneling and the same drop ceiling and fluorescent panels, though the latter were dark. The only illumination came from a steel flying-saucer-shade lamp with a grooved steel base on the wood-topped, military-green metal desk it rested upon. Many neat stacks of papers were on the desktop as well, beside a blotter and two phones.
Behind the oversize desk sat a medium-sized man in his craggy forties smoking a General MacArthur-style corncob pipe, harsh tobacco smoke hanging in the air like a filthy curtain. As had his minions, he wore a tan shirt but also a black tie, his black hair short-cropped, his complexion pale. A rectangular face bore carved features — cheekbones, slash of black eyebrows, sockets with lamb-dropping eyes, hawk nose, thin wide mouth, prominent jaw — an Indian-chief courtesy of a mediocre wood-carver.
In two seconds, I took it all in. On the wall behind him was an enormous sideways red flag with a swastika in a white circle — doesn’t every good church need a cross? — and left of that a framed print of the famous Sunday school Caucasian Jesus; at right was a framed original portrait in a smeary paint-by-numbers style of Adolph Hitler. A bookcase on the left side wall displayed German war souvenirs, helmets, knives, Lugers next to snazzy holsters; above was a display on blue velvet of Nazi medals.
Consuming the right side wall was an enormous framed black-and-white Korea-era photograph of the man at the desk in a Marine colonel’s dress uniform with a number of medals. A great American soldier who just happened to be president of the Hitler fan club.
His chin came up, and so did his pipe, as he said, “Rebecca — where are Sam and Dave?”
I felt like telling him “Muscle Shoals,” but doubted he’d get it.
“A friend of mine is babysitting them,” I said, answering for her. With the nine millimeter, I gestured to the two metal folding chairs opposite him. “Do you mind?”