“He left.”
“But you saw him.”
“For a minute,” Chip said. “Not even that.” He felt alert but was thinking in slow motion, trying to hold a conversation and make sense, sound convincing without saying too much, Christ, with a federal U.S. marshal creeping around outside. It was hard, it required nerves of fucking steel. He put the patio on the screen-empty in a glare of sunlight-and said, “Look, you don’t know anything, so there’s nothing you can tell him, is there?”
“You mean what I might’ve gotten from you.”
“Exactly, since I haven’t told you anything.”
“But what about what I know,” Dawn said, “without anyone telling me? I’m not going to prison, Chip, for fifteen hundred dollars I don’t even have.”
Chip said, “Jesus Christ.” He said, “Wait.” But she’d already hung up.
He sat listening now, staring at the empty patio. He wanted to smoke another joint and wanted something sweet, hungry again, and wanted to go to the bathroom. He thought of going through the house, the living room, the library, to look outside, all around, but didn’t want to leave the study and be in rooms with windows. He didn’t know how long he could sit here. Or what to do when he heard the sound coming from the sunroom-a rapping sound, four times on a pane of glass-and felt his neck become rigid.
Raylan had taken another walk around the house. He pressed close to the French doors now, hands at his face to block out his reflection looking in at the white-covered furniture and the door across the sunroom that was closed, but showed a line of light beneath it. He reached up and rapped his knuckles against glass, hard, watching the door inside the room, wanting to see it open. He waited a minute before stepping back, and now thought of taking off his hat, putting his fist inside and punching it through a pane of glass. Reach in then and open the French doors, walk over to the door with the light showing underneath and yank it open.
He thought of doing it knowing he wouldn’t. He could cut official corners to call a man out, give him twenty-four hours to leave the county, but couldn’t a walk in a man’s house unless invited, or else with a warrant and bust down the door.
It was the way he was raised, to have good manners. Though a situation one time in particular had set it in his mind as something more than etiquette, back when they were living in a coal camp and the miners struck Duke Power: Raylan walking a picket line most of the year, his dad in the house dying of black lung, and company gun thugs came looking for Raylan’s uncle, his mom’s younger brother, living with them at the time. They came across the street, five of them, a couple with pick handles, and up the walk to where his mother stood on the porch. He remembered she was having trouble with her teeth and they ached her that day. The gun thugs said they wanted to speak to her brother the agitator, set his thinking cap on straight for him. She told them he wasn’t home. They said they intended to look in the house, and if she didn’t move out of the way they would help her. Raylan came out the screen door to stand with his mother and remembered her eyes, the way she looked at him like she’d given up hope. Though it was not in her voice when she told them, “You don’t walk in a person’s home ‘less you’re invited. Even you people must believe that. You have homes, don’t you? Wives and mothers keeping house? This is our home and I’m not inviting you in.” They shoved her aside and hit Raylan with the pick handles to put him down; they went through the house and out the back, empty-handed.
Her words hadn’t stopped them. No, what they did was stick in Raylan’s mind-her words, her quiet tone of voice-and stop him, more than twenty years later, from breaking into this man’s house.
Walking away he had a strange thought. What if he wrote Harry a letter and sent it to this address?
“How can this guy be a crook,” Louis said, “he does everything the same always.”
“They no different than other people,” Bobby said. “I learn that skip tracing. Get to know the guy’s habits, he’s yours.”
They sat in Bobby’s black Cadillac on South County in Palm Beach, the golf course where Ben King played every afternoon on both sides of the road. They were waiting for the S&L crook to finish the first hole and cross the road in his golf cart to play number two, the guy always alone. “Thoughtful of him, huh?” Louis said. Nobody wanting to play with him now, associate with a man up on charges to defraud, embezzle, and maybe a few other things, out on a half-million dollars’ worth of bail put up by three different bondsmen.
They had parked by the clubhouse to watch him tee off. “Still having trouble with that slice,” Louis said. “But he’s all right. First three holes, you any good at all, they no such thing as a bad lie.”
Bobby said, “You telling me you play this course?” his tone saying bullshit.
“I caddied here when I first come over, skinny little boy, the golf bags bigger than I was.”
They pulled around to South County to watch Mr. King approach the green and putt out the first hole.
“There he is,” Louis said now, “marking his card. I bet you the man cheats.”
They watched him get into a green golf cart and cross South County in front of them.
“Man’s big,” Louis said. “You notice? Must go two hundred and I bet thirty pounds. What do you say?”
“About what?”
“How much he weighs.”
“I don’t give a fuck what he weighs.”
“Man takes up the whole cart,” Louis said, “going with pink and white today. The cigar, the sun visor-wants you to know he’s a big important motherfucker, why he smokes the cigar all the time. Chip say he stole money right out of his own company, put it in land deals, put it in offshore banks in the Caymans. Sold mortgages he didn’t even hold to different banks. How you expect to get away with shit like that? Stole money out of trust accounts, like old retired people had their money in? Wiped them out. Chip say, ‘I think of my poor mother, if it ever happened to her.’ What he’s thinking, there wouldn’t be no money for her to leave him. It’s why he wants this S&L man,” Louis said, his gaze following the green cart. “And off he goes.”
Once King was across South County, Bobby put the Cadillac in drive, crept up to the next intersection and turned left into a private road, this one narrow and shaded dark with tall pines lining both sides. “Hole’s a three-hundred and fifty-six yard par four,” Louis said, looking at it right there on their left. “Go up about halfway. You see those bushes out there, with the red flowers?”
“Hibiscus,” Bobby said.
“They put them every hundred and fifty yards so the gentlemen know where they at, what club to use.”
“Here he comes,” Bobby said, looking at his outside mirror, the green cart approaching along a path close to them, on the other side of the pines.
“Sliced it again,” Louis said. “I been counting on his slice, keep him over on this side of the fairway. See, but he underclubbed it. The shot plays longer’n you think. The man oughta know better.”
“How far was his drive?”
“About one-eighty. He won’t be on in two, and that’s good, how we want it. Let’s see where his second shot goes.” Louis turned to look back through an opening in the trees. “He’s lining it up. Slice the motherfucker, will you, please, so we don’t have to go out on the fairway?” Louis waited, still turned in the seat to watch. And smiled. “Man is stuck with that vicious slice. You see it?”
“It’s right up there,” Bobby said, “in the trees. I didn’t see it go through.”
Louis had turned to look ahead, not smiling now, but pleased and anxious. He said, “Thank you, Jesus, for delivering this big-ass millionaire to us. Where is he… he coming?”
“Pretty soon,” Bobby said. “He’s in his cart.”