“Were you with her when … your wife … was assassinated?”
“I was in the car behind her. Annie Maggie never thought about politics. She thought about cooking. She thought about the various kinds of fruits, and cheeses, and sauces, new potatoes and cutlets.”
“Was she fat?”
“No.”
“And you’re alone here now, on the farm?”
“I was going to apologize to you for all my questions,” Fletch said.
“Oh, I knew you know how to ask questions.”
“You were expecting my questions, weren’t you?”
“You were a reporter.”
“Aren’t I still?”
Jack flicked a hand at the study’s walls. “I don’t know any reporter who lives this way. Why don’t you have any paintings by Edgar Arthur Tharp?”
“Who can afford them? Besides, I spent years working on Tharp. One likes to think one can come to the end of something.” He opened a desk drawer. He took out of it a pistol. From a separate, locked drawer, he took out the pistol’s cartridge and a box of shells. “You know all this about me from newspapers and your mother, is that it?”
He crossed the study and put the pistol on Jack’s lap. He placed the cartridge and the box of shells on the coffee table beside the tray.
Jack asked, “What’s this?”
“A pistol,” Fletch answered.
Jack sat up, with the pistol still on his shorts. “I know that. I mean, what are you doing?”
“Giving you a pistol.”
“Why?” Besides having the pistol in his lap, Jack was touching no part of it. “Are you trying to trick me?”
“Would I do that?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“You weren’t with me in the Jeep when I came to that roadblock. Nor were you mentioned. An hour later, when the deputies arrived, you were here. How did you get here? Where’s your vehicle? People here don’t really, really believe frogs drop from the sky in a hard rain. The cops must have a description of you. I want you armed. If the counties come back knowing who you are, I want you to have the decency to tell them you have been holding me and—me captive. Load it.”
Jack put his hand into the box of shells. “You still have your pistol.”
“I can make it disappear faster than you can inhale a tuna sandwich.”
Jack concentrated on loading the cartridge.
Fletch said, “Aiding a fugitive from justice is against the law.”
“How about arming one?”
“You’re not going to shoot anybody.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Jack put only five shells into the cartridge. He put the cartridge down.
“Load the cartridge into the gun,” Fletch said.
Again watching himself carefully, Jack slid the cartridge into the handgun’s grip.
“Aren’t you going to put a bullet into the chamber?” Fletch asked.
“Later.” Jack placed the handgun on the divan beside him.
The brass knocker on the front door banged more than a half dozen times. Fletch smiled. He said: “Hark.”
He pulled his shirt out over the butt of the gun in his waistband.
On the front porch stood a short, fat, balding man in prison denims. From head to foot and side to side he was covered with mud and manure. He squinted through filthy, askew, steamed glasses.
“You’re Kris Kriegel, the escaped murderer?” Fletch asked.
“Yeah.”
“Go around back.”
Fletch slammed the door just as the man stepped toward it.
Going back into the study, Fletch said to Jack, “It’s someone for you.” The handgun he had given Jack was not in sight. “I sent him around back. If you can’t keep the shit out of the house, at least keep the mud out. Mud the cops will notice.”
5
On the bed, Carrie was sitting on Fletch, still in the position in which both had climaxed.
“I could sit here forever,” Carrie said, “feeling you inside me. What would you do if I sat here forever?”
On his back, Fletch shrugged. “Send out for Chinese, I guess.”
Laughing, Carrie fell to her side on the rumpled bed-sheets.
Climbing the stairs, Fletch had said to Jack, who was going along the hallway below him toward the back of the house, “I’m going to sleep.”
He did not sleep.
He had rapped lightly on the bedroom door and said, softly, “All escaped convicts are chickens.”
When he inserted his head around the door frame into the dawn-lit room, Carrie’s big, blue eyes were on high beam.
The shotgun was on the bed with her, aimed at the door. The index finger of her left hand was on the trigger.
Fletch laughed.
He closed the door behind him.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“All things being relative.”
Fletch took off his clothes and got onto the bed. “You’re not ready to go downstairs yet, are you?” he asked.
“No.”
She proved it.
Then, curled beside him, she asked, “Have we had any visitors?”
“Yeah. Santa Claus just showed up at the front door.”
“Hate to tell you this, Yankee, but Santa doesn’t come in the summertime.” She giggled and punched Fletch in the ribs.
“Poor him. His name is Kris Kriegel. He’s short, fat—”
Her head snapped back for a better look at Fletch’s full face. “You’re serious.”
“Yeah. He’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“Kris Kriegel.”
“One of the convicts! I thought I heard a pounding on the front door. It woke me up.”
“Guess he couldn’t find one of the chimneys. Two of the other convicts I guess are still hiding out in the gully.”
“What gully? The big gully…?” She moved her head to indicate direction. “… Yonder?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know they’re there?”
“I sent them there, to hide. Michael and Will came for the Jeep. They patrolled the place pretty well.”
“The gully.” Carrie made a face. “During the storm?”
“You care?”
“Why there? You knew that would turn into a ragin’ flood. God, the snakes!”
“To wear them all out. If we’re gonna have escaped felons around here, we might as well have exhausted ones.”
“Have them around here! Why didn’t you shoot them? Why didn’t you turn them all in? You said Michael and Will were here.” She sat up, cross-legged on the bed. Instantly, she was picking her fingers.
“Because of Jack.”
“Who’s jack?”
“Carrie, I think he’s my son.”
Her head snapped to look at him.
He sat up, too. “I knew a woman, once, named Crystal Faoni. She was a journalist, too.” Fletch spoke rapidly. “At a journalists’ convention we made love, once. This boy’s name is John Fletcher Faoni. He’s one of the escaped convicts. Or, at least, he says that’s his name. He seems to know about Crystal, about me.”
“Faoni.” She spoke slowly. “You recognized his name last night, at the roadblock. That’s why you began making sandwiches when you got home.”
“It’s not that common a name.”
“Your son!? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I mean, why didn’t you ever tell me you have a son?”
“I never knew he existed until he walked through the French doors of the study last night. Crystal is one of these women who wanted to have the baby, raise the child on her own. I believe that’s true.”
“She never let you know?”
“No.”
“Are you upset about that?”
“Of course.”
“How did you know he likes tuna puffs?”
Always Fletch was amazed at the acuity of Carrie’s questions. Next to hers, District Attorney Alston Chambers’s questions were vague. “Last night he would have eaten re-fried roadkill.”
She put her hand on his forearm. “I’m sorry.”
“Attempted murder,” Fletch said. “He took a shot at a cop.”
“E=MC2!” Such was Carrie’s expletive. She considered the theory of relativity the most outlandish thing she had ever heard of.
She looked out the window. “It’s stopped raining.”
“I think it will be a bright, hot day.”
“The fields got a good wetting,” she said.
“It flattened the corn.”
“It will spring up again.” She got up off the bed. “Why are you putting up with this? Even if he is, maybe, your son, he tried to kill someone; I mean, you have no responsibility for him. How old is he?”
“Curiosity.”
“You know what curiosity did to the orangutan.”
“What did curiosity do to the orangutan?”
“Go ask him. He’s still sitting over in the Memphis Zoo. You saw how hellfire angry he still is.”
“You heard the sheriff last night. For some reason, these escapees went well out of their way to come here, to this farm, this house, specifically. This kid, Jack, led them here. Why?”
Carrie said, simply: “To kill you.”
“Why?”
“You’re his father. You popped his mother and left her. You ignored him all his life.”
“No,” Fletch said. “He knows I never knew of his existence. The only thing is, well, I never called Crystal, an old friend, and said, How’re ya doin’? That’s not a capital crime.”
“This is a crazy, mixed-up kid. He shot a cop.”
“Shot at a cop. Supposedly.”
She looked down at him. “What do you mean, ‘supposedly’?”
“He said he fired a .32 at her. I just gave him my .32 to load. I watched him. It seemed to me he had to figure out how to load it. I don’t think he knew how to chamber a bullet. He seemed to have a revulsion toward the gun.”
“He should have,” Carrie snapped. “What would you expect? And he shot at a woman cop?”
“Blue is blue,” Fletch said. “I guess.”
“You’re making up excuses,” she said. “You think he’s your son, and you’re trying to like him.” She was reading Fletch’s face. “You think this boy has anything but green water between his ears?”
Fletch thought of the conversation he and Jack had had about Pinto. “Enough to be a pest.”
Forearms folded over her breasts, Carrie said, “These bastards. In this house!”
“There are still two outside. I guess I ought to go get them. Bring them in.”
“Into this house?”
“This old house has been occupied by worse, I expect,” Fletch said. “Yankees, probably.”
Carrie was listening. “What’s that? Someone playing the radio?”
“Someone playing the guitar.”
“Who?”
“Jack.”
“Jack!” she expostulated. “You call his name just as if he’s someone you know.”
“I’m getting to know him,” Fletch said. “A little bit.”
They listened to the acoustic guitar being played downstairs.
Carrie said, “He plays beautifully.”
“So he does.”
“Still,” Carrie said, uncertainly. “I think you ought to call the sheriff and have them all picked up. Including your Jack. If he shot at a cop, he needs nothin’ more than bein’ put in a pit with fire ants.” She was looking across the bed at the telephone.
“By the way,” Fletch said. “The phones are dead. They cut the wires.”
“I didn’t think they came here to cook, clean, and paint fences. Does your cellular phone work?”
“Yes. But I don’t want them to know I have it. I want to get these guys out of here before the telephone company discovers the wires have been cut. I told Will and Michael last night I’m driving Jack to the University of North Alabama this morning.”
“They saw him? They met him?”
“They even talked with him. He was as smooth as a Mississippi River stone. Michael even invited him fishing.”
“You passed him off as your son?”
“I sweet-talked ‘em. A little.”
“So you’re stuck, aren’t you. You’re as stuck as the smile on a beauty queen’s face.”
“Except I gave Jack the .32. So he can hold us captive. If the cops come back.”
“Say what?” Wide-eyed, she was looking down at him sitting cross-legged on the bed. “You done real good,
Fletch. You’ve brought fugitive felons, murderers and suchlike, into this house, and armed them! Against ourselves! Against the cops! When you came into this room, didn’t I ask you if everything was all right?”
“And I said, All things being relative.”
“That was a joke?” In fact, Carrie did smile.
“Carrie, this kid wants something from me. How do I know what to believe? How do you know what to believe?”
“He wants you to save his ass.”
“Maybe. I think it’s worth stringing him along a little, extending myself, to find out what, why.”
Picking her fingers, listening to the guitar, Carrie said, “You’re always playing, Fletch. You still think you can handle anything. Everything.”
“No. In fact, I don’t. There are just things here that don’t add up. I want to know why.”
Looking through the window again, Carrie said, “If we’re gonna give these felons breakfast, we’ll need the eggs from the henhouse.”
“I’ll get them!” Fletch sprang off the bed. “I allus obeys Ms. Carrie.”