That was good, though. It gave them some hours to work with, made this thing a hell of a lot easier than it would be if McGrath himself handled the money and they had to go through him and his pack of thug sons to get it. Having Owen serve as the money handler made things much simpler. They’d have the cash in hand from the start. All that remained to be done was to kill Wade.
Shadows loomed in the headlights, and Owen slowed as they approached a group of black men and women walking along the road. They were barefoot, their eyes white in the headlights. One of the women was holding a child in her arms.
Looking for work, Arlen thought. They’re out here wandering in the night, walking barefoot, looking for any form of work they can get. And Solomon Wade is waiting to put nine thousand dollars in a case and send it out to some Cubans on a boat in exchange for a drug that hides your pain-mental or physical varieties. This world.
They roared on past the walking family, two white men in a convertible out here in the backwoods. He wondered what they thought of that. If they took one look and knew that crooked money had bought the car.
“What’ll he do on that day?” Arlen asked. “Wade, I mean.”
“I’ve got no idea. Keep his distance, like I said.”
“Well, I’m going to need to find him. You know where he lives, where he works, that sort of thing?”
Owen gave a nervous nod. He looked over at Arlen, his face pale in the darkness, and said, “You’re really going to kill him.”
Arlen looked away. “I can’t let your sister end up like your father. I can’t let her stay here either.”
“You ever killed anyone before?”
“Killed plenty. Were days in the war I killed quite a few in just an hour.”
“What about away from the war?”
Arlen shook his head.
“Well, I expect it’s awfully different.”
Arlen said, “I don’t.”
“What?”
“It’s taking a life. Any time, and any way, it is always about ending someone’s life. There aren’t a whole lot of degrees to it. Not that I can see at least. People who haven’t done it, they can imagine all these differences. I might agree that the circumstances and defenses for the act shift around a good deal. But that act itself? It doesn’t change.”
“You’re going to kill him,” Owen repeated, as if all the rest of the words had slid past him without impact.
“Yes,” Arlen said. “I’ll kill him, and you’ll take your sister and get the hell away from this place. With the money.”
Owen was silent. They drove along for a while, and then he pulled off the road and set to turning the car around, ready to head back.
“What do you know about the men Wade’s connected to?” Arlen asked.
“Not much. They’re in New Orleans.”
“They the sort that’ll give chase over nine thousand dollars?”
“If they know who to chase.”
Arlen nodded. He expected they’d be looked for, at least in the early days, but with Wade removed he didn’t imagine the hoods in New Orleans would be willing to waste much time on the endeavor. They’d need to install somebody else to take his place, that was all.
“Paul’s getting some of the money,” Arlen said. “Before we do a damn thing, he’s getting some of the money, and he’s getting on a train.”
Owen said, “He thinks he’s going to be here for it. Helping.”
“Well, he won’t be.”
Owen nodded. “How much you figuring on giving him?”
“Enough,” Arlen said. “Enough.”
“What the hell are we supposed to do with the Cubans?”
“Let them sit,” Arlen said. “They never see the lights that signal them that it’s all clear, then they think there’s a problem, and they go on back, right?”
“That’s the point of the signal, I figure.”
“Exactly. So they won’t know what happened, but they’ll know something went wrong. And they’ll be right about that.”
“We’ll need to be gone before nightfall, then,” Owen said. “McGrath and his sons will come down about sunset. They’ll be set up in the inlet, waiting to unload. They’ll be watching everything. That old bastard doesn’t miss much.”
“By the time he gets there, the place will be empty. So, sure, he’ll know something’s up, and what’ll he do? Go looking for Wade. And find his body.”
“Then shit’ll get going fast,” Owen said, taking one hand off the steering wheel and rubbing it over his chin, a nervous gesture.
“What’s to get going? They’ll come looking for us. We’ll be gone.”
“Yeah, we better be. Just where in the hell is it you think we’re going?”
“Does McGrath have a boat that can handle open water?”
“No.”
“All right. You and Rebecca will leave in the boat that day, then. That way if McGrath or one of his sons is keeping an eye on you, they won’t be able to follow anyhow. You know a port town you can get to easy enough where I can pick you up in the car once Wade’s been dealt with?”
“There’s Yankeetown.”
“That’s what we’ll do, then. You take the boat there and wait on me. We’ll use this car at first, but we’re going to have to switch it up fast. All that time you spent at Raiford talking to big-shot cons, you actually learn how to steal a car?”
“I can steal one, sure.”
“Good,” Arlen said. “You’ll need to steal a couple before it’s done.”
Owen didn’t answer.
“You having second thoughts?” Arlen said.
Silence.
“If you are,” Arlen said, “you might think about that box we dug out of the sand again. And you might think about your father.”
This time Owen turned to look at him, and his eyes were steady. “I’m not having any second thoughts.”
“All right.” Arlen turned and let the wind blow into his face and said, “You know where Solomon Wade lives?”
“Yes.”
“Take me there now.”
“Why?”
“I can’t just drive up and kill him,” Arlen said. “It’s going to require the right opportunity. I expect I’ll have to spend a good bit of the day following him. He live alone?”
“He’s got a girl. I don’t know how much she’s there, though.”
“We’ll need to know,” Arlen said. “I’m not hurting anyone else. He’ll need to be alone when I come for him.”
He had a sudden vision of the sheriff of Fayette County and Edwin Main approaching in the night, Arlen standing there at the window watching them come, waiting on them.
“Yes,” he said, “he’ll need to be alone when I come.”
40
THE HOUSE WAS A sprawling plantation-style place about a mile outside of High Town, resting at the end of a long drive bordered with cypress trees. Lights glowed inside a broad expanse of glass that made up one side of the front of the home. Behind it was a carriage house, Wade’s Ford coupe parked in front, along with another car. Arlen didn’t see the second vehicle clearly at first, but then Owen Cady said, “Sheriff is here,” and he remembered it well, remembered sitting in the back with handcuffs around his wrists and a notion that all he needed to do was weather a little bit of a knockabout and he’d be back on the road to Flagg Mountain soon enough.
It was a memory so strong and so strange it seemed the property of another man. Arlen would never see Flagg Mountain again. What had seemed reasonable once was gone now, taken from him by circumstances far from his control. He wondered if Wallace O’Connell and the other men from that train had felt similarly when they realized the hurricane was upon them. He wondered if any of them had remembered him, remembered that night at the station platform when he’d urged them to get off, assured them that danger lay ahead.
They’d all been heading toward powerful storms, he realized. His had just been longer coming, that was all.