"We can't just sit on it," I argued. "They fuckin' murdered them."
"So we handle it ourselves," she said. "We did once before."
I thought about the two bodies and what would be the now-rusty guns piled in the unmarked grave in West Virginia. Yeah, by God, we had handled it before, and it made me sick to think about. Not that we could have done anything different.
"I gotta think," I said. "We can't just let it go."
"OK, but please, please, we don't tell Marvel or John what happened. We don't tell anybody. This is for us, man." She was looking up at me and it occurred to me how small she was. "An investigation would drag us out in the open."
"For us." I threw an arm around her head and tightened up in a wrestler's headlock. She wrapped her inside arm around my waist. Not your basic Gone With the Wind clinch, but it felt right.
"Bobby will talk to them, tell them he called us."
"So we tell them that we went out to Dessusdelit's house, saw no sign of Harold's car, so we just kept going," LuEllen suggested. "We looked around for a while, checked animal control, but there just wasn't anything to see."
"Jesus." I ran my hand through my hair. There was an impulse to go out on the bow, take off the lines, and head south. That was impossible now.
LuEllen looked at me closely. "Kidd, sometimes you have these. impulses. to do the right thing. You've got to keep them under control. There's not a goddamned thing we can do for Harold or that woman. Nothing that would be worth going to prison for."
"I'd better call Marvel."
"What for?"
I shrugged. "To start working both ends against the middle."
Marvel was frantic.
"I don't know," I kept saying. I suggested that she and her friends start hunting for Harold's car.
"You don't think he's hurt?"
"You know these people better than I do," I said, a sour taste in my mouth.
"All right. We'll get people out looking. Maybe I ought to go over to Dessusdelit's house, confront her-"
"No, no. Don't do that. If they have done something with Harold, you could be in trouble. Especially the way they've got the cops fixed. The best thing is, find him. Find his car. Figure out what happened. But don't do anything to derail the plan. If worse comes to worst, and something happened to him, it's more important than ever that we take the town."
It occurred to me that none of us was using the words killed, murdered, and dead. It was if something happened. if he's hurt.
The day dragged by. Marvel launched her search, while LuEllen processed her film and began printing.
"You want something to weep about, look at these," she said when she came out of the bathroom/darkroom. She was printing on RC paper to cut the wash time, and the prints were still soft and damp. She laid them out on the table like grotesque place mats.
The killings were graphically portrayed, as real as anything I'd seen from Vietnam, Beirut, or Salvador. She laid them out in sequence, from the time Hill and St. Thomas came out the door carrying Harold's body to the instant when the murder gun hit the river. If LuEllen had been a newspaper photographer, she'd have had a Pulitzer locked up.
"Christ, it could be out of the thirties; even the people look the same. Hill's got that haircut, those short-sleeve shirts."
You couldn't quite see the pores in Hill's face when he pulled the trigger on Sherrie, but close enough. If the photos ever got into court, they'd send the two men to the electric chair.
LuEllen slumped in a chair. "I'm feeling pretty bad for a cowgirl."
LuEllen had processed both the negatives and the prints wearing vinyl gloves, and I carefully avoided touching them, even when they were dry. Photo material is notorious for picking up and preserving fingerprints. When I was done looking at them, we sealed the prints inside a plastic garbage bag and taped them to the underside of a drawer.
Marvel called every hour or so. Finally she decided she had to see us. We'd meet at the Holiday Inn, at John's room, in an hour.
She and John were waiting when we arrived.
"Not a fuckin' thing," she said, pacing the room. "Can't even find his car. What do you think?"
"He wouldn't go off by himself?"
"No, of course not," Marvel said angrily.
"Then. I think. he may be dead."
She stopped, looked at John, and a tear ran down her face. "I think so, too," she said. "They couldn't just grab him and let him go later."
"No." I turned and looked at LuEllen, and her face was like a rock.
"Oh, God." Marvel sighed. She was standing close to John, and he slipped an arm around her waist and squeezed her.
Jesus, I thought, these people trust us.
With nothing more to say, we left Marvel to continue her search and made a pro forma stop in the bar. Bell, the city councilman, was sitting at a table with a pretty, freckled blonde. He raised a hand to us, and LuEllen waved, but we turned away, found a corner table, and ordered.
"What's next, boss?" LuEllen asked with a light overlay of sarcasm.
"Just keep cranking," I said. "But now we've got to put a little extra on Hill and St. Thomas. Dumping the machine isn't good enough anymore."
"I don't know," she said, now serious. "When I mess with you, things seem to turn violent. Before that time in West Virginia, I don't know if I'd ever seen a killed person."
"It's not us, not me-"
"You keep saying that."
"I've got to believe it," I said.
We talked for twenty minutes, through two drinks. Two is about as many as I can take before my lips start going numb. We paid, and LuEllen waved again at Bell. Bell nodded back, tipped up his glass, finishing a drink, and dug in his pocket for cash.
We were halfway across the parking lot when two car doors slammed with the kind of aggressive impact that makes you look around. Duane Hill was there, drunk, with St. Thomas on the other side. They each had a longneck beer.
"Hey, artist fuckhead," Hill yelled, wandering toward us.
"Keep walking," LuEllen said.
But I had the two drinks in me and, instead of walking, slowed down and stopped. Hill swaggered across the parking lot from his van, St. Thomas a step or two behind him. Two guys in broad-rimmed hats and cowboy boots had been sitting on the hood of a pickup down the lot. Now they hopped down and sidled over to watch.
"Where's that old bitch Trent? You trade her in on some younger cunt?" Hill asked.
"Fuck you, asshole," LuEllen said in a tone of pure ice. For a second Hill stopped, nonplussed. He was a brawler, tuned to danger, and he heard it in LuEllen's voice. He didn't know quite how to take it.
"Gonna let the pussy do your talking?" he said after a minute, trying to recover. He was about fifteen feet away. He half turned to the two onlookers, to catch their reaction to this witticism.
I gave him my best southern smile and got my right foot planted, slightly splayed to the right. The most dangerous man in a fight is the one who likes it the most. Watching him, I decided he'd be a grappler; he'd come storming in and try to throw me, rather than punch.
"I do hang around with nice-looking women," I said. "Mrs. Trent said you mostly hang around with some guy named Arnie."
The words hung in the air for a moment; then I leaned a little to the left, peering around him at St. Thomas, and shook my head. "Can't say I like your taste, Duane. He ain't got that much of an ass on him."
One of the cowboys let out a happy "Whoa," while Hill bellowed something unintelligible, dropped his beer, and charged, his head down, his hands out, and his legs churning. I was ready, my right foot grounded, and I whip-kicked him with my left foot, catching him on the side of the face. He went bellydown on the parking lot, landing on the blacktop like a racing driver. The fury climbed on top of me, the image of the killings, and I punted him once in the ribs, and again, as he rolled away, then pivoted toward St. Thomas. St. Thomas was an older guy, out of his fighting days. He wasn't moving, but Hill was trying to get up.