At the mill, there was a guy with a snake tattooed on his head. Stunk like an outhouse. Couldn’t stand dn’t saround him without getting sick. Fat Boy told me it’s because of his stink, that this guy, Snake, has a place out at the sawmill. Got a generator for electricity. Big Satellite dish. Big tank for water. There’s a field out back Fat Boy uses for a landing strip. I could see a little plane parked there.”
“Enough of the Better Homes and Gardens tour,” Price said. “You were saying about Fat Boy and Snake, the pictures.”
“We went in the mill, and this one big room they let me into, it was like a store. Photographs all over the place. Boxes of them. Fat Boy said they sold tons of the stuff. That it wasn’t that unusual, what I liked, and I should look around and see if there was something that caught my fancy.
“I looked at what they had, bought an assortment of photographs for what I thought was a fair price, and right before we got ready to leave, Fat Boy said, ‘By the way, you ever see any of this?’
“He went over and got this box of photographs out of a locked desk drawer. They were dead children. Some recent dead. Some starting to rot.
“I asked Fat Boy where he got the pictures, and he said he bought them, and not to worry, and why didn’t I take a couple. I asked if the kids were acting, if there were special effects involved in the rotted corpse pictures, and he just shook his head. He said they were dead already, so what did it matter if I took a couple. It wasn’t going to change things for the kids. I took them.
“Week later, he comes by my office again, bold as hell, says he’s got something really special. I went with him, and when we got there, there was Snake with these two other guys. They were out to the side of the mill, had picks and shovels and were working on the ground there. I thought they were putting in plumbing. Fat Boy made a point of telling me the two guys were cops, and that he worked for the cops.
“I thought I’d been set up, and Fat Boy was going to arrest me for buying child pornography. But that didn’t happen.
“He walked me out to where they were digging. I could smell Snake before I got there, and something else. We got up to the digs I saw what the something else was. A child. A little boy. Eight or nine, I guess. He was naked, lying on his back in a hole about four feet deep. They had a camera and tripod out there, but I guess they were through doing what they were going to do, because time I got there and saw what was in the hole, they started shoveling dirt and old piles of crumbled sawdust on top of him. Snake said something like, ‘There’s a lot of milk cartons out there with pictures on them wasting space.’
“I realized then Fat Boy had been playing me like a fiddle. I could spring the cops on him, but if he and those guys were really the law, then I wasn’t sure how they could make things look. My reputation would be destroyed.”
“The cops.” Price said, “Can you describe them?”
Doc described them. Price said, “Descriptions like that. They could be anybody.”
“They all had guns,” Doc said.
“Lot of people got guns,” Price said. “Go on with it.”
“Fat Boy took me back up to e back uthe mill for a drink. He showed me some more pictures while I drank it. I could tell now the pictures were taken there. Some were torture shots. Taken in the mill. I asked him how he got the kids, and he said it was easy. They normally went out of town, Houston, Dallas, some place like that. Nabbed them by offering them free toys and stuff. Or just grabbed them in broad daylight. They had quite a system. I asked him how he felt about it, and he said he didn’t feel anything about it. He said Snake got something out of it, but what charged him was commerce and the deal. He liked putting something together. He told me he put me together. That he put Jake together. Said without people like me and Jake he might be an accountant. You believe that? Tried to lay their murders at my feet.”
“Seems to me,” I said, “that’s the kind of thinking you’d understand. You didn’t love your wife to death, you know.”
“She was an adult,” Doc said. “She had coming what she got. And I didn’t do it. Fay Boy did it.”
“Why don’t we move on to that part,” Price said. “About the wife.”
“I’m coming to that. Fat Boy asked if I was going to say anything and I assured him I wasn’t. He told me he had connections everywhere, and no matter how I told my story, he could make himself clean and make me stink. He admitted it was him and Snake killed Jake and his family. That the wife wanted Jake and the kid dead because she was jealous Jake liked doing it with the little girl more than her. But Fat Boy did the job on all three of them after she paid him half the money, cause he had a whim he ought to do it that way. That’s what he said. A whim.
“I bought some photographs from him, one of the boy they buried, and he drove me back. I didn’t see him for a while. I got to seeing Bambi, girl you met in the hall.”
“Bambi?” Virgil said.
“Barbara,” Doc said, “but they call her Bambi. We got to running around, and she looked young, and she was legal, so, I figured that was the way to go.”
“And you still had your pictures,” Price said.
“Yeah,” Doc said. “I still had my pictures. So things began to heat up with me and Bambi, and things got worse and worse with the wife, so I got to thinking about Fat Boy doing Jake in for money. It seemed like a way to rid myself of Tara. I thought if I wasn’t here, and I offered to pay twice his price, gave him a couple installments to show I was sincere, then paid a couple more after it was done, promised to slip him a thousand or two a year from now on, he’d like the free money and wouldn’t have one of his whims.”
“But my nephew got into your plans,” I said.
“It helped in one way,” Doc said. “It gave Fat Boy someone to pin things on. Except the nephew got away,” he nodded at me, “and told you and started a kind of chain reaction.”
“And now here we all are,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Doc, “Here we all are.”
30
Price poured himself a drink and perched on the chair. He said to Doc, “Where’s your stash? Don’t look dumb. Go get it and be back pronto.”
“I don’t keep it at the house,” Doc said.
“Sure you do,” Price said. “Guy with your interests, I bet you got it close for those nights Bambi wants to sleep. She sleep on the same side your wife slept on, Doc? Huh? Quit jerking me around and go get it.”
Doc got up and left the room. He came back with a small cardboard box. He gave it to Price, went over and sat on the couch and looked pouty.
Price got out of his chair, put the box on the table and removed the lid. He picked up a couple of photographs and looked at them and put them back on top of the stack. He thumbed through the remainder, said, “You like this, huh?” He put the lid on the box. “All right, Doc, you can keep this stuff. My best wishes. But I got an idea, and you’re going to love it. In fact, I insist you love it. What you’re going to do is you’re going to do what Jake did for you. You’re going to recruit. You’re going to go to Fat Boy and say you’ve made a friend, and this friend wants to buy some pictures. Say what you want, but you lick Fat Boy’s dick enough he likes you.”
“I can’t do that,” Doc said. “I get caught in a lie, he’ll kill me.”
“You don’t do it,” Price said, “the state of Texas will kill you.”
“I guess I can talk to him,” Doc said.
“Who’s the friend going to be?” I asked.
“He knows me and you and your brother,” Price said. “Virgil would be good.”
“Whoa,” Virgil said. “I’m an attorney, not a Christmas turkey. He’s probably seen me around.”