David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

Snuff sat in back with his brothers Lyle and Roy. Frank sat in front, nestled between Dayball and Tully. Dayball removed his spiral notepad from his jacket as Tully put the Lincoln in gear again. “At long last,” Dayball said, addressing no one in particular. He checked his watch, wrote something down, returned the notepad to his pocket then turned sideways and squeezed Frank’s shoulder.

Dayball grinned at the side of Frank’s head, leaned close, and whispered something in his ear. To Frank, it sounded at first like, “The Menace in Man.” Or: “Good medicine, my man.” He said nothing in response. Dayball, still grinning, turned around to regard the Akers brothers.

“Where’s Hack?” Snuff asked him.

“Hack rides with the second detail,” Dayball said. “Car right behind us.”

Snuff looked over his shoulder. Hack was getting out of the Le Mans, waving at the truck crew as they rolled down the warehouse door and got ready to head on out. Hack would wait till the truck was gone, then lock the gates of the compound.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Snuff said. “Who else is in on this?”

Roy groaned. “You think we’d do this with just three men? Shut the fuck up.”

Dayball seemed to enjoy this brotherly spat. “Hack’s gathered a couple of buddies, Snuff, a little extra manpower. Got yourself a regular posse, kid. Strength in numbers.”

Frank heard the voices rise and fall around him but paid them little mind. The sound of his pulse seemed louder than the voices. He struggled to keep his eyes open, lifting his hand to the ear Dayball had whispered into. It was still damp from his breath. Frank chafed his finger and thumb together and returned his gaze to the empty road reeling toward him from the darkness.

The day after he’d killed the twins and buried the money, he’d accompanied Dayball and Tully out to the deserted milking shed. He chiseled away the Quickrete that sealed the cinder block in place at the hose-out hole, then crawled inside as Dayball and Tully watched from a window. He brushed aside the hay and dirt, revealing the new layer of Quickrete. Using tools they passed in to him, he opened up the floor, dug through to the money and hauled it out. He put the plywood back, kicked hay over it, then handed the Halburton case through the hose-out hole and crawled out behind it. They sealed up the hole again and Dayball elected to leave the jar of ether, the blasting cap and trip wire in place. It appealed to his sense of theater. Besides, there were Mexican squatters out this way at times. It’d serve as a message.

“Gotta give you credit, Frankie,” Dayball had said. “You got flair when it comes to squirreling loot.”

Frank snapped back to the present as they pulled up to the ranch house. Everyone in the car got out and milled toward the yard. Frank walked unsteadily between Lyle and Roy, trying to work his knees. As he did, he heard the sound of the sixteen-wheeler approaching from the direction of the compound, and shortly it took the final turn beyond the barn and thundered past, heading for the county road and vanishing in a roar of dust. Shortly, the Le Mans carrying Hack and his friends appeared and pulled up beside the Lincoln.

Everybody went inside and found a place to wait. From his seat in the kitchen Frank heard the sound of a third car arrive. Two doors opened and closed and Bud Lally, Felix Randall’s bodyguard, poked his head in, surveyed the room, then held the door open.

Felix Randall entered with a bent, painful weariness, walking with the help of a stick. With a nod of gratitude he accepted the chair offered him by Lonnie Dayball. His face was deeply cragged and he wore a two-day stubble that shone gray on his chin and cheeks. He wore his hair cut short in a military burr. At one time, in his biker heyday, the locks had flowed, but after his stint in Boron he’d decided on a more Spartan deportment.

His hair was not the only thing prison had changed. After they’d discovered the tumor in his throat and transferred him to Springfield, they’d hacked out the better part of his larynx and esophagus to snag the growth, then bombarded him with chemotherapy and radiation. It was only in the past six months he’d managed to eat anything resembling solid food, and he still spoke in a growling whisper.

Even with his haggard face and his weary eyes and his thin, bent body, he commanded the full attention of every man in the room. Sitting with both hands resting atop his walking stick, he gestured with his fingers for Dayball to lean toward him. When Dayball obeyed, Felix whispered to him, “Bring her in now.”

Shel sat waiting in the guest room by the window in the dark, with only the glow from her cigarette lighting her face. She did not turn when the door opened. From behind, someone snapped his fingers.

“Visitor,” Dayball said.

She stubbed out her cigarette and rose. The first two weeks she’d done as she’d been ordered to do, nurse Frank along, keep him functional. Every night, she’d told herself: You kept him alive one more day. It felt, more times than not, like fattening a calf for slaughter.

The past week they’d kept him from her, and given the sudden theatricality she’d sensed in everyone’s mood tonight, she expected to learn that he was dead, or due to die. She had little idea what had happened or even if it had already, but regardless it had taken three weeks to get right. Frank had kept it from her for her own good, which, given the circumstances, seemed a caring gesture.

This last week they’d been plying him with speedballs, a home brew made of crank mellowed with fentanyl. This was meant to flatten out his impulses, self-destructive and otherwise. The few encounters she’d shared with him since had revealed a caricature of the man she’d known. He meandered around in a state of thoughtful obsession, focused on what it was they wanted him to do and nothing else, like it was all he could hold in his mind at one time.

The most haunting thing about it was, he seemed happy. Once, when they’d passed in the hallway, he’d offered her a sunny, mindless smile, and she sensed it was as close to good-bye as they would come with each other.

She entered the kitchen with Dayball behind her. Felix Randall studied her for a moment, then gestured for Buddy, his bodyguard, to lean close. Felix whispered something to him. Buddy stood straight again and said, “Everybody but her and Frank, out to the cars.”

Dayball, Tully, the Akers brothers, and the other men filed out silently. When there was only the four of them- Felix, Buddy, Frank, and Shel- in the room, Felix gestured for her to come closer so he could talk to her directly instead of through Buddy.

He pointed to a chair and Buddy pulled it up for her. She sat down, leaning forward, her arms folded and at rest on her knees. Frank sat in the breakfast nook, staring at her.

“You two married?” Felix asked Shel in his throatish whisper.

The question took her utterly off-guard. “No,” she answered.

“Why not?”

His eyes were deeply set in his face, the result of having lost so much weight. Shel had never seen him well, but she had seen pictures, and he had been tall and fearsome. His eyes retained much of that power.

“It’s never come up,” she said.

“You been together how long?”

“Three years.”

“Three years,” Felix repeated, “and it never came up? What, there somebody else?”

“No,” Shel said instantly. She wondered what they knew about her past, what they knew about Danny.

“I been married twenty-one years,” Felix said matter-of-factly. “I believe in marriage, the right two people. Cheryl, twenty-one years, she’s been solid as a rock. You remind me of her a little.”

“Thank you,” Shel said.