David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

“Why look for him here?” Frank asked.

The guy threw up his hands. “What else am I gonna do? Like I said, he’s outta range, the homo.”

“He due here?”

“I’m desperate,” the guy said. “He had me playing shads on Frankie Maas’s old lady. Never seen her before, either, but Dayball, you know how he is, says, She’s the only one out there. Anybody leaves, it’s her. Felix wanted her thinking she was cool but then told Dayball: Put a tail on her. So that’s my deal, I sat on the house tonight. And I got news. Oh yeah.”

Frank sat there, head tilted like he hadn’t quite gotten the last part right. His throat clenched. The guy kept talking, but the blood pulsing in Frank’s ears drowned out the sound. All he caught was, “… any ideas?”

Snapping to. “About?”

“Jesus, what’s wrong with you? Where I can find Dayball.”

“I can pass word on,” Frank said. The words came out without thought. “I see him, I’ll pass the word on.”

The guy shuffled from one foot to the other, murmuring to himself. “Fine. Yeah. Hell. Whoever gets there first. Here goes. I sat out on the road, hidden in that bunch of trees down the road from the gate, like Lonnie said. Sure enough, not fifteen minutes go by, red Pathfinder pulls out and turns toward town. Woman driving, bingo. I give her a few minutes, I mean, there’s nowhere to turn off, right? I pull out finally, put the tail on. I find her about a half mile away, pulled to the side. There’s some guy pulled up behind her. Where he came from, I don’t know. Big guy, tall, well built, short hair. Mean anything?”

Frank felt as though the top of his head was lifting off. “Big?” he said.

“He’s standing there at her car, they’re talking. I slow down, I’ll get made. So I blow on by, keep going till the Oakley turnoff, pull in, can the lights, wait. Maybe ten minutes later, they go by, one then the other. Guy’s driving a fucking Dart. Again, I figure, don’t follow too close. I wait a couple minutes. But this time they reach the highway. I lose ’em.”

Tall, Frank thought. Well built. A cop. In a Dart?

“I must’ve driven up and down the highway two, three hours. I’m thinking Lonnie’s gonna have my head. Then I pull in to Rafferty’s, you know it? Friend of mine hangs out there. Turns out he saw Frank’s old lady and this big guy there just a little while back. They got pretty oily with each other.”

Frank closed his eyes. “Tell me where again?”

“Rafferty’s, by the water. They had a drink at the bar and then started in on the touchy-feely. What’s wrong, guy?”

Frank shook his head, as though to snap it free from some invisible thread. His heart was beating fast. “Sorry.”

“Then this woman who’s been around. This woman, she’s passing out handbills on the dead twins. You hear about that?”

“No,” Frank said. Then: “Yeah, sorta, I heard.”

“This woman, she says she wants to talk to Frankie, she gets pointed over to his old lady and they talk some, then everybody tippy-toes on out. Together. This was maybe two hours ago.”

Frank only half-heard the last part. His mind was elsewhere. He saw a woman cocooned in duct tape, a drug-crazed man leaning over her, a clot of her hair in one fist, a hammer in the other.

“Hey. You with me?”

“Can do,” Frank said. “We’re good.”

“Listen,” the guy pleaded. “You pass this on, please, the part about me bitching about Lonnie, that’s strictly you and me here talking, right?”

“Got it,” Frank said.

“And the part about me losing them for two hours.”

“No problem.”

It took another five minutes to get rid of the guy. Once he was gone, Frank stumbled back inside the house and to his room. A dime bag of crank was stashed in the wall behind a dummy light socket. He did five fast whiffs, rearing back his head with each snort. Shortly his spine crackled, his eyes cleared. His heart pounded like a fist inside his chest. The real me, he thought, banging to get out.

He went hunting. Something told him to check the trunk of the Mercedes. When he did he found pay dirt: five rifles, plenty of shells. He grabbed a Remington pumploader, armed it with nine shot, pumped a round into the chamber and filled his pockets with extra shot shells. Then he got in the Mercedes, started her up, hid it out beyond the barn and went back to the kitchen.

Right when I needed you the most, he thought. Ain’t that the way. Sorry little cheat. Liar and cheat. He wondered how much of it had been her plan all along. The setup with the Mexicans, it was just a ruse to get him killed with the chavos . Shel had decided to hand him over to Felix and the law and the Briscoe family all on the same night, pass him around to the highest bidder. Play them all against each other and slip away in the chaos. He’d never seen it all this clear. It’s not me, he thought. It’s them. Every goddamn one of them.

But especially her.

He sat with the gun across his legs, stroking the barrel like a cat and drinking from a bottle of Old Fitzgerald he held by the neck. I survive Roy’s killfire and come home to this. What can you say? One thing after another, then a kicker at the end. All of it fitting and fair.

The sound of an engine drifted up the hill, approaching from the county road. Frank went to the window. In time he heard rubber on gravel, then watched as the headlights sprayed the grass beyond the bluff. This time it was Shel. He could tell that from the motor.

She entered the kitchen and glanced at the clock. After leaving Danny she’d hurried back from the bar only to find Frank still gone, so she’d turned around, headed back out, driving around in a fury, hoping against hope to find him somehow. That was hours ago. After that she’d just given in, kept driving just to move, because staying in one place felt too much like waiting to die. Who knew where Roy and his brothers had taken Frank after their little episode, if they’d taken him anywhere. He might very well have been left there to die. It might already be over. She thought of Felix Randall telling her she ought to be married. In sickness and in health, till death. She thought of Jill Rosemond pressing her on where to find Frank, like some middle-aged Nancy Drew out to solve The Mystery of the Two Dead Twins . Everywhere, everybody, everything: death.

And then she thought about Danny. After all these years. Danny.

Every plan she devised ran smack into a wall, every backtrack, too. There was no right way to go, no best way out or even any way out- which was why, in the end, she’d just come back here. The place where all wrong turns converge. Home.

She tossed her purse onto the breakfast nook table before spotting what else lay there: a cigar box filled with nine shot shells and a checkerboard.

“You play chess?” Frank asked from behind.

She turned to face him. He was juggling a chessman one-handed. The other hand held a shotgun. His eyes were bleary from drink and yet there was something else about them, too.

“My God,” she said. “You’re here.”

“True enough,” Frank replied. He gathered up the chessman in a knuckleball hold and hurled it across the kitchen at her. She ducked the missile and called out from behind her arm, “What’s wrong with you?”

“A wee bit surprised to see me?”

He crossed the distance in two long steps and gripped her throat with his free hand. With the shotgun he forced her head down onto the table.

“Thought I’d be gone for good, right? Dead maybe? Not enough to tell Felix: Do it, kill him. Had to make sure. Just in case the Akers boys fucked up. Play both ends. ’Cuz you had a whole new set of plans tonight.”

She squirmed in his hold but could not break free. Her arms flailed without connecting.