Джеффри Дивер - The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

“Lucky number seven,” Speedy said. “Give Shipman a good talking-to.”

I got out of the rig. George Beck and Carl Larson were sitting on the road in their trucks. I decided to try one last attempt at getting the hell out.

“I don’t even have a gun,” I said.

Speedy shrugged. “There’s a pistol under the seat, take it if you need it,” he said.

I reached under the seat and came out with a nine-millimeter and snapped the trigger twice at Speedy before the weight of the gun told my hand it wasn’t loaded. He blinked hard, then relaxed. He smiled. It was the gun Beck had tried to hand me that night at Carl’s house. I had screwed myself even tighter.

I got down out of the rig and I knew the security cameras were catching me doing it, walking with a pistol into room number seven. The door was open — I pushed it with my foot — and saw Shipman on the bed, the side of his head gone from gunshot wounds. He’d been shot less than an hour earlier. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, trying to draw them into the room, or within camera range. Don’t throw up, I told myself, you always throw up. But nobody came, and eventually I just walked out. Speedy was gone. George Beck and Carl Larson had pulled down the road a ways. I walked and got in the back of Carl’s truck and we rode all the way to Potlatch. This time I kept the gun.

After that George moved in with Penny and they were considered married by everybody. Shipman’s body was found in a Dumpster ten miles from the motel, but the paper said the cops knew the body had been moved. Then I heard George Beck was being held in Boise on a federal warrant and was also wanted by the Mounties in Lethbridge on a gun charge and possible murder of a witness in a homicide case in Washington State. This just made me anxious. Penny had the baby, a girl, late the following spring. Soon there was another man living there with her, and I tried not to think about it.

Carl went back to Alaska and nobody really came to the shop after that, except the gas customers. I was in Moscow picking up a case of oil one day and saw Mac, the old logger, in the parking lot. He was talking to some men. He nodded at me.

“I could use some work,” I said. “Maybe you could get me a job as a fire spotter. With the park service or private. Like you talked about that one time, that private association of landowners in Montana.”

“No,” he answered. “No thanks. The woods are all full. It’ll burn with or without you. You should ask George Beck for work, he probably needs somebody to clean his cell or something.”

I came back to the garage and Dan must have seen me pull in, because he came out of his trailer and over to the garage.

“Some men stopped by here looking for you. Knocked on my door. Frightened Rose.” He handed me a business card. It was from an attorney in Spokane.

“What’s this?”

“What is it?” he said. “It’s fucking yours, that’s what it is, but it ended up on my doorstep, how is that?” He didn’t raise his voice, but he was clear. “Just because I don’t believe in heaven and angels doesn’t mean I don’t believe in hell and demons. You need to get that shit straight in your head. Realize what you’re involved in. Separate the concepts.” He pointed at his trailer. “I’ve got a purpose here on Earth, which is to provide for and protect Rose. You seem to be about to sign on as a short-order man in the devil’s butcher shop. You’re on a bad path, with bad men. Those two things put us at odds. There might be a time when someone with a badge comes around asking questions about you and George Beck and Carl.”

“And you’d rat?”

He shook his head. “Never. It’s not the law that concerns me, not a single bit. I want to make sure you and I have an understanding. The law doesn’t stop a thing. Consequences only come after and after is too late, far as I’m concerned.” He pointed at the pen behind his house. “My brother’s bringing me up a good dog from his farm and everything in my place is loaded with the safety off. Whoever buys the ticket will get an express trip if I can help it and I’m here to tell you, although she was a lot of trouble different times, I love my Rose and I love my job of protecting her. Knock on my door and I’ll let Remington answer it. Both barrels.”

“I understand,” I said.

“See that you do,” Dan said. “Or there will be pieces of you they’ll never find.” He started to walk back to his trailer. “We’re not all hicks and cousin-fuckers up here,” he said over his shoulder. “Do your business somewhere else. You mistook kind for simple,” he finished. He shut the trailer door.

I called the Spokane lawyer from a pay phone and once I got past the secretary the first thing he asked me was did I still have that gun. Sure, I said, and it’s keeping me alive. Because that’s the gun that killed Elmer Cooley. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, he said, and if I wanted to rely on that, put my whole life on the line for one ballistics test, then I could go right ahead. And I knew he was right, although I hoped otherwise.

The Feds were leaning on George Beck hard and he was going to inform on me, said the lawyer. His buddy at the motel had a videotape of me walking into Tim Shipman’s room with a pistol and coming out and a Polaroid shot of Shipman lying dead on the bed. My name was going to be tied to all this, unless I could get Beck’s lawyer some good information on the remaining members of the Cooley family who still lived in the Panhandle. The Cooleys ranked high on the Feds’ most wanted list and usable information about them would loosen pressure on George Beck, would reduce his charges.

What Beck and his lawyer didn’t know was that if the Feds got hold of my prints, my days as Ed Snider were over.

I wasn’t going to take the rap Beck was ready to hand me. I’d get the information and be gone. I hid George Beck’s nine-millimeter up underneath the dashboard of my truck, held by electrical tape to the fire wall. The truck stayed locked. That gun was the only thing that connected Beck to the murder of Elmer Cooley and I kept it for no reason other than desperation. I drove north into the Panhandle, past Priest Lake and further, headed to the Cooleys’ house to do the best rat work I could.

I liked the Cooleys right off, which was tough on my brain. Over those first two winter months, I tried to adjust. It was them or me. They bought my cover without a question, just a guy up to log some adjacent land. No big deal. Pop Cooley and I ate dinner together a couple of times. One working man talking to another in the mountains. Talking about making a living in a place where that was real tough work. I liked him and I liked the kid. After sixty days, I had them on a talking basis.

The kid sat in a green plastic lawn chair in the snow behind my three-room cabin. Light was just corning. The kid propped his feet on an empty propane cylinder. He wore a dark bluejacket against the cold. Under his watch cap he had a home haircut. He was whittling a stick with the new pocketknife his father gave him for Christmas. I knew he was whittling weird little smiley faces, even though I couldn’t see that far. I found the sticks everywhere; the kid did it to every piece of wood he came across. Small, crooked smiley faces and the word Peeler, his nickname. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. As soon as he heard me awake, banging and emptying ash from under the woodstove, he was at the back kitchen door. He was skinny, but tall with a man-size head.

“Well if it isn’t Kid Cooley,” I said, “bantamweight champion of the Pacific Northwest. How do you feel before the big fight, Kid, say something for the fans? Are you still single, the girls have been asking.”