Джеффри Дивер - The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

“Do they know that?” I asked.

He put his coffee down. “Everything with you is a question,” he said. “Who is they?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said.

“The only people here are you and me, Pop, and Peeler. Is that right?”

“Hey,” I said, “I misspoke myself.”

“I’m not moving off this mountain until yesterday is dead, do you get my meaning?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not hiding up here,” he said. “I’m out.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“You ever see a nest of snakes in the woods? Sometimes they’ll be in a rotted tree trunk or out in a field?”

I nodded.

“Crawling all knotted up with each other, biting each other, this one eating the tail of that one that’s eating the head of another, sliding all around each other, so you can’t tell which one is which one. Some poor people think that’s life.” He reached down and brought his coffee up, took a swallow. He was looking at the mountains. He set his coffee on the table and started for the door. “Solitary never bothered me,” he said. “It was being in population that I didn’t care for. Too many snakes.” He went out and I watched him walk back up the hill through the ankle-deep snow.

The next day I drove to Spokane alone. George Beck’s lawyer met me downtown and we talked near the water, in the park.

“What did you find out?” he asked.

“Nothing. Jack Cooley isn’t doing anything in any organization, as far as I can tell yet.” We walked along a side street and pretended to look at the shops.

“This isn’t what we agreed on, this isn’t going to help George. You’ve got to dig around and find something.”

“These people don’t trust me,” I said. “And they don’t talk much under the best of circumstances. Jack’s still wearing his prison laundry army coat, for God’s sake.”

“Fine,” he said. “Tomorrow, George is going to begin talking about Tim Shipman and you and that Larson girl and you can deal with the fallout from that on your own.” He started to walk away. “The gun won’t help you. We’re going forward.”

“That’s no good,” I said. “I need more time.”

“Two days,” he said. “And here.” He handed me a pad and pen. “Draw me a map of where the Cooleys are, so if it comes to it, the sheriffs can get a decent address for the warrant.”

I drew the map as best I could and if someone was really bent on finding it, they’d find it. I handed the pad back to him.

“That will buy you two days with me, but after that, George talks and signs statements and testifies and your name is on everything.”

When I got home, there was a sandwich on my kitchen table and a small stick with a smiley face on it. As I went to put wood in the stove, I realized that several of the logs carried messages. Peeler, on each one of them. Peeler.

The next morning Cannon was scratching at my door and I came out. Something was in the road, about fifty yards from my house. I thought it was Jack, facedown in the snow. I recognized the army jacket. Cannon started back toward his house and when I looked up, Pop and Jack were running down the road toward me.

“They shot Peeler,” Pop yelled to no one.

“I didn’t hear a shot,” I said.

“Nobody heard it,” said Jack.

When we got close I could see a faint spray of blood around Peeler’s head. I threw up into the snow. Not at any time had shooting the kid been discussed. Beck’s people would push until something gave. Either me or Jack Cooley. I threw up again.

“Why the fuck did they shoot Peeler?” Jack asked the sky.

I realized Peeler had Jack’s coat on.

“He drew the fire,” Pop said. “He walked around in it the other morning. I thought maybe you had some cigarettes in there and he was trying out smoking.”

When we got close, we could see Peeler was still breathing, even though there was blood coming out of his nose.

“Peeler?”

His mouth opened and his voice, scratchy and cracked, came out. “Pop,” the kid groaned. “It hurts.”

Jack rolled him over, pulled back the coat. He was wearing the Kevlar vest, my bulletproof. He’d been hit, twice, body shots. He was hurt, but he was alive, Jack carried him up to the house.

“What can I do?” I said.

“Keep an eye out,” Pop said.

I took George Beck’s pistol out of the truck, grabbed some shells Pop had given me when I first got there, and went walking. I went into the woods, to try to see if I could spot anyone.

Down the hill a ways, on the other side of the Cooleys’ house, was a small family cemetery. I stopped for a minute. Pop had told me who was in there, where his family tree had branched. Outside the cemetery, I noticed a pick and a shovel. Jack must have been down there. It looked like he was getting ready to dig a new grave. Peeler had carved some sticks and one was in the shape of a cross. The stick read GEORGE BECK, SENT TO HELL BY THE COOLEYS.

I walked back to my cabin. Somehow, while in the shadow of prison yards and guards and friends and enemies, Jack already knew who killed his grandfather.

An hour later, Pop came down to my door. “Do you think,” Pop asked me, “you could go into town and get some cigarettes and coffee and groceries — could you do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it right now.” It was my only way out.

I drove through town and kept going. Maybe they were planning my burial, too. For such big country, things had closed in on me rapidly. I needed to get out of rifle range of these people.

That fall, in one of the big shipping yards out in Grays Harbor, a guy who looked a lot like me started running a forklift and a log loader. He didn’t eat with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody. He cashed his check in the bar across the street and lived in a two-room apartment over the pool hall. He walked to work. The name he gave people was Tom Miller and he worked at the yard for six months. He didn’t miss a day.

Monday came, time to clock in, then noon, and the foreman noticed Miller’s card still in the rack. He asked around, did anybody know where Miller was? One guy said he heard Miller say he had a sister in California. He never said that to me, somebody else spoke up. Said he was from right here near Tacoma, born and raised. He didn’t want to go fishing Friday, someone said. We asked him to go fishing, said we were taking our kids and he was welcome, and he said no thanks.

I guess he quit, the foreman said when Miller hadn’t showed by the end of the day. So if anybody knows anybody looking for work and can run a loader and show up on time, the job pays four fifty a week, you do your own taxes as a subcontractor and don’t talk union here. Sitting behind his desk in his office, the foreman cut Miller’s time card in half and threw it in the garbage.

Tom Miller hadn’t quit. Somebody with sharp eyes and a long memory spotted him. The man who called himself Tom Miller couldn’t report to work because he was being held in a little room in the basement of a Seattle courthouse. Held until the investigators arrived.

After I told this whole story to the investigators, they kept me in custody for a couple of days. They told me that the man who lived with Penny Larson and her daughter was fatally shot in a hunting accident in the mountains of Northern Idaho, not far from their house, but managed to struggle into Canada before he died. The Mounties found him. They told me George Beck had been released. They told me Carl Larson was missing. They told me that Jack Cooley might be dead but that Peeler was still alive. They told me they knew I’d been Ed Snider for a while.

Then the investigators approached me about being an informant down in Oregon, on the Rogue River, where a group of white supremacists was moving meth and dogs and guns. We want you to do this, they said. Not that you have much choice. Sure, I said, I’ll do it. But all I wanted was out. The whole sky seemed covered with heavy-gauge mesh steel, one big prison. If I was lucky to be alive, I rarely knew it. Normal men get to be things. Sons and husbands, fathers and friends. I was not any of those things. I tried, but this is me telling you I failed.