Doug Allyn: The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

I drove all the next day, wound up at a cousin’s farm in Mississippi, and called a friend on the Detroit P.D. to fill him in on what happened. He told me Chen was dead already, whacked by Delagarza’s people, but the shooting was still going on. It might be wise if I stayed gone for a while.

So I did. I picked up a few odd jobs repossessing cars for a detective agency in Biloxi, worked a few skip traces, and kept body and soul together. It took most of a year for things to shake out between the triads and the Cubans. I kept in touch with my contacts in Detroit. Eventually they told me things were cool, that nobody in particular was looking for me. So I moved back and picked up the pieces of my life.

That was ten years ago, maybe a little more. And Danny’s memory had faded some, like an old photograph. It happens. I’d never seen Cheryl Vanetti again. Until tonight.

She looked different, of course, and it was more than just the years. He hair was waist-length now, and dark, though whether she was coloring it then or now. I couldn’t tell. Her face had a few character lines, but they weren’t unbecoming.

I glanced at a poster on the wall. The band was called Truth in Packaging. She wasn’t billed separately, so I couldn’t tell whether she was using her own name. I could have asked a waitress, I suppose, but that might have alerted Cootie, so I didn’t risk it. If she was still hiding, it was none of my business.

Her band was really good. A lot better than promising now. I couldn’t tell if she’d spotted me or not. She was wearing sunglasses, so it was impossible to follow her eyes. Or read anything in them.

They ended their set to enthusiastic applause. And I noticed that Cootie was getting restless, which was a bad sign. He was dumb enough to make a run for it, and I didn’t feel like chasing him around a redneck roadhouse in freaking Indiana.

I asked the waitress for our tab, but while she was totting it up, the background noise in the room tapered off.

Cherry had returned to the stage alone, carrying a battered old Martin guitar that I recognized instantly. She tuned it, then glanced around the room, waiting for the audience to quiet, and began to fingerpick a tune. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Bed Spring Blues.”

It’s an old song, a classic, but there was nothing derivative in her version of it. She sang it with power and anguish and heart. With soul. She’d always had the voice, the talent, but now what her singing had was passion, and the pain was real.

I didn’t know whether the song was meant for me or just part of her show, but I think it was for me. When she played a short solo before the final verse, she built it around a mistake, a broken lick, note for note, the same lame way Danny used to butcher it all those years ago. The timing was off, the tune was wrong, but in her hands it was brilliant, as imperfect as real life.

She sang the last verse, and maybe she and I were the only ones in the room who knew what the loss in that song was really about, but it didn’t matter. She was singing the truth and the audience sensed it.

When she finished, there was a stunned moment of silence before the roar of applause began, and it was far more telling than all the hooting and hollering in the world. Even Coolie joined in.

I left without speaking to her. I had Cootie in tow, but it was more than that.

The truth is. I don’t know what we can say to each other now. Some hurts never heal. They just scar over. It’s best to let them be.

I hadn’t liked her much, and her recklessness had helped get a friend of mine killed. But most of the blame was mine. Cherry had no way of knowing how dangerous Chen was. But I should have.

Still, we were both younger then, and when you’re green, the world’s a superstore, with everything you want. The catch is, the prices aren’t marked. So you make choices, but you don’t know what they’re going to cost you until later. Or how much your friends and loved ones will pay. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can make it up to them in some way. Not this time, though.

A few hours later, cruising through Toledo, halfway to the morning with Cootie snoring in the back seat, damned if I didn’t hear another Blind Lemon blues tune on a college station out of Lansing. And for a moment it brought Danny back so clearly I could almost sense his presence in the car.

And I had to smile, remembering how crazy we were in those days, about music and life and all of it. And it occurred to me that if Danny had been with me earlier, if he’d come back from Shadow-land to hear Cherry sing that one Blind Lemon song... if I’d asked him if the price we paid was too high, I know what his answer would have been.

At night, even in the chill mountain air, Mona Sue insisted on cranking the air conditioner all the way up. Her usual temperature always ran a couple of degrees higher than normal, and she claimed that the baby she carried made her constant fever even worse. She kept the cabin cold enough to hang meat. During the long, sleepless nights Ben bow spooned to her naked, burning skin, trying to stay warm.

In the mornings, too, Mona Sue forced him into the cold. The modern cabin sat on a bench in the cool shadow of Mount Nihart, and they broke their fast with a room-service breakfast on the deck, a robe wrapped loosely about her naked body while Benbow bundled into both sweats and a robe. She ate furiously, stoking a furnace, and recounted her dreams as if they were gospel, effortlessly consuming most of the spread of exotic cheeses and expensively unseasonable fruits, a loaf of sourdough toast and four kinds of meat, all the while aimlessly babbling through the events of her internal night, the dreams of a teenage girl, languidly symbolic and vaguely frightening. She dreamt of her mother, young and lovely, devouring her litter of barefoot boys in the dark Ozark hollows. And her father, home from a Tennessee prison, his crooked member dangling against her smooth cheek.

Benbow suspected she left the best parts out and did his best to listen to the soft southern cadences without watching her face. He knew what happened when he watched her talk, watched the soft moving curve of her dark lips, the wise slant of her gray eyes. So he picked at his breakfast and tried to focus his stare downslope at the steam drifting off the large hot-water pool behind the old shagbark lodge.

But then she switched to her daydreams about their dubious future, which were as deadly specific as a .45 slug in the brainpan: after the baby, they could flee to Canada; nobody would follow them up there. He listened and watched with the false patience of a teenage boy involved in his first confrontation with pure lust and hopeless desire.

Mona Sue ate with the precise and delicate greed of a heart surgeon, the pad of her spatulate thumb white on the handle of her spoon as she carved a perfect curled ball from the soft orange meat of her melon. Each bite of meat had to be balanced with an equal weight of toast before being crushed between her tiny white teeth. Then she examined each strawberry poised before her darkly red lips as if it might be a jewel of great omen and she some ancient oracle, then sank her shining teeth into the fleshy fruit as if it were the mortal truth. Benbow’s heart rolled in his chest as he tried to fill his lungs with the cold air to fight off the heat of her body.

Fall had come to the mountains, now. The cottonwoods and alders welcomed the change with garish mourning dress, and in the mornings a rime of ice covered the windshield of the gray Taurus he had stolen at the Denver airport. New snow fell each night, moving slowly down the ridges from the high distant peaks of the Hard Rock Range and slipped closer each morning down the steep ridge behind them. Below the bench the old lodge seemed to settle more deeply into the narrow canyon, as if hunkering down for eons of snow, and the steam from the hot springs mixed with wood smoke and lay flat and sinuous among the yellow creek willows.