Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

Karp waved a dismissive hand. "But we don't need that for Wayne. We got Wayne without his gun."

Emmett Heeney was driving the old red Farmall tractor, with Zak on his lap, steering and crowing with joy. The tractor towed a little stakebed trailer on which bounced Emmett's brother, his brother's girlfriend, her dog, and her other brother. Also in the trailer were tools of various kinds, fishing equipment, weapons, and a large picnic hamper. The Heeneys had acquired nearly forty acres along with their farmhouse; today Emmett and Dan were providing a tour of the land.

It had not been a farm for a long time. As Dan explained, Red had not been interested in land and had been a little wary of accepting the title of landlord-so bourgeois! Rose had raised a garden, but the rest of the land had been allowed to follow the natural succession and had grown up in thickets of dogwood, white oak, bay laurel, above which young yellow pine were beginning to tower. There was still a good-sized apple orchard, which they now passed, descending a little hill toward a shallow stream that ran through a sparse, pale forest of beech and willow. Emmett stopped the tractor. They all unloaded and walked along a narrow trail through the trees and over an earth berm. There was a little pond there, made by damming the stream, with lilies in the water and a tiny beach.

They ate barbecued-chicken sandwiches and potato salad and drank beer and lemonade. After lunch, Emmett took Zak to the pond's edge and taught him the first lessons in fly casting, and to call dragonflies snake doctors. Then Emmett went with tools to repair the dam and clear culverts. Giancarlo sat on a rock with his pad and markers and drew the pond and the surrounding woods, adding to it many creatures not normally denizens of West Virginia. Dan and Lucy put in an hour's work helping Emmett. Afterward, they sat against a log cooling off, talking or not as the mood struck them. They were for whole minutes at a time extremely silly, which delighted both of them, since neither had logged much time in that country. Lucy had almost forgotten the extreme unlikelihood of her situation, and that the delight was likely to stop before too long. Dan, for his part, was still wondering why the colors were so extraordinarily bright, why time had become variable in its pace, why he was never bored anymore, why music seemed more lovely and compelling than it once had. In common with many alienated bright kids, he had taken LSD a time or two. This was like that, but not like as well-the intensity and peace without the speediness or paranoia. Somewhere in the lower reaches of his overintellectualized mind, the L-word began its slow rise to the surface.

Zak caught a bass, which was admired, as was Giancarlo's drawing. Later that afternoon, Lucy went a distance away from the campsite to pee, and after emerging from the bushes, she heard Zak's voice coming from above.

"You can't find me."

She looked. "I can't. Where are you? In the tree?"

"In the deer blind. Emmett showed me." There was a rustling forty feet above, and the boy's delighted face showed in the leaves of a tulip poplar. "Come on up. It's great!"

Lucy found climbing rungs on the tree's other side and climbed up.

"Wow, you're pretty invisible. What're you going to shoot?" The rat rifle was couched in his arm.

"Squirrels. They're considered varmints. You could eat them, you know. Emmett's going to show me how to make squirrel stew. I almost got a crow, too. Emmett's going to let me nail it to his barn if I do. And he's got a hunting bow, too, he showed me. This is what they use this blind for, bow hunting. It doesn't have a season. The deer come down to the stream there, through the laurel. They have paths."

She riffled his hair. "You're having a great time, aren't you?"

"Yeah, I never want to leave."

"Oh, yes, I know just what you mean."

When Karp returned to the Burroughs Building, he was not amazed to find his wife there, in the room with the state detectives, kibitzing and making herself useful, which was useful indeed. Karp did not believe there were three people in the country he would rather have involved in a criminal investigation than his own dear one, as long as she stayed continually under adult supervision. For the past several days Marlene had realized that she was not, in fact, made to lie around pools. Working on her tan was not enough work, it appeared. So she had started to show up and was accepted immediately by the staties as a colleague. Word had spread about her speckled background.

Virtually all the person-power Karp had at his call had been directed at a single goal: tracing the $7,500 blood money to a source of funds controlled by George Floyd, Lester Weames, or both. He found her working on just this with Mel Harkness.

"Any luck?" Karp asked, kissing the top of her head.

"Zilch. I am prepared to state that at no time in the past six months did either of the two scumbags in question withdraw that sum in cash from either private or union bank accounts. Those that we know of, anyway."

"Mel?"

"I don't get my head kissed?"

"Maybe later. Is she right as usual?"

"She's right," said Harkness, a rotund, balding, bespectacled state police detective who looked like an accountant and was an accountant. "We got pretty excited there for a bit. We found a ten-grand check to cash written out, but then there was a ten-grand cash deposit a day later."

"Why would they do that?"

"Can't say. But if there's no net withdrawal, we can't attribute it to any illegal payoff. Of course, there's a million ways they could have done it that we can't trace. They could have used a kickback from a purveyor. They could have private accounts. The company could have slipped them the cash. They could have cashed in their piggie pennies…"

"Unlikely," said Marlene. "I would be inclined to doubt that either of them spent their own money on this. Weames has a rep for cheapness. Neither of them spend their own money for anything, as far as I can tell. Car, travel, meals-it's all out of the union account. And perfectly legal, too. It has to be union cash, and since your judge won't let us look at the union books…"

"He's not my judge," said Karp. "But let's think about this. They didn't expect an investigation by us, but they had to know that the feds would be interested in the union, since Red had said he was going to bring them in. The feds would want to look at the union finances, therefore they have to be a little careful. So no big cash withdrawals. What do they spend their money on, anyway, the union?"

"Mainly pensions and health," said Harkness. "Salaries. Mortgage on the hall. Bonuses. Research. Very straightforward as far as the bank is concerned. It could be cooked as hell, but we can't tell from this."

"Well, we'll just have to follow up every check they cut and make sure it's legit."

"Better call in the marines, then," said Harkness.

"He doesn't have marines," said Marlene, "just us." To Karp she said, "I bet you wish you were back chasing Beemer and the congressman now."

"What congressman was that?" Harkness asked.

Neither Karp answered. They were staring into each other's eyes, combining brainpower in a way that they hadn't in a while.

"Smurfs," said Karp. "Why didn't we think of that?"

"The old guys' spending money," said Marlene. "The bonuses." He grabbed her, they kissed.

Harkness stared first at one, then at the other, a confused look on his face. "What're you two talking about?"

"We just figured out how they did it," said Karp, moving, looking for a phone to call Wade Hendricks.

Royal Eberly lived in the coal company house he had been born in, a four-room wooden affair with a sagging porch. It was painted baby blue with white trim. Red geraniums bloomed in number-ten cans on the windowsills and in the center of a white-painted truck tire in the tiny front yard. A faded American flag flapped gently above the heads of Karp and Hendricks and Eberly, the latter rocking in a straw-back rocker, the others in straight chairs. Mr. Eberly was sixty-nine; Karp thought he looked eighty: hollow-chested, sunken-eyed, hands so knotted with arthritis that he needed both of them to hold the jelly glass of iced tea. They were all drinking very sweet iced tea as Mr. Eberly talked about the old days in the deep mines. He had worked with Hendricks's daddy right here in this coal patch, Racke Creek, forty-eight years, man and boy.