Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

“Is this the fella you run off from?” Captain Burke asked.

Me and Jinx couldn’t do no more than nod.

“Hello, Sue Ellen,” Don said.

“Hello,” I said.

“How’s your mother?”

“Tolerable.”

“Good,” he said, then looked at the floor and didn’t try to catch our eye again.

Captain Burke said to Don, “I’ll get you supper soon, and you ought to eat it this time, not just play with it.”

Don didn’t say nothing, just kept staring at the floor.

“Come on back to the office,” Captain Burke said.

We did, and we all got back in our same chairs, except Captain Burke. He had an icebox in there, and he opened it up and got out three Co-Colas and used an opener from his desk drawer to pry the lids off. He set the Co-Colas in front of us, said, “There, now. Ain’t nothing like a good Co-Cola to kick the thirst.”

He sat down and we all sipped our drinks, as if on command. They were lukewarm, but right then I would have taken a big slug of spit if it had just a touch of sugar in it.

Captain Burke said, “That man back there, Don, he come into this town over a month ago. He come by and said he was looking for some kin, and had I seen them, or had any word. I told him no, and that I didn’t have papers on anybody that was a runaway.

“Well, then, he didn’t leave town. He just drove around in his truck, which had an old tarp over the bed. He’d sleep in the front seat of the truck, and now and again he’d go down to the river, where there’s a place for boats to tie up, and look around, then come back and stay about. Flies was all over the back of that truck, so finally, I made him give me a look. Know what was back there?” Burke said, eyeballing me and Jinx like we might actually have some idea.

“No, sir,” I said.

“It was the body of a man, and he was well rotted. He had a hole through his chest about big enough to drive a tractor through, even if it was dragging a pile of brush.”

“That’s a big hole,” I said.

“Yep, it was a big hole,” he said.

Captain Burke let that bloody, flyspecked picture he had painted settle on us, but there wasn’t a thing we knew to do with it. Jinx, as if to feed the story, said, “Dead man, huh?”

“Yep. He had been dead some time and had heated up good under that tarp. So you know what I done?”

We shook our heads.

“I arrested this Don fella, your stepdaddy. I arrested him and I asked him who that was in the truck bed.”

“That seems like a good way to go,” Jinx said.

“I thought the same,” Captain Burke said. “I said, ‘Who in hell is that and how did he get dead?’ He says to me, ‘Why, that there is Cletus, and I shot a hole through him with a shotgun.’” He paused and looked at us. “How do you like the story so far?”

Neither Jinx nor I knew what to say, so we just waited, like birds on a limb.

“So I say, ‘How come did you shoot him?’ And he says it was cause Cletus had paid a crazy nigger named Skunk to hunt y’all down-that would be you-and that he didn’t want none of you dead. He said there was some money involved.”

“He didn’t want us dead?” I said.

Captain Burke nodded. “What he said.”

“There ain’t no money,” Jinx said. “That was all some kind of pipe dream of his.”

“Say it was?” Burke asked.

“It was,” Jinx said. “Cletus told him a pipe dream and for a while there I figure he thought it was real.”

I wondered then if Jinx was being mighty clever, or just digging us a big hole to fall in.

“This Don Wilson says there was a girl got murdered, and that kind of set things off, though he didn’t know exactly how it started the ball rolling, or anything else about it. Just that his stepdaughter-that would be you-and a boy, who ain’t here, as I see it, and a little colored girl, which would be you, was all friends of hers. He said that girl drowned with a sewing machine fixed to her feet and that got things in motion.”

“But he didn’t know how it got things in motion?” I said.

“What he said,” Captain Burke said. “Don said he figured it was Cletus what killed her. Said they wasn’t a close family, and there was some kind of quarrel, maybe over some money, and Cletus killed her. Cletus claimed you had the money, and that brought this Skunk character into motion. I don’t know I believe there’s a Skunk character.”

“There is,” I said.

The Skunk part didn’t excite him that much. “And you say there ain’t no money?” He said that like he might like some of it.

“All we got is ten dollars between us,” Jinx said, and dug the money we had brought from the can out of her pocket and slapped it on the desk. “That’s it, and some pocket lint.”

“Your stepdaddy said this fellow Cletus put this crazy killer on you named Skunk, the one you say is real, and he didn’t want that. He tried to get Cletus to call it back. But that wasn’t the way Cletus wanted it. So Wilson shot Cletus, said he went looking for this killer Cletus had hired, but didn’t find him. He came here to see if you showed up to catch a bus or something. He was down at that bus depot, parked out front all day, until I noticed all them flies and had me a peek in the back of the pickup. I asked him why he didn’t just toss the body. And you know what he said?”

We shook our heads.

“He said after he killed him and tossed him back there and covered him up, he just didn’t think no more about him. Can you imagine that? That fella with a hole blowed through him, lying in the back of a truck smelling like an outhouse, flies all over the place, and he didn’t think no more about him. There’s a man with something on his mind, that’s what I can tell you.”

“There really was a hired killer,” I said, thinking he hadn’t paid attention the first time I mentioned it.

“This Skunk, you mean?” he said, and then it come to me that he might be circling around to see if we was going to change our story. I decided to add to it, and let the thing I added be the truth.

“Yes, sir. He killed two men that was working for Cletus, and caused another to get killed when a raft turned over on the river. The man on the raft was a preacher who tried to help us. His name was Reverend Jack Joy. He was an all-right fella.”

“My wife ran off with a preacher,” Captain Burke said. “So I don’t know I feel the loss all that heavy of a preacher.”

“We was running from Skunk. But he got his the other day. He’s dead by the river, hanging.”

“Hanging?” Captain Burke said.

I explained that part to him. When I finished up the story, I said, “What you going to do with my stepdaddy?”

“I don’t know,” Captain Burke said. “But your story and his kind of fit, except for the money.”

He kept coming back to the money, and by then I had him figured. He had already taken that ten dollars Jinx had put on his desk, folded it up, and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Cletus just thought there was money, but there wasn’t,” I said. “His boy, who died not long back. He spent it up. Word was he stole it from a bank.”

“Do say?”

“Yes, sir, that’s the story,” I said.

“So we can run all this by a judge if we like,” Captain Burke said. “But Don tells me Cletus ain’t got no next of kin to worry about things. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “His whole family is deader than a doornail.”

“Well, then. You said this fella that was after you…Skunk. You said he’s dead and hanging?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “And Mama, and Terry, that boy with the one arm, they’re still in the cabin.”

I had told him this already, but he was a man that liked hearing a thing repeated, so I gave him his wish. I decided then to talk about how the old woman had died. I just mentioned before that she had cut Terry’s arm off cause it was bad infected, and that she had held us captive, but I hadn’t mentioned she had passed in her sleep. I told him now and told how Skunk had dug her up and we had left her leaning against the house.