John Miller - Side by Side

For a precious minute she held Eli to her, caressing his head, kissing his cheeks.

“Momou. Momou. Momou,” he said over and over.

“It’s okay, Elijah,” she told him. “I love you, baby. I love you so much. You are going to be safe.” Your father says so.

She thought about the big woman’s threat, and she believed the woman would make good on her word by hurting them, but she couldn’t make herself believe the woman would actually kill them. If these people intended to do that, why hadn’t they already done so? Everybody knew that abductees had no value once they were dead. Lucy was increasingly sure this was about money. A ransom. But, she thought, the woman is obviously unstable. People in these circumstances do die, and for your sake, Walter, I can’t risk that happening to Elijah.

FREE. A four-letter word for getting the hell out of Dodge.

Peanut Smoot strolled into the brightly lit drugstore and made a beeline for the prescription counter in the rear. The store was one in a chain of fifteen regional stores owned by a pharmacist Peanut did business with. The owner had a problem that involved deviant sexual needs that respectable people didn’t advertise, and Peanut had fixed it up so the man could safely get the urge met. As a result, the owner had been recruited to buy any pharmaceutical drugs Peanut’s people came across as well as the other kinds of drugstore items you might find-like shampoo, tampons, and batteries-in a truck you’d hijacked.

When the owner spotted Peanut through the observation window in his office, he hurried out into the area where three lab-coated pharmacists were filling small bottles from large ones. The man seemed a little nervous, but that was probably because they usually met late at night after the employees had left.

“Mr. Smoot,” he said.

“I need something for back pain, George.”

“What type of pain?” The skin on George’s face seemed stretched tighter than usual, his eyes darting around the store behind Peanut like he was suspicious that something odd was going on out there in the aisles.

“The back pain kind.”

“By that I mean how did you injure your back?”

“I fell off a ladder.”

“I have just the thing,” George said, holding a finger in the air. He darted off into a back storage room. When he returned, he handed Peanut a box of over-the-counter pain medication and, after winking at Peanut, said loudly enough to be heard, “These will work as well as anything nonprescription.”

Peanut handed the druggist a ten-dollar bill and waited for him to go through the cash register motions and make change for it.

“Please come again,” George said with a forced cheerfulness, like he was talking to just anybody who had come in to spend money in a store he earned by marrying the owner’s daughter, who herself looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy with hair that looked like a hat made out of straw painted red.

George had made up the incapacitation liquid Peanut needed to make the Dockery woman stay put. It was a potent blend of chemicals that doctors used for operating and had the effect of making it impossible for someone to move until it wore off.

Back in the truck, Peanut opened the small pasteboard box and took out a bottle that contained, not the blue caplets the box promised, but a couple dozen capsules filled with tiny colored balls.

Peanut swallowed two of the caps and chased them with a carbonated sip of warm soda out of a can he’d had sitting in the holder a good while.

When his unregistered cell rang, he saw that it was a familiar pay phone number. Peanut knew that cellular calls were not private. Ask Pablo Escobar about using a cellular when the government wants to track you by your voice.

“What?”

“There’s a little problem.” It was his son Buck’s voice.

“What?” Peanut felt the hollow burning in his stomach he always got when Buck said he had a problem. Buck’s little problems tended to be larger than he’d admit to.

“Damn twins.”

Peanut took a deep breath and shifted in his seat. “What’d they do?”

“I gave them that little digging job to do, but when I came back they’d gone off. Hadn’t more than just started it.”

“Go find ’em and you get it done.”

“I don’t know where to look.”

“Hellfire, boy, they didn’t go to Mars in a flying saucer. Just go to where you saw them last and track ’em down. Y’all mess this deal up, I’m gone mess you up. You got that?”

“I hear ya. Everything’s fine, except for the twins getting lost. Everything else is a hunnerd percent right like it’s supposed to be.”

“It damn well better be.” Peanut checked his watch. “You don’t find them in a hour, you call me back and I’ll come out and see to it. And you make damn sure the you-know-what stays put. Don’t do nothin’ stupid.”

Peanut closed the phone. It was obvious that Buck had ordered the twins to do what he was too lazy to do, then left them alone with just his instructions to go by. Peanut had told Buck to dig graves so he’d stay occupied. He didn’t know for sure where the Dockerys would be buried, because nobody had told him that yet. Maybe they’d want the bodies found sometimes, or put under a slab, or ground into burger. He should have told Buck not to involve the twins-or leave them alone to do the digging. Some things you could tell the twins to do, some things you couldn’t leave them at. Buck knew that better than anybody. Trouble was, Buck was like some kind of animal that couldn’t think about food until he was nearly starving to death. You couldn’t trust him to plan ahead or stick to any particular job for very long.

The psychologist that Peanut had taken Buck to because the public school made him do it had said he had behavioral issues. Peanut loved the term issues.

Peanut knew all there was to know about his oldest son.

Buck didn’t give a damn about anybody but himself.

He didn’t like people telling him what to do.

He had a hair-trigger temper.

He got a kick out of other people’s pain.

He was a liar.

He imagined things.

He was a bully.

Nothing made him sick to his stomach.

He never felt guilty about anything he did.

He took what he wanted when he wanted it.

He always got his revenge.

All of the “issues” that made Buck a hellcat to teach or to get to follow orders worked in the boy’s favor when it came to enjoying a successful career in his chosen field-the family business.

Dixie Smoot opened her mouth and snapped it closed to click her porcelain teeth loudly-something she did out of habit when she was really pissed off.

Buck said he’d left the twins to take a turn digging, and that he had just been gone for a “few” minutes to go and check on something. She couldn’t imagine what he had to check on out in the plumb middle of nowhere. Now Buck was gone off to the Utzes’ store down the road to use the pay phone to call Peanut about the twins. Her daddy would be fit to be tied if things weren’t going smoothly. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time he had needed to punch out Buck. When it came to discipline, her daddy didn’t spare a rod.

Dixie figured she’d find the twins before Buck got back and joined her, because whenever he could get by with it, he’d get back too late to do any work. Buck was worse things than lazy, but what he did to others was between him and whoever he did it to. It was mostly the lazy part of Buck that complicated Dixie’s life.

Dixie’s four-wheeler was one of several that Peanut’s people had found inadequately attended and had brought out to the house for hunting and chores. You could do a lot more with the 400cc Honda four-wheel-drive ATVs than use them for getting yourself and your gun into the woods, and bringing deer back out when you killed one. The roads on the thousand-acre property were really just trails and a challenge for the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles.