Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

And on the land, a presence moved through the undergrowth, waiting for him to come.

‘Mr Parker?’ said Cleon. ‘I want to ask your pardon if you felt I was prying into your affairs, or if I’ve added in any way to your grief. That was not my intention.’

‘It never crossed my mind,’ said Parker.

The Leonard Cresils of this world, he thought, were aberrations, evolutionary anomalies that would eventually bring about their own dissolution, just like the man who had taken his wife and child from him. Men such as Cleon could mitigate the influence on human affairs of such malign entities through the goodness of their own natures, even if they could not make up for it entirely.

‘The phone call was a smart idea,’ said Parker.

‘I thought so too.’

‘I’ll see you around, Cleon.’

‘I look forward to it, Mr Parker. Very much.’

55

Tilon Ward woke early, in an unfamiliar bed. The apartment in Hot Springs to which Randall Butcher had consigned him was on the first floor of a building divided into eight units, which was two more than it could comfortably accommodate. The remaining rentals were occupied by the kind of poor white families that provided Butcher with a small but steady proportion of his income, aided by the interest on unofficial payday loans. The interest was high, but not extortionate, as Butcher was reluctant to sow excessive resentment among the masses. His people also supplied some of these tenants with narcotics when required, and Butcher owned most of the local stores that catered to their grocery needs, along with their cigarettes and alcohol. Thus, almost unnoticed, Randall Butcher had enmeshed himself in the fabric of their lives. Without him, their existences would unravel.

Tilon walked to the window and looked out on the cheerless day. Most of the east and southeast was now colored blue on the weather maps, while the temperature had dropped to the low thirties, having been close to seventy only days earlier. Still, Tilon wouldn’t have exchanged Arkansas for anywhere else in the country, or not the parts he’d seen of it. He’d spent some time in Boston when he was in his early twenties, having chased the wrong woman to the wrong place, and was convinced his health had never recovered from that single winter in the Northeast. Sometimes, at the memory of it, the tips of his toes stung, like pain in a phantom limb. No, this was the place for him, and he hoped to end his days here, but not in the service of Randall Butcher, and not with the shadow of Donna Lee Kernigan’s death hanging over him. He found himself missing her voice and touch. It could never have amounted to anything between them, or nothing more than they already had, but he’d liked Donna Lee a lot more than he had his ex-wife – and he’d married the latter.

Tilon showered under a head from which the water barely trickled, the pressure being kept deliberately to a minimum. He dressed, and ate stale bread from the kitchen cabinet. Pruitt Dix, upon dropping him at the apartment the previous night, had instructed him to sit tight, and Tilon was already growing claustrophobic. He smoked a cigarette in the weed-strewn yard, and exchanged a nod with one of his neighbors but no further greeting. His unit had the unmistakable ambience of a safe house, a place of temporary refuge, and Tilon guessed that the other tenants had learned to mind their own business where its occupants were concerned. He watched TV, and read some of the articles and stories in a pair of ancient editions of Playboy magazine, using the blade of a knife to turn the stained pages.

Shortly before nine he heard a car pull up outside. Dix had returned. He had in his possession a black sports bag, which he handed to Tilon. Inside was a selection of Tilon’s own clothing, along with some toiletries and a razor.

‘I had your momma put it together,’ said Dix. ‘I told her not to worry about you, that you’d be back with her soon enough. If anyone came asking, she was to inform them only that you’d gone out of town on business, and she had no way of contacting you. Come on, we’re leaving.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Randall had a change of heart about the cook. He’d prefer you to get started right away, using whatever supplies are already at hand.’

There was no point in arguing. Tilon got into the car and waited for Dix to join him. The interior was clean and smelled of lemon air freshener.

‘You stink of cigarettes,’ said Dix, as he took the wheel. ‘You ought to reexamine your lifestyle choices.’

Tilon was in no mood for Dix’s shit. His ear still ached, and he was sure the lobe needed stitches, because he’d bled on his pillow the night before. For now, the dried blood was holding the wound together. Butcher kept emergency kits at the cookhouses – mostly burn medication and eye baths, but also adhesive bandages and paper sutures. Tilon would tend to the injury once they reached their destination.

‘Did they find Sallie Kernigan yet?’ he said.

‘If they did, they’re keeping it quiet.’

Tilon had a suspicion that Dix might be looking for Sallie Kernigan too, and for the same reason as Tilon: to make sure she understood the importance of keeping her mouth shut about her connection to Tilon and meth. Tilon didn’t believe Sallie was in any immediate danger from Dix, assuming she was still alive. Ironically, her daughter’s murder had guaranteed her safety, if only for the time being. Dix couldn’t risk killing Sallie to keep her quiet. If he made even the slightest error, the police would fall on him like wolves, seeking to tie him to Donna Lee’s killing, which would then link him to Patricia Hartley, and possibly Estella Jackson, back and back until every unsolved femicide in the state of Arkansas was being hung around Pruitt Dix’s neck.

Dix pulled out of the lot and drove west. ‘You really screwed up, Tilon, fucking the Kernigan girl like that.’

‘I know it.’ Tilon thought it was just one more bad decision to add to a lifetime of them. ‘But you screwed things up more by forcing me to leave Cargill.’

‘You telling me you had a mind to confess your indiscretion to the police?’

‘No, but skipping town means questions will be asked. It’ll look bad.’

‘Well, you can explain the reason for your absence upon your return. You possess a trustworthy face, Tilon, and you’ll have time enough to come up with a plausible explanation while you’re supervising the cook. You still have Evan Griffin in your pocket?’

‘I never had him in my pocket.’

‘If you say so.’

‘What about my truck?’

‘It’s garaged. We’ll have someone drive it out to you when your work is done.’

But Tilon was barely listening. Whatever was going on here couldn’t only be because of his connection to the Kernigans, could it? Randall Butcher didn’t ordinarily give a rat’s ass who was sleeping with whom, although he made a point of discouraging his dancers from getting involved with customers in his clubs, if only because it rarely ended well – strippers, in Butcher’s experience, being prone to lead disorderly lives, which in turn attracted disorderly men.

Then again, it was one thing sleeping with a girl who was barely of age, and another coming across that same girl naked and dead, and then neglecting to mention your earlier intimacy with her to the police. And sure, perhaps a degree of reticence made sense when you didn’t have an alibi beyond your own mother, who’d have lied to protect you even if the remains of a dozen dead girls were found stacked in your closet, but those kinds of secrets left a man vulnerable to pressure in the event of arrest, pressure that might usefully be applied to induce him to turn on his sometime employer Randall Butcher, the biggest supplier of meth in the region.