Broken river, p.15
Broken River, page 15
The other night Janine and Pam were sitting on the sofa with their heads mashed together, staring at the laptop, and when Louis asked what they were looking at—because he wanted to know what could possibly cause them to non-accidentally touch each other—Pam said it was the Broken River case, the missing girl. Somebody had found her, somebody posting on CyberSleuths. She was back in the area, this person said. “I know her name,” said the person. There was a picture.
“Lemme see that,” Louis said, and they scootched over and he added his head to the cluster, pressing it against Janine’s. He suddenly remembered when she was, like, two, before Fred, before Broken River, how they’d sit this way, in the old place, on that shitty sofa they used to have, the one that would swallow you up when you sat on it and that smelled like cat piss. Him and Pam, with the kid nestled between them, looking at a book or watching TV. His arm around Pam’s shoulders. He did this now, snaked his arm behind the two of them. They let him.
He didn’t get any chill, any shock of recognition. It was just a girl, kind of blurry, on a sunny street. Could have been anyone, could have been anywhere. Maybe she looked kind of like those people, but Louis had only ever seen them at night, in motion, illuminated by headlights.
Louis didn’t ask Joe if this trip was about the girl in the picture. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know. Now, though, he has got plenty of time to think about it. Plenty of time to sit in silence without the radio to distract him, and contemplate what possible other reason there could be for Mr. Chet to suddenly be back in their lives, telling them to go north.
Louis first met Joe at the carpet warehouse, more than fifteen years ago. Joe was working part-time for the franchise, making a delivery of boxcutters, tacks, carpet pads. They got to talking, sort of. Joe was in contact with other drivers, people who knew just how shoddy their bosses’ record keeping was. They hauled appliances, electronics, basketball sneakers: stuff you could sell. Louis had a big old warehouse here, with plenty of unused space. After twenty minutes they shook hands, and soon afterward Louis’s take-home pay began to rise. That was the longest conversation he ever had with Joe. They did all manner of jobs together, usually secured through Joe’s contacts, shadowy people known only by their first names or by no names at all.
One of them was a guy Joe called Mr. Chet. Everybody else they worked for or with seemed to Louis to be small potatoes, but Mr. Chet was somebody. If they had a big job that needed doing, Mr. Chet was typically behind it. You’d only ever hear him on the other end of a pay phone. His voice was calm and quiet, but high, nasal—it begged to be imitated, though you didn’t dare. He never involved himself directly. He didn’t show himself.
Until the thing with the guy and the lady in Broken River a dozen years ago. That was the first and last time Louis saw Mr. Chet. Everybody disappeared afterward, went quiet, and Louis put that part of his life behind him. When he knocked Pam up again, they decided they’d better get married, and after a while Louis got used to being out of the game, managing the carpet store, bringing up the kids, being more or less fucking stuck here in his shit house, with his crazy wife, never making quite enough money. Sometimes—more so back when the kids were little and he was still unaccustomed to lying to Pam—he lay awake at night panicking that Joe or Mr. Chet might throw him under the bus. Pin Broken River on him somehow. Sometimes he would dream about Broken River and wake up screaming and sweating, and Pam would bolt awake next to him saying “Jesus Christ, Louis, what is your fucking problem?” Nowadays she’s taken to wearing earplugs to bed. She can’t hear if one of the kids gets sick, or if the phone rings, or probably even if the fucking fire alarm goes off. It’s all his responsibility.
But whatever. It’s fine. He doesn’t wake up screaming anymore. Some days he barely even thinks about it. Today started out as one of those days.
An hour later they reach the outskirts of town. It’s nothing much to look at. Shitty houses, a car dealership, a Chinese buffet. Once they’re in town proper, it’s no better, with everything as broken-down and depressing as he remembers. Maybe it’s a good thing, being here, Louis thinks; it makes Argos seem cosmopolitan by comparison. He is recalling their meeting with Mr. Chet a dozen years ago and tenses up as they approach the turn that led to the empty, chained-off parking lot where they rendezvoused. But Joe drives past it without a glance. Louis says, “Is he here? Are we meeting him?”
“No.”
Well, that much is a relief. “So what are we doing?”
“Talking to a guy.”
“What guy?”
No reply. Joe turns onto Erie and then onto Shearn and pulls up in front of an abandoned storefront, yellowed newspaper falling away from one corner of a window that is already more than adequately obscured by dust. Joe turns off the engine and says, “Come on.”
Louis doesn’t move. Something has just occurred to him. Maybe Mr. Chet is just trying to tie up loose ends. Maybe this is all a ruse to get Louis far away from home without telling anybody where he’s going. Joe probably told Mr. Chet about the girl showing up on the website, and Mr. Chet probably told Joe to take Louis somewhere and kill him. So now Joe’s going to kill him. Louis is the weak link, the amateur. He always was. Joe’s got a little pistol with a suppressor on it tucked into his big canvas coat, and he’s going to push Louis into this abandoned store and pop him in the back of the head and leave him there. It’ll be weeks before his body is discovered, if not longer: weeks before Pam and the kids even realize he didn’t run off with another woman.
Joe has gotten out of the car and shut the door. Now he’s opened it again and poked his big, ugly head in. “Come on,” he says, in precisely the same tone of voice he said it in the first time. This only reinforces Louis’s fear. His blood has turned to sludge. He unbuckles his seat belt and sort of leans against the door, then unlatches it and lets his weight push it open. Ahh, fuck. His feet hit the ground and he is able to stand on them. They propel him slowly around the front of the car and onto the sidewalk, where Joe meets him and leads him not into the abandoned store but into the guitar shop next door.
Oh god. Thank you, god. Guitars are hanging on the walls, amplifiers are stacked on the floor, and there’s a tattoed girl with punk rock hair working behind a glass counter full of electronic-looking shit. She glances up without saying hello.
“Where is he,” Joe says.
“Teaching a lesson.”
“Tell him Joe’s here.”
“He’s teaching a lesson,” the girl says, dropping a shoulder and cocking a hip. She doesn’t drop her gaze.
Joe turns to Louis, stares blankly at him a moment, then jerks his head toward the hallway in back, from which the sound of halting electric-guitar scales can be heard. After a moment, Joe manages a frown.
“What?” Louis says.
“Get him.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, he’s in a lesson. You gotta wait,” the girl is saying, but Louis is happy to disobey, happy to have an errand, happy to be alive. He follows the sound of the guitar to an unmarked white door, knocks and enters.
There’s a guy here, older than Louis, long gray hair, smoker’s mustache. He’s sitting in a plastic folding chair, and across from him’s a girl a little younger than Louis’s daughter. They’re both holding guitars. The guy says, “Hey, sorry, man, Cherise can help you out front,” and Louis says “Joe’s here,” and the guy says “What?” and Louis says “Joe.” In response to the guy’s puzzled frown, Louis pantomimes Joe’s considerable height, large girth, and bald head with a series of creative hand motions.
“Oh,” says the guy. He turns to the kid. “Smoke break, Shooter. Keep noodlin’.”
Out in the alley behind the guitar shop, the guy looks pale and nervous and confused. Also cold. He’s a skinny bastard; in his puffy purple ski jacket, which must be something one of his students left behind, he looks like a length of insulated PVC pipe. He smokes his cigarette in little sips and jogs in place every few seconds.
“Yeah, I remember you, man,” he says to Joe, offering Louis a half glance as though to acknowledge, or invent, the possibility that he remembers Louis, too. Which he doesn’t because Louis has never met him. “What’s up?”
“Who’s the new Barney,” Joe says.
“I dunno who that is, man.”
“There’s a new Barney. And a girl making deliveries.”
“Don’t know any girl, Joe.” The guy’s in kind of a permanent shrug. Born shruggin’. He looks tiny in his big coat.
Joe turns to Louis. “Stand at the end of the alley.”
“What?” Louis says. Then he looks at the guy, who now appears terrified, and realizes why, and says, “Oh, okay,” and goes to the end of the alley and looks up and down the mostly deserted street for, what, he doesn’t know, a cop? A rival thug? There don’t seem to be many of either in this town. From behind him comes a squeal and a moan and then a lot of low, fast talking on the part of the guitar guy. When he turns around a few seconds later, the guy is scuttling back in through the alley door and Joe is lumbering toward Louis with his fingers twitching and an expression of mild distaste on his face.
“C’mon,” he says, and Louis follows him to the Cadillac.
They drive back through town the way they came. “Where’re we going?”
“House,” says Joe.
But they don’t go to a house, not right away. Instead they go to a diner. Louis is grateful for this; lunchtime was an hour ago, and he’s hungry and mildly nauseated from the hunger and from the smell of Joe’s car. The diner is mostly empty save for a farmer-looking guy falling asleep at the counter and, over in the corner, a Hispanic lady with makeup tattooed on her face who at first seems to be talking into a Bluetooth but actually just turns out to be nuts. The waitress takes their order. She’s a tall dyed-redhead of around forty. She and Joe know each other. Pretty well, by the look of it. Louis is jealous, the waitress is his type. Pam’s not. Louis isn’t sure why he is attracted to his own wife. It doesn’t make sense. Anyway, he’s never been unfaithful to her. He supposes he just still likes her in spite of everything.
The waitress—her name is Shelly—brings their food, and they eat it. It’s club sandwiches. Louis now understands why the diner is empty: the lettuce is wilted, the bacon is clammy, the turkey doesn’t have any flavor. Joe takes huge bites of his sandwich, champing and smacking like a dog with its face in a bowl, and licks his fingers—every one of them—when he’s finished. He gets up, carries his plate to the kitchen, and emerges with Shelly. Louis is only halfway through his first sandwich half.
Joe says, “I’ll be back.” Shelly is taking her apron off and hanging it over the back of Joe’s chair.
“Seriously?”
The two of them head for the door, Shelly leading the way, and as they pass into the street, Joe smacks her behind. They climb into his car and drive away.
Louis sits there, bewildered by this unexpected development. The mentally ill lady has stopped talking and is now moving her hands as though saying the rosary, but her hands are empty. The farmer is gone; a young guy is standing with his arms crossed behind the counter, scowling at the front door. The cook, Louis supposes, and then, in a burst of insight, realizes that he’s Shelly’s son. He can’t be more than twenty. How does he feel about his mother taking a nooner with some tough from out of town? Louis again remembers when Janine was still a little girl, when her room was pink, and lousy with bears and lacy garbage and posters of horses and princess shit, and how much he hated all of it, and how much he misses it now that the horses have been replaced by rappers and the tiaras by heels, and he wonders if someday—who knows, during her heroin-addiction-and-hooking phase, maybe—he will feel nostalgia for what he hates today. He is trying to get this bite of turkey club successfully chewed and out of his life. It’s taking forever. And then he finally stops trying and just swallows the damned thing, and nearly chokes, and he coughs, and tears up from the coughing, and then he has to calm himself down to keep from straight-up crying.
He didn’t mean to kill anyone. Jesus Christ, he never dreamed that was what they were doing. They didn’t even need a third man, that’s the crazy thing—Joe and Mr. Chet could have handled it all by themselves. They pulled into the driveway and met the Volvo coming out, and the Volvo swerved into the woods and hit that tree. Joe and Mr. Chet were out the doors in an instant, and Mr. Chet tackled the guy and Joe the lady, and they got the two of them up against a couple of trees in the headlights with guns up under their chins, and Mr. Chet started muttering to the guy, asking him unintelligible questions punctuated by insults: You little fucking twerp, you limp-dicked little hippie.
All they’d told Louis was they had to go pick something up. And they needed him to drive, and maybe to serve as backup in case things went a little screwy. And he would get a nice little payout if it all went well: a thousand bucks. No promises, but how’s that sound to ya, Louie? Eh? Pretty good, Mr. Chet, pretty good. Mr. Chet didn’t seem so intimidating at first—he was smaller than Louis had expected, though big-shouldered and amiable. More talkative than Joe, which wasn’t saying much, but he didn’t seem to mind Joe’s silences on the long drive to Broken River. “Whaddya say, Louie,” Mr. Chet said every fifteen minutes or so, and Louis said Sure, right, definitely, Mr. Chet. What did Louis know? He was twenty-eight. He worked at his uncle’s carpet store. He could use a thousand bucks.
And then, when the guy up against the tree was saying they didn’t have it, they didn’t have it, that Mr. Chet’s people had robbed them, they fucking robbed them, why don’t you ask them yourself? the lady started screaming. She just screamed and screamed until Joe’s hand clapped itself over her mouth, and she must have bit the hand because it reared back and smacked her. And then … Jesus. Louis couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Joe was raping her, that’s what he was doing—he had apparently got it into his head that this would make the guy talk, or maybe he just felt like raping somebody. Anyway, what the guy did instead was make a break for it, to try to save the lady, or maybe he was just a coward and was leaving her to die. And Louis heard Mr. Chet say “For fuck’s fucking sake” and somebody shot the guy, and after a while, after way too long, somebody shot the lady, it was dark and hard to tell who did what, and the guy and the lady ended up bleeding to death on the ground while Joe hiked up his pants and tucked his shirt back in.
Louis had been half-watching all this from the gravel drive, where he was standing with one hand resting on the driver’s-side door of Mr. Chet’s Expedition and the other on the butt of the gun they’d given him and which was half-buried in his jeans pocket. Now he just said oh Jesus oh Jesus under his breath over and over while the smell of discharged firearms dissipated in the air.
“The fuck,” Mr. Chet said.
“Sorry,” said Joe.
“The fuck?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“This is a real fucking mess, Joe,” Mr. Chet said.
“Sorry, Mr. Chet.”
“You’re sorry. You’re sorry. Louis!”
oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus
“Louis!”
“Yessir?”
“Open the back. There’s tarps. Get out the tarps and clear the rest of the shit out of the way. Then bring ’em over here and let’s fix this shit. Hurry it up.”
He did as he was told.
Joe and Shelly return to the diner sooner than Louis worried they might, though Shelly’s facial expression (bleary, small private smile) and body language (slow, sashaying walk with lots of hip action) indicate satisfaction, and Joe clearly feels confident enough in a job well done to smack her on the ass again as she heads for the kitchen. Is she aware that she just had sex with a rapist and murderer? Maybe she is. Maybe it’s a selling point. Louis has paid—the kid accepted the money—and left a significant tip, despite his waitress having abandoned the restaurant for forty-five minutes. Joe does not comment on the cost of lunch or on what has transpired. If there is evidence on Louis’s face of his recent bout of reminiscence, Joe betrays no awareness of it. He just says, “C’mon.”
In the car, Louis asks where they’re going and Joe again says “House.” Louis asks if he can be a little more specific than that, and Joe says nothing. Okay, fine. Joe’s got his phone out and the lady in it is telling him how far to go down what streets. They’re there in five minutes—it’s a little warren of fifties bungalows, most of them in disrepair or in need of paint. Old cars are parked in cracked and weedy driveways—not interesting old cars, old cars from when cars started looking the way they now look and will probably look forever. It occurs to Louis that Joe’s car is spectacularly inappropriate for criminal activity. Maybe what’s happened so far today, or is about to happen, doesn’t fall into the category of criminal activity. Mr. Chet’s car back in 2004 was stolen, it turns out. A throwaway car. When, someday, Joe arrives at Louis’s house in a ten-year-old Toyota Camry, Louis will know that he’s about to once again be put into service as an assistant murderer.
No car sits in front of 1313 Gauss Lane, though. The name on the mailbox is JANDEK. Louis follows Joe up the front walk and watches him bang on the screen door, five times, with deafening force. No one answers, and no one flees out the back. It’s snowing again, harder now, so maybe the owners will not notice the footprints Louis and Joe leave as they case the joint. Joe looks at the first-floor windows, presumably to see how secure they are; he crouches and peers down into the basement window wells. Either these are blacked out or it’s really dark down there, but nothing is visible through the dirty glass. Joe sniffs the air, squints up at the chimney. He grunts.
