‘Guilty,’ said Dobey. ‘What some men do to women makes me ashamed of my sex.’
The sentinel at the door continued to watch the lot, the suppressed pistol hanging by her side. Dobey briefly wondered what might have made her the creature she was, what might have been visited on her by men – because men it must have been; he’d grown adept at identifying their mark. Whatever she’d suffered, it had forged her into something awful, but it wouldn’t stop Dobey from hurting her in his turn if he had to. He didn’t think he could get to her before she had a chance to fire her gun, but he could probably tackle Quayle. The small nightstand beside the bed contained a lot of useless shit – old coins, plugs for cell phones that weren’t even manufactured any longer, broken pencils, expired painkillers – but it also held a fixed blade KA-BAR and a Sidewinder revolver in .22 Magnum. If he could take down Quayle, use him momentarily as a shield, and get his hand inside the nightstand— ‘No,’ said Quayle.
‘I don’t understand.’
Quayle dipped a hand into one of his trouser pockets, produced a coin, and flipped it to Dobey, who caught it instinctively.
‘Take a look,’ said Quayle.
Dobey did. It was a 2005 Kansas state quarter, slightly battered and scratched, bearing the words ‘In God We rust’ because a grease mark had prevented a clean pressing. Mint, it was probably worth a hundred dollars, but less so in its current state. Dobey recognized this particular example because it was one of the coins he stored in his nightstand, plucked from the register and added to the other rarities kept there with the intention of someday selling them on.
‘My colleague appropriated the gun and the knife, but her areas of expertise don’t extend to numismatics,’ said Quayle. ‘Tell me, Mr Dobey, do you know the tale of the Comte de Chalais?’
It took Dobey a moment or two to answer. If Carlos had gone to the police, they would have been here by now. The gun and knife were forfeit. His life was forfeit.
‘No, sir,’ he said finally, ‘I don’t.’
‘Henri de Talleyrand-Périgord, the count in question, was a French nobleman, close to Louis the Thirteenth, who made the mistake of plotting against Cardinal Richelieu, a gentleman who, in the manner of many great conspirators, disliked having conspiracies aimed at himself. Richelieu ordered Henri to be executed, but his confederates bribed the executioner to absent himself in the hope that Henri’s life might be spared. Instead, Richelieu entrusted the task to another prisoner, also condemned to death, but unfortunately lacking the skills required to perform a successful decapitation. It took thirty-four blows to sever Henri’s head, and he was still alive until the twentieth. The lesson for you, Mr Dobey, is that even if one is certain of death, one can die easily or one can die in great pain. So, Karis Lamb: What. Did. She. Say. To. You?’
‘She said,’ Dobey replied, ‘she was running from the devil himself.’
Quayle sat back.
‘I’d like to be able to assure you that she wasn’t speaking literally,’ he said, ‘but it would be a lie.’
12
The earth is never the same after winter. The season briefly seals the landscape, holding it in suspension, but only at the cost of a greater transformation with the coming of spring.
As frozen ground thaws, the ice beneath melts, and the earth sinks to fill the spaces created. But this process is not consistent: the quantities of ice, and the speed of the melt, will vary, with the result that a previously flat surface may become pitted and uneven over the years, its weaknesses waiting to be exposed.
The spruce was among the oldest in the copse. It was only to be expected that it should someday fall, or so it would later be said, as though the imminent revelation were entirely in the natural order of things.
Not everyone would concur with this view. The tree, whispered those who knew of such matters, was not so old, and the slope upon which it stood remained relatively stable. There was subsidence, but not so much that it should have caused the spruce’s hold upon the earth to be so fatally undermined, and certainly not so abruptly, with the thaw barely commenced.
But fall the tree did, and as it fell the rain eased, descending more gently now, the very heavens complicit in what was about to occur.
13
Karis Lamb had made it as far as Seymour, Indiana, when she called the diner asking for Dobey, but he was at a warehouse in Columbus looking at broilers. Wanda Brady, Corbie’s mother, had a catering background and covered for Dobey a couple of afternoons a week, and it was she who answered the phone. Wanda was prescient enough to detect the urgency in the woman’s tone, and to agree, if not to give out Dobey’s number, then at least to pass on a message to him.
‘She says she’s run away from a bad situation, and she’s pregnant,’ Wanda told Dobey when he answered his cell. ‘She’s sitting in a Starbucks in Seymour.’
So Dobey dialed the number Wanda gave him, and a woman picked up and said her name was Karis, and she’d heard that Dobey helped people like her.
Dobey did not think of himself as a good man. He acted as he did because it had become unconscionable for him to do otherwise, but experience had taught him to exercise a modicum of care. On more than one occasion, women and girls helped by him had later been tracked down by boyfriends, husbands, family, and were either forced to return by their tormentors or went back of their own volition, in some cases for reasons that Dobey didn’t even wish to contemplate.
At least two of those women later did what Dobey asked every woman who passed through his care not to do, namely mention his refuge to anyone else, not unless that individual was in a similar situation to the one they themselves had fled. The result, in the first case, was an abusive telephone call. The second involved a visit from a man named Derrick Flinn – guess whose hick family couldn’t even correctly spell a first fucking name, boys and girls? – who arrived at the diner with a Ruger on his hip, thanks to Indiana state law’s ongoing silence on open carry. Dobey was all for the Second Amendment, but even at the best of times he regarded anyone who entered a restaurant, store, or public park while flaunting a gun as a cocksucker of the highest order, and that went double for Dobey’s own place of business.
So Derrick Flinn took a stool, ordered a coffee, and engaged in some general conversation with Dobey that Flinn gradually steered round to the subject of men who involved themselves in the personal lives of other men, and most particularly their relationship with their womenfolk, which is when Dobey began to recollect a thirty-five-year-old woman named Petra Flinn. Petra had come to him a year or so back with so many dark bruises on her torso and thighs that Dobey might have taken her for black in the wrong light were it not for the fact that her face, her arms, and her legs below knee level had been left untouched – so she could still wear dresses in public, she said, and not embarrass her husband on social occasions.
Derrick Flinn didn’t attempt to visit violence on Dobey, didn’t make any threats, didn’t even raise his voice, but the forty minutes Flinn spent in the diner were among the most unpleasant of Dobey’s life, as Flinn squatted on the stool dressed in browns and greens, like an armed toad, while Dobey wondered if, when Flinn started shooting, he might kill Dobey alone and spare the staff.
Eventually Flinn thanked Dobey for his time, paid for the coffee, and left. He drove home and, since he was on a roll, beat his wife so badly that he stopped her heart, and was now serving life in the state prison up in Michigan City. So men like Derrick Flinn were among the reasons Dobey was very careful when any woman asked if he could come get her rather than have her travel to him.
‘Who gave you my name?’ Dobey asked.