$200 and a Cadillac

XI



Hank wasn’t sure why he had the Subaru towed to the garage at the other end of town. Maybe if they could fix it quickly he could use it to get his job done and get the hell out of there. The cost was irrelevant. Speed was everything. Hank walked the thousand feet from the motel to the garage. Although he walked almost everywhere in New York, somehow it felt completely unnatural here.

What passed for the town was a short strip of buildings spanning three blocks on either side of the main intersection where the road from the freeway came in from the south. The main drag was wide and gave the appearance of a once grand boulevard gone to seed. There were a few side streets that quickly turned to gravel, and ultimately dirt, and a small grid of residential streets surrounding Main Street, but the edge of town was almost constantly in view. There were no sidewalks, only narrow parking lots butting up against the shoulder of the road, and Hank had the distinct feeling that the town had been thrown together with no planning whatsoever. Everything was old, used, ragged, and random.

Hank had been in a million small towns—places he’d chased people to or tracked them down in over the years. Although most of them had a charm of one sort or another, each time he found himself in one, he felt claustrophobic. But this one beat them all. It seemed to be dying right before his eyes and threatening to take him with it. The signs of a long, slow decay were everywhere. He felt like a large animal roaming through a blighted, burned forest where only a few trees remained standing. There wasn’t much left and what there was made him homesick for the crowded anonymity of Manhattan.

At the west end of Main were the new gas station and mini-market and the Super 8 Motel. Next to the motel, heading east into town, was an appliance store that had once sold new refrigerators and washing machines. It had switched to repair work years ago, and was now abandoned—its interior piled high with rusted machines and other junk. Then there was a small hardware store. Across the street from the hardware store was a Chinese restaurant. Next to that was a low strip of commercial space—all of it boarded up except an auto parts store. Near the main intersection was an old, two-story brick building that looked like the city offices. Behind that appeared to be a small city park with a baseball diamond and a large parking lot. Altogether, the town was depressing and Hank couldn’t imagine why anyone would live there.

What was worse, at ten in the morning the sun was already heating the air well above ninety and Hank felt overwhelmed by it. And then there was the dirt. Everything—the streets, the windows, even the air itself—seemed to be coated with a grimy film. Hank imagined huge clouds of dust swirling up and down Main Street every time the wind blew—working its way into every crack and crevice, beneath every door, behind every ear, between every pair of parted lips, and down into every set of lungs in town. What a place. What a dirty little shithole of a place to be.

All in all, as he walked, Hank was left with an impending sense of disaster. He thought back over the wreck in the middle of nowhere and wasn’t convinced that making it to town had improved his situation much.

There was a small café at the main intersection. Hank went inside. Gold Formica everywhere. A long counter split the room in two. Booths along the windows facing the street and the grill along the back wall with a counter in between. Hank took a seat at the counter, ordered coffee, bacon, and eggs. The forty-something waitress was also the cook. Two old guys in a booth laugh about something funny that had happened a very long time ago.

While he was eating his overcooked eggs, a policeman came in and got a cup of coffee to go. It wasn’t the sheriff or the young deputy from the night before. The waitress called him Jimmy and they joked with each other while the coffee was brewing. Hank watched the cop. He was mid-thirties, athletic, and had the pompousness of a man who wasn’t nervous about anything, but who wasn’t really ready for anything either. It was what the young cop from the night before would turn into if he was lucky enough to have an uneventful life. Hank kept his eyes on Jimmy and then thought about the sheriff—Mickey O’Reilly—and how much different he’d been from the guy standing at the end of the counter, flirting with the waitress. That sheriff had gotten some experience somewhere, and it sure the hell wasn’t Nickelback.

The waitress turned her back on the deputy and spoke while she poured the coffee. “Heard about some body or something got found last night. It was on the radio report this morning.”

“Naw, it wasn’t a body,” Jimmy said. “Just a leg. That’s all.”

“Well, there must be a body somewhere. Legs don’t just come off.” The waitress laughed. Jimmy laughed too.

“No, I spose they don’t.” He took the Styrofoam cup from her and kept talking. “Chief’s out looking for a body, but he ain’t gonna find nothing. Least, it ain’t likely. He just feels obliged to look. You know how he is.”

“Sure. Mr. Thorough.” The way she said it almost sounded like Thoreau. She stood with her hands on her hips. Hank watched the way her left thumb looped into the strap on her apron. Her hands looked older than the rest of her. Too many years of hard work cleaning and cooking and getting cut, burned, and bruised had aged them faster than her eyes or neck. He saw she wasn’t married—no ring and no line where there might be one she wore when she wasn’t working—and he wondered why she would be in a town like this. Maybe she owned the café and made a good enough living to make it worthwhile. Maybe a husband had died and left her penniless and with nowhere else to go. Maybe she just didn’t care and this place was as good as any other.

Hank smiled at himself. Everything had to be a tragedy. He took a bite of hash browns with egg yolk mixed into them. Maybe she likes it here and maybe I’m the one with problems, he thought. Then he watched the waitress turn her back to the deputy and open the cooler behind her as Jimmy lifted a maple bar from the tray by the register and walked out without paying for either it or the coffee. Hank watched Jimmy through the windows, going out and getting into a police car parked along the street. The two old guys in the corner cackled away in their husky, hoarse voices, and the café came to life with the sound of raw hamburgers being thrown onto a very hot grill.

Between the café and the repair shop there were two bars, an absurdly small clothing store, another restaurant that looked like a sad imitation of a Denny’s, a combination pawnshop and video rental place, a real estate agency, and Nickelback’s only grocery store. Hank walked it as quickly as he could, hoping that the guys at the garage had already had a chance to look at the car.

The garage was an old gas station that no longer sold gas. It had one bay with a hydraulic lift in it and the Subaru was up on it with a twisted mess of wires and metal parts dangling like the tentacles of a post-modern jelly fish. Hank stood in front of the lift and stared up at the car. A man in the office came out through the side door leading into the garage and lumbered toward Hank. He was huge, wearing gray coveralls stained with oil and who knows what else, and had a head like a large ball of dough with whiskers.

“Your car?” the man called out like he was a mile away. Hank watched the man come toward him and thought about the grin on the tow truck driver’s face.

“Yeah, kind of,” Hank answered.

The man in the coveralls stopped and stared at him. The name embroidered above the breast pocket of the coveralls looked like it said “Cookie,” and Hank squinted, trying to make it into some kind of normal name. A silence hung between them, but Hank didn’t notice and the other guy didn’t seem to care much, so they just stood there, looking at each other. Hank was beginning to ask himself why he was there at all, why he’d even considered getting the car fixed, when there was noise from around the side of the building like someone knocking over a pile of hubcaps. Hank turned and saw a small, wiry guy come around the side of the building.

He couldn’t have been more than five foot three or four and barely a hundred pounds. He wore the same coveralls as the big guy, even the stains were similar. He moved quickly, almost vibrating over the earth as though powered by some inner charge, and was over to Hank with his hand out immediately.

“I’m Leo. This here’s Cookie. This your car?” He shook Hank’s hand and pointed up at the wreckage on the lift with his other hand. Before Hank could respond, Leo continued. “It’s in pretty bad shape. What happened? There’s a sticker on the bumper from Hertz. You buy one of them used rental cars? I hear you can get good deals on those, but you never know what other people have done to ’em.”

Leo was shifting his weight from foot to foot like a restless child. Hank watched his fidgeting movements: one hand scratching the back of his neck and then rubbing his chin, the other hand opening and closing its fist, like it was unsure what to do, and the whole time Leo’s head was bobbing and his feet were tapping to some rhythm only he could hear. Cookie stood behind him, completely still and unchanged since coming out of the office. The contrast reminded Hank of a cartoon, although he couldn’t place which one. Finally, Leo looked back at Hank and the small black dots of his eyes and the side-to-side movement of his twitching jaw gave it away: crystal meth or some other kind of speed. Leo was bouncing off the walls for good reason.

Hank stopped following the conversation and simply watched the hebephrenic Leo’s jerky movements against the backdrop of the inert and possibly lifeless Cookie. It was mesmerizing and it took direct questioning from Leo to break the trance.

“Did you get in a wreck?”

The answer had to be obvious, but Hank responded anyway. “Yeah.” He refrained from giving anymore details, aware that the coyote story had already traveled around town.

“What happened?” Leo asked from beneath the lift, staring up into the carnage hanging from the engine. Hank was about to respond when he saw a drop of a dark fluid land on Leo’s shoulder and run down his back. Leo didn’t seem to notice, but it sent chills up Hank’s spine. Suddenly, he realized he was standing in a large black oil stain on the cement and felt panic sweep through him. The whole town was a haz-mat zone.

Then, suddenly, Cookie answered Leo’s question. “He’s the guy that hit the coyote.”

“Well I’ll be a sum-bitch.” Leo laughed and smacked Cookie on the shoulder. But Cookie didn’t smile and seemed to be unaware that he’d even said anything. “I guess I shoulda guessed that.” Leo stood with his hands on his hips, staring at Hank, as if to say, well ain’t that a sight.

This was going badly. Hank had been in Nickelback barely twelve hours—most of them in the middle of the night—and everyone in town seemed to know about him. Time was of the essence now. He had to get things done and get out of town as quick as possible. Even immediately wouldn’t be too soon for Hank. If word traveled this fast, it wouldn’t take long for Howard Lugano to hear about him and put two and two together. Howie was a loud mouth, and he was careless, but he wasn’t stupid.

Hank asked, “So how long would it take to fix this thing? I don’t need it perfect, I just need it running.”

“Well.” Leo strolled back under the motor and stared up at it. “Your alignment’s shot, so we’d have to get that fixed. But your real problem is a cracked water pump and the hole you tore in your oil pan. One of your wheels is bent too. We’d have to special order that stuff.”

“Doesn’t it have one of those little doughnut tires?”

Leo scowled. His jaw twitched spastically back and forth from the methamphetamine. “Oh, you can’t drive on them doughnut tires, they’re not safe.”

Hank could see Leo was a safety conscious guy. “How long will it take to get the stuff?”

“Bout two weeks.”

“What?” Hank was genuinely startled. He could surely get a replacement delivered by then, or simply buy another car. But the estimate was so outrageous Hank couldn’t help but ask, “How the hell can that possibly be?”

Leo laughed and waved a hand out in front of him, palm up, slow and regal, a stark contrast to his restless movement. “As you can see, we’re in a remote location.”

“Christ, man. Vegas is only two hours away. Los Angeles—one of the biggest cities in the world—is only three hours away. Two weeks? You’ve got to be f*cking kidding me.”

“Hey man. They don’t make a lot of deliveries out this way. You take what you can get.” Leo grinned and scratched at his head and thigh simultaneously. “Inconvenience is the price we pay for living in such a beautiful place.”

Hank didn’t know what to say. He stared at the two of them for a few seconds, decided none of it mattered anyway, and then turned around and walked away. They could have the car, as far as he was concerned. It was rented with a fake name, so what did he care?

Two doors down, Hank stopped into the real estate office. It was just a cramped room, one wall lined with file cabinets, another lined with bookshelves, and a late-twenties/early-thirties brunette sitting behind a large, cluttered desk. Too cute for a withered town, she seemed as surprised to see Hank as Hank was to see a real estate office in a place like Nickelback.

The woman explained it when he asked. “Family started it years ago. For a long time there was a lot of business swapping oil properties, gas leases, that kind of stuff. Then it was pretty much just houses. Now, it’s pretty much just listings that never sell. People leaving town, for good.”

She smiled as she spoke, like the town was just a story that had nothing to do with her. Hank watched her brush an errant curl back off her forehead, thought of Cookie and Leo, and wondered why she didn’t leave town for good. Nearly everything in the office looked as old as she was, or older.

“Is there something I can do for you?” she asked.

“Yeah, I was wondering if I could get a list of all the houses that have sold in the last four years.”

“You looking to buy a place?” Her smile never left and she leaned her chin on her hands, resting herself on the desk in front of her.

“Oh I don’t know. I’m in town for work and had some car trouble. Seems it might take a day or two to get things worked out. Who knows? The place might grow on me.”

She rolled her head back and let out a laugh. “So you’re the guy. I heard about that. You hit a coyote or something? Man—” She shook her head, giving him an amused look. “Well, you better be careful. If this place grows on you, you might not be able to get it off.”

“I wash my hands a lot.” Hank smiled back at her, but her knowledge of the wreck sent a quick chill through him. It made sense, the cop at the restaurant knowing, but her? He watched her recline back in her chair, reflecting on his comment.

Then she said, “Good. This place has a way of infecting people.”

Hank looked around the room again and understood perfectly what she meant about not getting the town on him. He almost asked why she had stayed if it was that bad, but he held back. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to ask, it wasn’t that he wouldn’t have liked to hang around and talk to her, it was just a rule he had. No personal interaction when he was working. His goal on every job was to be as unmemorable as possible. Get in. Get out. No one knows you; no one cares about you; no on remembers you when you’re gone. It was the only way to live in his line of work. Personal relationships were messy, even on the most inconsequential levels. This job was already a disaster.

“I’ll try to be careful.” He grinned at her and wondered if she realized he was serious, that he really wanted to see the sales for the past four years. “But really, if it’s not too much trouble. I’d find it interesting.”

“Sure. It’s no trouble at all. You staying at the Super 8?”

It seemed like an odd question and Hank wasn’t sure what to say. His hesitation must have seemed strange. He was getting worried. Hank didn’t want a lot of talk about him looking for real estate. The fact that most people were aware of his wreck was bad enough. Finally, she got tired of waiting for an answer and laughed at him a little as she spoke.

“Hell, the town ain’t that big, Mister. If you’re staying in a motel, then you’re staying at the Super 8. The Super 8 people bought the old motel and tore it down after the Super 8 was built. Talk about destroying the competition. It’s pretty nice. Anyway, meet me at the Golden Dragon tonight and I’ll have the listings for you. You’ll want to be there anyway, it’s the only place in town to get anything decent to eat.”

Hank nodded at her and thanked her and asked her what time. When he thought the conversation was over he turned back toward the door, but she called out to him before he could get through it. “Hey, what’s your name? In case I have to drop this stuff at the motel instead?”

“Hank Norton.”

She smiled at him as she wrote it down. “You look way too Italian to have a name like that.” She was clever, and Hank wanted to get out of there before she had a chance to say or think anything else that might be more clever. “I’m Janie Gates,” she said.

Hank nodded and thanked her again and said, “I’ll see you tonight,” as he went out the door.

Back on the street it seemed the day had gotten even hotter and without a car he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. What struck Hank most about the streets of Nickelback was how empty they were. Other than a half dozen cars in the grocery store parking lot, there didn’t seem to be any people around. Each business had someone in it, but who they were waiting for Hank couldn’t guess. Maybe the heat kept everyone inside. Hank knew that’s where he belonged.

As Hank lingered in front of the real estate office, he saw the police Suburban pull around the corner and stop beside him. The sheriff leaned out the window and some guy in the other seat, who wasn’t wearing a uniform and who looked a little green in the face, leaned forward and looked over at him. Goddamn, what a small town.

“You already looking at buying a place?” Mickey grinned at him. “If you’re thinking of having Cookie and Leo fix that car, then you might as well start shopping for a house. It’ll be awhile.”

“I gathered that.” Hank watched the lines in Mickey’s face, the way the creases ran through his cheeks when he smiled, the way his nose wrinkled a little and one of his eyebrows kinked slightly in the middle. It was the first look he’d had at the sheriff in the daylight. In the brief silence between them, Hank felt an inexplicable sadness come over him, as though something was tugging at him from within, causing his heart to sink a little. It was sudden and strange. Had to be the heat.

Mickey motioned toward the back of the Suburban and said, “We found the rest of your buddy out there.”

“Is he happy to have his leg back?”

Mickey smiled and said, “I don’t think he misses it much. There’s nowhere to run in this town anyway.”

Hank smiled as the Suburban pulled away. No shit.