“You think he’s ever killed anybody?” I said quietly to Cherry.
“You mean this week?” the detective replied.
We worked our way down to the field, saw young Blake Wingstaff run over to see his father. His face was muddy from when he’d fallen on the ball.
“We got killed,” the boy said, his face awash with shame. His father, the biker boss, smiled and knelt down and gave his son a friendly rub on the head. You could almost feel him aching to hug the boy, but he didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his teammates.
“You done good,” he told him. “I saw that goal you made.”
“I fell down,” Blake said.
“We all fall down,” Wingstaff said. “Then we get up, and we keep on playing.”
22
“I’D LIKE TO DROP IN on Gary Merker’s mother,” I told Cherry as we walked back to his pickup.
“She’s a treat and a half,” Cherry said. “You might want to go in and talk to her alone. I don’t think she’s very fond of me.”
I glanced over at Cherry as he hit his remote key and unlocked his truck. “And that would be why?”
Cherry opened his door and waited till I had the passenger side open and was getting in before he said, “This would be, like, ten years ago, I guess. I had to arrest him once, at home. Hauled his ass out of the kitchen just as he was about to sit down to his momma’s lasagna. Stolen cars or something. Guy’s eating with one hand, picking his nose with the other. Anyway, he kicks up a fuss as I’m taking him through the living room, and I have to shove him up against the wall, and his forehead, it kind of makes a hole.”
“In the drywall?”
“Yeah. Not a huge one, you know, maybe like a good-sized yam. Like that. He was okay, though. Just the wall that looked like shit.”
We drove about ten minutes and Cherry slowed in front of a small, one-story white house, the only one with an empty garbage can out front, like Mrs. Merker never got around to bringing it in after trash pickup. The house, which looked to have been built sixty or more years ago, sagged in the middle. The streetlights were bright enough to reveal shingles that had curled, and rot had settled into the boards around the windows.
“There a Mr. Merker?” I asked.
“Naw. Run off when Gary was a little guy. Must have known what the little shit would grow up to be, figured get out while the getting was good. No father-son picnics for those two. See if she’s patched the wall. As you go in, it would be on the right side.” He smiled, eager to know.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll park a ways down the street,” Cherry said. “You have fun now.”
I got out of the car, and had only taken a step when my cell phone rang. I reached for it, flipped it open, and saw my home number displayed.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hi, Dad.” Angie. “How’s it going?”
“Okay,” I said. “Finding out some things. How’s it going there?”
Angie didn’t speak for a moment. “Mom cries.”
I swallowed. “Does she say anything?”
“Nothing. Not to me or Paul. She goes into the bedroom, figures we can’t hear her, but I stood outside the door, and she was crying.”
“Is she there? Can I talk to her?”
“She went out. She said she had to go to the mall or something, but I think she’s probably just driving around. Which, actually, sort of sucks, because I wanted the car tonight. I think she’s scared, Dad.”
“Scared?”
“Yeah, like, about a whole bunch of things. I think she’s worried about you, about what you might be getting mixed up in, and she’s scared her job is falling apart, and I think she’s scared that you guys are headed for the dumper.”
I felt a lump in my throat. “I don’t want that to happen.”
“Yeah, well, like, neither do I. And I don’t think Paul’d be all that crazy about it either.”
“How is Paul?”
“He’s okay, I guess. That reminds me, somethin’ kind of weird. This woman came to the door, like, she could have been a football player or something. And there’s a car in the drive, there’s another one exactly like her behind the wheel, and this really ugly woman in the passenger seat.”
Who the hell would that be? Not Mrs. Gorkin and her daughters?
“Anyway, the one that came to the door, she asks is Paul there, and I say no, because he wasn’t, right? And so she hands me this envelope, has a hundred bucks in it, and she says, ‘This is for work,’ well, actually, she says, ‘Dis iz for verk.’ She has this kind of accent, you know?”
“Okay.”
“She tells me to give it to Paul, that he should remember they did the right thing. These were the burger ladies, right?”
“Yeah.” I felt cold, standing outside Mrs. Merker’s house. “She didn’t threaten you or anything, or say anything about Paul?”
“No, nothing like that. Well, except, she said, tell Paul, he was wrong about the freezer. That the meat was okay.”