—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
Bull sat on a cot in a storage room behind a makeshift screen of stacked beer cases. The room consisted of a concrete floor and walls, with metal rafters high overhead, all weakly illuminated by the light of a gooseneck lamp. Set high in the wall behind him was a narrow rectangle of window, which even during the day probably let in almost no light.
Bull was fat and fleshy with that gone-to-seed look you find in ex-cops who have no desire to keep up with the physical. His hair was close-cropped, his nose red with broken capillaries. His good eye watched me coldly; he wore a patch over the other. He looked like an immense, bloated spider sitting at the center of a web that was empty of all but the wreckage of dreams.
His head swiveled to follow me as Clyde and I entered the room. He wore shorts and a wife-beater shirt. The room reeked of beer and the overpowering stench of days-old sweat. Beneath that was the sharp tang of Bull’s fear, like electrical current running behind a wall.
Beyond the cot was a desk, and on top of that were piles of food wrappers and a small fan laboring to circulate the stale air. Outside the weak halo of the lamp, the room was black as pitch.
Bull’s eyes stayed on mine. “You’re Jake Parnell’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
I downed Clyde next to the boxes of Pabst and Budweiser. I was carrying a bottle of Rebel Yell and a glass. I walked past Bull to the desk, set down the glass, and opened the bottle.
I showed him the booze. “Am I right in guessing this is your poison of choice? Beer and Rebel Yell?”
“Only liquor I drink. Your dad tell you that?” His eyes followed my hands. He licked his lips. “I remember when you weren’t much taller than my knee. You were a spitfire. Heard you stayed that way when you grew up.”
Bull chattered, but his uncovered eye remained flat. His accent was as long and drawled as I remembered it. The only thing gentle about him.
I handed him a glass with a finger of bourbon in it.
“Go on,” I said. “Drink up.”
He gulped the liquor and held the glass up to me. I poured more. He drank that, too. I poured a third glass, but held it out of reach, then snagged the bottle. I spotted a folding chair leaning against the wall, popped it open, and sat down. I put the bottle and the glass of bourbon on the floor.
“Let’s consider that a warm-up,” I said.
“I don’t know what you think I have to do with that little girl.” His eye made a sticky click when he lowered and raised the lid. Like a snake’s third eyelid. “But I swear I don’t know anything about her. I’m not so far gone I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.”
He struck me as a man who was as far gone as it was possible to go. But still, I believed him.
“How long you been on Hiram’s payroll, Bull?”
The change in topic didn’t throw him.
“I retired eight years ago,” he said.
“Not that payroll. I mean the one that covers your gambling debts. The one that has you doing things that fall a little too far on the wrong side of the line.”
He eyeballed the bourbon. I passed him the glass, and he tilted his head back and drank it down in one gulp.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“What I think, Bull, is that you’re not a bad man. Sure, you’ve got a bit of a gambling problem, but who doesn’t have some sort of addiction? Pills, alcohol, sex. Television or solitaire. There’s something that gets to all of us. It’s not our fault. We’re just wired that way.”
He was nodding as I spoke. He’d probably told himself this story a million times. And from what I knew about addiction, it was at least partially true.
“So I can understand your wanting to pick up a little extra work,” I said. “A railroad cop’s pension doesn’t go very far, does it? I mean, I would know.”
“It’s not enough to support a rat,” Bull agreed. “Not if the rat has any ambition.”
“And you want more. Of course you do. Hiram’s money gives you that chance.”
I watched a bead of sweat make its way through the hair on his right leg, the one he’d stretched out in front of him. His scalp shone through the buzz cut.
“What addictions do you think a man like Hiram has?” I asked. “A man who can have whatever he wants? What are his weaknesses?”
Bull smiled. The grin stretched his cheeks and flattened his face into the kind of visage you’d see in a fun house mirror.
“Power and pussy,” he said. His good eye glittered. “What any man would take if he could.”
I thought of Raya Quinn and Betsy King and Veronica Stern and wondered how many other women Hiram had been with. It was appallingly easy for a man in power to get what he wanted—from other men as well as from women. I wondered about Bull’s relationship with Delia. For a single woman with nothing but Medicaid in front of her, even a man like Bull had power. Queasily, I pushed the image out of my mind.
I offered more bourbon, and Bull held out his glass.
I said, “So Hiram’s sitting up there in his gold tower, commanding the world. And here you are, hiding like a mouse in a hole, waiting for the cat to find you. You did things for Hiram, followed his orders. And where has it gotten you?”
Bull watched me in silence. I could hear the second hand on my watch tick steadily. Noise from the television set in the bar filtered faintly through the walls. A ball game.
“I’m guessing at heart you’re a good man, Bull. And it eats at you, the things Hiram has had you do all these years. Unsavory things. Illegal things. Like sabotaging Lancing Tate’s trains.”
“I’m not confessing to anything.”
“Maybe some of the things he’s had you do even led to his family getting hurt and killed. And Lucy going missing. But here’s the deal.” I leaned forward, resting my forearms on my thighs, projecting an image of caring concern and hoping he wouldn’t see through it. “The thing I want you to know, right from the get-go, is that the only person in trouble is Hiram. Not you. Not anyone else he hired to do his dirty work. Hiram gave you orders, paid you a lot of money, and you did what you had to do. And that means I can protect you.”
He snorted, swiped at his nose with the bottom of his filthy T-shirt. “I’m not that naive.”
“It’s not men like you the FBI wants. It’s men like Hiram. You’re just the means to get to the really big guys, the trophy animals. You testify, and the Feds make all your troubles go away. Gambling debts. Killers like Roman Quinn—” Bull twitched at the mention of Roman. “Anything that’s a problem for you. The Feds can make it go away. Then, if you want, you can start somewhere new. Somewhere fresh.”