“Good,” his father answered and he slapped his son’s arm. Then he turned and yelled across the pond to Consuela. Voy a la tienda.
Russell looked at him sideways and said I bet you think you’re pretty damn smart and the two men walked together toward the house. Annalee held the hose and sprayed one hand and then she swapped hands and did the same. She turned off the nozzle and ran across the yard to Mitchell’s pickup and climbed in without waiting. Mitchell stopped at the hose and got a drink and then they got in the truck with Annalee sitting between them on the bench seat and ready for a ride.
Boyd walked into the sheriff’s department just as Gina was yelling at Harvey Dennis to put out that damn cigar. Smells like ass and you ain’t supposed to smoke in here.
“Shut the hell up,” the sheriff yelled back.
Boyd stopped at her desk as she spun around in her chair, a feisty little woman with glasses on her head and a small mouth seemingly stuck in the smirk she had worn every day of her twenty-five years at the department. “Not again,” Boyd said.
“You can tell when the shit hits the fan around here cause he starts puffing on them things,” she said and she opened a desk drawer and pulled out a can of air freshener. She sprayed a circle around her desk as if to form some sort of meadow-scented force field.
“I’m guessing I can go on in,” Boyd said.
“I’m guessing you can.”
The small office building was square and built for function with linoleum floors and cinderblock walls and industrial lighting. Every wall was painted the same shade of vanilla and metal file cabinets lined the hallways and most of them needed a hammer or at least a screwdriver to get into. Harvey’s door was open. Boyd tapped his knuckles on the wooden frame.
“Got a minute?”
The sheriff was sitting with his feet propped on the desk and a cigar between his fingers. A cloud of smoke engulfed him. His hair was thick and gray and combed in an arrow-straight part. “You can have as many minutes as you want if you can fill them up with something I wanna hear. But I’m going to say you’re about to tell me Russell Gaines didn’t do a damn thing and don’t know a damn thing.”
Boyd walked into the office and sat down in a chair across from Harvey’s desk. He started to cross his legs but he was too big for the chair and they wouldn’t cross so he slouched instead.
“This air freshener don’t do nothing,” Gina griped.
“Go to lunch,” Harvey called to her.
“It’s ten thirty.”
“Then go to brunch. Go somewhere. Leave me alone,” he said and he brought the cigar to his mouth and puffed again. He blew the smoke straight up and then said by God she’s bound to retire one day.
“I ain’t deaf,” she yelled and they heard her desk drawer and then the office door slam.
“Hallelujah,” Harvey said. “So I’m right. You got no news.”
“No news,” Boyd said. “Not that I wanted any from Russell anyhow.”
“I bet Mitchell Gaines is cussing my ass right about now but we ain’t exactly dripping with leads. I know it ain’t in Russell to do something like that but you never know how a fellow comes out of prison. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.”
“Sometimes the same.”
“Not the same. God, it don’t seem like it’s been that long since he killed that Tisdale boy. I remember it, though. Russell’s damn neck was split wide open and both those vehicles were twisted up like tin foil. I wanted to puke when that boy was dead cause I knew what was coming for Russell. Especially when I found that empty whiskey bottle up under his seat. I wanted to die riding out there and waking up Mitchell and telling him what happened.”
The phone rang and Harvey looked at it. “I bet you it’s that peckerhead from the newspaper. He’s called about twenty times already and he can’t figure out why the sheriff’s department don’t have nothing to say. We don’t got nothing to say cause there ain’t shit to say and when there is he’ll be the last to know anyway. Little son of a bitch.”
They both stared at the phone until it stopped ringing and then the sheriff smoked again.
“Did we find out anything about that woman at the shelter?” Boyd asked.
“I sent Watkins over there. Got a name but it brought up next to nothing.”
“What was it?”
Harvey moved around a couple of papers on his deck. He picked up a sticky note and read it. “Maben. Maben Jones.”
“What?” Boyd asked. He sat up a little in the chair.
“Maben Jones.”
Boyd rolled his eyes up at the flickering fluorescent light.
“Ring a bell?” the sheriff asked.
“I’m thinking that was the name of the girl who was left standing the night of Russell’s wreck. The girl out there with Jason Tisdale. The one who ran up the road and called it in.”
The sheriff took his feet down from the desk and took a long drag of the cigar and examined the sticky note that read MABEN JONES. “That’s a helluva memory,” he said.
“What happened when you checked it?”
“Nothing. Apparently there’s no such thing as a Maben Jones. Jones part could be made up.”