“Like heaven. I feel like I could eat half a dozen eggs and have room left over for pancakes.”
But as it turned out, Linnette Mars never got breakfast; she had, in fact, eaten her last meal the day before (two cherry Pop-Tarts microwaved in the sheriff’s station break room). As the two women turned onto St. George Street, Lila felt Linny’s hand melt away in her own. She caught just a glimpse of Linny from the corner of her eye, looking startled. Then there was nothing left but a cloud of moths, rising into the morning sky.
CHAPTER 10
1
There could be no telling, Lowell Griner Sr. used to say, where a deep seam of coal might begin. “Sometimes a single chisel’s worth of difference is all there is tween the shit and the Shinola,” was how he put it. This pearl had dropped from the old crank’s lips, around about the time when many of the Tri-Counties’ best miners had been marching through the fucked-up, fucked-over boonies of Southeast Asia, getting jungle rot and smoking heroin-laced fatties. This was a conflict the elder Griner had missed, given a lack of two toes on his right foot and one finger on his left hand.
Few men who ever walked the green earth spoke more nonsense than the late Lowell Griner Sr.—he had also believed in UFOs, vengeful spirits of the woods, and had taken as gold the empty promises of the coal companies. Big Lowell Griner, he was called, perhaps in honor of that old Jimmy Dean song about Big John. Big Low had rested snug in his coffin for ten years now, along with a full bottle of Rebel Yell and a pair of lungs that were as black as the bituminate he mined.
His son Lowell Jr. (naturally known as Little Low) had recalled his father’s words with rueful amusement after Sheriff Lila Norcross nipped him and his older brother Maynard with ten kilos of cocaine, a pharmacy’s worth of speed, and all of their guns. It had certainly appeared that the seam of their luck had come to an abrupt end, the Shinola magically turning to shit the moment the sheriff’s team used the department’s bull-ram on the kitchen door of the old family manse, a creekside farmhouse for which the term tumbledown was too grand.
Though Little Low (who actually stood an inch over six feet and weighed in at two-forty) was not sorry about anything that he had done, he was extremely sorry that it had all not lasted longer. In the weeks that he and Maynard had spent locked up in the county jail in Coughlin awaiting transfer, he had whiled away most of his free time dreaming on the fun they’d had: the sports cars they’d drag-raced, the fine houses they’d crashed in, the girls they’d screwed, and the numerous slobs they’d stomped, outsiders who’d tried horning in on the Griner patch and had ended up buried in the hills. For the better part of five years they’d been serious players, up and down the Blue Ridge. It had been a hell of a hot ride, but now it seemed to have turned cold.
They were, in fact, fucked in every orifice. The cops had the drugs, had the weapons, had Kitty McDavid to say that she had witnessed Lowell exchanging packets of cash for bundles of coke with their cartel connection on multiple occasions, and that she had seen him shoot that Alabama fool who had tried to pass them counterfeit bills. The cops even had the bump of C4 that they had socked away for the Fourth of July. (The plan had been to put it under a silo and see if they could get the motherfucker to lift off like one of those Cape Carnival rockets.) As good as the ride had been, Lowell wasn’t sure how long re-running the memories could sustain him. Thinking of those memories growing thin and then falling apart was a downer.
When they ran out, Little Low thought he would probably just have to kill himself. He wasn’t afraid of that. What he was afraid of was choking on boredom in some cell the way Big Low, confined to a wheelchair and sucking on Yell and bottled oxygen for the last few years of his life, had choked to death on his own snot. Maynard, quarter-wit that he was, would probably be fine for a few decades in prison. That wasn’t Little Lowell Griner Jr., though. He wasn’t interested in playing out a junk hand just to stay in the game.
Then, as they were awaiting a pre-trial conference, the shit had turned back into Shinola. God bless Aurora, the vehicle of their deliverance.
Said deliverance had arrived last Thursday afternoon, the day the sleeping sickness had come to Appalachia. Lowell and Maynard were shackled to a bench outside a meeting room at the Coughlin courthouse. Both the prosecutor and their lawyer should have arrived an hour earlier.
“What the fuck,” announced the prick from the Coughlin Police Department who was keeping an eye on them. “This is stupid. I don’t get paid enough to babysit you murdering peckerwoods all day. I’m going to see what the judge wants to do.”
Through the reinforced glass opposite their bench, Lowell could see that Judge Wainer, the only one of the three officials who had seen fit to show up for the hearing, had lowered her head between her arms and dropped off for a little snooze. Neither of the brothers had, at this point, any idea about Aurora. Nor had the prick cop.
“Hope she bites his head off for wakin her up,” Maynard had remarked.
This was not exactly what happened when the horrified officer tore away the mask of webbing that had grown over the Honorable Judge Regina Alberta Wainer’s face, but it was, as the saying went, close enough for government work.
Lowell and Maynard, chain-locked to the bench, saw it all through the reinforced glass. It was awesome. The judge, no more than five-one in heels, rose up righteous and smote the cop, say hallelujah, in the chest with a gold-tipped fountain pen. That put the bastard on the carpet and she pressed the advantage, scooping up her nearby gavel and beating his face in before he had chance to fart sideways or holler Your Honor, I object. Then Judge Wainer tossed aside her gory gavel, sat down again, lowered her head back to her crossed arms, and resumed snoozing.
“Brother, did you see that?” Maynard asked.
“I did.”
Maynard had shaken his head, making the unwashed clots of his long hair fly. “That was amazin. I be dog.”
“Court is fucking adjourned,” Lowell agreed.
Maynard—firstborn but named for an uncle when his parents felt sure the baby would die before the sun went down on his natal day—had a caveman beard and wide dull eyes. Even when he was dropping fists on some poor sonofabitch, he tended to look dumbfounded. “What do we do now?”
What they did was bang around until they broke the arms of the bench they were shackled to, and enter the conference room, laying a trail of shattered wood behind them. Careful not to disturb the sleeping Judge Wainer—the webbing was spinning around her head, thickening again—they nicked the cop’s keys and unlocked themselves. The brothers also requisitioned the dead prick’s gun, his Taser, and the keys to his GMC pickup.
“Look at this spider shit,” Maynard whispered, gesturing at the judge’s new coating.