He imagined himself in Huston’s place, imagined himself doing the thinking for Huston, feeling Huston’s emotions. You’ve just now found out the name of the man who forced you to stab your own baby and who slaughtered your family. You found out that the woman you trusted and helped—for no other reason than because your innate compassion told you to help her, despite your own misgivings—later betrayed you to her troglodyte boyfriend. Maybe she was coerced into it, beaten, threatened, who knows. Does that matter? No, what matters now is that you know the man’s name. So you don’t jump off the lighthouse. Your previously depleted body now swells with purpose. Fuck compassion, you’re through with that. You can maybe spare an ounce or two of compassion for Bonnie, for what she might have gone through, but not a drop for Inman. Him, you want to make suffer. Him, you want to punish with extreme prejudice. Your own life is over, you know that. You accept it as an irreconcilable fact. But before it officially ends, you want to see Inman suffer. You need it. Fuck food, fuck sleep, fuck oxygen. Your heart pumps lava now. Your pulse pounds revenge.
DeMarco felt the heat in his own veins and was uncertain whose thoughts were fanning that fire, Huston’s or his own. Not that it mattered. He wanted Inman as much as Huston did. Huston’s chances of finding the man were slim to none. No vehicle, no weapon, no knowledge of Inman’s whereabouts, no means of locating him. DeMarco’s chances, with the nation’s finest law enforcement units all backing him up, were better.
Fifty-Four
A long, gray day filled with long, dark thoughts. DeMarco quietly seethed through the first two hours of the morning, waiting for the telephone to ring. When he thought himself capable of conducting an interrogation that did not involve strangulation or similar means of persuasion, he drove north to a small mobile home on the periphery of a sand quarry and hammered on the metal door until Bonnie’s brother, Moby, appeared, blinking behind the filmy glass. He was wearing a wife-beater and gray sweatpants cut off at the knees, a two-day beard, and the look of a scrawny rat terrier that had recently been kicked in the balls by a Siamese cat.
DeMarco didn’t wait for an invitation to go inside. Moby’s empty hands were all the invitation he required. He pushed past the startled man and strode through the compact kitchen/dining/living room. “Where’s your sister?” he asked.
Moby rubbed his crust of beard. “I wish to fuck I knew.”
“How about Carl Inman? Seen him lately?”
“What the fuck is an Inman?”
“Tex. The bouncer.”
“Far as I know Tex’s last name is Snyder.”
“Uh-huh,” DeMarco said. He poked his head into the first bedroom. A tangle of sheets and a green wool blanket on the mattress, the thick scent of farts and old sweat. Dirty clothes on the floor, a soup bowl filled with and surrounded by broken peanut shells and dust, an open bottle of Lake Erie Rhine wine beside the bowl, four inches of wine remaining.
Unless that’s his piss jar, DeMarco thought. He was careful not to touch the bottle when he knelt beside the bed to look underneath. Three balled-up socks and what appeared to be the twentieth-year reunion of a large class of dust bunnies.
“There’s nobody else here if that’s what you’re looking for.”
The other bedroom was filled wall to wall with cardboard boxes and white garbage bags crammed with empty wine bottles. Moby said, “Those are all going to the recycler when I can get somebody to haul them away for me.”
“Good to see you’re living green,” DeMarco said. He took a quick glance in the bathroom, winced, and turned back toward Moby, who backed into the living room as DeMarco approached.
Moby said, “Aren’t you supposed to have a warrant or something before you can look around in a fella’s place?”
“I just came for the pleasant conversation,” DeMarco answered. “And to admire your talent for interior design.” He put two fingers against Moby’s shoulder and pushed him down onto the sofa. DeMarco sat across from him on the edge of the orange vinyl banquette bench. He felt the little mobile home shiver on its foundation. He felt the fragility of Moby’s life.
When DeMarco leaned forward, Moby leaned back. DeMarco said, “So as far as you know, the guy your sister has been banging for the past, what, seventeen years or so if you count the conjugal visits, is a guy named Snyder?”
Moby looked at him and blinked.
“Don’t even try to fucking bullshit me,” DeMarco told him. “She’s your sister and she’s been taking care of you most of your life. I understand that. I also understand that a guy who looks and smells the way you do has a liver that’s only going to last a couple more years if he’s lucky. A couple more years you’d probably rather not spend in a little concrete room where the only wine you’ll get to drink is what comes squirting out of some fat prison guard’s dick.”
“Prison for what? I didn’t do anything.”
“How about as an accomplice to murder? Multiple homicides, to be specific.”
“Bullshit.”
The man’s surprise seemed genuine to DeMarco. “Maybe you’re not in the loop on those, but you know what? Tough shit. You withhold knowledge of your sister’s whereabouts, you’re still going to spend your last days sipping golden wine through a hairy straw.”
“Look, she told me to call him Snyder if anybody asked. And that’s all she told me.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Moby scratched beneath his chin. “What day is this?”
“It’s Saturday, the original Sabbath. I should be sitting in a church pew singing praises to the Almighty, but thanks to you, I’m sitting in this tin shithole instead, and I don’t much feel like singing. So I swear to God, I’m going to drag your scrawny ass out to my car in about five seconds if you don’t stop scratching and tell me what I want to know.”
“She brought me home after we closed up Thursday. Then yesterday morning, her and Fuckhead come by to tell me they had to go somewhere for a couple days.”