Jack Hoskins crossed into Texas around 2 AM on July 26th, and checked into a fleapit called the Indian Motel just as the day’s first light was showing in the east. He paid the sleepy-eyed clerk for a week, using his MasterCard – the only one that wasn’t maxed out – and asked for a room at the far end of the ramshackle building.
The room smelled of used booze and old cigarette smoke. The coverlet was threadbare, and the case of the pillow on the swaybacked bed was yellow with age, sweat, or both. He sat down in the room’s only chair and ran quickly and without much interest through the text messages and voicemails on his phone (these latter had ceased around 4 AM, when the mailbox reached its capacity). All from the station, many from Chief Geller himself. There had been a double murder on the West Side. With both Ralph Anderson and Betsy Riggins out of service, he was the only detective on duty, where was he, he was needed on the scene immediately, blah-blah-blah.
He lay down on the bed, first on his back, but that hurt the sunburn too much. He turned onto his side, the springs squalling a protest under his considerable weight. I’ll weigh less if the cancer takes hold, he thought. Ma was nothing but a skeleton wrapped in skin by the end. A skeleton that screamed.
‘Not going to happen,’ he told the empty room. ‘I just need some goddam sleep. This is going to work out.’
Four hours would be enough. Five, if he was lucky. But his brain wouldn’t turn off; it was like an engine racing in neutral. Cody, the little dope-pushing rat at the Hi station, had had the little white pills, all right, and he’d also had a good supply of coke, which he claimed was almost pure. From the way Jack felt now, lying on this crappy excuse for a bed (he didn’t even consider getting into it, God knew what might be crawling around on the sheets), the claim had been true. A few short snorts were all he’d had, in the hours after midnight when it seemed like the drive would never end, and now he felt like he might never sleep again – felt, in fact, as if he could shingle a roof and then run five miles. Yet eventually sleep did come, although it was thin and haunted by dreams of his mother.
When he woke up it was after noon, and the room was stinking hot in spite of the poor excuse for an air conditioner. He went into the bathroom, peed, and tried to look at the nape of his throbbing neck. He couldn’t, and maybe that was for the best. He went back into the room and sat on the bed to put on his shoes, but he could only find one of them. He groped for the other, and it was pushed into his hand.
‘Jack.’
He froze, his arms pebbling with gooseflesh and the short hairs on the back of his neck lifting. The man who had been in his shower back in Flint City was now under his bed, just like the monsters he had feared as a little boy.
‘Listen to me, Jack. I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do.’
When the voice finally ceased giving him instructions, Jack realized the pain in his neck (sort of funny, that’s what he’d always called the old ball and chain) was gone. Well … almost. And what he was supposed to do seemed straightforward, if kind of drastic. Which was all right, because he was pretty sure he could get away with it, and stopping Anderson’s clock would be an absolute pleasure. Anderson was the chief meddler, after all; old Mr No Opinion had brought this on himself. It was too bad about the others, but they weren’t on Jack. It was Anderson who had dragged them along.
‘Tough titty said the kitty,’ he murmured.
Once his shoes were on, Jack got down on his knees and looked beneath the bed. There was plenty of dust under there, and some of it looked disturbed, but there was nothing else. Which was good. Which was a relief. That his visitor had been there, Jack had no doubt, and he had no doubt about what had been tattooed on the fingers that had pushed the shoe into his hand: CANT.
With the sunburn pain down to a low mutter and his head relatively clear, he thought he could eat something. Steak and eggs, maybe. He had a piece of work ahead of him, and he had to keep his energy up. Man did not live by blow and pep-pills alone. Without food, he might faint in the hot sun, and then he would burn.
Speaking of sun, it hit him like a punch in the face when he went out, and his neck gave a warning throb. He realized with dismay that he was out of sunblock and had forgotten his aloe cream. It was possible they sold something like that in the café attached to the motel, along with the rest of the rickrack they always kept by the cash register in places like this: tee-shirts and ball caps and country CDs and Navajo souvenirs made in Cambodia. They had to sell a few of the necessities along with that crap, because the nearest town was—
He came to a dead halt, one hand reaching for the café’s door, peering through the dusty glass. They were in there. Anderson and his merry band of assholes, including the skinny woman with the gray bangs. There was also an old bag in a wheelchair and a muscular man with short black hair and a goatee. The old bag started laughing about something, then she started coughing. Jack could hear it even outside, like a damn backhoe in low gear. The man with the goatee whacked her on the back a few times, and then they were all laughing.
You’ll be laughing on the other side of your damn faces when I get done with you, Jack thought, but actually it was good that they were laughing. Otherwise they might have spotted him.
He turned away, trying to understand what he had seen. Not the bunch of them hee-hawing, he didn’t care about that, but when Goatee Man reached to thump Wheelchair Woman on the back, Jack had seen tats on his fingers. The glass was dusty and the blue ink was faded, but he knew what they said: CANT. How the man had gotten from under his bed and into the diner so fast was a mystery that Jack Hoskins didn’t care to contemplate. He had a job to do, that was enough, and getting rid of the cancer that was growing in his skin was only half of it. Getting rid of Ralph Anderson was the other half, and it would be a pleasure.
Old Mr No Opinion.
2
Plainville Airfield sat in scrubland on the outskirts of the tired little city it served. There was a single runway, which Ralph thought horribly short. The pilot applied full braking as soon as the wheels touched down, and unsecured objects went flying. They came to a stop on a yellow line at the end of the narrow strip of tar, no more than thirty feet from a gully filled with weeds, stagnant water, and Shiner cans.
‘Welcome to nowhere in particular,’ Alec remarked as the King Air lumbered toward a prefab terminal building that looked as if it might blow away in the next high wind. There was a road-dusty Dodge van waiting for them. Ralph recognized it as the wheelchair-accessible Companion model even before he saw the handicap plate. Claude Bolton, tall and muscular in faded jeans, blue work shirt, battered cowboy boots, and a Texas Rangers gimme cap, stood beside it.
Ralph was first off the plane, and he extended a hand. After a second of hesitation, Claude shook it. Ralph found it impossible not to look at the faded letters on the man’s fingers: CANT.
‘Thank you for making this easy,’ Ralph said. ‘You didn’t have to, and I appreciate it.’ He introduced the others.
Holly shook his hand last, and said, ‘Those tattoos on your fingers … are they about drinking?’
Right, Ralph thought. That’s one piece of the puzzle I forgot to take out of the box.
‘Yes’m, that’s right.’ Bolton spoke like someone teaching a well-learned and well-loved lesson. ‘The big paradox is what they call it in AA meetings down here. I first heard about it in prison. You must drink, but you can’t drink.’
‘I feel that way about cigarettes,’ Holly said.
Bolton grinned, and Ralph thought how odd it was that the least socially adept person in their little party was the one who had put Bolton at ease. Not that Bolton had seemed really worried; more on watch. ‘Yes ma’am, cigarettes is a hard one. How you doing with it?’
‘Haven’t had one in almost a year,’ Holly said, ‘but I take it a day at a time. Can’t and must. I like that.’