Lone Creek

51

When I got back to Madbird's house, he made it clear that I was welcome to stay as long as I liked, and showed me how to slip into a closed-off part of the attic in case the sheriffs came-a sort of priest hole, like Catholics had used to hide their clergy during the English Reformation. I tried to take some comfort in the thought that the worst I was looking at was nothing compared with back then. Getting caught usually had meant the rack-the Jesuit Edmund Campion had been stretched four inches-followed by castration, disembowelment, and other niceties in the name of God.

But staying here still would be an extra risk to them, and it wasn't going to solve anything for me.

Madbird broke out some of his homemade venison sausage and started making spaghetti sauce. I sat at the kitchen table and gave him and Hannah a quick rundown of what had happened. Usually he really got into cooking, but as he listened, he seemed to be just pushing the sausage around the pan. He didn't comment, and his silence told me he had things figured pretty much the same grim way I did and didn't want to say so.

Hannah was in the next room unpacking her bag. In the silence after I shut up, she spoke in her lilting accent.

"Is this a present for me?"

She held up the book I'd lifted from Kirk's cabin, Consumer Guide to Precious Metals and Gems. I'd brought it into the motel room last night, thinking I might get a chance to look through it. But I didn't, and when I'd gone back this morning and realized that Laurie had disappeared, I'd crammed it into Hannah's bag along with our other stuff. Then I'd forgotten about it.

"It's Kirk's," I said. "I took it because there's some writing inside, but I'm sure it's nothing."

She brought it to the table and we all spent a couple of minutes trying to make sense of the scrawled entries on the folded sheet of paper.

The writing started out relatively neat but he'd gotten sloppier as he went down the page, finally scrawling FUCK in frustration. School hadn't been his strong suit. He'd probably had a calculator for the simple math-at a glance, that looked correct, and there were no signs of figuring. At the very bottom, it looked like he might have tried a more complex calculation, but that was scribbled over with the pen point dug into the page.

"Heroin?" I said. "Trying to figure the value? Say the first number's the weight, the next ones are money, and the difference is whether it gets sold as a chunk or dealt in packets."

"If them weights are ounces, it ain't much dope, and if they're pounds or kilos, it ain't much money," Madbird said.

"Maybe it's just his cut. Say that's how he was getting paid."

He flicked a fingertip at the line that read 13416 maybe more.

"So if this is what two of them's worth, whatever the fuck they are," he said, and moved down the page to 2887 x 4 = 11548, "and this is four times a half, how come it's less? Dope don't get cheaper when they sell it in smaller amounts. The other way around."

I shook my head. It was a feeble premise anyway. The thought of gold crossed my mind, but the entries didn't make sense that way, either. Besides, I was still sure that Kirk hadn't found any gold or even looked. I flipped through the book. There was no other writing and nothing that struck me as related to the numbers. I closed it again.

I wanted to do one more thing before I left.