The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Scott Wolven Vigilance

From Controlled Burn

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED, the same story I gave to the investigators:

I never met Carl Larson before I rented a one-bedroom house from him in Potlatch, Idaho. I’d seen a handwritten ad tacked to a bulletin board at the University of Idaho and I called the local number from a pay phone. An old woman answered and said she and her husband were Carl’s neighbors, just handled the keys for him. She’d be glad to show me the place, but I’d have to talk to Carl about renting it. Her name was Rose. She gave me a long-distance number to reach Carl. I dialed.

A woman answered and I asked for Carl Larson and she asked what it was about. The rental, I said. A man got on the line and introduced himself as Carl Larson. He didn’t mention a lease or paperwork. Nothing for me to sign. He asked me my name. Ed Snider, I lied. The utilities — phone and electric — stayed in his name. The phone was restricted from long-distance access to prevent renters from running it up, and the bill went directly to him. Same with the electric bill. All I had to do was mail him the first month’s rent, a five-hundred-dollar money order made out to cash. There was a garage I could use however I wanted and Rose and her husband, Dan, would explain that to me. The house heated with a woodstove in the living room and a pellet stove in the basement. The garage woodstove worked and the neighbors would show me about turning the water on, which valve was the pressure tank, and how to empty the tank, in case I went away during a temperature drop. Keep a close eye on the pipes in winter, Carl said.

The number I’d called was in the nine-oh-seven area code, Alaska, and the mailing address he gave me was Fairbanks. Everything was to be sent care of L. Matthews, and he told me on the phone the address was the house of a woman he knew, a shirttail relation of his. He spent as little time in town as possible. He’d built a cabin way out in the woods, far away, where he hunted and fished a good part of the year. His friends on the peninsula were all big fishermen, some commercial. His voice was deep and old, a little slow in coming. We drifted into a brief conversation about states with a single area code being the best for hunting and fishing. Montana, Idaho, and Alaska we ranked as the top three. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine in the East. Neither of us had traveled east in years. Carl said he liked the people out west better and I agreed. One time, he said, years and years ago, he shot a twelve-point whitetail in eastern New Hampshire, on the Maine border. He hadn’t expected to see a buck that size, ever, and his rifle was under caliber, the shot a hair too long. The hit was a solid lung shot, but the deer took off. Managed to get over the state line, marked in the woods. Carl came to a clearing and a logging road. Three Maine game wardens had the buck halfway dressed in the back of a pickup truck. Too bad about your New Hampshire deer, the one game cop said, he decided to die in Maine. That’s people from the East, Carl finished.

Like he’d said, his neighbors Dan and Rose held the keys and they’d explain the trash to me, answer any questions at all. He asked me not to move stuff around in the house and to be careful with the taxidermy and I said I wouldn’t and I said I would. How long did I think I’d stay in Potlatch, he asked, and I said I didn’t know. I understand, he said, don’t worry about it. Go look the place over and let the neighbors look you over. In the meantime, I’d mail the money order, and once it got to Fairbanks, I could move in, unless Dan and Rose didn’t like the way I dressed out. He told me if I had trouble with money to ask Dan, there was always extra work around. He wished me good luck and I said the same to him. We hung up and I walked across downtown Moscow to the post office a block off Main Street to mail the money order. I wrote “Cash” on the To line, “Snider” on the From line.

My brother and I had given up a scrap business in Nevada, so I carried a little money, but not much. Thirty-five hundred dollars and a truck that ran most of the time. My brother headed to Seattle after a girl, and in Seattle there were lots of girls in case he broke up with this one, so after a while you didn’t even ask last names, because that wasn’t important, you knew they would not be around long enough to worry about last names. Living in Potlatch put me close enough to two big colleges, Washington State and University of Idaho, both twenty minutes south. Plenty of dates if I wanted them. But I wasn’t looking for that right now. I wanted to earn honest money and get on the right track. I wanted that a lot.

The one-bedroom house in Potlatch was fine. It sat fifty yards off the main road. Dan and Rose were an older couple who lived next door in a trailer with a redwood porch, and he showed me around the place. He wore a bright flannel shirt and a wide-brimmed Australian cowboy hat. He must have thought I was okay, because he let me keep the keys.

“You send the rent to Carl?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “An hour after I talked to him.”

We stood on the porch of the house. The one-bay garage was a concrete-block building next to the road. I had told Dan I hoped to fix some chain saws out of it, sharpen and sell chains to loggers.

“Do you need extra work?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Always.”

“I can give you some work, but it’s a little out of season, know what I mean? Still good work, though. Easy.” He watched me.

“I shoot ‘em when I see ‘em,” I said. “I worry about the regulations after. I’ve been known to keep one or two I shouldn’t have. They taste the same.”

Dan smiled. “You bet they do.” He pointed at the garage. “See the pump behind the garage?”

I nodded. “It looks like an old gas pump.”

“I’ll give you the key for it. There’s about ten or fifteen guys who come around and get gas from us, a dollar a gallon cash, we only sell one grade, unleaded regular, and we don’t advertise.”

“Where do you get the gas from?” I asked.

“A couple years ago, some big wheel from one of the universities’ administration saw all the maintenance trucks pulling in and out of the gas station where both schools had their accounts. Apparently some of the boys were buying a lot of beer too, on the school card that was issued with each truck, and they were looking at the girls — the point is they weren’t working. Washington State is the biggest school west of the Mississippi, so that’s a lot of gas and beer.”

“That must have caused a problem.”

“Oh, it did,” Dan said. “The two schools got together and solved it by buying a mini-tanker, just five hundred gallons. And the schools bought their own big stationary tank and pump service, just to fill the mini-tanker.”

“I can see where you’re headed,” I said.

“There are over a hundred trucks and vehicles that take gas in that fleet, not to mention lawn equipment, straight gas for the cans of mixed fuel, every single thing comes out of that mini-tank and they don’t track it. They just pay the bill on the big tank and since it’s less than the card system they were using, they’re saving money.”

“So the mini-tanker comes here once in awhile?”

“Old friend of Carl’s ended up with the job and as long as he’s behind the wheel, we’re golden. That’s tax-free retirement, right there.”

“How does the money work?”

“Never raise the price on the boys, it’s always a dollar a gallon. Never take on any new customers, I don’t care if it’s your aunt Mabel. Let her get gas in town. Push the gas a little, if you’ve had a slow week, sell a couple cans to some loggers, just say somebody dropped it off or something. But every Friday, there should be an envelope on my porch with three hundred seventy-five dollars in it. Nothing bigger than a twenty, never take anything over a twenty and the boys know that.”

“What about the driver?”

Dan smiled. “A couple years ago, he got himself into quite a fix with a woman and that woman’s husband and Carl and some of Carl’s friends sorted that out, so he’s paying back, we’re not paying him.” He thought for a minute. “You know George Beck, the big fellow?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ll meet him, maybe. Anyway, he fixed it.”

“And the rest of the money is mine?”

“Call it salary,” Dan said.

“That sounds good to me,” I said.

Dan patted the top porch rail. “Then welcome home,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned.” He walked across the gravel back to his place and Rose waved to me through the window.

I turned the garage into a fix-it shop. It had the one-car bay, three stools, and a room in the back with a cot. Lots of tools and the woodstove on one side. I sharpened chains and sold new ones for the loggers and fixed their saws. Sold bar and chain oil. The garage air compressor worked and guys were always stopping by for air in their tires. The business brought in enough to pay the rent and the one twenty-five I kept from the gas business felt good in my pocket. I listened to the loggers talk about Montana fires and wealthy landowners who had set up their own fire stations and association. A sort of committee on wildfire vigilance. But the summer fires burned regardless and having spotters in homemade watchtowers didn’t help.

At night I slept in the house and looked at the stuffed heads on the walls. Carl’s small house was filled with antlers and wall mounts. A ratty-looking brown horse and a burro were penned in the field next door and behind. Sometimes a sleek black horse came out and ran through the field. I fed them apples. Dan and Rose were friendly. A warm apple pie sat on my porch two days after I moved in. I watched their lights go on and off in the night. If I got up early enough, I could listen to one of them snore through the thin trailer walls. I sent Carl’s mail to Alaska for him, what little there was of it, and made sure the envelope was on Dan’s porch every Friday.

She pulled in one Friday evening, right next to the garage. She had a tan cowboy hat pushed back on her bright blond hair. “Put this in the garage,” she said. “Close the door. I’m Carl’s sister Penny from Lewiston.” She paused. “Is Carl here?”

“No,” I said. “He’s in Alaska.”

“Lucky you.” She winked at me. “He doesn’t do me a damn bit of good in Alaska. “

Her tits swayed in her denim shirt just a little as she shut the car door. Tight jeans with a big silver cowboy belt buckle that showed off her small waist. She was gas on the fire. She walked down the driveway, into the house, and I watched her the whole way and she knew it.

I put the car in the garage, turned the lights off, and made sure the place was locked. I went into the house.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Penny sat on the couch in the front room and took the cowboy hat off. “My boyfriend’s after me,” she said. “Boyfriend” didn’t sound right, coming from her. She was a woman, not a girl, probably in her late thirties. “I’m staying here tonight.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want to go to Moscow for pizza? I was just going.”

“You get it,” she said. “I’m staying here.”

On the drive to Moscow, I thought about my chances of going to bed with her and decided that they weren’t good and that it might screw stuff with Carl. The whole arrangement, the rental with no paperwork, the gas business, the garage. I couldn’t let that slip away for big tits and a hot ass. I got to the pizza place and ordered and watched the college girls while I waited. Penny ranked right up there. I put the pizza on the front seat and drove back.

When I got there, a big guy I didn’t know was sitting on the front porch smoking a cigarette. He threw it into the gravel and stood up. I guessed he was six seven or more, close to three hundred pounds. The type of man you have to shoot twice. I figured it was Penny’s boyfriend and this could get mean in a hurry.

“I’m George Beck,” he said. “Good friend of Carl’s.”

We shook hands. I said, “What can I do for you?”

“You must be Ed Snider.”

“That’s right.”

“You going to be here tonight?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Penny’s staying here until we can get a handle on her boyfriend.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Tim Shipman,” he said. “You don’t know him, do you? We all call him Ships.”

“No, I don’t know him,” I said. “What makes you think he’ll come here?”

“You’ve seen Penny,” he said. “If you thought she was here, wouldn’t you drive up here from Lewiston?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d have already been here.”

“You can see I came right away,” he said, “and Penny and I broke up years ago. She’ll look at you and fuck up your brain.” He reached inside his coat and brought out a pistol, nine-millimeter, and tried to hand it to me. “Here,” he said. “Ships is violent. This is in case he needs convincing.” He held the piece out to me, butt first.

I wouldn’t touch the gun. “I’ll be here,” I said. “And that’s all that’s necessary.” Never touch another man’s gun, because you never know what its bullets have hit. I was trying to get out of the habit of handling guns.

George slipped the pistol back inside his coat, “Suit yourself,” he said, “but Ships will be strapped, so I’m just telling you.” He scratched his head. Something about this wasn’t quite going as planned for him.

“I’ll be here,” I repeated.

“Carl will appreciate that,” George said. “I mean, the other thing you ought to know about Penny is that she probably did cheat on Ships or rip him off or whatever.”

“I’ll keep an eye out.” I noticed that some makeup stained the shoulder of his jacket.

“Good,” George said. “We’ve got some buddies in Lewiston and around and we’ll take care of this.” I stood looking at the ground and George went on. “Wouldn’t have happened if Carl hadn’t gone to Alaska.” I wanted to ask why but didn’t. “I’m the guy around here that gets shit done,” he said. He took off and I went inside the house.

That night Penny stayed with me at Carl’s place. As soon as George left and we ate the pizza, she wanted the lights off. We sat in the dark on the couch. There were only the cars passing on the main road. The lights reflected off the marble eyes of the stuffed animals. We sat there for two hours without saying a word. I watched the back field. The moon shone bright and full. The black horse was running around for some reason, but I couldn’t tell which was the horse and which was the shadow. They both looked alive. Penny dozed off and I watched her small breathing, her lips and perfect nose.

Then a car pulled off the road. The door slammed and I heard footsteps over to the garage and then up to the door. The handle jiggled.

“Carl?” a man’s voice asked the night. “Carl, it’s me, Ships. Is Penny here?” There was a pause. “Penny?”

She was up now. She pulled me close and put her mouth on my car. “Pretend you’re Carl,” she whispered. “Use a deep voice, he won’t know.” Her hand was on my thigh.

I tried to use the voice I’d heard on the phone. “What?” I said in Carl’s voice. “Who is it?”

“Carl,” the voice said, relieved. “Carl, look, is Penny here?”

Now I was Carl. “What the hell’s going on, Ships?”

“She owes me a lot of money,” he said, “and she’s going all around town talking.”

“Talking about what?” I asked.

“About stuff she shouldn’t be, is what, about you and me and George Beck and she needs to shut her mouth.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t have anything to do with you guys, you know that, and she’s all over town with it. She’s loud wrong, is what she is.”

I knew that I had been right not to touch that gun Beck had offered me. “Where is she now?” I asked.

“I thought she was here,” he said. “Open the door, will you?”

“Ships, I’m busy,” I said.

“If she’s here, you better talk to her,” he said. “And if not, I’m going to find her. She knows the whole story, I don’t know why she’s lying, unless she’s just scared of George.” He crunched gravel back to the car. The car sat there for a minute and then started again and spun out on the road.

I turned to talk to Penny, but she was already unbuttoning her shirt, standing up and pulling off her jeans. The plan I’d been following vanished and we barely made it to the bedroom. She straddled me and her whole body was smooth and tight.

The sex was fast and terrible. We sort of mutually stopped after a while. Just lay there. She was already pregnant, she said, which is the best birth control there is. She said it was why she was so horny. But both of us had other things on our minds. It really hadn’t been worth it.

She sat on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair. “All this trouble is because Tim gave me a watch. That watch creeped me out. It was a present because I was always late. It was a man’s watch, okay, but it was weird because every time I looked at it, it showed the same time. Twenty to six. It wasn’t that the watch had stopped or anything, it just happened to be twenty to six when I looked at it.”

She was fixing her makeup now. “Well, one month I came up short and pawned the watch. Tim and I were broken up, so what did I care? I had to write my address on the pawn slip and I bet it was a week later and two detectives and an officer came to my apartment about that watch. It belonged to an old man named Elmer Cooley from way up in the Panhandle. He’d been missing for about a month and they wanted to know how I got that watch. Cooley, they told me, had a grandson in prison who was head of a group of militiamen that live in the mountains and did I know a George Beck, they wanted to talk to him about a murder and where was my brother? So I told them the watch came from Tim Shipman and I didn’t know anything else.”

I had just half-fucked a woman who was involved in a possible murder, who was lying to me and lying to the cops and being actively questioned by them. She stood up to put her jeans on and I couldn’t believe her body was that good, but now the whole thing was gone south. “I’d try not to worry about it,” I said. “Bad coincidence.” I was enough of a liar to know when I was being lied to. I’d leave at the first possible chance.

“It’s on my mind all the time,” she said. “What do you think Tim did?”

“I have no idea,” I said. The room was much darker than the moonlit field.

“I tell people I’m married so they won’t hit on me,” she said.

“Does it work?” I asked. I shifted around to lean on my elbow.

“No,” she said. She paused. “Men used to sit around and talk about me when I was gone. I used to be beautiful.”

“You still are,” I said.

“George Beck was the only man who could keep them off.” She looked out to the black field. “I just didn’t like some of the things he did.”

It popped in my head that George Beck had been involved somehow in the disappearance of the guy named Cooley and that was what the cops were after. The watch probably came from him, not Shipman, who was trying to save his own hide.

“I’m going back to Lewiston,” she said. “Tell George that’s where I am and don’t tell him we screwed.”

“There’s not much to tell,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “It just didn’t click. We’ll have to try again. I’d like to.” She showed me a fake smile. “We just have to make sure George doesn’t find out.”

I knew she’d tell him the instant she saw him. I had half-fucked myself into a real problem. “Sure,” I said. “Keep George in the dark.”

“You bet,” she said. “Count on it. Trust me.”

When I woke in the morning, she was gone.

The next day I met Carl Larson. There was a knock and the door opened. I was sitting on the couch, having coffee, thinking about leaving.

“Hey,” the man said. “I’m Carl. You must be Ed.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” I said. “I didn’t expect you back.”

“There were some problems.” He waved his hand.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Is that your truck by the garage, the black one?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How did that happen?” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“I think you’ve got four flat tires,” he said.

I stepped onto the porch. My truck sat lopsided by the garage and the rims rested right on the ground. I wouldn’t be running anywhere too soon. I went back in.

Carl walked around the place. I suppose he wanted to see if I’d moved anything. I hadn’t. Then he came out to the living room and sat in the chair by the door.

“George Beck called me and said my sister Penny was in trouble.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“How come you didn’t call me? Or write?”

I shrugged. “It wasn’t my place to do that, George said he was taking care of it. It only came about the other day.”

Carl shook his head. “Don’t do that again,” he said. “If my sister comes to you for something, let me know right away.”

“Okay,” I said. “From now on I will.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“I didn’t even know you had a sister.”

“No offense taken,” he said. “Now I’m going down to Lewiston to visit her and see if I can straighten this out.”

“Okay.”

“I should be back in a couple days and we’ll work out some sort of arrangement when I get back.”

“The garage is fine for me,” I said. “As long as I can cut my rent in half.”

“Go ahead,” Carl said. “While I’m here sleeping in the house, just pay half. That should give you about a month at half rent.”

“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll pay it now, cash.” I pulled a roll of bills out of my front pocket and counted two hundred fifty dollars in front of him and handed it to him.

“See you in a couple days.”

As soon as he was gone down the road, I went out to patch my tires. It was no use. They’d never hold air again. Someone had taken a jagged blade and ripped each tire completely around the sidewall. Whoever it was had to have been a very big, strong man.

The next day the phone rang and I let the machine answer and it was Carl from Lewiston.

“Pick up,” he said. “It’s Carl.”

I picked up the phone and he went on. “Is my sister there?”

“No,” I said.

“Did you fuck her?” he said.

“No,” I said. It sounded wrong.

“George Beck says you did. We’ll talk about that when I get back. Go check the mail for me.”

Sure enough, there was a letter from Penny. The postmark showed Portland, Oregon, and I told him that. He asked me to read it to him over the phone. And I did. It was a story about Tim Shipman, but completely different than the one she had told me. She’d been telling everyone that Tim Shipman might have murdered someone. She was doing that, she said in the letter, because George Beck had given her that watch and she knew damn well what was going on. George Beck was killing people in some rival gang, George Beck was moving speed. George Beck killed some old man Cooley in the woods near the Columbia River. George Beck had better pay her for keeping his name out of it, but if the cops caught Ships, he’d spill the whole thing. Ships knew about the watch and George Beck and Elmer Cooley.

“That’s it?” Carl asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll be back in a while,” he said. “Sit tight.” He hung up.

An hour later, George Beck showed up. Two other guys pulled in, too. My truck just sat there, completely useless to me on flat tires. Mac, one of the gas customers, also pulled in with his rig. He eyed George Beck.

“Just come back tomorrow.” I said. “I’ll take care of you then, if you can wait.”

He lowered his voice. “Never certain if tomorrow’s going to show, with people like that around,” he said. “You take care and I’ll see you when you don’t have company.” He pulled back onto the toad.

“Why don’t you close up now?” George Beck said. “You’re going with us.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Carl didn’t say anything about this.”

“You can go with us,” he said, “or never go anywhere again.”

“Fine,” I said.

We drove to a truck stop in Montana, seven miles over the Idaho border. George Beck and his two buddies sat in a booth drinking coffee and ordered food and Carl showed up and we sat there eating.

George waved to a trucker at the counter. “That’s Speedy,” he said. “You ride in his rig and we’ll be behind you.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We’re going to talk to Tim Shipman and straighten this out. He’s hiding in a motel over here, but we found him.”

“What’s Speedy got to do with it?”

George Beck got bigger in the booth. “I don’t know, you see, because I’m dumb,” he said. “People expect me to do dumb things. For instance, you fucked Penny and I’m so dumb I just found out about it, just now, this instant. So we can all drag you out in the parking lot and in the middle of things, a gun goes off and dumb local boy George Beck shot the man who was fucking his woman behind his back and the jury comes in, local folks, and they see me, and they know what I’m about and who I’m friends with, and I go do two years. You think two years is going to bother me? I’ll come out of prison with more friends than I’ve got now.” He pulled his coat back a little to show me a shoulder holster with a stainless steel pistol. “It makes little holes going in, big holes coming out, and all I asked you to do was ride with Speedy.”

I was trapped. We got up and I walked outside with the trucker who was hauling logs. I got in the passenger’s side of the sleeper King Cab. It was an older rig. Speedy cranked it through the gears and we headed out of the parking lot.

“That George, he’s a son-of-a-bitch, ain’t he?” Speedy said.

I didn’t say anything.

We curved through the mountain roads and in the side mirror I could see Beck and Carl and the others behind us. Speedy pulled over at a small cabin-unit motel. The big engine kept rolling as he put the brakes on.

“Lucky number seven,” Speedy said. “Give Shipman a good talking-to.”

I got out of the rig. George Beck and Carl Larson were sitting on the road in their trucks. I decided to try one last attempt at getting the hell out.

“I don’t even have a gun,” I said.

Speedy shrugged. “There’s a pistol under the seat, take it if you need it,” he said.

I reached under the seat and came out with a nine-millimeter and snapped the trigger twice at Speedy before the weight of the gun told my hand it wasn’t loaded. He blinked hard, then relaxed. He smiled. It was the gun Beck had tried to hand me that night at Carl’s house. I had screwed myself even tighter.

I got down out of the rig and I knew the security cameras were catching me doing it, walking with a pistol into room number seven. The door was open — I pushed it with my foot — and saw Shipman on the bed, the side of his head gone from gunshot wounds. He’d been shot less than an hour earlier. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, trying to draw them into the room, or within camera range. Don’t throw up, I told myself, you always throw up. But nobody came, and eventually I just walked out. Speedy was gone. George Beck and Carl Larson had pulled down the road a ways. I walked and got in the back of Carl’s truck and we rode all the way to Potlatch. This time I kept the gun.

After that George moved in with Penny and they were considered married by everybody. Shipman’s body was found in a Dumpster ten miles from the motel, but the paper said the cops knew the body had been moved. Then I heard George Beck was being held in Boise on a federal warrant and was also wanted by the Mounties in Lethbridge on a gun charge and possible murder of a witness in a homicide case in Washington State. This just made me anxious. Penny had the baby, a girl, late the following spring. Soon there was another man living there with her, and I tried not to think about it.

Carl went back to Alaska and nobody really came to the shop after that, except the gas customers. I was in Moscow picking up a case of oil one day and saw Mac, the old logger, in the parking lot. He was talking to some men. He nodded at me.

“I could use some work,” I said. “Maybe you could get me a job as a fire spotter. With the park service or private. Like you talked about that one time, that private association of landowners in Montana.”

“No,” he answered. “No thanks. The woods are all full. It’ll burn with or without you. You should ask George Beck for work, he probably needs somebody to clean his cell or something.”

I came back to the garage and Dan must have seen me pull in, because he came out of his trailer and over to the garage.

“Some men stopped by here looking for you. Knocked on my door. Frightened Rose.” He handed me a business card. It was from an attorney in Spokane.

“What’s this?”

“What is it?” he said. “It’s fucking yours, that’s what it is, but it ended up on my doorstep, how is that?” He didn’t raise his voice, but he was clear. “Just because I don’t believe in heaven and angels doesn’t mean I don’t believe in hell and demons. You need to get that shit straight in your head. Realize what you’re involved in. Separate the concepts.” He pointed at his trailer. “I’ve got a purpose here on Earth, which is to provide for and protect Rose. You seem to be about to sign on as a short-order man in the devil’s butcher shop. You’re on a bad path, with bad men. Those two things put us at odds. There might be a time when someone with a badge comes around asking questions about you and George Beck and Carl.”

“And you’d rat?”

He shook his head. “Never. It’s not the law that concerns me, not a single bit. I want to make sure you and I have an understanding. The law doesn’t stop a thing. Consequences only come after and after is too late, far as I’m concerned.” He pointed at the pen behind his house. “My brother’s bringing me up a good dog from his farm and everything in my place is loaded with the safety off. Whoever buys the ticket will get an express trip if I can help it and I’m here to tell you, although she was a lot of trouble different times, I love my Rose and I love my job of protecting her. Knock on my door and I’ll let Remington answer it. Both barrels.”

“I understand,” I said.

“See that you do,” Dan said. “Or there will be pieces of you they’ll never find.” He started to walk back to his trailer. “We’re not all hicks and cousin-fuckers up here,” he said over his shoulder. “Do your business somewhere else. You mistook kind for simple,” he finished. He shut the trailer door.

I called the Spokane lawyer from a pay phone and once I got past the secretary the first thing he asked me was did I still have that gun. Sure, I said, and it’s keeping me alive. Because that’s the gun that killed Elmer Cooley. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, he said, and if I wanted to rely on that, put my whole life on the line for one ballistics test, then I could go right ahead. And I knew he was right, although I hoped otherwise.

The Feds were leaning on George Beck hard and he was going to inform on me, said the lawyer. His buddy at the motel had a videotape of me walking into Tim Shipman’s room with a pistol and coming out and a Polaroid shot of Shipman lying dead on the bed. My name was going to be tied to all this, unless I could get Beck’s lawyer some good information on the remaining members of the Cooley family who still lived in the Panhandle. The Cooleys ranked high on the Feds’ most wanted list and usable information about them would loosen pressure on George Beck, would reduce his charges.

What Beck and his lawyer didn’t know was that if the Feds got hold of my prints, my days as Ed Snider were over.

I wasn’t going to take the rap Beck was ready to hand me. I’d get the information and be gone. I hid George Beck’s nine-millimeter up underneath the dashboard of my truck, held by electrical tape to the fire wall. The truck stayed locked. That gun was the only thing that connected Beck to the murder of Elmer Cooley and I kept it for no reason other than desperation. I drove north into the Panhandle, past Priest Lake and further, headed to the Cooleys’ house to do the best rat work I could.

I liked the Cooleys right off, which was tough on my brain. Over those first two winter months, I tried to adjust. It was them or me. They bought my cover without a question, just a guy up to log some adjacent land. No big deal. Pop Cooley and I ate dinner together a couple of times. One working man talking to another in the mountains. Talking about making a living in a place where that was real tough work. I liked him and I liked the kid. After sixty days, I had them on a talking basis.

The kid sat in a green plastic lawn chair in the snow behind my three-room cabin. Light was just corning. The kid propped his feet on an empty propane cylinder. He wore a dark bluejacket against the cold. Under his watch cap he had a home haircut. He was whittling a stick with the new pocketknife his father gave him for Christmas. I knew he was whittling weird little smiley faces, even though I couldn’t see that far. I found the sticks everywhere; the kid did it to every piece of wood he came across. Small, crooked smiley faces and the word Peeler, his nickname. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. As soon as he heard me awake, banging and emptying ash from under the woodstove, he was at the back kitchen door. He was skinny, but tall with a man-size head.

“Well if it isn’t Kid Cooley,” I said, “bantamweight champion of the Pacific Northwest. How do you feel before the big fight, Kid, say something for the fans? Are you still single, the girls have been asking.”

The kid half-smiled and then got serious. “No power, right, you got no power, no juice?”

I snapped the light switch back and forth. The kitchen ceiling light stayed off. “No juice,” I said. I had rented the cabin from the Cooleys for two months now and the power was always steady, which is rare in the mountains and deep woods. It tends to flicker. A single light came from the Cooleys’ house, further above me on the hill. “You got lights, though.”

“Jap generator,” the kid said. “Pop put it in a year ago, hard-wired it from out in back, so they couldn’t cut power on us.”

I sat on a folding chair at the card table in the kitchen. “How am I going to have coffee, Kid?”

The kid pointed at the rusted set of blue, white, and black camp pots hung behind the stove on what used to be the fireplace. “Pop says you got to give us a ride today. Pop says we’re the soldiers and he’s the general.”

His father was standing right outside the kitchen door and raised his voice from there. “I did not say that, I most certainly did not, nobody has to give us a ride anywhere. I said catch him before he left for work if he was working today and see what he said. That’s what I said.” He cleared his throat as he came into the kitchen. “Seems we were vandalized in the night, somebody cut the tires on the Jeep and the power’s out.” The Cooleys used an old Jeep with its stick on the column to get around. The back fender was rusted except for a bumper sticker, MARINE SNIPER: YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU’LL JUST DIE TIRED. Pop had been in the Corps, with Vietnam action under his belt. He mentioned it when I first moved in and saw the sticker. Pop’s father, Elmer Cooley, had been involved in the white gangs that live in the Pacific Northwest. Elmer had been murdered, he said, in the woods of Eastern Washington, near the Columbia River. Elmer was buried up the hill, in the family plot near the house. Elmer had lived in the cabin I was renting and I knew Pop kept alert.

“Did you hear anything in the night?” I asked. “Did the dog go after anything?”

“I had the dog inside with me because of those big bears coming around lately, too close to the house,” Pop said. “I didn’t want Cannon getting mauled.”

“Sure,” I said. “Where do you need to go today?”

“Spokane,” he said. “To the train station.”

“What’s going on there?” I asked.

“My younger brother’s coming home,” he said. “He just got done doing ten years of federal time. He maxed out.”

“That’s a long time,” I said.

“I don’t think they could give Jack enough time to beat him,” he said. “When he was a kid, eighteen really, he did five years here state time for some shit. Now he’s done ten more and he won’t be forty until August. You’ll see when we pick him up. Jack’s a stone house, inside and out. Always has been, always will be.”

“Hey, Snider,” the kid said. “Let me wear your bulletproof, since we’re going into the big city.”

He had tried on my vest before and loved it. “Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t want anybody to mess with you. Big city of Spokane, tough town.” I tightened it on him, made sure he was comfortable.

We climbed in my truck, heading south through the woods and mountains, under the eyes of hawks and eagles, two hours to Spokane.

The lines were down because I’d dropped a limb on them. The tires were flat because I’d cut them. I wondered if Pop, somewhere in his mind, didn’t suspect this. He wasn’t a stupid man, when it came to hunting and fishing and fields of fire and decoy interest. All manner of blinds, lures, and smoke to fool the enemy. He talked hunting to Peeler as we drove. If he suspected, he never let on. He needed to get to Spokane and I was the only man available for the job, I had made myself that way, cut myself to fit. Purposefully become a piece of the puzzle. Cold sweat ran down over my ribs and bled into my T-shirt all the way to the train station. Jack Cooley wasn’t a Girl Scout, He’d started out with the Hammerskins and moved up to the elite Eighty-eight Dragoons. Federal law enforcement blamed the Dragoons for a host of crimes, but most recently tied them to a shoot-out in Wyoming where five officers died raiding a meth lab and supposed Dragoon safe house. I knew any information I got out of Jack Cooley would be all George Beck needed to loosen his own state-held noose. George Beck had been in the woods of Eastern Washington the day Elmer Cooley died, and although they couldn’t prove he pulled the trigger, they were applying pressure. When it comes to law enforcement, they prosecute deaths of their own kind hardest. Everybody else is just a scumbag to them anyway, or was involved in stuff that they deserved to die for. We didn’t catch you at it, but you’ve got to be guilty of something, something you did before or something we don’t know about.

The train station in Spokane is brick, a mix of new and old. Jack Cooley wasn’t there yet; his train was late. The kid rode up and down on the escalators and had a soda. Pop sat on the wood benches and watched the people with their luggage, buying tickets. When I went to sit next to Pop, there on the bench was a small smiley face and Peeler written underneath. The kid went down the escalator again, back up. Then the train arrived.

Jack Cooley was one of the first ones to come out of the arrival door and start walking toward us. He was an inch taller than I was and broad in the shoulders. He wore an old army jacket and jeans and work boots. The kid went right over to him and hugged him and Jack hugged him back.

“Peeler,” Jack said. “Fucking little Peeler. Jesus Christ.” He hugged the kid again.

Pop went over and shook hands with Jack and hugged him with one arm. He introduced me. “This is Ed Snider, he’s renting Grandpa’s house while he does some contract logging over on the edge of old Freleigh’s property. He drove us today.”

Jack Cooley looked me up and down. “Thanks,” he said. He motioned at Pop and the kid. “These are nice people to be nice to.”

“Glad you’re out,” I said.

“You’re never out after that long,” Jack answered. “The cell just gets a little bigger.” He looked around at the vending machines and pay phones by the door. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get up in those mountains. I’ve been dreaming about them for ten years. Are they still there?”

“Nothing’s changed,” Pop said, “Nothing’s changed.”

The kid stopped to take a piss before we got in the truck and when he came out, he had another can of soda with him. He shook it before he got in my truck. He cracked the can open and sprayed Jack with the soda and Jack was laughing and shaking his head soaking wet. “I’ll clean it,” the kid said. “Pop told me we shouldn’t use champagne, so I used soda.”

“Peeler,” Jack said, “you should never sleep too heavy.” He was laughing as he said it.

I drove the Cooley family back to the tip of the Idaho Panhandle. By the time we got home, it was snowing lightly and the three of them walked up the hill to their house while I reloaded my woodstove for the night.

The next morning I had been up for a while when Jack Cooley came down for a cup of coffee. He was still wearing the old army jacket.

“How’re you doing?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said. “Same as always.”

“How was it inside?”

“Brutal,” he said and left it at that.

“Where’d you do most of your time?”

He sipped his coffee. “Kentucky. Pennsylvania.”

He was right across the table from me, so I had to ask. “Pop said you might come out and go after some people.”

Jack shook his head. He rubbed his chin. “I’m not doing anything to anybody up here, not a thing. I’m not involved in anything other than my own life.”

“Do they know that?” I asked.

He put his coffee down. “Everything with you is a question,” he said. “Who is they?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said.

“The only people here are you and me, Pop, and Peeler. Is that right?”

“Hey,” I said, “I misspoke myself.”

“I’m not moving off this mountain until yesterday is dead, do you get my meaning?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not hiding up here,” he said. “I’m out.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“You ever see a nest of snakes in the woods? Sometimes they’ll be in a rotted tree trunk or out in a field?”

I nodded.

“Crawling all knotted up with each other, biting each other, this one eating the tail of that one that’s eating the head of another, sliding all around each other, so you can’t tell which one is which one. Some poor people think that’s life.” He reached down and brought his coffee up, took a swallow. He was looking at the mountains. He set his coffee on the table and started for the door. “Solitary never bothered me,” he said. “It was being in population that I didn’t care for. Too many snakes.” He went out and I watched him walk back up the hill through the ankle-deep snow.

The next day I drove to Spokane alone. George Beck’s lawyer met me downtown and we talked near the water, in the park.

“What did you find out?” he asked.

“Nothing. Jack Cooley isn’t doing anything in any organization, as far as I can tell yet.” We walked along a side street and pretended to look at the shops.

“This isn’t what we agreed on, this isn’t going to help George. You’ve got to dig around and find something.”

“These people don’t trust me,” I said. “And they don’t talk much under the best of circumstances. Jack’s still wearing his prison laundry army coat, for God’s sake.”

“Fine,” he said. “Tomorrow, George is going to begin talking about Tim Shipman and you and that Larson girl and you can deal with the fallout from that on your own.” He started to walk away. “The gun won’t help you. We’re going forward.”

“That’s no good,” I said. “I need more time.”

“Two days,” he said. “And here.” He handed me a pad and pen. “Draw me a map of where the Cooleys are, so if it comes to it, the sheriffs can get a decent address for the warrant.”

I drew the map as best I could and if someone was really bent on finding it, they’d find it. I handed the pad back to him.

“That will buy you two days with me, but after that, George talks and signs statements and testifies and your name is on everything.”

When I got home, there was a sandwich on my kitchen table and a small stick with a smiley face on it. As I went to put wood in the stove, I realized that several of the logs carried messages. Peeler, on each one of them. Peeler.

The next morning Cannon was scratching at my door and I came out. Something was in the road, about fifty yards from my house. I thought it was Jack, facedown in the snow. I recognized the army jacket. Cannon started back toward his house and when I looked up, Pop and Jack were running down the road toward me.

“They shot Peeler,” Pop yelled to no one.

“I didn’t hear a shot,” I said.

“Nobody heard it,” said Jack.

When we got close I could see a faint spray of blood around Peeler’s head. I threw up into the snow. Not at any time had shooting the kid been discussed. Beck’s people would push until something gave. Either me or Jack Cooley. I threw up again.

“Why the fuck did they shoot Peeler?” Jack asked the sky.

I realized Peeler had Jack’s coat on.

“He drew the fire,” Pop said. “He walked around in it the other morning. I thought maybe you had some cigarettes in there and he was trying out smoking.”

When we got close, we could see Peeler was still breathing, even though there was blood coming out of his nose.

“Peeler?”

His mouth opened and his voice, scratchy and cracked, came out. “Pop,” the kid groaned. “It hurts.”

Jack rolled him over, pulled back the coat. He was wearing the Kevlar vest, my bulletproof. He’d been hit, twice, body shots. He was hurt, but he was alive, Jack carried him up to the house.

“What can I do?” I said.

“Keep an eye out,” Pop said.

I took George Beck’s pistol out of the truck, grabbed some shells Pop had given me when I first got there, and went walking. I went into the woods, to try to see if I could spot anyone.

Down the hill a ways, on the other side of the Cooleys’ house, was a small family cemetery. I stopped for a minute. Pop had told me who was in there, where his family tree had branched. Outside the cemetery, I noticed a pick and a shovel. Jack must have been down there. It looked like he was getting ready to dig a new grave. Peeler had carved some sticks and one was in the shape of a cross. The stick read GEORGE BECK, SENT TO HELL BY THE COOLEYS.

I walked back to my cabin. Somehow, while in the shadow of prison yards and guards and friends and enemies, Jack already knew who killed his grandfather.

An hour later, Pop came down to my door. “Do you think,” Pop asked me, “you could go into town and get some cigarettes and coffee and groceries — could you do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it right now.” It was my only way out.

I drove through town and kept going. Maybe they were planning my burial, too. For such big country, things had closed in on me rapidly. I needed to get out of rifle range of these people.

That fall, in one of the big shipping yards out in Grays Harbor, a guy who looked a lot like me started running a forklift and a log loader. He didn’t eat with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody. He cashed his check in the bar across the street and lived in a two-room apartment over the pool hall. He walked to work. The name he gave people was Tom Miller and he worked at the yard for six months. He didn’t miss a day.

Monday came, time to clock in, then noon, and the foreman noticed Miller’s card still in the rack. He asked around, did anybody know where Miller was? One guy said he heard Miller say he had a sister in California. He never said that to me, somebody else spoke up. Said he was from right here near Tacoma, born and raised. He didn’t want to go fishing Friday, someone said. We asked him to go fishing, said we were taking our kids and he was welcome, and he said no thanks.

I guess he quit, the foreman said when Miller hadn’t showed by the end of the day. So if anybody knows anybody looking for work and can run a loader and show up on time, the job pays four fifty a week, you do your own taxes as a subcontractor and don’t talk union here. Sitting behind his desk in his office, the foreman cut Miller’s time card in half and threw it in the garbage.

Tom Miller hadn’t quit. Somebody with sharp eyes and a long memory spotted him. The man who called himself Tom Miller couldn’t report to work because he was being held in a little room in the basement of a Seattle courthouse. Held until the investigators arrived.

After I told this whole story to the investigators, they kept me in custody for a couple of days. They told me that the man who lived with Penny Larson and her daughter was fatally shot in a hunting accident in the mountains of Northern Idaho, not far from their house, but managed to struggle into Canada before he died. The Mounties found him. They told me George Beck had been released. They told me Carl Larson was missing. They told me that Jack Cooley might be dead but that Peeler was still alive. They told me they knew I’d been Ed Snider for a while.

Then the investigators approached me about being an informant down in Oregon, on the Rogue River, where a group of white supremacists was moving meth and dogs and guns. We want you to do this, they said. Not that you have much choice. Sure, I said, I’ll do it. But all I wanted was out. The whole sky seemed covered with heavy-gauge mesh steel, one big prison. If I was lucky to be alive, I rarely knew it. Normal men get to be things. Sons and husbands, fathers and friends. I was not any of those things. I tried, but this is me telling you I failed.

So I went in undercover, and in the middle, the fucking middle of it all, there was an hour when nobody was watching me and I had a little money and I slipped away, on the ghost train out of there.

I can’t even imagine how many people are looking for me now.