The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

Michael Cebula Second Cousins

from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

“Could you ever kill a man?”

That’s how she said it, that’s how she laid it on me, us two in bed and it so early in the morning that I hadn’t even had my first cigarette. Of course, I could guess who she was talking about.

I took my time, which is my way, and before I could respond, Toola turned and propped herself up on her elbows, looked me over, and answered herself.

“You could do it,” she said.

I knew how she came to that conclusion, or thought I did. I’ve got that lean and hungry look, one you’re born with, one that persists even on a full belly, and it’s enough to make people assume you’ll do anything for a dollar; it makes them think they can ask you something like that and you’ll stick your hand out and say, “How much?” without ever wondering How come? Didn’t even matter that she knew I was a deputy and had the badge to prove it. The color of your eyes and the set of your mouth determine your destiny as much as anything else. Well, that and your family.

“That’s quite a question,” I said, “for so early in the morning. I don’t know.”

“Now you’re going modest on me?”

“When wasn’t I modest before?”

Instead of answering, Toola turned again and lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, her old and much-abused mattress squeaking and protesting like it’d been shot. The box fan on her bureau did nothing to cool the room down, and sweat lingered on her chest like some kind of slick icing. Toola claimed she was thirty-one, her license said thirty-six, and sometimes when she’d smile you’d swear twenty-five. She had long black hair and soft white skin and was good-looking in all the ways you’d expect, but what caught me first was she had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. She told me later they were contacts.

Now I pawed at the nightstand beside me but couldn’t find my cigarettes. I was feeling about half starved, but even after all our times together I still didn’t know if Toola could cook, only that she wasn’t the type of woman you asked to make you breakfast. My head was aching and I wanted to sink back down into that bed, but I could already hear the combine running over the soybean field across the road. That meant somebody could have seen my patrol car out front. I hardly had the energy for it, but I swung my legs over the bed and looked around for my clothes. My clothes and my cigarettes.

Toola said, “You ever think of leaving here, Danny?”

“Can I put my pants on first?”

“They’re in the kitchen. Under the table, next to your boots.”

“In the kitchen, under the table. How did they — ​never mind.”

“What I meant is, you ever think of just hitting the road? Getting in your car and driving until you leave everyone behind and find someplace better than all this?”

I gave up looking for my cigarettes and walked to the door. Toola hadn’t moved a muscle. You never could guess what that girl might say next. But I always liked hearing her talk.

“No place is all that different,” I said. “Not in any way that counts.”

“Lord,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”

I left Toola where she was, and where she was likely to remain for as long as the sun was up, and walked outside to the porch. My patrol car was out front, surrounded by a mess of chickens, but I’d locked the doors the night before so I wasn’t too worried about them stealing it even though they moved with the nervous jitter of a money-hungry band of tweakers. It was hot already and humid, the kind of air you don’t walk in as much as swim through, and I wasn’t much looking forward to my shift, even before you considered my hangover.

Me and Toola had been visiting each other several nights a week for the last six months, and while that had its benefits it was costing me sleep, especially sleep in my own bed. That’s one of those prices you pay that looks different in the daylight than it did the night before. Which isn’t the same as saying you regret it. Toola was the kind of woman that was hard to get out of your mind.

I could still hear that combine, but I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see any other cars or houses, for that matter, only woods and soybean fields. Probably only two or three people passed by Toola’s house in a given day, but leaving my cruiser out front was sloppy. I knew Toola sold weed, and she knew I knew she sold weed, and we never talked about it. My job was to stop criminals from hurting people, and Toola never hurt anybody, was the way I figured it. Now, the sheriff, he might have seen this different. Which was why I kept my mouth shut about Toola.

I stopped at home long enough to grab a shower and a clean uniform and eat a plate of eggs and potatoes, that tired bachelor meal, one served at my place as much as three times a day. After a while on your own, you start to wonder how many men get married just to improve the menu. When I finished, I radioed dispatch to say I was going straight to patrol. Nobody cared. They never do once you earn their trust.

There’s country roads here in Ohio that you can roam for miles without seeing anything other than soybeans and field corn, copses of trees and maybe a stray barn. It’s enough to drive you crazy with loneliness or thrill you with the illusion of freedom, depending on your mood. I picked one of those roads at random and set to it. My inclination that morning was to lay low and let that hangover burn off. I pulled two people over for speeding and let them both off with a warning. I never give tickets unless I have to, even though I’m mostly convinced that anyone driving slower than me is an idiot and everyone else is a maniac.

It turned out that second driver was some distant acquaintance of my father’s, and he went on for so long at his surprise at finding me on this side of the law that I thought for a moment of giving him a ticket after all, but in the end I just stone-faced him and gave curt, unhelpful answers to his questions about my father’s current whereabouts and he drove off mad like somehow I was the jerk in all of this. There’s some people you just can’t do favors for.

It was on about noon by then, and I was thinking of heading into town for lunch when I saw them: brief black skid marks shooting off the road not far in front of me. I don’t know why exactly they caught my eye. Maybe you drive these roads enough, day after day, you notice anything new. Or maybe I saw them because that’s how it was always meant to be. Either way, I stopped my cruiser along the side of the road, got out, and looked down the hill, over the grass field and into the woods. It wouldn’t have been visible if you were driving past, singing along to Waylon or Johnny Cash, but standing where I was and looking close, you could just make out the back of a steel-gray Cadillac Eldorado sitting silent between two fat buckeye trees.

I froze for a moment. That car was as familiar to me as my own name.

I walked back to my cruiser and looked down the road both ways. Still empty. I drove down the road about a mile, then backed into a small dirt trail that led away from the road and into the field corn. Anybody that passed by and saw my cruiser would figure I was taking a snooze.

I slipped down the trail into the woods and backtracked toward the Cadillac. By the time I got there I was sweating hard and about ate up by mosquitos. The window was down, the flies were buzzing, and the smell was awful. I looked inside. One dead, gunshot, the same man I expected.

This was bad. Really bad. And not just for the usual reasons either.

I spent a few more minutes looking in and around the car, then headed back to my vehicle. But I didn’t call it in to the sheriff. I wasn’t that stupid.

My half-brother, C.T., lived outside of town in a beat-up piney-wood cabin surrounded by overgrown and dying ash trees. He was as good a place as any to start. I about wore out my knuckles knocking on his front door before he finally answered.

“What in the world?” he said, blinking in the harsh sunshine, his wet eyes shining liquor-slick.

“Too early for you?” I said, with as much false cheer as I could muster.

C.T. didn’t move from the doorway. He looked at my patrol car, then back at me. “Depends what you’re here for.”

C.T. sold weed, pills, and powder. And probably a whole lot of other illegal substances too. But he would have been reluctant to talk to me even if all he hawked were steak knives or newspaper subscriptions. Me and C.T. had never been friendly, even when we were kids.

“Why don’t you invite me in first,” I said.

“Is it gonna be that kind of conversation?”

“It might could be.”

C.T. sighed and turned and walked back inside, which was as much of an invitation as I was likely to get. However you are picturing the inside of C.T.’s house is pretty much how it looked. There were too many empty beer cans and whiskey bottles to count and enough dirty dishes laying around that I had to take a minute to clear a space on the couch to sit down.

C.T. sat across from me in a ripped and faded easy chair, sipping a two-liter bottle of orange soda. He had the kind of thick long blond hair that you knew would last forever, and he wore the casual and wrinkled clothes of someone who never punched a clock. Me, I spent all day in uniform, and though I was barely thirty, my own hair was starting to retreat in a way that told me it would disappear slowly and then all at once like clear-cut timber. One night Toola had run her hands through what still remained and told me she thought bald men were sexy. I hadn’t yet decided how I felt about that.

“What’d you spike that soda with?” I said.

“Nothing you could handle.” C.T. took another sip. “What is it you’re wanting?”

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” I said. “Thought it might be good to hear what you’ve been up to lately.”

“Same as always, man. Just trying to find me a pretty girl, you know, one that’s got legs as long as a Monday.”

“And a skirt as short as the weekend?”

“It’s not as funny if you steal the punch line,” he said.

“How about you try being a little more specific.”

C.T. slunk back in his chair like a sulky child. “Is this a cops talk or a family talk?”

He always said it like that, cops, just so he could turn it into a four-letter word. It was unspoken between us, but we had a kind of silent agreement that I wouldn’t ever bust C.T. and in return he would give me a little information from time to time. It never amounted to much; the rare solid piece of info was always aimed at some new enemy of his and was more gossip than anything else, but so far it had suited us both fine.

“Let’s make this one a law-enforcement conversation,” I said. “The kind where I hear enough good intel that I lose interest in searching your pickup to see what I might find.”

“Man, you don’t have to put it so harsh as that,” C.T. said. He leaned farther back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, and rubbed his mouth. “Okay, let me think on that for a minute. What would Deputy Dan like to know, what would Deputy Dan like to know. Well, how about Lowell Adams is selling pills out of that new bait shop of his.”

“Not anymore. He got popped two days ago.”

“Shoot, really?”

I couldn’t tell if C.T. really didn’t know or was just feeding me stale information. He wouldn’t help me if he didn’t have to.

“Yes, really,” I said. “You got something worthwhile or not?”

“Now, just hold on,” C.T. said. “Don’t get so agitated. Give me a second to keep on thinking.” After a moment he grinned. “You hear Laurie DelMarr’s stepping out on Horace?”

“Why you telling me that for?”

“Man, I’m telling everybody,” C.T. cackled. “You imagine what’s going to happen when Horace finds out?”

I stood up. “It’s a shame you don’t know anything good,” I said. “Looks like I’m going to have to search that truck of yours after all. The barn too.”

“C’mon, man, if I don’t know, how can I tell you? I’m just small-time now; it’s not like the glory days, you know? I do a little business and it’s hardly enough to pay my rent.”

“Believe it or not, I’ve heard sadder stories than that, C.T. How about you join the rest of us and get a real job?”

“Hey, man, I look for work, like, every week.”

That was a lie. C.T. would rather have a crooked quarter than a straight dollar.

“If times are so tough,” I told him, “you ought to go work for Selby Cluxton.”

I said that to needle him, and also to throw out a little bait. But C.T. didn’t even nibble at the hook.

“Can’t see myself ever getting so desperate as that,” he said.

It wasn’t the answer I was hoping for. I looked around the room, at a loss for what to do next. C.T.’s place always depressed me, probably because it looked no different from the series of dumps we’d lived in growing up. Neither one of us spoke. I needed to figure out if he knew anything about the dead man in the Cadillac without letting him know what I’d found. I was about to press C.T. again when something caught my eye.

On the windowsill, next to two dead flies, was a half-empty pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. I walked over and picked it up with my pen, the way I’d seen actors on television do. Only one man around here smoked these.

“This mean what I think it means?” I said.

“Daddy always did have particular tastes. He come on over the other day, must have left them on accident once we got to drinking.”

“He’s back?” I said. “Since when?”

C.T. kicked his feet up on top of the wobbly coffee table and grinned. Did I mention he was taller than me too?

“Aren’t you supposed to know Daddy’s back?” he said. “Being the law and all?”

“We don’t keep track of all his comings and goings. He doesn’t rate that highly, not anymore.”

“Maybe not to the rest of them. But to you?”

C.T. was enjoying this a little too much. “All I’m asking is how long he’s been back,” I said. “And what you’ve been up to.”

“He’s been back, say, two-three weeks. He didn’t come calling till last week, though, wanted me to help him move some new furniture to where he’s staying now.”

“Should I be checking reports of armed robberies at furniture stores?”

“Nah, he bought it. It’s all legit.”

“Is that a fact?”

C.T. shrugged. “He’s going legit. For real.”

I shook my head. “You believe that?”

C.T. leaned forward, still grinning. “You can’t even say his name. You know what that tells people?”

“Is it better or worse than what it tells them when a grown man calls his father ‘Daddy’?”

C.T.’s smile dropped as quick and final as a man in a noose. “There’s no call for that kind of talk,” he said. “Listen, you want to search my property, then try and get a warrant. Until then, maybe you ought to get going, so I can get my beauty sleep.”

“It’s lunchtime.”

“You keep your hours and I’ll keep mine.”

“What’s he planning to do, now that he’s back?”

“If he told me, and you know that’s an if, how could I ever tell you?”

And there it was. So much for turning legit.

“I expect he’s wanting to take back what was his,” I said.

“Look at that,” said C.T. “And people say you’re not smart enough to make sheriff.”

I kept the Chesterfields, even though they’re not my brand. In fact, just the sight of them on the seat next to me turned my stomach. On the way back to town, I stopped at a gas station to buy my own. While I was there, just to check, I used the pay phone to call C.T. His line was busy. Two guesses who he was talking to.

My father, the man C.T. called “Daddy” and I called Lionel, had run the drug game in this county and the ones surrounding it for most of my life. He did until recently, that is, due to a two-year stretch he’d served in the penitentiary for beating the tar out of a mouthy college boy who was filled with more whiskey courage than good sense. Lionel had been released six months ago, and then he’d just gone and disappeared without so much as spending a single night in the one town he’d ever called home. Nobody knew where he went, though I had my guesses.

The beating he laid on that college boy, the beatings he used to lay on me, all the drugs he sold, and all the dirt he did to stay on top, none of that is what broke us up. No, only one crime of his really mattered to me. When I was six, my mother disappeared. Ran away, if you asked Lionel. Which, for lack of proof to the contrary, is what ended up in the official report. I know, because I’ve seen it. It was all lies. Problem is, there’s what you know is the truth and there’s what you can prove, and they’re only about as related as second cousins.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but Lionel was the reason I was a deputy. Before I was big enough to hold a gun there was some stupid notion in my mind as a kid of arresting him, leading him off in handcuffs. Not for what I knew he did to my mother — ​that case was long since ice cold — ​but for dealing, or beatings, or any of the other evils he did every day. That’s kid stuff, those fantasies, and I never told anyone about it, just kept it alive in my heart. Except then once I finally convinced the county to hire me, I was immediately taken off any case that might relate to him. Conflict of interest, they said; what would the voters think, relying on a son to investigate his father? It was funny, in a way.

When Lionel was released from prison a few months back and then disappeared himself, people figured he didn’t come back because they thought he couldn’t. See, Lionel never had a true second in command, unless you count C.T. It wasn’t my father’s way to share one bit of power. And when he was sent away to serve that two-year stretch, C.T. was in no position to hold on to what Lionel had built. It just wasn’t in him.

So in Lionel’s absence, a foulmouthed and filthy-minded creep nobody much liked named Selby Cluxton rose up and took everything over. Selby had always been a fat and greedy low-level dealer held down by my father, most likely because Lionel knew the threat he could become. But once Lionel was gone, there was nobody stopping him. Toola worked for Selby. Most everybody that sold pills, weed, or powder around here did.

Creep though he was, it said something about Selby that people would think he could keep Lionel from coming back. But it said more about how quick people are to forget. Because I knew Lionel wasn’t scared of Selby or scared of coming back. Lionel wasn’t afraid of anything, because nothing in his life had shown him he ever had reason to be. I knew Lionel wasn’t avoiding Selby, he was only out of state for a little bit, repairing the relationships he needed to keep him with a steady supply of drugs to sell. He’d be back sooner or later to take over again.

And if people had a little more information, if they knew what I knew, then they’d start to believe that time was now. After all, it was Selby Cluxton that was laying dead in that Cadillac.

The sheriff’s station might have been impressive when they built it fifty years ago, but I doubt it. All I knew for sure was that now it was a squat, faded red-brick building that was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and looked like something God had squished with his thumb. I stayed away as much as I could, but I didn’t have that option now.

Inside the station Billy Price was reading the newspaper, his long legs kicked up on his desk, looking as thin and limp as a string hanging from a balloon. Billy had a deputy’s star and the title that came with it, but he was seldom allowed to carry a gun or go out in the field. Only the sheriff knew why that was, but everyone acquainted with Billy agreed that it was probably a good idea anyway.

Now Billy looked me over lazily and yawned. “Where you been at all day?”

“Keeping the world safe from outlaws and Methodists,” I said.

Billy laughed, a little too hard. He always did, as if he wanted to prove he could recognize a joke. You’d be surprised who gets hired for jobs that nobody particularly wants.

“The sheriff in?” I asked. I was feeling anxious. If I was going to do anything on Selby Cluxton’s murder, I had to hustle. There was only so much time before the Cadillac would get discovered. Somebody skipping work to go fishing or poach deer would find it sooner or later. And then they’d box me out and there’d be nothing I could do. Before that happened, I wanted to grease the skids that pointed to Lionel. Give them a head start, so to speak. And I needed to do all this without telling anybody about that dead body.

“Sheriff’s in his office,” Billy said, nodding toward the back. “Same as always.”

Sheriff Gutherie was in fact in his office, hidden behind three tall stacks of paperwork on his desk. The sheriff was a good man, as far as that went, but he seemed constantly vexed, like a man who had to spend each day trying to shovel another hundred pounds of garbage into a ten-pound bag. There was a rumor every year that he was going to retire, and those rumors were getting stronger now.

“Okay,” he said, after hearing what C.T. told me, “your father’s back.” He shrugged. “Probably was going to happen sooner or later.”

I glanced at the door like I didn’t want to be overheard. “What worries me is, he’s not exactly the type to take to rehabilitation.”

“You’re probably right on that. But we can’t arrest a man for what he might do.”

It was a weird feeling, not reporting the murder. But there was no other way.

“We can follow him,” I said. “That’d help keep him on the straight and narrow.”

“How am I going to do that? And who am I supposed to do it with?”

“What about Billy?”

“Deputy Price is good right where he is, sitting at his desk reading the paper cover to cover every day. We shouldn’t strain that brain of his with anything more difficult.”

The way the sheriff folded his hands across his gut and leaned back in his chair, I knew he had made his decision and I had lost. But I had to play my role anyway.

“I’m just worried it’s only a matter of time,” I said. “Before he’s back to doing his dirt.”

“And then we’ll investigate it when he does. Look, I appreciate you telling me this, I know it’s hard for you and you only want to keep him out of trouble. But we can hardly deal with the crimes that have happened, let alone the ones that haven’t yet.”

The sheriff set a chaw in his lip and scooted the tallest pile of paperwork closer to him. His way of saying goodbye. There wouldn’t be any tail on Lionel, and that would make my job that much tougher. For a second my nerves got to me and I wondered if the sheriff could be in Lionel’s pocket. But the sheriff was cautious and responsible to a fault, the kind of man who gets more pleasure from reserving his cemetery plot than buying a new pickup. The sheriff wouldn’t take a dirty dollar, I didn’t think.

He looked up from his work, as if surprised to still find me there. I stepped out, like a scolded child, and shut his door. I stood for a moment in the empty hallway, thinking.

That Lionel killed Selby Cluxton would make sense to everybody; they wouldn’t need a calculator to add it all up. The problem was, guesswork would be all they had, and that wasn’t near enough to convict anybody, let alone someone as slick as Lionel. Five decades of committing every crime you could imagine and the only time the jury got to say guilty was when he beat that college boy, and that was only because an off-duty highway patrolman drinking in the corner of the bar happened to see it all. Unless you got that kind of luck, you need confessions, physical evidence, eyewitnesses.

For now I had none of that. And with no tail on him, Lionel would be free to go and do as he pleased. But that didn’t mean I was quitting.

On my way out of the station, I rapped my knuckles on Billy’s desk to wake him up.

“Come with me, deputy,” I said. “You just got a new assignment.”

Billy was nervous, and that’s without me even mentioning the murder. I explained it to him again.

“All I’m asking is, back my play,” I told him. We were sitting in Billy’s borrowed cruiser in the empty parking lot of a bankrupt lumberyard, while my patrol car idled a few feet away. “There’s no risk in it for you. It works, you get all the credit. If it doesn’t, nobody will ever hear about it.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You want to get out in the field more than once a month? You want to carry a gun without asking permission? Then you got to give the sheriff a reason to believe in you.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Besides, Joe might not be sheriff much longer. Who knows who the next sheriff might be. Doing this would go a long way in impressing whoever that is. And look, this won’t sweat you any. You see something, you call for backup. You don’t, you go on home. It’s gonna be easy as shelling peas. You used to do that for your mama, right?”

Billy laughed, too hard again. It didn’t give me a good feeling, but there was nothing that could be done now. All I could do was hope that the next time I saw Billy he’d be accepting handshakes and backslaps from the rest of the department, not tightening the noose around my neck.

I got out and tapped the hood and Billy drove off. It was time for me to go find Lionel.

The new girl that lived with my father was glassy-eyed and talked real slow, like her mouth had a limp. I call her a girl, but she must have been twenty, standing in the doorway looking thin as a promise and wearing only an old white T-shirt. She saw my badge and set her mouth and you could almost see her trying to remember her line.

“Lionel?” she said. “Lionel’s not here.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “He trained me to say the same thing five years before you were ever born.” Then I edged past her into the house.

I figured if Lionel was back in town and wanting to lay low, he’d head to this hunting cabin north of town that he’d bought a decade before. My guess was right.

Lionel was sitting at the kitchen table working over a pen and paper, next to a pile of safety-deposit keys. When I came in he looked up for only a moment, then he went back to work as if I’d arrived a few minutes early for an appointment instead of this being the first time we’d seen each other since the morning the judge handed him a two-year stretch.

The funny thing about that day was, everybody in the courtroom expected him to get at least five years. But then, for reasons nobody knew but I could guess at, the judge dismissed the most serious charges and gave him the minimum. The prosecutor looked like he’d just learned that his wife had run away with the local preacher and took the dog too, but I could have told him it wasn’t personal, he was just another in a long line of men to get rolled by my father.

Now I set my hat on the kitchen table, sat down, and wiped my face. “Boy, it’s hot out,” I said. “If we don’t get any rain soon, the trees will start bribing the dogs.”

Lionel kept working. “You come to talk about the weather?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

Lionel looked the same as ever. Broad shoulders sticking out from underneath a cut-off black Harley T-shirt, long white hair in a ragged ponytail, and pale blue eyes that always seemed to look right through you. He had a few more tattoos than before, but that was all. He was still bigger than me, and showed no sign of slowing down.

A small fan pointing at Lionel was the only sound in the room. He continued to ignore me. I realized I was chewing my nails and I wiped my hand across my leg, disgusted with myself. How long could you live with a man that you knew killed your mother? A day? A week? I did twelve years. And leaving home doesn’t fix anything.

I nodded toward the front room. “What’s this one’s name?”

“Who, Keely?”

“Yeah, Keely. You tell her she’s only the latest in a series?”

“I don’t know that that would surprise her.”

“She be surprised to know how the other ones fared?”

Lionel kept working. “That’s a better question for her than me,” he said. “If you’re really wanting to know, then you ought to hustle on in there and ask, because if I meet my guess there’ll be no talking to her in another twenty minutes.”

“Guess that’s what it takes to keep them when you’re more than twice their age.”

“No, but it does save a lot of time and hassle.” Lionel got up, stuck the keys in his pockets, and shoved the papers in a drawer. “Speaking of hassle, looks like you’re still as much of one as ever. I see you haven’t lost your taste for judging people.”

“I come by my self-righteousness honestly, through prayer and hard work.”

Lionel leaned back against the kitchen counter and looked at me, his eyes running over me cold and flat, completely at ease, like a rattlesnake sunning itself on a rock.

“That’s why you never accomplished anything,” he said. “Too busy making jokes. What you never learned about women is, they’re as disposable as socks — ​when they get too old or worn out, or hell, you just get sick of them, there’s no use keeping them around. Now, tell me what you’re here for or get the hell out.”

I wanted to slug him then, but that would have ruined everything. I get a smart mouth sometimes, but Lionel always held the trump card. I took a breath, tapped my hat against the table, and tried to appear relaxed. I had to be careful. Lionel was slick, too slick for me to see every move. I had to keep things simple, not try to prove the whole case right here.

“How long you been in town for?”

Lionel shrugged, like the question bored him. “Maybe a week.”

That didn’t square with what C.T. told me, but I expected the lie. I didn’t know when Selby Cluxton was murdered, but by the looks of him, it had been within the last few days. Before I went too far, before I got more people involved, I had to know for sure that Lionel didn’t have a card hidden up his sleeve, some airtight lie that put him out of town.

“What have you been doing since you been back?” I said.

“Fixing this cabin up, what do you think? C.T. was supposed to take care of things, but turns out he’s not as reliable as I’d expected.”

“That’s all you been doing, just playing handyman?”

“C.T. and Keely and me, we been here all day every day working.”

So C.T. and Keely would be Lionel’s alibi. Everybody knew they’d repeat whatever lie he taught them.

“Nobody’s seen you for six months,” I said. “People thought you were gone for good.”

Lionel grinned. “Damn, son, almost sounds like you wished I stayed away.”

“Wouldn’t have cried any. Especially since I know what you’re planning.”

“That right?” Lionel shrugged. “Plenty of people thought they had me all figured out. But I’m still around and they’re not.”

That was true. And it worried me.

“I know what you’re planning,” I said. “It’s not hard to figure. But I’m giving you a chance. Clear out, tonight, leave town and don’t come back. This county is closed to you.”

“Closed to me. This county I’ve run longer than you’ve been alive.” Lionel shook his head. “What is it about you that’s always made you so eager to spit into the wind?”

“There’s going to be a raid on all your stash spots tomorrow. Starting with the loft in C.T.’s barn. You’re done here. I’m giving you a chance to run instead of going back to prison for a longer stretch than two years. Don’t screw it up.”

“And why would you be telling me this for?”

“Because you’re my father.”

Lionel laughed. “You develop a lot of love for your daddy while he was gone?”

“No. But I aim to be sheriff of this county. And I can’t do that with a jailbird father in prison for dope.”

“You think they’d elect you anyway? All them voters know your blood.”

“I’d like to take my chances. And they’re a damn sight better if you’re a million miles from here.”

Lionel thought that over for a moment, then sat back down. His hands looked like something you’d see in a zoo, and he cracked his knuckles one by one. Those hands could hit you hard enough to shake your life loose. I knew it, because I’d seen it.

Suddenly his hand shot out and I jerked back. But Lionel was only reaching for my hat.

His lips smiled but his eyes stayed lethal. I hated myself for flinching like that. He set my hat on his head, then took it off and tossed it back on the table.

“When, exactly?”

“They plan to hit you in the morning, at dawn,” I said, trying to act more relaxed than I felt. “When they figure you’ll be asleep. That means you got to leave tonight.”

Lionel sighed and waved his hand, dismissing me. “All right, then,” he told me. “You’ve said your piece. For all the good it will do.”

I didn’t know if I’d accomplished anything, but I’d given it a shot. I stood to go as Keely walked in. She tried to slip past the table to the sink, but Lionel grabbed her by the hip and made her sit on his lap. In the soft kitchen light, I could see a dim yellow bruise shining under her left eye like an ignored caution signal.

“Look at her,” Lionel said. He grabbed her face and turned it toward me. “Bet you can’t remember, but she’s just the spitting image of your mother.”

Lionel wouldn’t run. But he wouldn’t sit still and lose all his dope either, and working to save his product would tie him up for a bit. If I was lucky, that was enough time to put me a half step ahead of him. But something told me that was as likely as finding a box of day-old sunshine.

I rolled my window down and lit a cigarette, cruising empty backcountry roads as the sun began to set. Growing up, on hot summer days we’d jump off the highest cliffs we could find into cold spring quarries. And every time I did it, there was a feeling halfway down that everything was moving too fast and I couldn’t quite believe how I’d put myself in that position. That’s how I felt now. I needed to talk to Toola.

I caught her just as she was locking up the house, on her way out for the night. We sat on the porch swing together, listening to the crickets and watching the chickens hunt them in the stiff yellow grass.

“You been out playing hero?” she said.

“Do I look like any kind of hero to you?”

She grinned. “Sometimes salt looks like sugar.”

Could I trust Toola? was the question. Sometimes I think your feelings mostly lead you into bad places, especially when you’ve spent your whole life alone and searching. But then, you never know if those feelings are worth anything unless you try.

“Selby Cluxton is dead,” I said.

Toola’s eyes went wide and she quit trying to light her cigarette and just looked at me.

“I found him, this afternoon. Off of Paint Creek Road. You’re the only one I’ve told, but the sheriff will find out soon enough.”

Toola looked confused. “How come you didn’t tell the sheriff ?”

“People will be smart enough to guess my father did it,” I said. “But they won’t be smart enough to prove it. Not without some help. I want to make sure they can, but I need time to do it. I don’t want him to wiggle out of this one.”

I waited to see how Toola would take that, but she was smart and a big girl; she had to be to survive the way she had. She didn’t even blink.

“Lionel’s back,” she said.

“He’s back,” I said. “Look, there’s a lot going on and I’m not sure how it’s all going to play out. Why I’m telling you is, you ought to lay low for a while, until things die down. I don’t think you’re in any danger, but better safe than sorry.”

“I got people expecting me. Customers. I don’t know if—”

“They can wait a day or two. It won’t kill them any. This thing with Selby, it’s going to shake up a lot of people, there’s no telling how they’ll react. Or what Lionel will do.”

Toola stood up and stuffed the pack of cigarettes in her jeans. It wasn’t in her nature to rely on anybody. “Shoot, if it’s that bad, maybe I ought to leave town,” she said.

“It’s not so bad as that yet,” I said. “And if it ever is, then I’ll be there running right behind you. But for now, go stay at your mother’s old place. Nothing bad will happen there.”

Toola paused and looked away. I stood up, sweating and nervous. How does a woman decide to trust a man? Why would they ever? The moment stretched. Then, finally, Toola nodded. That’s all, just nodded one time. I knew enough about her experience with men to know that even that much was harder than it seemed. I just hoped I wasn’t going to be the next man to let her down.

Toola packed quick and went on her way, and for a moment I felt about as alone as I ever had in my life. I wanted to stay at the house with all its reminders of her, but that made me feel weak and anyway it was too far from the action. So instead I drove back to that bankrupt lumberyard where me and Billy had met a few hours before.

It was full dark now and my mouth was dry. My brain was working on overdrive but not in a good way. Things were in motion and there was nothing for me to do now but wait. That gave me too much time to think and worry, remembering all that I knew of my father.

I kept thinking of a dealer named Donald Ray Wallace the most. One time, years ago, when I was little, Donald Ray got tired of working for my father. In fact, he got so tired that he went to the police station up in Harris County and offered to set my father up, wear a wire and get him on tape making a big heroin buy. The cop up there told Donald Ray that was a good idea, the cop told him to go about his business as usual and he’d call him when the warrants and such were in place. A few days later the cop told Donald Ray to meet him out at the Milk Creek mines, that he’d give him his instructions and wire him up there. Except when Donald Ray drove out to those old abandoned mines the cop wasn’t there. Only Lionel was. And nobody ever saw Donald Ray again.

Lionel didn’t live on luck, is my point. He was smarter and meaner and willing to do more than anybody I’d ever met. He had to be, to stay on top as long as he had. Nothing I’d ever done in my life could compare.

Was Billy Price leading me to the same fate as Donald Ray? Were there men like that cop in Harris County working in my department? Was there something I was missing? I couldn’t say. But there’s times in life that the world calls you to shoot your shot, and this was it for me.

My radio cackled to life. Billy was calling me in.

I put my flashers on and floored the gas, running red lights and passing every car in my way. Before long town was far behind me. Heat lightning shot across the sky, but everything else was black. Miles rolled past just that quick, then I turned off Cross Creek Road and headed into the woods down a ragged dirt track that I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years.

How many times in your life do you know that you’re approaching a moment that will change everything in your world, either for the good or for the bad? That old feeling, falling quickly through space and wondering how I put myself in that position, came over me again. My heart was pounding, thinking of Donald Ray Wallace, my mother, of all the times Lionel had come out on top. I crested that last big hill and saw cherry lights from patrol cars — ​one, two, three, four in all. I prayed Billy Price had come through.

I parked on the perimeter and got out of my cruiser, with my holster unbuckled and my hand by my gun. As if that would help me. Billy came running up, like he’d been waiting for me.

“It was exactly how you said it’d be,” he told me. “Just exactly.”

His eyes shone wide and his smile too, like some kind of game-show winner. My heart tripped a little, in a good way. But I kept my hand near my gun all the same.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I sat up on that hill like you told me and on about midnight here comes your father with the other two, and they start unloading product off their truck into that bunker.” Billy motioned to the other deputies working somewhere behind him. “I got dispatch to call up a couple of the guys real quiet, and we ambushed them as they came out of the bunker for the last time. We got all of them, the girl, C.T., and your father. It was just as simple as you said it’d be.”

Billy couldn’t keep the smile off his face. I let out a shaky breath and buckled my holster. I don’t think Billy saw me. He was in his own world now.

“You know what to tell everybody from here on out?” Any screwups could still kill me.

“Oh, sure, that’s the easiest part,” Billy said. “I’m gonna write it up how you told me to. On my way home, I see some jerk swerving all over and I go after him. I lose him in these hills but then I see some lights off in the distance and decide to investigate. That’s when I see your father and that girl and C.T. unloading a bunch of dope into that old bomb shelter.”

Billy laid it out like a hard-won war story, and in time, with enough retellings, I knew he’d come to believe it too. Seeing Billy so confident and sure, seeing the flashing lights and the deputies securing the scene, I tingled, beginning to wonder for the first time if maybe everything really would work out. The bomb shelter was Lionel’s oldest, most secret warehouse. I had come here once, as a child, when Lionel had to unload product in some kind of emergency. I kept that secret in my mind for years, protecting it like a precious inheritance. I didn’t know where his other stash spots were, not anymore, but I had a hunch that he’d move it all here if he was worried about a raid. It looked like I was right.

“Listen,” Billy said. “I appreciate you bringing this to me. I know it wasn’t easy on you, it being your father and all.”

I shrugged, kept my face blank, and retreated to the safety of cliché. If nothing else, I know my role. “What’s right is right. People can’t sell dope in this county. I just don’t want anybody knowing I was behind my own daddy getting locked up.”

Billy nodded, looking sympathetic, then he pointed to a patrol car underneath an ancient blue spruce tree. “He’s sitting right there, if you want to talk to him.”

I thought about that for a second, then decided I did.

Lionel sat in the back of the patrol car, looking angry but in control. The deputy standing watch nodded and wandered off a respectable distance. I leaned over Lionel’s window, took in the scene surrounding us for a moment, then looked inside and locked eyes with him. Seeing my father handcuffed in the back of a patrol car and knowing I put him there, it felt like the enormous weight that had been crushing my chest and my heart for most of my life had started to lift just a little.

“Thought you were leaving town,” I said.

“I don’t expect that’s exactly true.”

“No,” I told him, “it isn’t.”

Lionel leaned back, looking comfortable, but that didn’t bother me as much as I’d have thought it would. It was all out there in the open between us now.

“I got two sons, and each one is dumber than the next,” Lionel said.

“Is that a fact?”

Lionel shook his head. “You must think this will make you sheriff. You’re so dumb you can’t see that Keely and C.T. will tell everyone those are their drugs.” He shrugged. “This is nothing, this will be just a parole violation for me. I’ll do six months at most.”

“Is that a fact?” I said again.

Lionel nodded. “None of this will stick to me. It never does.”

I looked at him and smiled. And my smile got wider and wider, so wide that it felt like my face would crack. And my father looked at me, really looked at me, for maybe the first time in his life. And when he did, I leaned in close and whispered in a voice as clear and cleansing as a mountain creek: “Old man, it’s not the drugs you should be worried about.”

I left Billy to his paperwork and the slaps on the back. He didn’t know it yet, but he’d be getting a lot more of both soon. Who knew, maybe before I was done Billy would be the next sheriff, him the deputy nobody much trusted with a gun.

As for me, there wasn’t much else to do. Just the last two dangerous parts.

First I went back to the Cadillac and Selby Cluxton’s body one more time. Nobody saw me. I mean, Lord, I hope not. Then, when I was done there, I went looking for Toola.

I found her at her mother’s old house, like she said she would be, sitting on the front porch steps, as if she had been waiting for me all night. She wasn’t wearing makeup or any colored contacts now, and her eyes were a soft blue-gray. She looked more beautiful than I could ever remember.

“They caught Lionel moving a mess of drugs,” I said. “He’s on ice now. He will be for at least a couple months. It’s awful hard to buy judges or intimidate witnesses from prison, even for Lionel. And that’s all the time we’ll need.”

“Need for what?”

Toola looked at me for a second, waiting for an answer, and I felt that tingle again, that belief that it was all going to work out. Then I put her necklace in her hand, the necklace I found ripped and broken beneath the driver’s seat of Selby Cluxton’s Cadillac yesterday morning. I didn’t know for certain why she shot that disgusting creep or why her necklace would be ripped and lost right there. There’s a danger in letting your mind run wild. And there’s a danger too in asking for explanations.

“Tomorrow morning you need to go to the sheriff’s station and ask for Deputy Price,” I said. “Tell him that Selby Cluxton is missing and you haven’t seen him for a couple days. And that the last thing he said was, he was going to meet with Lionel to settle a disagreement.”

I took a deep breath and kept going.

“If they don’t find Selby in a couple days, I’ll make an anonymous call. I’ll tell them about seeing Selby’s Cadillac off of Paint Creek Road. They won’t find anything of yours there, I made sure of that. But they’ll find Lionel’s pack of Chesterfields on the dash. I made sure of that too.”

Toola looked at me and she didn’t nod or say anything. There wasn’t a need to, not anymore. But after a moment she smiled.

Because to answer Toola’s question, I still didn’t know if I was the type of person who could kill a man. But I knew for certain now that I could send a man to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. I could do that if it meant getting revenge for the woman I had always loved. And if it meant protecting the woman, I believed I was starting to. Lionel would learn that about me soon enough, but he wouldn’t be able to complain. That’s the way the world works, after all. Like he taught me years ago, what the truth is and what you can prove, they’re only second cousins.