Carlos McDaniel was skimming duckweed when the two men came and shot him full of holes.
It was at his ex-wife’s uncle’s place, fifteen miles south and east of College Station, Texas, and it had a summer cabin on it, complete with air-conditioning and an ancient refrigerator always stocked with Cokes, cheap beer, and sandwich materials. The cabin stood ten feet from the edge of the one-acre lake.
The lake was little more than an overgrown duck pond, but it was all the water anyone could need on a hot summer day when the only breeze came from the flapping wings of wild waterfowl and even the water moccasins lay listless on the floating platform, unmindful of interlopers. It was a hidden spot, well away from competing salesmen and customers who gravitated to the two extremes: bored-stiff disinterest or unrealistic expectation. Carlos got more of those two kinds than any other as a real estate salesman. And when they got to be a little too much for a bright-eyed young man with all of life ahead of him and a ticket for this Saturday’s Lotto Texas in his pocket, he would climb in his ’77 Datsun short-bed pickup and head for the country and the cool, spring-fed waters of Hidden Lake. And his share of the beer.
When blacktop gave way to caliche gravel and a long-following geyser trail of fine, reddish dust spreading out like a comet’s tail, only then could he breathe deeply and begin to take in life again.
Hidden Lake, as his ex’s family called it, lay at the tail end of everything. The last county road doubled back on itself toward the north and west at the turnout of the lane to his ex’s family property. The property was the last customer on the water and electric line, and it was five hundred yards from the Navasota River, which defines the county’s easternmost border.
The family—the few that were left of them—hardly ever came out, and almost never in the middle of the week. Carlos would have some alone time. Some time to look at nature and think and let things settle out. Skimming the duckweed was a damned dirty job, and damned if he didn’t love doing it.
This day he hadn’t bothered locking the gate to the property behind him, as he more often than not did. Possibly things would have turned out differently if he had, but then again, who could know? There are no could-have-beens, should-have-beens, or would-have-beens to life, other than what we consider in the universe-wide space behind our eyes. There is only the moment right here and now.
Carlos looked up from the task at hand when he had the feeling he was being watched.
He had managed to get the floating landscape timbers in a fairly straight line and was just skirting the edge of the floating platform, whereon lay three large and completely still cottonmouth moccasins, when he felt it. There was movement there under the shade trees some thirty feet away. The sun was hot and bright overhead and he squinted.
“Hello,” he called out.
They weren’t family—or rather ex-family. He’d never seen the two men before in his life.
They were dressed as if they had just come from a highend real estate closing. His first errant thought was that they were potential clients who had gone to a lot of trouble to find him.
In a way, he was right.
The water came up to Carlos’s chest. It was a good thing they had waited until he was nearly done before happening along. Ten minutes before and they would have come upon him slogging through the muck on the opposite shore with his bare ass dripping mud and water.
“Hello,” one of the two men said, and waved. The man smiled.
Carlos almost waved back, but he was mindful of the snakes, just three feet away. Snakes couldn’t hear worth a damn, but they could sense movement, and cottonmouths are known for their aggressiveness.
“Give me a minute, will you? Go on in the house. There’s beer and Cokes in there. Also, I’m not exactly dressed for visitors at the moment.”
Carlos had a towel in his pickup, and he was thinking about how he’d look trying to move across the yard to get to it before the two glanced back out the front window. Chances were they’d get an eyeful no matter what he did. But that was all right. They were guys, after all. And something else was beginning to take hold inside of him. A far-off song, like a radio picking up a skip on a clear night: the opening chords of the world’s oldest song—opportunity. Anyone coming this far to see him must want something awfully bad.
And he was right about that as well.
The two men went inside without further word.
Carlos pulled the leading timber up into the mud of the bank and made a break for the truck. The towel was there behind the seat where he’d left it, but it wasn’t a beach towel. He kept it there for those moments when the old Datsun itself had had enough and decided it was time to overheat. You had to have a thick, dry towel to remove a hot radiator cap, and the towel—complete with the three Powerpuff Girls: Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup (the only thing he’d truly walked away with to call his own from his former marriage)—wrapped around him just enough for him to make a small knot. Even that, in the final analysis, would do him little good.
The towel would have to do.
Carlos stepped up to the front porch and slid the glass doorway back on its tracks. The track needed a good cleaning out and a bit of graphite to smooth the slide of the door, but like all things, there was never enough time.
The air inside was cool. Not cold, but just enough to make him shiver. He was still wet and water trickled down his legs. There were tiny green specks of duckweed all over him. He usually went from the lake right into the shower because if he dried off with the duckweed still on him it tended to stick like glue.
The two men came in from the kitchen. Each had a Coke in hand. One of the men was smiling, the other looked at him with dead-fish eyes.
Carlos shivered again.
“How can I help you fellas?” he asked. It came out sounding uncertain, and he knew it.
“Just a little information,” the smiling fellow said. His big teeth were as false as the rest of him, Carlos suddenly knew. That song—that radio-skip melody—was no closer now than the background hum leftover from the Big Bang.
“You guys cops?” Carlos asked.
The dead-fish-eyed fellow laughed. It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
For Carlos the temperature in the room plummeted.
“No,” Smiley said, cutting his own light chuckle off short. “Not cops. Businessmen, Mr. McDaniel. Just like yourself. You had a client. A lady.”
“I’ve got a lot of lady clients. And you said ‘had.’ I don’t keep track of my old clients very well. Which is maybe why I’m not pulling down a hundred Gs a year.”
“We understand, Mr. McDaniel. We really do. This lady you’d not easily forget.”
“Who is she?”
“Your first name is Carlos, right?” Smiley asked. “But your last name is McDaniel. You got some greaser blood in you?”
“I don’t think I like you,” Carlos said.
“You don’t have to,” Smiley said. “Who’s the bean eater? With a last name like McDaniel, it’d have to be your mother, right?”
He felt it then, strong. The floodgates of adrenaline opening somewhere in his body. It was going to be either fight or run. Running, at the moment, looked best. Two on one with him naked in his ex’s uncle’s cabin, a mile to the nearest neighbor? Not good odds.
But Carlos fought the urge to run. Who can truly tell the future?
“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he said. “Then you can leave.”
“Smart fellow, right, Sammy?”
“Yeah,” Sammy said. He was the broad-shouldered, deadeyed one. Or perhaps his eyes were more reptilian than merely dead. “Fart smellow,” Sammy said and laughed again. Carlos’s instant assessment of him was bleak at best. He was all gristle and fat with little brain. If Sammy ever graduated high school, Carlos was willing to bet he’d been in his mid-twenties at the time.
“Okay, kid,” Smiley said. “Her name is Linda Sneed. That’s two e’s. Remember her?”
“The penthouse deal. Haven’t talked with her in six months. Lost my ass on the deal too. What do you want to know?”
“See, Sammy? I told you today something was gonna break.” His eyes never wavered, but the tone of his voice dropped a whole scale. “Where is Ms. Sneed, pepper-belly?”
Carlos considered. The moment had arrived. The moment he’d known was coming the instant he’d seen Sammy’s dead-fish eyes.
Sammy’s hand went into his suit jacket, and what came out was exactly what Carlos McDaniel knew was going to come. It was a gun. A black 9mm.
“Tell him,” Sammy said.
Carlos’s control of his bladder slipped for just an instant. He knew without looking there would be a small spreading stain on the front of the towel. It felt like hot lava in the chilly room.
“She’s … gone. Long gone. I’m not lying. I tried to reach her. Everybody did.”
“Yeah?” Smiley said. “Who’s everybody?”
“Me. My broker. The title company. The lawyers. Last I heard she was somewhere in West Texas.”
“Yeah? That’s a pretty big area. You mind narrowing it down for me a bit?”
“Littletown. No. Littlefield. That’s northwest of Lubbock.”
“Thank you, Mr. McDaniel,” Smiley said. He turned toward Sammy and nodded.
Carlos stood frozen.
Sammy shot him three times: once in the leg—he had been aiming for Carlos’s groin and missed by half an inch—once in the stomach, and once in the chest.
The two men left him for dead.
Carlos McDaniel didn’t hear the sliding door close behind the two men. He was concentrating on the ocean of pain that had suddenly invaded his life. He hurt. The pain was deep—a fundamental thing that could not be ignored—and blackness was coming. He was already graying out.
His hand moved, touched the widening pool of blood soaking into the old carpet beside him. He brought it to his stomach and traced five letters.
He pulled his finger away and looked at it. There was a tiny speck of green in all the red.
Duckweed, he thought, because for some reason he couldn’t speak, and then the blackness rolled over him and carried him away.
Carlos McDaniel was either a fortunate or unfortunate man, depending upon one’s point of view.
He was unfortunate to be in the path of the two-man tornado which was composed of a couple of Brooklyn hoodlums named Sammy “The Gootch” Rosario and Victor Cicchese.
Carlos was fortunate in that he initially survived the tornado. The three muffled reports were heard by a man named Charles Lyman, who was walking the power-line cut on the north side of the property that had the idyllic little lake and the cabin. It was the last property on the line, and when he was done he was supposed to turn around and head back. But there was a little glade near the end of the line where it was his custom to stop and have a smoke before returning. Lyman was grinding the spent cigarette butt into the earth near all the others that he’d smoked at the spot over the last twelve years when he heard the reports. He was two hundred yards away and instantly knew what the sounds were.
A person can hear all kinds of things when walking through the east and central Texas woods. A gun going off is not uncommon. It was, however, an uncommonly hot day and the only game in season at the moment was the kind of game that was always in season: rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, and other varmints that weren’t worth shooting in 105-degree weather. Moreover, these shots had come from indoors. A gun being fired indoors has a peculiar and particular sound to it. Most of the noise rattles around inside, crossing and recrossing itself, and consequently has a distinctive muffled, and yet hollow, rattle quality to it.
Charles Lyman ducked through the brush and a barbed-wire fence and was behind the cabin within a minute after the last shot was fired. A pair of ducks had taken to the air and were beating their wings hell for leather to the south, just disappearing over the line of trees past the lake.
Glancing out from around the rear corner of the house, well hidden by brush, he saw two men walking back down the lane toward the main gate and the road beyond. They wore business suits.
It was hot, powerfully so, but the blood in Charles Lyman’s veins felt as though it had been transfused with ice.
He stepped around the side of the house with the lake, away from the two departing men, stepped up onto the porch from the side, peered through the window, and saw a man who was busy dying.
It took thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive from town. During that time he had resuscitated the dying young man three times.
The EMTs, when they did show up, would have bet against Carlos McDaniel. The odds were too long and the kid had lost an ungodly amount of blood. They went to work in earnest. They were both veterans who had seen their measure of curtain calls.
There was severe internal bleeding, the kid’s pulse was thready, and according to the grisly-looking gas company fellow who had called them, he’d been repeatedly pulled back from the grave.
The representative from the Brazos County Sheriff’s Department arrived as the kid’s gurney was being loaded into the ambulance.
The deputy didn’t have time to say “howdy.” He walked up as the kid was trundled past, took a snapshot picture of him with his eyes, fished a pocket notebook out, and wrote one word on it: Linda. It must have been a hell of an effort making those letters in his own blood on his stomach, he thought.
“Don’t wash that name off his stomach, fellas,” he said. “Take a picture of it. Especially if he … doesn’t make it. Where you fellas takin’ ’im?”
“To meet the life-flight chopper.”
“Oh. Where’s he going to from there?”
“God only knows. Excuse us, officer.” The younger of the two paramedics hopped down from the truck and closed the door behind him. “Gotta go,” he said.
“See ya,” the deputy said.
Charles Lyman was sitting on the porch of the cabin looking out onto the still duck pond. There was a half-ring of floating landscaping timbers out there tied end-to-end. One end of the daisy chain was anchored to the opposite shoreline and the closest end was lodged in the mud on the nearby bank.
“That’s what he was doing,” Lyman said.
The deputy wheeled around.
“What?”
Lyman pointed.
The deputy glanced away, quickly, and then back to the man sitting there. It was difficult to look away from him. He was a craggy-looking fellow, mid-fifties, with sparse, rustcolored hair and large freckles all over him. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit with some kind of logo embroidered on the chest. But none of these things were as notable as the amount of drying blood covering the man. His hands were two dark red gloves. His arms, chest, and face were spattered with it. And he just sat there, looking toward the lake.
“He was skimming the lake when they came along,” the blood-covered man said. “He was in his birthday suit and was still wet. He had duckweed all over him.”
“You’re the fella that saved his life. Lyman, right?”
“Not if he don’t make it, I ain’t. Yeah, I’m Lyman.”
“Okay,” the deputy said. “My name’s Ralph Bigham. We need to talk.”
Charles Lyman looked at the deputy, then back toward the lake. “Have a seat,” he said.
Carlos McDaniel gave up the ghost three days later. When he went, his hand was gripped by that of his new best friend, the craggy-faced angel who was there whenever his eyes opened, swimming into focus when consciousness slowly yet inexorably returned.
“Who’s Linda?” the angel asked him.
Carlos blinked, smiled, and uttered the name in a whisper: “Linda Sneed.”
Two weeks later, when he got the word that the case had been closed on the shooting, Charles Lyman left his job with Central Texas Gas. At ten minutes till five, he stuck his head in the air-conditioned substation office in the little town of Kurten, Texas, and told the foreman he wasn’t coming back. The foreman—a forgettable fellow named Seth Sweet—shrugged at the closed door, lit another cigarette, and turned back to his weekly report.
“Politics, that’s why,” Ralph Bigham told him.
“Politics?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t look good to have open files, so it’s easier to close them.”
“I’ll be damned,” Charles Lyman said.
“Tell me about the two men again,” Ralph Bigham said before the other fellow could start losing his temper.
“One was big,” Lyman replied. “He looked like a big scoop of muscle and a dollop of fat poured into a suit, but he walked sort of like a penguin. The other guy was shorter and slim. Their backs were to me.”
“What do you think all of this is about?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I found something you missed.” Charles dropped the leather binder on the cafe tabletop.
Carlos McDaniel’s Day-Timer business calendar contained the details of his appointments for the six months leading up to the shooting. Bigham leafed through it. There were upcoming real estate showings, open houses, closings, and appointments scattered throughout. There was nothing for the weeks previous to the shooting that seemed to amount to anything, but then, leafing his way back, he saw one entry all by itself: L.S. Littlefield.
“Who’s L.S. Littlefield?” Bigham asked.
“L.S. is probably Linda Sneed. At least I hope it is. Now, the name Littlefield is about as Austin as you can get. There’s a Littlefield Building here, the Littlefield home, the Littlefield statue. You name it, and there’s a Littlefield ‘it.’”
“That name is familiar to me somehow,” Bigham said. “But I’m not an Austonian.”
“Austinite,” Charles corrected.
They were in a little Mexican restaurant on College Avenue near downtown Bryan, Texas. A waitress came by and cleared away their plates and left a ticket. Lyman fished out a twenty and dropped it on the table.
“Thanks,” Deputy Bigham said.
“Sure. The guy everything is named after is George W. Littlefield. He was a Civil War hero and land baron. He owned the Yellowhouse Ranch up in the Panhandle. I think it was land trimmed off of the original XIT Ranch, which was how the state funded the construction of the new capitol building after the old one burned. I think that was back around the 1880s, 1890s. Littlefield was almost single-handedly responsible for the establishment of UT Austin.”
“Seems to me like there might be a town with that name as well,” Bigham said.
“You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that before? It’s up northwest of Lubbock, not far from the New Mexico state line.”
Bigham nodded and kept rifling through the pages of the Day-Timer, while Charles Lyman, who actually liked the deputy, found himself wanting to slam it on his fingers.
“You know,” Bigham began, “the name Linda Sneed keeps sticking in my craw. Seems to me there was some news item in the local paper some months back. If it’s the same person then I think she’s some kind of fugitive from justice. Something about some real estate dealings.”
“Wanted, huh?” Charles said.
“I think so. I’ve never been much of a newspaper reader, myself, but all you have to do is glance in the direction of the damned things and the stuff jumps out at you.”
“That’s for sure. I’m stuck on that name myself. Not sure why.”
“Okay,” Ralph said. “So what are you going to do now?”
“I’m leaving town,” Lyman said.
“I thought you might.” Ralph Bigham reached beside him, pulled up a leather case, and slid it across the table to Charles Lyman.
“What’s this?”
“Something you might need.”
Lyman tugged the zipper on the side of the case and saw a round metal cylinder. It was the barrel of a .357 Smith & Wesson magnum.
“I can’t accept this,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I can’t hold a gun in my hands.”
“Not a religious thing, is it?” Deputy Bigham asked.
“Also, I can’t vote.”
“You’re a felon.”
“Yeah. I was a kid, and it was a long, long time ago. I’m only lucky we live in an age where they don’t brand your forehead or otherwise mark you.”
“What did you do?” Bigham asked.
“I killed a man,” Charles Lyman said.
The next question was there between them, an invisible yet wholly tangible thing, and Ralph Bigham found himself asking it.
“Who did you kill, Chuck?”
Lucid, teal-blue eyes looked up at Ralph Bigham, measuring, weighing.
“My brother,” Lyman said.
A deep silence settled in around them. It was one of those moments where each was expecting the other to say or ask something first. Bigham waited long enough to be sure that Lyman wasn’t going to give him his life story.
When Lyman didn’t, Bigham pushed the leather pouch directly in front of him and said, “Keep it anyway. Something tells me you’re going to need it.”
Farmhouses, windmills, grain silos miles away, vaguely reminiscent of old, well-crafted dime-store miniatures of such, slowly dwindled in the distance as he passed. The Caprock is a true plain. He felt its solidity, its permanence, as he drove into town in his ancient battered Ford F-150 pickup.
Charles Lyman whistled.
He passed a population sign: 6,032.
Somebody likes it here, he thought.
A wind was up and dust was blowing from the west. It was fine dust, and it was coming in through the air-conditioning vent enough to make his nose itch.
It wasn’t difficult finding downtown Littlefield. Phelps Avenue is an undivided street, with bluish-green metal seats covered by 1950s-style awnings near each intersection. Half of the businesses were closed, permanently, and there were no more than a few dozen cars along the four-block stretch leading from the train tracks to the courthouse.
“I’d say this town has seen better days,” he said to himself. “Reminds me of The Last Picture Show.”
Two blocks from the courthouse—which was not on a town square like most of the rest of Texas’ small burghs—he found a Mexican restaurant. A red neon sign in the front window declared it to be open.
Inside there was red carpet in need of a good cleaning and a pleasant smell wafting from the kitchen.
There was a hand-lettered sign on one wall that declared: Absolutely NO Table Moving.
The waitress was a pudgy young lady of perhaps nineteen. She wore a burgundy apron and a beatific smile. She had dimples in her cheeks and her name tag read Cassandra.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“You said it,” Charles replied. “Coffee first, though. Then bring me whatever you think I’d like to eat.”
She glanced down at his ring finger quickly, saw that it was bare, then looked back up to his eyes. He winked at her, and she smiled, turned, and darted off.
He was nearly done with breakfast and thinking about Carlos McDaniel when they came in the restaurant door. A smile flashed at him, all false teeth and malice. Lyman smiled back.
The two men were the Undertaker and Lardman, Lyman’s new pet names for them in the two seconds that it took him to fully assess them. They were wearing the same clothing he’d last seen them in as they walked away from the cabin, three hundred miles to the south and what seemed a lifetime ago.
And again, Charles Lyman’s blood froze in his veins.
He waited until they took a seat before he fished out his wallet and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table. He’d liked the waitress, and he was already sorry for the trouble he was about to cause her if things didn’t go well. Then he reached down into his right boot and brought out the magnum. He stood, forgetting to put his truck keys in his pocket, turned, and walked to the table where they were sitting, the pistol with his finger lightly on the trigger behind him.
“Hi,” he said. “My name is Charles Lyman.” He stood there and looked down at the two killers.
The men looked up at him quizzically.
He swung the gun around and pointed it between the two. Their eyes riveted to it. The two men tensed, as if to spring.
“Not a good idea,” Lyman said. “Let’s make an agreement. You two guys be nice and we’ll take us a little ride and have us a little talk. That sound all right with you?”
“Talk? What about?” the Undertaker asked.
“About Carlos McDaniel. And Linda Sneed.”
When he got outside he realized his predicament.
There were two of them, and he had to cover them both. Also, he couldn’t find his truck keys.
He turned back toward the diner for just an instant, but in that short space he noted the face between the still window curtains. It was Cassandra, the waitress.
The face vanished, as if it had never been there.
He made Lardman drive their black Crown Victoria while the Undertaker rode shotgun and he covered the two of them from the backseat.
The late-model Crown Vic wended its way through town and out into the countryside where the sun beat down relentlessly on the stubby cotton and the tall corn.
“You guys are pretty quiet,” Lyman said. “Remember our agreement.”
“We ain’t got nothing to say,” the Undetaker replied.
“See?” Lyman said. “We’re having a conversation already. Tell me where she is.”
Lardman and the Undertaker exchanged glances, and suddenly Lyman knew what was coming.
Lardman made an abrupt turn down a dirt road, then began accelerating.
So much for agreements, Lyman thought.
The Undertaker moved, quick and catlike. His hand went inside his jacket.
Charles Lyman fired the Smith & Wesson point-blank into the back of the driver’s seat. Lardman jerked the wheel to the right as he crumpled over it. His foot came off the gas and the car slewed toward the ditch.
Lyman reached forward as the Undertaker came up with a gun, took it from him, grabbed the back of his suit collar, and shoved forward with everything he had.
The Undertaker’s face got very personal with the windshield.
The car came to a stop in the sand at the side of the road and fetched up against a culvert, hard. The Undertaker flopped back in his seat, out cold.
“Should have buckled up,” Lyman told him. “It’s the law.”
He dropped the snub-nosed .38 he’d taken from the Undertaker onto the floorboard and kicked it under the seat in front of him.
Lardman was slumped over the steering wheel. He had a hole in his back. Probably the bullet had gone through the seat of the Crown Vic, through his back an inch to the right of his spine, and most likely was lodged in his right lung. His days of eating linguini were over.
Lyman got out, opened the driver’s door, fished out Lardman’s wallet, and found a driver’s license. The license was out of state. Samuel Rosario. No middle name. Some address in Brooklyn, New York. There was nothing else. He replaced the wallet, went through the man’s pockets, and came up with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, a gold lighter, and a wad of cash about the size of a small horse apple.
“I’m giving this to Carlos’s family,” Lyman told him.
He went back around to the passenger side and checked the glove box. Nothing.
He went through the Undertaker’s pockets and found an ancient calfskin wallet and with it a name: Victor Cicchese.
Victor sported a nose that grew in size and kept emitting a stream of blood and mucus as Lyman continued the search through his pockets.
“One pocket comb. Check,” Lyman intoned. “One prophylactic, unused. Check. One tin of Altoids. Check. Aha,” he said. “What have we here? One slightly tarnished photograph of a little cutie-pie.”
The photo was a black-and-white studio shot of a platinum-blond young lady of that indeterminate age somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five.
He flipped it over.
Blue ink told the tale: Linda, sophomore year, NYU.
In the inside pocket of the Undertaker’s jacket he found a magnetic key card with a bright Motel 6 logo emblazoned across it.
At that moment, Mr. Victor Cicchese let out a low moan.
“Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Lyman said.
Victor’s head lolled to one side. His eyelids fluttered for a moment and then slowly opened.
“Hello,” Lyman said.
“Uh … what?”
Lyman punched him, hard. His eyes closed.
“Sometimes I just can’t help myself,” Lyman said.
A truck was coming, trailing dust.
“Ah, hell,” Lyman said.
The truck slowed. It was his own pickup, and as it drew closer, he recognized the face behind the wheel. It was Cassandra from the restaurant.
Cassandra got out, raced over to Lyman, and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him on the cheek. It took not a little effort to get her to stop.
“I thought you’d be dead,” she said.
Lyman chuckled, holding her in the air. After a moment he had to set her back down.
Charles Lyman’s first thought was to turn the Undertaker into a hood ornament and strap him across the front of his truck like a trussed deer, but then he reminded himself that he wasn’t looking for more attention than he could handle at the moment.
Cassandra found a spool of twine in his truck, which he used to bind up their captive and ensconce him in the bed of his pickup truck. He took a moment to get the Crown Victoria off the road and into the corn.
He walked back to the road.
“Darlin’,” he said, “where’s the Motel 6?”
Cassandra directed him to the motel.
“Be right back,” she said, and climbed out. “I know the girl who works the counter here. This won’t take a minute.”
True to her word, she was back beside him in the pickup in seconds.
“Around in back and down on the end, number 167,” Cassandra said.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I told her that we were borrowing our friend’s room. I told her I got lucky and found a man.”
Charles laughed. “I wouldn’t want to make a liar out of you,” he said.
* * *
The door had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the handle.
They found Linda Sneed inside, barely alive. Charles had to fish out a pair of bolt cutters from his pickup in order to get the handcuffs off of her while Cassandra held water to her swollen lips. She was dehydrated, had fouled the bed linens underneath her, and was talking out of her head.
The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes after she regained full consciousness. Ten minutes after that, the sheriff came knocking.
“What was it all about?” Ralph Bigham asked him.
“It was about money and revenge. She knew her life wasn’t worth anything if she told them where it was stashed. So she rode it out.”
“What money?”
“Lardman’s,” Lyman said.
“Who?”
“His name was Sammy Rosario. I call him Lardman because I like that name better. Linda met him at a bar in the Bronx. He bragged about being a hit man who had just made a big score and was going to retire. She took him to bed, robbed him blind, and cut out.”
“How much?” Bigham asked.
“Quarter-million. That is, if she’s telling the truth.”
“What about the other guy?”
“The Undertaker? His name was Victor Cicchese. Lardman’s cousin.”
“Okay. What about McDaniel? Why’d they kill him?”
Lyman released a long, slow breath. The answer came to him, and as he said it, he knew he was right.
“Because. Some guys are lucky. Some ain’t. They make their own luck, good or bad. Carlos put himself in the path of the tornado. In that respect, he was a lot like my brother.”
“I don’t understand,” Bigham said, knowing it was the only way to finally pull it out of the craggy-faced, teal-eyed man in front of him. But Lyman shifted the subject from himself, from his own past, and back to McDaniel.
“McDaniel screwed up pretty bad. Linda Sneed was his client, and he broke a rule. He took her to bed. Word got back to Lardman somehow, where she was, what she was doing, who she was screwing, and they came looking for her. But they found him first.”
The silence grew around them. The restaurant had grown still.
“I’ll go ahead and tell you,” Lyman said. “Because you want to know, and it’s secrets that always get us. My brother made his own bad luck. I caught him in bed with my girl. We were going to be married, you know.”
A moment passed. Then another.
“I killed him with my own bare hands. It was rage, Ralph. Consuming rage.”
“When was that?” Bigham asked.
“Twenty years ago. My parole expired last month. I’m a free man now. I can go where I want, do what I want.”
“Yeah?”
“But we’re never free, I think. That is, until we somehow make it right.”
Ralph Bigham looked down at the table, weighed his own words before speaking. “I hope,” he said. “I hope you’ve made it right again, Chuck.”
Lyman smiled. “Me too,” he said. “Oh. I almost forgot.” He reached into the large paper bag beside him, pulled out the leather gun case, and pushed it across the table. “I gave it a thorough cleaning.”
“Thanks,” Ralph said.
A horn blared.
Lyman turned toward the restaurant window and waved.
Cassandra waved back.
“Impatient, isn’t she?” Bigham said, and then laughed.
“Yeah. Women. I gotta go,” Lyman said. “My girl’s waiting, and I think she’s waited long enough.”