'Thanks.'
'Don't thank me,' Divit said. 'Don't thank me for nothing.'
Couple days later they let me limp down to Leonard's room. He was full of tubes and wires. Those bags they hang on those bars were all over the place, thick as fruit on trees. I hadn't expected him to look as bad as he did.
He had his head turned to me. 'Hi,' he said.
'Hi.'
'You all right?'
'Good enough. I'm going home pretty quick. I don't know I've got enough insurance for all this.'
'Man, I lay here and think about my dogs. About old Chub too. Got to considering, he bought the big one standing up for me. Well, maybe not me, but for an idea. I guess if he'd known Soldier was that nuts he'd shut up, but, you know, he maybe wasn't such a bad guy. . . . Hap, what I said about you not really being my type? Remember?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, I just wanted you to know, I meant it.'
I laughed.
Three days later they let me go home. I talked to Divit again, but it was a conversation not too unlike the other. He said he felt certain Soldier would get some years for a lot of things. Quite a few years. Like maybe three lifetimes. He mentioned the money again, about how if it showed up I'd keep my promise about letting him know.
I lied to him again.
I went home for a couple of days and rested, then I drove over to Leonard's. Calvin had left his spare key in the hiding spot, and I took it and went inside. All the crime scene stuff was gone and it had been cleaned up some.
Calvin had buried the dogs and nailed plywood over the busted windows. I went out to the barn and looked around. The shovel that had killed Howard and that I had used to zing Angel wasn't around. Maybe the cops called it a clue. I found a hoe, took that and limped out to the creekbank. On the way over there I noted where a lot of digging had been going on. The holes had been filled carefully and leveled off, but it didn't fool me. A country boy knows about digging and dirt, and those holes were fresh. I wondered if Divit had been here to supervise. I wondered if they had found the money. If so, I might be talking to them again and have to lie some more.
But it wasn't likely. I had an edge they didn't have. I had some idea of where it was supposed to be.
I went along the bank and found the part where the gravel had been put down. I looked around there but didn't see anyplace where she might have dug.
I guess I stayed at that for a couple of hours, looking around like that, digging a spot or two on a whim, but I didn't come up with anything. I got down on the very edge of the creek and tried to think like Trudy might have thought, out here in the freezing weather with a flashlight and a shovel, trying to be quick and smart about it. I went back to the barn and took a straight path from the back door to the creekbank, walked down it to where the gravel was, then went over the edge and right up against where the water ran.
All right. Don't think about the gravel and clay except as a guide. She came here and started shining her light around. Maybe she shined it across to the other side. I looked and didn't see any dig spots, but I saw an armadillo hole in the side of the opposite bank. Roots from trees partially exposed by erosion draped over it.
I jumped the little creek and went over and looked in the hole. There was dirt not far down in the hole, so that proved the armadillo didn't live there anymore. Nothing lived there anymore. I raked back the dirt and looked inside. There were several plastic bags.
I reached in and took them out. They were those sealable bags. I stuffed my coat pockets with them, took the hoe to the barn, and went back to the house. I felt surprisingly casual.
Neither the FBI nor the sheriffs department were waiting in the kitchen.
I sat down at the table and put the money on it. When I reached for one of the packets to open it, I saw the nail hole where Trudy's hand had been. I put my hand over it and centered it about where I thought the hole was.
Poor Trudy.
I opened the bags and poured out the money and counted it. There was a little over three hundred and fifty thousand. Subtract the five thousand the authorities had, and you were still short, but not much. Trudy might have rough-counted that night, or maybe Paco palmed a little. It didn't matter.
I put a hundred thousand in one bag. It was a tight fit. I got up and got a big black trash bag out from under Leonard's sink, looked through the drawers till I found a big grocery bag and some package tape and scissors. I went back to the table and sat down. I put the rest of the money in the plastic bags and put all of it, excluding that one hundred thousand, into the trash bag. I folded the bag down and around the money and made a nice compact bundle. I opened the paper bag, put the trash bag in and folded the paper bag around it, used some package tape and the scissors to make a nice parcel.
I got up again and looked around until I found a black marker. I went over and wrote in big bold letters on the package, GREENPEACE. I'd have to look up the rest of the address later, but seeing it written made me feel pretty good. It wasn't what Trudy had planned to do with it, but what she had planned had ultimately been in the support of things like that. I liked to think she would be proud of me. After all that talk Leonard and I had given about not giving to the seals or whales, I thought there was a certain pleasant irony in it all.
The hundred thousand was for Leonard. He'd need it when he came home. If the insurance didn't pay his hospital bills, it wouldn't do him much good, high as they are, but it could give him eating money until he could go back to work.
I put the hundred thousand in my coat pocket and stuffed the package under the couch. Not exactly ace hiding places, but I figured they'd do until I got home and could do better. And besides, it had all been laundered. Who was to say it was stolen money? How was it to be proved? Greenpeace could spend that dough good as they could
