swarming there, there was just the occasional kamikaze. We took the rods and reels apart and put them in the trunk of the car with the fishing tackle. We poured the worms out so that they might breed and multiply. I watched them squirm around in the soft sand, making their way into the earth.
Florida climbed up on the hood of the car and stretched her legs and scratched at the knots the mosquitoes had made. On her, even the knots looked good. Hanson seemed to be taking note of that himself.
Hanson said, “I’m waiting. And not patiently.”
“Once upon a time,” Leonard said, “me and Hap found a dead guy in a pond.”
“Yeah,” I said, “in a bookmobile.”
“Come again,” Hanson said.
We explained about Illium but didn’t give his name or say where his body was. We didn’t tell him any more than we needed to. When we finished, Leonard said: “It’s gonna look bad for the ole boy, things you’re gonna find on his couch. A box of kid’s clothes and some kiddie fuck books. But it’s bullshit. He isn’t guilty of anything. Neither’s my uncle. You see, all this is connected to those missing kids, but it’s not connected the way it looks.”
“Another thing,” I said, “me and Leonard got to talking last night, thinking about what we’d seen, and we came up with something else. In this guy’s house-”
“The drowned guy?” Hanson said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’ll find a dirty bathtub with pieces of hay in it. We figure he’d just finished mowing his field, was grabbed by whoever while he was in the bath, and drowned in his own tub. Then they put him in the van and ran it off in the pond. An autopsy will probably show the water in his lungs isn’t the pond water.”
We didn’t say anything else. We leaned against the car and waited. Hanson looked at us for a while. “That’s it?” he said. “You’re not telling me any more than that?”
“We’ll tell,” Leonard said, “but we want something.”
“You’re not in any position to want shit,” Hanson said. “It’s best you talk your asses off.”
“You know we haven’t done anything,” Leonard said. “We want to solve this crime, bad as you, but we want the deal you didn’t give my uncle. You help us solve the case, but we lead.”
“I can’t do that,” Hanson said. “Department wouldn’t stand for it, a couple of amateurs. Why do you think they didn’t let your uncle do it?”
“He was nuts?” Leonard said.
“Well,” Hanson said, “that was part of it.”
“We already got more leads than you on this missing child business,” I said. “You might be amazed what we got.”
Hanson studied the lake in the distance. A soft hot wind brought the smell of it to us. It stunk faintly of dead fish and stagnation. A large bird’s shadow fell over us and coasted away.
Hanson said, “If I wanted to do it, I couldn’t. I tell my superiors, they’ll laugh their asses off, me suggesting you guys run an investigation. They’d be on you assholes like rash on a baby’s butt. They got through with you, you wouldn’t know if you wanted to shit or go blind. And they’d stick me writing parking tickets.”
“We don’t want you to ask them anything,” I said. “Not yet. What we want is you to join up with us, and cheat a little. Show us the stuff you got on the case, we’ll show you something. We think we know what’s going on, but we want to set everything up, and the more we all know, the better. We see the files, we might recognize something there goes with what we already know.”
“I’ve read those files,” Hanson said. “There’s not a whole lot of help there.”
“Something that’ll jump out at us,” Leonard said, “won’t necessarily jump at you ’cause you don’t have the information we got.”
“Sounds like some shit talk to me,” Hanson said.
“This way,” I said, “when we turn it over to you, and nod out like we never existed, no one’s going to know we did anything, unless you want them to.”
“Of course, we’ll know,” Leonard said, “and that’s all that matters.”
“You had all your ducks in a row on this,” I said, “you could make those jackasses at the station stand up and notice, and you’d get the respect you deserve.”
“Not to mention solving an important crime,” Florida said.
Hanson turned and looked at her. “I thought you weren’t in on this.”
“Just a wee bit,” she said. They held each other’s eyes longer than made me comfortable.
“We’re deadly serious,” I said, drawing Hanson back to me. “We’ve got the guy that’s been murdering these kids by the ying-yang, and now we’re gonna put it in the wringer, crank it up a couple notches. You don’t help us, we’ll find some other way to get it done.”
“I could just run your asses in for obstructing justice,” Hanson said. “And ought to.”
“You could,” Leonard said, “but you don’t want to.”
“Say I don’t?”
“You want this murderer bad as we do,” I said, “and we can make things happen a lot quicker if you do it our way. You help us, we get the benefit of your experience, and you get to look like Supercop. Hell, aren’t you tired of being neglected? You solve this, on your own, with our help, you might end up chief.”
“And most important,” Leonard said, “those kids will have justice. Well, some kind of justice.”
“I don’t know,” Hanson said.
“We start with the body in the pond,” I said. “Telling you who it is and where it is. It’s not like we say, then to hell with it. It is, you play that one any way you want, then we feed you some more. Tell you what we know and how we know it and what we think it means. Then we’ll stick the killer’s dick in the wringer and put your hand on the crank.”
Hanson crossed his arms, furrowed his brow, and looked into the distance. A minute ticked by like it was an hour on holiday.
“What’ya say?” Leonard said.
“I’m thinking,” Hanson said. “Give me a minute to breathe here, will you? I’m thinking.”
27.
Some mornings the beautiful face of my ex-wife, Trudy, hangs over me like a moon, but when I open my eyes there’s only the sunlight as seen through tears. Some mornings the light itself is the color of her hair, and the smell of summer flowers is the smell of her skin.
Some mornings I awake and the bed is too huge and I cannot remember how I’ve come to where I am, cannot believe what happened to Trudy, or imagine that beautiful body and face of hers in the ground, withering, feeding the bugs and worms. I won’t allow myself to look straight on at the memory of violence that took her and wounded me and Leonard. She went wrong and I went after her, pulling my best friend behind. Gunpowder and bloodshed, sulfur and death were Trudy’s final perfume. And me and Leonard, we’ve got the scars.
I awoke the next morning having dreamed that way about poor, pretty Trudy, awoke feeling old and blue and not much for coffee. All this the consequence of Florida not being in my bed. She had not invited herself to stay and I hadn’t the guts to push it.
Her absence between the sheets had been part of why the old dreams of Trudy came back; part of the feeling behind my bones and viscera that violence was oncoming direct in my path, like bright lights on my side of the highway on a dark, wet night; the feeling I was about to meet wet grillwork head-on, followed by two hot tons of speeding steel.
I got dressed and went outside without waking Leonard and sat on the porch steps in the cool of the morning and watched the sunlight brighten. Long about the time you could call the morning golden, Hanson pulled up at the curb in a car I had not seen before, a beige Buick with a dent in the rear fender. He got out of the car with something under his arm and looked at me. He managed his cigar out of the inside of his coat and put it in his mouth and came up to the porch and sat on the step beside me. He looked tired. He rolled the cigar with his tongue and put what was under his arm on the steps between us. It was a thick manila folder.
“Glad you’re up,” Hanson said. “I was gonna wake you.”
“Thanks for giving Florida a ride home last night,” I said.
