“Now,” Tenson said, “here’s what we do. You two go outside with Hirem, and we’re gonna stand on the porch so we can see you, and you’re going to walk out a ways and Hirem is going to tell you something he won’t tell us, and that’s okay. That’s how he wants it and we can live with that. We’ll get our results. You hear what I’m saying?”
We nodded, Hirem pulled a heavy coat over his lighter one, and we went outside, across the porch and down a little trail that led into the woods. The wind was picking up and it was carrying a lot more cold with it now, and it hit us like ice picks. I tugged the collar up on my coat and put my hands in my pockets as I walked.
After we were out a ways, Hirem said, “I got to see you guys are wearing a wire or not.”
“You saw him pat us down,” I said.
“Wearing a wire for them,” he said. “They could pat you down all they liked and not find it.”
“All right,” I said and we stopped walking and I held up my arms. Hirem patted me down, then did the same to Leonard.
“Good,” he said. “Now, let’s walk a bit more.”
29
As we started to walk, Tenson yelled from the porch, “Don’t go too far. We start to worry you aren’t so we can see you, Hirem. And you don’t want us worried, do you?”
Hirem didn’t answer, but he turned to us, said, “They know I’m not going anywhere. I want my boy back and I’ll do what I got to do until that’s done. They just like to harass me. Hell, I came to them, wasn’t like they brought me in. They been trying to nail my ass for years. I finally had to hold the nail for them.”
“You got some idea how to find your son,” I said, “but you’re telling us, not the FBI?”
“That’s right,” Hirem said. “I don’t trust those guys. I don’t trust the law. I don’t trust my mother-in-law all that much, and she’s dead some ten years now.”
“But you trust us?” Leonard said. “Didn’t you send those bozos to kill us?”
“It was business, but I can tell about you guys, and I can trust you.”
“Say you can?” I said.
“I think I can. You’re like the old guys in the organization, you got a sense of honor.”
I didn’t believe the organization, as Hirem referred to it, ever had a sense of honor, but I listened.
“Bottom line is I like you better than them,” he said. “Let’s put it that way and call it close enough. What I think is I’m gonna get a better shot with you than them.”
“You’re the one gonna sing to them,” Leonard said. “You’re gonna tell them everything, so why not tell them this?”
“Get my kid back safe, I’ll tell them whatever they want to know. After that, it don’t matter for me. I should’ve been a barber. My daddy was a barber and he offered me into the business, but I didn’t take it.”
“There’s still time to hone up your skills,” I said. “But you do, you’ll be giving prison haircuts.”
“Listen now,” Hirem said. “I’m gonna tell you guys some things I need you to know, so you got some idea who might get in your way.”
“Sort of figured this might not just be a bring the kid home kind of thing,” Leonard said. “It never is.”
“What I know some others can figure out,” Hirem said, “and the people I worked for, they can figure better sometimes than the FBI. These feds may have our phones tapped, and they may have all kinds of law on their side, but these guys I work for, they been around awhile now, and they got people more expendable than the feds got. You hear me?”
“We’re all ears,” I said.
“First and foremost, get my boy back.”
“And the girl?” I said.
“She ain’t nothing to me,” Hirem said. “But it makes Tim feel all right to have her around, I can get over her being coated in chocolate.”
“So that’s what this is,” Leonard said, holding out his hands, looking astonished. “I just thought I was dirty, and it’s been chocolate all the while.”
“Not now, Leonard,” I said.
“Ain’t got nothing against your people,” Hirem said, looking at Leonard. “Just never figured I’d have a boy fuckin’ one of them.”
“Now that makes me really feel tight with you,” Leonard said.
“I’m not used to all the changes in things,” Hirem said.
“Civil rights happened … let me see,” Leonard said, “about mid-sixties, right? And the Civil War, it was over some one hundred years before that. Good to see you’re catching up.”
“My boy never did cotton to what I do, the way I think. And maybe that’s good. I’m not so sure about things I was sure about just a few months ago.”
“Death threats and prison terms can change a man’s perspective,” I said. “We know.”
Hirem nodded. “Thing is, I don’t really know where my boy is, but I have a maybe. He was a little kid, we were close. His mother was dead and it was just me and some hired help. We had a place we went to, rented a cabin by the lake and fished. He mentioned it from time to time, though we quit going there some years ago. It had good memories for him, back when he thought I was just a businessman and his daddy. We went there and fished and talked, and from the way he talked, I knew then he wasn’t like me, that there was something different about him.
