“Yep,” I said. “I promise.”
She looked at Leonard. He smiled. “When he promises, or I promise, baby girl, we’re promising together.”
43
The kids got one bedroom, and Leonard won the other due to a coin toss. I got the couch. It was a good way to make sure the kids didn’t get a wild hair up their asses and want to sneak out in the middle of the night. I doubted that would be the case, but insurance seemed like a good idea.
Leonard helped me move the couch close to the front door, which was the only way out of the room, and then I picked up the phone and called over to Jim Bob and Tonto’s room to see how they were doing. Jim Bob was watching TV and he said Tonto had gone over to one of the casinos.
We bantered a little, but neither of us was really up for it. After I hung up the phone, Leonard and I took some time to clean and oil the guns we had with a little kit I carried in my overnight bag.
After that, Leonard went to bed and I got a pillow and blanket and turned out the lights and lay on the couch and went to sleep immediately. It was a deep sleep, but there were bad things down there in the deep with me, and so I came awake about three a.m. I lay there for a while, then finally sat up, and saw that Tim was out on the deck, sitting at the table looking at all the lights, which were clearer now, because the rain had stopped at last.
Pulling on my pants, not bothering to turn on the light, I went out there barefoot, and when I pulled the sliding door back, he turned in a kind of panic.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I don’t know who I was expecting.”
“Probably the guy you saw killed today. I keep thinking he’s going to come back from the dead.”
“Tough guy like you thinks that, I don’t feel so bad.”
“Don’t fool yourself, kid. I’m not that tough.”
“You look tough.”
“I look tired, that’s what I look.”
I sat down at the table, and Tim said, “I couldn’t sleep. Katie, she can sleep anytime. No matter what’s happened, she can sleep. I wonder why that is?”
“I’m like you,” I said. “Brett, my girlfriend, she’s like Katie. We can have an argument, or something can go wrong that will stress me out and I won’t be able to sleep, but she can lay down and hibernate like a bear.”
Tim nodded. He said, “I really didn’t mean to cause trouble.”
“You know what your father does for a living.”
“You know I do. For some time now.”
“You know he has people to answer to.”
“Sure. I just didn’t think it would amount to this. I thought they’d be mad and he’d be mad at me, and what I did was a kind of vengeance.”
“For the work he does?”
“It’s not work. It’s drugs and whores.”
“I agree with you. It’s not work and it’s not good. You should have just run off with the girl. That said, my bet is her parents are worried sick about her.”
“I’m sure they got the cops out after her,” he said.
“The cops, the FBI, and us.”
“What happens to the money?”
“The FBI gets it.”
“And what do they do with it?”
“Good question. Three hundred thousand dollars is lot to do with.”
“Three hundred thousand?” Tim said. “It’s more than that.”
I went into the living room with Tim trailing along behind me. I got the duffel bag with the money out of the closet and dragged it out and opened it up and poured the money on the floor. It was a mixture of hundred-dollar bills and twenties, some tens and fives.
I said, “Get down on the floor there with me, and let’s count it.”
We did that, and when we had it counted and in stacks, I said, “Just short of five hundred thousand dollars. That the way you had it figured?”
“Sure. I’ve counted it a few times. It was five hundred thousand when we started. We been living on some of it.”
“But your dad is saying three hundred thousand is missing.”
Tim shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know either, but I tell you what. Let’s put it back in the bag and put it away and go to sleep. Tomorrow we’ll see if something comes to us.”
Lying on the couch I thought about the money, and I thought about what we had been asked to do, and I thought about Hirem. Something was niggling at the back of my mind, but I wasn’t able to grasp what it was. I’d feel as if I almost had hold of it, and then it would move away from my grasp. I fell asleep dreaming of Big Guy coming out of the water with most of his head missing, climbing into the
