Eladio’s rattletrap Dodge was parked between the fairgrounds’ restrooms and the portable storage unit where he kept his power tools and other job-site materials locked up. The unit’s door was open, Eladio and the half-wit already working. You couldn’t trust most Mexs, but Eladio had worked for him off and on for years-Balfour hadn’t had any qualms about letting him have a key.
He was still feeling mean, so he ragged on them some, told them to quit dogging it even though they weren’t. The kid showed his smarmy grin, but kept his mouth shut-good thing for him he did. Two of them were doing the last of the fixes on the two big booths that sold beer, inside out of the sun, so he got his hand tools and a couple of sheets of already-sized and cut plywood, and went to work on the partitions between the toilets in the women’s can. Already hot closed up in there; he was sweating like a pig before long.
Some days he could work off a hangover. Not today. His head ached like a bitch and his gut felt as if it was boiling, getting ready to toss up his breakfast any minute. Couldn’t keep this up all day, not without a break and a little hair of the dog-two or three beers and a double shot of Jack. Take an early lunch, go on over to the bar at Freedom Lanes. The bowling alley was closer than the Miners Club, and he’d had his fill of the Buckhorn.
He was thinking about that, outside using his table saw to cut another section of plywood, when Tarboe showed up.
The faggot went to check on the concession booths first, so he finished the cut and took the piece back into the women’s can. He was fitting it into place when Tarboe came prancing in. Not a drop of sweat on him, not a wrinkle in his clothes. Suit and tie in the middle of summer, for chrissake. Like he was somebody important… a lousy small-town fairgrounds manager.
“You and your men don’t seem to be making much progress, Balfour.”
“Then why don’t you pick up a hammer and some nails and give us a hand?”
Tarboe’s nose twitched like he was smelling something bad. “Why do you always have to be so disagreeable?”
“Why do you always have to come around biting my ass when I’m trying to work?”
“The mayor-”
“Don’t start with that mayor shit!”
“If you’d just listen before flying off the handle. I was about to say the mayor, Mayor Donaldson, called me this morning. He’s concerned that the work won’t be done by the Fourth.”
“How many times I got to tell you it will be?”
“Well, it doesn’t look that way to me,” Tarboe said. “If you’d started this project when you were supposed to, and worked a full, forty-hour week instead of whenever you felt like it, it would have been done long since.”
“So you said maybe fifty times already.”
“You know we’re expecting between fifteen hundred and two thousand people on Friday. The rows of portable toilets won’t be enough, we need all the facilities to be available.”
Balfour gritted his teeth, banged a nail into place.
“And all the refreshment booths open for business. Do you have any idea how much money we’ll lose if-”
Lost it then. “No, and I don’t give a flying fuck!” Spitting the words.
“You have a foul mouth, Balfour. If it had been up to me, you would never have been hired for this project.”
“Yeah, and if it was up to me, the county wouldn’t hire fags to tell people what to do.”
Tarboe’s mouth got thin and tight. “You’ll regret that,” he said. “I’ll see to it that you do.”
“Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you go find somebody to bugger and let me get back to work?”
Big glare. Tarboe turned away, then turned back and said before stomping out, “You know, what everyone’s saying about you is right. You really are the biggest asshole in Green Valley.”
Balfour stood there with the sweat running on him and it felt like the top of his head was ready to come off. Nothing going right anymore, pressure from every direction. Verriker, the woman, the Buckhorn crowd, Charlotte, Tarboe, Donaldson, snotnose kids and half-wits and people he hardly knew… seemed like everybody in the valley was his enemy. Looking at him like he was a pile of dog turds, wrinkling their noses like they couldn’t stand his smell. Ragging on him, laughing at him to his face and behind his back, screwing him over, pulling the noose so tight he couldn’t breathe. Man could only take so much. Some of the pressure didn’t get released quick, he was liable to blow like a boiler with a busted safety valve.
He couldn’t work anymore today. Just didn’t give a shit anymore. He bulled out of the restroom, yanked off his toolbelt and threw it into the storage unit, then got into his truck and roared out of there. Didn’t bother to tell Eladio and the half-wit he was leaving and not coming back; screw them, too.
He drove over to Freedom Lanes, went into the bar, and threw down two double shots and a bottle of Bud before some of the pounding in his head and boiling in his gut eased off. But he could still feel the pressure like a hundred-pound sack of cement sitting on his shoulders, weighing him down.
Out on the alleys, balls thudded on hardwood and pins crashed, and the sounds all seemed to come together into one steady beating noise that got inside his head like a voice talking, shouting. Verriker’s voice, saying the same things over and over.
Biggest asshole I know, maybe the biggest one in these parts. I bet somebody’d nominate you for mayor, I bet you’d win hands down. Pete Balfour, the first mayor of Asshole Valley… mayor of Asshole Valley… mayor of Asshole Valley…
11
Broxmeyer was at the substation to take my call and showed up on the logging road, alone in his cruiser, within fifteen minutes. He examined Kerry’s sun hat, looked over the area where I’d found it, looked at the marks on the ground where the vehicle had been parked, poked around elsewhere in the vicinity. Accommodating, professional, sympathetic up to a point, his expression carefully neutral the entire time. But he was too young, too inexperienced, too detached to share my place sensitivity, or my fears. None of it seemed to add up for him the way it did for me.
“Well, those tire impressions don’t necessarily mean anything,” he said when he was finished looking. We were standing next to his cruiser, me leaning against the rear door because my legs were still a little shaky. “Kids park up here sometimes. One of the other deputies caught a couple last year… you wouldn’t believe what they were doing-”
“I don’t care what they were doing. All I care about is finding my wife.”
“I understand that. But I think you’re jumping to conclusions. There’s no evidence here to support the idea that she was abducted.”
“What about the other marks on the ground?”
“Anything could’ve made them. No clear signs of a struggle.”
“The hat,” I said.
“Not damaged in any way. Nothing on it but some pine needles stuck in the straw.”
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t forcibly knocked off her head.”
“It indicates she was here, but-”
“Indicates? The hat wouldn’t have been if she wasn’t.”
“On this road, yes. She could have lost it walking along.”
“No,” I said. “I told you, it’s her favorite. If she’d been able to go get it, she would have.”
“Maybe she tried, and couldn’t find it. You said so yourself you missed seeing it the first time you went down the slope.”
“I wasn’t looking for it. It wouldn’t’ve been all that hard to spot if I had been. Besides, there wasn’t any sign that she’d been down there. I told you that, too.”
“There might’ve been some that you missed. You were excited, you moved around down there calling her name. You could’ve accidentally covered up any she made.”
“Except that I didn’t. There was no sign. I’d’ve found it if there was. I’m not an amateur when it comes to situations like this, Deputy.”
