all his teeth.
My heart jolted. 'Who?' I asked. He didn't answer. 'Goddammit, Brinkman, who was in the truck?'
'What the hell you getting so excited about? Who're you expecting was in the truck?'
I started to move down the steps toward him, but Eve held my arm.
'Sheriff, who was it?' she asked.
'Well, ma'am,' Brinkman drawled, 'well, that's the strange thing.' He adjusted his hat again. 'Doesn't seem to have been anyone in it.'
'What the hell is this, Brinkman?'
'You tell me, city boy. Why would someone send a new Chevy four-by-four into the ravine, just to stand there and watch it fall?'
'How do you know no one was in it?'
'Shape that truck was in, if anyone'd been in it we'd be scraping 'em off the insides now.'
'Maybe the driver was thrown.'
'Well, now, we thought of that, too. Checked the area, but damned if we didn't come up empty.' He started to get into the car, paused as if struck by a sudden thought. 'Now, no one being in that truck doesn't mean it wasn't interesting.'
'In what way?' I asked. My hands were clenching and unclenching themselves.
'Two ways. One, seems to be a little blood smeared on the seat. Not a lot, just a little. And the other, there's this nine-millimeter automatic we pulled from the cab.' He grinned a final grin, said, 'See you around, Smith. Miss Colgate, you take care of yourself.'
He and the deputy climbed back in the car. They U- turned in the driveway, drifted slowly under the bare chestnuts back to the road.
'Why does he dislike you so?' Eve asked as we headed down the hill behind the house, Leo charging back and forth beside us.
'Last fall,' I said, 'when he picked up Jimmy, what he really wanted to do was get his hands on Frank Grice.'
'The man you told me about?'
'Yes. He wants Grice badly. But he can't make anything stick to him. Grice is always a step ahead. It drives Brinkman crazy.'
'Well, he is the sheriff, and this man Grice is a criminal.'
'It's beyond that. This is Brinkman's county. Grice isn't just a crook, he's an outsider. Like I am.'
Pushed by a strong wind, the heavy clouds were rushing west, but the sky they left behind remained dull and gray. I turned up my collar. Eve, beside me, wore only her sweatshirt over a sweater, and didn't seem to mind the cold. Or maybe it really wasn't that cold at all.
I went on. 'Grice had people running drugs from Florida to Albany for an Albany boss, then ditching the courier cars here. That was Jimmy's job, getting rid of the cars. Everybody knew it, but no one could prove it, and Jimmy wouldn't talk. He was offered a deal but he wouldn't take it. He was prepared to go to prison.' I shook my head.
'Honor among thieves?' Eve suggested.
'He's a brave, stupid kid. He thinks he's tough, but he'd've been eaten alive. But we were lucky. Brinkman wanted Grice so badly he beat the shit out of Jimmy—' I caught myself. 'I'm sorry,' I said.
'About what? Your language? Don't patronize me. Besides'—she smiled—'you should have heard yourself last night.'
'I can imagine. Anyhow, I got Jimmy a slick city lawyer and we parlayed Brinkman's mistakes into a dismissed case. Brinkman lost Jimmy and he lost Grice and he looked like a fool.'
'And he blames you?'
'He's right.'
We were walking the way we had walked two days before, through fields now oozing muddy water under every step. Twigs, leaves, and branches forced down by the storm lay on the earth among sprawling puddles. This way to the clearing was longer than the way straight down the slope— the way I'd fought my way up last night—but it was also easier and faster.
'You got quite angry when the sheriff talked about your piano,' Eve said, her eyes on me. It occurred to me that she might want to keep talking to keep her mind off where we were going.
'That he played it,' I said.
She nodded, but said, 'Or that he knows now that you play it?' I didn't answer. 'We talked a good deal about music last night, but you never told me you were a pianist.'
My response to that was silence; hers, to my silence, was an ironic smile. 'I suppose, coming from me, that's an odd complaint.'
I smiled at that. 'I don't play for other people, ever. Very few people understand about that. Mostly I don't care whether they do or not.'
'I understand,' she said.
'I know,' I answered.
