money, maybe he’s in a jam.”
“Yeah.” Fearless ducked his head. “Yeah, you right, Paris. Maybe so. But when I saw her and heard that boy cryin’, I was just so sure that she was the one in trouble.”
“And she wanted you to bring her man back?” I asked, worrying about what my deadly friend might have done.
“No,” Fearless said. “All she wanted was to know if I knew where to find him.”
“And did you?”
“No. That’s why I believed her story.”
That was when I should have stood up and shown Fearless the door. I should have said,
“Why?” I asked beyond all reason.
“Because Kit hadn’t shown up to work at the gardens on Monday. He wasn’t there Tuesday neither. His drivers all came but he never showed. I wasn’t surprised. The last couple’a days out there he kept talkin’ about some big deal he had and how he was gonna make a whole room full’a money.”
“Doing what?”
Fearless shook his head.
“Did anybody call him after he didn’t show up?” I asked.
“Nobody knew his number. And we really didn’t need him. You know I was the one loaded the trucks anyway. And I never liked the fact that he was pawnin’ off those melons like they was real Texas. When he didn’t come in on Wednesday I called it quits.”
“And when did Leora come to you?”
“Day before yesterday.”
It was Monday morning, so I asked, “Saturday?”
“No . . . I mean yeah.”
“You want some coffee, Fearless?”
He smiled then, because coffee was the signal that meant I was going to hear him out.
2
MY KITCHEN WAS AN UNFINISHED BACK porch furnished with a butcher-block table and a twelve-foot counter that held three hot plates, a flat pan toaster, and an electric rotisserie oven. I boiled water and filtered it through a cheesecloth bag wrapped around a five-tablespoon mixture of chicory and coffee.
“Damn, Paris,” Fearless said after his first sip. “You sure can make a cup’a coffee taste good.”
The back wall of my kitchen was just a two-ply screen. It was the tail end of summer and not too cool. Moths and other night insects were bouncing off the screen, trying to get at the light. A thousand crickets hid our words from any spy that might be hiding in the darkness.
I sat up on the table while Fearless leaned his chair against the wall.
“What about this Kit?” I asked.
“Like I said, Paris. The boy was hollerin’ and cryin’ for his daddy. I felt bad for him. Leora said that she didn’t know what to do, so what was I supposed to say?”
“That you don’t know where the man is,” I suggested. “That you wished her luck.”
“Yeah. Maybe that’s what I should’a did, but I didn’t. I told her that I’d ask around, and that if I found him I’d tell her where to go.”
“Then what?”
“Well, you know I’d been out there in Oxnard most the time. Harvestin’ all day and camped out on guard at night —”
“Guard for what?”
“Kit had a lease on the property, but it was way out in the middle’a nowhere. He was worried that somebody’d come steal his trucks. So he paid me seventeen dollars a day to keep guard and pick melons.”
A dark shadow appeared at the screen door, about the size of a sparrow. After a moment I realized that it was a bat come to feast on those juicy bugs. The bat bobbled and dipped in the air like an ungainly puppet. But as silly as he looked, I felt that chill again. This time it made its way down into my gut.
“Come on, Fearless,” I said then. “Let’s go drink our coffee in the front.”
He kept talking while I led him back to the sitting room.
“The men drove out in their own cars every mornin’. Most of ’em got there about five-thirty. One of the men was a guy named Maynard, Maynard Latrell. More often than not, Maynard was the one drove old Kit up to the farm. At least on the days he came up.”
“So he didn’t come every day?”
“Naw. He used to but lately he been takin’ days off here and there. But never Wednesday. Wednesday was
