“Yeah, I’m sorry, that’s the best I can do.”
“Thanks, Kenny. That’s a start anyway.”
Mainwaring was on his feet. “What did he say?”
“Milburn. Some guy named Windom. But he says the only way he heard it is that some kid who wants his books autographed told him.”
“People want that trash autographed?”
This coming from Mr. Open Marriage and Mr. Wife Swap. But now wasn’t the time to respond.
We took his Jaguar. Milburn was fifteen miles away. We both smoked. Any time we pulled up behind a car or truck Mainwaring leaned on the horn as if he thought they’d be so afraid that their vehicles would just take flight and clear a path for us.
“If he laid a hand on her, I’ll kill him.”
“First of all, we don’t even know that he’s the guy. So it would make sense to stay a little cool until we find out.”
“You don’t give a damn, she’s not your daughter.”
“No, but believe it or not, I like her and I don’t want some butcher cutting her up.”
All I got was a snarl.
Despite the heat, autumn could be seen in the hills, the tips of trees burning into golds and browns and reds and that scent of fall on a few vagrant breezes. For all the stupendous colossal magnificence of the Jag, the damn air conditioning wouldn’t work so we had the windows down.
Milburn runs to maybe fifteen thousand and is known mainly for the Pioneer Days celebration it throws on Labor Day, complete with costumed people and a lot of artifacts from the middle of the last century. It gets a lot of state press, and some big national advertisers sponsor a good share of the expenses.
As we entered the town limits I had the feeling that the place was a big old dog lying on its side in the boiling heat. The shopping district, which ran four blocks, showed a lot of empty parking spaces and only a few people on the sidewalks. A tractor was ahead of us at a stoplight so Mainwaring went into one of his rants about how hillbillies should be shot-stabbed-set on fire for getting in the way of the movers and shakers who by divine right were running this planet. Since (A) farmers aren’t hillbillies and (B) I’m pretty sure that there had to be some hillbillies in my bloodline dating back to the early 1800s, I started thinking about shooting-stabbing-setting him on fire.
Finally I saw a Sinclair station and said, “Pull in.”
He swept the beast onto the drive and I was out the door, him shouting, “What the hell are you doing?”
I like gas stations-the smells of oil and gas and the clang and clank of the guys working on cars in the garage. I like good old gas station conversations, standing around and saying nothing much with a Pepsi and some peanuts and a cigarette with some other guys who are also saying nothing much. This time all I wanted was a phone book which, in the case of Milburn, was about as thick as a comic book.
The middle-aged guy in the green uniform who came out of the garage wiping his hands on a rag looked like the man to ask. “Can you tell me how I’d find Sullivan Road?”
“Sure. Easy to get to from here. You go down two blocks to the Woman’s Shop-big store right on the corner- and you turn right and go straight for-let’s see-eight blocks. Maybe nine. Anyway, Sullivan Street is off that road there. You’ll see a street sign.”
“Thanks.”
“We don’t see many of those around here.”
He meant the Jag. “Yeah, but the air-conditioning doesn’t work.”
He had a great midwestern grin. “You’re kidding.”
“’Fraid not. Well, thanks.”
“You took long enough,” Mainwaring said when I got in the car.
“Shut up and listen.”
“I’m not used to people telling me to shut up.”
“Tough shit. Now listen.”
I gave him directions. They were easy to follow but we went through the honking again. I wanted to find Nicole, too, but without a siren on the Jag, other vehicles just weren’t going to shoot up on lawns to get out of our way.
Sullivan Road was where houses went to die. Most of the homes were built in the ’20s from what I could see, two-story white clapboards adjacent to garages not much bigger than closets. Porches leaned and chimneys toppled and shutters hung crooked. On a few of them you could see porch swings that hung from only one chain. The cars were also old, blanched colors and monster rust eating its way across the length of the vehicles.
“This is just the kind of place I expected it’d be,” Mainwaring said.
“We’re looking for Seventeen twenty-four.”
“Some rathole.”
“We’re on the sixteen hundreds now.”
“If he’s touched her, I’ll kill him.”
“You already said that. There’s Seventeen-oh-two.”
“There’s her car!”
The way he grabbed the door handle I thought he was going to leap out of the car before he even slowed down. There was a space across from Nicole’s silver Mustang. Mainwaring pulled in. I had to grab his shirt as he tried to vault from the car. “We don’t know what we’re walking into here. So let me handle this, you understand?”
“Take your hand off me. This is my daughter you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, well if you’re so concerned about your daughter, then we go in there cool and calm.” He was so pissed I reasoned that the only way to get his attention was to shock him. “What if he’s operating on her? He hears us breaking in and he slips and makes a mistake? You want to be responsible for that?”
His eyes closed tight. An anxious breath. “Oh, God, my poor little Nicole.”
“I’ll handle things. All right?”
“All right.”
“Let’s go.”
The white picket fence around the scorched grass leaned inward, in some spots so low it was only a few inches from the ground. The gate was missing. The walkway to the door was cracked into jagged points. A variety of animals had used the east side of the lawn for a toilet. Apparently the right side didn’t have any toilet paper.
Mainwaring dragged himself now, as if afraid of what lay ahead. He must have still been thinking of the image of the abortionist’s tool slipping when he heard our invasion. He muttered to himself but I wasn’t sure what he was saying.
In the short distance between the car and the screenless screen door I was already soaked with sweat. We were going to hit ninety-four today according to the dubious wisdom of the weatherman.
There was a bell but I stuck my hand through the frame of the screen door and knocked. The neighborhood was quiet. The loudest sound was the power mower we’d passed about half a block away.
I knocked again. This time a male voice behind the door said something. Then the man who I assumed owned the voice did a foolish thing. He went to the east window and edged the dirty white curtains back and looked out. Straight into my face. I jabbed a finger at the door. The curtain dropped back.
Just to annoy him I knocked again. This time he opened the door. He was a short, heavyset man who had more hair on his body than a papa gorilla. A white T-shirt only emphasized the thick, hirsute chest and arms.
“Help you with something?”
Mainwaring’s strength was sufficient to hurl me off the low doorstep and grab on to the hairy man with enough force to drive him back inside so fast I didn’t have time to quite understand what was happening. I piled through the doorway right behind him. By now Nicole, who was seated on a badly soiled light blue couch, was pounding on her father’s back as he bent over to smash his fist again and again into the hairy man’s face. The man was on his knees. His face was already bloody.
I pushed Nicole aside so I could slam my fist into the side of Mainwaring’s head. But he had true madness on his side. He was gone into a realm where only murder would satisfy him. Prisons are filled with men like him, men
