He switched on the light. There were three bedrooms and one bathroom, door at the end. A shotgun house. He remembered the first room as Larry’s as he walked along the wall, the gun cabinet halfway down the hall empty of rifles and shotguns, piled instead with mail and books.
In Larry’s room he turned on the light, neat bed, tucked corners, paneled walls. Shelves full of the books Larry had read as a kid. Stephen King hardbacks. Tarzan paperbacks, Conan the Barbarians. Harlan Ellison. Louis L’Amour and others, lots of them he’d never heard of. In one corner there was another pile of yellowing mail. Hundreds of catalogs and sales circulars. A whole stack of Book-of-the-Month Club catalogs. Another of the Double-day Book Club. The Quality Paperback Book Club. Several stacks of old
In the bathroom he flipped past his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. No prescription drugs. Just a tin of Bayer aspirin rusting on the metal. Tube of toothpaste. No dental floss.
Toilet bowl was clean of the ring Silas’s had, which meant you needed to use some Comet or something. Even had one of those blue disinfectant things. Behind its curtain, the shower was clean, drain a little rusty, few hairs. Head & Shoulders, nub of soap.
Moving through the rest of the house, he opened drawers and looked under beds but found nothing surprising. He left all the lights on and went out the back door and down the steps. He stood in the dark, listening to the birds and bugs. Out here wasn’t what you’d call a backyard: it was more of a back field. His cone of light showed more footprints and he found an unmarred section of ground and walked to the gate and stopped.
There it was.
The barn.
He stood leaning on the gate and saw himself years ago, the day he’d come here. No grown-ups, no teachers, no other girls or boys, black or white, just him and Larry. He remembered following Larry through the house, past the gun cabinet, rifles and shotguns standing in their racks. Remembered going out the back door and over the huge yard, rolling open the doors and going inside the barn. They’d climbed on the tractor and caught lizards-anoles, Larry had called them. Then quickly added, “But some people call em ‘lizards,’ too.” They “incarcerated” (Larry’s word) the anoles in an aquarium Larry found in a dark cluttered room Silas didn’t enter. They found what Silas proclaimed a cottonmouth-moccasin but Larry called a chicken snake woven around the rafters under the eaves, and Larry took its tail and unwrapped the snake as it snapped at him and shot out its tongue. He grabbed it behind its neck and held it, enormous and gray, patterned with darker green ovals, longer than either boy. Did Silas want to hold it? Hell naw. It had a bulge like a softball in its stomach and Larry said it must’ve eaten a rat or something. He said there were big rats in the barn. Silas said why didn’t they keep the snake incarcerated, too, and they did, in a gallon jar, alongside their aquarium. Silas had said, “Like a reptile house,” and Larry had said, “A herpetarium.”
Now, Silas took a deep breath and remembered the watermelon aroma of cut grass. He played his light over the yard, mown close, then turned back to the barn and followed the beam of light to the bay door and rolled it open. He slipped inside the dark, recalling the snake in the mailbox and trying to remember if snakes hung around after dark. His flashlight threw the tractor’s shadow on the far wall and then probed the ground, no boards, just soft dirt. Rat waddling away. The lawn mower handle sticking out, wrapped in black electrical tape. A chain saw hanging on a nail. He saw a door on the left side and heard movement within it. A stirring.
His heart beat faster. For a latch the door had a slab of a two-by-four nailed in the wall. He moved his light to his right hand and slid his.45 from its holster with his left, easing up on the door. That smell. What was it? For a moment he imagined it was a body. Aiming the pistol with a stiff arm, he used the flashlight to turn the latch down, and when he did, the door swung open and the noise stopped.
He poked his head in and a hen fluttered in his light and he yelped and his pistol discharged and set all the other birds aflight.
“Shit,” he said, laughing.
The chickens agreed.
HE WAS WAITING on Larry’s porch listening to the wind chime when Angie called, said she and Tab were headed to the Bus, if he wanted to join them. If he could he would, he said.
A while later French’s Bronco came bouncing up, blinding him with its lights, and pulled to a stop beside his Jeep. The CI got out adjusting his sidearm, holding a plastic bag with something in it. He went to the back of his Bronco, careful where he stepped, and raised the shell and lifted his heavy black investigator’s kit out and joined Silas on the porch. He had a cigarette hanging from his lower lip and set the bag down.
“How is he?”
“Not dead,” French said. He held up a bag with keys, a wallet, and cell phone in it and exhaled smoke from his nose and shook his head at, perhaps, the general nature of things. “Lost a shitload of blood.”
“So I seen.”
French pointed to the concrete walkway heading over the yard, a series of small sneaker prints, in blood, going away from the house, each dimmer than the one before.
“There’s Angie.”
Silas put his hat on and crossed the porch with his own light, fanning it out into the yard. People often covered their fingerprints, he knew, and destroyed bloody clothing and hid weapons. But they rarely thought of the simplest and oldest evidence in the world, footprints. Or tire prints.
French knelt at the end of the sidewalk with his light, reading the runes and ruts, a cigarette smoking in his fingers. Silas came to the top of the steps.
French turned his light. “Hold up your boot sole toward me.”
Silas did.
“Yeah, this would be you.”
French reached in his shirt pocket and withdrew a clump of thick rubber bands. “Put these on your feet,” he said and watched as Silas stretched the bands over the thickest part of his foot. French also had them over his own shoes. Any foot without a band wouldn’t be law enforcement and would require investigation.
“Sorry, Chief,” Silas said.
He ashed his cigarette in his palm and blew it into the wind. “You will be when I make you mold these motherfuckers.”
Not bothering to put out his smoke, French hefted his investigator’s kit and Silas followed him inside. The CI pulled out a chair from under the kitchen table and set the plastic bag and kit there and stood, pushing his hands in the small of his back until it clicked.
In the living room they stared at the floor. The blood had dried to the color of molasses and the room had an unpleasant tang. French picked up the pistol by its barrel-it left a smear of blood-and examined it, ejected the cylinder. “Twenty-two,” he said. “Fired once.” He turned it. “Serial number’s bout rubbed off.” He replaced it and stood. “Sheriff Lolly took Ott’s gun privileges away. After his daddy got killed. He ain’t even supposed to have any firearms at all.”
“Took em away how?”
“Just did it.”
They went to the gun cabinet in the hall, gazed down at its stacks of old magazines on the green lining. French opened the drawer at the bottom, more mail. “Maybe Ott moonlit as a postman.”
“Where’d they go?” Silas asked. “All the guns?”
“County auctioned em off, I expect.”
“So where’d he get that pistol?”
“If it was his? Pawnshop. Gun show. It’s a old model, could’ve had a dozen owners. I’ll run a trace, but it’ll be a dead end.”
He fished his camera from his pocket.
“Bullet entry was straight in,” he said, clicking through the pictures, Silas moving to see. Shots of Larry’s pale face, obscured by the oxygen mask. The chief did a miniature slide show, shots of Larry on a table in his mechanic’s uniform, bloodied at the chest. Larry’s shirt being scissored off, an IV going into his arm, close-ups of the wound, tear marks and blackened skin.
“My guess?” French said. “Self-inflicted.”
More shots, his pants being cut off, his egg-white legs, people in scrubs and masks, the keys and wallet, cell phone, money fanned out, close-up of Larry’s driver’s license.
