Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

fifteen

AFTER BREAKFAST, THE deputy watching as he ate, saying no, French wasn’t back yet, Larry asked the nurse to put Night Shift in his hand and spent the afternoon wandering through the familiar stories, difficult as it was to hold the book and turn pages with one tired hand. The words were harder to see, too, from this angle, and it occurred to him that he’d been holding books farther and farther away from his eyes these last years, that he needed reading glasses. When he got out he’d make an appointment to see an eye doctor.

In the afternoon he called the deputy back in. “Yall said he’d come this evening,” Larry said. “I got something he’ll want to hear.”

“It’s been an incident,” the deputy, Skip, said. “He’s out investigating a crime scene. He might be a while.”

“What you mean?”

“We had an officer hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Yeah. That black fellow kept coming in here? One watched you on night shift?”

“Silas Jones?”

“Yeah.”

“What about him?”

“He went to see a fellow and the fellow sicced a pit bull on him and took some shots at him.”

Larry knew the answer before he asked, “Was the fellow, was his name Wallace Stringfellow?”

Skip looked at him. “Shit. It’s on TV already?”

“No.”

The deputy watched him a moment longer.

“Is he okay?”

“Don’t know. He’s down in surgery now, what I’m told. Dog took a big chunk of him. Chief French and the sheriff and them, they out at Stringfellow’s house now.”

“Is it any way I can talk to Chief French? It’s important. It’s about Wallace Stringfellow.”

Skip said wait and went in the hall. A moment later he came back with his radio and Larry heard French’s voice crackle over it. Skip held it up for him to use. “Talk when I mash the button.”

“Chief French?”

Background noise, other radios. Men talking. “Yeah, go ahead.”

“This is Larry Ott. In the hospital?”

Static. “Go ahead.”

“I been waiting to tell you, I think it was Wallace Stringfellow shot me. Took that girl, too.”

“How you know that?”

He started telling it, Skip holding the radio with his mouth slowly opening as Larry talked, how Wallace knew of the cabin where they found the girl, his last visit, how Larry had recognized his eyes behind the mask when the fellow shot him, the voice that had asked him to die.

“Mask?” French asked. “Describe it.”

Larry did, leaning up, his back sweaty. “Is Silas okay?”

More static. “I got to go,” French said. “Thanks for the information. I’ll be there when I can.”

LATER THAT NIGHT Larry woke and heard French outside. He and the night shift deputy spoke in low tones, then French came in the room smelling of cigarettes and sweat, wearing a black T-shirt with a pistol on it pointing at Larry. GUN CONTROL, it said, MEANS HITTING WHERE YOU AIM. He had a large plastic bag with what looked like a severed head inside. Larry’s mask.

The chief set the mask on the other bed and then, gently, undid the restraint on his right wrist and came around the bed and did the same to the one on his left. He tossed them aside and sat on the other bed and took off his glasses, looking tired, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“What a day,” he said. He reached for the mask and held it up for Larry to see, its eyes dead now, and black. “Can you identify this?”

“Yeah,” Larry said. “It’s mine.”

French tossed the bag back and folded his arms. Larry watched it, remembered ordering it, racing his bike to the mailbox every morning hoping for the box that was so big the mailman would have to lean it against the post.

“You’ll get it back,” French said, “but for now we got to keep it.”

“I don’t want it. Just throw it away.”

French’s radio blared and he mumbled something in it.

When he signed off, Larry said, “How’s Silas?”

“In recovery.”

“Will he be okay?”

“Looks like it. Don’t know if that arm of his’ll be any good. That damn pit bull bout tore it off.”

“John Wayne Gacy,” Larry said.

“What?”

“That’s the dog’s name.”

“Was his name.” French put his glasses back on and felt his back pocket for a pad and wrote that down. “Now what’s left of its head’s on its way to Jackson to get tested for rabies and its body’s on the way to the incinerator.”

“How’s Wallace?”

“Dead.”

“What happened?”

“Watch the news,” the chief said. “You’ll find out.”

Larry lay back.

“How would you characterize your relationship with him?” French asked. “With Wallace Stringfellow?”

“I thought he was my friend.”

“You got a strange taste in friends.”

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Larry said, “but I ain’t had a lot of options.”

French stopped writing but didn’t look up.

“You’ve been the only person inside my house since they come took Momma,” Larry said. “In a way, you were the closest thing I had to a friend till Wallace came.”

“Yeah, well. Can you tell me about him?”

Larry thought of the show about the serial killer and the killer who imitated him. He thought of how he used to catch snakes and bring them to school. He thought about the boy in his barn, the boy in church, that grown boy coming back a decade later in a stolen DIRECTV truck. He thought about Pabst beer and marijuana. The pistol, the only Christmas present he’d gotten in twenty-five years. “We were both lonesome,” he said. “I think that’s why he came to see me in the first place. I don’t think he had anybody to look up to, a daddy or uncle, and crazy as it sounds, he chose me.”

“You said he came seen you last, when?”

“Night before I got shot.”

“Said he said he’d done something?”

“Yeah, but he never told what. But I started to figure it might’ve been the Rutherford girl.”

“And how come you didn’t report this?”

“I tried to.”

“You called 32.”

“He came to see me,” Larry said. “Silas. After yall questioned me yesterday. All in a hurry, like he wasn’t supposed to be here. He said he knew I didn’t shoot myself or kill that girl. He wanted to know if I could tell him anything to help him figure out who really did it. I’d already started to put it together, that it must’ve been Wallace, that pistol, the cabin, but I didn’t tell Silas. I didn’t want to talk to him.”