“Off hand I can think of any number of reasons.”
“Know why he’s plannin’ on finishin’ you tonight?”
“No.”
“Because he made a deal and said he would.”
“A deal? With who?”
“That old guy who looks like a corpse.”
Cadaver. Not a great surprise, but it adds a layer of hurt to the pile that’s already festering inside me. What does come as a surprise is finding out Kyle knew Cadaver was behind everything, even if the old man didn’t start the fire. Now I’m wondering what they were really saying while they stood watching Eddie’s burn. The idea of the two of them being in cahoots makes my blood run cold and those two pennies in my pocket are starting to feel like sandbags.
“You know what the deal was?” I ask Iris.
“Nope. Kyle wouldn’t say, but I expect the end of you’ll be his ticket out of town. Maybe he’ll even get Flo back for his efforts. You never know.”
We share a moment of silence, both of us burning up inside over Kyle’s betrayal. I stand, careful not to send my cup of coffee flying, and put my hands on the cold bedrail. “He say where he was going?”
“He did.”
I wait. She says nothing.
“Where?”
“Not sure I should tell you.”
“Why’s that?”
“You haven’t settled up for the information you’ve already gotten outta me.”
“What is it you want?” I ask, sure I already know.
“Come here.”
“Iris. I have to get going. You know why.”
“I do, so I’m not gonna be hurt that you ain’t gonna stay with me. But that ain’t it.” She lays back, sheet to her waist, hands by her sides. “Just come here. It won’t take long.”
Against my better judgment, and struggling to keep my eyes from studying what’s there to be studied, I sidestep my way through the candles until I’m standing next to her. “What?”
She reaches up, one hand finding the back of my neck, drawing me down even as her face is rising toward me, an odd look about her, her eyes like stars, and she kisses me. But my eyes are open, and in the honey-colored light from the candles, I see a deep angry-looking scar running from the top of her forehead back into her hair, like someone tried to split her skull open with an ax. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Doing what she does is bound to put her in the company of some mean folks, but I don’t like seeing it. I break the kiss, despite it making my body tingle with warmth that spreads across my chest and down to where I don’t want it going, and I step back, look at her. Goddamn it’s been way too long.
Iris hasn’t bothered to draw the sheet up again, but that’s all right. She’s smiling, and the urge to say to hell with everything and just crawl in with her is powerful. But I can’t, and she knows it. Knew it before she even opened the door to me, and I guess all this has been is a little betrayal of our own.
“We square?” I ask, after a few moments in which nothing needed to be said.
“I guess we are,” she says dreamily. “Too bad you’ve got to go runnin’ off though. I like talkin’ to you. You ain’t nothin’ like your boy.”
That’s hardly a revelation.
“Maybe when this is over,” she says. “If it ever is, and if you don’t end right along with it.”
“Where did he go?”
“The Reverend’s house,” she says.
“Why there?”
“Beats me.”
This puzzles me. I can’t figure out what he’d want up there, unless Hill had something he needs. Or something Cadaver instructed him to get. But what?
“I’m sorry.”
She raises her eyebrows. “What for?”
“For…” I don’t know how to apologize for thinking her nothing but a common whore. Don’t know how to apologize for a scar I didn’t give her, or for my son’s casual and tactless confessions. Or for the fact that this whole town’s gone to seed and I never once tried to stop it. And the only reason I’m saying a goddamn thing at all is because I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to say it again.
“Sheriff?”
But there are no words, and if there are, I don’t know them, so I do what any man does when what he feels he has to say gets lodged like a chicken bone in his throat.
I tip my hat and leave.
Chapter Eleven
Hendricks opens the door to a scarecrow in a top hat.
“What?” he asks, unwilling to extend even the pretense of courtesy to a man he once caught urinating on his doorstep.
“Doc,” Kirk Vess says, crossed eyes wide. “You’re awake, good. That’s good.” As he searches for words that seem to be dangling just beyond his grasp, he snatches his hat from his head, revealing a greasy nest of hair that resembles a mound of limp noodles heaped atop a dirty upended bowl. Beneath the pallid brow and contradictory eyes, a single drop of clear snot, sweat, or water dangles from the tip of a fishhook nose, which in turn presides over an impossibly wide mouth, packed to capacity with thin black teeth. Hendricks has often wondered, judging by his scars and the man’s erratic behavior, if Vess, at some point in his unremarkable life, donated his brain to science. It summons the comical image of a bunch of perplexed medical students clustered around a stainless steel pan wherein stews Vess’s brain.
Of Vess, he knows very little, except that the man is homeless and given to outbursts of violence, and that come autumn, he will disappear, to reappear in the first week of winter. What he does during this absence is unknown, but there are few, if any, folks in Milestone who care enough to ask.
“Good, good,” Vess says again, fingering with pale tapered fingers the brim of a hat as flaccid as the man himself. He wears a coat torn at the elbows and frayed at the hem, the lapels encrusted with a substance of some indeterminate origin. He reeks of urine, alcohol and vomit, from his scabrous scalp to his sole-less boots.
“What are you doing here?” Hendricks snaps. “If you’ve come to beg…”
Vess squints, leans in a little as if unsure of what’s been said, then gasps and raises his hands, the hat flopping wildly as he protests. “No sir, no sir. Not money. What am I doing here? Big question. Keep asking it and no one has an answer. Course, they couldn’t really.” He shakes his head, dismissing a thought that perhaps didn’t even make sense to him. “I didn’t want to bother you for nothing, truth be told. But I had to ask someone who’d know where it might have come from or who might own it.”
Annoyed, and loath to waste any more time on this odious creature, Hendricks takes a step back, intending to close to door. Vess’s pleas stop him. “No, wait! Sorry, sir. Just a tick. A sweep of sixty, please. I’ll show it to you.” He starts to rummage around in his pockets, which look flat and empty. “I kept it safe as I could, but it looks dead a long time.”
Intrigued despite himself, yet fully expecting the man will produce a dead rodent from one of those pockets, Hendricks only closes the door half way, just enough to let Vess know if this is some ridiculous scheme, it will be revealed to the morning breeze and a quiet street, but not a gullible doctor.
Frustrated, Vess begins to chastise himself in what sounds like an alien dialect. “Fffteck! Shlassen shlack!” Then with an apologetic look, he calms himself and reaches into the inside pocket of his coat. “Yes, yes. I knew it. I’m a fool,” he says and slaps a grubby palm against his forehead hard enough to make Hendricks jump. “Yes,
