“THIS AIN’T AMERICAN!”

I reached out and hooked my finger into Kirkson’s front pocket and drew him so close I could smell the fear rising from his armpits.

“Really, Donnie? In my America, thirty-one-year-old men take fifteen-year-old runaways to a shelter or a social worker, they don’t fill them with vodka and take them to a motel.”

I poked Kirkson backward with a stiff finger. He grunted, spun away, and sucked the cig to the filter, squished the butt on the floor. When he turned his eyes showed surrender.

“Terry Lee was a fuck-up, all right? He was like a big stupid kid. Why you need to know about him?”

“If he was such a fuck-up,” I asked, “why were you friends with him?”

Kirkson shrugged, studied the floor. He actually seemed confused by my question.

“I always kind of felt sorry for Terry Lee. We both had shit for families. He was so fucking ugly and always trying to be cool and say the right words and act like some kind of stone killer, a mad dog.”

“He wasn’t?”

“Terry Lee Bailes was a Chihuahua with a loud bark. He looked the look and talked the talk, but he couldn’t walk the walk. Underneath all that leather and ink was pure chickenshit.”

It didn’t make sense. No chickenshit would slip past hospital security, steal a kid, then, cornered, try to leap to a grisly death. I put my hand on the chair behind Kirkson, leaned close.

“Bailes tried to steal a kid from a hospital, Donnie. When someone got in his way and the event went south, Bailes grinned and tried to jump out a fifth-floor window. No second thoughts about taking the long dive to the bottom floor.”

Kirkson looked at me. “Wait a minute. You mean you didn’t find it out?”

“Find out what?”

“When you did the thing with the…” Kirkson made a knife-cut motion from his groin up to his neck.

“The post-mortem?” I said. “The autopsy? Those things take a few days to get to, Donnie. Thanks to great citizens like you, there’s a stack of dead bodies at the morgue. It’s a take-a-number operation.”

He grinned. “That explains it.”

I jammed him into the wall. “EXPLAINS WHAT?”

He held his hands in front of his face. “Take it fucking easy – Jesus! Terry Lee was dying. He had cancer in something by his liver. It always kills you. It hurts like hell and you die screaming.”

“Pancreatic cancer?”

“That’s the shit. Terry Lee visited here a week back and told me. He was crying like a fucking baby. I told him to man up, live the rest of his life like there was nothing to lose.” He grinned. “Cuz there wasn’t.”

Chapter 22

Heading back to Mobile, my heart started pounding like a drum and my skin felt tight. I figured it was the irritation of highway driving, an idiot behind every third steering wheel and slowmoving semi-rigs backing traffic up for miles.

I veered down a ramp and took the back roads south, driving through piney woods with trees straight as arrows, crossing slender bridges over black-water swamps. I roared around a bend and saw a typical roadhouse bar, a mason-block building with painted-over windows and a heavy metal door. A sign saying Al’s Hideaway hung over the door on a rusting iron frame. A dozen pickups and cars were on the dusty, crushed-gravel lot. A portable sign near the road proclaimed Big Picher of Beer $8.

I was thirsty and hot and what energy I’d had was fading. I veered into the lot beside the building, skidding sideways in the gravel.

It was as cold as a refrigerator inside. Three men sat at the bar, another five played cards in a back booth. Two chalked cues and stalked pool balls at a table. I heard a decades-old Conway Twitty song on the juke: “It’s Only Make Believe”.

Eyes found me, held for an evaluative two-count, turned back to the serious work of heavy drinking.

The man behind the bar was a porcine guy in his thirties, a bandana covering his pumpkin head. His shirt advertised Colt Arms. His voluminous jeans were held aloft by a black leather belt clasped by an ornate silver buckle big as a dessert plate. He was pulling beers from cases at his feet and racking them in a cooler. He didn’t look happy at being distracted from his labor, muttering shit and padding over.

“Whatcha need?” he asked.

“A couple RCs. And a half-pint of Maker’s.”

He reached in a cooler, scrabbled through some bottles, produced two RCs, dropping them in a bag with the bourbon.

I headed toward my truck and put the bottles in the passenger seat. I heard a bite of tires on asphalt as a big-ass Dodge Ram veered on to the lot. The driver gunned the engine for no reason but to announce arrival. He swerved to send a rolling cloud of dust my way and jammed the brakes to skid to a stop. A bumper sticker said, DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-EAT SHIT. In the back window was a Confederate battle flag, only at the crossing of the bars was the grinning face of country singer Hank Williams, Jr. The license plate was from Ohio.

Ohio?

The door pushed open and out jumped a jostling beer belly overlaying a large frame, six three or four. The belly’s owner had a wide chest and heavy biceps, and I took him for a laborer on a construction site or maybe a loading dock. He looked at me, seemed to sneer at the sports jacket, like I was a lost tourist. He flicked his cigarette to the dirt, hawked up a gob of phlegm, fired it at the butt, missed by two feet.

The passenger was smaller, with tight tiny eyes and dirty fingernails tapping the side of the truck. His wispy beard, long trailing mustache, and hard-edged face made my neurons fire three random words: syphilitic hillbilly Confucius.

“Get a case for the cooler, Beefer,” Syphilucius whined, a nasal wind as flat and nonmusical as air dribbled from a balloon, the tone straight from the plains of a Midwest backcountry nowhere.

Beefer. I looked at the driver and the name fit, probably applied while a high-school lineman pushing aside smaller players like a fat bull, stomping their ankles when he saw the chance. He maybe went on to some second-tier college on scholarship, but found that elbow-spearing opposing players’ necks didn’t make up for slow legs and an inability to remember the play-book.

I looked at the sullen, obnoxious Beefer. My eyes went to the comedic flag on the cab and the bumper sticker. I looked at the license plate. I felt a fast and scarlet anger sizzle through my guts and a deep thrumming in my brain. Normally I would have pushed the irritation out with a few quick breaths, moved on. But something kept my feet planted.

“Hey, buddy,” I called to the wide back.

He turned. Eyes squinted in a flat red face. “Huh? You talkin’ to me?”

I nodded at the flag in the rear window. “I like the flag. Looks good.”

He was pissed at my stepping into his day, bewildered by what seemed a compliment to his truck’s attire. It was a wash, so he nodded, turned away toward the roadhouse.

I said, “Hey, buddy.”

He stopped, wheeled. This time there was no confusion, only ire.

“What now?” he growled, squaring in my direction and pulling off his shades. I removed my sunglasses, absent-mindedly polishing them on my shirtfront.

“What’s it mean to you?” I asked, looking at my glasses, not him.

“What the hell you talking about?”

“The Stars’n’Bars. The flag of the Confederate States of America. What does it mean?”

“It means I’m a rebel. That’s what it fuckin’ means.”

I puffed breath over my lenses, studied them closely. Resumed polishing. “What are you rebelling against?” I asked.

He moved two steps my way, fists closing. “Stop with the fucking questions, freak. You got a problem with my flag?”

“Your flag?” I twirled the glasses in my fingers and nodded toward his bumper. “But the license tag says Ohio.”