ground four of them would ever touch. Johnny made it out alone nine weeks later with a permanent limp and a never-explained tendency to gag at the sight of beets.
I took the best scholarship offer I got, the one from TCU, where I blew out both knees against Kansas State my second year and had no choice but to become an actual student, while Johnny eventually earned his law degree at Baylor and hung out his shingle in Burnsville, the county seat. He married a blonde former cheerleader named Alicia Meador and settled down to practise country law and watch his cows get fat on the little farm he and Li signed the mortgage on after he brought in his first big settlement. His medals were still gathering dust on his office wall along with his Chamber of Commerce and Rotary certificates and the team picture from our championship season, all of us standing forever shoulder to shoulder in sunlight that somehow seemed historical and heatless in the old print. Johnny himself looked like a dangerous but dapper Prohibition rum-runner or a tragic Irish poet, brick-coloured hair brushed casually to the side and face turned toward me with a small smile, as if I’d just cracked some dumb joke.
‘Hi, Jim,’ said Li’s telephone voice.
I told her what I had in mind.
She said, ‘Whatcha cooking?’
‘The Special.’
‘With that weird sauce?’
‘It’s the only one I know how to make.’
‘Count us in. I know Johnny’ll want to hear all about your hot case.’
I heard Johnny’s voice in the background: ‘Ask him what’s going on with that. He got any suspects yet?’
‘Tell him when I catch somebody I’ll give them his number,’ I said. ‘If they’re rich enough to afford a big-time lawyer.’
Hanging up the phone, I sipped beer, thinking about what Li had said. It resonated weirdly in my mind because, although the coin had felt warm to me, the case itself didn’t at all. It felt cool, like old mausoleum air or the dank and unfresh stirring of the breeze off a swamp at night.
I put Mutt on the arm of the chair and stood up, thinking about what I wanted to ask Jonas and about the way things ought to be. ‘Your watch, boy,’ I said to the cat. ‘Don’t let any rats get by you.’
He just stared at me, looking mystified.
SIX
I took Border Avenue south, with Arkansas and its liquor stores on my left, Texas with its car dealerships and Baptist bookstores to the right, and a mile ahead, the Louisiana Quarter, which some said existed only to show the world just how much political corruption and fine cooking it was possible to cram into one medium-sized town.
Catching the light, I downshifted the F-250 around the corner onto Eastern and listened to the exhaust grumble and roar, a sound Jana called the ‘Serengeti baritone’. It was probably more of an indication of my thinking than I understood at the time, but a few years ago when Jana and the girls were still with me, I realised I was tired of our number-two car, the Acura I’d been driving to work for the last six years. The first vehicle I’d ever been able to call my own had been a pickup, and after my time on the Flying S working for Dusty, nothing felt as natural under my feet as a truck. Which is probably why this one, parked under a huge oak beside the highway with a For Sale sign wedged behind one windshield wiper, had caught my eye. After a ten-minute test drive I bought it from the alcoholic mechanic who’d reworked it, a committed Jehovah’s Witness until he came down with depression, started mixing his medications with vodka and fell from grace. He wasn’t definite about exactly how it happened, but I got the impression it involved several counts of interrupting services at the Kingdom Hall to offer his opinions in favour of wholegrains and anal intercourse. Losing business, he decided to cash in some of his assets, starting with the big four-wheel-drive Ford. It had a heavy brush-buster and winch, oversized knobby tyres and a ceramic eyeball the size of a peach for a shift knob.
‘Throw a hook down the well, you could turn the world inside out with this hoss,’ the Witness said, his breath a weapon of mass destruction as he patted the brush-buster affectionately.
My daughter Casey’s judgement had been, ‘It suits you, Dad.’ Later she had decided for some reason that the truck ought to be called Buford, and painted the name neatly in purple fingernail polish on the left fender just back of the wheel well.
Her sister Jordan had said, ‘Mom keeps the van, right?’
‘What does this thing eat?’ had been Jana’s first question as she did a walkaround of the vehicle.
‘Scornful wives.’
‘Knock yourself out, Thunderfoot,’ she’d said, giving me a quick kiss and going back to her flowerbeds.
I found Jonas at a window table in John Boy’s, staring at the screen of his laptop. He was dressed in faded jeans, sneakers and a red Centenary sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, and had a bottle of Corona at his elbow, but still somehow looking monkish with his prematurely white, close-cut hair and beard, and lean frame. I hung my jacket on the back of the chair and sat across from him, which gave me a view up into the split-level bar where most of the drunks and coloured neon were.
‘Nachos coming,’ he said, picking up the beer and taking a sip.
‘What’re you working on?’
‘Exam for tomorrow. What’s on your mind, JB?’
‘Crucifixion.’
He cocked an eye at me and said, ‘You trying out for Messiah?’
The waitress brought a plate of nachos piled high with cheese, refritos, chopped tomatoes, fajita strips, guacamole and pico de gallo, set a bottle of Corona with a slice of lime in front of me then disappeared back into the kitchen. I passed the lime around the mouth of the bottle a couple of times, shook some salt onto the rim and took a sip. ‘This is about a case,’ I said. ‘I want to get your thoughts.’
He nodded. ‘Always been your method: send you out for a bagel, you’re not coming back until you find out who invented wheat. And why. But what are you doing investigating cases – aren’t you supposed to be some kind of boss now?’ He paused to sip from his own beer then studied my face for a moment. ‘Wait a minute, I know that look,’ he said. ‘Like the time that little girl got kidnapped. You’re on something big.’
He was talking about Joy Dawn Therone, the Girl Scout whose body had been found behind an old warehouse ten years ago. She had been raped both before and after her throat was slashed to the spine. I hadn’t been one of the lead investigators, only one of the guys volunteering time, but I couldn’t help thinking about the case, and had never believed it was a regular serial killing. I wasn’t sure why, but I thought the murder more likely came under the heading of what the guy who kept the department statistics called HAMs – homicides of ‘happenstance and misadventure’. Nobody knew one way or the other, though, because no suspect was ever identified and no arrest ever made, but everybody at Three had kicked in to help pay for the giant angel she was buried under at Sylvan Memorial Park. Counting the marble plinth, it was over ten feet tall – big, but not nearly big enough to make up for us failing to protect her, or at least make the killer pay for what he’d done.
‘Yeah, I’m on something,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how big yet.’
Catching
