All That I Have (13 page)

But I was saying about Addison. Maybe Clemmie and I didn’t talk much about having kids or not, but everybody else did, including Clemmie’s cousins. It was one day we were all sitting around after lunch at Addison’s, talking about sperms and eggs and hormones and all that fascinating kind of thing, and one cousin speaks up and says, Well, have you considered adoption?

And Addison, who’s probably got a leg pretty well up over the back of the White Horse by now, gives a big guffaw and says, “Why would they do that?” Then, looking at me, “He’s already adopted the whole god damned county, don’t you know?” Good old Addison.

So: Deputy Keen says I’m not doing my job, that I’m giving Sean a get-out-of-jail-free card. Am I? I guess I am. Is that because of what Addison said back then? Am I making Sean a special case? Am I going easy on him because I think he’s one of my own? Never. Sean ain’t mine. I don’t want him; he don’t want me. If I’m giving him some extra rope — and I am — it’s because that’s my method. That’s sheriffing. In sheriffing you don’t stop things from happening. You know you can’t do that, mostly, so you don’t try. People are going to do what they’re going to do. You let things happen. “Let them come to you,” said Wingate.

Your bad boys, he was talking about. Let your bad boys come to you. The idea is that you give them a little cover, so they have a little room to screw up, a little time to figure things out and come around. What you’re aiming for is a taxpayer with a few good stories, a few memories that today make him shake his head, and not a convict sitting in a jail cell somewhere.

In working with your bad boys, you’re also in the conservation business, in a manner of speaking, you’re in the endangered species business; because bad boys are getting scarce, at least the old-fashioned kind like Sean are. It’s like I said before: without the Seans of this world, it looks like the only young fellows we’d have in these parts would be bank clerks and sales representatives and fellows who work on computers — kids who want to grow up to be big lookers, kids who want grow up to be Logan Tracy and Emory O’Connor.

Sure, there are bad boys who test Wingate’s method, who won’t come to you, who will not shape up, not ever. Sean may be one of them. But you don’t assume that. You try to use the method with Sean, too. At least you try until you get done trying. Then you come down onto the hard bottom of the law, the bedrock, the place where Deputy Keen wants to do business. Then you say that your job is to make the law work, to make it real, and in the end what makes the law real can only be one thing. If you’re a trooper, you carry it on your hip; if you’re a sheriff like Wingate, like me, you keep it locked up in your sock drawer. But you’ve got it, you know where it is, you know how to use it, you know you’re allowed to use it, and so does everybody else.

Would Sean make us all come down onto that hard place? I didn’t think he would. And this time, anyhow, I was right. Because as it happened, I didn’t catch up with Sean. Sean caught up with me.

He did it fairly neat, too: got me out of the office and as off duty as I ever am. Dinnertime. Clemmie was making something in the kitchen and came up with not enough sugar. Would I make a sugar run? So I got in her little car and drove down to the store at the Four Corners. It was beginning to get dark. I parked in front of the store, went in, got the sugar, paid for it, came back out front, and climbed into the car to start home. Sean was sitting in the back. He was down kind of low, so I didn’t know he was there till he spoke up.

“Evening, Sheriff,” said Sean.

“Jesus.”

“Take it easy, Sheriff.”

“I might have shot you,” I said.

“You ain’t got no gun, though,” said Sean.

“You don’t know that.”

“Everybody knows that. Drive around for a few minutes, okay, Sheriff?”

“Where to?”

“I don’t give a fuck. Just drive. Go ahead.”

I started the car, and we left the store and went right, away from the Four Corners and up the hill.

“Sheriff, I told you to keep them fucking spics off me,” said Sean. “I wrote you a note about that. Didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?”

“You know I’ve got nothing to do to keep them off or put them on,” I said. “If you want to get done with them, you’ll help me.”

“Bullshit,” said Sean. “They came after my girl. They didn’t have the balls to come after me, not after what I did to the one fucker. So they came after her. Well, fuck them. They can kiss my ass.”

“You ain’t listening to me,” I said. “Do you know why they’re looking for you?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” said Sean. “Let them find me. Bring them the fuck on.”

Talking to Sean was like talking to a barking dog, except that any dog that’s smart enough to bark is smarter than Sean.

“Okay,” I said. “Were you there at her trailer when they came?”

“Fuck, no,” said Sean. “I had been, you would have had a couple of dead spics.”

“You keep on saying spics. Who do you think these people are, here?”

“What?”

“Who do you think’s after you? Who broke into Crystal’s, there?”

“The Mafia,” said Sean. “Fucking Mafia. Ain’t they?”

“No, they ain’t. They’re from overseas. They’re Russians.”

“Russians? Fucking Commies?”

“No. They ain’t Commies anymore. They switched teams, a while back, it looks like.”

“Fuckers.”

“They’re just like us now,” I said. “They want what’s theirs. You’ve got what’s theirs.”

“Fuck I do,” said Sean.

I pulled off the road into a turnout and switched off the motor. We were right at the top of Paradise Hill, and you could see out over the country to the south and west, toward Gilead, the hills like waves on the ocean, one after another, spread out in the evening as the sun set and houselights began to come on in the valleys between the hills, here and there, some lights close, some miles off.

“Okay,” I said to Sean. “You wanted to talk. Talk, then. Tell me what you took out of their place. Tell me where it is. Then I can help you. Maybe I can.”

“I tell you fucking nothing,” said Sean. “I know what happens, I do.”

“Nothing happens,” I said. “Not for that. Not now. You’ve got the upper hand here, remember? You came to me. We get done, I’ll drop you wherever you say, and off you go.”

“How do I know that?”

“Because I said it.”

Sean was quiet for a minute. He was probably trying to think if he knew how to say something without saying “fuck.” It took him a while, but he finally made it. He said, “It wasn’t just me.”

“Who else?”

“Her,” said Sean. “Crystal.”

“You and Crystal broke in there together?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, ain’t it?” said Sean. “It was her idea.”

“What did you take away?” I asked him.

“Now, I ain’t saying I didn’t do nothing,” Sean went on. “That it was Crystal that did it all, not me. Fuck no. I did it. I busted down their door. I’d seen the place, working there, I’d seen all that shit they have in there? How far out in the brush it was? Burglar alarm didn’t mean shit way out there. I knew how to open their gate. I told Crystal, and she said, Well, let’s go have a look.”

“What did you take?”

“Little kind of safe or like a chest,” said Sean. “Steel. Heavy sucker. Crystal’d worked for a guy once had one like it. He kept his coin collection in it. Gold coins. It wasn’t, like, bolted down or nothing. We thought we’d toss the place a little bit, fuck it over so nobody would miss the safe right off, take the safe, take the whole fucking thing, and then, later, we had time, get some tools to it, bust it open. See what was in it.”

“What was in it?”

“Fuck if I know,” said Sean. “We couldn’t get into it. Took it back to Crystal’s, hid it. Then Saturday we went by her brother’s with it. He’s got a garage. He’s closed weekends. We got out the bars and chisels and shit, sledgehammer, and banged away at it for most of an hour. Fucking nothing.”

Sean was laughing now.

“So,” he went on, “couple days later, I went out to my uncle Fred’s, there in Humber. He’s got this big fucking magnum revolver. Told him I needed it to kill a dog, had rabies. Fred is so fucking dumb. He said sure. I got the revolver and a box of shells, and Crystal and me took the safe and the magnum way out into the woods back of her place, there. Set the safe up on a log. We were going to shoot the fucker open. You know, you see them do it on TV all the time.”

“So you do. How did that go for you?”

“Went like fuck-all,” said Sean.
“Blam, blam, blam
— we shot up half the box at it. Did nothing. You couldn’t even hardly tell where we’d hit it, just little dents and like smears from the jackets on the rounds. Great big fucking .44 magnum, there. They do it on TV all the time, you know? Shoot the lock? Shoot the door open? Bullshit. We couldn’t even knock the fucker off the log. Crystal was pissed.”

“What then?”

“Crystal said, Fuck it, we’ll lose the thing,” said Sean. “She told me to drop it off a bridge somewhere.”

“Did you?”

“She thinks so.”

“Where is it, then?” I asked Sean.

“It’s in a safe place, Sheriff,” said Sean. He was so stuck on himself.

“That’s why I wanted to see you,” he went on. “Like you say, those Russians or whatever the fuck? They want their little safe. They want it very fucking bad. Ain’t that right?”

“I’d say it was.”

“Well, then,” said Sean, “I reckon they can pay me for it. What do you reckon?”

I didn’t answer him. I sat there looking off over the hills and shaking my head.

“That’s why I wanted to talk, see?” Sean said. “You, you’re working with those fuckers, ain’t you? Investigating for them? You know them. You can make the deal. Tell them to make me an offer. We’ll give you a piece.”

“We?”

“Me and Crystal.”

“I thought Crystal thought you’d got rid of the safe,” I said.

“Oh,” said Sean. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, she does. Okay, then, I’ll give you a piece.”

“Going to cut Crystal right out, is that it?” I said. “Being kind of tough on her, ain’t you? What’s she going to say?”

“Fuck I care?” said Sean. “Fuck her. She ain’t the only girl in the world.”

“I guess not,” I said.

“There’s others, Sheriff,” said Sean.

“ ‘Course there are.”

“More than one,” said Sean.

“Is that right?”

“Fucking-A right that’s right, more than one. More than two, Sheriff.”

I started the car and got us onto the road headed back down to the Four Corners.

“Where’s your vehicle?” I asked Sean.

“Around back of the store,” he said. “So, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About what?” Sean said. “About what we said. About you making the deal. About the plan.”

“Oh,” I said. “The plan. I think the plan is the dumbest plan since General Custer rode down the hill after the Sioux,” I said.

“General who?”

“General Custer. Your great-great-I-don’t-know grandfather.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Sean. “Well, fuck him, too.”

“These people are not going to buy their thing back from you,” I told Sean. “What they are going to do, they’re going to put your balls in a vise or wire them up to a truck battery, and get you to see things their way.”

“Bullshit,” said Sean.

“No bullshit,” I said. “They can do that. They will do that.”

“They can try,” said Sean.

“You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you?”

“Tough enough,” said Sean.

“Nowhere near,” I said.

“We’ll see,” said Sean.

“No, we won’t,” I said.

“Fuck, we won’t,” said Sean. “Why won’t we?”

“Because you won’t be here.”

“Fuck, I won’t,” said Sean. “You think I’m going to run?”

“That’s right. That’s what you’re going to do.”

“Fuck that,” said Sean. “I’d rather they did what you said they’d do to me. I’d rather that than run.”

“That ain’t your choice,” I said. “Your choice is this: You get out of town, now, or you deal with me. Not them. Me.”

“Fuck that,” said Sean. “You think I’m going to run because you ask me to?”

“I ain’t asking,” I said.

I left Sean at the Four Corners and went on home for dinner, told Clemmie I’d got delayed at the store, didn’t tell her why. Why didn’t I tell her? In the kitchen I put her sugar down on the counter.

“What’s the matter?” Clemmie asked me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. You look like something’s the matter. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “When’s supper?”

“This side of midnight,” said Clemmie. I left her in the kitchen.

Now, I never claimed to be the brightest fellow in the world, but that night I felt like my IQ, such as it was, had lost twenty-five or thirty points just from my sitting for ten minutes in the same car with Sean. What was going to become of him? The way he was going, nothing good. The way he was going, even the bottom of the law wouldn’t be the end of his fall.

One thing, though: I guessed I knew where that little strongbox was. I guessed I did. If I was right, then maybe I could let the air out of this business, maybe I could make this business go away — if Superboy would only get to hell on the road.

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