The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [67]
Lee moved to a stool down at the end of the bar so he could watch the door. Ever since that night he’d had to come in the bar and pick up that bag of money—the dumbest fucking thing that Tater Brown had pulled on him so far, and the bastard had heard about it, too—Sandy had hardly spoken to him. It bothered him, at least a little when he took the time to consider it, that she would think badly of him. He figured she was still pissed off because of all the hell he’d raised about her selling her ass out of the back of this dump. He turned to look at her. The place was dead, the only sound that of glasses clinking together in the water as she picked one up to wash it. Fuck it, he thought. He began talking, mentioned that Carl sure was spending a lot of time talking to a young waitress at the White Cow while she was stuck here serving drinks to pay the bills.
Sandy set the glass in the plastic drainer and dried off her hands while she thought of something to say. Carl had been driving her to work an awful lot lately, but that was none of Lee’s business. What would he do with some girl anyway? The only time Carl got hard anymore was when he looked at his photographs. “So what?” she finally said. “He gets lonely.”
“Yeah, he lies a lot, too,” Bodecker said. Just the other evening, he had seen Sandy’s black station wagon sitting at the White Cow. He parked across the street and watched his brother-in-law flap his jaws with the skinny waitress. They looked like they were having a good time together, and he’d gotten curious. After Carl left, he went in and sat down at the counter, asked for a cup of coffee. “That guy that just left,” he said. “You happen to know his name?”
“You mean Bill?”
“Bill, huh?” Bodecker said, trying not to smile. “He a friend of yours?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We get along all right.”
Bodecker pulled a little notebook and a pencil out of his shirt pocket, pretended to write something down. “Quit the horse shit and tell me what you know about him.”
“Am I in some kind of trouble?” she asked. She stuck a strand of hair in her mouth, started shuffling nervously back and forth.
“Not if you talk, you ain’t.”
After listening to the girl repeat a few of Carl’s stories, Bodecker glanced at his watch and stood up. “That’s enough for now,” he said, putting the notebook back in his pocket. “It don’t sound like he’s the one we’re looking for.” He thought for a moment, looked at the girl. She was still nibbling on her hair. “How old are you?” he said.
“Sixteen.”
“This Bill ever ask you to pose for any pictures?”
The girl’s face turned red. “No,” she said.
“The first time he starts talkin’ that kind of stuff, you call me, okay?” If Carl hadn’t been the one trying to fuck the girl, he wouldn’t have even bothered. But the sonofabitch had ruined his sister, and Bodecker couldn’t forget about it, no matter how often he told himself it wasn’t any of his business. It just kept eating at him, like a cancer. The best he could do right now was let Sandy know about this little waitress. But someday he still wanted to make Carl pay big-time. It wouldn’t be that hard, he thought, not much different from castrating a hog.
He had left the diner after questioning the girl and drove out to the state park by the prison and waited for Tater Brown to bring him some money. The dispatcher squawked something on the radio about a hit-and-run on the Huntington Pike, and Bodecker reached over and turned the volume down. A few days ago, he had done another job for Tater, used his badge to flush a