The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [32]
“Yessir,” I whispered.
He took a hand from a pocket, slapped hard the roof of the Luv, a sound so loud even Tabitha jumped. Then he turned, faced the Plymouth. Still I hadn’t seen his face. But I knew him.
“Now,” he said, and in just that one word here was all sun and blue skies. “Y’all got money for gas?”
I breathed out, looked to Tabitha. She hadn’t seen anything, so hadn’t heard anything, either. I said, “You have any money for gas?”
She tilted her head, her forehead wrinkled, mouth squinted up: What kind of question is that? She shook her head no.
“No sir,” I said, and turned back to him.
There on his arm, sneaking out from beneath the rolled-up sleeve, was the bottom edge of a homemade tattoo: JUNIOR.
Officer Tommy Thigpen, the second cruiser at the scene. Backup for Sergeant Doug Yandle.
The only one Unc would talk to.
They’d shaken hands. And he’d just run a truck off the road, pinned a man’s arm between a car and a truck. An officer of the sheriff’s department.
I faced forward, afraid he’d seen me see it, and the thought occurred to me, what if he wanted me to see it?
But he just pulled a roll of bills from his jeans pocket, peeled at it, dropped some in on me.
I looked down: five twenties.
He stuffed the roll back into his jeans, then turned one last time to me, knocked twice on the roof.
“Drive careful,” he said.
We reached the railroad tracks. There’d been next to nobody from the Amoco on out, though I’d breathed shallow the whole way here, afraid somebody’d pull out of the woods and ram into us or take a shot at us: anything seemed possible.
And as we’d gotten closer to the Rantowles Motel, just past Hollywood, I’d wondered for a few seconds if there’d still be cruisers parked out front, lights going, crime-scene banners up everywhere, everything still going on though it’d been six this morning Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons’s suicide was called in, and I thought of those two buzz-cut officers at the hospital just this morning, thought of them being the ones to tell me of her dying, and I wondered for a second whether SLED were in with Thigpen on this.
And Yandle? Was he with them too, every cop in the Lowcountry party to a murder and suicide, all of them part of the people who counted who could fix things, if only Unc would do what’d been asked?
Then here came the hotel: only a brick box of a building, six parking slots in front of six doors, six windows each with a room air conditioner plugged into it. One lamppost sat to the far end of the little parking lot, everything gray in the wash of light it gave up.
There, making an X across the third door to the right, was the crime-scene banner.
Nothing else. There’d been no lights on anywhere, not even a single car.
The tracks banged beneath us, no closing gate this far from Charleston, as though people down here weren’t worth that kind of safeguard. Now we were on Hungry Neck, Tabitha’s time to take over. Though I’d been back here a million times, maybe more, the dark of it all seemed too dark now, too heavy, all of it full of something could happen: the moss off the live oak above us looked too much like that man’s arm out the window of the yellow pickup, or like a woman who’d hanged herself might look: gray and twisting in the low wind out there, the half-moon I could piece through the branches more dead and bright than any moon I’d ever seen before. Anything could happen now.
I slowed down, and I looked at her, shrugged: What next?
She’d written me no notes the hour it’d taken to get here, only’d latched back on to my arm when I came back from paying for the gas. The black woman with the orange cowlick at the Amoco had only yawned as she slipped nine beat-up dollar bills into the metal drawer.
Now Tabitha let go, looked around for the pad and paper, reached down. I heard her paw through the broken glass on the floorboard. She came back up with the pen and pad again, wrote, and handed it to