Desperation Road(59)

“Hallelujah,” Harvey said. “So I’m right. You got no news.”

“No news,” Boyd said. “Not that I wanted any from Russell anyhow.”

“I bet Mitchell Gaines is cussing my ass right about now but we ain’t exactly dripping with leads. I know it ain’t in Russell to do something like that but you never know how a fellow comes out of prison. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.”

“Sometimes the same.”

“Not the same. God, it don’t seem like it’s been that long since he killed that Tisdale boy. I remember it, though. Russell’s damn neck was split wide open and both those vehicles were twisted up like tin foil. I wanted to puke when that boy was dead cause I knew what was coming for Russell. Especially when I found that empty whiskey bottle up under his seat. I wanted to die riding out there and waking up Mitchell and telling him what happened.”

The phone rang and Harvey looked at it. “I bet you it’s that peckerhead from the newspaper. He’s called about twenty times already and he can’t figure out why the sheriff’s department don’t have nothing to say. We don’t got nothing to say cause there ain’t shit to say and when there is he’ll be the last to know anyway. Little son of a bitch.”

They both stared at the phone until it stopped ringing and then the sheriff smoked again.

“Did we find out anything about that woman at the shelter?” Boyd asked.

“I sent Watkins over there. Got a name but it brought up next to nothing.”

“What was it?”

Harvey moved around a couple of papers on his deck. He picked up a sticky note and read it. “Maben. Maben Jones.”

“What?” Boyd asked. He sat up a little in the chair.

“Maben Jones.”

Boyd rolled his eyes up at the flickering fluorescent light.

“Ring a bell?” the sheriff asked.

“I’m thinking that was the name of the girl who was left standing the night of Russell’s wreck. The girl out there with Jason Tisdale. The one who ran up the road and called it in.”

The sheriff took his feet down from the desk and took a long drag of the cigar and examined the sticky note that read MABEN JONES. “That’s a helluva memory,” he said.

“What happened when you checked it?”

“Nothing. Apparently there’s no such thing as a Maben Jones. Jones part could be made up.”

“Could be,” Boyd said. “Ain’t many Mabens.”

Harvey blew out a stream of smoke and turned in the chair and bent over and let out a gruff cough.

“You ain’t supposed to smoke that in here.”

The sheriff raised up. “Put on a khaki skirt and cop the attitude of a rattlesnake and I got a secretary’s job ready for you.”

Boyd waved at the smoke cloud. “What now?”

“Why don’t you ride back over to the shelter and talk to them? See what she looked like. Any tattoos or anything. If she had a car and what kind was it and whatever else.”

“All right,” Boyd said and he stood up and walked around behind his chair. He paused and looked around the sheriff’s office. Framed newspaper clippings and certificates of duty and pictures of grandchildren were hung without pattern. A hat rack stood in the corner and held Harvey’s gun belt and a green John Deere hat and a full-length raincoat with PIKE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT in block letters across the back.

“I swear to God I should just pack up and go home,” Harvey said. “Hard to believe I gave up being a park ranger for this headache of a life.”

“How many times you gonna tell me that?”

“Gets harder to believe, though. Don’t it? I don’t even understand it myself. All I had to do all day was ride around and wave to men in boats across the dam. Watch kids play on the sandbanks and watch their mommas in their bathing suits with their pretty legs stretched out. Talk to campers, take a beer if offered. Traded all that for car wrecks and wife beaters and fools with guns. And now this crazy meth shit on top of all else. Teeth rotting and brain eating itself. Why the hell would I trade sunrises and sunsets for this?”

Boyd didn’t answer. He then asked Harvey if he could have a cigar.

“Didn’t I just tell you to go and do something?”

“Yeah, but I’m gonna need a couple of minutes to recover.”

The sheriff pulled open a drawer and took out a cigar and handed it to him across the desk. “From what?”

Boyd reached down and took a lighter that was sitting on a pile of papers. “You tell such gutwrenching sad stories I got to cope somehow. I swear to God I’m gonna bust out crying like a little girl next time you start talking about sunsets.”

The sheriff leaned back in his chair and crossed his heels on the edge of the desk and said I wish to God you’d go do something. Boyd flicked the lighter and huffed and puffed until the end of the cigar glowed orange and the fog in the room spread into all corners.

“Maben,” Harvey said.

“Yep.”

“Maybe I knew her momma.”

“She still around?”

“Nah. She wasn’t no good. If it’s the woman I’m thinking about.”

“This Maben had a kid with her,” Boyd said.