Bull Mountain(26)

The old man pulled the thin, clear tubing that supplied his supplemental oxygen off his nose and let it hang around his neck. He tapped a thin finger on the table, clicking his fingernail against the hard wood. “I’ll tell you, but I already know it ain’t gonna matter nohow. You’re just going to do what you want.”

“Pop, I’m trying to—”

“This family doesn’t need anything from anybody.”

“Cooper,” Ernest said. “This time it’s different.”

Cooper stared at Ernest hard and long. His look was cold with genuine confusion. “Who the hell are you?” he finally said. “And why are you in my house?”

Gareth and Val both narrowed their eyes at the old man, then at each other. “That’s Ernest,” Gareth said. “And this is my house, Pop. Not yours.”

Cooper glared at his son. “You got all the answers, don’t you, Rye? No tellin’ you nothing. I don’t know why you even ask.” He tried to replace the tubing in his nose but couldn’t. His hands had taken to shaking too bad. They did that when he got upset. Which meant they did that all the time.

“Jimbo, help him with that and do me a favor. Bring him home.”

“Sure, Gareth,” Jimbo said, and got up to reattach Cooper’s oxygen. “Where are we with all this?”

Gareth looked at Val first, and the big man nodded. Ernest did, too.

Gareth slid back in his chair and seated a fresh plug of chew in his cheek. “Everybody give me a minute.”

2.

After the room cleared, Gareth picked up the card and turned it over and over in his fingers, running his thumb over the embossed lettering. His father was sick—and dangerous—but he was right about keeping the family safe from outsiders. It felt wrong, but something had to be done. He sat folding, unfolding, and refolding the small cream-colored card between his calloused fingers. Plain block letters printed across it read WILCOMBE EXPORTS, with a phone number underneath with a 904 area code. He noticed the thing barely held a crease. Some kind of goddamn crazy space paper, he thought. He wondered how much something like that cost. He wondered what kind of * would pay for something like that.

The same kind of * that could supply him with what he needed.

The same kind of * Cooper had traded his sanity to keep his family safe from.

He slipped the card back into his pocket, walked over to the phone, and dialed. It rang twice before a husky female voice answered. Not at all what he expected an * to sound like. More like a vampy late-night deejay spinning those terrible disco records.

“Wilcombe Exports. How can I help you?” The woman’s voice dripped with enough honey, Gareth almost asked for a meeting with her instead of her boss. He centered himself and spit a string of tobacco juice into a coffee-can spittoon. “I need to speak with Mr. Wilcombe.”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Go ahead.”

There was a long pause on the line before the woman’s voice finally said, “Sir?”

Gareth spit again. “Look, honey, my name’s Gareth Burroughs. I got this card from a fella named James Cartwright. You might know him as Jimbo or you might not. Why don’t you go ahead and put your boss on the phone.”

“Please hold the line, Mr. Burroughs,” the woman said without losing a bit of her late-night sizzle. Gareth listened to a few seconds of David Bowie crooning “Starman” on the line and looked at the phone like it had just mutated into a dead fish. He guessed that’s what folks like Wilcombe were passing off for music in the sunny state of Florida. He held the phone a few inches from his ear until the line picked back up.

“Mr. Burroughs?”

“Yep.”

“Oscar Wilcombe here.” His voice was nasally and monotone. This was the voice Gareth expected. Weak. Fancy. Entitled. He already missed talking to the female. “Mr. Cartwright said you might be calling.”

“He did, did he?”

“How can I help you, Mr. Burroughs?”

Gareth also took the man’s voice as foreign, but clearly he’d been stateside long enough to make his accent barely noticeable. Probably Cubano, he thought. Florida is full of them Cubanos.

“I wanted to let you know I’ll be down your way in a few days. Was hoping to bend your ear on some business.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” There was the sound of the phone being muffled, and Gareth thought he could make out another voice besides Wilcombe’s—a man’s voice. Although Jimbo had already taken him from the room, he felt his father’s stare across the table from him, and the faint clicking of his fingernail on the wood.

“This family doesn’t need anything from anybody.”

He shook it off. It was the only idea on the table, and he wasn’t his father.

“You still there, Wilcombe?”

“Yes, yes, Mr. Burroughs. Three days’ time works well for me. I can assume you’ll be bringing something along to make the trip worthwhile for everyone involved?”

“If that means the quote I got from Cartwright, then I reckon it would be a good assumption.”

“Outstanding. When you arrive in Jacksonville, call this number and Julie will make all the arrangements.”

“Julie, right.”

Wilcombe might have said something else, but Gareth hung up.