The Red Hunter(74)

Jane used to be the nurse at the high school and everyone was afraid of her. Unless you were really sick, and then she was an angel. Her hair had gone snow-white since then, but her face had hardly aged. To Josh, she looked exactly the same as she always had. Her dark eyes glittered with intelligence and something else, a kind of hard seeing.

“Don’t let him drag you into whatever trouble he’s got brewing,” she said. “You worked hard to get yourself right. You stay in touch with Lee.”

Jane’s husband, Ray, who was a master carpenter and helped Josh now and again on various jobs, was also in the program. Jane knew well the demon of substance abuse, how it could tear through your life if you let it.

“Can you stay awhile?” he asked. She only worked a half day on the weekends. “I have to go out, and I don’t want to leave her alone with him. Not like this.”

She looked at her watch, at Rhett, her face turning into a hard scowl. “I can stay till two if you need me.”

“I’ll pay you time and a half.”

She waved him away.

“Just text me if he wakes up?” said Josh.

She nodded. “You heard what I said, right? About not letting him drag you into anything.”

“I heard you, Miss Jane,” he said. “Thank you.”

She left the room, and he stood there a second, thinking. His eyes fell on Rhett’s car keys, the sound of his brother’s snoring growing louder. Rhett had showed up driving an old blue 1970 Barracuda. The thing spewed black smoke and was rusting along the bottom, but Rhett said he’d picked it up for less than a grand and it hadn’t broken down yet. Josh picked up the keys, as well as the single one, the survey, then walked over to where his brother lay. Rhett’s cell, an old flip phone, lay beside him on the coffee table. Josh pocketed that, too.

Then he left the house, climbed into his Toyota, and headed toward the Bishop place. What was he going to do? What were his options? He could go to the cops and come clean—about everything. That’s what Lee would no doubt tell him to do. There’s power in the narrative. Saying what was, what really happened, so that you can move clean into the future. Lee was 100 percent about the truth, the whole truth, all the time. Lies took too much energy. They drained you and left you vulnerable.

Josh could call the big man, tell him what he told Rhett, that the money wasn’t there. That he needed to leave the house, the people living there alone or Josh was going to tell the police what happened all those years ago. But that was basically like just asking to get killed. No joke. That man, those men, they didn’t care who lived or died, especially not Josh or even Rhett. The fact that they’d been left alive after the mess at the Drakes’ was basically a miracle. Because they’d proved they could keep their mouths shut, never talked, even when the police brought them both in; that was the only reason either of them was still breathing. The second Josh became a liability, a problem, he was going to find himself buried back in the woods, or in a chipper, or a vat of chemicals somewhere. So far, he’d kept secrets, done what he was asked, kept an eye on the place, an ear out for anyone digging around. He met Dilbert once a week or so at Lucky’s. Dilbert—like all cops—was a talker. He had a pet interest in the Drake murders, because Seth Murphy was Dilbert’s best friend. So it came up—people got caught digging, kids broke in. In all these years, no one ever found anything. Still Josh, dutifully called the old man every couple of months, just to say he still had an ear out. More than ten years he’d done that.

Or Josh could go to the Bishop house and try to talk his way in, just see if he could get down into the basement, say he wanted to measure or something. If there was a tunnel, the entrance would definitely be in the basement. And if it was there, it would explain where that money was and why in all these years he’d never found it. In the best case, he found what he was looking for and got out somehow.

Or he could just go to Lee’s, ask for help. They would talk it through. Josh knew he could trust Lee to keep his mouth shut.

He pulled into the lot of the party store and was parked before he even realized he’d done it. It was the beer he’d watched Rhett drink; it kept popping up in his thoughts—the way it smelled, sounded, that pop and fizz, the swallow. He sat in his car, breathing hard. This was a bad moment; a fork in the road with no good turn. He reached for his phone to call Lee, but then he heard another foreign ringing. Rhett’s phone. He didn’t recognize the number, but he knew who it was. He answered.

“It’s Josh,” he said.

There was a pause, an annoyed sniff.

“What are you doing with his phone?” The old man.

“I borrowed his car,” Josh lied. “He must have left it in here.”

“What’s the plan?”

“I’m going over there now,” he said.

“Now.”

“I know her,” said Josh. “I’m helping her renovate. I think I can talk my way in, get it if I can find it, and get out. She doesn’t have to know anything. No one gets hurt. She’s a nice person, has a daughter.”

There was just breathing on the other line. Then,

“I don’t give a fuck how you get it,” he said. His voice was always flat, no matter what he said, always just above a whisper. “Just get it.”

“What if it’s not there?” he said. “You know I’ve been looking all this time.”