The Searcher(88)

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? What do you do for a living?”

“Bit of this, bit of that.”

“That doesn’t sound like enough to keep a man occupied,” Cal says. “You ever consider going into farming? Plenty of that to go round hereabouts.”

Donie snorts.

“What, you don’t like sheep?”

Donie shrugs.

“Seems to me you got some kinda grudge against them,” Cal says. “One of ’em turn you down?”

Donie eyes him, but Cal is a lot bigger than he is. He spits on the street.

“How’d you get that?” Cal nods at Donie’s eyebrow.

“Fight.”

“But I oughta see the other guy, right?”

“Yeah. Right.”

“I gotta tell you, Donie,” Cal says, “he looked OK to me. In fact, he looked happy as a clam. That’s pretty sad, considering he’s half your weight and twice your age.”

Donie stares at Cal. Then he grins. His teeth are too small. “I could take you.”

“Well, I bet you fight dirty,” Cal says. “But then, so do I. Lucky for both of us, I’m in a talking mood, not a fighting mood.”

He can see Donie’s mind operating on two tracks at once. A small, slow surface part of it is taking in the conversation, more or less. The majority of it, running underneath and a lot more expertly, is assessing what he can get out of this situation and what, if anything, might be a threat. Although it’s muted now that he’s sober, he still has that bad, unpredictable hum that first made Cal pick him out: the look like there are none of the usual processes between his ideas and his actions, and the ideas aren’t ones that would occur to most people’s minds. Cal is willing to bet that, while the general concept of the sheep may not have been Donie’s idea, the specifics were.

“Give us a cigarette,” Donie says.

“I don’t smoke,” Cal says. He pats the wall next to him. “Take a load off.”

“Am I under arrest?” Donie demands.

Cal says, “Are you what now?”

“ ’Cause if I am, I’m saying nothing without a solicitor. And if I’m not, I’m going inside, and you can’t stop me. Either way, fuck off from outside my house.”

Cal says, “You think I’m a cop?”

Donie snickers, enjoying the look on his face. “Ah, man. Everyone knows you’re Drugs. Sent over from America to give our lot a hand.”

By now Cal should be used to the unfettered panache of the townland’s rumor mill, but it still has the power to catch him by surprise. This is not a story that he wants taking hold.

“Son,” he says, grinning. “You’re overrating yourself. No police force in the whole of America gives a shit about you and your pissant drug ops.”

Donie gives him a disbelieving stare. “Then what’re you doing here?”

“Here like Ardnakelty, or here like outside your house?”

“Both.”

“I’m in Ardnakelty because the scenery’s so pretty, son,” Cal says. “And I’m outside your house because I live in this neighborhood, and I’m curious about a coupla things that’ve been going on around here.”

He smiles at Donie and lets him decide. With the beard and the hair and all, he looks a lot more like a biker or a survivalist loon than like a cop. Donie eyes Cal and considers which of the possibilities he likes least.

“If I was you,” Cal advises him, “I’d just sit down, answer a few easy questions without making a big fuss about it, and then go on about my day.”

“I know nothing about drugs,” Donie says.

This is exactly the kind of fucky conversation, with exactly the kind of pointless shitweasel, that Cal has been congratulating himself on never having to put up with again. “You already admitted you do, you fucking moron,” he says. “That’s OK, though, because I don’t give a shit about your pissant drug ops either. I’m just a good Southern boy who was raised to be neighborly, and there’s been some things happening to my neighbors that I’d like to understand better.”

Donie should go indoors right about now, but he doesn’t. This could just be because he’s dumb or bored, or because he’s still looking for some way he can benefit. Or it could be because he feels the need to find out what exactly Cal knows.

“I need a smoke,” he says. “Give us a tenner.”

“Left my wallet at home,” Cal says. Even if he was inclined to give Donie money, that would only land him with weeks’ worth of made-up bullshit, punctuated by demands for more cash. “Have a seat.”

Donie evaluates him for another minute, mouth open in a small feral grin. Then he sits himself down on the wall, out of Cal’s reach. He smells like some meal, cabbage and deep-fried stuff, cooked a few days back.

Cal says, “You’ve been killing my neighbors’ sheep.”

“Prove it.” Donie pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his tracksuit pocket and lights one, not bothering to blow the smoke away from Cal.

“You got some unusual tendencies, son,” Cal says, “but seeing as I’m not a shrink, I don’t give a shit about that, either. My only question is, when you go slicing the private parts out of sheep, is that for your own personal enjoyment, or you got a bigger agenda going on?”