Heads You Lose (3 page)

Dave,

Okay, back to you. I think it’s time for a little backstory on the siblings. Maybe you can take care of some of that.

Also, I’ve decided Lacey should be studying botany. You might want to get started on the research since you’re good at that sort of thing. Mind setting that up in your chapter?

Also, I didn’t mention how the parents died. I’ll leave that detail to you. I don’t care how. Just don’t go crazy. Leave the mafia out of it. Capiche?

Good luck,

Lisa

Lisa,

Nice job. I’m reminded how succinct and propulsive your writing can be. Don’t worry about backstory—I’ve already got a novel’s worth in my head.

Just a note for both of us to keep in mind as we continue: Let’s make sure we don’t start taking sides, with you favoring Lacey and me favoring Paul. That’s the kind of predictable gender stuff that derailed us back in the
Fop
days (although I stand by my allegiance to Lucius Van Landingham). I think we’re both above that now.

Dave

CHAPTER 2

“Dude grew fucking honeydews in Qua-
tar
.”

That’s what Paul’s friend and mentor Terry Jakes used to say about Darryl Cleveland. Spoken in Terry’s unplaceable twang, it was the first thing to pop into Paul’s head when Lacey identified the body. Then he pictured Darryl in elementary school, a quiet blond kid always attached to his beat-up ten-speed. After high school, Darryl went straight into the Marines. “The few, the proud, the available,” Lacey said at the time, though Darryl, a former mathlete and an instinctive gearhead, was in fact a pretty smart guy.

In the Marines, Darryl had worked on irrigation systems somewhere in the Middle East—maybe not really Qatar, but definitely not Iraq or anywhere too dangerous. He came back to take care of a family property up in Tulac. Now Darryl lived with his stepmom and worked for growers, including the Hansens, as a kind of overqualified freelance water consultant.

One of the more persistent conundrums surrounding Mercer was that the residents of so rainy a place could be so preoccupied with the acquisition, storage, and allocation of water. Another one was that the natural serenity of the place seemed to foment
¹
anxiety and despair more efficiently than any urban housing project. A third was that no one seemed to ever visit or even talk about Mount Shasta, although there it always was.

Even before he enlisted, Darryl seemed to have a knack for getting water from one place to another. At one of Terry Jakes’s most remote plots, the property owner kept chopping up the hoses they’d run from a nearby spring. Darryl had the idea of buying an old waterbed mattress, filling it up, and taking it to the plot on old fire roads in the back of his Chevy LUV truck. Darryl had paid Paul twenty dollars and all the PBR he could drink round-trip, to help him machete a couple of thick patches so the truck could maneuver to the plot. After that, the yield turned out to be a monster.

Paul remembered it so clearly because it was the first time he left the house after the cabin incident. He’d wondered at the time if Darryl had even heard about it. Bad news traveled fast in Mercer, but Darryl kept to himself. That made it easier to be with him than with any of Paul’s real friends, who didn’t have much experience hanging out with a seventeenyear-old whose parents had just died. And it beat hanging around the house with his comatose sister and the relentlessly nurturing aunt who’d come to live with them during “this challenging time.” Aunt Gwen put a lot of stock in the healing powers of chamomile tea; Paul found Pabst more effective.

Paul and Lacey had both been relieved that they weren’t expected to accompany their parents to the family’s cabin down by Wallis, an hour south of Mercer. They needed some alone time, their parents said. Paul looked forward to a weeklong slow burn of a party. Lacey just welcomed the break in her mom’s surveillance.

During the vacation, a generator under the cabin leaked carbon monoxide into their parents’ bedroom. When a week passed and no one heard from them, Lacey and Paul called the sheriff, who drove up to the cabin and found the bodies. It was a couple of years before carbon monoxide poisoning became a big public health scare. And that was it. Their dad’s sister came down from Bend, Oregon, to live with Paul and Lacey for the rest of the school year. Then Paul went off to college, and Lacey, with one more year of school remaining, moved in with her best friend’s family in downtown Mercer.

Senior year Lacey met Hart, a sandy-haired rich kid from the Central Valley with a rebellious streak. Lacey was the only girl in school who didn’t seem impressed—a fact that drew him to her irreversibly. For Lacey, Paul thought, the appeal was just as simple. He was the one guy in Mercer who wasn’t
of
Mercer. Hart had been all over, even to Europe, and loved to talk about the trips they’d take. Within a month, he and Lacey were inseparable. In two years, they were living together on the outskirts of town. Paul noted that Hart seemed more intent on traveling inside his head, via whatever substance was available, than ever taking Lacey anywhere, but he kept his mouth shut. Once Lacey had made up her mind about something—in this case that Hart was what she needed—there was no point talking about it.

Five years later, Paul came back from college with some basic horticultural knowledge, but without decent job prospects. What he had was land and unlimited access to Terry Jakes, who seemed to know everything there was to know about growing pot, indoors and out. Darryl helped out with the water during a leave from the Marines. By the summer after graduation, Paul was in business. In the five years since then, he’d managed to build up a steady little client base. Lacey had been back with him almost a year. She didn’t exactly embrace the business, but for now it was all they had. And at least she was back with family.

“I’m sorry it’s Darryl,” Paul said, standing over the body now. “But it doesn’t really change anything. Put the watch back on him, leave him here, get rid of the tarp and gloves, wait for someone to find him.”

“I guess. But I hate to think—”

“There’s nothing to think about except getting away from this and staying there.”

Lacey returned the watch to Darryl’s cold wrist and Paul gathered up the tarp. They got home with five minutes to spare before
Cudgel,
the show where people tried to complete an obstacle course while being pummeled by giant mechanical clubs. A stocky receptionist from Michigan took the early lead. The low-center-of-gravity types always beat the natural athletes, Paul noted to himself.

Lacey waited until the commercial break. “So, what now?”
²

“Jesus. Is that your new catchphrase?” Paul replied.

“Nope. It’s still ‘Shut the fuck up.’”

“Standard,” Paul said. “He’s not going to get any less ripe, especially if it stays hot. I bet someone finds him and calls the cops before his stepmom even notices he’s gone.”

“What about the you-know-what?”

“The head? We’re not being recorded, you know. I’ll look around in the morning, but I doubt it’s anywhere near here. Let’s not go sneaking around with flashlights again.”

After
Cudgel
they sat through a whole
Mythmatch
rerun, the one where Dracula beats Poseidon, a highly questionable upset in Paul’s book. It was becoming clear that they were both just delaying going to bed. Not out of fear of a killer lurking in the woods—by now they were used to a sort of constant low-level fear (“alertness,” Paul called it)—but because they knew what to expect in their sleep.

The only uncanny sibling weirdness they shared was that whenever something big happened, they had the same dream. Or not exactly the same dream, except for after the cabin incident, but always close enough to be creepy. “What are we, twins?” Lacey had said after the first time, echoing Paul’s thoughts with irritating precision. They quickly discovered that the phenomenon was boring to reasonable people who had lives and endlessly fascinating to long-winded stoney types, of which Mercer had no shortage.

Paul started to drift off and Lacey hit the mute button, waking him immediately.

“So,” she said. “Why did they cut off his head?”

Paul cleared his throat. “Either
a.
That’s where the bullet was lodged and they wanted to remove ballistics evidence, or
b.
Maybe they wanted a souvenir.”

Among the many verbal habits of Paul’s that irked Lacey, only a few inspired true loathing. Speaking in outline form was number one, followed by the use of horseracing odds to describe the relative likelihood of anything.

“They should have taken his fingers, too,” Lacey said, without contemplating how ghoulish that sounded.

“Fingerprints only matter if he’s in the system,” Paul reminded his sister.

“Right. But why leave it on
our
property?” she asked.

“Either it was random or they knew what they were doing,” Paul replied, trying not to think too hard about it.

“They, not he?” she asked.

“Darryl’s not exactly svelte. Anyway, I’d make option
a
the 3 to 2 favorite, with
b
at 4 to 1. Anything else,
c
through
z
, 10 to 1 tops.”

Lacey and Paul sat there in silence, but neither of them could settle into their usual state of benign mutual irritation. And for the first time, they missed it.

Paul gave in first, with his usual “Night, Lace,” and then lay in bed thinking of the trident in Dracula’s chest. The wrong tool for the job.

In his dream he was walking down rows of different kinds of melons. The oleaginous
³
redheaded detective from
NYPD Blue
and that forensics show was walking next to him in his sunglasses, whispering, “That’s a cantaloupe, Paul.
That’s
a casaba. Do you know the difference? Do you like casabas, Paul?” Lacey’s dream was simpler. She was cutting up melons; inside was just sand.

It was still dark when she got up for her run. She felt the gravitational pull of the tarp and gloves in the garage but stuck to her standard route—they’d agreed to wait for burn day. Halfway through the run was a ridge where she always paused to look out over the house, the town, everything as the sun was coming up. She had an urge to get up there fast just to see if everything still looked basically the same. It did, which was no comfort.

For the rest of the run, she recounted the milestones of her days with Hart. She often did so when she started questioning her move back into her childhood home. First was “I failed Botany 1A at Las Piedras Community College,” which had felt like the bottom at the time. Then it was “I lived in an actual trailer park.” Finally, for the last few months of the relationship, it was “my perfect boyfriend Hart cooks meth.” Yep, her current living situation was still better. But the past was narrowing the gap all the time.

When she came through the screen door, Paul perked up, just barely.

“Melons and Caruso?” he mumbled into his coffee.

“Just melons.”

Then they both heard gravel spitting into mud flaps. Someone was coming up the hill.

NOTES:

Lisa,

You want backstory, you got it. I can already see how we’re going to complement each other, what with your plotting expertise and my eye and ear for detail. I can’t believe how easy this is. Although beginnings were never the problem, if I remember correctly.

Dave

Dave,

Thanks for all the backstory. Since it gives us a solid foundation, feel free to ease up on it a bit next chapter. Also, since I’m on the subject of cutting back, can we maybe keep the made-up TV show references to a minimum? A little goes a long way.

I also want to follow up on my request about Lacey’s botany studies, given her sudden failure of Botany 1A. It’s fine that you didn’t go with my suggestion, as long as there was nothing passive-aggressive in your decision. We’re in this together.

Terry Jakes is going to make an appearance, right? Let’s not make him like Professor Solemni from
The Fop
—quoted but never seen.

Still, I’m feeling positive. We’re off to a good start!

Lisa

P.S. I’m curious where you learned all this stuff about growing marijuana plants. It would explain some things in our history.

CHAPTER 3

Lacey ran to the window and peered through the blinds. Her heart was racing until she saw the mud-whipped truck. An old Ford, green beneath the dirt, but you’d never know that. From now on, every time an engine stirred in their driveway Lacey would assume it was the cops.

“It’s just Rafael,” Lacey said.

She returned to the kitchen, finished her toast, washed her plate, and topped off Paul’s coffee. Paul had never been a fan of stimulants of any kind, but Lacey had discovered that caffeine had a slight impact on Paul’s work ethic and so she pushed it like a regular old drug dealer. In fact, sometimes when she was feeling particularly hostile, she’d crush up NoDoz into his beer.

Approximately three and a half minutes after they heard Rafael’s car in the driveway, the doorbell rang. The delay wasn’t unusual for Rafael. Once Lacey timed him at four minutes and thirty-five seconds. Rafael could never leave his truck until the song on the radio was over—an isolated OCD tic. Lacey once wondered aloud whether Rafael maintained that policy even if he didn’t like the song. Paul said he did.

Rafael Dupree handled half of the college circuit for Paul and Lacey, selling their product along the string of small schools to the south, as well as to other clients scattered around the area. He was a student at Sequoia State who didn’t attend class much until he dropped out. Now that he was dealing, he audited lectures regularly. In fact, he’d even started supplementing his income by selling his notes.