The Two-Bear Mambo (23 page)

"I think she might have thought she ought to move Soothe."

"Dig him up?"

"If Florida was here to do an investigation, was convinced Soothe was murdered, she might get to thinking someone like Reynolds, or whoever, might figure an inquiry by outside authorities could result from her snooping around, doing an article, and the outside authorities would come in and want Soothe exhumed—"

"To see if he hung himself, or was hung?"

"Yep. So she dug up the body to keep it out of the hands of anyone who might spoil it, want to destroy autopsy evidence that could prove Soothe was murdered."

"She did dig him up, where'd she put him, Hap? And another thing, Florida, petite as she was, wasn't all that suited for grave

digging."

"She didn't like getting dirty either. However, she wasn't above using her feminine charms when it suited her needs. What she would need was a horny sap who thought doing a favor might get him a little stinky on his dinky, even if all Florida really planned to give him was her heartfelt thanks. Get my drift?"

"Well, I'll be goddamned. You mean—"

"Yep."

We sat there about an hour, until the rain slacked, then we started for Grovetown. When we got there the water was running wild and deep through the streets, and we had to park up by an antique shop and wade to Tim's station.

The water pushed at us so hard it was difficult to stand, but we made it. The station was locked up. We went around to the back and beat on the door there, and after a moment Tim opened up. He didn't look that thrilled to see us. He told us to go around front, and closed the door.

He let us into the store. The room was still warm, but the heater was down to coals. We went over and sat by it anyway. I checked out the junk under the stove again. It was becoming my focus point, especially that little blue object.

Tim said, "I've closed up for the day. Weather isn't giving me any work. Unless I can do something for you guys right away, I think I'm gonna pack a few things, go out to Mom's see if I can get her to come with me, head out till all this passes. I'm not wanting to be rude, but

"Tim," I said, "you took Florida out to Soothes grave, didn't you?"

"What?" he said.

I knew I was taking a hell of a flier, but the more I thought about it, considering what I knew of Florida, how she thought, I figured it was as good a flyer as I might ever take.

"She wanted to move Soothe to another place, didn't she? She asked you to take her out there and help her do it."

"Why would she do that?"

I told him what I thought. He said, "That's ridiculous," but he had a look on his face like we'd just caught him jacking off to a grainy photo of a shaved dog butt.

"You took her out there, and you helped move the body. All we want is you to show us where."

Tim studied the floor. He said, "If she did want it moved, and say I did help her, and showed you where the body is, what difference would it make now? All the time he's been in the ground, I don't know they could tell much."

"Not for us to say," Leonard said. "Forensic people can do pretty amazing things."

"And how would that help you find Florida anyway?" Tim asked. "That's what you're after, isn't it? Florida? Not this Soothe thing."

I knew I had hit pay dirt. I tried not to stare directly at Tim, lest I unnerve him. I focused on the blue object under the stove when I spoke.

"I'm not trying to say you did anything wrong, though Texas frowns on bodies being moved around after they're in the ground. But if Florida had you help move the body, and then someone, Reynolds, your father, lackeys, went out there to steal and destroy Soothe's corpse because they thought there might be an autopsy, and the body wasn't there, they might figure since Florida was asking around about Soothe, trying to prove he was murdered, well, they could put one and one together, decide she moved the body. They might not figure on you, but they'd think of her."

"Then," Leonard said, "they kidnapped her, made her tell where it was."

"Considering the boys around Grovetown can be real persuasive," I said, "I think she told, showed them where it was. And : she did, and the body was in a place where they didn't think : would be found, wouldn't cause them a problem, they left it. And they left Florida with it. That's logical. If the body wasn't in a good place, they took it off somewhere in the bottoms where it wouldn't be discovered, and probably took Florida with it."

"If it's the first thing," Leonard said, "we can find Soothe, and maybe Florida. If it's the second thing, then we . . . well, we don't have plans. We're taking it a step at a time."

"I don't know," Tim said.

"We do it this way," I said. "Me and Leonard, we'll figure a way to make it look like we put it together. We won't involve you. I promise you that. You don't help, we got to talk to Canuck."

"Why didn't you do that anyway?" Tim asked.

"Because you and your mother befriended Florida," I said. Because we don't want to tie you to stuff we don't have to."

"And Florida was our friend," Leonard said. "Something happens to a friend and you can do something about it, you ought to."

"But the weather," Tim said. "That's right out there by the dam, and that baby is startin' to pop."

"It floods," I said, "that grave may be worse off than it is now.

both of them are out there, the sooner we get to them, better the forensic evidence. And the sooner we get some kind of knowledge of what happened to Florida, even if it's bad, the better."

"Dirt's soft out there," Tim said, "but with all this water, it could be a mess."

"We'll chance it," Leonard said.

Tim went in the back room and put on boots, pulled on his heavy coat hanging by the stove, then we went out to the big garage and Tim loaded some shovels in his pickup along with a big tarp in case we found Soothe, or Soothe and Florida, then he drove us through the water and up the hill to my truck. Leonard and I followed Tim. We went out the highway where Bacon lived. I hoped the place we were going wasn't beyond that great hill, 'cause if it was we might not make it, and tomorrow Tim might forget he knew anything. I felt the whole situation was fragile, needed to be pushed now.

We came to the road that led out to his mother's, and though it was covered with water, we took it. The water was not deep over the road, but I was nervous as the proverbial long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I kept thinking about that pickup I'd seen wash over the bridge.

We went down the road a ways, then took a worse road, but it went uphill some and the water disappeared. It was really a high hill for East Texas, and when we got to the top, Tim stopped and we pulled up alongside him. Down below us we could see the road was blocked by water over a narrow wooden bridge. The sky was growing dark again. The rain was coming down harder, and it was so cold the heater in the pickup sounded as if it were crying.

Leonard rolled down his window, and Tim his. Yelling across from truck to truck was difficult, the rain was coming down so hard it drowned out our voices.

"I'm afraid to drive across," Tim said.

"Me too," I said. "How far is it?"

"On the other side of the bridge, up the hill and down. To the right. It's the paupers' graveyard."

"I thought that's where he was in the first place?" Leonard said.

"And still is," Tim said. "I didn't want to do this, but now I've thought on it, I think we ought to. Get it over with. We can leave the trucks here. I don't think traffic is going to be a problem today."

When we all had a shovel and I had the rolled-up tarp under my arm and Tim had a flashlight, we started down the hill. We hadn't gone a few steps before Leonard began to limp as if his leg were made of wood. He was using the shovel to help him along. I said, "Hold up. You that bad off, brother?"

"I'm a little stiff is all," Leonard said, shivering in the cold rain.

"It's not that far," Tim said.

"Going across that bridge on that leg, I don't know," I said. Leonard's leg was so swollen it looked like ground meat pumped into a sausage casing. ' >

"Guess all the wear and tear, the weather, it's not doing me any good," Leonard said. "But I don't like being a weak sister."

"Go to the truck," I said. "Me and Tim will take care of it."

"I can make it," Leonard said.

"It's not really that far," Tim said.

"Go on to the truck," I told Leonard. "As a favor to me."

Leonard nodded. "I guess I ought to. I don't like digging anyway. Watch that water." He limped away, tossed the shovel into the bed of Tim's truck, then got in my truck on the passenger side. Through the blurry haze of the rain on the windshield, I saw him lift a hand and wave.

Tim and I went down the hill and into the water, hanging on to the bridge railing as we went. The force of the water was terrific, and I felt tremendous panic. I lost the tarp from under my arm and the water whisked it away.

We inched our way across the bridge, and on the other side the water was barely across the road. We walked along more quickly now, and up a hill, and when we came down on the other side I could see the graveyard off to the right, about halfway down the hill, the stones and markers sloping toward the Big Thicket. Definitely a pauper's graveyard.

There was a barbed wire fence around it and an open gate, and we went through there and Tim took the lead. He led me over to where Soothe's grave was, tapped it with his shovel. The grave was covered in colored glass and the cheap gravestone that stated his name, birthdate, and death was wrapped in colored beads. There was a little doll's head in front of the stone with melted wax on top of it where a candle had burned down. Part of the doll's head had melted, and wax had run down over the painted eye.

"Empty," Tim said. "All this shit was put here after we dug the grave up officially. Me, Cantuck, Reynolds, and the Ranger. You wouldn't believe how hard it was for me to act surprised when we opened it."

"Why all this stuff?"

"Voodoo," Tim said. "It's to keep Soothe in the ground." He strolled over to the grave next to Soothe's, stuck his shovel into the dirt at its base. "Old Mrs. Burk has company."

"You put Soothe in there with her?"

"Florida's idea," he said. "Just temporary. Way the weather's been, washing the place and all, no one could tell we'd done anything when they dug up Soothe's spot."

"Clever," I said. "Let's do it."

Grave digging is not nearly as easy as you might think. It's backbreaking, and next to picking corn out of pig shit with tweezers it's the most boring thing in the world. I tried to focus on things other than my injuries, my sore muscles.

I tried not to think about Florida possibly being down there, and I began to hope I was wrong. If she was dead, I wasn't sure I wanted to find her now. I tried not to think about her being forced to bring those Klan idiots out here, show them where Soothe was buried. I tried not to think about what they did to her afterwards, before they put her down here with Soothe and Mrs. Burk.

As we dug, the water ran down the hill and tried to fill the grave. We could hear the woods crackling as the water ran over the dried branches and leaves, and in the distance I could hear a roaring, which I figured was the rush of the creek swelling. But we kept digging, slogging into the mud, and after about an hour my shovel hit something hard. We scraped it clean. A coffin. Wood.

I stood there on top of it, not knowing exactly what to do next. Tim said, "Mrs. Burk, she's under that box."

I had a sudden uncomfortable thought. I said, "What if Florida told the Klan folks you helped do this? You think your father will have you done in?"

I looked at Tim. He shrugged. "If she'd told, and they were going to do something, I reckon they would have done it already. Let's widen the grave a bit."

"It's wide enough. Let's pop the lid."

"Let's widen it so we can pull it out. I think we got to pull it out, don't you? You lost the tarp, so we have to somehow get the coffin up the hill."

We started digging again, widening the grave. That nasty snake of my subconscious began to work at me again. It was trying to tell me something, as it often did.

Tim climbed out of the grave. He got the big flashlight he had carried with him, turned it on, tilted it at the edge of the grave so that it shone down on the coffin. It had grown nearly dark as midnight in the time we had been digging. Water was nearly to my knees, and rising.

"Why don't you pop the lid now," he said. "Use your shovel."

I looked up at Tim. He was standing above me, leaning on his shovel, one hand in his pocket. The rain was so thick, it seemed to be a sheath around him. Lightning sawed across the sky in bright, crooked explosions.

"All right," I said.

I took the tip of my shovel, started forcing it under the lid of the cheap coffin. It wasn't really an official coffin, which would have taken tools to open. It was one of those cheap kind they called pressed wood, which was essentially high-caliber cardboard. It was already starting to come apart due to all the rain since Soothe had been buried. Then reburied.

It popped free, and the stench from it was horrible. Lying on top of what had to be Soothe, though there wasn't much of him to recognize—bones and skin stretched over a skull so tight it looked like a stocking mask—there was another badly decomposed body. The features were basically gone and the hair was patchy. Flesh hung from the skull like chunks of dried glue and above the right eye socket the forehead was pushed in. The rain splashed on it, made the flesh loosen and it slid off the bone as if it were alive and seeking shelter.

In spite of the damage, I recognized the short blue dress the corpse wore, and there was one blue earring dangling from a rotting lobe, and in that instant, I knew I had been a sap all along. I knew what that blue thing under Tim's stove was suddenly, and I knew why Tim wanted the grave widened.

It had to accommodate me. Then Leonard.

I dropped the shovel, reached for the gun in my coat pocket, tried to turn, but didn't make it. Tim hit me across the back of the head with his shovel, knocked me against the grave wall.

My head was splitting. I assumed I had only been out for seconds, because when I came to Tim was stepping into the grave, a foot on Florida's corpse. He reached the pistol that had fallen from my hand out of the coffin and pointed it at me. I was too dazed to do anything. There were just enough brain cells cooking to know I ought to be doing something and wasn't.

I was standing up, lodged between the coffin and the wall of the grave. There hadn't been room to fall down. Tim was squatting in the coffin now, still pointing my gun at me. If that wasn't enough, he pulled a little automatic from his coat pocket with his empty hand, aimed it at me too.

Two-Gun Tim.

"It's nothing personal," he said. "I didn't want to kill you and Leonard, but I got to now. I kept thinking you'd just go off. I mean, I like you. I liked Florida. It was just one of those things. You knew though. Right there a while ago. You knew. How?"

It took me a second to make my mouth work, but I wanted every second I could buy. "Her earring is missing. I realized it's under your stove, at the store."