Turn Left at the Cow (22 page)

“I can't believe he was really going to shoot you for that money,” she said.

At the word “money,” my head jerked up. Iz looked at me.

“I know where it is,” I blurted out.

Kenny looked over too. “Dude?”

“I mean, I think I know. But it all fits. It explains everything. It was right over there. I remember the mannequin. We're just ten feet away.”

Kenny and Iz were both staring at me as if I had transformed into one of the voices inside Crazy Carl's head. I wanted to pound on my ankle in frustration, but even I'm not that stupid.

“Just take the flashlight and go around to the other side of this mound and look. It's only been a few days. A holiday weekend. They can't be buried too deep.”

“Bro, look, Dad will be here soon and we'll get you to the hospital—”

“No, listen—remember that morning you found me down in Gram's cellar?” They both nodded.

“I was cleaning her old freezer chest. I emptied out all these really old packages. They were labeled like they were fish and deer and stuff my dad had hunted. Carl saw me dump them right there behind that mound. Iz, you said yourself that he goes through all the junk here to see what he can sell off. The day after Gram and I hauled the bags out here, Carl was in town spending all this money. The same day they found the bait money. I just figured it all out, right before you took down the deputy. My dad hid the money in Gram's freezer fourteen years ago, and it sat there until I got to Minnesota and hauled it here to the dump.”

Kenny jumped to his feet and picked up the flashlight. “The other side of this mound? What do these packages look like?”

“They're in those pumpkin leaf bags from Halloween, you know? They're bright orange—you can't miss them.”

Kenny disappeared around the mound but Iz stayed where she was. I felt her arm tighten around my back. Her voice came out low so that I had to lean even closer to hear her. “When I heard those raccoons screaming, for a minute I thought it was you. I thought he'd hurt you. I thought somebody else was going to be . . . just gone from my life.”

Hearing that, I felt so crappy that I had to look away. “I'm sorry. You were right. Again. Coming out here on my own at night was stupid. Maybe next time I'll actually listen to you.”

She gave a little sniff. I couldn't tell if it was a “fat chance” sniff or if she was starting to cry, so I finally turned my head in her direction.

And then somehow we were kissing, and it turned out that kissing is one of those things that goes much better once you stop thinking so much and just do it. Because as soon as we did, everything kind of worked itself out. It was like how I always imagined flying might be: head-rushing, gut-leaping, my pulse jumping double time when she curled her arm around my neck.

“Iz!” Kenny's voice boomed over the mound. “Get over here and help me look!”

Iz pulled back slowly and we looked at each other for another heart thump. Then she stood up, pulled another flashlight out of her pocket, and turned it on. She looked from me to where Deputy Death still lay stretched on the ground.

I could tell what she was thinking. “I'll keep the flashlight but you go help Kenny,” I said. “You'll only be ten feet away.”

I lit her way around the mound. “If he moves one muscle, you start yelling,” she said.

Actually, screaming was starting to sound like a good idea; without Iz to lean on, I was feeling a little shaky again. Pain was beginning to slice and burn my ankle into strips of beef jerky. I was pretty sure that if it kept getting worse, before long I'd be begging Kenny to just shoot me after all.

I turned the flashlight directly onto Deputy Death and discovered his eyes glittering in the light. He seemed to be staring straight at me.

I tried to focus in on everything he'd told me, but my brain skittered away from grasping all of it. It was like when you try to push together the same poles of two different magnets; hard as you try to force them, they repel. Hard as I pushed, my mind couldn't seem to keep hold of the fact that the deputy had killed my father.

“Did you really kill him?” I said. “I thought he used to be your friend.”

He didn't answer. It was probably a good thing that I didn't know where Iz had put his gun.

Then Kenny and Iz walked back around the mound. Iz dropped an orange bag with a jack-o'- lantern face at my feet and sat down next to me again.

Kenny returned to his seat on Deputy Death's legs. “Right where you said it would be, man. Didn't even have to dig too far for it.”

I ripped open the bag and pulled out a white-wrapped package. “Walleye,” it said, in handwriting I now recognized. I unwound the white paper.

It wasn't poor Nemo.

The package was crammed full of crisp twenties. The old-fashioned kind. It had to be the cash my father had used to buy his own death.

I held up a handful for Kenny and Iz to see. And Deputy Death went crazy.

He let out this wolf howl and somehow kicked up with his legs. Kenny had been staring at me and the money. The whole bucking-bronco thing took him by complete surprise and he went rolling.

Fortunately, Kenny lives and breathes to give people the chance to try to crush him. His football reflexes got him out of the way of those killer boots just in time.

Which was how he happened to be pinning down Deputy Death with the freezer chest just as Big Ken rounded the corner.

At first it looked like maybe Kenny and Animal Planet were onto something. Big Ken swung all 180 or so pounds of his only son up and off the ground in what was either a crushing hug or some kind of extended strangulation ritual. It was actually a pretty impressive show of strength for a guy his age. I would have been worried except Kenny seemed to be holding his own, hugging him back.

Eventually Big Ken let go of Kenny and crouched down in front of me and Iz. He hugged her, too, and then took her chin in his hand and gave her a long once-over. Then he turned to me.

“I'm good, man,” I said. I put up my hands, palms out. I didn't think I had enough air left in me to survive one of his death grips. “Thanks for coming.”

He spotted my ankle, which had swollen up to softball size, and before I could say anything else, he'd reached out to touch it. My whole body convulsed as if he'd zapped me with lightning.

“Okay.” He reached out again and gently leaned me back up against Iz. “I'm sorry. I know it hurts. I had to find out if your foot was still getting blood flow. But it's not turning cold. Now try to wiggle your toes for me. Good? We'll get you to a doctor. You'll be okay.”

It was nice to know somebody thought so. I was actually pretty sure I was going to hurl in Iz's lap.

I'd forgotten about the money. I had thrown it into the air when Big Ken had touched my ankle and I'd jumped like that. A little breeze picked up a couple of the bills and they fluttered like moths in the light. Big Ken turned his head and watched them float away.

Then he stood up and looked at the freezer chest.

A steady stream of wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap vocabulary words were pouring out from underneath it.

“I'm almost afraid to confirm this, but who do you have trapped under there, Kenny?”

“It's Deputy Anderson. Dad, you're not going to believe this—he admitted he was in on that bank robbery, and he said he killed Trav's dad, too. He wanted the money real bad. He was going to shoot Trav to get it, and maybe hurt his grandma. So it's a really good thing we followed Trav out here, right, because we, like, saved his life? By hitting the deputy with your big flashlight. Sorry it's broken. We didn't have a choice, Dad—the deputy's some way heinous dude.”

Big Ken kind of scrubbed at his face with his hands. Then I think he borrowed one of Deputy Death's vocabulary words, but he said it behind his hands, so I wasn't positive.

“I'm going to nutshell this, Kenny, to make sure I understand correctly. On a day when you'd already been grounded for fighting, you and your cousin left the house in the middle of the night, without permission and without asking an adult for help, to come out to the dump. You discovered an officer of the law confessing to serious crimes and threatening someone with his gun, so you confronted him with only my flashlight as a weapon? Which, by the way, is now broken?”

“I guess that's one way to put it,” said Kenny.

“Okay, I just wanted to make sure I had everything clear.” Big Ken scrubbed at his face once more. “All right. First you and I are going to pull this freezer off the deputy.”

“But, Dad—”

“Kenny, I think we've already got enough to deal with, without you being hauled in for smothering him. Does he still have his gun?”

“Here it is, Uncle Ken.” Iz got up and pulled it out of a door-less refrigerator. Once they'd hoisted up the freezer chest, Big Ken took the gun from her and stood looking down at Deputy Death for a moment. The deputy shut up pretty quickly. I think I might have, too, if I'd had Big Ken giving me that look with a gun in his hand.

“All right, I want you two to very carefully elevate Travis's ankle. Put that bag of trash under it.” He pointed to the pumpkin bag. My injured ankle was going to be resting on the most expensive footstool any of us would ever see.

Big Ken pulled out his cell. “After that, you all stay perfectly still until I'm done calling the people who need to be called. But”—and he pointed the phone at Kenny—“please don't assume we're finished discussing this whole episode. By the time we're done with it, you're going to wish for the good old days when being grounded was your biggest problem.” He started dialing one-handedly, never taking his eyes or the gun off Deputy Death.

“See? I told you! He is
so
going to kill me.” Kenny's shoulders slumped.

Like I said, that was the Animal Planet view too. But seriously, wasn't that how I ended up in this whole mess—listening to them about the wack walking catfish?

Maybe it was time I switched channels.

“I know you're excited to be out of that cast. But remember what the doctor said. I don't want you to hurt yourself again.”

“Huh?” I'd been staring at the freak show also known as the bottom half of my right leg since we'd left the specialist. After six weeks it had emerged from the cast fish-belly white and withered. And a little stinky, too.

“Have you been listening to me at all?”

Okay, it was time for me to switch my focus. After all, Ma and I had a new deal in place now.

“I promise to be careful, Mommy. No more running away from killers. I'll just stand still and let the next one catch me so I don't break my ankle again.”

“Ha!” She took a hand off the steering wheel and reached over to squeeze my arm. “There's my favorite smart aleck. These past few weeks I've kind of wondered where he was.”

I glanced over at her. “Still here. I just wasn't sure that was the kid you wanted.”

“I'll take whatever kid I can get, especially if he's in one piece.” She clicked off the car radio and together we listened to the silence for a minute. “But I'll let you in on a little secret, kiddo. I'll take my smart aleck any day over the Travis I found when I first walked into that hospital room. That Trav had me scared. I'm still pretty worried about you.”

“Hey, Ma, cut a guy some slack. I don't know how you got to Minnesota as fast as you did, but even so, by the time you showed up, they'd already put me through a medieval torture ritual in the ER. Plus, I think every cop from the FBI to who knows—the Secret Service and the KGB, maybe—had thumbscrewed me to get all the gory details. Seeing you after all that just . . . surprised me. I think I'd earned the right to a tiny little breakdown at that point.”

She took enough time out of driving to give me the classic Mother Look.

“And now? How are you feeling now? You have to be honest with me, Trav. This is important. Because I won't leave today if you need me to stay longer.”

I looked out the window of her rental while I thought about it. High over the cornfields a flocking spiral of giant birds were funneling up into the sky like a white tornado. Gram had told me they were pelicans, riding the thermals so they could fly as high as possible without wasting any energy. Birds, man—they have life all figured out.

Then I recognized the cornfields: we were almost back to Gram's house. My house too, at least for now.

“Really, Ma, I'm back to all good. Better than I've been in a long time. I swear. Now that people have quit staring at me like I'm some kind of circus act, it really is better. Even that shrink doc has been helping. It's the right thing for you to go back to California.”

“Even though I'm not at all sure it's the right thing for me to let you stay in Minnesota.” My mom sighed.

“I'm gonna be okay. We're gonna be okay. The shrink doc says there are a lot of different ways to make a family work. And you and Dale—that's good for you. I get that. But I need to be here right now. You letting me stay with Gram is huge for me.”

“It's pretty huge for me too, Trav. So remember: I'm not agreeing to a permanent change. We're going to keep talking about it. Maybe every single night during those Skype calls you've agreed to. I'm kind of counting on the fact that once it starts to get cold here, you'll race back home. And when you're ready to give him a chance, you're going to find out that Dale really is a good guy.”

I nodded because I knew she needed me to. Then she pulled the car into Gram's driveway and we both climbed out. My right leg felt a little shaky, like it was still going to be a while before I could count on the ground feeling solid underneath me. But it was good to be out from under the weight of that cast.

“It took longer at the doctor than I expected, so I'm glad I packed the rental before we left,” Ma said. “I've got to dash if I'm going to make my plane. I said goodbye to your grandma earlier, so all that's left now is a hug from you that has to last me until Dale and I come visit in October.”