Very Bad Men (3 page)

Lark kept an eye on him from the kitchen. He laid the tire iron on the seat of a kitchen chair and took an ice tray from the freezer, a pair of dish towels from a drawer. He piled it all on the chair and carried the chair into the living room.

He bundled some ice cubes in a towel and the old man accepted them without a word, laying the bundle against the side of his nose. Lark filled the second towel and pressed it against his own forehead.

“What's wrong with you?” the old man asked.

“I get headaches.”

The old man's laugh sounded half like a groan. “That's a damn shame.”

“It's a symptom,” Lark said absently, and then a thought occurred to him. He had settled into the chair with the tire iron across his lap, but now he rose and put the iron and the towel on the floor and dug his notebook from his pocket.

He found the page he wanted and held it a foot away from the old man's eyes. “Tell me what you see,” he said.

Twisted strands of iron-gray hair hung over the old man's brow. His eyes squinted. “That's my name.”

“Is there anything odd about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it moving?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What color would you say it is?”

“Is this a joke? It's written in black.”

Lark turned the notebook around and read the name.
Charlie Dawtrey.
“Yes, the ink is black. I know that. Intellectually. But the words seem red to me. They don't seem red to you?”

The old man's eyelids fluttered. “God in heaven.”

“They don't ripple, like they're floating on water? They don't expand and contract, like they're breathing?”

“God in heaven. I'm talking to a crazy man.”

“I'm not crazy,” Lark said, turning back a page. “What about these names?”

He watched the old man's eyes move down the list.
Henry Kormoran. Sutton Bell. Terry Dawtrey.

“That's my son. My son and two of his no-good friends.”

“But you don't see the letters breathing?”

“Is this about my son?”

Lark closed the notebook and slipped it into his pocket. “Are you close to your son?”

“Not for a long time.”

“If something happened to you, would it matter to him?”

“What's this about?”

“Would he mourn, if you were gone?”

“What do you want here?”

A dull ache wound itself in a figure eight behind Lark's brow. He returned to the chair and reached for the towel-wrapped ice.

“I want you to answer my question,” he said. “I think if you were gone, it would affect him. He would mourn your passing.”

The old man sat forward slowly. His ice pack lay neglected on the sofa cushion beside him. His nose had stopped bleeding.

He said, “Mister, if you think you can get to my son by hurting me, you've gone off the rails. No one's going to care much when I'm gone, least of all Terry.”

“You haven't kept in touch with him?”

“He's been in prison the last sixteen years. I gave up on him, and he gave up on me, a long time back.”

“You never go to see him?”

“Not anymore. So why don't you clear out now, and take whatever grudge you've got with you.”

“I don't have a grudge.”

“You're wasting your time.”

“I don't think so. You have a sparrow calendar.”

The old man brushed iron-gray hair out of his eyes. “What?”

“There's providence in the fall of a sparrow. I'm pretty sure that's in the Bible.”

“Oh Lord, you've gone crazy again.”

“I'm not crazy. That line about the sparrow—it means we're all part of a bigger plan. You shouldn't be afraid of playing your part. You shouldn't lie to get out of it.”

“I haven't lied to you.”

The towel was damp against Lark's brow. He felt a drop of icy water roll along the bridge of his nose and onto his cheek.

“You have a sparrow calendar,” he said again. “Every other Saturday is marked with a ‘T.' Short for ‘Terry.' You're still close to him. You visit him at the prison every other Saturday.”

The old man didn't try to deny it. He flexed the fingers of his swollen right hand. His eyes settled on Lark's.

“You don't look good. How's your head?”

Lark shrugged the question away.

“Maybe it's trying to tell you something,” the old man said.

The pain traced its figure eight. The ice helped, but not enough.

“The headaches are just a symptom,” said Lark. “I'll have them until I deal with the underlying problem.”

“Is that what you're doing? You imagine killing me is going to solve all your problems?”

“It's all I can think of.”

The old man shook his head sadly. “Look, mister, you don't want to do this.”

“The truth is, I don't. If there were another way, I'd try it. But they've got fences at the prison, and towers. This is the only way I can get at him.”

The old man's eyes fell shut and a jagged breath escaped him. When he spoke, his voice was a whisper.

“The men in that prison are animals. Terry's been in there sixteen years. Do you think there's anything you can do to him that hasn't been done? Do you think you're going to make him suffer, by killing me?”

Lark drew the towel away from his brow, dropped it to the floor. A cube of ice skipped quietly over the carpet.

“It doesn't matter if he suffers,” Lark said. “The point is, they're going to let him out. That's how it works, isn't it? Just for a few hours.”

The tire iron lay at Lark's feet. He bent to pick it up.

“I can't get through the fences, or past the towers. But I think they'll let him out. He'll be at your funeral.”

D
oesn't matter how you get there,
Lark's father used to say.
Just so long as you get there.

Thomas Lark spent thirty years building Mustangs at the Dearborn Assembly Plant on the Rouge River. After the first few months the job lost all its appeal, but he clung to it anyway, because he only wanted a few modest things—a wife and a family and maybe a fishing boat—and it didn't matter how he got them as long as he got them.

So he stayed on, weathering layoffs and buyouts, and he found a wife—Helen, a kindergarten teacher. They had a son, Anthony. And Thomas Lark bought four boats over the years, starting with a small aluminum skiff, ending with a twenty-four-foot fiberglass runabout. His three decades on the assembly line earned him two years of retirement before a valve in his heart gave out and he collapsed on a dock one fine spring morning an hour before sunrise.

Helen Lark, who had spent her days teaching children their letters and numbers, never complained about the equation of her husband's life: thirty years in exchange for two. When Anthony Lark wept at his father's funeral, she drew him close and did her best to comfort him. Then she took him by the shoulders and said, “Promise me you'll use the time you're given.”

He thought of her on the morning after his encounter with Charlie Dawtrey, and though he would have liked to sleep the day away he decided it wouldn't be right. He had a few days, at least, until Dawtrey's funeral, but there were preparations he needed to make.

He took a long drive south through mild June heat, crossing over the Mackinac Bridge around midmorning—Lake Michigan on his right, Lake Huron on his left. He kept on driving, first to the town of Grayling on the Au Sable River, then west to Traverse City. At a sporting-goods store on Front Street he bought a Remington hunting rifle, a scope, and a box of 30-06 cartridges. He ate lunch in a park by the water and watched the sailboats out on the bay.

He drove back to Grayling in the afternoon and got on I-75 heading north. When he saw an exit that looked like it wouldn't lead much of anywhere, he got off the interstate and drifted along until he found an unpaved road that took him through bramble fields and past an abandoned grain silo.

Three miles after the silo, he pulled over to the side of the road and got the rifle out of the trunk. He mounted the scope, loaded the magazine, and fired into a stand of trees thirty yards from the roadside. The first shot chipped bark from a sickly looking ash and shocked a pair of crows into the sky—a reckless flutter of black wings against the blue. He took a few more practice shots, returned the rifle to the trunk, and drove back to I-75.

The next day he made some calls from his hotel room and found the funeral home handling the arrangements for Charlie Dawtrey. A mass would be held at Saint Joseph's in Sault Sainte Marie. The burial would be directly after at a local cemetery. The date for the funeral was July eighth, still a week and a half away. He took some encouragement from that. The family would need time to arrange to have Terry Dawtrey attend.

The days passed slowly, but Lark didn't mind. Sometimes in the evenings he flipped through the channels and managed to find the woman with the wondrous smile. He watched her with the sound down and his headaches stayed away from him.

If he couldn't find her, he could always read. He had some paperback novels with him—Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly—and several copies of a mystery magazine called
Gray Streets.

He had an affinity for crime stories because the language tended to be simple, the sentence structure straightforward. The words stayed put on the page—not like the names he had written in his notebook, which still seemed to float and breathe in a way that made him uncomfortable.

There was a term for his condition; his doctor had told him all about it.
Synesthesia.
A confusion of the senses. A rare affliction that manifested itself differently in different people. Some experienced sounds as having color. Some associated textures with emotions. In Lark's case, written words were endowed with color and movement.

Ornate language tended to unsettle him. Passages from nineteenth-century novels might glow like hot coals or squirm like heaps of snakes. In fact, he tried not to read anything written before the First World War. Hemingway made a good cutoff point. Hemingway's sentences were a nice deep blue, and they mostly held still, like stalks of wheat on a windless day.

Novels from the 1950s and '60s were generally safe. Kurt Vonnegut wrote comfortable blue-green prose that moved patiently, like a slow upward escalator. Joseph Heller was a different story. Heller's characters rarely came out and said anything: instead they “cried heatedly,” they “declared jubilantly,” they “whispered cautioningly.” All those adverbs made it impossible for Lark to get through
Catch-22
. For Lark, adverbs buzzed like static on a television screen or swarmed like marching ants.

Mystery novels rarely gave him any trouble. A wisecracking first-person narrative flowed reassuringly, a stream of cool green letters. So mysteries and newspaper stories occupied Lark's days as he waited for the funeral of Charlie Dawtrey.

Dawtrey's death was all over the papers. The early stories hinted at progress. The sheriff of Chippewa County believed there could soon be a break in the case. Then a headline announced that an arrest had been made: Kyle Scudder.

The development caught Lark off guard, though he told himself he should have anticipated it. Scudder had been in a fight with Charlie Dawtrey on the night of the old man's death. He had knocked Dawtrey to the floor in front of a barroom full of witnesses.

In the days after he read the headline, Lark filled several pages of his notebook, writing a summary of his encounter with Charlie Dawtrey. He thought at first that he should go into reasons and motives, but when he did, the sentences were black (not a good black) and bristly and grainy. They trembled on the page until he scratched through them and decided he would stick to the facts.

It crossed his mind that he could send his account to Kyle Scudder's lawyer and spare an innocent man from being put on trial for murder. But in the big scheme of things it seemed unimportant. He didn't feel any responsibility toward Scudder.

There's no justice in the world,
his father used to say.

But Lark felt strongly that he needed to lay claim to the death of Charlie Dawtrey.
We all need to own our actions,
he thought.
Otherwise no one will ever know us.
That bit of wisdom never came from his father. It was something his doctor was fond of saying.

 

 

THE SUN GLOWED on the copper spire of Saint Joseph's Church. The bell in the tower struck ten and Anthony Lark listened from his Chevy in the lot across the street. He could see the vestibule standing open, a pair of heavy oaken doors swung wide.

Dozens of mourners had already gone inside, far more than Lark had anticipated. He had thought of Charlie Dawtrey as a man with a single son, but now he supposed there must be other children, a whole extended family. Lark watched them ascend the granite steps of the church.

The woman from the Cozy Inn—Madelyn—arrived late. She had a teenaged boy with her, the one whose photograph hung on the wall of Dawtrey's cottage.

Lark saw them pass inside, and then he watched a sheriff's cruiser draw up in front of the granite steps. A stocky deputy with curly hair stepped out on the driver's side and walked around the front of the car, looking up and down the street. A second deputy—younger, slimmer—opened the rear passenger door and hauled out Terry Dawtrey.

Dawtrey wore a gray suit that hung loosely on him, no tie. His dark hair was shaved down to stubble. His hands were clasped in front of him. A glint of sunlight caught the circlet of a handcuff on his wrist.