Walking the Bones Page 6

  “This end holds the microphone,” he said.

  Vicente leaned closer. “Which end?”

  “This one. With the pinhole.”

  “How am I supposed to see a pinhole?”

  Hoyle turned the other side toward him. “This is the USB port. The opposite end has the microphone. Make sure it is not obstructed in any way. Here on the underside is the power switch.”

  Vicente squinted. “I can’t tell if it’s on or off.”

  “It’s off. When you move it, it will be on. The device will then record for twenty-five hours. After which, the battery will be depleted.”

  “What’s this wrapped around it?” Vicente said.

  “A protective film. Do not remove it until you are ready to install the device. The top side of the device is coated with an adhesive, so do not touch the top side. Peel off the film on top, attach the device, peel away the rest of the protective film, and use your fingernail to switch the device on. Bring the protective film back with you, else you will be leaving your fingerprints behind.”

  Vicente slipped the device into his coat’s side pocket. “Twenty-five hours doesn’t seem like a lot.”

  “He will be here, in this building, until ten or later this evening. During that time, how frequently will a man of our age urinate?”

  Vicente said, “I could urinate a thousand times and never once say anything incriminating. Who’s he going to be talking to in there—his pecker? Oops, I’m sorry, Rosemary.”

  She blew out a little puff of air and waved his apology away.

  “David,” Hoyle said, “while I fully understand, and even share your lack of confidence, I must also concede that we are left with few practicable options. Traditional means of surveillance have gotten us nothing. Other than a new stent in my heart. So if you would rather we forego this tactic, and throw in the towel, so to speak, I will not attempt to argue otherwise.”

  Vicente watched the last of the morning’s parishioners enter the building. Everything he looked at was a sickly yellow.

  “For the sake of our seven little sisters,” Vicente said, “I shall hazard yet forward. One of my nephews can retrieve the device next week.” He popped open the rear door, climbed out, and shuffled toward the church.

  Inside, he queued up behind the last five parishioners at the entrance to the sanctuary. Then, when a deacon touched him on the arm and said, “Follow me, brother. I’ll find you a seat,” Vicente pulled up short and whispered, “Ahh jeez, I gotta go. I’m gonna pee my pants if I don’t. Which way is the restroom?”

  With a hand on Vicente’s elbow, the deacon guided him back into the lobby and turned him to face a corridor. “Public restroom third door on your left.”

  “Thank you, brother, thank you. I feel a tsunami coming on.”

  Vicente walked as briskly as he imagined a feeble man could, found the men’s restroom and stepped inside. Counted to five, peeked out into the hallway, saw no sign of the deacon, and then continued more briskly down the long hall.

  Near the end of the corridor he found the pastor’s private office, its door locked. But adjacent to it was a door marked Private, No Admittance—exactly where he had been told it would be. He turned the gold-plated handle, and the door swung open.

  Inside was a spacious, well-lighted bathroom. Pink-veined marble tile on the floor and walls, a full-length mirror, twin bowl sinks set into a long black marble counter, an electric hand dryer, a shower stall large enough for three people, a Jacuzzi tub, a toilet with a padded seat and backrest, soft instrumental hymns playing through concealed speakers, a long bench seat covered in wine-colored leather, and, atop a marble pedestal, a bronze seraphim with outstretched wings.

  Vicente fingered the listening device. Where to place it? Would Royce do most of his talking on the toilet or standing before the mirror?

  He was a vainglorious man, this much Vicente knew. So, the mirror. The frame, flush with the wall, offered no concealment. But it ended a foot above the floor. Who was likely to look down there?

  Hurriedly, though not as deftly as he would have preferred, Vicente lowered himself to his knees, removed a portion of the protective film, stuck the device to the bottom of the frame, pulled away the rest of the film, and struggled for most of ten seconds to move the power switch to On. Then, just as he was about to shove the protective film into a pocket, the door swung open behind him. A man’s full frontal image filled the mirror. The deacon.

  Vicente clasped both hands to his chest and leaned forward, the rim of his golf cap touching the glass.

  A hand on his shoulder. He looked up in the mirror.

  “What are you doing in here?” the deacon asked. “This ain’t no public bathroom.”

  “Praying somebody would find me,” Vicente said. “I don’t know where I am.”

  “You’re where you don’t belong,” the deacon said, and took him by the arm. “Stand up here.”

  He pulled Vicente to his feet, turned him around, and leaned close to stare into his eyes. Behind the orange lenses, Vicente let his eyes go sleepy, half-closed.

  “You come here drunk?” the deacon asked.

  “I don’t even know where here is,” Vicente said. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in the Resurrection Baptist Church.”

  “Praise God,” Vicente said.

  “I ain’t letting you in the sanctuary like this.”

  “Put me outside,” Vicente suggested. “I’ll be all right. The sunshine will show me the way home.”

  “You remember where you live, old-timer?”

  “Of course I do. Three blocks straight, four blocks right.”

  “You sure you can walk that far?”

  “You just get me started in the right direction, young man, and I’ll be fine. My head’s clearing up already.”

  The deacon guided him back to the lobby and out the front door.

  “Praise God,” Vicente said again.

  “You sure you’re gonna be all right on your own?” the deacon asked. “Maybe you can call somebody to come pick you up.”

  “God bless you, brother,” Vicente said. He gave the deacon a pat on the cheek, then walked away singing “Shall We Gather at the River.”

  From the Ford Bronco, Hoyle and Rosemary watched Vicente and watched the deacon. Vicente came singing out to the sidewalk. Hoyle lowered his window to listen. “I didn’t know he could carry a tune,” he said.

  Rosemary said, “He sang in a blues band in college.”

  Hoyle turned to face her, eyes wide.

  “It’s true,” she said.

  They watched him continue down the sidewalk, still singing.

  When the deacon disappeared back inside the church, Hoyle started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. He caught up with Vicente, who, shambling along at a snail’s pace, was no longer singing, but holding his side and breathing heavily.

  When the vehicle stopped beside him, Vicente pulled open the rear door and climbed inside. “Mission accomplished,” he said.

  Sweating profusely, he pulled off the Ben Hogan, the beard, and the mustache, but not without a few grunts. He scratched at his cheeks and upper lip, the skin flushed and pimply.

  “You must be allergic to the glue,” Rosemary said.

  He kept scratching. “It feels like it’s burning my skin off.”

  To Hoyle she said, “Stop at the first drugstore you see. We’ll get a jar of Pond’s.”

  Fifteen minutes later, in a Walmart parking lot, his face white with cold cream, Vicente leaned back against the seat while Rosemary used tissues to gently wipe the cream away.

  “I almost lost my cookies back there,” Vicente admitted. “It’s such a pain being old.”

  Hoyle said, “Try it morbidly obese.”

  Rosemary cleaned the cold cream from the corner of Vicente’s nose.
“Waa waa waa,” she said.

  EIGHTEEN

  The following Saturday, Jayme took DeMarco shopping for a recreational vehicle. “Three months,” she had told him. “If we can survive three months together in an RV, then we’ll know, right?”

  When she talked, she had him. When he could smell her delicate scent, feel her warmth against him, no argument was available. “You smell like morning,” he’d told her once, by which he meant like sunrise, always clean and fresh and new. But when alone, the stale dark heaviness returned, and trepidation assailed him. He was too old for her; he could never keep her happy; she would dump him some day and break his heart; he didn’t deserve the happiness she offered.

  They were sitting alone in the captain seats of a motionless four-year-old Fleetwood Storm when he finally expressed those doubts. The sun glared down on the wide windshield, the leather smelled like Armor All. The steering wheel grew slick under his hands. Twenty yards across the parking lot, a smiling salesman in a blue suit waited in the dealership doorway, pen in hand.

  “I just think it’s maybe too soon,” DeMarco told her. He was thinking about all those Sundays he would miss, those hours of dusk with his son. It felt like bad luck to break that routine. It felt like neglect, an abandonment of duty.

  She leaned toward him so quickly that he flinched. But instead of knocking his head into the side window, she seized his chin, yanked him across the console, and put her mouth to his ear. “Get over it, my love,” she whispered. “We are buying this mo-bile home.”

  NINETEEN

  Mid-July, southwestern Kentucky

  DeMarco had been jogging down Poplar Street—if his slow, lurching, heel-to-toe locomotion could be called jogging—when the pain in his side convinced him to stop. He used his phone to check the time. 8:36 a.m. He had been jogging for only seven minutes. Seven minutes that felt like thirty. Pathetic. Already his pulse was pounding, chest on fire, eyeballs feeling swollen with the summer heat. Jayme was already out of sight, probably a mile and a half ahead of him by now. Miles he had no intention of covering, not unless he keeled over and an ambulance crew scooped him up before he melted into the pavement.

  This was all her idea anyway. No more beer, no more whiskey. A glass of red wine or two in the evening. Easy on the fried food. Easier on the fast food. Exercise daily.

  Some of the exercise he enjoyed. Some of it made the rest of this ordeal worthwhile. An hour ago, for example. Jayme cool and naked beside him on the RV’s allegedly king-size bunk, her morning scent every bit as sweet as her midnight scent, her fingertips light against his back, her small breasts hard and cool against his chest…

  Stop it, he told himself. Not here. He pulled the front of his jogging pants away from the protrusion, took a quick look from right to left, and was glad to see all but two of the residential yards empty, a man washing his car in the driveway three houses away, a woman kneeling in a flowerbed two houses nearer but with her back to DeMarco.

  Good boy, he told his erection. Down.

  The previous night they had landed in this little town in southwestern Kentucky, maybe twenty miles from the Tennessee border. They had been south of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, three hours from New Orleans, when she got the call, Grandma’s gone. So they immediately reversed direction, swung northeast to Birmingham, then due north on Interstate 65 up through Tennessee to Grandma’s neat little Craftsman home in Aberdeen, Kentucky, population 1400, minus one.

  They had already spent thirteen days on the road, with some lovely layovers in Ocean City and Rehoboth Beach. Then down to the Outer Banks, hang gliding in Kitty Hawk—a thrill for Jayme, but twenty minutes of sphincter-squeezing past-life appraisal for DeMarco—and hand-lining for blue crabs off Manteo’s Little Bridge. “More my speed,” in DeMarco’s words, a cold beer in one hand, a dangling chicken neck skewered to a fishing line in the other.

  They had listened to an audio book of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil all the way to Savannah, but found the city charming despite the book’s ominous whispers, and opted to prolong their stay in lieu of a long drive down the Florida peninsula to Key West. After Savannah they swung inland because DeMarco was uncomfortable on the beaches in his T-shirts and shorts, and even more uncomfortable when, to please Jayme, he briefly exchanged them for swim trunks.

  “You know what we need?” she said somewhere outside of Hinesville, as if she had only then thought of the idea. “We need to start getting some regular exercise. Start eating right. We might be on the road for a long, long time. We need to start taking care of ourselves.”

  DeMarco groaned as if she had moved up the date of his execution.

  “It will be fun,” she said.

  “Fun for somebody already in good shape. Perfect shape, in fact. As for El Lardo here…”

  She reached for his hand atop the steering wheel. “You are by no means fat, babe. You just need to move things around a little.”

  “Right,” he said. “Like completely off my gut and into thin air. Which won’t be thin anymore after my contribution to it.”

  The unpleasant exercise started the very next morning, and every morning thereafter. A quarter-mile slog for him, three or four graceful miles for her. But he was determined to work his way up to a full mile. If only so he could ditch the T-shirt when they made love.

  Then came the phone call from Jayme’s brother, and late yesterday afternoon they swung off the interstate and onto a two-lane state road leading into Aberdeen. The road ran parallel to a wide, shallow stream with high, forested bluffs on both sides. With the roar of the big highways still echoing in DeMarco’s brain, he slowed to forty miles an hour and powered down his window. He took a long, deep breath.

  “What do you smell?” Jayme asked.

  “Trees,” he said. “Water. It sort of reminds me of home.”

  She said nothing. Smiled. Watched the glint of water out her window.

  “See up there?” she said a minute later, and pointed to a large stone building perched near the edge of a bluff. “When I used to visit here, that place was empty, just a stone shell. A bunch of us would sneak up there on summer nights.”

  “And do what?” he asked.

  “Scare ourselves mostly. The place was supposed to be haunted.”

  DeMarco took a last glance at the bluff. “It doesn’t look empty now,” he said. “I think I see some lights on. Or just the sun reflecting off the glass.”

  “Some rich guy bought it a while back. Put millions of dollars in it, Grandma said.”

  “Just think,” DeMarco told her. “If you had played your cards right, you could be living up there in luxury. The queen of all she surveys.”

  “Now you tell me,” she said.

  Two miles later they entered Aberdeen. The short driveway and both sides of the street in front of Grandma’s house were lined with cars from six states, and the covered porch was overflowing with Matsons and their heirs and in-laws, most of them with a beer or iced drink in hand. DeMarco brought the twenty-eight-foot Fleetwood Storm to a stop directly in front of the house. “Grandma was popular,” he said.

  “That’s just family,” Jayme told him, and waved toward the house. When she popped open the passenger door, a spice-scented heat washed inside. “Oh God,” she said. “I’ve missed that smell.”

  “One of your relatives?” he asked.

  “Hummingbird summersweet. See those bushes with the white bottlebrush flowers? Everybody grows them around here.”

  DeMarco leaned toward the open door and inhaled. “Sweet as tupelo honey, honey.”

  “Sweeter. So listen; if you drive about three blocks down, there’s a convenience store on the right. There’s plenty of space to park out behind the store. Just tell whoever’s working there that you’re with me, and we’re here for Grandma. We’ll need a place to park for at least two nights, maybe three.”

  “Three nights?” he
said. “Parked behind a convenience store?”

  She gave him a look, then climbed down, turned, and faced him. “And I’ll see you back here in ten minutes or so. Right?”

  “I should maybe check the fluids and the tire pressure and, you know…”

  “You should maybe get back here and meet my family.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said.

  “And try not to be a smartass, okay?”

  He smiled. “I have been trying.”

  “And someday you’re going to get the hang of it. See you soon.” She closed the door and sprinted up to the porch and into a sea of sweaty hugs. The mourners not embracing Jayme kept squinting in his direction.

  “Uffa!” DeMarco muttered, and gave all the strangers a wave.

  TWENTY

  After guiding the RV into the rear corner of the gravel lot behind Cappy’s Meat, Milk & Bait Mart in Aberdeen, Kentucky, DeMarco entered the little store and introduced himself to the clerk.

  “You with Jayme?” the man asked. “No shit? You married or what?”

  His age was difficult to determine beneath the greasy black hair and week-old scruff of beard. He wore torn jeans and a dingy black T-shirt with the Metallica logo nearly flaked away. DeMarco ballparked the clerk at fortyish, the T-shirt at no younger than thirty. The man’s arms bore crudely drawn tattoos—a skull and crossbones on one forearm, a snake on the other.

  “You know her?” DeMarco asked.

  “Do I know Jayme Matson? She spent every summer here till she was seventeen or so. So yeah, I know her. I surely do.”

  DeMarco wished he had access to his baton or flashlight. One sharp whack would knock that smirk off the clerk’s lips.

  Instead, DeMarco reached for his wallet. “I’m happy to pay whatever you think is fair.”

  The man stroked his scruff. “For Jayme,” he said, “I’ll give you my best discount. Make it twenty…naw, better throw in another ten. I’ve got some regular customers you’re going to piss off for using their parking space.”