The Ruinous Sweep Read online

  I’ve killed him, thought Donovan. All I have to do is stand by the side of the road, stick my thumb out, and people die. He hung his head and as he did, noticed a briefcase thrown up against the back corner of the ceiling, which was now the floor in this upside-down world. Water was trickling into the cab from the driver’s side and was puddling, growing deeper, as the car settled. The briefcase sat in a pool of dank water. The ceiling light picked out details in gold. Donovan grasped the handle and lifted the briefcase out. Cracked from the impact, it fell open, and before he knew what was happening, stacks of money were falling into the oily black muck gathering in the car’s interior. He slammed the top of the briefcase shut and lifted it clear. Then he stared back into the car. Several bundles of cash lay partially submerged, the bill on the top of every one a new hundred. The stacks were dense, perhaps two inches thick, wrapped in a mustard-colored currency strap.

  Stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

  Donovan gave in to shock. He stumbled backward until his heels hit the embankment, where he sank to his butt on the gravel. That’s what gravity does, brings you down. Some ancient almost-man stood up some three million years ago to see if anything was coming, to see if there were fruit trees over yonder, maybe a stream, to check if there was a saber-toothed tiger looking for lunch. Gravity didn’t like you standing. Gravity wanted to keep you in your place. But this almost-man all that time ago kept doing it anyway, standing up. Got into the habit. Gravity only laughed. Go on, stand up all you want, you’ll fall eventually. You’re mine.

  Donovan hugged the broken briefcase to his chest. When he had caught his breath, he straightened the briefcase on his lap the right way up, the handle toward him. Slowly he opened it. There was nothing inside but money, two stacks deep, twelve stacks per layer, even though several of the stacks had fallen out into the car.

  He managed to close the briefcase and lock it. Then he leaned his elbows on it and rested his head in his hands and stared out into the wet woodland. He closed his eyes again. Felt pain rake his body. Swore. Opened his eyes. The car’s headlights suddenly went out. Gave up the ghost. He was in the dark again. Which is when he saw, dimmed by shadowy distance, a light, a light far across the other side of the forest.

  He got to his feet, stepped down almost involuntarily into the mud, drawn to that distant light. In three steps the mud was up to his shin, just below his knee, but after three more steps it hadn’t climbed much higher. The ground was soft on top but still mostly frozen, which was the cause of the standing water. Soon he had splashed his way under cover of the woods, leafless but dressed in fog. It felt as if the fog were in him, in his lungs, his head.

  It was then that he heard sirens. Turning, he saw lights far off coming west along the highway, moving at a clip. Cops or an ambulance? No one had passed by on the highway to phone in the accident. But maybe this was a highway where everything just happened all on its own. No cause and effect. Randomness. The opposite of hope.

  He should give himself up. He tried to think how that would work.

  “I surrender.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I did something bad. I’m not sure what.”

  “Did you flip this car upside down?”

  “No, sir. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “What’s in that briefcase?”

  “Oh, right.”

  Something in him resisted. These fog-enshrouded woods would shelter him. He would disappear, just like the other passenger in the Chevy did. And if by chance the water got deeper as he made his way farther into the bush toward that flickering and ghostly pale light, then he would walk deeper into it, weighed down by what he had stolen, until he drowned and saved everyone a whole lot of trouble.

  He set off. The coldness of the midnight water numbed some of the pain in his leg. He sloshed through the swamp, his chukkas sticking sometimes in the muck, squelching as he pulled them free, the ground not quite as frozen as he’d thought. By the time the cops arrived on the scene, he was well beyond the strobing light show taking place on the shoulder of the highway. He stopped behind a tree to look back. There were two cruisers. One of the cops was setting up flares along the road. Dono could hear the crackle of their radios in the liquid air. He watched for another minute or so and then set off again, away from the carnage, swinging the briefcase like a man off to the office: a man of seventeen with a gimpy leg and some dark crime weighing heavily on his broad shoulders, and what he guessed must be several hundred thousand dollars to think about.

  There was something else he had to think about. Something he needed to tell Bee. He stopped. “Are you . . .” he said. But he’d lost it again.

  It was a farm, rendered ghostly by the night: a sprawling yard of dark buildings wreathed in smokelike fog, dominated in the foreground by a long, low-slung storage shed, backlit by a high-wattage yard light. Between the shed and the farmhouse, through the naked maples, he could see equipment strewn here and there, made almost warlike by shadows: machines with hulking limbs.

  He stumbled. Got his balance. Looked down. He had tripped over a blanket lying in the wet grass. The other passenger had come this way, drawn to the light just as he had been. He looked up again and for one startling moment the image in his head clicked and he saw the spread before him in full summer light. He had been here! He couldn’t remember when or why. As a child, perhaps. Yes. He shuddered at the shock of it.

  There were lights on in the kitchen of the farmhouse, or at least what he suspected was the kitchen — suspected or remembered — because there was a side door into the lit room. As he drew nearer, he saw a porch with a bench up against the wall and work boots lying in the light oozing out the back-door window. He drifted away from the house toward the impressive storage shed. He stopped, leaned against the aluminum wall of the shed, April-cold — colder than the air. But it hardly mattered anymore. The chill was in his bones now. “I’m so cold,” he said out loud, hoping that if Bee really were there somehow, she would hear him and cover him or lie beside him and hold him. He breathed deeply. He could smell her, the fragrance of her. He closed his eyes and felt her hand on his chest, registering its movement up and down as if she were counting his ribs. If he could just sleep . . .

  But this was no place to drift off. He opened his eyes and looked around. If he was even to dare approach the farmhouse, he should probably stash the briefcase. He made his way back toward the rear end of the shed and there, a base-run away, was a trash heap: a place of junk and broken things. Approaching the pile, he could easily have imagined that it housed some kind of monstrous spirit all its own. It was constructed of spiked things and gears, iron claws and rotting axles, chipped blades, rolled and rusted barbed-wire fencing, twisted and demented-looking in what light spilled this far. And there, caught up in the barbed wire, was another blanket.

  Such a strange trail of crumbs.

  Around back of the trash heap, he dug into the dead leaves a shallow grave for the briefcase, his newfound fortune, and covered it, grunting with the effort. He laid a rotten slab of particleboard over it. He stood up and surveyed his handiwork. He would need this money. He knew that much. Then he made his way stealthily toward the house, rubbing the dirt off his hands onto his hoodie, shambling, foot dragging — the walking dead following the walking dead — reaching the northeast corner of the house, where the windows were dark. He sidled along its length until stopped by a storm cellar. That’s what he assumed it must be. He’d seen one sometime. Maybe here. A door on a forty-five degree angle to the ground, built into a low bunker. A door you had to lift up. He thought about the car door of the Camaro: all these doors all of a sudden that you had to fight gravity to open. He thought for a moment of entering the cellar and crawling into a safe dark corner to sleep. There was no lock on the door. Then he thought of being cornered there with no way of escape, trapped among the jars of pickles and dusty boxes of potatoes and root vegetables, all bound up in spiderwebs and choked with dust. He must have read that somewhere — wh
at you kept in a storm cellar. Or had he been in one sometime? He felt a bit like a root vegetable. He thought of potato eyes — eyes that sprouted, feeling their way into the dark, looking for the light.

  He passed the bunker and made his way toward the lit windows. He peered inside. Three men were playing cards. The window was cracked open, probably to let out the cigarette smoke that swathed their heads.

  There was a bottle of Canadian Club half empty on the table and a couple of ashtrays piled high. Woodstove-warmed air seeped from the window. Not all the smoke was coming from cigarettes.

  On the table were toppling columns of poker chips, and the air was full of the kind of banter that went along with Texas Hold’em. Each man held two cards; the rest were laid out on the table before them: the flop, the turn, the river. The talk, what there was of it, was drunken, loud between two of them anyway; the third had folded in more ways than one. He seemed to be asleep, his head on his arms in the space where his chips might have been if he’d won any.

  In profile, on the right, sat a man with a gut that spilled over his studded belt. He had a tat on his left bicep, a bicep that was roughly the circumference of Donovan’s thigh. His beard was coming in red, though his hair was a dirty blond with strands of gray in it. There was a massive mane of it, bedraggled and filthy, like he might have been rolling in the dust after bringing down the zebra he’d eaten for lunch. To his right and facing the window sat a skinny dude wearing an improbable leopard-skin vest — maybe stolen from a bad band sometime in the seventies. Under it, he wore a T-shirt that might once have been white. He was a man with sallow skin and a double band of thorns tattooed around each wrist. His skin was stretched too tightly over the bones of his face. His black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, the better to see the assorted bits of metal poking from his earlobes, his eyebrows, his lip. He had a scar down the right side of his face that bisected his eyebrow and curled in toward his mouth, almost as if he were smiling. But only almost.

  Then there was the sleeper. Something about the top of his head, the balding in the middle, the shade of driftwood brown, the set of his shoulders . . . The man started and lifted his head from his arms as if he had just come back from a long way down. As if he had become aware of Donovan staring at him. He looked toward the window and narrowed his eyes as if trying to see the face on the other side — Donovan’s face — frozen with shock.

  “Dono?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” said the lion.

  “Are you in or out, Murphy?” said the leopard.

  “Donovan . . .”

  “Knock, knock!” said the leopard. “Anybody home?” His raised voice covered the gasp uttered by the boy at the window, who stumbled backward and fell down hard on his backside.

  The third gambler was his father.

  More cops, Bee assumed. Detectives this time, in street clothes but still somehow recognizable as cops. He and she cops. He, old school: tweedy kind of jacket, tartan tie, complete with stain, white shirt, gray slacks, brown shoes. The woman was in designer jeans, a pale-yellow top and Windex-blue faux leather jacket. She was wearing blue high-tops on her feet, and one of those feet was tapping. Bee clutched the front of her shrug closed as if maybe she had something to hide. The man had little hair to speak of; the woman wore her gingery-blond hair athlete-short and no-nonsense.

  “Staff Sergeant Jim Bell,” said the man.

  “Hi, Beatrice,” said the woman. “Callista Stills.”

  Bee shook hands. Bell’s big hand was rough as sandpaper, his handshake slack, as if he were aware how easy it would be to crush bones. Stills’s hand felt like Bee’s — like she had just put on moisturizer.

  “You look beat,” said Stills. She smiled, but Bee felt as if this were the talking-to-youth smile she kept in her pocket until needed.

  “I’m okay. Thanks.” And here she was, trotting out the kind of lie you offer to people who pretend to care.

  “The nurse was telling us he’s talking a bit?” said Stills. “Donovan?” she added, as if maybe Bee had been bedsitting a number of patients.

  Bee shrugged, an attempt to hide the fact that her brain had suddenly gone into high alert. She crossed her arms. Sergeant Bell had taken a step back and was leaning against the wall of the waiting room Gerry had led her to, through the locked doors of the intensive care unit. The doors had clicked shut behind her ominously as she’d left.

  “Amazing to think he can talk,” Stills prompted.

  “It’s not really talk, exactly,” said Bee. “Mumbling mostly.” And there was lie number two, definitely a different grade of lie.

  “Okay,” said Stills. “That’s got to count for something.”

  Stills either didn’t have a rank or hadn’t wanted to reveal it.

  Bee looked at Bell, but he was silent. This was obviously a job for the younger, hipper detective. And was the almost-chic look supposed to make her appear like one of the girls? Bee wasn’t sure why, but she had taken an immediate dislike to the woman.

  “It’s kind of unusual for a hit-and-run victim in such bad shape to be in any condition to talk. So we were wondering if there was anything Donovan might have said that would be, you know, useful in any way.”

  “Useful?”

  “Maybe shed a little light on what happened.”

  Bee rubbed her nose, looked around, and saw a box of tissues on a nearby table. Supporting actor Sergeant Bell beat her to it, handed her the box. She nodded her thanks.

  “So no actual words?” said Stills.

  Bee was glad she had left her journal in her bag back in the unit. She shook her head. “What’s up?” she said.

  Stills glanced back at Bell, who nodded, as if they’d rehearsed this. “Shall we sit down?” said Stills.

  There was a little grouping of chairs, cushioned in tangerine-colored plastic. They sat.

  “Do you have anything yet?” Bee asked.

  Stills tipped her head, a noncommittal gesture. “We did a preliminary door-to-door on Wilton. No luck so far. It’s a quiet street, rainy night, not a lot of traffic. We’ll follow up on that, for sure.” Bee nodded expectantly. “Something will come up,” said Stills. “Crime Stoppers. You know. Somebody will have seen something.”

  It didn’t sound like much to Bee. And it sounded as if Stills wasn’t saying everything. Fine. Two could play at that game.

  “A fair number of hit-and-runs turn themselves in,” said Bell. “They drive home, sit for a while in the dark not sure what to do, try to sleep, can’t. And — bang! — their conscience gets the better of them.” He held out his hands as if he’d completed a magic trick and produced a perp. “See it all the time.”

  “So you don’t have anything,” said Bee.

  “We’re following up on a lead,” said Stills, “but we’d —”

  “A lead?”

  Stills had blue eyes, a shade or two darker than her leatherette jacket. She was actually quite pretty, except she looked, right now, like someone who didn’t enjoy being interrupted.

  Bell leaned forward, settling his elbows on his knees. The word “avuncular” came to Bee’s mind. “We’ve got a paint chip,” he said. “That’s what we’ve got.”

  “A paint chip.”

  “That’s right.” He held up his thumb and index finger about a button’s width apart. “It’s not much, but the fellows in forensics can do things with a paint chip.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s not like on TV. They can’t tell you what the guy driving the truck had for supper. Not from a paint chip.”

  It was an attempt at gallows humor, but Bee didn’t miss the one clue embedded in the sentence. “A truck?”

  Stills glared at Bell. Bee didn’t miss that, either. Bell glanced at Stills placidly and then looked back at Bee. “A truck, possibly: a pickup or an SUV.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Stills’s eyes seemed to vibrate with the effort it took not to roll them, but Bell ignored her. “He was hit high.” With his
hand, he indicated a spot halfway up his torso. “Fender height of a car is around twenty inches. The injuries, according to the clinical manager here we talked to, suggest first impact was higher. High enough, it might even be a lift job.”

  “A lift job?”

  “A vehicle with modified suspension, new springs, shocks, and larger than stock tires. For better traction off-road.”

  “Jim, if you’ve just about finished . . .”

  Jim held up a hand to call Stills off. “Know anyone with a red pickup, Bee?”

  Bee’s mind reeled. Suddenly, there was this flood of information. Was this detective suggesting the driver might not have been a stranger? She shook her head, tried to formulate a response, but Stills stepped in.

  “Ms. Northway,” she said, not quite able to hide her irritation at being sidelined. “What was Donovan’s state of mind last time you saw him?”

  Bee looked at Stills, trying to read her. “He was fine.”

  “When was that?”

  “This morning, at school.”

  “Did he seem bothered about anything?”

  Bee wondered if Stills could see the vein pumping in her forehead as clearly as Bee could feel it. “He was excited about getting together with his guys.”

  Bell produced a spiral-bound notebook and started writing. “Guys?”

  “His team. He plays baseball in this adult league. Spring training.”

  “He plays ball?” said Bell.

  “Yes.”

  Bell glanced at Stills, who nodded.

  “How is that important?” said Bee. Bell just wrote in his notebook. Stills was clearly back in charge.

  “Can you give us any names?”

  Bee thought, shook her head. “It wasn’t a scheduled session. Training camp doesn’t open for a couple of weeks. So it was just some guys. Sorry.”