Chapter 11 #3
"That's not luck. That's a place where enough people were raised to think a certain way that it still holds when everything else quits. And I will not be the man on that bench who looks at nineteen people in his yard and does the calculation and sends them down the hill, because if I do that,
then it was all just a hobby."
Crowe looked at him for a long moment.
"I won't hear any arguments to the contrary," Joe said.
"I wasn't going to make one."
"Good."
They walked back down.
At the bottom of the slope, Crowe stopped.
"Henfry."
"Yeah."
"Six weeks of food."
"I know."
"So we have to go get the wheat."
"I know."
"With Teague sitting somewhere south with eleven men and a grudge, and a man on top of the silos who nobody can identify, and eleven families on that road who have not eaten a proper meal since the first of November."
"I know."
"When?"
Joe looked at the sky.
Cloud coming in from the northwest, low and gray and stacked up over the ridge, the kind that meant the first real storm.
"Before that," he said.
They went in the house.
And Imogen was standing in the front room with her back to the wall, and her face was absolutely white, and the man in the green coat was sitting up on the cot with his feet on the floor.
He was looking at Joe.
"Mister Henfry," he said.
"You should be laying down."
"Probably." The man's voice was thin but steady. "Your wife's been very good to me and I've been rude about it."
"What's your name?"
"That's what I want to talk to you about."
Imogen said, "Joe."
"In a minute."
"Joe, listen to me."
"Imogen, in a minute."
"He told me what's on the silo," she said.
Joe turned.
"What?"
The man in the green coat put a hand on his side and breathed carefully.
"There's nobody on that silo," he said.
"Eleven men watched somebody shoot out every light in that parking lot."
"That's right."
"Then somebody's up there."
"There's somebody up there," the man agreed. "I said there's nobody on the silo. Those are different sentences."
He looked up at Joe with pale exhausted eyes.
"I've been on that headhouse catwalk four times since October," he said. "There's a door at the top of the leg and you can shoot out of it from eleven feet back in total dark and nobody on this earth will see a muzzle flash."
"You're saying you know who it is."
"I'm saying I know how she does it," the man said.
The room went absolutely silent.
"She," Joe said.
"Mister Henfry." The man in the green coat closed his eyes for a second. "Your wife was not the only person your father in law paid for eleven years."
Imogen came off the wall.
"Say that again," she said.
"Ma'am, you should sit down."
"Don't tell me to sit down. Say it again."
The man in the green coat put both hands flat on the cot beside him and breathed for a moment.
"Your father paid me for eleven years," he said. "Nineteen ninety three to two thousand four. And I was not the only one."
"You worked in the yard."
"No."
"Then what did you do?"
"I found things," the man said.
Joe pulled a chair around and sat down four feet from him.
"Start at the beginning," he said. "And I want everyone in this room to hear it, because I am finished with information arriving in pieces."
"That's fair."
"And I want your name first."
The man looked at him for a long moment.
"Marchetti," he said. "Samuel Marchetti. People called me Sam and I have not used the last name since 2007 and it feels strange in my mouth."
Imogen sat down.
"I don't know you," she said.
"No, ma'am. You met me twice and you were eleven and nine and there is no reason on this earth you'd remember."
"The photograph."
"I took that photograph," Sam Marchetti said. "August of 1993. That's your grandmother's backyard on Cypress and that's your cousin's shirt with the horse on it and that's Danny holding his boy."
Imogen went white.
"That's Uncle Danny?"
"That's your uncle Danny in 1993 with a beard he shaved off in 1995 and never grew back."
Imogen put a hand over her mouth.
"I looked at that picture for ten hours," she said. "I looked at that man's face for ten hours and I did not know my own uncle."
"He was thirty one and he had a beard and you knew him at fifty," Marchetti said. "That's not a failure. That's just time."
"Then why write her father's friend on the back?"
"Because that's what he was," Marchetti said. "Danny was your father's brother and your father's friend and the only man in that family your father actually trusted, and when I wrote that I was not thinking about how it would read to a woman in Utah in the dark."
He shifted on the cot and winced.
"I wrote it in a truck at two in the morning by flashlight," he said. "It was a bad note. I've written four bad notes to you in six weeks and I'd take all of them back."
Joe said, "Go back to 1993."
Marchetti nodded.
"Your father in law ran a salvage yard," he said. "You know that part. What you probably don't know is what came through that gate in the eighties."
"Aircraft parts," Imogen said.
"Aircraft parts," Marchetti agreed. "And a great deal else. And in about 1991 a man came into that yard with a stake bed truck and sold him something he should not have had, and your father figured out about four months later what he'd bought and who was going to come looking for it."
"What was it?"
"Ma'am, I genuinely do not know. I was hired in 1993 and by then it was gone and the only thing anybody would tell me was that there had been a problem and that it was solved."
"So what did he hire you for?"
Marchetti looked at his hands.
"To make sure it never happened again," he said.
"I checked people. That's the whole job. Somebody wanted to sell him four tons of copper, I found out where the copper came from before he bought it. Somebody wanted a job at the counter, I found out who they were. Somebody started coming around the fence line at night,
I found out whose cousin they were and had a conversation."
"For eleven years."
"For eleven years, at eight hundred dollars a month, cash, in a coffee can, whether there was work or not." Marchetti looked up. "That's the part that tells you who he was. Eight hundred a month for eleven years and about nine months of it was actual work."
"He was paying for availability," Joe said.
"He was paying to never be surprised again."
Imogen laughed, one short broken sound.
"That's him," she said. "That is exactly him. That is the single most my father thing I have ever heard."
"And the other person?" Joe said.
Marchetti went quiet.
"That's the part I've been walking eleven days to say," he said.
He took a breath and it clearly cost him.
"In 1996 your father hired a second one," he said. "A girl. Nineteen years old. She came in off the street looking for work pulling parts and he put her in the office instead, and inside of a year she was doing the same thing I did and doing it better."
"What was her name?"
"Then, or now?"
"Both."
"Then she was Junie," Marchetti said. "That's all I ever had. I don't know if it was short for something. Now I don't know at all."
"And she's on the silo."
"She's somewhere. I don't know that she's on the silo. I know that somebody put eleven rounds into eleven objects from a hundred feet up in the dark last night without hurting a single human being, and I know exactly one person who would do it that way, and I have known her for thirty years."
Joe sat back.
"Why," he said. "Why is a woman your father in law hired in 1996 in a valley in Utah in November?"
"Because I called her."
The room went absolutely silent.
"In August," Marchetti said. "Two months before the lights went out. I called her from a gas station in Cedar City and I told her where I was going and why, and she said she'd think about it, and then I didn't hear from her again, and then there were no phones."
"Why would you call her?"
"Because I was coming here," Marchetti said, "and I didn't like the shape of it, and she's the only person alive I'd want on a hill behind me."
Joe stood up.
"Stop," he said. "Go back. Why were you coming here at all?"
Marchetti looked at Imogen.
"Because Danny called me in July," he said.
"My uncle Danny."
"Your uncle Danny, seventy seven years old, in Redlands, in a house he's lived in since 1981."
Marchetti's voice was very careful. "He called me on a Tuesday and he said, Sam, I need to hire you one more time, and I said, Danny, I'm sixty one years old, and he said, I know, and I said, who is it, and he said, my niece."
Imogen did not move.
"Why," she said.
"He said you'd moved to Utah."
"That's it?"
"He said you'd moved to Utah with a man who was preparing for something, and he said he'd read an article, and he said he was old and he couldn't drive that far and there was nobody left in the family who'd do anything."
Marchetti spread his hands. "And he said, I've got forty one thousand dollars and I want you to go up there and just be near her. That was the whole job. Be near her."
"That's insane," Imogen said.
"That's a seventy seven year old man watching the last person in his family drive off into the mountains and having enough money to do something about it."
"Why wouldn't he just call me?"
"He did," Marchetti said. "Four times. He said you were polite."
Imogen made a sound like she had been hit.
"Oh God," she said.
"He didn't say it to complain, ma'am."
"I was polite." She put both hands over her face. "I remember being polite. I remember exactly being polite to him and getting off the phone because I had eleven things to do and I remember thinking, I'll call him properly next month."
Joe crouched beside her chair and put a hand on her back.
"He didn't hire me because he was angry at you," Marchetti said. "He hired me because he loved you and he had no other way to do anything about it."
"So you came in August."
"I came in August. I rented a place in Kamas and I have been on this mountain, on and off, since the twenty ninth of August."
Joe's head came up.
"Since August."
"Since August."
"You've been watching us for three months."