Chapter 6
Trick
Fitch had been dead about nine days by the time we found him, which meant he'd been dead before Nadia ever tried to hand him a duffel bag in a diner, which meant the man who'd run out of the Ponderosa and left a shoe had been somebody else entirely.
Deadwood took us a day and gave us three things: a storage receipt, a pawn ticket, and a bartender named Yolanda who wanted forty dollars and a genuine conversation about her son's community college applications before she'd say a word.
The forty dollars was the easy part.
"He's got the grades," Yolanda said. "He doesn't have the — what do you call it. The thing where you write about yourself."
"The personal statement."
"He can't do it. He sits there."
"What's he want to study?"
"Welding."
"Then he should write about welding," Nadia said, "and not about his grandmother, because everybody writes about the grandmother and the admissions officer has read four hundred grandmothers this month and is tired."
Yolanda looked at her.
"Huh," she said.
"Tell him to write about the first thing he ever fixed that stayed fixed."
Yolanda wrote it down on a napkin. Then she told us about the storage unit in Cheyenne, unprompted, for free, and threw in the fact that Fitch had paid twelve months up front in cash in March.
Outside, in the truck, I said: "That was a con."
"That was advice."
"You got a storage unit out of it."
"I got a storage unit out of it afterward," Nadia said, "because she liked me. That's not the same thing and I'll fight you about it in Wyoming."
She didn't get the chance, because of what was in the unit.
"That's not possible," Nadia said, when I showed her the date on the receipt against the date on the man in the freezer.
"Look at the date."
"I spoke to him. On the phone. He screamed at me about a jaw."
"I know."
"Trick, he left a shoe."
"I know," I said, "and I'd like to point out that a shoe is the exact kind of detail you'd add if you were building something for somebody who notices details."
We were standing in a storage unit off Yellowstone Road in Cheyenne, and Fitch was in a chest freezer that was not plugged in, and around him, stacked neatly, were forty-one boxes labeled in his handwriting.
Nadia opened one.
"Newspaper," she said.
"All of them?"
She opened four more.
"All of them."
"Wait." Nadia had gone very still over box seven. "Trick. Look at the newspaper."
"It's newspaper."
"Look at the date."
I looked.
Every sheet in every box was the same edition. April the ninth. The Cheyenne paper, four days old on the day Fitch died, and about six hundred copies of it packed into forty-one boxes by a man who had been sitting in a booth in Dickinson every afternoon holding the same one.
"He was reading this," Nadia said. "Sharon told me. Same paper for a month."
"Who's Sharon?"
"Waitress. Long story, she's great, she gets a Christmas card now." She pulled a sheet out and held it to the light. "There's nothing in it. I've been through the front page twice. It's a school levy and a fire in a garage and a photo of a dog."
"So why the same one."
"Because it's not a message," she said slowly. "It's a marker. He was holding a thing that meant 'this is the day,' so that when somebody eventually came looking, they'd find six hundred copies of it and understand that everything after April ninth was staged."
"That's a lot of trouble for a dead man to go to."
"He wasn't dead on April ninth," she said. "That's the point. That's the last day he wasn't."
So: bait. Somebody had killed a fence, kept his phone alive for a week, walked his errands, and built us a room to be standing in.
"Okay," I said. "We're leaving."
"We're leaving," she agreed, and the roll-up door came down behind us with a noise like a filing cabinet falling off a building.
Two figures at the mouth of the row. Backlit. One of them held a shotgun the way you hold a shotgun when you'd genuinely rather not.
The other one said:
"Hi, Nadia."
I felt Nadia's whole body change beside me. Not fear. Something with more architecture in it.
"Pepper," she said.
Pepper Vance was maybe forty, with a grey streak she'd earned and a canvas jacket and a face like a closed ledger. She came down the row unhurried, hands out of her pockets, which I appreciated.
"You look good," Pepper said. "You look rested."
"Pepper—"
"That's what got me. When they sent me the picture from Dickinson. I thought, she looks rested." She stopped fifteen feet out. "I did nineteen months in Nevada and you look rested."
"Yes," Nadia said.
"That's it? Yes?"
"You said a true thing. I'm not going to argue with it."
I want to say something about this scene, because I've thought about it a lot.
Pepper Vance was right.
Not partly. Not in a complicated way that we'd get to unwind later. She had been left in a room in Reno holding a charge that belonged to two people, and the other one had gone out a service corridor, and everything that happened to her after that was a thing my wife did.
I've been in a lot of confrontations where the person pointing something at me was wrong. This was not that, and I could feel the room tilting, and I did what I do.
"Ms. Vance," I said. "Can I—"
"You're the husband."
"I'm the husband. Silas. And I think what happened to you in Reno was—"
"Don't." She looked at me flatly. "Don't do the voice."
"I'm not doing a voice."
"Everybody does a voice."
So I did it properly.
I want you to understand what that means. I stopped being charming and started being accurate — I found the thing she needed, which was for somebody to say her name in the right order in the right sentence, and I opened my mouth and put fifteen years and a god's whole gift behind eleven words.
"You don't have to be here," I said. "You've already paid. Go home."
That's the sentence that has emptied bars. That is a load-bearing sentence.
And I heard it fail.
I don't have a good comparison. It wasn't like a gun clicking on an empty chamber, because that's silence, and this wasn't silence.
It was like a string going in the middle of a note — that specific slack, mid-word, where the tension leaves and the sound is still coming out of you but there's nothing behind it, and you can hear yourself become a guy in a storage facility saying words.
Pepper's face didn't move at all.
"Wow," she said. "Was that supposed to do something?"
"...Yeah," I said. "Yeah, it was."
"Huh," said Pepper.
"Trick." Nadia was looking at me. "Trick."
"It's fine."
"Your face just—"
"It's fine."
"You went grey. I've seen men go grey and it's never once been fine—"
"Nadia, there is a shotgun, can we table it—"
"I'm not tabling it, I'm witnessing it," she said, and that's the only reason I got through the next ten minutes, honestly: because somebody in that storage row was paying attention to me on purpose.
"It's fine," I said, and it was not fine, and I stood in a storage row in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at thirty-four years old, being for the first time since I was nineteen exactly as persuasive as my face and my record, which is to say: a known liar with a shotgun pointed at him.
"Here's where we are," Pepper said. "The people I'm working for want the tote. I don't know what's in it, I don't want to, and I've been told to be polite about it."
"Who's paying you," I said.
"Not your business."
"It's a little my business, there's a shotgun."
"Ivo doesn't want to be here either." Pepper didn't look at him. "Ivo would like everybody to know he's got a daughter."
"She's nine," Ivo said.
"Thank you, Ivo."
"I'm just saying I'm not — this isn't a—"
"Ivo, buddy, we're all clear on where you stand," I said.
"I appreciate that," said Ivo.
"Nobody's paying me," Pepper said. "That's the part you're not going to like. I got a phone call three weeks ago from a man who told me where she'd be and when, and he didn't want anything, and I said what's the catch, and he laughed at me."
Beside me, Nadia stopped breathing.
"Was he wearing a suit," I said.
Pepper's eyes came up.
"How the hell would you know that," she said.
"And what do you want," Nadia said.
"I want you to feel something," Pepper said. "But that's not on the invoice."
And Nadia stepped forward, past me, with her hands open.
"Nadia—"
"I'm sorry," she said.
The whole row went quiet.
"Don't," Pepper said.
"I'm not running a play. I know what one looks like and so do you, so watch my hands.
" She kept walking until she was well inside the range where a shotgun stops being a threat and starts being a liability.
"I left you in Reno. I had four seconds and I used them on me.
I've told myself since then that it was reflex and that anybody would have, and that's a lie, because you wouldn't have, and I knew that at the time, and I went anyway. "
"Stop."
"I sent money to your sister for eleven months and I never once put my name on it, because I wanted to be a good person without having to be a person you could reach.
" Nadia's voice cracked exactly once, in the middle, and she kept going.
"That's the worst thing about me. Not the corridor. The eleven months."
Pepper Vance stood there in a storage row with a shotgun in her hands.
"You sent that?" she said.
"Yes."
"Deena thought it was the church."
"I know. I wrote 'the church' on the envelopes." Nadia laughed, wet and awful. "I'm so good at this, Pepper. I'm so good at it and it's never once made anything better."
The guy with the shotgun looked at Pepper.
Pepper looked at the floor for about six seconds.
Then she pointed the barrel at the ground and said, "Get out of Cheyenne."
"Pepper—"
"Don't thank me. I'll come back on you for it." She was already walking. "I want you to be extremely clear that this isn't over and that I've got no idea what I'm going to want from you, and one day I'm going to call and you're going to answer."
"I'll answer."
"You'd better answer with your actual voice," Pepper said. "Not the other one. I've been listening to you do the other one since Tulsa and I want you to know I've always been able to hear the difference."