Bloody River Blues

Memphis.
    “Drive,” Ralph Bales instructed, looking back at the camper. “It’s like he was looking at us.”
    “Well, was he?”
    “What?”
    “Looking at us?”
    “Just drive.”
    The night was cloudless. Off to their left the big plain of the Missouri River was moving slowly southeastward. The same water that had looked so muddyand black yesterday, when he was planning the hit, tonight looked golden—lit by the security floods of a small factory on the south shore.
    Ralph Bales had thought that locating the witness would be easy. Just find the store where he’d bought the beer and trace him from there.
    But he’d forgotten he was in Maddox, Missouri, where there was not much for the locals to do except be out of work and drink all day, or do muscle labor for Maddox Riverfront Services or stoop labor for farmers and drink all night. Ralph Bales, checking the yellow pages, found two dozen package good stores within walking distance of where he’d collided with the witness as he climbed from Lombro’s car.
    So they’d ditched the Trans Am, sent the Ruger to sleep forty feet below the choppy surface of the Missouri and sped home to change clothes then returned here in Ralph Bales’s own car. He had shaved off the mustache, donned fake glasses, a rumpled Irish tweed cap, a pressed blue shirt open at the neck, and a herringbone sport jacket. Pretending to be an insurance company lawyer representing the cop who’d been shot, he walked from store to store until he finally found a clerk who remembered selling a case of beer to a thin man in a bomber jacket at around seven that evening.
    “He said he’s got a camper parked over at Bide-A-Wee.”
    “It’s that . . . What is it?” Ralph Bales asked.
    “You know, that trailer park? By the concrete plant?
    “One thing,” the clerk had warned solemnly. “Don’t ask him for a part in the film. He don’t take to that.”
    Film?
    Ralph Bales and Stevie had then cruised down to the river and parked in the weedy lot outside Bell’s Bide-A-Wee. They could look through the camper’s small windows, but Ralph Bales had not been able to see clearly if it was the beer man or not. Then the door had opened and Stevie had gotten it into his head that he was calling in a description of the car to the cops and had burned out of there, Ralph Bales shouting, “Be careful with the transmission case,” and Stevie Flom not paying any attention.
    They now cruised through the night, at fifty-five m.p.h. even, away from Maddox.
    “Tomorrow morning, let’s pay him a visit.”
    “But maybe he’ll give the cops a description of you tonight.”
    Ralph Bales considered this. He shook his head. “He doesn’t even know about the hit. Christ, he had a party going on in there. A guy’s a witness to a hit, he isn’t going to have a party. I mean, wouldn’t you think?”
    Stevie said he guessed and put on a Metallica tape.
    AT SEVEN THE next morning they started with the sledgehammers on the Winnebago door.
    The interrupted dream was about old-fashioned cars driving slowly in circles around a movie set. Someone kept asking Pellam if he wanted a ride andhe did but whoever asked didn’t stop long enough to let him get in the car. Pellam had grown very bored waiting for a car to pick him up.
    It wasn’t a great dream, but at least he was asleep when he was having it and when the sledgehammers started he became awake. Pellam sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bunk in the back of the camper. He found his watch. Pellam had often been up at seven but he had rarely wakened at that hour. There was a big difference between the two.
    The hammers pounded.
    He stood up and pulled on his jeans and a black T-shirt. He looked in the mirror. He’d slept in one position all night—on his stomach like a baby—and his black hair had gone spiky. Pellam smoothed it and rubbed at the welts that the crumpled sheet had left across his face. He went to see who was swinging hammers.
    “Hey, dude,” Stile said, walking into the kitchen past him. “I was sent to collect you.”
    Pellam put a kettle on. Stile stood beside the camper’s tiny dining table, still covered with cards and Pellam’s meager winnings. He looked at the chili pot and tapped the black crust with his fingernail. He foraged in the miniature refrigerator. “You got zero food in here.”
    “Why are you here?” Pellam mumbled.
    “Your phone. It’s not turned on.” Stile found an old bagel and broke it in