Clean Slate

Chapter 20

Mac felt dry-mouthed, hopped up. He honked the Suburban horn. The wrecker kept grinding on, paid no attention. When the left lane cleared Mac powered up next to the wrecker and, rolling even with it, mashed the horn button down in a long steady bray. The driver gaped at him and, with sweeping arm gestures, Mac waved him to the right: "Pull over! Pull over!"

The wrecker did so, easing into the driveway of a small for-sale factory. Mac angled in behind him and jumped out. The wrecker driver, a bulbous man in blue jump-suit and ball cap, climbed down. "What the problem?" he asked, glancing from Mac to his load, no doubt wondering if parts were falling off or something.

"Where'd you get that?" Mac asked.

The wrecker man squinted. "Dogtown. By the tracks. Why?"

Mac looked up at the cab. It was a sad sorry sight. The driver side had been crushed inward from the front wheel well to the back door handle. The windshield was gone. The roof was buckled up. The tires were flat, wheels bent. It looked like some giant kid had squashed it in his fist. Mac felt ill. "This might belong to somebody I know."

"Who're you?"

"I need to look inside."

"You can't go up there. Insurance rules."

Mac looked at him. "I'm a parole officer." He dug out his neck tag, waved it. "The man who – it's a long story – he's a client of mine. I need to look in there."

The driver, Mac could see, was a good citizen type, the kind of man whose default reaction was always to cooperate. Not, thank God, a reflexive hard-ass. "I got another hot run after this, man."

"Just give me a minute."

"Okay, okay. Hurry."

Mac hoisted himself onto the wrecker deck and stepped over one of the chains to get toward the front of the cab. Up close the car was nothing but dangerous, with its twisted jagged rusty metal and glinting strands of broken glass: One wrong move meant puncture wounds. There wasn't much left of the driver side. The passenger side, too, had been V'd inward. As cars and trucks roared by on the Boulevard, Mac heard the wrecker man's voice: "They said she got in the way of one of those county trucks. Gravel hauler. Mashed her up good."

Remembering the power pole, Mac could figure what had happened. Something – the gravel truck, if the driver was right – had hit the cab and driven it with overwhelming force into the pole. That part was fairly clear. What wasn't so clear was the question of Eddie. Mac climbed carefully up onto the buckled heaved hood, and forward to where the windshield had been. The cab interior, what was left of it, was chaos. Litter prevailed, and a wealth of crushed auto safety glass, and the features and equipment – steering wheel, gear shift, head rests, dash board – crinkled and twisted as if seen through a fun house mirror. The odor of old food, and of something else unpleasant, arose. The brown vinyl bench seat, accordioned in and up, was stained darkly. Mac swallowed, feeling sick. Oh Lord Lord Lord, he thought. Could Eddie have been in here?

No way to know. Hell: this might not have even been Eddie's cab.

Taking a deep breath, he called down: "They say anything about a man inside here?"

"I don't know. Hope not. Bad timing, if he was." Yes, Mac thought, bad timing; sounded like Eddie. "You done yet?" the driver urged. "I got to run."

"Just a minute." Mac had spotted a wad of papers between the bench seat and the punched-in passenger side door. Reaching his long arm as far as it would go, he got hold of the papers and fished them out. The parchment looked familiar. From a fold inside, with a clink of metal-on-metal, fell, onto the car hood, a dull, oft-handled star made of bronze.

Which removed all doubt, had there been any, of whose car this had been.

---

Besides its massive headquarters at Judiciary Square, Department of Sheriff had substations located all over St. Marys County. This in a way was a revival of the old days, before government was consolidated at the county level, and the city of St. Marys and its surrounding suburbs was a crazy-quilt patchwork of municipal and law enforcement jurisdictions, which the citizens who paid for it all, even knowledgeable ones, found sometimes to be incomprehensible. The substation system – inaugurated in the late 1980s in tune with a nationwide move toward "community policing" – was just as incomprehensible, since the boundaries among them were ill-defined, quasi-secret, and about as symmetrical and uniform as congressional districts in Texas. The substation covering Dogtown was not only not the one closest to Dogtown. It was a full five miles away, not far from the University and across the street from Receiving Hospital.

Mac parked in the hospital visitor lot and trotted across Bryant Avenue, dodging traffic and concrete barricades that kept cars from getting too close from the front of the substation. Pushing through glass doors that bristled with warning signs, he went through electronic security screening – evidently today was not a day for the Homeland Security people to be impressed with his county employee badge – and over to the high reception desk.

The deputy who greeted him looked out of place in his crisp new black uniform. He was sixtyish and white-haired and he managed to look gaunt of face and pudgy of body at once. Not for him the jogging paths and racquetball courts; this one had spent years pounding down burgers and fries and other cardiac bombs at places like T.G.'s and Denny's and the rump-sprung passenger seats of surveillance cars. The lines of his wasted face showed the effects of years of drinking booze, smoking cigarettes, listening to people try to snow him, and watching others die. The small name plaque on his chest said HALSIG. "What's up?" he asked in a reedy voice, with no interest. Mac had a vision of him rising each morning and crossing a number off his DAYS TILL RETIREMENT calendar.

Mac flashed his neck tag. "DPP," he said. "You guys covered a car that got crushed over in Dogtown, I don't know, sometime over the weekend?"

Halsig's gray eyes bleared and cleared. "By the construction zone. Yeah. Why?"

"It may be tied to a probation case of mine."

"You guys routinely make house calls?" Halsig asked, dark teeth showing in his grin.

"More and more, yeah."

"Vic got squashed like a rat in a closet, poor bastard," Halsig said, shaking his head.

"His name?"

"He's a john doe," Halsig said. "Unless you can make him."

Mac felt sick. Of course he'd considered this possibility ever since seeing the crushed cab, but now certainty was closing in. "Where is he?"

"Wait a minute." Halsig vanished around a cluster of file cabinets. Evidently the paperless office concept hadn't made it this far out in the precincts. Mac waited patiently as several citizens came and went, attended by other deputies with the usual coplike sleepy suspicion. Halsig returned with a file folder, so thin it almost seemed empty. Opening it, he slid it face first on the counter to Mac's hands. A single computer-printed report sheet was clipped to the left. To the right was stapled a color photo of a man's head. It was Eddie Fant, all right.

"Digital camera," Halsig said. "The latest thing."

In the photo, Eddie was in profile. His eyes were open, his mouth in rictus, his dark hair in disarray, his skin so pale the shape of his head was hard to define. But it was him.

The ultimate asshole tax.

"Squashed like a rat in a closet, poor bastard," Halsig noted.

Mac closed his eyes, trying to banish the image, knowing he would not be able to. This would join the ghostly gallery in his head, a new stop for the tour he took in his dreams most nights. Opening his eyes, he stared at the old deputy. "Edward Fant," he said.

"Spelled how?" the deputy asked, spinning the file around, pen a-ready.

"Just like it sounds." The deputy made notes in big block letters. He added Mac's name, too, and his badge number. "What do you mean, ‘john doe'?" Mac asked.

"It's what it says here," Halsig said, still writing. "Not in the system."

"He has to be in the system. He's got a sheet from here to Tuesday. All petty stuff, but --"

"Aw, computers," Halsig said, as if it explained everything. Finishing his writing, he looked up. "Did Fant what's-his-name, the alleged victim or whatever, the uh, alleged victim of this incident?"

"Is that a question?"

"I'll repeat it," he wheezed. "Did he actually live in that cab? Do you know? That's an open question in the report here."

"Said he did," Mac answered, feeling defensive. "I was in the process of finding him a place --"

"No matter now," Halsig said, and flipped the file shut. "Thanks for stopping by."

Mac blinked. "I'm not quite done yet, do you mind?"

Halsig turned back to him. "What else?"

"I mean," Mac fumbled, "what happened? How'd he get killed?"

The deputy sighed, opened the file again. "Freak accident," he said. "A county truck, one of those big gravel dumpers? Parked at the construction site. Brakes picked that minute to let go, down the hill it came, and --" He ran one thin white fist into his palm – "BAM! Mashed the cab into shredder food."

"So, uh. . .nobody was driving the truck?"

"Nope."

"Anybody see it happen?"

"Witnesses? In Dogtown? You ever been there?"

"So the truck," Mac said, "with no brakes, and no driver, ran smack into the cab?"

"With Fant inside it," the deputy confirmed. "Squashed like a rat in a closet, poor bastard."

"Do you have to keep saying that?"

"Poor fella," Halsig amended.

Mac sighed, shook his head. "So he was dead when they found him?"

"Yeah," Halsig replied, consulting the file again, "dead at the scene, it says here." He looked up. "Never knew what hit him. They had to take him out through the windshield."

Mac considered. "So the brakes, on this truck. Picked that minute to let go."

"That very minute. Freak thing, one of those freak things."

"Yeah." Thing is, Mac thought, it could be. It sounded like just the kind of ending Eddie would have. Wrong place, wrong time. Survived two tours in Vietnam, and three war wounds, and that grievous maiming by the scrap yard metal shear, only to get crushed in a derelict cab in Dogtown. "When did it happen?"

Halsig checked. "Thursday night sometime."

"And he didn't make."

"Not in the system."

"But see, that doesn't make sense," Mac said. "Not only is he a repeat offender, he's a veteran. War hero, in fact. There's got to be files on him up the ying-yang."

Halsig squinted at Mac, leaned forward. "Could I have a word?" he asked softly.

"Sure."

With skeletal white fingers, the elderly deputy beckoned Mac closer. Inches away, aromatic of tobacco, Halsig whispered one word: "Lawsuit."

"What?"

"County truck," Halsig rasped softly.

"So?"

"They're afraid next of kin will sue the county," Halsig whispered louder, impatient.

"So they deliberately don't ID him?" Halsig nodded. Mac shook his head. "Well, even if that's true, I guess I've blown it now. But not to worry," Mac added. "There's no next of kin. And this kind of thing, it's not going to make the papers. Who's going to ask questions?"

"Aside from you?"

"Aside from me."

---

The air in the Suburban was thick and hot. Mac notched some windows. It was past ten now. Abigail was handling his first appointment. His next was not till eleven thirty; he had plenty of time to get back to Fannie Annie for that. For long moments, as pedestrians marched past his car toward the hospital outpatient entrance, he sat behind the wheel, leaning back in the bench seat, composing himself. Offenders had died on him before. Never quite like this. Looking back, it seemed to Mac that this, for Eddie, was the final chapter in what had been a story that spiraled down, down, evermore down, in a pattern fully discernible only in retrospect. Slave to his own appetites, unable to act consistently on his positive qualities, an offender whose petty crimes had, despite their potential, never actually hurt anyone other than himself, Eddie had had more than a kernel of genuine decency. Mac would always believe that he had had the potential to straighten out. But he'd never quite gotten there, and now time had run out. Nothing left for Eddie Fant but a destitute burial in county ground, marked only by a number plaque.

Mac's thoughts wandered back over his last session with Eddie. It had gone well, as he remembered it. Eddie was up to date on everything but his costs. And he'd said he'd have that caught up by Friday. By which time he was, of course, dead. Mac remembered Eddie's offhand comment, about some kind of income opportunity. He'd expected to have the dough. Mac had believed him, because Eddie, for an offender, had a remarkably low bullshit quotient. He really thought he'd have the money. Mac wondered what that was about. And whether this "income opportunity" had anything to do with his death.

The truck's brakes had picked that moment to let go.

Just happened to pick that moment.

The wad of papers lay on the seat beside him. The red fob of the Bronze Star stuck out of them. Mac picked the papers up – Eddie's final possessions, homeless now – and unfolded them. The citation was on top. UNITED STATES MILITARY ASSISTANCE COMMAND VIETNAM. CITATION FOR THE BRONZE STAR MEDAL. Mac read it, then pried open the next page. This was a multi-page medical bill from the free clinic over by the train station. A slip of some sort peeked out at the bottom of its several pages: greenish. Mac pulled it out, pressed it flat, and gazed into the bemused face of Benjamin Franklin.