“Maybe you should call a cop,” Roof says. “Oh, wait.”
“Well, you got me there,” Hader says. “But truth is, I’m still willing to help you boys any way I can. And you know I’ve still got that old place belonged to my uncle over there in Old Mill, you ever need to lie low.”
“Why would we want to do that?” Roof asks.
“You might not believe it, but I was a pretty good cop once,” he says. “That place is yours, you ever need it.”
“For a price, right?” Roof says.
“Man’s still gotta eat,” Hader says. “But what do you—?”
“Your suspect list for those pretty girls who keep disappearing,” Roof says.
Nash Hader still needs coffee. But for now, he has to admit to himself, the Crockett boys have gotten his attention.
“You mind telling me why?”
“While the cops are fixed on finding who shot a cop nobody in this room gives a rat’s ass about,” Roof says, “we’re fixing to find the girls for them.”
Roof grins at him now, then spits some tobacco juice into the mug Nash Hader has just noticed is in front of him.
“You think old 109 is the only one around here who can be a local hero?” Roof asks. “Now go get us the fucking list.”
SEVENTY-NINE
IN THE END, there’s only one name on the list that interests them: Carlton Fish.
He’s a well-known local hillbilly who’s lived in a run-down shack for as long as anybody can remember, almost like one of those weird survivalists, his place all the way up a mountain in Old Mill, a few miles at least from civilization, the way Fish has always preferred from everything the Crockett boys know. He hardly ever comes down the mountain these days, which makes it as easy to stay away from people as it is for people to stay the hell away from him.
“A drunk and probably a perv,” Hader had told Roof and Lynyrd before they left his apartment. “Cops have been shooing him away from schools, on the rare occasions when he does come down off his mountain, for years. I gotta tell you boys, I wanted him to be good for these girls going missing in the worst way. So did Burt Webb, for that matter. He talked to Fish, I talked to him, because both of us wanted everybody in town to get off our asses every time another girl would go missing. But we had nothing to tie him to any of it.” He’d paused and said, “And so you know? That old man even givesmethe creeps.”
That night, using the directions to Fish’s shack that Hader had written out for them, the Crockett brothers leave the car they’ve rented in a patch of trees off Route 61, just in case somebody might be looking to track their pickup after the fact. They then make the long walk up the mountain from there, finally seeing the smoke coming out of Carlton Fish’s chimney on what’s an unseasonably cold night.
When they get close to the shack, they see a pickup that looks older than this mountain parked practically at the front door.
Roof and Lynyrd both have guns. Lynyrd has the bag with the goodies in it slung over his shoulder, walking a few yards behind his brother.
“Okay,” Roof says, “let’s get ’er done.”
They knock on the door and, after a couple of beats, hear Carlton Fish growl at them from inside.
“Go away, whoever you are.”
“We just want to talk,” Roof says.
“I open this door,” Carlton Fish says, “you’ll be talking to the business end of my Mossberg.”
“You don’t want to do that, Mr. Fish,” Roof says. “It’s Roof and Lynyrd Crockett. You know who our daddy is, and he’s the one that sent us.”
There’s a pause now. They still don’t hear any movement from inside the shack.
“Sent you here for what?” Fish asks.
“Give us just five minutes and we can explain,” Roof says. “Then we’ll be on our way, I promise.”
The door opens now and Carlton Fish stands in front of them, his white beard looking to be nearly a foot long, ratty-looking red flannel shirt hanging out of carpenter jeans, T-shirt showing underneath it, casually pointing a 20-gauge Mossberg at them, as promised.
“What’s this BS about your daddy?” he asks. “I ain’t seen him in years.”
