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He must be smart. Smarter than anyone gives him credit for. Smarter than even he believes himself to be. He must rise to the occasion . . . because if he doesn’t, he may end up dead.
“Talk to me, Argent,” Nelson says. “Tell me everything Lassiter said while you had him in your basement.”
It’s day one: They’ve just left Heartsdale not half an hour ago, heading north. This man behind the wheel—this parts pirate—is intelligent and knows his business. But there’s something about his eyes that hints that he’s lingering near the edge of the world. Balancing on the brink of sanity. Driven there, perhaps, by Connor Lassiter. If Nelson has truly lost his edge, perhaps he and Argent are on even footing.
“Tell me anything you remember. Even if you think it’s insignificant, I want to know.”
So Argent starts talking and doesn’t stop much. He goes on and on about the things Connor said and a whole lot of things he didn’t say.
“Yeah, we got to be tight,” Argent brags. “He told me all this crap about his life before. Like how his parents changed the locks on him during his last stint at juvey, before they signed the unwind order. Like how he resented his kid brother for being such a goody-goody all the time.” These are things Argent had read about the Akron AWOL long before he turned up to buy sandwiches at Argent’s register. But Nelson doesn’t need to know that.
“You were so tight that he cut up your face, huh?” Nelson says.
Argent touches the stitches on the left side of his face—bare now that the gauze has been removed. They itch something terrible, but they ache only when he touches them too hard. “He’s a mean son of a bitch,” Argent says. “He don’t treat his friends right. Anyway, he had places to go, and I wouldn’t let him unless he promised to take me with him. So he cut me, took my sister hostage, and left.”
“Left where?”
Now comes the part Argent has to sell. “Never talked much about it except, of course, when we were high on tranq.”
Nelson looks over at him. “The two of you smoked tranq?”
“Oh yeah, all the time. It was our favorite thing to do together. And the good stuff too. High grade, prime tranq.”
Nelson eyes him doubtfully, so Argent decides to pull back on his story a little bit. “Well, I mean, as prime as you can get in Heartsdale.”
“So he talked when he was high. What did he say?”
“Ya gotta remember, I was buzzing up there too, so it’s all kind of fuzzy. I mean, it’s still up in my noggin, I’m sure, but I gotta tease it out.”
“Dredge is more like it,” Nelson says.
Argent lets the insult slide. “There was this girl he talked about,” Argent offers. “â??‘Gotta get there; gotta get there,’ he said. She was gonna give him stuff. Not sure what, though.”
“Risa Ward,” Nelson says. “He was talking about Risa Ward.”
“No, not her—I would have known if he was talking about her.” Argent wrinkles his brow. It hurts to do it, but he does it anyway. “It was someone else. Mary, her name was. Yeah, that’s it. Mary, something French. LeBeck. Or LaBerg. LaVeau! That’s it. Mary LaVeau. He was gonna meet with her. Drink themselves some bourbon.”
Nelson is silent after that, and Argent doesn’t give him anything more. Let him chew on that for a while.
• • •
Day two: Crack of dawn. Cheapo motel room in North Platte, Nebraska. To be honest, Argent had expected better. Nelson wakes Argent when the sky is still predawn gray.
“Time to go. Get your lazy ass out of bed; we’re turning around.”
Argent yawns. “What’s the rush?”
“Mary LaVeau’s House of Voodoo,” Nelson tells him. He’s been a busy boy doing his research. “Bourbon Street, New Orleans—that’s what Lassiter was talking about. For better or worse, that’s where he’s headed, and he’s got a week-long lead. He’s probably there already.”
Argent shrugs. “If you say so.” He rolls over and presses his face into the pillow, hiding his smile. Nelson has no idea how thoroughly he’s been played.
• • •
Day three: Fort Smith, Arkansas. The blue piece-of-crap van breaks down in the afternoon. Nelson is furious.
“Cain’t get parts for that on a weekend,” the mechanic says. “Gotta special order it. Get here Monday, maybe Tuesday.”
The more Nelson blusters, the calmer the mechanic gets, extracting a kind of spiritual joy from Nelson’s misery. Argent knows the type. Hell, he is the type.
