Chapter 21

SO, WHO WAS SHE?”

“I don’t know. Someone who works for them. Whoever they are.”

I sat in the passenger side of Melford’s Datsun. I’d eaten the lo mein and put back five or six little cups of tea. Desiree’s little visit that afternoon had left me stunned, but Melford appeared unperturbed. He’d eaten his green-tinted dumplings with splintery chopsticks and talked for a while about a philosopher named Althusser and something called “the ideological state apparatus.” Only once we were back in the car did I try to talk about the woman.

“Doesn’t it bother you that a strange person in peekaboo clothing is shadowing us?”

“Peekaboo clothing isn’t without its pleasures. Don’t you think? I noticed you inspecting the lace of her bra. Maybe you were thinking about buying a gift for Chitra.”

I hated the feeling of being caught. “I do have to admit it. She seemed less scary and more…” I let my voice trail off.

“Sexy?”

“Sure,” I agreed cautiously. I didn’t know that Melford would be the world’s best judge of which women were sexy and which were not. “But, still. We’ve got someone following us. What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Melford said. “She’s not following us now, and to be honest, I don’t think she means us any harm.”

“There are dead people floating all over the place. I know you killed some of them, but isn’t it a bit naïve to assume they don’t mean us harm?”

“I can’t speak for they. I’m sure they do mean us a whole truckload of harm, but I don’t think Desiree does. You could see it in her eyes. She is straying from them. She doesn’t want to hurt us, or even report back about us. I have a feeling.”

“Great, you have a feeling. Fine.”

“It’s the best we have until we know who they are.”

I thought about telling him what I knew, that the Gambler was involved, but I hadn’t told him last night, and now it would look weird, as though I’d been holding out on him and that maybe he ought not to trust me. There would be a way, I decided, to steer him in that direction if it became necessary, or to discover something that would point to the Gambler. In the meantime, I felt safer with his not knowing, even if it meant keeping a huge secret from a guy who was known to resolve his grievances, from time to time, with a silenced pistol.

“So, where are we off to now?” I asked.

“You’ll recall that we have a task to do,” Melford said. “We have to figure out who that third person was, the body in the trailer.”

“What about the money? They’re looking for a ton of cash. Maybe we should find out about that.”

He shook his head. “Forget the money. It’s a dead end. Let’s think about finding the body.”

“And tell me again how we do that?”

“The first thing we want to do is look at the body. Who knows. Maybe they were dumb enough to leave identification on her. Long shot, I know, but it’s worth trying.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s a great idea, poking around at a dead body, looking for a wallet. But, and I may be being dense here, shouldn’t we know where the bodies are first?”

“It so happens, smart guy, that I have a pretty good guess where they put the bodies. You catch that bad odor in the trailer park? You know what that was?”

“The smell of trailers? I don’t know.”

“It was a hog lot, Lemuel. The city of Meadowbrook Grove is mostly just that trailer park, which raises the bulk of its revenue through speeding tickets. Behind it is a small factory farm that raises hogs. Intensive hog farming produces a ton of waste, and that waste has to go somewhere. That bad smell in the trailer park comes from the waste lagoon, a nasty, environmentally hazardous seething pit of pig piss, pig shit, and pig remains. It also happens to be the single best place I can think of to hide bodies. So that’s where we’re off to.”

“And we just waltz onto this property and start digging around through pig crap and no one will mind? Is that it?”

“No one will be there. There’s no Old MacDonald. There’s no oink oink here and oink oink there. The evil brilliance of these things is that they require virtually no maintenance. Just someone to stop by once a day to make sure the animals are fed.”

“How do you know that the guy who feeds them won’t be there?”

Melford shrugged. “Because I killed him yesterday.”

I sucked in a breath. I felt the painful jolt of realization. “Is that why you killed Bastard? Because he worked at a pig farm?”

“Relax. I’m nowhere near that arbitrary. That had nothing to do with it. I feel sorry for most of the employees at these places- they’re exploited just like the animals are. They earn low wages and labor for employers who neglect their health and safety. They’re victims. The owners deserve to die, not the workers. No, this is a coincidence.” He paused thoughtfully. “Sort of.”

Melford pulled off the main road and drove behind the trailer park, then made a sharp right onto a dirt road that I might never have noticed even if I’d passed by a dozen or more times. It cut through a dense wood of scraggly pine and wayward Florida shrubs and white rock. We followed this path for a good mile or so, and all the while the thick stench of sulfur and ammonia became stronger until it felt as if someone had fashioned an ice pick out of bad smells and was shoving it into my sinuses.

We arrived at a fence and Melford stopped the car, hopped out, and removed a key from his pocket, which he used to open a padlock. When he got back in the car, he was still grinning.

“Where did you get the key?” I asked.

“I have my methods.”

Back in the car, and after a little more wood-lined road, we pulled out into a clearing and I could see in front of us a large, flimsy-looking building with no windows. It was maybe two stories high and made out of what appeared to be aluminum sheets. The thing vaguely resembled a warehouse, but a nightmarish one, all alone in the clearing like it was. Or maybe it resembled a prison. I figured Melford must be getting to me.

He parked behind some pines so it wouldn’t be visible if someone happened by- better safe than sorry, Melford explained- and we got out and began to walk toward the building. I thought it smelled bad in the car, thought I was getting used to it, but it grew stronger, harsher. The stench in front of us was like a physical weight in the air. Walking into it was like walking against the force of a wind tunnel. How could anyone work here? How could people stand to live nearby? And the pigs themselves- but I decided not to consider that. I had bigger things to worry about, and I was determined that Melford’s obsession would not become my own.

Around the back of the warehouse, the grass and brush faded into a thick black dirt from which sprigs of grass shot upward intermittently. This beach extended maybe thirty feet, and then the lagoon began abruptly- so abruptly that I thought it must not only be man-made, but concrete lined. It was smaller than I imagined, the word lagoon suggesting tropical excess, lush green, misting waterfalls, flocks of shrill tropical birds exploding into flight. Waste lagoon turned out to be a euphemism, and when your euphemism has the word waste in it, you’re starting from a pretty bad place. I found not a lagoon but a ditch, the worst, most horrible ditch I could ever have imagined, maybe three hundred feet in diameter. Nothing grew near except a scattering of the most ragged of weeds- and the strangely miraculous exception of a single black mangrove tree, whose gnarled roots looped in and out of the soil and into the lagoon.

I expected to get mud on my shoes as we approached, but the dirt was as dry and crumbly as a moonscape. With each step, however, the stench grew worse, impossibly and exponentially worse. The stink, to my surprise, seemed to possess mind-altering qualities. My head grew light, my steps unbalanced. I held out my hands to keep my balance.