Free Red Dog by Jason Miller

again.”
    â€œThat’d be a record.”
    â€œOh, I’m sure it’d hold up, too. What’s in the envelope?”
    I’d almost forgot the envelope. It was in the back of my trousers, where I’d stuffed it, but my mind was elsewhere. I opened it and looked inside. I showed the inside to Anci: thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

5.
    I FINISHED COUNTING. I PUT THE LAST CRISP BILL DOWN ON the kitchen table and neatened the stack and patted it with my hand. I said, “Goddamn. A hundred thousand bucks.”
    Anci whistled and said, “I want to say goddamn, too. Can I say goddamn?”
    â€œYou already did. Twice. Also, you’re punished.”
    Anci whistled again and picked up some of the bills. “What do you think it means?”
    â€œTruck farm business must have picked up some. Either that or sorghum prices are doing better than I thought possible.”
    â€œProbably it’s that. The sorghum thing.”
    â€œProbably.”
    â€œSay, what is sorghum, anyway?”
    â€œIt’s a crop. Like a kind of grass. They make molasses out of it, some other stuff. Beer sometimes. Why?”
    â€œJust hard to imagine them growing anything. The Cleaveses. Burying stuff, I can imagine. Cutting it down. Burning it. Growing it, not so much.”
    â€œI guess I have trouble believing it, too.”
    â€œUpshot is, we can finally get the air-conditioning fixed. Maybe even get a brand-new one. And none too soon, either. Can’t fit no more box fans in my bedroom.”
    I nodded. “I know it ain’t exactly been a hayride around here lately, and I appreciate your patience . . .”
    â€œBut?”
    â€œHow do you know there’s a ‘but’ coming?”
    â€œYou’re smooth-talking me up for one. A person can tell. That bit about the patience and how you’re proud of me and my maturity and how I’m turning into a grown lady and all.”
    â€œI actually didn’t say a lot of that stuff. The maturity stuff and the grown lady stuff. You tossed those on the pile yourself.”
    Anci wanted to ignore this. She said, “Think you’re being slick, but—guess what?—you ain’t. Might as well have it painted on your face. I know you, you rascal.”
    â€œOkay, but maybe we ought to hold off for a just bit longer, make sure this money isn’t tied up in anything nefarious.”
    â€œIt came from that Cleaves boy, didn’t it?”
    â€œHanded it to me himself.”
    â€œIt’s tied up in something nefarious,” she said.
    I dropped the envelope into the safe in my office back of the house and then Anci and I watched a movie for a while—something happy, Singin’ in the Rain —until we were laughing hard at Donald O’Connor and the unsettling memory of A. Evan Cleaves began to fade and we felt ready for our beds.
    I T RAINED A LITTLE THE NEXT MORNING, THIN PELTS OF RAIN. That should have been a relief, but in the end it was one of those summer showers only seems to make things worse. The paved roads smoldered and the air grew thick with a suffocating humidity. The rainwater pooled in black mirrors on the baked earth, and as soon as the clouds pushed off the sun came out again and drank it all greedily back down.
    â€œIt’s like we’re being punished,” Anci said.
    I said, “We’re being punished,” and went inside to scratch together some breakfast: chunks of fresh apple and melon and some berries so we wouldn’t have to use the stove. Anci found some cold biscuits in the fridge. We filled our coffee with fistfuls of ice.
    We were cleaning up our plates and mugs and things when my cell rang. It was Susan, a cranky woman but a fairly decent business manager (Anci says assistant manager) and occasional operative. Susan had been on the periphery of that mess with Galligan and Luster and the Becketts a while back—my first official case—and when