Free The Clinch Knot by John Galligan Page B

my copies that count. All you’ve done is lost the nice little envelope to put your money in.”
    “I have no money.”
    “Not my problem. I gave you gas.”
    “I guess you fish the Roam River,” I said. “On Dane Tucker’s land.”
    That startled him. “Do I?”
    “You and your friends. Your buddies in the SUVs.”
    He drew oxygen through his nose, his sore eyes narrowing. “My buddies …”
    I said, “Those skinheads work for Dane Tucker, so given what you’re going through, I can understand why you looked the other way about the campground thing. I really can. Just the sight of that river makes my hands shake. But Tucker fired Henderson Gray a year ago. You can ask Gray where he was last Wednesday without messing up your fishing.”
    He kept those red slits on me for a long, silent passage into what I slowly understood was a region of no return. I had picked a fight with a dead man, hooked into his grief. Behind him, his wall of treasures from the land said it all. Among the petrified wood and arrowheads and hunting and fishing photos, one treasure in particular caught my eye. It was a wren’s nest, a perfectly woven cup of dried bunchgrass and bison hair, wed to the three-pronged fork of a willow sapling. Chubbuck displayed this remarkable integration of natural elements like a trophy on the shelf behind his head.
    “But I guess you’re not going after Gray.”
    “That’s correct,” he said. “I am not.”
    “I’m a nuisance here.”
    “Pretty much.”
    “Does he talk?”
    “Does who talk?”
    “My buddy Sneed.”
    “He talks.”
    “Did he confess?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Is his brain damaged?”
    “Seems to be.”
    “Does he have a lawyer?”
    “Not at this point in time.”
    I stared at this invalid, suffering man. He had to be delusional, had to be ripped on oxy-contin if he was headed where I thought he was.
    “You’re going to try to take a confession from a brain damaged black man without a lawyer? What the hell do you think this is, Alabama, nineteen-fifty-five? Don’t you see how that’s going to work out?”
    Chubbuck pushed his chair back a bit from the desk and opened a drawer. He put a fly box on the desk. “You might be surprised how things are going to work out.” It took him several tries to squeeze the clasp and open the box.
    “As for a lawyer, I’m waiting on next-of-kin,” he said as the fly box separated to display neat rows of mayfly patterns. “Depending on how things develop, we may have a call to make on life support as well as legal representation. Leave me a phone number, Mister Oglivie. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
    I snarled back. I told him Sneed had no family. I said his mother was an offender, someone he meant never to see again. Sneed ran away from his mother and his foster care at fourteen, I said, and no one followed. But Sheriff Chubbuck disinterestedly pushed papers around his desk, found a pair of tweezers. He aimed these unsteadily into the fly box. At length, he extracted a tiny baetis dun, a mayfly imitation, held it up in the light between us.
    “Say what you will. But we found a likely Sneed,” he said, “working in the Houston Fire Department.”
    He turned the fly around for inspection. “Open your hand.” He dropped the baetis into my palm. It was perfect, tight and balanced, uncommonly detailed for a size 18. “I tied that,” he told me. “Just a year ago.”
    I looked up. Chubbuck put that raw, dry squint on me, gave it to me hard, and he held it.
    “That one fools them every time.”
    The door creaked open.
    “Russell,” the sheriff snapped, “take this man out of my county. And do it right this time.”

A Desperate Tangle, A Wishful Mess
     
    Outside in the lot, Deputy Russell Crowe said to me, “You want to see what Elmer Sorgensen can do?”
    The skinny old drunk sat on a yellow parking cleat beside Crowe’s cruiser gnashing Doritos with his bad teeth and rinsing the shards down with Red Bull. He grinned at me