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MEN WHO CAST NO SHADOWS

In the first hour after midnight, discussing matters of grave import on their way from the town of Kettleton to the property where Sheriff Nash Deacon seems to have disappeared, Galen Vector rides shotgun while Frank Trott drives the big Ford F-150 pickup.

In the back seat of the extended cab, Monger and Rackman are silent, for it isn’t their role to speak. They are the equivalent of golems, as slab-bodied and blunt-faced as men made of mud and imbued with soulless life, supernatural in their seeming indifference to the world, tasked with nothing more than enforcement of the crime family’s interests and the taking of violent revenge.

“This chippy must be somethin’,” Trott says.

“How do you mean?”

“Takes four men to handle her?”

“She’s given us reason to think maybe so.”

“She a witch or somethin’?”

“Why would you ask is she a witch?” Vector wonders.

“Iffen she ain’t some kind of witch, how’s she make grown men disappear?”

“Probably pretty much the same way we’ve done more than a time or two.”

“She ain’t got the muscle we got.”

“Sometimes brains beat muscle.”

Frank Trott is having none of that. “Not so I ever seen. Brains or not, she’s just another skirt.”

“Not just another.”

“How’s she special?”

“You’ve never seen her?”

“Not so I remember.”

“You’d remember.”

“How special could she be, bangin’ Nochelobo’s kind?”

“From what I can tell, theirs was a clean, true love.”

“Heard such a thing talked about, but I ain’t never stood witness to it.”

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking she’s loose and dumb.”

“So then she ain’t a woman after all?”

“Frank, you’re lucky some righteous lady hasn’t put a knife in you as a matter of principle.”

Beyond the town limits, the county road is deserted, a black ribbon unraveling through the moon-washed land. The lack of traffic at this hour isn’t unusual, but something about the way the lonely highway rolls across the undulant valley floor, disappearing and reappearing, disquiets Galen Vector, though it never has before.

Frank Trott says, “How we supposed to break the bitch, find out what she done, what she knows?”

“Do whatever it takes.”

“No limits?”

“None. Too much is at stake.”

“Was just you and me, I’d say let’s make good use of this chippy before we break her. But I never want to see the brothers Frankenstein with their pants dropped.”

Behind them, Monger engages in a noisy clearing of his throat. He’s not preparing to speak, and he hasn’t taken offense, because that isn’t in his nature regarding a matter like this. The noise he makes is just an issue of phlegm.

“Belden, now Nash,” Trott says. “So is this chippy takin’ out who she thinks had somethin’ to do with Nochelobo gettin’ dead?”

“That’s what we need to find out. Her motive, what she knows.”

“Why’s she wait eight months ’tween Belden and Nash?”

“Maybe she worried popping them close together would draw too much suspicion to her. Or, hell, maybe this has nothing to do with Nochelobo.”

After a silence, Trott says, “No matter how good she looks, she’s some hard kind of woman.”

“Or just a survivor, only defending herself and good at it.”

“Whatever she is, shit like this could blow up the project.”

“Won’t happen. It’s too sweet a deal to let anyone monkey-wrench it.”

“Almost seems somebody already done it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Think about them eight months,” Trott says.

“What about them?”

“Not a damn thing been done up on the plateau.”

“A lot has been done,” Vector disagrees. “It’s in permitting. They need sign-offs from a shitload of agencies. It’s moving along.”

“At this rate, by the time it’s done, I’ll be wearin’ them adult diapers and won’t know my own name.”

“The fix is in. They just have to make it look like they’ve followed the rules. Actually, the longer it takes, the better.”

“How you figure?”

“The money’s been committed with full inflation protection and easy approvals of cost overruns, with no performance deadlines.”

“I ain’t never had no problem with performance,” Trott says, “but it’s them deadlines can make a marriage grim.”

“How is Cora these days?”

“Fatter, meaner, peckin’ her new hubby into an early grave. So even if no ground gets broken, you think a blue-collar guy like me has a year-end bonus comin’?”

“You’ll be pleased. Payments are already flowing, just not as big and fast as they will be later on.”

“So we just got to be good citizens and do our part.”

“That’s right.”

“Break the chippy for what she knows, kill her, burn the house down with her in it. Growin’ up, I never woulda thought.”

“Thought what?” Vector asks.

“How one day I’d be paid so handsome just for havin’ fun.”

“It’s a great country.”

“For damn sure.”

Vector’s disquiet has grown, and still he doesn’t know why he is so uneasy. The highway is without another vehicle, as though it leads from nowhere to nowhere. When the engine is shut off, maybe the world beyond the windows will vanish, and a void will take its place. When they open the doors, there won’t be air to breathe.

“Jesus,” he says.

Trott glances at him. “Jesus what?”

“Nothing. I just ... just realized we’re almost there. The turnoff to her place is on the right, maybe a mile or so ahead.”

“Ain’t it across from the church house where four was shot?”

“Directly opposite, yeah.”

“You remember that crazy fortuneteller?”

“What fortuneteller?”

“For a while back in the day, she worked her racket outta that house ’fore they made it a church.”

“I heard some talk about her.”

“I went to see her once,” Trott reveals.

“You believe in fortunetellers?”

“This is eighteen years ago. I was nineteen. Weren’t as smart about things like I am now.”

“What did she tell you? How far off the mark was she?”

“Weren’t no mark to be off from. She couldn’t see a mayfly’s future iffen it was one day through its two days in this world.”

“But what did she tell you?”

“Says she don’t want no money. Just wants what I value least.”

“So she’s working some scam.”

“Yeah. I tell her, shit, I value everythin’ high, ’cause I had to kick so much ass to get it all.”

“She had a comeback to that?” Vector asks.

“She tells me I need some tough love. I start tellin’ her what kind of lovin’ I like best ... but then, I don’t know, I didn’t feel right talkin’ trash at her that way.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Lookin’ back on it, I don’t understand myself. Anyway, she says she sees how I don’t put no value at all on my soul. She says this breaks a mother’s heart.”

“She knew your mother?”

“Shit no. You could break a ball of iron sooner than break that bitch’s heart. I wish she’d died in childbirth and spared me ever knowin’ her.”

“So the fortuneteller . . . ?”

“She says even the devil hisself won’t want such a pitiful thing as my soul. She says she can’t touch it neither until first I do some work to polish it up and give it at least a little value.”

“Your soul.”

“My soul.”

“I don’t see what her scam is.”

“Weren’t no scam. She starts talkin’ about souls, I know she’s bug-shit crazy, can’t be nothin’ she can tell me about the future or anythin’ else. So I’m out of there before she can pick my pocket.”

Trott brakes the car. “Here it is.” He turns right into the dirt lane that leads to Vida’s house.

“Kill the headlights and stop here,” Vector says. “We’ll walk in so we don’t wake her till we want to wake her.”

Monger and Rackman are the last to disembark. When Galen Vector sees them exit into the moonlight, it seems the vehicle can’t have contained them, as if their emergence from the confines of the truck is a stage magician’s illusion. They are not Samoan, although they have that formidable quality. If, as the Bible says, there were giants on the Earth at one time, Monger and Rackman are compacted descendants of that long-lost race. They are half brothers, born of the same mother two years apart. They work in concert, quick and light on their feet for men their size, moving to the same cadence and with the same pitiless intent. With only their bare hands, they can do to a man what others in their line of work would need pliers, hammers, and crowbars to achieve.

The unpaved driveway curves uphill and out of sight, flanked by deep forest. The pale dirt takes the lunar radiance unto itself, but because the source is at its apex, the four men cast not even the faintest of moon shadows.