What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy Read Free

gone dark, A&P, Dollar Store, Baptist church, Gulf station. Pulled in behind city hall. One-story prefab painted gray. Probably took them all of a week to put it up, and it’d be there forever, long as the glue held. The paint job was recent and hurried, with a light frosting of gray on bushes alongside. A single black-and-white sat nosed in close outside. Inside, a rangy man in polyester doing its best to look like khaki sat nosed close to the desk. On it were a radio, a ten-year-old Apple computer and a stack of magazines, one of which he was paging through. He looked up as we came in. Wet brown eyes that reminded me of spaniels, ruddy face narrow and shallow like a shovel, thin hair. Something electric about him, though. Sparks and small connections jumping around in there unremarked.
    “Anything going on?” Bates said.
    “ ’Bout what you’d expect. Couple of minor accidents at getting-off time. Old Lady Siler reported her purse stolen, then remembered she’d locked it in the trunk of her car. I ran the spare key out, as usual. Jimmy Allen showed up at his wife’s house around dark and started pounding on the door. Then he tried to steal the car. When I got there, he had two wires pulled down out of the radio, trying to hotwire them.”
    “Been at it for an hour or more, if I know Jimmy.”
    “Prob’ly so.”
    “He in back?”
    “Out flat.”
    “This goes on, Jimmy might as well just start having his mail delivered here.”
    Bates walked over and closed three of the four light switches on the panel by the door. Much of the room fell gray, leaving us and desk in a pool of dim light outside which shadows jumped and slid.
    “Don Lee, this’s Mr. Turner.”
    The deputy held out a hard, lean hand and I took it. A good handshake, no show to it, just what it was. Like the man, I suspected.
    “Pleased to have you, Detective.”
    “Just Turner. I haven’t been a detective for a long time.”
    “Hope you’re not telling us you forget how,” Bates said.
    “No. What happens is, you stop believing it matters.”
    “And does it?” This from Don Lee.
    “Does it matter, or does it stop?”
    “There’s a difference?”
    In that instant I knew I liked him. Liked them both. All I’d wanted was to be left alone, and I’d taken giant steps to ensure that. Rarely strayed far from the cabin, had goods delivered monthly. The last thing I’d wanted was ever again to be part of an investigation, to have to go rummaging through other people’s lives, messes and misdemeanors, other people’s madnesses, other people’s minds.
    “Why don’t you fill me in?” I said.
    “You’n go on home,” Bates told his deputy. “Appreciate your holding down the fort. Dinner must be getting colder by the minute.”
    “All the same to you, I’d as soon stay,” Don Lee said.

Chapter Four
     
    NABORS MADE IT , survived the shooting that is, but he never came back on active duty. Mondays, my day off, I visited him at the rehab facility out in Whitehaven. Sculptured, impossibly green lawns with sprinklers that went off like miniature Old Faithfuls, squat ugly buildings. Never did figure what those were made of, but they put me in mind of Legos. Soft-handed young doctors and platoons of coiffured, elegantly eyelashed young nurses manning the pressure locks, all of them with mouthfuls of comfort like mush for both visitors and patients, couldn’t spit out those lumps of good advice fast enough.
    Suddenly around the station house everyone knew who I was. Older cops who’d pointedly ignored me before, smelling as they often did of sweat socks, stale bourbon or beer, aftershave and last night’s whore, now nodded to me in the locker room. Two shifts in a row I got put in a squad that didn’t haul hard left or need new tires and assigned uptown. Really knew I was some kind of made man the day Fishbelly Joe, the blind albino who’d run a hot dog stand outside the station house as long as anyone could remember, refused my