The Peripheral

59

People think the really bad ones are something special, but they’re not,” her mother said, sitting on the edge of her bed, next to the table crowded with meds. “Psycho killers and rapists, they never ruin as many lives as a man like Corbell does. His daddy was a town councilman. Stuck-up boy, Corbell, selfish, but no more than lots that age. Thirty-some years on, he’s ruined more people than he can be bothered to remember, or even know.” She was looking at Flynne.

“We took something on,” Flynne said. “Took the money. Nothing to do with him, that we knew of. Now he’s turned up in it. Not like we asked him to, or asked for him.”

“If Burton’s moonlighting, and the VA finds out,” her mother said, “they’ll cut him off.”

“Might not matter, if things work out.”

“VA’s not going out of business any time soon,” her mother said.

Flynne heard the door open behind her. Turned.

“Sorry,” said Janice, “but that asshole’s giving Burton the gears. Didn’t want to be standing where he might see me and think I heard.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“On your bed, doing hate Kegels. Went up there after I’d put the coffee on and helped Ella put her hair up, when Burton told us who was coming over. You okay, Ella?”

“Fine, honey,” said Flynne’s mother, but her sickness was showing.

“You take your meds now,” Janice said. “You’d better get back there,” she said to Flynne. “Sounded like there was business being done.”

Flynne noticed the picture of her very young dad, younger than Burton, in his dress uniform. The room had been his den, then her mother’s sewing room. After she started having trouble with the stairs, they’d moved her bed down here. “Have to go back now,” Flynne said to her mother. “I’ll look in after. If you’re still awake, we’ll talk.”

Her mother nodded, not looking at her, busy with her pills.

“Thanks, Janice,” Flynne said, and went out.

“Not without a better idea who’s doing the buying,” Pickett was saying, as she entered the living room. He sat in the rocker armchair with the tan slipcover, which she now saw could do with a wash. Burton and Tommy were at either end of the sofa, facing him across the coffee table. Pickett saw her, kept talking. “My people in the statehouse won’t talk to you. This outfit you’ve hooked up with will be going through me. The other thing they need to understand is that what they’ve spent so far was just to get the door open. Maintenance is going to be due, on a regular basis.”

She realized, sitting down between Burton and Tommy, that each sentence of what he’d just said had been in a cadence she remembered from his commercials for his dealership, a sort of spoken wedge, narrow on the front end but widening out to a final emphasis. Driven like a nail.

“Now you,” Pickett said, looking her in the eye, “you’ve actually met our Colombian adventure capitalists.”

Tommy, on her left, leaned forward, elbows on his knees, one hand around the other, which was curled into a loose fist. From where she sat she could see there was a pistol, smaller than the one in his belt holster, down the front waistband of his pants.

She met Pickett’s hard stare. “I have,” she said.

“Tell me about them,” Pickett said. “Your brother either doesn’t know or isn’t that eager.”

“They have money,” she said. “You’ve had some of it yourself.”

“What flavor, though? Chinese? Indian? I’m not even convinced it’s offshore. Maybe it starts here, goes out, comes back in.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. Company’s Colombian.”

“Columbia S.C., for all I know,” Pickett said. “You and Burton in partnership with them?”

“Trying to be,” said Burton.

Pickett looked from Burton to Flynne. “Maybe they’re government.”

“Wouldn’t have occurred to me,” she said.

“Homes,” Pickett said, “on a sting?”

“Not Homes as we know it,” she said.

“Milagros Coldiron,” Pickett said, as if foreign words tasted bad. “Not even good Spanish, people tell me, ‘cold iron.’”

“I don’t know why they call it that,” she said.

“Your Milagros bought an interest in a Dutch bank. Just while I was driving over here. Spent a lot more than this county’s worth, this one and the next three over. What have you and Burton got that they want?”

“They chose us,” she said. “So far that’s all they’ve told us. Could you have bought that bank, Mr. Pickett?”

He didn’t like her. Maybe didn’t like anybody. “You think you can be in partnership with something like that?” he asked her.

Neither she nor Burton answered. She didn’t want to look at Tommy.

“I can,” said Pickett. “I can right now, and the result, for you, if I do, would be money you don’t even know how to dream of. If you don’t partner with me, though, you don’t have a statehouse connection. As of now.”

“You aren’t comfortable not knowing where the money’s from?” she asked him. “What would you need, to be comfortable?”

“Access to who I’m really dealing with,” Pickett said. “That company didn’t exist, three months ago. I want somebody with a name to explain to me what they’re a shell for.”

“Netherton,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s his name. Netherton.”

She saw that Burton was looking at her. His expression hadn’t changed.

“Tommy,” Pickett said, “nice to meet you. Why don’t you go and make sure that business with the two boys has been taken care of. Jackman tells me you’re good with the details.”

“Yes sir,” said Tommy, and stood. “I’ll do that. Burton. Flynne.” He nodded to both of them, went into the kitchen. She heard him putting on his jacket, zipping it up. Then she heard the blinds on the backdoor rattle, as he went out.

“Got yourself a smart sister, Burton,” Pickett said.

Burton didn’t say anything.

She found herself looking at the plastic tray propped on the mantelpiece, the one with the aerial-view cartoon map from Clanton’s bicentennial year. Her mother had driven the three of them over for the celebrations, when she was eight. She remembered it, but it seemed like somebody else’s life.