Going Nowhere Fast by Gar Anthony Haywood Page B

loud what each one of us was thinking:
    "What in the hell?"
    The photographs were all different shots of a man going out to his mailbox; stepping out of his front door, moving down the walk, taking a handful of letters from the box. He was a white man somewhere in his middle to late forties, wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants. He was trim and immaculately clean-shaven, with a wide band of scalp running front to back on the top of his head like a small highway. All in all he seemed very ordinary, except for one small thing: He looked scared. In all three photographs, his eyes were not on what he was doing so much as on his surroundings; it was as if he were expecting some kind of trouble to drop on him at any minute. The pencil sketch, meanwhile, was still more obscure: just a poorly drawn outline of someone's disfigured right foot. The drawing showed much of the third and fourth toes to be missing; the former was nothing but a tiny stub, and the latter was only marginally more than that. Their tips were identically angular, so that it seemed they had been trimmed simultaneously with a pair of garden shears.
    "I don't get it," Bad Dog said. He took the envelope from his father and looked inside, but of course, it was empty.
    Joe glared at him. "What's to get? You wanted 'evidence,' and you got it. Three pictures of a white man going out to his mailbox, and a drawing of someone's messed-up right foot. Proof positive none of us killed Geoffry Bettis."
    I took the photos and sketch from my husband's hands and examined them myself. Written on the back of one of the eight-by-tens, I found a Flagstaff, Arizona, address I hadn't noticed before, but other than that, the material revealed nothing new to me. Certainly nothing that could be seen to help our cause, anyway.
    "Come on, Dottie," Joe said. "We're wasting time. Let's get this boy over to the rangers' office before they come looking for him. It'll look better for him that way."
    "Joe, this stuff has to mean something ," I said, handing him the photographs and sketch so he could put them back in the envelope.
    "Look. I don't care if it does or it doesn't. All I know is, it's got nothing to do with us, and that's all that matters right now. So let's stop talkin' and start walkin', all right?"
    "But why would a man put stuff like that in a safety deposit box at the Grand Canyon? Unless it was somehow very valuable?"
    "I don't know, and I don't care. Hell, we should've never opened this envelope up in the first place! All we did was add another count to the charges they're going to eventually bring against us."
    "Joe—"
    "You're gettin' on my nerves, Dottie. Okay?"
    "But she's right, Pops!" Bad Dog cried. "Those pictures have gotta mean somethin'!"
    "They do. They mean you've told your last lie in the state of Arizona. Now, let's go."
    He took Bad Dog by the arm and started marching him down the road again. In a last-ditch effort to change his mind, I stayed put, but I don't think Joe ever even noticed. He had finally taken all of Bad Dog's nonsense he could take.
    And one way or another, he was going to get to the bottom of things.
    *     *     *     *
    "I was just about to call you people," Ranger Cooper said. "I've got good news."
    We were standing out in the receptionist's area, shaking in our boots as we waited to be called inside to his office, when Cooper came out to greet us instead, grinning from ear to ear.
    "I just got off the phone with the sheriff's office. They say they've found Bettis's car. Seems some fellow robbed a convenience store down in Williams last night and was driving it when they picked him up this morning. They aren't sure, but they think they've got their man."
    His grin grew wider, fanning the bristles of his red mustache out like a peacock's feathers. It was starting to look cute to me again.
    "What I'm trying to say, folks, is that you can all go home," Cooper said.
    None of us Loudermilks knew what to say.