Coldwater Revenge, James Ross [books for 9th graders txt] 📗

“Didn’t get anything. Mounties are taking their sweet time these days on any requests from this side of the lake.”

The brothers passed the binoculars back and forth while they watched Frankie Heller lead his visitor to one of the junkyard wrecks, open the trunk and stand aside while the man stuck his head in the trunk. Then the visitor got behind the wheel and Frankie leaned through the open door and did something that neither brother could make out in the fading light. Finally, Frankie heaved himself out of the car and the other man started the engine and drove the junker out of the yard through an open gate in the back of the chain link fence.

Tom handed the binoculars back to Joe. “Okay, I give up. What’s going on?”

Joe shook his head. “Don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s not what we’re here for.”

“You’re not curious?”

Joe shrugged. “I said I don’t know. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a pretty good idea.”

Tom waited.

Joe tilted his head and grinned. “You really don’t know?” His tone managed to imply some fundamental breakdown in the natural order of things, like you should not be learning about the birds and the bees from your adult younger brother.

“Should I?”

Joe smiled. “Do you remember Frankie’s dad?”

“Scariest looking human being I’ve ever seen. The size of you and me put together.”

“And did you ever know anyone who brought a car to his garage to get it fixed? Or went looking in his junkyard for spare parts?”

“No one in their right mind went near here.”

“So how do you figure the Hellers’ garage stayed in business, if nobody ever came here?”

Tom hesitated. “Look, if it’s about Dad….” His voice dropped and his eyes shifted to an unfocused middle distance. “Maybe we should drop it.”

Joe smirked as if they were boys again and Tom had just said something unmanly like he didn’t really enjoy gutting frogs. “It’s not. At least not what you think.”

Tom braced for the unknown and likely unwanted.

“A hundred fifty years ago, or so, there was a farm down there where the garage and junkyard are now… with Hellers on it same as now. Dad said that it was a stop on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Abolitionists hid runaway slaves in the barns before taking them out to Pocket Island and then across to Canada. The Hellers weren’t abolitionists or anything. They were just making money, like always. With Canada so close, people around here have been bringing stuff back and forth for generations.”

Tom looked through the windshield, trying to avoid his brother’s gaze.

“Frankie’s great uncle or someone got the idea of turning the farm into a garage during Prohibition. The way Dad put it… what’s the perfect cover for strange cars coming in and out of town without attracting a lot of attention? A commercial garage. Right?”

“That was then,” said Tom. “This is now.”

“Right. So in the twenties it was liquor. In the seventies it was marijuana, and a little later cocaine. Since then, it’s been a bit of everything.”

“And you let it go on? Just like Dad did?” It was an accusation, not a question. Tom sometimes wondered if the fuel for his outsized ambition wasn’t simply the need to demonstrate to his ethically challenged family that you could make money honestly.

Joe rolled down the window and spat the four feet to the ground. “I’m not the DEA, Tommy. My job is to keep Coldwater safe. Period. That’s all I care about and that’s as far as I go. The Hellers are just weeds in my garden. I pull up the worst—the violent and ambitious. But the rest I leave alone, unless they get out of hand.” He paused to let the nuggets of homespun philosophy sink in. “If that seems lazy to you, or even suspicious, think about it. Coldwater isn’t big enough to have more than one or two full-time cops. If I go locking-up everybody who deserves it, what comes along to take their place may not be so easy to keep in line.”

Easy or not, brother, that’s the job.

As if reading Tom’s thought, Joe added, “Dad thought he could do it all. But look what happened to him that year he put away Frankie’s dad, the Flynns and Eddie Cashin all at the same time. Their pals from across the lake were here before Christmas, and they took care of Dad’s ass real quick.”

Tom had been in his final year of law school when their father’s body was found in the front seat of a Coldwater patrol car with his tongue pulled through a semi-decapitating gash in his throat. It was April Fools’ Day. The State Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration sniffed around for a while. But they never discovered who did it or why. Tom and Joe stumbled onto why? even before the body was in the ground, and knowing that, they left the who? unmolested.

Mary had given the funeral parlor one of her husband’s seldom-used suits for his body to be buried in. Hours later, Joe got a call from an agitated funeral director who had found stacks of hundred dollar bills in the jacket lining. When Tom arrived the following day, he found Joe hunched over a pile of cash in the middle of the family’s kitchen table, with a look on his face like he’d swallowed something rotten.

Their mother had showed little concern over her husband’s unusual form of banking. A child of parents for whom the Great Depression was a fresh and vivid memory, she’d grown up with cash-stuffed mattresses and fruit jars full of everything but fruit. Her husband had been the same, she insisted.

But her sons were not that naive. They talked for days, finally agreeing that sharing their discovery with the state police or DEA would only bring pain and humiliation to a woman who deserved neither, and that it would be