Chapter 10

Hampton Automotive was on the outskirts of Hastings Rock, located on a prime patch along the state highway. It looked like any used-car dealership: a big, illuminated sign; an enormous lot filled with cars and crossovers and trucks, and yes, even the occasional minivan; pennants strung overhead, fluttering in the wind. I couldn’t find a parking spot, so I wedged the Jeep along a red stretch of curb near the service department’s roll-up door. Maybe, I considered, at that exact moment, Deputy Bobby’s internal parking monitor was going off. Maybe he was sitting straight up in bed, eyes glowing, his whole body energized with the possibility of writing me one final parking ticket.

But I sincerely hoped not.

When I got out of the Jeep, the sound of the pennants’ snapping met me, and from farther off, the boom of hearty, middle-aged-man laughter. It took me a moment to spot the group: a big guy with a goatee not unlike Gerry’s, in a sport coat and a striped button-up, thundering more laughter as he guided a young couple toward what appeared to be much more car than they could afford. The day was bright, the sky fringed with puffy clouds to the west, and one of those inflatable tube men wobbled and cast a dancing shadow across the lot. The air was crisp to the point of making my teeth ache, and my first deep breath caught the smell of fresh paint and rubber. I decided I seriously (seriously, this time) needed to dig around and find my winter coats.

Inside, Muzak met me (Taylor Swift crossed with a synthesizer), and the smell of freshly popped popcorn mixed now with the odor of new tires. It was a large, open room, with glass walls on three sides, and amidst the decorative straw bales and plastic pumpkins and a little animatronic witch’s head that cackled every time someone walked past it, someone had parked sixty thousand dollars’ worth of Audi. A woman in a black dress made her way toward me. I recognized her from the Otter Slide, and I thought her name was Maya.

“Welcome to Hampton Automotive,” she said. “How can I help you today?”

I glanced around. “I had an appointment with Mr. Hampton.”

“Oh.” Maya looked toward the back of the room, where cubicles offered the illusion of privacy. “He’s finishing up a sale right now. If you wanted to look at something in particular, Mr. Dane, I can help you until he’s free.”

Small town. Small, small town. “No, thanks. I’ll just putz around until he’s free. Maya, right?”

She smiled at me. “Let me know if you need anything.”

As Maya returned to her desk, I meandered—purposefully. Without making it too obvious, I let my rambling take me toward the cubicles at the back. I pretended to look at the Audi. I pretended to be impressed with the decorative hay bales. I pretended to have an obscene amount of interest in a poster on the wall explaining Hampton Auto’s lifetime alignment policy. I was inching toward a row of chairs, complete with while-you-wait pamphlets on an end table, when Maya’s voice broke through the Muzak.

“Hampton Automotive wishes you a happy Halloween,” she said. “This season, treat yourself to one of our new arrivals.”

I looked around. I was the only one in the showroom.

Maya wore a wry grin as she lowered the phone from her mouth and stage-whispered, “I have to do it every fifteen minutes.”

And, by sheer coincidence, at that moment I arrived at the chairs lined up outside Nate’s cubicle. I got a glimpse of the space inside: plaques on the walls announcing the DEAL OF THE MONTH, which apparently Nate had a track record of winning (and awarding to himself); framed print advertisements for Hampton Automotive, all of them featuring a close-up of Nate’s face; a photo of a billboard (guess whose face?); and, just for giggles, novelty foam car keys as long as a yardstick. Nate sat behind a particleboard desk, nodding enthusiastically as an older couple explained something about their finances; to judge by Nate’s face, he was from the wait-for-an-opening-to-talk school of listening. A whiff of overpowering cologne wafted out, and I hurried past the opening and dropped into a seat.

“—can’t afford it, Nathan,” the woman was saying. “We’re on a fixed income. In fact, we shouldn’t even be here—”

“Right, Mrs. Carlson,” said Nate. “Right. Right. But the way I see it, you can’t afford not to buy it. This is the deal of a lifetime. I’m practically giving you this car.”

“It’s a good deal, Betty,” the man said. “The deal of a lifetime.”

“Listen to your husband, Mrs. Carlson. You don’t want to do something stupid.”

It was refreshing, I thought, to have a front-row seat, so to speak, to somebody else sticking his foot in his mouth.

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Carlson said.

“I mean—”

“Listen to me, Nathan Hampton. I swatted your bum in preschool, and you’re not too old for me to swat it again.”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“Roger, we’re leaving.”

“No, please, Mrs. Carlson—”

“And you’d better believe I’m going to be telling the gardening club about this.”

Nate’s breathing had a slightly strangled quality to it. “You can’t—no, no, wait—”

But Mrs. Carlson—who did, to be fair, look like a bit of a battleaxe—tromped out of the cubicle, with Mr. Carlson (who had a snazzy suede jacket that looked a million years old) close on her heels.

Nate let out a short, deep noise of frustration, and something slammed into the desk. A moment later, he emerged from the cubicle, his face red.

“Maya—” he barked.

“Hi, Nate,” I said.

He jumped as though I’d goosed him, but he recovered quickly. After giving me a once-over, he said, “Have we met?”

“Not officially. I saw you at the surfing competition.” Standing, I offered my hand. “Dash.”

“I know who you are.”

“Good. That makes things easier. I was wondering if you’d have a few minutes to talk.”

He made an effort, I’ll give him that: his face reassembled itself into something approaching politeness, and he even tried out a wooden smile. “Of course. Give me a minute, and I’ll be happy to show you around.”

“Oh, no. I don’t want to buy a car. In fact, I probably shouldn’t even be driving at all. More of a bike man, I think. Fewer casualties that way. Plus, the tickets.”

“Uh, right.”

“I want to talk to you about Gerry Webb’s murder.”

The flush mottling Nate’s face drained away.

In a quieter voice, I said, “Let’s sit down. I have some photos I’d like to show you.”

Nate shook his head—weakly at first, and then more forcefully. “I don’t have to—” He stopped and started again. “You need to leave. Right now.”

“That’s a bad decision, Nate. A terrible decision. Because if I leave, I’m going to talk to the sheriff, and I really don’t think you want me to talk to the sheriff.”

He wavered, and I thought I had him. Then he said, “Get out.” He pushed past me, snapped something at Maya, and pushed through a fire door; I glimpsed a more utilitarian space beyond, which I guessed was the service garage, and the door swung shut.

Maya was staring at me, so I made my way over to her.

“I am so sorry,” she said, “but Mr. Hampton asked me to make sure you leave.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want to cause you any problems. I just wanted to ask—”

I was about to launch into a few questions about Nate—shots in the dark, mostly, hoping I’d get lucky. But then the door opened, and the salesman in the sports coat and the striped shirt maneuvered the young couple inside. He had his hands on their shoulders, and he was talking so loudly that, even from across the room, my ears were ringing. His volume rose even more, though, as he delivered what sounded like the punchline to a joke: “And the man says, ‘You have to keep your worms warm.’” Without missing a beat, he looked over at Maya and me and shouted, “Maya, let’s get Robby and Nina something to drink.”

The young couple exchanged pained glances, although that might have had more to do with the fact that the salesman had a death grip on their shoulders.

“Excuse me,” Maya said.

It all came together in an instant: who Nate Hampton was, and what he wanted—the DEAL OF THE MONTH plaques, his face in every advertisement, the instant groveling when Mrs. Carlson had gotten angry. I wasn’t a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a therapist. If you asked Keme, I wasn’t even allowed to use the microwave without adult supervision (although that was one time, and I only forgot the spoon because I was so excited about the hot fudge). But you spend enough time writing about people, thinking about people, trying to get inside their heads, and you learn a thing or two. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have a mom who checks herself into psych wards for fun.

I nodded and asked, “Do you mind if I use your phone? My battery is almost dead.”

“Oh sure. You press this button to dial out.” And then, with an apologetic smile, Maya hurried to get Robby and Nina something to drink. I was guessing they’d like a big helping of cyanide.

I gave the phone’s complicated array of buttons a quick study. And then I picked up the receiver and pressed a button. The Muzak overhead cut off, and my voice echoed over the sound system.

“Hi, everyone. My name is Dash, and I’m excited to wish you a happy Halloween from Hampton Automotive. We’ve got some tricks and some treats for you today. Our first treat is going to be a dramatic reading about Mr. Nate Hampton and the Hastings Rock Sewage Improvement Fund—he loves tricks, and I’m going to share one of his best ones with you.”

That was as far as I got before Nate Hampton—who cared about approval and validation and awards and being liked (and who also probably had a healthy interest in not going to prison)—burst into the showroom. The color was high in his cheeks, and his eyes were glassy as he stared around the room. Maya was staring back. Robby and Nina were staring back. The salesman seemed to have forgotten whatever he was saying (probably another joke), and it looked like Nina might try to make a break for it.

I cocked my head at Nate in question.

“Sorry about that, folks,” Nate called with a quite frankly unbelievable attempt at good cheer. “Dash loves playing jokes on us. Excuse me for a minute.”

I gave my tiny audience a rueful smile and hung up the phone.

“What are you doing?” Nate asked in a furious whisper as he came toward me. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Why don’t we talk about that?”

Nate shot another look at the salesman and the hostages—er, customers. “Hurry up,” he said and stalked off.

Instead of heading for his cubicle, though, he led me through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Behind us, excited conversation broke out, but the door swung shut, cutting it off. A short hallway connected with a pair of restrooms, a cramped kitchenette, and what appeared to be storerooms. Above a toaster oven, a poster showed a smiling Nate Hampton and THE ABC’S OF HAMPTON AUTOMOTIVE: ALWAYS BE CLOSING. I caught a whiff of Totino’s pizza and despair.

Spinning to face me, Nate asked, “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about Gerry Webb’s murder.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“But you can see why I’d find that hard to believe, right? I saw Gerry’s files. I know he was blackmailing you.”

Nate flinched. He couldn’t quite meet my eyes as he mumbled, “It was a misunderstanding. I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”

“I don’t care about the embezzlement. Well, I do, but I’m not here to talk about that. How much were you paying Gerry?”

“Huh?”

“The blackmail. How much was he taking you for?”

“I wasn’t paying him.” And then, as though I were a little slow, he said, “He wanted help with the zoning and the permits for his development.”

That explained one thing: how Gerry had gotten permission to build on sacred land.

“That’s all?” I asked.

“That’s all? Man, do you know how hard that was? I busted my hump making it happen. Ruined my reputation in town, too. Half the people around here think I was getting kickbacks from Gerry, and the other half think I’m out of my mind.”

“That must be hard,” I said. “But once you got him the permits, what did Gerry start squeezing you for?”

“Nothing. I already told you.”

“Then why did you attack him at the surfing competition?”

A hint of color rose in Nate’s cheeks. “He told me he’d let me invest in the development. After I’d fixed everything, though, he told me he already had a partner, and he wasn’t interested in adding someone else. I tried to let it go, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I just kept thinking and thinking. And then I saw him at that stupid competition, and—I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was like somebody else was doing it, you know?”

I wasn’t sure I believed all of that, but I believed part of it. Somebody as desperate for validation as Nate would have to work himself up to that level of aggression; it would take a lot to force him out of the patterns of placating and pleading I’d seen from him today. The real question, though, was what had happened after the surf challenge. Had that attack at the beach been an isolated incident? Or had Nate whipped himself into a frenzy again after his public humiliation?

“How long has Gerry been blackmailing you?”

“I don’t know. A year. A little more. He showed up here one day. He introduced himself, told me he had an eye on some land, wanted to talk to me about a business opportunity. I told him no way—getting on the bad side of the Confederated Tribes is a sure way to piss off pretty much everybody in town. I thought that was the end of it. The next time I saw him, he was at my front door showing me—”

“Showing you what?”

“You know. Papers.”

I nodded. “Where were you during the Halloween party?”

“I don’t know, man. I had some drinks. Moved around. I wasn’t exactly invited.”

“That’s the best you can do?”

“What do you want me to say? I was right there.”

A question struck me. “Why were you there?”

Nate grimaced. “One of the surfers. She and I—I mean, it’s a small town. And when it’s not tourist season, we don’t get a lot of new faces.”

“Any chance she can tell me where you were?”

“No.” He sounded even more miserable than when he’d been confessing. “She said she didn’t like gingers.” Then his gaze came toward me, and his voice sharpened, “You know who you should be talking to? That protester. The crazy one.”

He meant Ali Rivas, I was pretty sure. I asked, “Why’s that?”

“Because she’s crazy! She’ll do anything. She breaks into the construction site. She smashes the windows, and they have to replace them. She puts sugar in the gas tanks of the heavy equipment. She was costing Gerry a fortune, you know? They hated each other.”

“She wasn’t at the party that night.”

“Man, she goes wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Hey, wait! She was there—I heard about it. She broke the windows at the surf camp that night.”

Now that he said it, I did remember something about broken windows from my visit to the surf camp the next day—my chat with Damian, Jen’s anger, the clean-up effort.

“And that’s not all,” Nate said, excitement making him speak faster. “Gerry had something on her. He got something. Like he did, you know, with me. I heard him talking about her at the party. About how she wasn’t going to be a problem any longer.”

“That’s kind of a convenient thing to remember when you’re the prime candidate for a murder.”

“I’m telling you the truth. I heard him say it, and I remember feeling sorry for her—once Gerry set his sights on somebody, he’d find something to use against them.”

He certainly had with me, although I wasn’t going to share that with Nate. “There’s kind of a problem with that, though. Aside from how it’s a little too neat. I saw Gerry’s files, remember? And he didn’t have anything on Ali Rivas.”

The look Nate gave me verged on pitying. “Yeah, man. Duh. Whoever killed him took their file.”