The judge’s companion tonight was the man called Tate. He had a wide leather belt like the kind issued to police, with a holstered pistol hanging off one side and a sheathed knife on the other. Wade appeared to be unarmed, wearing dark pants and a shirt with suspenders, no jacket, wire-rimmed glasses over his eyes. He looked like a small-town banker.
“You two haven’t found your way up the road yet?” Wade said. He’d taken Rebecca’s chair, sat facing Arlen. Rebecca was standing back by the door, and Tate had circled around behind Paul and was leaning on the railing, the one they’d just repaired. Paul shifted uneasily, as if he didn’t like having Tate behind him. Arlen didn’t like it either.
“What’s keeping y’all in Corridor County?” Wade asked when no one responded to him.
“They’re helping me,” Rebecca said from the doorway. “I told you that, Solomon. I needed help and—”
“I was asking them,” Wade said.
Arlen took a long drink of his beer. “Maybe you didn’t catch it the last time you were out here and spoke to us, but we were robbed. Tough to move on down the road without a single dollar.”
Wade gave him a long, cold stare. Arlen wanted to meet his gaze, but he also couldn’t help glancing at Tate every few seconds. There was something damned unsettling about the old bastard. He had a face like untreated saddle leather, dark eyes, strings of unkempt gray hair trailing along his neck and down to his shoulders. There were scars over almost every inch of the backs of his hands, a variety of colors and textures to them, souvenirs of different incidents. When the breeze pushed in off the Gulf, Arlen could smell the odor of stale sweat coming from him.
“So you want to make some money before you move on,” Wade said. He had a distant way of speaking, as if he always had minimal interest in the conversation.
“Want to,” Arlen said, “and need to.”
Wade blinked and looked out at the sea, purple and black filling in around the edges now, a shrinking pool of orange in the center.
“I believe you were offered a chance to make your money back overnight. I believe you passed on the opportunity.”
Paul turned his head and looked at Arlen, a frown on his face.
“There was no opportunity,” Arlen said. “You tried to bribe me with my own dollars, and what you wanted, I didn’t have. I still don’t.”
“Supposing you made back your losses as well as an additional profit, might you be inclined to reconsider?”
Arlen looked at him for a long time. Then he said, “No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
It was the first time Wade had shown any spark of emotion. His eyes had narrowed behind the glasses.
“Even if I’d been holding out on you,” Arlen said, “I wouldn’t tell you a damn thing now. I don’t like being pushed around, by money or muscle.”
He’d spent most of his life without money in his wallet; he had not and would not spend any of it being run around by men like Solomon Wade. The man wanted him to cower like a whipped dog, expected him to. After all the things Arlen had seen in this life, he’d be damned if he’d cower for this son of a bitch.
“You know who you are?” he said. “You’re Edwin Main.”
Wade tilted his head and stared. “What?”
“A man I used to know back home. You remind me of him.”
Arlen could remember going to get the sheriff, walking down the street with his legs trembling and two faces trapped in his mind: his father’s bearded one and a dead woman’s pale-lipped one. When the law came back, it came with Edwin Main, who wasn’t a member of it but thought he was and had the rest of the town convinced of the same.
When Arlen spoke again, his voice was harder than he’d heard it in years.
“We’ve told you again and again all that we can tell you about Sorenson—nothing. You tried to beat it out, threaten it out, and buy it out. How you can be so damned stupid not to realize that we’ve been telling the truth the whole time, I don’t know. But I’m done with it. And something you need to understand, Wade? I’ve been around for a while, done a lot of hard living, seen a lot of tough boys. You ain’t the first.”
Wade didn’t answer. Arlen hadn’t seen Tate move, but the older man’s hand was resting high on his thigh now, near the pistol.
“Your business is of no interest to me,” Arlen said. “None. Nor to the… nor to Paul. But I’ll tell you something else: ours ought not to be of any interest to you. It better not be.”
It was quiet for a long time. The sun was all the way gone now, the porch covered in darkness. Wade finally spoke.