King of Methlehem

HAD TO TELL YOU LIES I had to tell you lies to help you get to the truth. This is the motto of Detective Wyatt James, who believes a good old-fashioned dialogue is the surest way to solve anything, though sometimes the specter of coercion is necessary to keep the conversation lively. "Let's hear it, Marvin," he says. "Hear what?" Marvin squirms and adjusts the cuffs on his wrists, aggravated by the cold steel rubbing against his scabbed skin. Over long johns he wears shredded Levi's and a gray T-shirt that reads: REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS. "Don't waste my time," Wyatt says, walking in a circle around the scrawny tweeker. "I don't know what you want, I swear." Sweat drips from Marvin's pocked forehead. He licks his teeth, dying brown and gray pegs poking out from swollen gums. Judging by the dental deterioration, Wyatt figures Marvin has been using for at least three years. Though a plainclothes detective, Wyatt wears a uniform of a kind: khakis, a button-down oxford shirt, and a worn blue blazer. He looks like an overgrown college kid except for the Glock .40 on his hip next to his badge. His parents named him Wyatt after the Peter Fonda character inEasy Riderand, weirdly, Wyatt grew up with a vague physical resemblance to the lanky movie star. "Have I been fucking with you, Marvin?" Wyatt asks, stopping in front of him. "No, I guess not." "Youguessnot?" "No, you haven't." "Then why are you fucking with me?" "I'm not," Marvin says, glancing at him, then looking back down. "I swear to God." The more they swear to God, the more they're lying. Wyatt could conduct this interview back at the station, but he prefers the eerie atmosphere of the cook site. They are in a clearing surrounded by fir trees. On a grill mounted on rocks over a campfire is a shallow pie pan crusted with white powder and littered around the site are mason jars, porn magazines, shredded lithium batteries, cans of muriatic acid, a propane tank with blue tinting around the valve, and a plastic soda bottle with rubber tubing snaking out to nowhere. Despite a chilly fall breeze, ammonia lingers in the air and stings Wyatt's nostrils. He is considering his next move when the wind suddenly picks up and the tree branches rustle. Seemingly out of nowhere a dirty white Starbucks paper cup rolls toward Wyatt's feet and stops with the black and white mermaid inside the green circle facing up. A sign. "Howard was here?" Marvin twitches in a nodlike motion, but Wyatt cannot be sure if this is an answer or a random tweeker jitter. Wyatt once read about an East Indian monkey trap in which a hollowed-out coconut with rice inside is chained to a peg in the ground. The trap has a hole carved in the coconut and the hole is large enough for a monkey to reach inside and grab the rice, but small enough that the monkey cannot pull his hand back out while holding on to the rice. Even as hunters approach, the monkeys hold fast. Tweekers remind Wyatt of these monkeys -- they typically cannot let go of the rice, no matter the cost. "Do you want to talk? Or do you want to just go to jail?" "Talk." "Then start talking." "What do you wanna know?" "The truth." Marvin dimly weighs his options, the upsides and downsides of snitching flapping around in his meth-damaged brain like bats. "Was the midget here?" Wyatt tries. "What?" Genuine confusion contorts Marvin's face and Wyatt knows he missed. He has heard that Howard sometimes works with a midget, but it could be a joke, the sort of semi-amusing information tweekers occasionally dissemble. Clearly Marvin is not in on the joke, if it is one. "Who all was here?" Wyatt asks, quickly moving past his misstep. "Just me and him." "Just you and Howard?" "Yeah." "Tell me what you know." "Like what?" "Let's start with what he looks like." "He's...short, I guess." "How short?" "Five-foot-six or so." "Complexion?Lindquist, Mark is the author of 'King of Methlehem' with ISBN 9781416535782 and ISBN 1416535780.