I did not wake my grandfather that night. I sat in the kitchen of the little brick house with the business card on the table, Sooner State Lending in gold letters, and I watched the street through the curtains the way I have watched a fire line at three in the morning. A car came down the block at midnight. It slowed. It kept going. Walter Branscum slept in his bedroom with the door cracked, the way he had slept since I was a boy, so he could hear me if I woke up screaming for my mother. I would not let anybody hurt him.
My friend at the office of the sheriff was a deputy named Reyes, who had run a saw next to me for three seasons. He met me at a diner at six in the morning with a folder under his arm. “Cody,” he said, “the man you are calling Darrell Voss is Dennis Marlow. Fifty four. He has run this scheme in four states. He finds old men who are lonely and in trouble, he lends them money at a crushing rate, and when they cannot pay, he gets them to sign a life insurance policy as security. Two of those men are already dead. We could never prove it.”
I looked at the folder. Photographs of two old men in their church suits, one smiling at a fishing dock, one holding a puppy. Dale Pruitt, eighty one, found at the bottom of his stairs. Harold Teague, seventy nine, a fall in his bathtub. Both men had Marlow as the beneficiary of a policy they could not remember signing. Deputy Reyes said the county was at a dead end, because Marlow always had an alibi, and because the old men never had family nearby who knew to ask.
A man who sells his own blood for family will be repaid in the end by the family that refuses to look away.
“You have family,” Reyes said. “You have a grandson who is a hotshot and who will not look away. That is our break.” So we made a plan, the two of us and a federal agent named Torres, in a tiny conference room smelling of coffee. On the first of the month, when the payment was due, my grandfather would meet the young man in the parking lot of the plasma center the way he always did. Only this time I would be in the back seat of the truck, a wire taped under my shirt, and the whole lot would be full of unmarked cars.
I told Grandpa that morning. I knelt in front of his chair and said it plain. His thin hands trembled in mine. “Cody,” he said, “Brody is my own blood.” I said, “I know, Grandpa. That is why we are going to save him too.” He was quiet for a long moment. Then my grandfather, who had never hurt anyone in eighty five years, said, “All right, son. Tell me what to do.” And we practiced it at the kitchen table, over and over, until he could say his lines without looking away.
The day came gray and cold. Brody walked up to the truck at ten past ten with his cap pulled low, shaking so badly he could hardly hold his hand out for the envelope. In the lot behind him a black sedan idled, and in the sedan sat Dennis Marlow himself, in a leather coat, watching. The wire caught every word. “Grandpa, give him the envelope,” I whispered. My grandfather did. And then I stepped out of the truck, and Agent Torres stepped out of a van, and Marlow turned his head and saw the entire parking lot rise up around him.
He did not shoot. He did not run. He sat in the sedan with his hands on the wheel as the agents came to his door, and he said one sentence to Torres that I will remember until I die: “Those old men were going to die anyway.” That was the end of Dennis Marlow. The federal court in Tulsa convicted him on fraud, extortion, and two counts of murder for hire. He is serving three consecutive life sentences in Terre Haute. The loan papers my grandfather signed were declared void, and the bank sent him a letter of apology.
Brody sat in the county jail for three weeks. I went to see him on a Sunday, through the glass. He had lost twenty pounds and he could not look at me. “I did it for the money, Cody,” he said. “I told myself I was saving myself. I was selling our grandfather.” I did not forgive him that day. But I did not leave. I said, “You are going to testify, you are going to go to the program in Muskogee, and you are going to pay every dime back, and then maybe one day you can sit at his table again.” He nodded, crying.
Brody did all of it. He testified without a lawyer at his side. He stayed in the program for a year and a half, and he worked a job at a tire shop, and every Friday he put a hundred dollars in an envelope and brought it to the brick house, and my grandfather, who never in his life took money from anyone, put it in a coffee can on the shelf. When Brody came to Thanksgiving, thin and quiet, my grandfather took his face in both hands and said, “You are late, boy.” That was the only thing he ever said about it.
I deploy again in the spring, to a fire in the Cascades, and I call my grandfather every night from the camp. He plays checkers with the old men at the burger place on eleventh street, and the nurse from the plasma center, whose name is Janelle, comes in every Tuesday morning and plays the winner. He is eating well. He is gaining weight. At the end of every call, as the smoke settles in the dark, he says, “You stay safe out there, Cody.” And this time, when I say I will, I know he is not the one who needs protecting.