The Driftless Area by Tom Drury

Author:Tom Drury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Shane followed the river south and arrived around midnight in Chartrand, a city laid out along the water and one that had a reputation for shadiness because of its unusual concentration of dealers and fences and bookmakers. The man he went to see was called Ned Anderson, short for Edmund.

Ned’s trade was partly legal and partly not. He ran a car rental place at the regional airport and sold methamphetamines in the form of little white pills. It was a solid and quiet living that he made from the two enterprises. He could have cleared more selling modern drugs but believed that the white cross drew less attention from cops and competitors.

He had the speed flown in from California, bypassing the fly-by-night meth labs, which he considered shabby and unreliable. The rental operation provided a clandestine freight depot for the speed. Ned thought of himself as a regular businessman and made it a point to donate to charities and political candidates.

Ned lived in a ranch house in a low-slung neighborhood where only the mailboxes were ornate. Shane knocked on the door and was ushered in by a woman with a red wool blanket drawn around her shoulders. Without a word she led him back to the kitchen, where she took her place at an oval table of quarter-sawn oak.

There she and Ned and two others were trying out a batch of amphetamines. They crushed the tablets with the edges of coins and inhaled the powder through rolled dollars. With the money and the white dust on the sturdy table, they looked like employees in the last days of banking.

Ned stood at the head of the table, tall and imposing with a big stomach that seemed to symbolize power rather than excess weight, though that’s what it was. His hair and eyebrows were wavy and dark red and his head tilted forward with a serious squint to his eyes. He wore a coarse gray suit and a blue tie loose at the collar.

“I got a car out here you should get rid of,” said Shane.

“Why don’t you get rid of it?” said the woman who had brought him in. She had black glossy bangs that came down to the top of her eyelids.

“I’ll leave it where it is if that’s where you want it,” said Shane.

“Here, here, let’s not fight,” said Ned. “What do you want done with it?”

“It’s your town, you decide,” said Shane.

“Get the car out of here,” said the woman in the red blanket.

“We haven’t been introduced,” said Shane.

“This is Luanne Larsen,” said Ned.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Shane.”

“We know who you are.”

Ned introduced the two others. One was Jean Story, who sat with her arms folded in a shirt of light gray cotton and smiled fiercely with hard green eyes. The other was Lyle Wood-Mills, whom Shane had met before, a mechanic who made deliveries for Ned and coordinated his network of dealers. In Shane’s view, Lyle was a complainer, who viewed any given situation as a

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