A Killing in the Hills Page 5

  And squeezing.

  ‘So how long?’ he asked her. They had strayed off topic, far from the morning’s shootings. Or maybe they hadn’t.

  ‘How long what?’

  ‘How long can we hold out against what’s coming?’

  ‘One case at a time, Nick,’ Bell said. ‘That’s how we do it. Bottom line, though, is that we have to keep fighting.’

  The sheriff was getting tired of the fight. He had other fights to worry about these days.

  His wife, Mary Sue, a sweet-faced and fragile-natured woman, a former third-grade teacher at Acker’s Gap Elementary, had begun to be tormented by major episodes of clinical depression. She suffered through long days of sitting by windows, staring at air, while tears slid down her pale cheeks and the pink tissue in her lap was separated into tiny pieces, and those pieces into tinier pieces still. She’d been hospitalized three times in two years.

  In the first frightening hours after Mary Sue’s initial breakdown, Bell had helped Nick arrange for her care at the hospital in Charleston. On the middle-of-the-night drive over, he was at the wheel, shoulders hunched, jaw moving slowly back and forth, glaring meanly at the small notch of twisting road made visible by his headlights, while Bell sat in the backseat with Mary Sue.

  Bell hadn’t said a word on the way. No false cheer, no phony reassurance. No hand pats. No ‘There, there.’ Bell, Nick knew, would go anywhere he told her to go, she’d do whatever he asked of her, but she wouldn’t lie. Neither of them had any idea how things were going to turn out for Mary Sue Fogelsong, and Bell wouldn’t sugarcoat it.

  All Nick knew – all anyone knew – was that Mary Sue would require a great deal of care over a very long period of time. By professionals. Even the people who loved her best weren’t enough for her anymore. It might break their hearts to think so, but their love was now largely beside the point.

  If ever there was a time for the sheriff and the prosecuting attorney to take a step back – only one, and only for a little while – and not go after prescription drug abusers with such single-minded passion, this was it.

  Wasn’t it?

  Nick looked into Bell’s eyes. He knew what he’d see there, he didn’t have the slightest doubt about it, but he had to check, anyway. Just in case.

  He saw the same resolve that was always present. If anything, it looked even tougher. Firmer. More entrenched. This woman, he thought, is so goddamned stubborn.

  When he thought it, though, he smiled.

  ‘That white horse of yours,’ the sheriff said. His tone was lighter now. Bemused. ‘The one you’re always riding when you go tearing after those windmills. You ever give him a day off?’

  ‘Tried to once,’ Bell said. She’d found another tiny thread to pick. This one was on her left sleeve. Her voice, like his, had turned playful – sort of. ‘Really tried. He got restless. Damn near kicked down the barn.’

  5

  Charlie Sowards loved cheap motel rooms. He knew them well, and the cheaper they were, the more comfortable he felt. At home.

  He finished rinsing his face at the small sink in the drab little bathroom. Eyes still shut, so as not to get water in them, he groped blindly for the hand towel he’d dropped on the counter just a few seconds before.

  When he dragged the cloth across his face, he relished the harsh texture. It was a thin, coarse towel – not much better, really, than an old two-by-four yanked from a porch floor. He wouldn’t have been too surprised to find a knothole in it. These towels were a piece of crap to begin with, he knew, and then they went and washed them in the cheapest laundry soap they could find and dried them until they were stiff as jerky. The towel, he was sure, would leave his face red and sore.

  He grinned.

  When he lowered the towel, he saw the ragged checkerboard leer coming back at him from the faded mirror. He had three teeth missing, one right up front, two on the side. He liked that; he thought it tipped people off that he’d been in enough fights to not care about getting in one more, and that maybe they ought not mess with him.

  Actually, he’d lost the teeth the old-fashioned way. Nobody had ever taken him or his brothers or his sister to the dentist. Couldn’t afford it. He was nineteen years old now and the Mountain Dew he’d been drinking all day, every day, ever since he was a kid had done a real number on his teeth. Still did.

  Well, so what? he’d ask himself, every time he thought about it. Nobody he knew had very many original teeth left. Maybe you weren’t even supposed to anymore. Everything was artificial these days. Fake. This was the modern world.

  He finished rubbing his face with the piece-of-shit towel, still looking in the mirror. He had a turned-up nose and tiny eyes – pig eyes, a girlfriend of his had called them once, and he’d oinked and grunted when she said it, waggling his ass, making her laugh, and then he’d hit her in the mouth, hard, with a closed fist, which stopped her laughing, right quick – and a bad-looking beard, a scraggly, runty thing. Patches of pinkish-red hair alternated with patches of rusty-colored fuzz. He’d grown a beard two years ago, in high school, to cover up his acne, but it never really took. Back then, you could spot the acne through the wispy mess of the beard. You still could, only the beard had faded to a dingy color in too many places.

  He flung the towel on the bathroom floor. He shuffled back out into the motel room. He was shirtless. He hadn’t zipped his pants yet.

  He picked up one of the cell phones on the bedside table. His personal one. He always kept two; this one, plus a throwaway, a pay-as-you-go. So certain calls couldn’t be traced. He was savvy that way.

  He flicked it open with a dirt-edged thumbnail.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, when the man answered. ‘Done.’

  ‘Any problems?’

  ‘Nope. Well, one little snag, but it don’t matter.’ He laughed. ‘Happened too fast for ’em. Nobody saw nothing.’ Truth was, it had happened fast for him, too; he hadn’t seen much of anything, either. No faces. He couldn’t tell you how many people were there, or what they were doing. He’d been too focused. Single-minded.

  ‘Snag?’

  ‘Like I said, it don’t matter none.’ He belched, not bothering to cover the phone first.

  ‘Nice.’ The voice on the other end of the line sounded disgusted. ‘Real polite. You really are a pig, you know it? You look like one and you act like one. You’re a damned pig.’

  Chill laughed again. The pig thing seemed to be a trend. ‘Well,’ he said, still cocky from having pulled off the job and gotten away clean, ‘this here pig just did a real good thing for you. And this here pig would sure as hell like to know when he’s gonna get paid for doing it.’

  ‘We’ve been through that already, Charles.’

  ‘It’s Chill, okay? I go by Chill.’

  Chill was his nickname. He’d given it to himself, on account of how cool he was under pressure. People meeting him these days, people who hadn’t known him back in high school, maybe thought it was his real name. He hoped so. He hated his real name.

  ‘Fine. Whatever.’

  ‘So,’ Chill said. ‘My money. We was talking about my money.’

  ‘No. We weren’t. You know what the agreement was.’

  ‘Yeah. But that was before I done it.’

  No reply.

  ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Still here.’

  ‘So how ’bout it?’

  ‘How about what?’

  Chill snorted. ‘How ’bout my money.’

  ‘When the job is finished. As we discussed.’ The man’s voice had a persnickety edge to it that Chill didn’t like. He’d had to get used to it, though. The boss was a businessman, after all, and businessmen were like that. They kept records, kept everything neat and precise. Tidy. ‘It’s a multipart job. You received half up front. The other half comes after. We went over this. Do you need everything repeated twice, Charles?’

  Chill didn’t bother to correct him again on his name. No point to it. The boss did
n’t care for nicknames, Chill had figured out, any more than he liked slang or untucked shirttails or loose ends of any kind. The boss hated anything sloppy or second rate. Everything was rigid with the boss. Well planned. He wasn’t like anybody Chill had ever known.

  He stuck the phone between his shoulder and his tilted head. He needed his hands in order to zip up his pants.

  ‘So tell me,’ Chill said, ‘what’s next.’

  ‘I don’t know the details yet.’

  ‘How long till you do? I ain’t got all day, you know.’

  Chill was feeling jaunty, sure of himself. His whole body felt as if it were humming. Not shaking, not trembling – humming. There was a big difference. He felt alive. He felt like one of those power lines that gets knocked down in a bad storm and that jerks and twists and twitches in the road, with sparks jumping out of it in a fizzy spray. Nobody dares to get too close to it, not even the people from the power company. They have to wait, just like everybody else, until it settles down.

  That was why he was challenging the man on the other end of the call. He was feeling untouchable. Normally, of course, Chill didn’t argue with the boss; he was afraid of him. He’d seen what happened to people who asked too many questions or who demanded more money or who – God help ’em – tried to back out.

  But right now, Chill was flying high. He felt like he did after sex: nerved up, wound tight, polished to a high gloss. Some men got sleepy. Not Chill. He got antsy.

  He’d just killed three people. And gotten away clean. He’d walked calmly into a Salty Dawg and he’d shot three old men in the head – quick and neat, no fuss, no muss – and then he’d walked out again and gotten back in his car and he’d driven away. And nobody touched him. Nobody ever would.

  It was, he decided, better than sex. Because it was all him, all Chill Sowards. He didn’t need anybody else to help him get this feeling.

  ‘Just want,’ Chill said, ‘to wrap things up. Get my money. Move on. Get the hell out.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  Chill hadn’t really expected early payment. He was probing. Pushing. Seeing how much bullshit he could get by with. It was a game, right? You had to keep yourself amused. That was the key. Until today, he’d been bored; the only thing he’d done for fun in a long, long time was to crash a few parties with high school kids. Pass around some samples. Try to expand the customer base. Maybe recruit a few new employees, too.

  ‘Also,’ Chill added, ‘I need a better car. One I got’s a piece of shit. What’s it built for, midgets?’

  No response.

  Time to back off. The boss had a limit. You could push to a certain point, but you had to know when to quit.

  Chill knew.

  ‘Okay,’ Chill said. He sat down on the unmade bed, wondering where he’d left the hard pack of Camels. This was a nonsmoking room, which made smoking even more fun. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘keep me posted. Don’t want to hang out here too long.’

  ‘You won’t have to. Oh – there’s one more thing.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  The man’s voice suddenly changed. It came in low and slick and fast, slashing like a razor across a piece of tender pink skin: ‘Listen, you goddamned shit-for-brains – you ever talk to me like that again, you make demands on me, you cause any trouble for me, I’ll rip your fucking head off and spit in the neckhole. Got it?’

  Chill shouldn’t have been startled – he knew what he was dealing with – but he was, anyway. The boss didn’t usually talk that way. When the boss was stressed, worried, it was like he reverted back. Back to something that came before all the smoothness, all the tidiness. That lived with him but stayed hidden, like an animal kept under the porch.

  ‘Got it,’ Chill said. His voice was small. He was the kid who’d taken too many cookies and gotten his hand smacked.

  No wonder the boss was in a bad mood these days. They were getting squeezed in a lot of different directions. There was more competition out there. It wasn’t the way it used to be, just a while ago. Things were relatively easy then. No more.

  Silence. Chill wondered if the boss had hung up.

  No. He hadn’t. He was, as always, strategizing. Sizing things up. Planning ahead. The boss was very, very smart.

  ‘Okay,’ the boss said. ‘I’ve made my decision. I’m sick of this. Sick of the aggravation. We need to quit fooling around and just go right to the top. One bold strike. Put them on notice – they’d better stay out of our way.’ Another pause. Chill imagined he could see the boss thinking, stroking his chin with a finger. ‘Although,’ the boss continued, ‘I’m not sure yet about how or when to do it. Because once it’s done, that’s it. I can’t use you anymore, at least not around here. It’s far too risky. And it’s not like it’s going to be easy. What you did today – that was a piece of cake. This’ll be a lot tougher. Especially if you use firearms. So I want you to become a bit more creative.’

  Chill grinned. With the tip of his tongue, he touched each empty socket where a tooth should’ve been. He did it twice. It was a ritual with him now. His lucky charm. ‘No worries, man. So who’s next?’

  ‘That bitch. Belfa Elkins. The prosecuting attorney.’

  6

  Bell pulled into her driveway and shut down the engine. She’d driven through a dark town to get here. Night fell blunt and heavy in the mountains, like something shot cleanly out of the sky that drops to earth with a whisper.

  The big stone house with the wraparound porch reared up on her right, massive, imperturbable. Peppy yellow light filled the first-floor windows. No lights burned in any other house on the block. People in Acker’s Gap went to bed early and got up early; you’d find more lights on at 4:30 A.M. than you would at 9:30 P.M.

  She opened the door of her Ford Explorer and felt a mean pinch of cold. If it was already this chilly in November, a hard winter was waiting for them. Hard and long. Standing on the blacktopped driveway, Bell reached back into the vehicle, scooping up her briefcase in one hand and her empty coffee mug in the other. She shut the door with a cocked knee.

  In the distance, a dog yodeled his protest. He’d probably smelled a coon, and now strained painfully against a stake-out chain. Each elongated bark ended in a series of high-pitched yips. The yips bounced and echoed, hitting the cold air one by one with a ping! like a strike by a tiny bright hammer.

  And then the sounds abruptly stopped, which meant the dog had either given up on the coon or was just taking a short break.

  Bell hoped it was the latter. She didn’t like the idea of anybody giving up on a chase these days, no matter what the odds.

  It was later than she wanted it to be. Much later. She’d planned to get home to Carla a long time before now, but as the meeting with the sheriff had gone on and on, she’d resigned herself to the necessity of being painstakingly thorough. To getting a jump on the case. To doing things right. She’d explain it all to Carla. And Carla would understand.

  Of course she would. Wouldn’t she?

  Bell paused a moment at the bottom of the porch steps, looking not at the house but above it, beyond it, back up at the mountain, as if it had, just now, softly called her name.

  It knew her name very well.

  It knew because the past was always present here, no matter what time your wristwatch tried to tell you it was. Time was like a mountain road that wound around and around and around, switching back, twisting in a series of confusing loops, so that you were never quite sure if you were in forward or reverse, going up or going down, heading into tomorrow or falling back into yesterday, or if, in the end, it really made all that much difference.

  Before she’d left the courthouse, she and Fogelsong had gone over the preliminary forensics and ballistics reports from Charleston, which had finally come stuttering out of the fax machine. They’d fielded a call from Floyd Fontaine over at Fontaine’s Funeral Home about the timetable for releasing the bodies, referring him to the county coroner’s office. They’d conferred with Nick’s deputies abou
t the discouraging lack of progress in the manhunt. After that, there’d been a brief conference call with the regional vice-president of the Salty Dawg chain down in Charlotte. The company wanted to establish three college scholarships for students at Acker’s Gap High School to commemorate the victims.

  And then, because she and the sheriff were already so tired and heartsick and bewildered that they figured they might as well push on through, might as well bring all the bad news right out into the open, they had talked again about the theory – based on rumors, based on recent patterns of arrests and statistical data they were getting from the state police – that a lot of the prescription drug abuse in West Virginia was being coordinated out of just a handful of places.

  One of those places was Raythune County.

  The thought repulsed Bell, and it angered her, but the facts were persuasive. Prescription medications were showing up everywhere, but if you stood before a state map and used your finger to trace a path toward the center of one set of concentric rings, it would end up in the vicinity of Acker’s Gap.

  By the time she had risen from the straight-backed chair facing the sheriff’s desk and said, ‘That’s it for me, Nick,’ fatigue was making her left eyelid twitch.

  She’d rubbed at it as she had driven home, using her knuckle to dig deep, which put her left eye temporarily out of commission. But when you knew these streets as well as Bell did, you could easily drive them one-eyed.

  Hell. She could probably drive them blindfolded.

  Bell opened the big front door – the hinges always sounded like a cat in a catfight, no matter how often she shot WD-40 into the creases – and walked in.