A Killing in the Hills (15 page)

So Chill still hated Sunday afternoons. Always would.

There was a knock at the door.

Startled but not surprised – he was expecting it, but didn’t know just when it would come – Chill mashed out his cigarette on the jar lid that he kept on the nightstand. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up, buttoned his jeans. With his right hand he smoothed back the hair on one side of his head. The hair felt greasy and clotted beneath his palm.

The knock came again.

15

Bell looked at her daughter. The living room suddenly felt colder, even though the afternoon sunlight was cruising in through the large picture window, filling the house with a casual radiance, turning the rundown chair and the worn carpet and the chipped mantel into brighter, brasher versions of themselves.

‘So you want to go live in D.C.?’

Carla shrugged.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I do.’

‘What about school? And your friends?’

‘There are schools over there.’ Carla said it quietly, seriously, not in the smart-ass way that Bell had anticipated. ‘I’ll make new friends.’

Bell let some time go by. Sam didn’t speak either. He sat back on the couch, the ankle of one leg balanced on the knee of the other leg, and he fingered the pressed hem of his slacks.

If Carla truly didn’t want to be in Acker’s Gap, then Bell wouldn’t keep her here. She had made a promise to her daughter. She didn’t want West Virginia to seem like a prison. If you felt that you were trapped here, it could seem like the worst place in the world. If you stayed voluntarily, it could be the best.

Sam and Carla had discussed the logistics before Bell had arrived home. Just in case, Sam had said. Just in case Carla decided to do it. She could finish out the semester at Acker’s Gap High School. After the Christmas break, she would move into her father’s condo. And enroll at a high school in Alexandria.

The three of them stood in the front hallway. Sam needed to get back to D.C. There was, he said, an important meeting that night at the office, a conference call with Dubai.

‘With who?’ Carla said.

‘Dubai.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a place, honey, not a person. Better Google it. I spend a lot of time there these days.’

He had won, so he could afford to be gracious. He turned to Bell.

‘You’ve had a hell of a weekend,’ he said.

Bell wondered how he knew about the chase on the mountain – then realized he didn’t. That’s not what he meant. He was referring to the shooting the day before. And the Sheets trial, which she’d mentioned to him in an e-mail. She liked to keep Sam up to speed on her hardest cases. He had excellent legal instincts – even though he hadn’t actually practiced law for years now, preferring to use what he knew about the law to help his powerful clients worm their way around it. She liked to hear his gut feelings about her cases.

Bell shrugged, nodded.

‘I’ve had better,’ she said.

He turned to Carla and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘See you later, sweetie. I’ll tell Glenna the good news. We’ll start getting your room all ready for you.’

Bell watched him go down the front steps. Sam had the same crisply confident way of moving through the world that he’d always had. Even in high school. First time she had really noticed him, first time she was aware of him as something other than just a blur in the hallway at school, he’d been shingling a roof downtown. She heard her name. She looked up and there he was. Raising his hammer high over his head in some kind of weird tribute. Smiling.

If anybody else had done that, it would’ve seemed ludicrous. From the guy up on the roof, though, it somehow struck Bell as . . . gallant. A gallant tribute. Like something out of her favorite novel,
Wuthering Heights
. Tall and confident, even though he was standing on a roof and wearing filthy pants and cracked work boots and a ratty red T-shirt with
MECKLING CONSTRUCTION CO
printed on the front in slanty white letters, and even though his hair was spiky with sweat and there was dirt smeared across his face, Sam Elkins was her Heathcliff. Her Heathcliff with a hammer.

‘Hey!’ he’d called out. Just that: ‘Hey!’

She had pretended to ignore him. But she wouldn’t ignore him for long.

Bell shook her head. Memories were a bitch.

The present-day Sam – her ex-husband Sam – was just about out of sight by now. Behind her, Bell heard Carla climbing the stairs, on her way up to her room.

That left Bell alone in the front hallway. Silence was what she’d wanted, ever since she’d arrived home; silence and peace were what she thought she craved, after the wild ride down the mountain that morning. Now that she had it, though, the silence and the solitude felt peculiar to her, unsettling, and she felt an emptiness that she didn’t want to call fear. Bell Elkins would rather be sad than afraid, any day of the week.

Her cell phone rang. She quickly levered it out of her pocket and checked the screen. It was Hick again. Calling her this time, instead of texting. More news on the Sheets case, no doubt. Or news on any of the other cases they were handling. News too complicated to be reduced to a few acronyms in a text message.

She felt a quick surge of relief. Relief that she had her work, her cases, her obligations to the people who had elected her. If Carla moved away to live with Sam and what’s-her-name – was it Julie? No, wait, that was last year – Bell would need something to keep her mind and her heart occupied. She hated the idea of emptiness, of a gap at the center of her life. She was grateful for the heavy caseload in the prosecutor’s office.

Glenna. That was it, right? Yeah.

The name of Sam’s girlfriend was Glenna Saint-something-or-other. Bell would have to get used to the name. This Glenna person would become a daily part of Carla’s life. She’d see more of Carla than Bell did.

Bell would get Skype and e-mail. Glenna would get the real thing.

‘Hey,’ Bell said hurriedly into her cell, trying to keep her voice steady, nonchalant, so Hick Leonard wouldn’t guess at the emotion that had just rocked her with that last realization. ‘What’s going on, Hick?’

16

Chill opened the door of his motel room. He wasn’t tentative about it. He did it with authority – in fact, with a sort of grand flourish, like what you’d see in the movies, so that if it wasn’t who he expected it to be, they’d know he wasn’t scared of them. That he wasn’t scared of anything.

But it was just who he’d expected it to be, even though he’d never seen her before in his life. The woman was as skinny as the leg of a card table. She had flat, lank brown hair. Both greasy halves of it fell away from a crooked middle part. Thin arms dangled at her sides. Each arm concluded in a dirty little scallop of a hand. She was wearing a tight white tank top from which the tiny nipples of her small breasts bumped out like minor imperfections in the fabric. Her jeans, even tighter than the tank top, ended at mid-calf, and the white band of exposed flesh had gone bloody from constant scratching. Clawing, it looked like, as much as scratching. She wore red flip-flops.

The flip-flops bothered Chill. This was fall, and fall wasn’t flip-flop weather. He also thought the flip-flops were disrespectful. This was a job, right? A profession? She was getting paid, and if you got paid for something, you damned well ought to think about the impression you were making to the boss. And he was the boss.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘You’re Lorene, right?’

‘I’m Lorene.’ She didn’t move.

‘I said to get on in here,’ Chill said. He was testy. She was pissing him off. ‘Now.’ He looked past her, out into the parking lot, and to the road beyond it. There was nobody there. His car was the only vehicle present. No cars went by on the road. Still, he was nervous.

She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. ‘I gotta see the money first,’ she said. Her voice sounded so bored and generally absent that Chill wanted to smack her just to get a reaction. She was like a goddamned turtle, he thought; she was like one of those big slow turtles with the shells hard as concrete that live for, like, a couple of centuries, and only breathe or twitch once every fifty years or so. You can’t even be sure they’re alive unless somebody tells you they are.

For the first time, he took a good look at her face. Acne had done a number on it, turning the petite surface into a catalog of nicks and bumps and red-rimmed craters. Her eyes were blank. She’d tried to smear on some makeup, but the effect was comical; she looked, Chill thought, like a goddamned clown. Her nose was too big. Her mouth was too small.
Well
, he told himself,
you get what you pay for, doncha?

He’d found her number the night before in a phone booth in front of the Shell station outside Rainey Hollow. The presence of the phone booth had surprised him. You didn’t see so many of them anymore. Everybody had cell phones now. After he’d gassed up the piece-of-shit compact, he’d gone over to the phone booth and pulled open the hinged door and peered inside. It smelled like somebody had puked in there a month ago and then turned around and slapped the door shut, trapping the smell, turning that sour puke smell into a solid block. The smell knocked him back, but he still wanted to look inside, so he did.

The black plastic receiver, its top half missing, was off the hook for good. It hung down on a ridged silver cord that looked like a dead snake. Somebody had maybe smashed that receiver against the side of the booth, because there was an angry-looking starburst pattern in the glass, and the top part of the receiver was, Chill saw, lying on the floor in a couple of pieces.
What coulda made somebody mad enough to slam the receiver like that? Coulda been anything
. The surprising thing to Chill wasn’t that people got mad enough to do shit like that. The surprising thing was that they weren’t that mad all the damned time.

This phone hadn’t been in working order for a long time. That was obvious. Before Chill backed out, though, he looked at the big black hunky thing bolted to the wall, the part that had the numbers and the rotary dial and the instructions for making long-distance calls printed on a sticker on the little metal plate. And the coin slot. Somebody had used a knife and scratched a message on the side:
LORENE SUCKS DICK
. And then there was a phone number.

Well, hell
. He knew he might have some time to kill on Sunday, depending on how things went with his stakeout of the lawyer lady, so he’d repeated the number out loud and hoped he could remember it until he got back to his car. He didn’t want to stand out there in the open any longer than he had to. Once he was back in the compact, Chill had dialed the number on his cell. He got a recording. After the beep, he said, ‘Towser Motel out on Route Nine, room fourteen, don’t come before three on Sunday.’ He had nothing to lose, he figured. If somebody showed up, great. If not – well, he’d be checking out Sunday night anyway. Boss said he had to move on. Chill had killed three people, maybe he would’ve made it four by that time – Chill didn’t know how he’d get to Belfa Elkins, but somehow he’d make it happen – and he had to clear out. Lay low. Maybe even head on down to Virginia, or over to Ohio, until things cooled off.

So what the hell. He could have a little fun that afternoon, right?

This woman didn’t look like she knew anything at all about fun. She repeated her request for the up-front cash. Chill started to tell her to go screw herself, he didn’t need the aggravation, but damnit, he was bored. He was antsy. He could use the distraction.

‘How much we talking about?’ he said. He was sure that whomever had dropped her off was waiting just down the road in an old Pontiac with four bald tires and an iffy transmission, hanging close in case the customer got fussy about the price and kicked her ass out of there. In which case the guy – the pimp, Chill corrected himself, although that was a big-city word, not a word he much used – would circle back around and pick her up, probably. She was like a piece of livestock. You let her loose for a while and then you went back to fetch her. She didn’t have any say in the matter. You could put a collar on her if you wanted to. With your name and phone number just under the
IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN
to line. She wouldn’t fight you on it. She wouldn’t fight you on much of anything, Chill figured.

‘Hunnert bucks,’ she said.

He laughed. It came out like a bark, and she flinched. He was glad to see that she still had her reflexes. ‘I’ll give you twenty,’ he said with a sneer, ‘and I’ll be right quick, so’s you and your boyfriend can party the rest of the night with it.’ Chill loved a good negotiation.

She, however, didn’t. The woman who called herself Lorene appeared to have no energy left to bargain with. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Twenty.’ She stepped into the room. ‘There ain’t no boyfriend, though. It’s just me. Got a lift over here.’

He believed her.

He reached around her, to pull the door shut, and as he swept past she made a tired, halfhearted movement toward his crotch with her tiny right hand. The gesture felt like something she’d read about in an instruction manual and practiced a few times. There was nothing erotic about it. Nothing sexy or spirited.

He’d be doing most of the work himself. Turtle Girl was hopeless.

Door now locked, he nudged her stringy shoulder to get her to move farther into the room. He took another look at her, at what the pills or the booze – who knew which it was, and did it really matter? – had done to her. He’d be working hard to get himself off with this one.
Twenty bucks’ll be a gift. A goddamned gift
.

17

Albie Sheets had eaten soap.

‘Soap?’

Bell repeated the word back to Hick.

‘Soap.’ Hick’s voice on her cell was matter-of-fact. ‘Irish Spring, I think, although it might’ve been Dove. Or Ivory. Not that they have the fancy stuff in the county jail – can you imagine Nick Fogelsong’s face, if he thought we were giving inmates fancy name-brand soap at county expense?’

Hick chuckled. When Bell didn’t join him, he cleared his throat and went back to his report. ‘The soap came from Albie’s family. They’d brought him some stuff yesterday afternoon. Toiletries ’n’ such. In a little basket. With a ribbon on it. Pink. The ribbon was pink. Way I hear it, Albie’d chewed and swallowed a bar and a half before the guards put a stop to his little between-meal snack.’