A Killing in the Hills (7 page)

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 about 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.

An arched threshold separated the foyer from the living room on the left. Four steps later, Bell was leaning over the faded green couch. Carla was curled up in a corner of it, lying on her right side, knees at her chin, arms linked around her knees, caught in a restless sleep. Her eyelids fluttered. Her chin quivered.

‘How’s she doing?’

Bell’s whispered question was addressed to Ruthie Cox, who sat at the other end of the couch, book in her lap. Ruthie’s wrists were as thin as sticks. The eyes in her hauntingly concave face were large and dark, as if she kept them open just a little bit wider than everyone else did, so that she wouldn’t miss anything.

Ruthie was sixty-seven, but on account of her illness, could be mistaken for eighty. Fuzzy wisps of white hair dotted her scalp, like cotton balls glued to pale construction paper in a child’s art project. Her hair was struggling to grow back after repeated assaults of chemotherapy.

‘She’s okay.’ Ruthie mouthed the words.

Bell looked around the living room: Every lamp was lit.

Ruthie answered the implied question in a soft voice. ‘She didn’t want to wake up in the dark.’

Bell nodded.

The two women on this couch – her daughter, her best friend – and a third woman, the sister she hadn’t seen in almost three decades, were, along with Nick Fogelsong, all that Bell loved in the world.

That was it. Four people.

The thought made her feel vulnerable, exposed. So she shoved it aside.

The living room was small – Bell preferred to call it ‘cozy’ – with a working fireplace and a white wooden mantel, a wide front window garnished with long brown drapes that Bell generally kept pulled back and cinched at either side and, next to the couch, an overstuffed armchair. Bell had bought the chair at a Goodwill store many, many years ago, in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and it was her favorite piece of furniture in all the world precisely because of that crooked but unknown history. It was severely dilapidated. The brown plaid fabric on its arms was stained by innumerable sloshes of coffee, its back and sides sagged, the skirt around the bottom was torn and, in some spots, missing completely. Somehow, though, despite all the insults it had absorbed, the chair retained a tender, flaccid, inviting charm. Bell longed to just sink down in it, to try and forget about the day and its horrors.

Ruthie was rising. She slid the book onto the coffee table and motioned for Bell to follow her back into the foyer.

‘She’s had a few restless spells,’ Ruthie said, ‘but for the last hour or so, she’s been sleeping.’

Bell nodded.

‘I was worried when I first got here,’ Ruthie went on. ‘She was pretty agitated. I was just about to call Tom and ask him to bring over my prescription pad. Rest is what she needs. I was thinking about a sedative. But then she just dropped off. With any luck, she’ll sleep through the night.’

‘I can’t thank you enough, Ruthie, for coming over and for—’

Ruthie shook her head so swiftly and emphatically that Bell had to stop talking.

‘Hush,’ Ruthie said. ‘You know there’s nowhere else I’d want to be. Just here. So you hush.’

Bell bit her lower lip, to keep the emotion from showing. She realized she was still holding her car keys and briefcase and coffee mug, and so she took a few steps over to the hall table. On the wall above it, the oval mirror played a nasty trick: It told the truth. Her shoulders were slumped. Her skin tone, sallow. Her eye sockets looked as if they’d been pushed too far back in her head.

‘Still,’ Bell said, setting down her cargo. She didn’t want to look at Ruthie. If she lost herself in her friend’s kind face right now, if she let go, she would relinquish the equilibrium she had maintained so carefully throughout the long day, the perfect wall of composure. ‘It was sweet of you. She needed you tonight, Ruthie. And I needed you.’

She and Ruthie Cox had been best friends for five years, ever since Bell had returned to her hometown and moved into the neighborhood. Back then Bell was a divorced mother with a twelve-year-old-daughter, a law degree she hadn’t yet put to much use, and the vague, outlandish idea that someday she might want to run for Raythune County prosecuting attorney.

One year later, the incumbent, Bobby Lee Mercer, was forced to resign after a scandal involving his romantic liaison with the choir director over at Good Hope Baptist Church – Mercer was the married father of six children – and Belfa Elkins put her name on the ballot. During the campaign for the special election a few stories flared up about her past, some dark mutterings, and a couple of ugly, innuendo-laced missives ran in the letters-to-the-editor section of the
Acker’s Gap Gazette
, alluding to what had happened twenty-nine years ago in the trailer at Comer Creek, but most people were willing to judge Belfa Elkins by who she was.

Not who she’d been. And not who her family was.

When Sheriff Fogelsong announced his support for Bell, it was a done deal: She crushed Hickey Leonard by a three-to-one margin. Now Hick worked for her as an assistant prosecutor, along with Rhonda Lovejoy.

Ruthie and Tom Cox had supported Bell’s bid as well. And in the years since Bell and Carla had moved into the stone house on Shelton Avenue, the older couple had become a very big part of their lives. Ruthie was a semi-retired physician. Tom was a vet who still practiced, still ran his hands several times a week down the quivering length of golden retrievers and Border collies and sleek Labradors while murmuring, ‘There’s a good dog. Easy, girl,’ feeling for lumps or tender places, keeping eye contact with the dog’s owners as he stroked, so that they would know from the slight rise of his brows – never altering his voice, never frightening the animal – that he had found something, and that it might be serious.

Even though they were two decades older than Bell and old enough to be Carla’s grandparents, Tom and Ruthie were the best friends she’d ever had. Was that the right phrase for it, though? ‘Friend’ seemed too small a word, too ordinary, to contain the essence of what they meant to her. Too common. There was a calmness to Ruthie and Tom, a stability, a rootedness, that was so different from what Bell had known for most of her life. She rejected the idea that she’d been drawn to them because she was searching for parent figures to replace the ones she had lost. She despised that kind of trite psychology. But she had a hunger for something solid, dependable, and when she looked at Tom’s hands or when she looked into Ruthie’s eyes, eyes that never judged, eyes that seemed timeless with an expansive understanding, Bell felt, at long last, that she belonged somewhere.