The Blackstone Commentaries (3 page)

“Sheriff! We got a shootin' up on the mountain.”
Routine
, Fillmore's tone said.

A few minutes later, as he was going out on that call—what would become known as “the Carver call”—he once again had the premonition
he'd felt earlier on the edge of town, but less defined somehow, more like an echo. Then it eluded him once more.

Traffic was heavy along North Charlotte Street, but then it merged with South Charlotte, the parallel main street of town, and they were on the highway and free, the night sky glowing through patches of mist. They crossed the Creek River, the blue light chattering through the vertical gaps of the concrete railings on the bridge that Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself dedicated during the Great Depression, when they paved the highway all the way up to Tennessee.

He didn't so much see as feel the beginning of the climb, as familiar as the rhythms of his body. They entered the national forest, where mist glided through the trees and swirled over the hood. The highway began to twist, the tires hissing on the wet pavement. Eddie was driving, the needle creeping up on eighty, the silence between the man in the back and his driver viscous and familiar, smothering the occasional crackle from the radio.

The thought came to Dugan as it had many times before: his wife's father loved Roosevelt. “Dru's parents were there for the dedication of that bridge we just passed over,” he said, aloud now, “her mother with a new Brownie camera bought just for the occasion.”
What were the politics really like then?
he wondered. From all this distance, they looked clean and purposeful, standing for something noble, not the muck he was accustomed to. That bridge had become a routine meditation.

Dru's father had been dead for almost a year when Dugan—at the urging of Martin Pemberton, by then a county commissioner as well as a surgeon, “Doc” as he had come to be known after Doc Willis died of cancer and Pemberton appropriated the title—switched parties and won the race for sheriff on the Republican ticket. He had beaten Wilmot C. “Mac” MacIntosh, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who had been in office a dozen years and who everyone thought would die there. But right back to Abraham Lincoln, there had always been Republicans and other kinds of heretics in the mountains where Dugan had worked as one of Mac's deputies, and party loyalty had never been more than an afterthought for Dugan anyhow. He'd been a Democrat before that because everyone in his family back to Adam was. But it wasn't the 1930s anymore, or 1865 either, and whatever people stood for now, be it for the Vietnam War or against it, for
patriotism or integration or free love and nudity, it all seemed muddy at best. Local politics, now, he'd vote for whomsoever seemed right for the job, party be damned. Up close, you could see through a man's bullshit.

Dugan wasn't worried about his own reelection in November, not at all. When he got up on the back of a truck and emptied moonshine like he just did, and felt the pulse of his constituency, he knew that it really was his to lose. Because it would be his third term, people were already predicting still another after that, like Roosevelt. “The most popular sheriff in memory,” it was said on the radio, in the paper, among county officials. And the best—they said that, too. They were grateful, this car he was riding in being just one indication of their gratitude. On his reelection, he'd brought in a whole Republican tide, a clean sweep of the board of county commissioners and even the clerk of court. His office was political as hell, but that wasn't why he did it. He hated politics.

But he did love the feel of that big silver Dodge hunkering down to the mountain, its blue light probing the forest like something timeless, guiding them deeper into an unexplored night, into solitude and memories and dreams.

They were high up, just about to New Hope, when they swept out of the forest and around a bend right into a pile of railroad flares. He saw the Chevrolet Monte Carlo first, over against the embankment, a new and pretty expensive car, mud-spattered, a couple of its windows blasted out.

“It was Martin Pemberton, sheriff! Doc himself!” Junior Trainor, the deputy on the scene, yelped as though Dugan had asked a question, which he hadn't. Like a puppy, or maybe a school kid flapping his hand in the back row hoping for a right answer for once, that was Trainor. A big man full of antics, he was called “Whistle” sometimes, though no one ever said why and Dugan hadn't dared ask, and “CB” at other times. Dugan knew why he was called CB and tried not to think about it.

Eddie glanced at Trainor, then at Dugan, who had no doubt about what Eddie was thinking. Then Eddie went a short way off to direct traffic. He never had to tell Eddie what to do. There wasn't much traffic, and he knew Eddie was watching, would understand in that gut way of his what was going on, including what was being said even if he didn't hear it.

Trainor watched Dugan closely from under the deep shadow of his campaign hat, yanked way down over his eyes like he was some kind of
marine. Dugan paid no attention to the man's fussing. He'd heard all too well the first time the name Martin Pemberton and the implication he was somehow the culprit. Dugan was a man who listened; he heard people and was known for that. And Junior, who had been working for him right from the start, pushing eight years, should have known, too. No, Dugan would not shout for an all-points bulletin, nor fire his pistol in the air and call for a squadron of B-52s, some napalm maybe, and God knew what else Junior might think necessary to get the job done right.

But even before Dugan climbed out of his car, he saw the driver of the shot-up Monte Carlo, Daniel Earl Carver, standing mostly in silhouette about sixty feet up the highway next to Trainor's cruiser. The blue lights shattered the darkness behind Carver and his frazzled hair, making him look like he'd just taken about a thousand volts, the red from the flares tinting one side of his lean, coiled face. For a moment, Dugan couldn't keep his eyes off him. Everything about the man was coiled.

Hands on hips, Carver focused on Dugan and the other two officers he was standing with, Trainor and a highway patrolman, pouring his soul into a look none of them could see at that distance. But they all felt it. Dugan knew Carver was waiting his turn to talk to him, waiting for the justice that had been promised him all his life—at home, in church, at school, in political speeches—but which until then he'd never needed, and had probably ceased to believe in before he was out of diapers anyhow, but which he'd insist on now as a matter of principle.

From time to time, headlights flashed off the bright steel guardrail on the other side of the highway, then off Carver's Monte Carlo up against that clay bank looking at once derelict and ominous. Most of the traffic was coming up out of Damascus, it being Saturday night. Gaping faces were at the windows. Dugan saw Eddie lean in a time or two and talk to the drivers, if there wasn't a line. He'd be patient with their burning curiosity, telling them nothing but being pleasant about it, calling people by name if he knew them—and he knew most—before waving them on through the wild pink spots of fire closing the southbound lane. It took but a second more to make people feel respected, and Eddie was superb at that.

Without a word, Dugan suddenly turned and walked over to Trainor's cruiser. With a nod to Carver, he opened the back door and squatted so his
head was level with the occupants. Two little girls were inside, a woman between with her arms tightly around them. The woman stared at Dugan like she might scratch his eyes out if he came any closer. The little girl on the far side, whom he judged to be seven or eight years old, leaned forward and took in Dugan with large, quiet eyes. “I'm Sheriff Dugan, child. Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir,” the girl said.

He looked at the woman clutching her girls.

“They tried to kill us,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, and waited. But the woman turned and stared out over the hood of the car, dismissing him. He knew she was fighting tears—tears of rage, sure, but above all, shame. “I'll be back in a few minutes,” he said, gently closing the door.

“It would take at least a .357 to do that,” Junior said as Dugan approached, and in a twang he could not modulate to save his life. He pointed at two holes in the fender just in front of the passenger compartment. “I called for a tow truck, sheriff.”

Dugan looked for Junior's eyes but couldn't see them under the brim of the man's hat. He stared until the hat turned away, then bent and put his face close to the holes. Christ, how he'd hated the politics from the first, some of the men he'd had to hire on. “If they could just do their jobs,” he would complain, to Eddie only—that being one of Eddie's functions. Dugan had wanted to change the nepotism and roaring political favors at the outset, but Pemberton had insisted. “We just won for the first damn time since Reconstruction, Charlie! We've got promises to keep. Don't rock the boat all at once or it'll capsize.” He should have insisted. As Eddie said, “If you don't rock it at first, it'll never rock.”

“They was just coming back from her folks' up in Bristol,” Trainor began after a long, itchy pause, a slightly submissive note in his voice now. “Her daddy's not feeling well, may have a cancer. The little darlings were fast asleep in the back.” His tone had become honeyed with drama, like the kickoff for a revival testimony.

Dugan raised himself slowly and with a flashlight peered in through the remains of the side window behind the driver. Glass twinkled on the seat and rear deck. Then he turned to the tall, heavyset state trooper who
had been the first person on the scene, just minutes after the shooting, and who so far had merely said, “Hello, Charlie, Eddie,” giving Trainor all the leash he wanted.

“What are you thinking, Mort?” Dugan asked him.

“One of the shots took out the windows. That makes three at least. Suspect vehicle may be an Eldorado, maybe two-tone black and white, maybe even have opry lights. Carver thinks so but can't swear to it. A number on the tag—a 4, North Carolina, though he won't absolutely swear to that either. Also according to Carver, there were two men in the front seat of the vehicle and at least two women and maybe a third person in the back, wild looking and crazy, like they'd all been drinking. Billy Gaius Ford's got a Monte Carlo almost identical to this one, Charlie. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.”

“I thought he was still locked up in Burnsville.”

“Paroled two weeks ago,” the trooper said lazily. “Heard he was at Natty Moon's the other night. Fire chief's new wife was there, too.”

“Edgar's?”

Mort nodded.

Dugan shook his head. “So if Carver's right on all counts, and it was an Eldorado …”

“Four possibles: one from Fayetteville, another from New Bern, another from Cary. The fourth, Martin Pemberton, 403 Pine Terrace, Damascus.”

Dugan looked over at Carver standing by the cruiser. It was one of the new Chevrolets with the six-cylinder engines, bought by the commissioners for fuel economy—geldings, everyone called them, when they weren't laughing. Mort Riddell, the trooper, turned aside, the way one does to be polite when someone else is caught with more than his fly unzipped, for he knew how politically loaded this night had become for Dugan, if the car turned out to be Pemberton's.

“You playing with yourself, Mort?”

Mort laughed, but he was a good egg, and it was sympathetic. Dugan went back to trying to feign interest in something on the backseat of an automobile that could undoubtedly be repaired, where everyone had survived, where no one, miraculously, had gotten hurt, not visibly, not in a way anyone could medically treat. But it was the
Titanic
. He could feel the hull ripping open.

The woman—Loretta Carver. Something about her. He'd wanted to talk with the officers before the family but couldn't get her out of his mind—her face looking out the rear window of Trainor's cruiser into the glare of their headlights when he and Eddie first drove up, a flash of pale skin, dark, disheveled hair, dark circles around wild-looking eyes, clutching her babies. He knew from experience the worst for her would be the shame, the being proven vulnerable, weak and powerless in the face of someone with a gun. Lord, he'd seen that shame time and again. Once, not too long ago, he thought he might have helped diminish it some—if not the shame, then maybe the opportunities and even the causes. He'd certainly wanted to, but for a while now he'd been feeling discouraged, just not willing to admit it.

He remembered for an instant how he'd loved being a deputy. He'd loved the cool mornings inside the cabin the county had provided up on that first mountain beat of his. He'd shove aside the front door onto the porch, a barn-type door on a track, hear it rumble along with his stomach, and step out onto the rough boards and look down across the meadow, silver-blue with frost, at the sky, the mountains, the valleys below so clear it hurt as the sun rose golden over the forest and crept down the grass. He had felt all things were possible then.

You scratch some people and find the fire just below the surface rippling over red coals, transparent and blue and beautiful, just begging for a little air. He knew if you found that, you'd best watch out. That's what he believed he'd seen in that rear window, and again when he'd opened the door of Trainor's cruiser.

A tow truck burst up over the rise like Christmas, all colored lights, thumped off the highway onto the shoulder and slid to a halt about ten feet from Dugan and Mort. The door opened and the driver dropped out of the high cab all in one motion.
Forrest Brothers
was emblazoned on the door in glitter that would have done any stripper proud, the rich navy-blue background paint making the truck look blacker than the night and real sweet.

“Cub,” Dugan called with a short nod. He was unable to suppress a smile as he eyed the scrawny young man with rat's-nest hair who'd popped out of the cab. Clyde Dean Forrest was wearing his usual olive-colored aviator coveralls unzipped almost to his navel—probably nothing beneath,
though no one could prove it, nor wanted to—and Vietnam-type jungle boots, no laces.