A Killing in the Hills (6 page)

‘Friends are great, Nick, but what I really need are a few more assistant prosecutors, you know? I’ve got the Albie Sheets trial coming up next week – and now this.’

‘Yeah. Now this.’

She sat back in her chair. ‘We’ll get him,’ she declared, but it sounded hollow.

They both knew how easy it was to get lost in the hills surrounding Acker’s Gap. They knew how many nooks and creases and crevices were hidden out there, how many rough, wild places inaccessible except on foot, and only then when you’d grown up here and knew the land, knew it in all seasons, all weathers.

‘What’s your instinct, Nick? Robbery gone bad? Shooter panics?’

‘Coulda been that. Or coulda been some crazy fool out on a spree – a random thing, I mean, and those three old boys were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Damnit, Bell,’ the sheriff suddenly said, his big fist bouncing on the desktop, making the pile of notebooks shift and slide. ‘When’d this kind of thing start happening around here? Wasn’t always this way. Was it? Or am I turning into one of those nostalgic old bastards, going on and on about the good old days? I just don’t know anymore. But something tells me – it’s a feeling, only a feeling – that we’re losing something real important here. Something precious.’

He sucked in a massive chestful of air and blew it out again before continuing.

‘You know what, Bell? Sometimes I think – Oh, hell. Forget it.’

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘Nothing. Just a lot of nonsense, is all.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well,’ the sheriff said.

He grunted, changing the position of his hips yet again. The swivel chair was too old to be comfortable. Its springs were shot. The black plastic pads on the armrests were cracked. One of its tiny wheels was prone to flopping sideways if he scooted more than half an inch in any direction. Still, he refused to replace it. When Bell had urged him to visit Office Depot in the mall out by the interstate to pick out a new chair, the sheriff had snorted and said,
What’re we now – kings in a palace? Just be glad I don’t make us all sit cross-legged on the damned floor. Count your blessings
.

He shifted his chin back and forth a few more times.

‘It’s like this, Bell,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I just wonder if it’s worth it. Pushing like we do. I know some sheriffs and prosecutors in other counties who take things a lot easier, and they sleep real good at night.’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’

‘Sure you do, Bell,’ he said quietly. ‘Sure you do.’

And she did. She couldn’t help but know, because they’d talked about it so many times. Talked – and argued. He wished she would ease off, wished she would ratchet down the pressure and not be so zealous and inflexible when it came to narcotics cases.

They weren’t like anything else they had ever faced, because the drugs – not street drugs like cocaine or crystal meth, not drugs that promised glamour and good times, but drugs that eased sore backs and sore lives – almost seemed like a natural part of the landscape. They seemed, insidiously, to belong here. To fit right in. Fighting these drugs felt like pushing back against the mountains themselves.

Bell, though, wouldn’t back down. She had a clear-eyed and wild-hearted hatred for the illegal suppliers of prescription medications, and for the drugs that, she believed, were poisoning the people in these mountains like arsenic dumped in a well.

Used to be, the sheriff was right there beside her, her strongest ally, following every tip and carrying out raids on big-time dealers and small-time ones, too, the ones who operated out of their pickups and off the stoops of their trailers and in the bathrooms of truck stops out on the interstate. But he’d been rethinking things. And today’s violence had rattled him. He was feeling helpless, overwhelmed.

He had stated it plainly to her just the other day. Even before the shooting:
Maybe if we took a little break, Bell, maybe if you quit making so many speeches that identified drugs as the single greatest threat to the future of West Virginia, maybe if you stopped prosecuting drug-related crimes with quite so much fervor – maybe we’d have some peace again
.

He’d seen what they were up against: multiple generations of the same families addicted to prescription painkillers. Kids as young as twelve or thirteen trying the stuff, underestimating its quicksilver grip. He paid close attention to the reports from the regional medical clinics, from the state police. He knew about the drug operations – audacious, increasingly well organized and, in many cases, well armed – that now had a major financial stake here, spreading their distribution networks, pushing deeper and deeper into West Virginia, wrapping their greasy little tentacles around its heart.

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 didn’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.