Good Day In Hell (33 page)

“Some people actually enjoy this type of thing,” the man went on. The naked man tied to the heavy wooden chair in the middle of the room said nothing. He tried to stare straight ahead, but his eyes kept darting to the table where DeGroot had laid out his tools. The room was empty except for the table, the chair, and the plastic sheeting covering the floor. The man in the chair could hear the harsh crinkling sounds of the Afrikaner’s boots on the plastic as he walked around.

“I don’t enjoy it,” DeGroot said. “But you do what you have to.”

The man in the chair hated the way he was sweating. He hated how he desperately wanted to know what it was that DeGroot was doing behind him.

There was the snap of a switch and a high-pitched whine. A sharp, electric smell filled the air. He felt the Afrikaner step up behind him, felt the man’s breath on his ear.

“I scheme your training’s like mine,” DeGroot said. “Everyone’s got his limits. Everyone talks eventually.” He stepped around to face his captive. He was holding a pair of wires in his hands. The wires ended in a pair of large alligator clips. The other ends were somewhere behind him.

“You tell yourself you’ll be different. You’ll be the one who holds out.” The man smiled, almost sadly. “It’s who we are. We’re the best.” He was opening and closing the clips absentmindedly as he spoke. The man in the chair stared with horrified fascination at the jaws opening, closing, opening, closing …

“But in the end, we’re human,” the Afrikaner said. “Flesh and blood. We’re all the same underneath. We hurt, we bleed, we scream, and”—he looked directly at his prisoner—“we talk. It takes longer for some than others, but we do. So save yourself some pain, eh? Tell me. Where’ve you been? And who’ve you been talking to? And most important, where’s your key?”

“I haven’t told anyone,” the man in the chair said. “I swear it.”

The Afrikaner shook his head. “I wish I could believe you, boet. We’ve been through a lot together already. But I can’t take any chances.” I kint take inny chanzes. He stood up and approached the man in the chair, the electrodes clenched open in his hands. “Don’t feel bad about screaming,” he said. “It’s not like anyone can hear you, way out here.”

There are few places hotter than a tarpaper roof in the late summer in North Carolina. The small group of men working around the tar kettle were stripped to the waist, the skin of their backs and chests cured to the color of old leather by the twin blasts of the sun from above and the waves of heat shimmering up from the sticky black goo they spread around the chimney that stuck up from the gabled roof. They were mostly silent, moving with an economy of motion. It was too hot to move fast,
and they didn’t know one another well enough for small talk to come easily. Mostly they kept their heads down, concentrating on the job of spreading the tar evenly.

They looked up, however, as the ladder that leaned against the side of the building shook and rattled. Someone was coming up. They looked at each other curiously. The whole crew was already at the top; they were expecting no one else. All work and motion stopped as they turned to see who was invading their space. As they watched, a head came into view, followed by a pair of broad shoulders. The man who clambered off the top of the ladder was tall and lanky, with shoulder-length blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He straightened up and looked at the men standing silently by the edge of the roof. His gaze took them in, one by one. Finally, he stopped, his eyes fixed on a wiry dark-haired man who had moved to the middle of the group as if trying to lose himself in the tiny crowd.

“Afternoon, Edward,” the blond man said in a soft drawl. “We missed you in court the other day.”

The other men looked at Edward, then moved slightly aside. He was the newest member of the group, and no one felt inclined to try their luck against the dangerous-looking interloper. They were especially disinclined to stick up for him since he had previously introduced himself as Gary.

Edward looked from one of his co-workers to the other and saw no help there. He looked back at the blond man and squared his shoulders.

“I ain’t goin’ back,” he said.

“Yeah,” the blond man said. “Actually, you are.” He advanced on the smaller man calmly, moving as easily as if he were on level ground. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a set of handcuffs. Edward looked desperately one way, then another, then over the edge of the roof. He turned back to the blond man. “Fuck you,” he said, and ran off the edge.

It wasn’t meant as a suicidal move; in lunchtime small talk, the other men had regaled Edward/Gary with the story of how one of them had lost his footing, slid off the edge of a roof, and landed on his feet without any ill effect other than a sore ankle for a few days.

Edward didn’t have that kind of luck; he never had. He screamed as he landed, his ankle breaking with a sickening crack. He rolled over onto his back, howling like a wounded animal, pulling his knee up to his chest in a futile and belated attempt at protecting the shattered joint. He looked up to see a short Latino man standing over him. The man was in his mid-forties with deep brown eyes and a thin moustache that drooped on either side of his mouth. He was holding a shotgun pointed at Edward.

“Hold still,” the man said in a soft Spanish accent. “We will get you a doctor.”

Edward screamed again, the tears of pain and frustration rolling down his face. Dimly, through the haze of his own agony, he heard the metallic rattling of someone coming down the ladder. He looked up to see the blond man standing over him. The blond man turned to the Latino and held out his hand silently. The Latino man sighed and handed over the shotgun. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He riffled through the contents for a moment, then pulled out a bill and handed it to the blond man.

“You were right,” he said. He shook his head.

“I usually am, Oscar,” the blond man said, not unkindly.

“What?” Edward snarled. “Right about what?”

The Latino man shrugged. “I did not think anyone would be stupid enough to try to escape by running off a roof. Mr. Keller here bet me five dollars I was wrong.”

“Fuck you,” Edward said again. Keller pulled out a cell phone. “Look, you want me to call an ambulance before we run you in or what?”

The man with the rifle tracked the progress of the red Jeep Grand Cherokee as it wound its way up the mountain. Even at this altitude, it was beginning to heat up, but he paid no attention to the sweat that ran down his face. The huge rifle was heavy and awkward, but the rifleman moved easily with it. He kept the crosshairs of the telescopic scope locked on the tinted windshield, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. As the Jeep reached the bend in the road, the man’s finger tensed ever so slightly. The Jeep stopped. The headlights flashed once, twice. The rifleman relaxed the pressure. If the Jeep had not stopped and signaled, he would have put a .50-caliber bullet into the driver’s side window, then another into the engine block. Each
of the rounds was the length of a man’s hand and traveled at three thousand feet per second. The rifle was originally designed to disable vehicles at extended ranges; against flesh and bone it wreaked terrible damage. The rifleman had seen the weapon cut a man in half at fourteen hundred yards.

As the Jeep approached the cabin below him, the rifleman saw a flash of movement at the edge of his field of vision. He swung the rifle to bear, his finger taking up the slack on the trigger again. The crosshairs centered on the back of a blond head. He tracked the figure of the small child running across the tiny yard in front of the cabin. She was about five years old, dressed in a light blue flowered dress. The rifleman held the sight on the girl for a long second. He blew out the breath he had been holding and let off the trigger. He kept his eye to the sight and focused again on the red Jeep. It pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust. A man got out. The rifleman swung the scope to bear on the passenger side. No one got out. The driver was alone. The rifleman took his eye away from the scope. Only then did he wipe the sweat from his brow. “Shit,” he said under his breath.

A slight breeze blew up and he closed his eyes, savoring the coolness on his flesh. He opened them again and looked out over the vista before him. He was standing in a rusting steel hut at the top of an abandoned fire watchtower. The tower itself was situated atop the highest of the local mountains. His vantage commanded a view of hundreds of square miles of forest that covered this part of the Blue Ridge. The ever-present haze that gave the mountains their name was light today. It obscured his view only slightly. The tower and the cabin at its base were far enough from the main road that even the muted whisper of traffic that most people tune out at the edge of hearing was gone. The silence of the ancient hills seemed to be a noise in itself, an emptiness that roared at him from the valleys below. In that enormous sound that was not a sound, the Jeep door’s opening and closing seemed muffled, as did the voices that followed. One was high and childish, the other one deeper. It was a voice the rifleman knew as well as his own. But it was only one voice and he had hoped to be hearing two.

He sat down on the wooden floor of the tower and leaned against the steel side. The massive rifle lay across his lap. The tower vibrated slightly as the man
below mounted the steps that spiraled up from the bottom of the tower. The vibration grew stronger as the second man drew nearer, until his head poked up through the hole in the middle of the floor.

“Anything?” the rifleman said.

The second man shook his head. He climbed the rest of the way into the observation deck. He walked over to the side and looked out.

The second man was tall and broad-shouldered, in contrast to the rifleman’s wiry compactness. The second man was light-haired and fair-skinned, where the rifleman was dark-haired and Mediterranean-looking. Yet there was an indefinable similarity between them that occasionally led people to ask if they were related or even if they were brothers. In some senses, they were.

“We’re going to have to call DeGroot,” the rifleman said.

“He’s not going to like this,” the second man replied.

The rifleman lifted up slightly and fumbled in his pocket for a coin. He pulled one out. “Call it,” he said as he flicked the coin into the air with his thumb.

The second man smiled slightly. “Tails.”

The rifleman caught the rapidly spinning coin out of the air with one hand and slapped it down on his other wrist. He took his hand away. “Heads.”

The second man grimaced. “I’ll make the call. You get to feed the kid. I got groceries.”

The rifleman sighed. “Spaghetti-Os again.”

“It’s all she eats.” The second man smiled tightly. “And we’ve eaten worse.”

THE END

About The Author

J.D. Rhoades was born and raised in North Carolina. He has worked as a radio news reporter, club DJ, television cameraman, ad salesman, waiter, practicing attorney, and newspaper columnist. His weekly column in the Southern Pines, North Carolina Pilot was named best column of the year in its division. His Keller novels, THE DEVIL’S RIGHT HAND, GOOD DAY IN HELL, SAFE IN SOUND and DEVILS AND DUST are available from Polis Books. He lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage, North Carolina. Learn more at
www.jdrhoades.com
and follow him on Twitter at
@jd_rhoades
.

Read on for an excerpt of the brand new Keller novel DEVILS AND DUST. Now available in hardcover and ebook from Polis Books.

CHAPTER ONE

The
jefe
affectionately called him
El Poeta
—the Poet. It had nothing to do with literary talent; in fact, the man driving the truck was almost completely illiterate. The nickname was in honor of the man’s ability to curse. El Poeta was a virtuoso of invective. The
jefe
once said El Poeta could curse for twenty minutes and not repeat himself once.

The road he was driving gave him plenty of inspiration. The old truck bounced and rattled over the corrugated surface, abusing El Poeta’s spine mercilessly.

“
Hijo de mil putas
!” He spat as the truck bottomed out on a particularly bad pothole. “
Me cago en la leche de tu puta madre
!” It was unclear if his rage was directed against the road, the truck, or the world in general.

Someone banged on the wall of the truck, behind El Poeta’s head. “
Parate, pinche idiota
!” he shouted back. This close to the border was no place to stop for a piss break. That’s what the buckets in the cargo area were for. If they sloshed a bit because of the bad road, that wasn’t El Poeta’s problem. This was the road he knew the Border Patrol never watched. El Poeta didn’t know if they just didn’t know about it or if some palms had been greased to make them look the other way, and he didn’t give a damn. His job was to drive the big truck to a deserted area just north of the border, hand each of the
pollos
in the back two bottles of water, point the way north, and get the hell out. It was up to them to figure it out from there. He slowed, stuck his head out the window, and squinted at the sky. It was still full dark, the stars glittering coldly above.