Last Ragged Breath (36 page)

“Well, I suppose I'd like them to know about my work. I changed fields, you know. A lot of my graduate research was in microbiology. Lab work. But I looked around and I realized what was happening to our world. So I shifted to environmental science. I know there won't be any easy answers to the problem of climate change. But whatever those answers are—they'll come from science. Not politics.” She heard, for the first time since they had been shocked by the halt of the hoist halfway up the shaft, a note of hopefulness in his voice. “Yes. That's what I want them to know. How much I love them and how much I still love their mother. I always will. And how much I love this planet. Corny as that sounds.”

“Doesn't sound corny at all.”

“How about you? What do you want Carla to know?”

Bell started to answer. Then something occurred to her. She would never know if that idea had somehow drifted up from the depths of the Drago No. 4 mine, rising on the back of a rich plume of coal dust, or if it had been in her mind all along, and just needed a jolt to shake it loose.

“David,” she said. “What if I lied?”

“Pardon?”

“What if I threatened to tell a different story about you? That you were a terrible coward in these last few minutes? That you were disappointed in your girls, and you hated their mother, and you hated your work?”

“I don't know what you—”

“What would you do?”

“Well,” he said, “I'd be pretty pissed, frankly.”

“How pissed?”

“I'm not following what you're—”

“If I was blackmailing you with that threat, what would your response be? Remember—I'm going to tell a heinous lie about you. A lie the world's likely to believe. So—would you do my bidding?”

“I might,” he said. “But I'd try to stop you first.”

“Exactly.”

Fourteen minutes later, the man-hoist began to grunt and moan once more. In another five, they crested the surface. They were met there by the sweaty, dirt-seamed face of Dickie Lavender.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, yanking open the gate. “Shoulda warned you. This thing sticks worse'n a rusty truck door. Gets hung up every few trips. I been outside with the electrician, trying to get 'er going, else I woulda shouted down to you, tell you what was going on.”

“We did okay,” David said.

“Piece of cake,” Bell put in.

David looked over at her. And she realized, based on what she read in his eyes, that he now understood. Sometimes it happened that way: You both tried to make a relationship work, but then you realized, in a moment when you weren't even thinking consciously about it, that it was never to be. No blinding flash of revelation, no grand moment of truth. Just a sober, quiet knowing. It wasn't going to happen between them. And that was okay. Disappointing, perhaps, especially to him—but okay.

On paper, David was perfect for her. In the real world, though, things were different. She knew the man she wanted. And it wasn't David Gage. She might never have another chance with Clay Meckling, and she might be alone for the rest of her life—but she wouldn't compromise. She couldn't. Something in her blood made her that way.

Dickie Lavender, having no idea about what had just passed silently between them, thumped Bell's helmet. Then he thumped David's, too. “Lotsa people,” he said admiringly, “scream like stuck pigs when the man-hoist quits like that in the dang middle of the trip. Or they start yelling to Jesus. But you two were as cool and comfortable as a couple of old miners. Oughta be proud of yourselves.”

 

Chapter Thirty-four

Rhonda Lovejoy stopped the car. She did it too abruptly, with a hard punch of her right foot, and the vehicle's tires shrieked their indignation as the hindquarters fishtailed wildly to the right.

“Holy crap,” her passenger yelped. “You trying to put me through the windshield, or what?”

“Look over there.” Rhonda ignored his complaint and pointed eagerly. “On the concrete pad in front of the garage. That black one's an Escalade. The other one's a Lexus. Come on.”

Before Jake Oakes could tell her one more time just how truly bad an idea he considered this to be—how foolish, reckless, and most likely ineffective—Rhonda had already scooted out of her car. She'd parked within sight of Walter Albright's ostentatiously massive brick house in Harbor View, a new housing development located just past Blythesburg. There was no harbor here, hence no view of same; the name had been chosen because the developers thought it sounded snooty and exclusive, as if these were elegant oceanfront estates in Connecticut, not gaudy McMansions set down in a converted farm field in West Virginia.

From here she and Oakes could see a portion of the lengthy, triple-wide concrete pad that constituted Albright's driveway, and had as well a beguiling peek at his rolling, meticulously landscaped backyard. The house included a two-story, four-car garage, topped by a small replica of a sailboat that served as a weather vane; the copper was well on its way to oxidizing into the classic blue-green shade. Albright apparently liked to indulge in the Harbor View fantasy himself.

Rhonda and Oakes got back in her car. They needed to see the place from another angle. Their suspicions were being richly fed by every frill and accouterment they came across: This was too much house, too much garage, too much everything for a retired state trooper, even one who had worked an additional two decades as security chief for a chain of truck stops. Rhonda had done her due diligence before setting out: She'd checked with her niece, Judy—a real estate agent in Collier County—and discovered that Walter Albright's wife, Gloria, had purchased the $950,000 home just over a year ago. She paid cash. And she filed the title in her maiden name—Gloria Bransted. Judy was able to find out all of this because she was Rhonda's niece. And Lovejoys always knew where to look.

Rhonda was glad that Oakes had agreed to accompany her. “Agreed” was too generous; “consented under coercion” might be closer to the mark. Rhonda had stopped by the courthouse early Saturday morning and found the deputy just as he was finishing up the night shift, ready to head home, whereupon she announced to him her plans to drive over to Harbor View and snoop around Albright's property. During one of her visits to Nick's hospital room, Rhonda explained, Nick had talked about Albright. About how inefficient the old man had become at his job, how slipshod and forgetful. Something had clicked in Rhonda's head—and so, she told Oakes, she was going to check it out. Right now.

You can't do that,
Oakes said.
Watch me,
she'd snapped back at him.
You're crazy
, he replied.
Could be
, Rhonda said, adding,
But I'll be damned if I'm going to keep sitting around without lifting a finger to find out who shot Nick Fogelsong. He's my friend
. Oakes shook his head and said:
Friend or not, it's Collier County's lookout, not ours, and besides—
At that point, Rhonda started walking away.
Hold on,
Oakes called out.
You can't go by yourself
. And she turned back to him and said,
Well, okay, but you've got to change out of your uniform first. Dressed like that, you can't sneak up on anybody
.

As they drove toward Harbor View he had expressed his surprise that there was a passel of palatial homes in such a benighted area of the state. “You're making a common mistake,” Rhonda had reprimanded him. “You think it's all shacks and trailers in these parts. No. There's houses that serve the high end, too—doctors, lawyers, people with real money. Go-to-hell money, we call it. And that's the problem these days. There's high and there's low. But there's no middle.”

Then he'd asked another question: What made her so certain that, if Albright
had
been involved in a drug ring, and profited handsomely from same, there would be sufficient evidence of that at his home? “Oh, Jake, Jake,” Rhonda said, giving him a piteous glance as she swung her car toward the exit marked
BLYTHESBURG
. “What's the point of having more money than other folks if you can't show off to the neighbors? Subtlety is not a virtue much prized by the sort we're talking about. Believe me—if Walter Albright took payoffs to let Highway Haven turn into an open-air drug market, he'd put that money to good use. He'd be conspicuous about it—and he couldn't help himself. In a funny kind of way, all those shiny new toys would help a man like Albright feel better about what he's done. They justify it. Working all those years in law enforcement for peanuts, while the bad guys rake it in—why, it's only right and proper that he finally gets a taste of the high life. You see? Okay, so here's the bet. I say there'll be at least one riding lawnmower, a motor home, a trampoline, a snowblower, and maybe a Bobcat in an outbuilding.”

Oakes laughed and said, “I'll see your lawnmower, your motor home, your trampoline, your snowblower, and your Bobcat, and I'll raise you a swimming pool and a hot tub.”

While they watched, an overweight man came out of the back door of the house. He headed toward the Escalade. With a jaunty nonchalance, he flipped a set of car keys up in the air and then caught it again. Flip and catch. Flip and catch. It was cold this morning, and he wore a green plaid coat. On his head was a ball cap with a Peterbilt logo.

Oakes pulled Rhonda back behind her car. He unclipped the cell from his belt. Punched in a number.

“I'd like to speak to Sheriff Ives,” he said. “Tell him it's Deputy Jake Oakes from the Raythune County Sheriff's Department.”

*   *   *

“We got 'em.”

Bell repeated the words triumphantly into her phone—“We got 'em”—just to make sure that Mary Sue Fogelsong had heard her correctly on the other end. “Tell Nick that a search warrant for Walter Albright's house and grounds was executed at 2:14 this morning by the Collier County Sheriff's Department. We found evidence that he accepted bribes to compromise security procedures at the Highway Haven.” She paused. “Sure, put him on the line. I'll tell him myself.”

Waiting for the phone to be passed to Nick in his hospital bed, Bell looked across the table at Rhonda and Jake. Both had taken her up on her offer to buy them a truly epic breakfast here at JP's—eggs, sausage links, grits, hotcakes, waffles, toast, and coffee—on this early Sunday morning, and were currently clawing their way through it at warp speed, like a demolition crew paid by the brick. They'd been up all night and they were ravenous; they had gone along on last night's raid that had dismantled a major drug ring. Even though they had no official role, it was their tip that had initiated the action, and the Collier County Sheriff had taken one look at their eager faces and muttered, “What the hell. Come on, you two—you can ride with me. But keep your damned heads down, okay?”

Nick's voice on her cell sounded tired. “Hey, Bell,” he said. She looked forward to the moment when he didn't sound tired all the time. Tired didn't suit Nick Fogelsong.

“Hey.” Bell was excited, and pleased that she had good news for a change. “We nailed the bastards. It was Albright's son-in-law—Leroy Smathers—who ran the show. He'd been paying Walter for the last year and a half to look the other way while they set up their operation. Walter was more than happy to pocket the cash. Once Walter got fired, though, they had to find another distribution point. That's why they went to Royce Dillard.” She stopped to take a long, satisfied breath. “Albright's decided to cooperate with us. Turns out that after he lost his job, he wasn't worth a damn to them. So they started treating him pretty bad. Moved into his house, ordered him around. They even trashed the inside of his motor home—and that was enough to turn Albright against his own kinfolk. I mean, drug dealing's one thing, but pouring beer on the Berber carpet? He's jumping at the chance to testify against the lot of them—for whatever amount of time is shaved off his sentence.”

“Good. That's real good news,” Nick said.

She waited for him to ask her for more details. When he didn't, she supplied them, anyway. “The guy in the green plaid? That's Leroy. Guy who shot you is a scumbag named Tommy Boykins. He's looking at an attempted murder charge. I know some of those Collier County judges. They won't go easy on him.”

There was a pause, and then Mary Sue was back on the line again. “He's having a rough morning, Bell. Lots of pain. Pushed himself a little too hard in physical therapy yesterday. He didn't want to ask for pain meds this morning—but he finally had to and he's pissed about it. Listen, though—this is wonderful news. You've done a splendid job.”

“Not me,” Bell said. “It was Rhonda Lovejoy and Jake Oakes.”

At the sound of their names, the two people across from her grinned. Oakes toasted the table with his orange juice glass.

“You tell them,” Mary Sue said, “that I'm sure Nick'll want to thank them personally. Just as soon as he's able.”

“I will.” Bell ended the call. She placed her cell next to her napkin. The napkin was still folded; she'd ordered only coffee.

“What did Nick say?” Rhonda asked. She'd had to finish swallowing a jumbo bite of syrup-beribboned pancake before she could speak. “Got to be a relief, knowing that the man who shot him is gonna be out of action for a good long while.”

“Yes,” Bell said. “He's looking forward to the day he can shake your hands.” She didn't elaborate. She felt protective of Nick and his despondency; she didn't want to share with too many people the fact of how changed he was, how knocked back by his wound and by his awareness of all that he couldn't do anymore.

“So how'd you spend
your
Saturday?” Rhonda said. She was saucy, sky-high, happier than Bell had seen her in weeks. The Dillard trial was taking a toll on her.