Liquid Fear (7 page)

Roland reached the West Virginia mountains in early afternoon.

Whatever the pill was, it hadn’t impaired his driving. In fact, it had helped clear his head, and Cincinnati seemed years away. Sure, it had been crazy taking the pill, but the orange bottle seemed like the only reliable and honest thing in his life.

The radio offered no reports of a murderer on the loose, but he had no way to tell whether the body had been discovered or simply that murder was no longer major news.

Despite the rental-car receipts being made out to “David Underwood,” Roland veered off the interstate in Kentucky and stuck to the back roads, crossing the Big Coal River and entering the mountains. His brother, Steve, a dentist in Fort Lauderdale, kept a log cabin there as a summer getaway and had shared a key with Roland.

“We all need to hide out now and then,” Steve had said, flashing a six-figure smile. Roland figured Steve was talking about entertaining mistresses and fishing for trout, not evading capture for murder.

But it wasn’t murder
, he reasoned, as he eased past a goat farm on the outskirts of Logan, heading up the gravel road that led into a dark hollow of the type praised in old Appalachian folk ballads.

Or, it may have been murder, but it wasn’t mine.

He thought of all the cop shows he’d seen. Most of them were built on the simple words “It wasn’t me.” If you believed the fairy tales, nobody ever did it, especially the good guy.

And despite a blackout, despite blood on his hands, despite a pile of evidence that would make any prosecuting attorney salivate, Roland still believed he was one of the good guys. At least until proven guilty.

And I’m not David Underwood. Only Roland can feel this shitty and scared.

The gravel road gave way to twin muddy ruts, and Roland wondered how Steve navigated the driveway in his BMW. The neighboring goat farmer, whom Steve said took pride in monitoring the row of mailboxes for signs of vandalism and theft, had no doubt observed the unfamiliar vehicle passing by.

The Ford Escort was not exactly the wheels of choice for a deer hunter or fisherman, and there was a slim chance the farmer would jot down the license-plate numbers just in case. Nosy neighbors could be just as much a blessing as a curse, but Roland figured he’d be safe as long as he didn’t poach any goats.

The key fit the lock, which was comforting. Further proof that he indeed was Roland who had a brother named Steve who owned a cabin near Logan. It may as well have been a jail cell, however, because Roland was imposing his own sentence.

Although his plan was to think the problem through, inaction would be seen as the resignation of a guilty man. The DA would have a field day retracing his movements in court.

Stale, musty air, with a wet-fur accent, wafted from the cabin’s interior as the door opened. Steve rarely visited it, and Roland hadn’t been there since a business stopover two years before.

The cabin was stocked with the usual rodent-proof fare: canned beans, a rusted tin of coffee, and powdered milk on the shelves; sherbet, ice cubes, and a graying, cellophane-wrapped hunk of mystery meat in the freezer; and a half-bottle of flat ginger ale and a crusted mustard jar in the refrigerator.

The cabin had no telephone, even though cellular reception was spotty in the mountains. “Part of getting away from it all,” Steve had said.

Roland was afraid to even switch his phone on, much less make a call, fearing the signal would somehow be traceable. He didn’t know if the police had ways of tracking phone locations using global-positioning satellite data, or whether the rental car contained such technology.

All he knew was that someone had planted links to the pills, the murder, and the car, and if one person could connect the dots, then so could the cops.

A distant dog brayed, a lonely sound that reminded Roland that he had no one to trust. Steve, the younger, overachieving brother, was almost his polar opposite, too slick to take on serious problems. Their father was dead, hammered by a coronary thrombosis, and Mom was living in that fragile state of denial that afforded no room for adversity.

The close friendships of his early twenties had given way to the forced camaraderie of coworkers and business clients, all his old buddies poured down the drain with the contents of that last half-bottle of whiskey. Only one person would have shared this dark burden, even at risk of being charged as an accomplice to murder.

No, he couldn’t think of Wendy. That was over, a marriage killed by his selfishness. One of the sayings in his twelve-step program was that drunks didn’t have relationships, they took hostages. And Wendy had paid her ransom with dignity and two years of counseling.

Roland checked the bedroom, wondering if he should air out the blankets. Even in March, the mountain air was humid. As he sat on the bed, he realized how exhausted he was. The adrenaline that had fueled him during that morning’s discovery and subsequent flight had receded, though his thoughts still raced down the same avenues of the past few hours.

Had he killed someone? What had happened during the missing chunk of memory? And who was David Underwood?

He pulled the pill bottle from his pocket, a solid link to what had happened in Cincinnati. It had been over four hours, but damned if he was taking any more pills.

It was only after he’d stretched out on the bed that he realized he had no course of action. Too wired to doze, he stared at the ceiling. Harry Grimes would be expecting a sales report this afternoon.

He was supposed to be in Kentucky tomorrow, visiting a few tire dealerships to present a new style of rubberized signage, complete with tread marks. Now the wheels were bare, the road reaching a dead end, no exits.

Actually, that wasn’t true.

One detour remained.

Steve, like many weekend hosts, stocked an array of cocktail staples. Though alcoholism stemmed from a genetic predisposition in many cases, Steve managed fine as an occasional imbiber. The very existence of a liquor cabinet was proof enough that his brother had dodged the affliction. Roland had never owned more than one bottle at a time, and he never slept until that bottle was empty.

Sweat arose in his armpits, his palms, and along the line of his scalp. He was convinced that the murderous blackout had not been caused by drinking, but now that the insidious whisper filled his head, it would not stop its siren song until he crashed on the rocks. Two years of sobriety, and what had he gained?

And it wasn’t like this was
his
fault. After all, he didn’t kill the woman. David Underwood did, and Roland wasn’t David, was he?

She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And because of her, Roland’s world had been tipped off its axis.

Clearly, she was the one to blame.

He sat up. One of the ground rules of recovery was to maintain daily contact with your sponsor. Especially when the monkey climbed on your back and dug in its dirty claws.

No cell phone signal. Roland couldn’t call.

He sighed, relieved, though his gut clenched in craving.

No Harry. So Harry shared in the failure as much as the dead woman did.

Fuck it.

Fists tight, Roland stood. He was almost to the closet when Wendy’s voice came to him.

“What did you ever do to deserve this?” he’d once asked when they were exploring the damage of people who loved alcoholics.

“What did
you
do to deserve it?” she asked.

And he’d had no answer, then or now.

She’d been as supportive as any spouse should be. She even attended Al-Anon, the support group for family members of alcoholics. She’d sat with him in open meetings, listened as he made his required amends and worked through the steps; she memorized the little homilies, including the one that reminded drunks to remember the futility of control, resentment, and selfishness.

But where was Wendy now?

Out of his life, living across town from him, both of them financially damaged by the separation and legal battle.

Of course, when you got right down to it, God had set up the bowling pins for this particular split. Why cast about for blame when there was One who had all the power?

In the Blame Game, you didn’t need to point the finger at yourself. The real target was in the sky, everywhere, pervading the fabric of reality.

Or, alternately, God was nowhere.

The grin was a grim rictus on his face. Justification, that savior of drunks the world over. He licked his lips. His hand was actually trembling in a way it hadn’t since he’d beaten
delirium tremens
during a thirty-day stay in a treatment facility.

If God didn’t want him to drink, God would cause him to trip over the living room rug and break a leg. And God wouldn’t have stuck Steve’s liquor in the cabin, just waiting for him like manna.

God’s fault. God’s desire. God’s will.

He was heading for the liquor cabinet when someone knocked on the door.

He glanced at the ceiling, wondering if God was up there laughing, the hoary old bastard.

He thought about hiding, or maybe going for the back door and running into the woods, but that would be stupid.

No, the best thing was to answer it and act like he belonged there.

Roland opened the door, smiling but with a little hint of annoyance at being disturbed. A man stood there, beefy, dressed in a flannel shirt and overalls. He wore a new straw hat on his head that looked uncomfortably stiff. One side of his mouth was slack, as if he’d worn out his muscles from chewing tobacco in that cheek.

“Can I help you?”

“Howdy,” the man said, waving vaguely off to the left. “I own the farm down there and keep an eye on the place for Steve. Thought I might check in and see if you need anything. Place has stood empty a while.”

Yeah, right. And not a bit curious, I’ll bet.

“I’m just stopping over on a road trip,” Roland said. “I’m Steve’s brother.”

The man squinted. “I see a little resemblance, now that you mention it.”

“Yeah, he got the brains, but I got all the looks.”

The man nodded, no sense of humor. “Well, if you need anything, just holler.”

Roland glanced at the man’s feet, expecting to see scuffed boots flecked with goat shit. Instead, the man wore shiny leather dress shoes.

“I’ll do that, sir,” he said, though the man was only ten years older than him.

The man turned, and Roland noticed there were no other vehicles in the driveway. The farmer must have walked at least half a mile. Without scuffing his new shoes. “All right, David, enjoy your stay.”

“My name’s not David,” Roland said. “It’s—”

He caught himself as the man turned. “Steve said he had a brother named David,” the man said.

Roland thought about lying, but he planned to be long gone soon. “It’s Roland.”

The man’s lips pursed, and then they broke into a grin. “That’s right. I was just testing you. We get all kinds of weirdos out in these parts. It pays to be a little suspicious.”

“Sounds like good advice.”

“You’ll be heading back to North Carolina soon?”

How the hell did he know?
“Depends on how much I enjoy my stay.”

“I wouldn’t enjoy it too much. You might never want to leave.”

The man laughed, but the humor was off, like an inside joke he didn’t want to share. Roland watched him walk down the road, those new shoes slapping in the dirt and gravel.

He slammed the door. Soon it wouldn’t matter if he was Roland or David or the fucking ghost of Kentucky Colonel Jack Daniels.

He reached the cabinet and swallowed hard, throat stinging with the anticipated heat of the liquor. Steve’s drink was Crown Royal, out of Roland’s price range, but there would be rum, vodka, gin, and probably some brandy as well. Enough.

The cabinet was oaken, the door slightly warped by dampness. But now it was the gate to paradise.

As he opened the door, he closed his eyes, half-hoping for a final reprieve, some cosmic gesture that would gird his spirit.

The cabinet door creaked open. A warm, putrid odor wafted out with the force of floodwater.

A goat hung in the cabinet, a hemp rope tangled in its horns. Its body cavity was peeled open, red ribs exposed, offal spilling in trails of gray-green and pink.

As Roland dry-heaved for the second time that day, he realized the kill must have been recent. A strange jubilation surged through him; here was proof that he was not the killer.

On its heels came a deeper relief. He had stayed sober. Maybe through a little luck, maybe through the divine hand of that Big Bastard in the Sky.

But sobriety didn’t change reality. The sacrificial slaughter had occurred while he was in the car, on his way here. Someone must have left the mutilated carcass for him, someone who knew his destination, someone who had anticipated his moves after leaving the Cincinnati motel.

Someone who knew he’d open the liquor cabinet sooner rather than later, because the killer had left a message.

Scrawled in congealed blood were the same cryptic letters he’d observed in the motel shower stall: “CRO.” And beneath it, “Every 4 hrs. You’re late.” The symbols were smeared as if by a callous finger.

As blood continued to drain from the goat, it pooled around the message, and Roland realized the letters would soon be obscured.

The crime techs would be able to decode it. They’d be able to match evidence with the crime scene in Cincinnati and he’d be off the hook. Of course, there was still the problem of the missing time and his new identity—

“It’s not
my
identity, damn it,” he said, the words scouring his ravaged throat.

Roland couldn’t stay in the cabin now, not while that hideous face leered from the cabinet with its strange, milky eyes. He reached past it and grabbed the only bottle there, half a pint of vodka. He twisted the lid free.

Here’s to you, you glassy-eyed fucker.