Summer of the Dead (2 page)

“Bitch!” Fat Ass yelled at her. He'd yet to rise from his seat on the ground, thwarted by, in equal measures, obesity and drunkenness. “Goddamned bitch.”

That only made his friends laugh harder. “Looks like she up and tole you what she thinksa you,” one of them opined, nudging Fat Ass with the toe of his boot, as if his buddy were a clump of dirt that needed relocating. The others re-upped their laughter, hooting like fools, slapping at their knees when they weren't using their fingers to point at Fat Ass. A gray scab of moon regarded the scene indifferently from above.

Bell pondered her next move. Her mission was simple: Go in the bar, find Shirley, and somehow persuade her to come home. She wasn't looking for a fight. If these creeps kept it up, though, and interfered with her, she would handle it. Fat Ass didn't know what trouble was until he'd tangled with the likes of her. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Carla—currently living with Bell's ex-husband, Sam, but due back in Acker's Gap for summer vacation in a week—had put it best: “Mom,” Carla said, “when you get mad, I think I'd sorta rather deal with the guy in the
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
movies, you know?”

The bar's double doors flapped open. During the few seconds that the interior of the establishment was exposed—the hot wild noise, the undulating red lights framed by the solid black night—it looked, to Bell's eye, like a peephole into hell.

A female deputy sheriff—short, hatless, and heavyset—came striding out of Tommy's, turning this way and that to cut a path between the parked cars. Her long gray hair was funneled into a twisty braid that perched on her shoulder like a pet. Black boots chopped at the gravel with each forceful step. Her gun was holstered on her wide hip, but she kept her big right hand in contact with the grip, a
Don't make me use this
set to her meaty jaw.

The three men scattered like scrap paper swept off a desktop by a sudden draft. Fat Ass, also highly motivated, flopped over on his hands and knees and crawled a short distance and then hoisted himself up, courtesy of the rusty back bumper of a Dodge Ram 1500.

As he and his buddies hustled away, the deputy nodded in approval. “Evening, ma'am,” she said to Bell. “Deputy Sturm. Thought you might be arriving right about now.”

“Met the welcoming committee.” Bell stepped out of the Explorer and gestured toward the severe darkness that bordered the lot, a bottomless pit into which the four men had disappeared. The darkness seemed all the more menacing because of its adjacency to the garishly lit space. There was no middle ground. If you left the illuminated area, it was as if you'd fallen off the edge of the world.
No dark like summer dark,
Bell thought.
No end to it. Goes on forever.

She shuddered. She'd had a sudden unwanted memory of the crime-scene photo still on her desk back at the courthouse: Freddie Arnett's lanky body facedown on the oil-stained concrete of his driveway, blood and brain matter shining wetly in the velvety glow of the front porch light.

“Those boys tried to get friendly with me, too.” Sturm chuckled. With two fingers, she tapped the badge pinned to the left breast pocket of her gray polyester shirt. “Then they saw this.”

Bell nodded. Enough with the small talk. “Where's Shirley Dolan?”

“Right where I left her—rounded up in the back of the bar with a bunch of troublemakers, waiting to see if I'm going to give 'em even more of a hassle than I already have. Maybe haul 'em in for drunk and disorderly. They've been calling me every name in the book and then some.”

“What started it?”

“Don't know. I mean, Bobo Bolland's here with his band, and it seems like he brings trouble wherever he goes. Somebody calls somebody else a low-down sumbitch or a man-stealing whore or something similar, and before you know it, the whole place goes crazy.” Two more cars fishtailed into the lot, one right behind the other. The drivers must have caught the glint of the badge on Deputy Sturm's broad chest—or, the more likely scenario, simply sniffed out the presence of the law after long experience with dodging same—because their hasty U-turns back onto the road were executed with a panic-fed zeal.

Sturm barely noticed. She and Bell had begun walking toward the door of Tommy's, and something else was on her mind. “Listen,” Sturm said. “Before we go in, I wanted to say—well, I heard about that poor old man. Hell of a thing. Bet folks in Acker's Gap are plenty shook up.”

Bell nodded. Freddie Arnett had suffered multiple blows to his head from a sledgehammer—that was the coroner's preliminary analysis, given the shape of the wounds and the fact that the probable murder weapon was lying in the grass next to the driveway—in an astonishingly vicious assault. No prints, no motive, no suspects, no leads; it was, Bell had reflected, almost as if the summer night itself had reared up and come after Arnett, as if the darkness had taken shape just long enough to grab a handy weapon and use it to crush an old man's skull, then spread itself out again in a soft black ooze.

“Makes you wonder,” Sturm said.

“Yeah.”

They had reached the entrance to Tommy's. Bell heard muffled thuds from the other side of the wall, along with wicked guitar licks and fuzzy throbs from a cheap amplifier and the ominous insect hum of packed bodies rubbing up against one another.

Sturm's big right hand reached for the dirty wooden handle. The upper half of one of the doors was smothered by a thumbtacked white poster that showed off the wobbly work of a black Sharpie:

TONITE! BOBO BOLLAND AND HIS ROCKIN' BAND!!! 11 pm to????

Bell followed her into the bar—and into the kind of frantic, sweaty bedlam that Bell had spent a good portion of her adult life trying to avoid, because it reminded her too much of her childhood, when the world was big and bad and loud and out of control, and she was the weakest, frailest thing in it. The prey.

*   *   *

There she was.

Shirley Dolan stood at the far end of the bar, her back to the nicked brown counter that featured what looked to be at least a century's worth of interlocking rings from wet-bottomed glasses of beer. Long gray hair frizzled down her narrow back. Bell had anticipated that it might take a few minutes to locate her sister in the raucous crowd; she'd thought her eyes might have to rove over at least a dozen or so sweat-shined faces with sloppy grins and pinprick eyeballs—but no. She picked her out right away, even though Shirley was dressed in an echo of what everybody else wore: cowboy boots, tight jeans, T-shirt, untucked flannel shirt.

Shot glass pressed to her lip, Shirley took a long soulful slug. Then she shook herself with gusto, like a dog after a deluge, as the fiery liquid pitchforked its way through her insides. She twisted her torso to thump the glass back down on the bar. It was then—with Shirley in a half turn, licking her bottom lip—that her eyes met up with Bell's. The three-man band in the opposite corner had just commenced another number, and the blistering bass beats seemed to make the small building shimmy and throb.

Before Bell had a chance to speak, another commotion erupted. Several chairs tipped and crashed, the top rails of their wooden backs clattering against the red concrete floor as people jumped and scattered. Three round tables were upended; glasses slid off and shattered. First one woman screamed, then two more. The band stopped playing—not gradually but abruptly, as if someone had kicked out a power cord.

Jesus
, somebody muttered.
What the hell
, came from somebody else, followed by yet another opinion:
Drunk as a goddamned skunk, just like always. Leave him be, why doncha
. There was a sudden batch of ear-ripping static from the electric guitar, until the skinny, big-nosed guitar player—having brushed the strings with his sleeve—silenced it again with a hand clamped over the fret.

The crowd parted clumsily, opening up a Z-shaped lane to the source of the tumult. Sprawled facedown on the greasy floor was a wiry, black-haired man in a pale yellow flannel shirt and dirty white carpenter's pants. Sturm and Bell moved simultaneously to the spot. The deputy, reaching it first, called out sharply, “Hey, mister—you okay?” and then lowered herself to his side with the velocity of a dropped rock. Sturm's movements, Bell saw, were surprisingly nimble and efficient for a woman her size. She groped under his chin for a pulse. Nothing. With two hands, she turned him over.

An orange-handled screwdriver had been punched into the man's chest, after which the force of his fall pushed it sideways, ripping the wound wider. A dark stain fled rapidly across the front of his shirt, as ominous as a storm system filling out a digital weather map. His acne-chipped face was white, his jaw slack. Eyes open. Pupils fixed and dilated.

Sturm's big head swung up to look at Bell. There was a stunned, uncertain quality to the deputy's stare.
When you do this for a living,
Bell reminded herself,
you always think you're prepared
,
but you're never prepared. Never
. Bell felt a swell of nausea cresting in her belly. She fought it, clenching her jaw. And she was aware as well of a cold sense of dread throwing a shadow over her thoughts like a cloud crossing an open field.
First the old man back in Acker's Gap. Now this
.
Jesus.

The deputy quickly recovered her composure. Still on one knee, she unclipped the radio from her belt and thumbed it on. The bar had grown eerily quiet—no one so much as coughed or shuffled a foot or bumped a table—and that fact gave the few simple words of Sturm's summons for an ambulance the chiseled mien of a haiku.

Call completed, she barked at the stunned onlookers: “Anybody know this guy? Anybody see what happened? Anybody?”

More silence.

The deputy reached in the dead man's pocket, hunting for ID. Bell was just about to tell her to back away to preserve the integrity of the crime scene when Sturm pulled out a small white business card. She scanned it, then passed it up to Bell.
Can't matter much at this point,
Bell thought, accepting it. There had already been enough contamination of the scene to piss off the state forensic folks, the ones who would be showing up in their fancy van just as soon as the techs back in Charleston finished their argument about whose turn it was to make the drive over crummy roads in the tricky dark. Communities as small as this one didn't have their own crime-scene units. They had to wait their turn, just as Bell and the deputies had had to wait two nights ago, when they stood, helpless and appalled, alongside Freddie Arnett's shattered body. And they would have to wait now.

Bell scanned the black embossed letters on the card:

SAMPSON J. VOORHEES. ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. NYC.

No phone number, no fax, no e-mail address.
Strange way of doing business for a law firm,
Bell mused.
Usually they're throwing their contact info at you so fast, you have to duck
. Her ex-husband worked for that kind of firm.
Hell,
she'd often thought,
given half a chance, he'd probably slap the company logo on the toilet seats in the men's room
. She turned over the card. Along the bottom edge, another name had been hand-scrawled with a blue pen:

Odell Crabtree

Sturm was reaching up now to retrieve the card, because it was evidence. Part of the official record. Bell wanted a longer look, but complied; this was Deputy Sturm's turf, Deputy Sturm's investigation. Collier County would be calling the shots. Which was good news: Raythune County had all it could handle right now.

Still, Bell was curious. She wondered what link there could possibly be between a publicity-shy New York City lawyer and a body on the floor of Tommy's bar in the middle of West Virginia on a sweat-oiled summer night, the life in that body having recently seeped away amid a sour backwash of sloshed beer, bad jokes, loud cackles, high-hanging gray webs of cigarette smoke, and the foot-stompin', good-time tunes of Bobo Bolland and His Rockin' Band.

 

Chapter Two

He was moving around again. She could hear him bumping into things, and with each thump, Lindy winced; she imagined the pain of a knee hitting a box or a cheek scraping a rough wall. But she was reluctant to check on him. She didn't want to open the basement door and call down into the darkness, “You okay, Daddy?” Not anymore. She had done that at first—in the early days, she had reacted to every noise—and like as not, he'd come roaring up at her, swinging his fists over his head and yelling: “Leave me be!
Told you to leave me be!
”

So now Lindy just listened. Listened hard. In ten minutes, she would have to leave for her overnight shift at the Lester gas station, and she couldn't be late. Summer Saturdays were a zoo. A twenty-four-hour place in these parts was a magnet for every drunk, every weirdo, and every druggie in a thirty-mile radius; Saturday nights seemed to bring out the crazy even in normal people. But before she left, she had to make sure he was okay.

There were three or four bumps in a row. Then a spell of quiet. That meant, most likely, that he'd gotten his bearings again; his internal radar had mysteriously kicked back in. She pictured him as he moved amid the loose branches and the jumbo rocks. Three years ago, she had dragged in those loads from outside, inch by inch, scavenging them from the ravine out beyond the big hill. She also tracked down, from yard sales and thrift stores, a mess of old wooden tables, chipped and rickety. Some were round, some square, some rectangular; some were as small as TV trays, while others were long enough to host a dozen family members at Sunday supper.

She had made a place for him that was like the place he knew best, the place he loved: a coal mine. The coal mine that had closed down five years ago, leaving him and thirty-two other miners stunned and bereft, not knowing where to go or how to be.