The Third Hill North of Town (31 page)

“I’m coming, Ben!” Julianna sang out from the far side of the kitchen, tearing open the heavy oak door at the top of the staircase.

“Gotcha!” Ronnie panted, catching her from behind and lifting her off her feet before she could exit the apartment.

The three young men below inexplicably stopped yelling, and Julianna and Ronnie likewise fell silent, too winded to do anything but breathe harshly as they lumbered around the stairwell door in a violent, exhausting dance of some duration, both red-faced and sweating from exertion. Dottie watched numbly from the hallway as Ronnie—wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and looking oddly underdressed compared to Julianna in her formal evening gown—began turning purple from the neck up. Dottie’s feet were bleeding heavily but she was too worried about her husband at the moment to tend them.

“Just let her go, Ronnie,” she begged. Her heart went out to him, knowing he was doing all he could to keep from hurting Julianna, even though the woman was still scratching and biting him every chance she got. “You’re going to throw out your back again if you aren’t careful!”

She’s probably right,
Ronnie grudgingly admitted to himself as sweat and blood ran into his eyes, blurring his vision. The zipper on the back of Julianna’s dress had come partly unzipped again and the soapy smell of her skin at the nape of her neck seemed to be making him dizzy.
Maybe I should just lock this hellcat up in a cell until she . . .

His left arm went numb all at once, followed by a lancing pain in his chest. Unaccountably losing control of his limbs, he staggered toward the open door at the top of the steps again, still holding Julianna off the ground even though she was writhing in his arms.

“Ronnie!” Dottie gasped in horror.

The marriage of Ronnie and Dottie Buckley may not have had much romance remaining in it, but as Ronnie teetered on the top step of a dark, steep staircase, Dottie teetered, too, on the brink of a life without Ronnie in it. In a harrowing flash of self-discovery, she understood that romance was no longer important to her, nor was the chronic discontent she had felt for years. The man she had shared her life with for decades was in mortal jeopardy, and losing him was unthinkable: These two simple facts were all that mattered to her now.

“Ronnie!” she cried again, fighting to rise but unable to get her legs under her. “Just put her down!”

“Let . . . me . . . go!” Julianna squeaked out, unable to catch her wind because of how tightly Ronnie was clasping her around the ribcage.

Unlike Dottie, Ronnie Buckley had never faulted his spouse for any dissatisfaction he had with his life. His unfulfilled Academy Award aspirations aside, in fact, he considered himself to be a lucky man, and he looked forward every night to coming home to Dottie. He loved listening to her talk just as he loved listening to the news on the radio as they lay in bed together on Sunday mornings; he loved watching her buzz around their apartment, chattering harmlessly, just as he loved watching the sunlight gleam on the clean countertops in their kitchen as they ate their breakfast and drank their coffee together, each day before he went to work. She comforted him, and she needed him, and he had always believed that marrying her was the smartest thing he had ever done.

“I’m . . . okay . . . Dot . . .” Ronnie puffed, aware of her distress and hating to worry her. His bare feet were slippery with perspiration on the linoleum. “Just need to sit down . . . and maybe have a little . . .”

This unfinished sentence was not what Ronnie Buckley would have chosen as the last thing he would ever say, but even if he’d had the gift of foresight and could have come up with something more fitting, Dottie wouldn’t have heard him. Blood loss and terror had done their work by then, and she had slumped over in the hallway in a dead faint seconds before he spoke. She would regret this ill-timed swoon of hers for the rest of her life, but in truth it was a blessing: Blacked out as she was, she missed the pivotal moment when Deputy Bonnor Tucker, grabbed from behind by Elijah in the jail cells below them, frantically pulled the trigger on the Colt revolver aimed at Jon Tate.

The mercy of unconsciousness should never be underrated.

At the sound of the gunshot beneath them, Julianna went berserk, flailing her arms and legs like a drowning child. Ronnie—who had finally understood he was in the throes of a major heart attack—released her all at once; she collapsed in surprise on the top step at his feet, almost tumbling down the stairs before managing to save herself at the last second by seizing the bannister.

The Oscar-worshipping sheriff of Creighton County, Iowa, however, was not so lucky.

Clutching his chest in a spasm of agony, Ronnie accidentally tripped over Julianna’s torso and plunged headfirst down the long concrete staircase, unable to break his fall or slow it in any way. His heavy body bounced off the steps several times before landing with bone-jarring force on the concrete floor at the bottom, yet even this wasn’t enough to stop him; his momentum was such that he rolled over once more in an almost graceful somersault at the base of the steps and banged his skull on the steel door leading to the jail cells. The door chimed like a gong, low and mournful, and Ronnie Buckley crumpled to the ground at last, already dead before his limbs ceased moving.

Chapter 12

D
eputy Bonnor Tucker gripped the bars of his jail cell and began screaming at the middle-aged black couple and the older white man the instant they stepped into the hallway of the Maddox, Iowa, jailhouse at 10:49 p.m. that Sunday night.

“It’s about FUCKING time!” he raged, rattling the iron bars but otherwise having no effect. “Get me the FUCK out of here!”

Bonnor had only been conscious for five minutes, but being alone in a silent building with the corpse of his former employer a few feet away had made the time stretch for what seemed an eternity. The absence of windows in that part of the building made him feel as if he’d been buried alive in a mausoleum; his cries for assistance had been swallowed by the shadows beneath the cots and in the corners of the room, and he’d known that no one passing by on the sidewalk outside would ever hear him, even if it were the middle of the day.

The black man and woman were slender and neatly dressed; the older gentleman was rumpled and bald. Bonnor had never seen any of them before but was too distraught to even hazard a guess as to who they might be. All three froze in place as they saw Ronnie Buckley’s body by the open steel door at the opposite end of the hallway. The older man staggered a little in shock, and the black man reached out to steady him.

“Yeah, that’s right!” Bonnor’s voice broke a little. “Those murdering cocksuckers killed Sheriff Buckley!”

For all his grumbling about Ronnie Buckley, Bonnor had liked the man very much, and found himself wanting to cry every time he looked over at the base of the stairs. Ronnie may have talked to him every now and then like he was a naughty three-year-old, but the majority of Bonnor’s memories of the sheriff were good: Ronnie hiring him fresh out of high school and teaching him to shoot a gun, Ronnie belting out a painfully tone-deaf rendition of “Over the Rainbow” one night in the jail cells when he thought Bonnor had already left the building, Ronnie allowing car after car to go speeding past him on the highway because he was too busy woolgathering about the Academy Awards to care. (Bonnor had learned of Ronnie’s Oscar aspirations years earlier, during a heart-to-heart conversation the two men had over a beer after work.) The truth was that Ronnie Buckley had been a good man, and a kind one—never making fun of Bonnor’s name—and Bonnor couldn’t seem to come to terms with the fact that he was gone, just like that.

Things like this ain’t supposed to happen,
he thought, grieving.

It never occurred to Bonnor to wonder why Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate would have left him alive if they had indeed killed the sheriff. All he knew was somebody he cared about was dead, and the two boys he held responsible for this atrocity needed to pay for it, as well as for everything else they had done. He glared at the strangers watching him from the doorway of the sheriff’s office and tried to mask his sorrow with another burst of fury.

“For shit’s sake, don’t just stand there!” he roared. “Find the goddamn keys and let me the fuck out of here!”

Bonnor’s head was throbbing; there were two olive-sized bumps on the crown of his skull. One was from where he had struck it on the bars of Elijah’s cell after the teenager had seized his collar and pulled him backward, causing him to fall, and the other was from being clubbed with his own nightstick, ripped from his fist by Elijah when he, Bonnor, was lying on the ground in front of the cell, too stunned by the first blow to protect himself from another. He had lost consciousness after Elijah hit him, and when he came to, both boys were gone—along with his gun and his nightstick—and he was locked in the very cell Elijah had been in less than twenty minutes before. He could still smell the black boy’s sour sweat in the air, mingling with his own.

The first thing Bonnor had seen when he regained consciousness was Ronnie Buckley’s body. Bonnor had immediately begun bleating for help but nobody had heard him. Maddox was a ghost town on Sunday nights, and the jailhouse was surrounded by stores and offices that wouldn’t be open until the following morning. His relief at the timely arrival of his rescuers was enormous, but in spite of his impatience to be let out none of them seemed in any hurry to follow his orders.

“Jesus Christ, will you hurry up?” he railed at them. It was obvious from his uniform he was no criminal, and he couldn’t understand why they were just standing there staring at him as if he were a goddamn monkey in a zoo. “I have to call the state police right now so we can catch those little bastards before they get too far away!”

The older white man finally took a step toward Bonnor’s cell but he stopped abruptly when the small woman held up a restraining hand.

“Please examine the sheriff’s body, Dr. Reilly, just in case he’s still alive and needs your help.” The woman’s voice was calm, but had an underlying edge. “You should also have a look around upstairs after you’re finished, to see if anyone else is hurt.”

The man identified as “Dr. Reilly” slid what appeared to be an M&M into his mouth and winced apologetically at Bonnor. “Shouldn’t we let the officer out first?” he asked.

“I’ll see to the officer,” the woman responded. “Please do as I ask.”

Dr. Reilly jumped as if he’d been prodded with a branding iron and trotted down the hall, averting his eyes as he passed Bonnor. The black couple followed him, but more slowly, scanning as much as they could see of the jailhouse in the light cast by the single bare bulb dangling from the hallway ceiling. To Bonnor’s displeasure, the woman ignored him when they drew even with him, choosing instead to step into the empty cell across the hall.

“Hey, get the hell out of there!” Bonnor demanded, glancing at the black man but quickly focusing on the woman again after intuitively realizing she was the one who required his attention. “This is a goddamn crime scene, lady, and I’m the goddamn county deputy! Who do you think you are?”

The black man joined the woman in the cell, and both of them stared at the back wall. The wall was concrete and painted white, but five feet or so above the floor there was a small gouge in the paint, surrounded by a sparse constellation of dark red dots, visible even in the shadows at the rear of the cell. Some of the red had run down the wall in streaks; it looked as if an artist with a taste for the abstract had dipped his hand in red paint and flicked it once or twice, lightly spraying the concrete around the gouge.

Mary Hunter groped for Sam’s hand.

“Even if that’s Elijah’s blood, he’s still alive,” she whispered to Sam. “The deputy just said as much.” She managed to control her trembling, but only barely. The gore on the wall was a bad sign, yet surely there wasn’t enough blood to suggest anything besides a superficial wound.

Based on the deputy’s comments and the evidence of her own eyes, her son had somehow escaped the Maddox jail, hurt or not. Everything else was less obvious, however, and the presence of the dead body at the end of the hall both terrified and confounded her. Her first concern, however, was ascertaining if Elijah had indeed been injured; the rest of the details could wait.

She schooled her features and turned around again to face Bonnor Tucker.

This is not a smart man,
she thought, sizing up the hostile, uniformed officer before her in a single glance. Boneheaded bullies like Bonnor Tucker—she could always spot them—were child’s play to her, and under other circumstances it would have afforded her a great deal of amusement to slowly demolish the man’s blustering persona bit by bit. But there was nothing funny whatsoever in the blood on the wall behind her, or in the dead sheriff on the floor, and she had no time to spare for anything but a blunt interrogation.

“Where’s my son?” she asked quietly.

The woman was half his size, and Bonnor could barely hear her. But something in her taut, pretty face—as well as her now obvious connection to Elijah Hunter—made him lose any inclination to scream at her again.

He studied her through the bars before beginning to speak hesitantly. “So you’re the nigg . . .”

He stopped. He had been about to ask for confirmation that she was indeed “the nigger’s mom,” but on further reflection he realized she’d already told him the answer. He also had an unusually sage notion that referring to Elijah as a “nigger” in front of his mother and father might be a bad idea. He was unarmed and trapped in a jail cell, and for all he knew they might be just as dangerous as their sneaky, vicious child. There was certainly something in the woman’s manner that he found frightening, in spite of her diminutive size.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “They knocked me out, and both him and his friend were gone when I woke up.”

“I see.” Her eyes, glacial and unwavering, appeared to treble in size as they bored into him. She gestured at the stains on the wall behind her without turning her head. “And whose blood is that?”

Braver men than Bonnor Tucker had buckled under the force of Mary Hunter’s personality, and none of these unfortunate souls had been subjected to the pitiless psychogenic battery she now brought to bear on the Creighton County deputy. The barometric pressure in the room seemed to drop in the same way it did when a tornado was nearby, and Bonnor was suddenly, and unreasonably, terrified. The menace emanating from Mary’s small frame made him feel like she had probed all the hidden recesses of his mind and had seen each and every blow he’d inflicted on her child that evening.

“Not
his!
” he blurted, stricken by a nearly uncontrollable urge to pee. “It’s the white kid’s, I swear!”

Bonnor wondered how much the woman knew about the mischief her son had been up to, but her face was unreadable, and so he kept on talking, praying that the rush of words tumbling from his mouth would somehow appease her. “I was aiming my gun at Tate, the white kid, when the ni—when your son grabbed me from behind and made me fall. I got off a shot on the way down and must have hit Tate somewhere, but your boy took my nightstick and knocked me the fuck out before I could see for sure what happened. I swear to God the blood is Tate’s, though. Your kid was behind me the whole time.”

Even under the intense pressure he was feeling, Bonnor was unwilling to share just how badly he’d screwed up. Like Mary, he, too, knew that there wasn’t enough blood on the wall to indicate a mortal injury, leading him to conclude that he’d obviously missed his intended target. If he’d succeeded, there’d be one less asshole in the world, and Jon Tate’s corpse would be on the floor of the other cell, sporting a nice big hole in the middle of his forehead. Bonnor guessed the bullet had caught Tate in the shoulder, however, or maybe the bicep. It had apparently passed clear through him, as well, taking a chunk out of the wall afterward; the bullet was still probably somewhere in the jail cell. Wherever Tate had been hit, though, the little shit-for-brains was plainly still mobile—which meant, of course, that Bonnor had also failed to do any real damage to him, or even slow him down much.

I bet it hurt like a bitch, though,
he told himself, trying without success to find a glimmer of consolation. Ronnie Buckley was dead, after all, the two murderers were once again free, and the women upstairs were either dead themselves or had been taken hostage. And all Bonnor had managed to do was wing one of the little pricks before they went on yet another killing spree.

Well, fuckin’ hurray for me,
he thought with remorse.
Maybe I’ll get a fuckin’ merit badge from the Boy Scouts.

The black man spoke up for the first time. “How long ago did this happen?”

Samuel Hunter was in little better shape emotionally than Bonnor Tucker. The stress and fatigue of the long trip from New England had worn him to a frazzle, and this alone made it nearly impossible to keep his feet under him. But to finally arrive where he had believed Elijah was being held, only to discover that his son was missing again—and yet another person was dead—was more than his fragile spirit could handle. He wanted to sob with frustration; he could feel his heart turning to dust in his chest.

Bonnor Tucker had shifted his attention to Elijah’s father, and the spell of obedience he’d been under while talking to the woman was broken. He realized he’d been revealing things he probably shouldn’t have, and he was still caged up and chattering like a mynah bird when he was the one who should be in charge.

“I’m done answering questions, mister,” he said, straightening to his full height and glowering down at the much smaller man. “I’m an officer of the law and you fuckin’ people had better let me out of here right now if you know what’s good for you.”

Mary Hunter stepped across the hallway and stood less than a foot away from the massive deputy. “Answer my husband,” she ordered.

Bonnor blinked, then swallowed hard and dropped his eyes to the floor.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, shocked by the meekness in his voice but unable to speak normally. It was all he could do to keep from calling her “ma’am” and bowing to her like a footman. “Not very long, I don’t think, but I don’t have a watch, and like I said I was out cold when they got away.” He paused. “Can I
please
be let out, now?”

Dr. Reilly cleared his throat over by Ronnie Buckley’s body. “This man is dead, I’m afraid.” His chin was quivering. “He’s got several broken bones and some trauma to his head, too, but there’s no way to tell for sure what killed him without an autopsy.”

Bonnor swore, crushed by this official confirmation of Ronnie’s death. He had already known what Edgar was going to say before he said it, but some part of him had still hoped that the sheriff had just been knocked unconscious, like him, and would soon revive and start putting things to rights again. He stared woodenly at Edgar, noting the sweat on the man’s bald head and his trembling jowls.

Guy looks like a fuckin’ walrus,
Bonnor noted, unaware of the tears coursing down his own face, one after another.