Graveyard Fields

by Steven Tingle

  Dale nodded again. “That fits,” he said.

  It did fit, but it didn’t fully explain Diana’s involvement. If she thought drugs were in her safe, she was either after them to get them off her property or she was planning on selling them to get the bank off her back. But the drugs weren’t in her safe. They were in my basement. What had she done when she discovered the safe empty? Where had she gone? It didn’t make sense. Unless …

  “There are more drugs,” I said. “A lot more.”

  Dale lowered his eyebrows. “Why do you think that?”

  I pointed to the baggie. “How many pills would you guess are in there? Three hundred? Four hundred?”

  Dale shrugged.

  “Let’s say it’s five hundred,” I said. “Even then that baggie’s only worth, what, twenty-five hundred dollars? I find it hard to believe that Diana and Jeff and Becky were going crazy for that amount of money.”

  “I’ve seen people go crazy for less,” Dale said.

  “But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Diana owes the bank.”

  I thought about the storage unit and the cases of drugs and cash I’d discovered. Dealing pills is like running a dollar store—it takes a lot of individual sales to make a decent profit. Based on what I’d seen, Greg and Perry had probably been making an extra six to eight grand a month with their game. Not enough to retire to the islands with but enough to buy some toys. To make any real money with pills, you needed to be high up the ladder. The pill business is like those cosmetics companies that recruit people to sell lipstick and eyeliner to their friends. Those friends then beginning selling to other friends, who begin selling to an even wider group of friends. It’s a cash-based pyramid scheme.

  The pill business also depends on the product line. In Charleston I could buy Xanax off the street for as little as four or five bucks a piece. But that was a pain in the ass and put me in contact with people I’d rather not associate with. That’s why I used the good Dr. Landry. The prescriptions he wrote and the pharmacies that filled them were legit. Now, whether it was completely ethical, or even legal, was a gray area. Either way, it was a lot easier than making a deal on a dark corner in a neighborhood I’d rather not be in. But other pills were different. Opioids, like OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet—those could fetch up to eighty bucks a pill on the street, partly because they were much more powerful and much more in demand. If the baggie in my basement had been filled with any of those pills, the stakes would be much higher. There had to be more pills out there somewhere. Enough to make Diana and Jeff and Becky desperate.

  “When I had lunch with Byrd, he told me prescription drugs weren’t a problem around here,” I said. “Is he right? ’Cause I thought it was a problem just about everywhere, especially in small towns.”

  Dale put the baggie of pills back into the plastic bag sitting on the dirt floor.

  “Well, it’s around but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a problem,” Dale said. “I mean, hell, I’ll bust a kid every now and then and find he’s got one or two of his granny’s cancer pills on him, Oxy and shit like that. Or sometimes a dude’ll get hurt at work and have a hard time weaning hisself off his pain meds and start looking for other ways to get ’em. But ain’t no one trafficking that shit around here. If they are, it’s small-time. Like smaller-than-your-dick small.”

  I started to speak, but Dale cut me off. “But every now and again we’ll hear rumors about them bikers that come through. You know, for them rallies up in Maggie Valley? They come up from Atlanta or Charlotte or down from Knoxville, and they’s always talk about trades taking place. But so far it’s just been talk. We ain’t never found nothing. Well, not more than a few ounces of pot here and there.”

  ZZ Top’s “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” started playing in my head.

  I reminded Dale of Diana’s “overprotective friends.”

  “What if they were there to pressure her?” I said. “What if Cordell had made a deal with them but then Cordell, and his keys, disappeared?”

  Dale cranked up his nodding routine. “A deal gone wrong,” he said.

  “Exactly. So the bikers are out their cash, or their product, and it’s all sitting in a safe that, without the key, would have to be dynamited to open.”

  Dale grabbed an empty growler off the brewing table and used it as a spittoon. “I’d hate to say it, but I’d rather this’d been about gold.”

  “Me too. But we’ve got to find Diana. She’s had plenty of time to open the safe and hand over whatever was in it, and she’s still missing. That’s another reason I think there’s a lot more to this.”

  I tried to imagine the possible scenarios. Even if Diana had given the bikers what they were after, it didn’t necessarily mean she was safe. And that was assuming the keys led to what they were after. Plus, Skeeter was still roaming around looking for Diana. No matter how I connected the dots, I couldn’t draw a picture that showed her out of danger.

  I looked at my watch. “Where the hell is Byrd?”

  “He’s probably talking to his buddy down in Charleston. He’ll want to get that shit straight ’fore he comes up here and talks to us.”

  I kicked the dirt floor, sending up a small cloud of red dust.

  “Call him,” I said. “Tell him about Skeeter. Tell him to bring him in. I don’t want Skeeter finding Diana before we do.”

  Dale huffed for a few moments, then pulled out his phone and made the call. When Byrd answered, Dale used his official voice to tell him our theory about Skeeter, including the bag of evidence we’d found in the basement. When he finished speaking, he listened intently to Byrd’s response, which I couldn’t hear. After a minute Dale said, “Yes, sir,” then ended the call.

  Dale paced around the basement for a minute before he walked over to me.

  “He wants me to bring you in.”

  A moment later Dale’s radio crackled. The dispatcher was female, and in a sweet southern twang, she said, “All stations, all units, be advised. Suspicious situation. Be on the lookout for a black 2015 Ford Mustang. Registration Lima, Alpha, Whiskey, Mary, Alpha, Nora, Niner, Two.”

  The dispatcher then gave Skeeter’s description. I was disappointed when she didn’t mention the aviators.

  “Well. There ya go,” Dale said.

  “His license plate is Lawman92?”

  Dale shrugged, then picked up the plastic bag. “C’mon, let’s go talk to Byrd.”

  We went upstairs and found Floppy sitting at the kitchen table. He had a glass of beer in his hand, and I knew from the color it was my IPA. I was too tired to be angry.

  “Was that BOLO for Skeeter?” Floppy said. “When Mike and Earl heard that, they ran outa here like their momma’d called them to dinner. Hey, do you have any other beer? This beer ain’t very good. I think it’s gone bad.”

  Dale grabbed the beer out of Floppy’s hand and finished it in one long gulp.

  Floppy pointed a finger at Dale. “He don’t care if beer’s bad. He’d drink a quart of turpentine if he thought he could get a buzz off it.”

  “Follow us to town,” Dale said. “Davis and me have to talk to Byrd, and you’ve got to give a statement about your Bruce Lee bullshit.”

  * * *

  The three of us walked past Perry’s Audi on the way to Dale’s patrol car. The devils suggested picking up a piece of gravel from the driveway and scratching it down the side of the vehicle, but then the angel perked up and mumbled something about futility, so I kept walking.

  Floppy cranked up Sally while Dale put the bag of evidence in the trunk of the patrol car. Soon we were barreling down the driveway with Floppy right on our tail. I hoped Dale and Floppy weren’t planning on racing to the sheriff’s office. The last thing I needed was a family-feud sprint through the winding roads of Cruso.

  We were almost to 276 when Dale’s phone chimed. He slammed on the brakes, and Floppy nearly smashed into the back of us. Dale pulled out his phone and gazed at it as if it were a puzzle.

&
nbsp; “What the fuck is this?” he said, handing the phone to me.

  I looked at the screen and immediately recognized the app as the phone’s “I’m Here” service. The app allows you to let your friends know where you are for a set amount of time. You simply select someone in your contact list, tap I’M HERE, and then that person is alerted with a map and a blinking red dot showing your exact location. I’d mentioned the app to Laura when she first started questioning Greg’s late-night disappearances. The only problem was, you couldn’t see someone’s location unless they chose to share it, which Greg was not prone to do. But now someone had volunteered to let Dale know where they were.

  The blinking red dot on Dale’s phone was surrounded by light green, which designated a park area. There were no other markings or location indicators on the screen; it was as if the dot were in the middle of nowhere. I zoomed out on the map until a squiggly white line with the words BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY appeared. In the middle of the line, and directly below the red dot, was a green icon designating a hiking trail. I recognized the location: Graveyard Fields.

  I scrolled back to the red dot and tapped it. A phone number appeared. I showed the screen to Dale.

  “Do you recognize this number?”

  Dale squinted, then shook his head.

  “Someone’s letting you know they’re at Graveyard Fields,” I said. “Whose number is this? It’s not someone in your contact list. If it was, their name would show instead of the number.”

  “Beats the fuck outa me,” Dale said.

  I opened the phone app and scrolled through Dale’s recent calls. It didn’t take long to find the number; Dale had received a call from it the previous day. I tapped the info icon next to the number to see the details. The call had been received at 3:35 and had lasted two minutes.

  “Where were you yesterday at three thirty?” I asked.

  Dale scrunched his face and looked out the window. After a moment he said, “I was at the impound lot, where they’d towed that BMW and Land Rover. Then you called me and told me to come to the cabin ’cause you had the keys.”

  A chill struck the back of my neck and traveled down my spine.

  “It’s Diana,” I said. “I called you from her phone, remember?”

  Dale’s response was drowned out by the roar of Sally’s engine. It seemed Floppy was getting impatient.

  As the sound died, Dale grabbed the phone out of my hand and pushed the patrol car forward. When we came to the highway, he stopped and looked both ways.

  “You know what we need to do,” I said.

  Dale grunted. “You heard the BOLO. Everybody’s out looking for Skeeter right now; that’s all that needs to be done. We’re going to go talk to Byrd.”

  I looked both ways as well. To the left was Byrd’s office and god knows what kind of waste-of-time questioning. To the right were Diana and some answers.

  I stared at Dale. I could tell he was torn.

  “It’s up to you, brother,” I said.

  Dale smacked the steering wheel, then gunned the accelerator and turned right. I buckled my seat belt.

  42

  The next fifteen minutes was an experiment in how not to puke. Dale drove so fast I worried the windshield would shake loose and fly back into our faces. In the curves he used both lanes of the road to straighten the path, and I knew that if we met an oncoming vehicle, it would be the end of everyone involved. I dared not look behind us but could hear Sally’s engine roaring so loud that it sounded like it was mounted in Dale’s trunk.

  When we reached the parkway, Dale ignored the stop sign and spun the patrol car to the left. The rear of the vehicle fishtailed, and Dale corrected by spinning the steering wheel clockwise. When we straightened out, Dale stomped on the accelerator, and we zoomed past the Cold Mountain overlook like a Blue Angel passing over the Super Bowl.

  “Why’d she send me her location?” Dale yelled over the sound of the engine.

  I pushed my feet into the floorboard.

  “Don’t talk to me,” I screamed.

  * * *

  Dale finally slowed down as we approached the Graveyard Fields parking lot. When we pulled in, I saw what I had been dreading: Diana’s Mercedes parked next to three motorcycles. There were no other vehicles in the lot.

  Dale killed the engine as Floppy whipped Sally in next to us. We all stepped out onto the pavement and stared at one another.

  “What’re we doing here?” Floppy asked.

  “Remember that woman who ran off with the keys?” I said. “Well, she’s out here somewhere.” I pointed toward the motorcycles. “And she’s in danger.”

  For once, Floppy didn’t speak. He simply nodded his head as if he understood the situation perfectly.

  Dale popped open the trunk of the patrol car, reached in, and removed a shotgun and a box of shells. He flipped the gun over and placed the butt of the stock against his hip. He shoved five shells into the loading flap, flipped the gun back over, and then tossed it to Floppy, who caught the weapon with one hand.

  I looked at Dale. “Can you do that?”

  “I just did,” he replied.

  * * *

  The three of us walked across the parking lot to the stone steps that led down to the trailhead. I was still in pain. Greg had worked me over pretty good in the kitchen, and even though my adrenaline was pumping, I didn’t know how far I could make it on a rough trail. My condition must have been obvious.

  “You wait here,” Dale said. “Floppy and me can take care of this.”

  The angel and devils were in a heated debate, arguing between the options of sitting comfortably in the patrol car and powering through the pain and finding Diana. The angel finally cast the deciding vote.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said.

  Floppy started hopping down the steps while Dale shoved my chest.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Floppy can take care of hisself, but you won’t make it fifty yards.”

  I had an idea, but I didn’t like it. I knew Dale wouldn’t like it either.

  “Carry me down the steps, and then I’ll be okay,” I said.

  I thought Dale was going to explode. He stomped his feet and spun around. “Go sit in the fucking car,” he said.

  I moved behind Dale. “C’mon,” I said. “Let me hop on your back.”

  Dale stomped again. “We’re wasting time,” he yelled.

  I looked down the steps and saw Floppy drag himself around a curve of the trail and out of sight.

  “Floppy’s going to be the hero again,” I said.

  Dale snorted, then squatted down as if he were ready to play a game of leapfrog. I pushed off with my good leg but didn’t rise more than four inches off the ground. My chest slammed into Dale’s back, and I slowly slid down onto the pavement.

  “Bend down farther,” I said.

  Dale turned and gave me a death stare. I grinned. He turned back around, then grunted and bent down onto one knee.

  “Is that low enough, motherfucker?” he screamed.

  I straddled Dale’s back, and he wrapped his arms around my legs. As he pushed himself up, I slung my arms around his neck.

  “Not so tight, asshole.”

  A moment later we were descending the stone steps toward the trailhead. I felt like a kid on vacation, riding on my dad’s back so I wouldn’t tire out and throw a tantrum.

  When we reached the bottom of the steps, Dale stopped, and I slid down to my feet. The trail wound through a stand of thick laurel bushes. We moved forward quickly, Dale in the lead. We’d gone about thirty yards when we came to a long set of wooden steps that snaked down through the trees.

  “Goddammit,” Dale said, taking a knee.

  As we descended the steps, Dale turned his head in my direction.

  “I ain’t carryin’ you back up these fuckers, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  The steps ended at wooden bridge that spanned a small creek. I dropped down and followed Dale across the bridge to a dirt trail. We walked
a few hundred feet to a point where the trail forked. Floppy was there waiting.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  Dale pulled out his phone and handed it to me. The red dot was in the same position as earlier. Since the map was designed for driving directions, it didn’t show hiking trails or unmarked roads. The dot was just a tiny red beacon surrounded by a sea of green.

  “I can’t tell anything from this,” I said. “She could be anywhere out here.”

  My adrenaline was being replaced by anxiety. I thought about the pills in my coin pocket. I could take one and try to even things out, but it would slow me down, and I was slow enough already.

  “We need to split up,” I said. “Floppy, you take that trail. Dale and I will go this way. If you see something, fire off a shot.”

  Floppy nodded and took off on the trail heading west. Dale and I stared at one another for a moment, then turned and headed east.

  The trail was rough and covered in coiled roots that resembled thick, brown snakes. I tried to ignore the pain in my leg. And my chest. And my head.

  “What would Diana and them dudes be doin’ out here?” Dale asked.

  I tried to think of a reasonable explanation, but reasonable didn’t seem to hold much sway these days, so I let my mind wander. There was a part of me that still hoped a trunk full of gold was at the heart of the situation. Maybe because I believed gold involved a better clientele. Sure, people killed one another over money, but drugs was a different business. A mean business populated with mean people. Treasure hunting seemed more genteel to me somehow. A gentleman’s game. But with three dead bodies, the point was moot.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they brought Diana up here to kill her for some reason. Or maybe they’re looking for something Cordell left out here.”

  I thought about the receipt I’d found in the back of Cordell’s BMW, the one for the spade and shovel and other landscaping tools. Then I thought about the metal detector I’d seen in the back of the Land Rover. I’d thought Jeff and Becky were using it to hunt for gold, or Cordell’s keys, but maybe they were looking for something else altogether.