The Devil Walks in Mattingly

by Billy Coffey

  The bubble light stashed beneath the Blazer’s front seat was the only official means to signify whether I was on duty or not. It had been collecting dust there since the Christmas parade. Before that, I guess it was the Fourth of July. I slapped the light against the small bit of roof that enclosed the front of the Blazer and pulled out of Peter’s driveway, shaking my head at that small but important revelation—the only time I ever acted like a sheriff was when Zach and I were inching down Main Street, sandwiched between Hollis’s polished John Deere and a staggering column of old men from the VFW.

  My mind was divided between the fear that something terrible had happened and the hope that it was all a misunderstanding. As the road opened up, I decided it was likely a combination of both and neither. Not terrible, not good, just—

  “A couple lying drunks,” I said into the windshield. “Just a couple lying drunks and nothing more.”

  The single blue light spun. What few cars I met along the way slowed as I passed. Some drifted to the shoulder. Others stopped completely. Black shapes turned toward me, craning their necks, wondering what had happened.

  I couldn’t blame them for their confusion. Because Hollis was right—nothing ever happened in Mattingly. But I knew even then that something had. And as the lights of the Texaco loomed through the windshield, my only comfort was that for the first time in months, I was wide-awake.

  3

  Taylor was too numb to be afraid, which was more than what he could say for the strange girl beside him. She gripped the steering wheel with fists that had gone a milky white as the driver’s side tires jerked off the pavement. The car corrected just before smashing a wooden mailbox post and then corrected too much, sending them veering to the opposite side. The girl screamed a curse as the side mirror next to Taylor clipped a large green trash can parked at the end of a driveway. He turned to see refuse littering the street behind them. The sight of all that trash in need of picking up reminded Taylor of Charlie. Poor Charlie. He’d never even get to spend his fifteen dollars.

  Hitting the trash can only strengthened the girl’s grip on the wheel, which only made the car snake more. Taylor’s head spun. He thought it could be the two beatings he’d taken that night, or maybe it was the thick smell of the fancy car’s leather seats. Maybe it was that he’d left his only friend in the world knocked out and bleeding on a gas station floor. He rubbed the legs of his jeans and tried to put that thought away, found he could not. It had been a long while since Taylor Hathcock had felt shame.

  “Take some air and ease off that gas pedal,” he said. “Only place in this town more perilous than being in its stores is being on its pavement.”

  The engine’s steady whine backed off, though only slightly. The girl failed to heed the stop sign on the next corner. Taylor shook his head in disbelief.

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “Fifty, near’s I can tell. You hear me, lady? I said ease off. Take a right here.”

  They turned down a darkened street of brick ranch homes and Cape Cods adorned in various shades of yellows and tans. There were no streetlights—Taylor knew there wouldn’t be, the only bright spots when he looked down at night from his log in the Hollow were in the center of town. A handful of glowing porch bulbs that welcomed and warned away. Most of the houses were dark hulls with small, lamplit eyes that stared out from behind otherwise empty windows. There were no late-night strollers, no teenagers sneaking home from some backwoods carousing. That was good. That was fine.

  “Up ahead’s a stop sign,” Taylor said. “That’s S-T-O-and-P, which means quit moving. Left there, then another right.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Away.”

  “What about your friend?”

  Taylor couldn’t think. His head was a throbbing mass of nerves and those houses kept staring at him, asking what he was doing there, telling him that he should have stayed in the Hollow where he belonged. He reached for the book in his pocket and held it tight.

  “Charlie’s sung all his songs,” he said. “There’s no more for him. He was dull, not bright.” Taylor rubbed the legs of his jeans again and saw Charlie sitting at the table in the cabin, heard Charlie saying, I dunno, Taylor and You sure ’bout this? and You’re apt to snap. He remembered telling Charlie that he was meant for greater things. “I offered him the Truth, but he wanted the world instead. My heart pauses for him still.”

  She stopped at the sign, turned left and then right, taking them closer to downtown. The man at the fill-’em-up would have called someone by now, Taylor thought. That meant whatever law was in town would be on the way. He’d have to keep to the fringes. Get out of Mattingly. Get back to the Hollow.

  “That Timmy Griffith deserved everything you gave him,” the girl said. “I was going to get him myself. He ruined my life.”

  “The man back there?”

  She nodded.

  “You wanted to pain him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sound like Charlie,” Taylor said. “Charlie hurt that man like he hurt that other man. ’Tis a sin, hurting folk.”

  She took her eyes off the road. A queer look passed over her face that was part fear and part amusement. “That so? How much of that blood you’re getting all over my car is yours, and how much of it is someone else’s? Now, where am I going?”

  “Left.”

  He guided her around the downtown area rather than through it, opting for a labyrinth of side streets and alleyways Taylor had seen from afar but never up close. They passed no vehicles and saw no flashing lights. The town proper gave way to secondary roads that wound toward the hill country to the east and the mountains beyond.

  “Why’d you come for me?” Taylor asked.

  There came no answer at first. Taylor doubted she even knew. Yet he saw a hurt in the girl and a longing for freedom that reminded him of the boy he’d awakened in the BP—a hurt and longing that reminded Taylor of himself. He knew above all that every beating heart carried its own wound, that there was a thread coiled around that wound that looped around the pain in others, linking us all. Taylor thought maybe that was why the girl had come for him. He thought maybe that was her secret. And he knew all were defined by their secrets, and their choices as well.

  “Maybe it’s my destiny,” she said.

  Taylor’s eyes shrunk and burned at the corners. He bent around the gearshift between them and looked down. Lucy tensed, sending the car toward the far edge of the road.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled.

  “What’s on your feet?”

  “What?”

  “Your feet,” Taylor said.

  The girl lurched back as Taylor grabbed her leg. He smiled and fell back into the seat.

  Sneakers. She wore sneakers.

  He saw her as neither spirit nor demon. Still, “How come you got a girl’s body and a boy’s hair?”

  “I don’t know. How come you got a boy’s body and a girl’s hair?”

  Taylor reached back and brought his ponytail forward, waving it in front of her eyes.

  “This here ain’t no girl’s hair, lady,” he said. “’Tis a king’s mane.”

  Her lips flattened to a near smile. “Then where’s your kingdom, Your Highness?”

  Taylor pointed through the windshield to the dark mountains ahead. “Yonder.”

  Pavement gave way to gravel, which turned to a dark, packed clay. The forest closed in around them. Taylor guided her to the next left, which was little more than a broken place in a phalanx of oaks barely wide enough for the car to maneuver upon. Branches reached down and whipped against the roof. The sound was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  Taylor did not have to tell her when to stop; the rusted iron gate said that for him. He watched as whatever spunk left in the girl peeled away like a mask to reveal the child beneath.

  “This is Happy Hollow,” she whispered.

  Taylor waited until there was nothing left for her to do but look at him. Th
en he said, “Hear me well, lady, and listen long. I have a question, and you’ll be plainspoken in your answer. It’s yay or nay, and all that rides on it is whether you’re about to breathe your last in this sorry world.”

  She managed a small nod.

  Taylor leaned in close. “Are you awake?”

  4

  Timmy stood just inside the Texaco’s closed doors as I pulled into the lot. He held the shotgun with the barrel high. It moved in small, sporadic circles, like a batter itching for a hanging curve. His starched shirt hung loose from khaki pants that had been torn above the knee. His cropped hair was tinged a bloody red.

  I got out of the Blazer and tucked Bessie at the small of my back. A ’70s Ford pickup sat crooked at the far end of the building. It looked familiar in a strange way, though my mind was too muddled to place it. The canopy lights ended just beyond its front bumper. The moon took over from there, shining its passive glow over fields of shrubs and tall grass. I saw no movement there. High on the hill across the road, the Kingman house stood dark and silent.

  The heavy clack of the doors unlocking made me jump. I managed to pull my arm behind myself, wanting to show Timmy that had been no jump at all, I’d just been reaching for Bessie. He cracked the right-side door just enough to speak.

  “The one’s in the cooler, Jake. Haven’t heard’m in a while. Don’t know where the other one is.”

  “That their truck?” I asked.

  “Yeah. They were gonna kill me, Jake.”

  I took a long pull of air through my nose and let it gather before passing it over my lips in a thin stream. Doc March had suggested that little exercise to help me stay calm. I found it worked just as well in Timmy’s parking lot as it had in my own bed.

  I said, “Okay, Timmy. You did real good, but I don’t want no trouble and I need to know what I’m dealing with. So why don’t you just open that door and let me in.”

  “But he’s out there, Jake.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but not in this very spot. Come on, now. You can lock back up when I get inside.”

  Timmy opened the door just enough for me to squeeze through and clacked it shut again. His face was swollen, and his right eye would look like Zach’s by morning. Timmy might have gotten them both, but they’d gotten plenty of Timmy too. I had to get him to the hospital, or at least to Doc March.

  “You say he’s in the cooler?” I asked.

  “Cooler,” he said. “Somebody done got their licks in on them both, Jake. Reckon that was Andy. Is Andy okay?”

  “Squad’s headed there now.”

  “The little guy, he wanted money. Said they killed Andy and the sissy he was with.”

  I blinked, trying to replay that last bit in my mind. “Somebody was with Andy?”

  “That’s what he told me,” Timmy said. “Then the big guy, he asks me if I was awake. What’s that mean, Jake?”

  I didn’t know. I took off my hat and ran a hand through my hair. My fingers came back soaked. There was no such thing as police procedure in Mattingly, other than staying ten feet behind Hollis’s tractor during the parades. I had no deputies, nothing in the way of staff other than Kate, and even she was unofficial. I supposed I could call Alan Martin at the county police station in Stanley, but decided against it. Alan was forty minutes away, I was there now. Which meant I had to do this on my own.

  “I’m gonna go in there and bring him out,” I said. “You stand ready.”

  I moved past a tangled mass of overturned snack racks toward the cooler in back. There was nothing on the other side of the door but the steady hum of the fans. I pulled Bessie from my belt. Just as I was about to thump her against the door, my cell rang. I jumped—this time so fast and so completely that I couldn’t disguise it as anything else—and pulled the phone from my pocket. Loud voices and a wailing siren greeted me.

  “Jake? Joey. It’s bad. Had to get everyone else up here too. Both trucks.”

  Both trucks. So the man in the cooler had told Timmy the truth.

  “How’s Andy?” I asked.

  “Hanging on. He got burned up pretty bad. Banged his head too. Frankie says he’s hallucinatin’.”

  “You said you needed both trucks?”

  “You know that kid been stopping there in the mornings with his brother?” Joey asked. “Name’s Eric?”

  I did. I’d been in the BP more than a few times when the two boys from Away had stopped for their smokes and snacks. Kate had taken an interest in them (had even gone so far as to consider writing their names in her book), but it was Andy who’d taken to looking after the boys.

  “I know him,” I said. “He there?”

  “Was. He’s gone, Jake. Got stabbed. It’s a mess down there at Andy’s. You’re gonna have to call in some help.”

  “I will.”

  Joey was still talking when I closed the phone. My heart felt like an anvil in my chest. I felt the world slip away. There was a killer on the other side of that steel door, and it was my job to bring him out. Mine, no one else’s. That was a far cry from taking the Widow Cash to market every Monday morning and waving to parade-goers.

  I said I’d been afraid of Phillip since the day he died. That’s true in a way. Closer would be saying I’d been afraid of everything since that evening in the Hollow twenty years before. Terrified, not only at the thought of what I did to Phillip coming out, but that the truth of the man I was would come out with it. The only thing worse than sinning is living with it after, and in that regard you could say Phillip McBride had taken even more from me than I ever took from him.

  Timmy stood watching me. His finger rested just over the trigger guard and his eyes held steady, waiting for me to do my job. A slow realization that I could not crept over me like rising water. In that moment I longed for my father. I hefted Bessie, turned her head so the hammer pole faced the door, then banged three times.

  “This here’s Sheriff Jake Barnett. I’m gonna open up this door now. I don’t want no trouble. You hear me?”

  Silence.

  Bessie shook in front of me. I slipped the pin from the handle and pulled hard on the door. The room inside was still but for the bobbing head in the back, behind a wall of frozen chicken containers. One of the men who’d beaten Timmy sat on the cold concrete floor, head rocking back and forth, whimpering into an arm so cold it had turned blue. Blood crusted into a serrated line from his right eye to his jaw. His shirt was torn at the chest.

  I forced my feet inside. Cold air blew down from the vents above, pushing my hat down over my eyes. Gooseflesh sprouted on my arms. I rushed ahead, propelled more by adrenaline than purpose, and grabbed the man by his hair. He let out a cry that was all fear and no threat as I jerked him to his feet and spun him against the wall. I pinned him there with Bessie.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “Where’s the other guy?”

  “He gone,” was all he said.

  I kept Bessie’s blade to the back of his neck and searched his pockets. There were no weapons or identification, only fifteen dollars in cash.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked.

  “Don’t matter. He gonna kill me. Said so. You won’t even finish readin’ me m’rights.”

  His rights. I shook my head, not having even thought of that. I holstered Bessie and said, “You are under arrest for . . . robbin’, attempted robbin’, almost killing Andy Sommerville, and killing Eric—” It occurred to me that I didn’t even know Eric’s last name. I left it at that. “You have the right to remain silent. If you don’t be silent . . .”

  I closed my eyes and cursed as the cold air blew down on us. The man turned his head as much as he could. The look on his face was a mix of amusement and shock.

  “What kinda dumb hick cop are you?” he asked.

  I barely heard him. I was still trying to think of the last half of the Miranda warning, something about getting a lawyer or a judge. I didn’t know because I’d never had to speak it. I spun
him around and led him out through the store.

  Timmy raised the shotgun as we approached.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Put that scatter-gun away, Timmy. Just get the door.”

  Timmy did. I led the man to the Blazer and put him in the back, then found an old pair of handcuffs at the bottom of the glove box beneath three of Zach’s Matchbox cars, two tubes of Kate’s lipstick, and a stack of Johnny Cash CDs. One of the man’s hands went above the roll bar in the back, the other below it. I buckled the seat belt last. It wasn’t the best way to secure a prisoner, but it was the only way I could figure.

  I turned to Timmy and said, “I’m gonna drive you over to Doc March’s. No objections.”

  He cast a wary eye to the backseat as I pulled the phone from my pocket to dial the office.

  “Go on,” I said. “All the fight’s out of’m, Timmy.”

  The line rang in my ear as Timmy climbed into the passenger seat.

  Kate answered and said, “Jake?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “Is Timmy okay?”

  “Will be. Just a few bumps. I’d let you talk to him, but I don’t think he’s up for it right now. I’m dropping him at Doc’s. Andy’s at the hospital. He’s been burned.”

  Kate choked back tears. “What happened?”

  “Two drunks looking for a quick dollar, near’s I can tell. I got one, but the other one’s in the wind. I need you to clean out the cell. Got a plate for you to run too. Can you do that?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “You’ll have to call Alan Martin too, tell him to get people down here. And I need some crime scene people. To the BP first, then here.”

  “Alan, okay. What’s the plate?”

  I read the numbers off the truck along the curb.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  There was. And while I took no pleasure in saying it, I knew it should only come from me. “You know those two boys been coming by the BP in the mornings? Brothers? Older one’s Eric.”