When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  That was part of the reason he was surprised to hear one of the dealers they’d been watching over the past year had come to the table ready to play. Then again, this fellow never had fit the profile. He was some punk ass kid from an upper-class suburb who’d gotten in over his head. Privilege and money will buy you a lawyer. A lawyer will get you a deal.

  Just so happened this kid was the right skin tone and hadn’t ever been in trouble. When they raided the house, the crow-chested little shit was cutting eighty grand of powder heroin with dry milk in his underwear while Full Metal Jacket blared on the television. What would’ve gotten anyone else a minimum of ten years, twenty if they could’ve tied a single overdose back, would probably only amount to a slap on the wrist and five years’ probation for the simple fact he was well-off and white.

  Holland didn’t care. This was America. The whole idea of justice was comical. If a man in this line of work got caught up in the rights and wrongs of the criminal justice system, he might as well shove his service weapon into the back of his throat and get it over with. The only thing you could do was work the case. Save yourself the headache: leave the bullshit for someone else to decide. That was hard for some people, but he was better than most at compartmentalizing the work.

  The lawyer had signed a Queen for a Day proffer letter with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and if the information seemed legit, the kid would get a deal. Holland had driven four hours from Atlanta to an SBI office in Asheville to question him. The last thing on earth he wanted to endure was some smug attorney in a thousand-dollar suit, but that’s what the day looked like. He carried a pot of coffee into the interrogation room and didn’t offer a drop to the lawyer or the kid. He filled an empty Styrofoam Hardee’s cup from the road and started the tape recorder. A video camera was already running in the corner of the room, but his routine was a matter of habit and consistency. He was old school.

  The kid was wearing a white short-sleeve dress shirt and a black tie like he might’ve been about to knock on your front door and hand you a pamphlet about Jesus. A navy sports coat was draped over the back of his chair. He’d cut his hair and shaved the patchy beard since his mug shot, going from patchouli-drenched hippie to preacher’s son overnight. Holland had beaten the shit out of kids like him in high school. He’d have beaten the shit out of him right then if the lawyer wasn’t present and the camera wasn’t rolling, or at least he would’ve wanted to.

  “This is Agent Ronald Holland of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration Field Division.” He glanced at his watch. “We are conducting this interview in the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation offices in Asheville, North Carolina. The interviewee is one Russell Parker, age twenty-three, of Asheville, North Carolina. He’s here with his attorney . . .”

  “David King. King, Kraft, and—”

  “His attorney is David King. Our conversation is being recorded. Should either of you wish to end the conversation at any point in time, you’re certainly within your rights to do so. Do you understand?”

  The kid glanced at his lawyer. The lawyer nodded his head. “Yeah,” he stuttered.

  “Mr. Parker, how long have you been involved in drug trafficking here in western North Carolina? About how many years?”

  “He’s not here to talk about what role he played in your investigation.”

  The statement caught Holland off guard. “Then why is he here?”

  “He’s here to address the specific questions outlined in our letter.”

  “Okay, Mr. Parker, during the course of your involvement, who was your primary source of narcotics, and specifically the heroin?”

  “Again, Agent Holbroooo . . . is it Holbrook?”

  “Holland.”

  “My apologies, Agent Holland. As I said, my client is here today to field specific questions as outlined in our letter to the AUSA.” The lawyer opened a thick, black leather folder and pulled out a stack of papers. He offered the papers across the table and Holland waved him off.

  “Speaking of the AUSA, where is he?”

  “She,” the lawyer corrected him.

  “Well, where is she?”

  “My understanding is that she had to cancel last minute, some sort of family emergency. But she said we could move forward with the meeting as long as I was okay with her not being here. With you having driven all the way from Atlanta, I hated for you to have to turn around.”

  “So if your client doesn’t want to talk about his involvement and he doesn’t want to give up any names, what exactly does he want to talk about today? I’ve driven four hours to hear it, so believe me, I’m all ears.” Holland took a long sip of coffee and leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. He stretched his legs straight and crossed one foot over the other.

  “The offer was that my client would provide the location of the supplier and that in turn he would plead guilty to a first offense federal trafficking of a schedule one narcotic, and that by doing so the amount would be reduced to nine hundred and ninety-nine grams. The not-less-than-five sentencing normally associated with that offense would then be waived. So we’re not here to discuss whom, but where.”

  “You know just like I do that your client can say anything he’d like in here today and that none of it can be held against him. That’s the way the game works, right? You parade your client around the office, we get to ask him questions, he’s not prosecuted for any crimes he talks about, and assuming it checks out, he gets the deal.”

  “Regardless of how the game works, we also know this boils down to specificity.”

  “Okay. So where exactly were you getting the heroin, Mr. Parker?”

  The kid looked at his attorney and the lawyer nodded his approval. “Cherokee.”

  “Cherokee.” Holland chuckled and shook his head. “Any specific place in Cherokee?”

  “No.”

  “Just Cherokee?”

  “Just Cherokee.”

  The chair Holland was seated in skittered across the floor loudly. “Well, I’d like to thank you both for coming in today. I sure know it was worth every bit of my time to get up here.” He slid the recorder into his pocket as he stood, took his cup in one hand, the pot of coffee in the other. “How about one of you gentlemen get that door for me?”

  The lawyer stood and opened the door. The kid glanced back over his shoulder with one hand floating in front of his mouth to hide his smirk. Holland wanted desperately to dump the pot of coffee over that boy’s head and watch it melt the skin off his face.

  Halfway down the hall, an agent named Rodriguez hustled out of a side room and pulled a set of headphones off his ears. He’d been listening over the video feed. He was the undercover who’d worked the kid’s case and organized the local PD to make the arrest.

  “What in the fuck did you call me up here for? Cherokee. Cherokee, he said. You could’ve told me that on the goddamn phone.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I thought he was here to play.”

  “And where the hell is the AUSA? She cancels and you send me in there blind?”

  “I didn’t know till the lawyer got here, sir.”

  “Did you not read the letter?”

  “I thought it was full cooperation.”

  “So did I. So, again, did you not read the letter?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Exactly. If that’s all the information he had, then the assistant attorney should’ve told that lawyer to shove that letter up his client’s ass. Cherokee. Cherokee, he said. And that’s supposed to get him a goddamn deal when we found him with eighty grand of heroin sitting in his lap.”

  Rodriguez looked like he’d just been caught having pissed his pants. Truth was, he was gung-ho and got ahead of himself, made a rookie mistake and obviously felt like shit about it. Holland knew he was the best street-level agent on his team and that once he got a few more years under his
belt he’d likely make his own way. But Holland wasn’t about to coddle him and he damn sure wasn’t going to offer a hand to pick him up.

  “Have them take him back into custody.”

  “What about the deal?”

  “He’s not getting a fucking deal.” There was nothing else to say, no other reason for being there. If Holland didn’t hit traffic, he’d be back to the office by seven, but it was Atlanta and there was always traffic.

  His son, Garrett, had a basketball game that night, and looking at his watch, Holland knew there was no chance in hell he’d make it. It was bullshit like this that ended marriages, and for months his had been hanging from the tip of his finger like a drop of water. Fifteen years in and halfway to pension, he was nothing more than a badge-wearing cliché.

  EIGHT

  Raymond sat with his chin down so that his beard flared across his chest like the brush of a broom. He curved the blade of an old barlow knife around the cuticle of his right index finger, the knife edge marring his fingernail, the severed skin dropping onto the bib of his overalls.

  A car was coming up the driveway, something he and the hound heard rather than saw. Tommy Two-Ton stood beside Ray’s feet and hobbled to the edge of the porch’s awning. Headlights shone on the trees above the house, then lowered as the driveway topped out into the yard. The sound of gravel crunching under tires filled the air with static. Ray shaded his eyes with his hand, while Tommy bayed at whoever had come upon them.

  When Ray’s eyes resettled to the night, he saw that a patrol car had pulled beside his truck. There was no light on outside, just the low yellow glow from the front room of the house sifting through thin linen curtains. The deputy’s hair was pulled back in a bun and the bulletproof vest beneath her uniform concealed her shape.

  Leah Green walked just like her old man with a long-stridden gait as if she might’ve been crossing a stretch of water from dry rock to dry rock. Her father, Odell, had rolled his tractor two summers back and drowned in a cattle pond at the edge of his property. Ray had known Odell all his life, and if he’d been the type to say such a thing he would’ve admitted Odell was the best friend he ever had. As he watched Leah walk, a memory spread through his mind like a drop of dye in water. He was eight years old and had snuck down to the creek while his father filled up his flatbed. Odell’s daddy had owned the gas station where Caney Fork joined the river.

  The way Ray met him, Odell was coming up the bank with a mess of trout skewered through the flanks on a spear of sharpened river cane, rainbow bodies with heads blown ragged. The boy had a Browning .22 rifle slung across his back and when Ray asked what he’d been doing Odell told him shooting fish. The boy explained how a thick mayfly hatch had crowded the streetlamps by the pumps the night before, and he’d swept up a pile that morning to use for bait. Since daylight he’d been down by the river, slinging a handful of bugs into the water before running downstream to shoot the dough-bellies as they rose to the surface to feed.

  Wandering back into the past was a welcome escape. Ray scoffed and shook his head as Leah appeared within an island of dim house light, Tommy Two-Ton wagging her tail as she sniffed her way around Leah’s ankles.

  Thankfully Leah took her looks from her mother, natural curls the color of poplar honey, an oval face high in the cheeks. She smiled with her lips rather than her teeth, more stoic than shy. Kind green eyes softened the fact she was tough as ironwood, thick-legged enough to kick down the walls of a barn.

  “How are we this evening, Ray?”

  “Oh, I’m just sitting here enjoying my supper.”

  “Let me guess. A jelly jar of whiskey and a cigar that smells like feet.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call that vision.” Ray cocked his head to the side and looked at her from the corners of his eyes. “I figure you could smell this fine cigar soon as you stepped out of the car.”

  “I could smell it before the pavement turned to gravel,” she answered. “And it don’t take seeing the future to know you ought to take a day off every now and again to keep that liver of yours from pickling.”

  “Take a pig’s foot out the brine and the meat’ll turn,” Ray said, draining a long slug of whiskey from his glass and chasing it with a pull from his cigar. He exhaled a heavy cloud from the corner of his mouth so as the smoke would not touch her.

  “Never heard it put like that.” Leah hooked her thumbs inside her service belt and shook her head with her gaze turned to the ground. A wide smile spread across her face when she met his eyes. “You just might be onto something, old man.”

  There was an empty rocking chair next to Raymond’s, but she eased herself onto a small woven wicker stool like she might’ve been about to shine his shoes.

  “Why on earth you going to sit down there? Here, I can move this.” He reached over and grabbed the coyote book he’d been reading from the seat of the chair and dropped it onto the ground beside him. “Sit in this chair and make yourself comfortable.”

  “Afraid if I get too comfortable I won’t want to get back up,” she said. “I can’t stay long anyways.”

  Ray had never been one for mincing words. He knew why she was there and rather than wait around while she toed at the surface, he knew there was only one way to get into the water. “Look, I’ll tell you just like I told the detective that come down there to the hospital. How I found Ricky, where I found him, that doesn’t involve you. There was a debt that he owed and that debt’s been settled.”

  She scratched behind her ear and shook her head with a wry smile. “I figured you would’ve at least offered me a drink first.”

  “You said you couldn’t stay.”

  “And I can’t.”

  “Then why should I waste your time?”

  “Understood.” She settled her elbows onto her knees and leaned her face forward. “The thing is, the sheriff sent me up here thinking I might could talk some sense into you. He knows you and I have been close a long time. He knows we’re like family.”

  “We are. We are family,” Ray said. He looked down the front of his chest, brushed the front of his overalls, folded the barlow closed, then leaned to one side to slip the knife back into his pocket. “But we can save the sentimentality for homecomings and funerals. And I don’t mean that to sound harsh, girlie, but the truth is when you pin that badge on of a morning, you’re no different to me than that fellow who come clopping down the hospital hall in his suit and tie. The law’s the law, and there’s some things you’re privy to and some things you aren’t.”

  “This isn’t me coming up here asking about the old days, about how you and my daddy took bets fighting chickens over there in Del Rio, or asking whether or not Coon Coward’s cooking liquor again. This is about your son having his face kicked in. This is about you dragging him into the hospital half dead and strung out like a run of beans. If you ask me, that’s something I think we have a right to know.”

  “Like I said, there was a debt that was owed and that debt’s been paid.”

  “Yeah, with five broken ribs, one of which all but punctured your son’s lung. He took a kick to the side of the head that almost shattered his orbital. That’s what the doctor told us. Doctor said if that boot had landed an inch left of where he caught it he might’ve lost his eye.”

  There was no change in Raymond’s demeanor. He didn’t even consider correcting her about how the debt was paid, telling her about forking over damn near every dollar he had just to buy his son’s life back one more time, a life the boy would surely squander. He pushed himself in the rocking chair on his heels and rested the jar of whiskey on his stomach.

  “It would seem to me if the law cared anything about saving my son’s life you’d quit letting him out every time you lock him up. You know that last time y’all shot him full of Narcan, by the time I got to the hospital, he was out there in the parking lot in some old boy’s car tying off his arm. I saw that with my
own two eyes.” Ray puffed a few quick drags from his cigar to keep it lit, then picked a piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and wiped it on the arm of the chair. “Somebody told me not long ago y’all shot one old boy with Narcan four times in one day. Seems a little backwards, don’t it?”

  “I can’t—”

  “So you’ll have to forgive me for not believing the sheriff cares whether or not he’s half dead, as you put it,” Ray stopped her from bending his ear. “That boy’s been half dead for damn near twenty year. That ain’t nothing new. And you know that the same as I do.”

  The two-way radio Ray used to listen to emergency chatter crackled on the ground beside the runner of his chair. The radio was catching static from the one clipped to the deputy’s belt, and he leaned over and rolled the volume dial back till the two-way clicked off. The call came in clear through her speaker now and both listened as Dispatch reported a domestic off Monteith Gap. Must be ten o’clock, Ray thought.

  This was a call that came in like clockwork every Monday evening when Lonnie Luker came home squashed. Lonnie’s wife would get to swinging a cast-iron skillet and screaming about Jesus and before long he’d grab a knife and tell her he’d cut her throat, and even though they’d been bickering back and forth for forty-two years without so much as drawing first blood, the law responded every week just to satisfy the Florida neighbors.

  “Sounds like old Lonnie’s home from the VFW,” Raymond said.

  “I believe you’re right.” Leah slapped her hands on her knees and clambered to her feet. He knew she understood he wouldn’t give her any information just as he knew she was obligated to ask. She thumbed the push-to-talk button on the handheld clipped to the left breast pocket of her uniform. “Charlie Two, County, I’ll be en route.”

  “You tell Lonnie and the missus I’ll see them at church on Sunday.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that.” Leah knelt down and scratched behind Tommy Two-Ton’s ears, the beagle raising her head with her nose straight up to force Leah’s fingers under her chin. When Leah rose, she put one hand on Ray’s shoulder and plucked his hat off with the other. She leaned down and kissed him on the top of his head, then dropped his hat back where he’d had it. “Good night, Uncle Raymond.”