When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  Denny slid around the back bumper of Carla’s car and pulled a paint drape off his scooter. He’d bought that cherry red Suzuki when he lost his license on a DUI and needed wheels to get back and forth to work. Somehow or another, this was one thing he hadn’t pawned. The key hung in the ignition and he turned it halfway so that the headlight flickered, then glowed against the wall. The battery still had enough juice to light the gauges.

  There wasn’t much gas in the tank and he wasn’t sure if the spark plugs were fouled, but seeing those lights was enough right then, enough to provide some little glimmer of hope. He stepped over the foot deck and rested on the duct-taped seat, the air in the foam hissing out of the vinyl. Turning the key, he closed his eyes and prayed the motor would fire. One way or another he was leaving. One way or another he was going to find some way to score.

  TWENTY-TWO

  On flat ground the Suzuki topped out around forty miles per hour, but downhill a man could really get moving. Denny’s hair whipped wildly from the back of his helmet and the smell of smoke in the air made him believe he was just shy of catching fire, everything burning off as the headlight sailed down the mountain like a comet.

  When he’d made up his mind, he hid the scooter in a stand of sumac off Whitewater Drive. He’d driven by the Exxon four times, scoping the place out. The plan was to hit the gas station, tear off through the woods, and be back to the Suzuki in under a minute. The sound of the river would conceal the motor’s high-pitched whine. He’d shoot down Whitewater, hang a left by the bear zoo, and slip off for the island park. There was a big grove of bamboo where he could hide for an hour till things calmed down before making his way up Big Cove.

  A bell rang on the back side of the door when he entered. There was an old white woman working the register. She lifted her head and pushed her glasses up her nose with the tip of her finger. She sized him up, then turned back to the crossword puzzle spread on the counter. It was still a few weeks shy of Thanksgiving but there was Christmas music playing from the ceiling. The old woman was humming “Silent Night” in that beautiful vibrato tone that only old people seemed capable of.

  He hung an immediate left along pallets of two-for-five twelve-packs and crept past the motor oil and fuel additives, being sure to keep his back to her. Head down so the cameras couldn’t get a clear shot of his face, he turned around the end cap and made his way up the candy aisle. It had only ever come to this once before and that time he’d had a shirt that was worn so thin that the clerk could read the candy bar label through the fabric. He’d sworn it was a gun but she laughed as she dug through her purse and pulled out a key chain pepper spray and damn near melted his face off.

  The knockoff Tommy T-shirt was navy blue and there wasn’t a chance in hell that old woman had passed an eye exam in decades. Denny grabbed a Snickers bar and situated it in his hand so that the shape mimicked the slide on a pistol. He slipped the rig under his shirt and started for the front of the store.

  The clerk looked up from her crossword puzzle and eyed him through cloudy bifocal lenses. A cough drop ticked against the front of her teeth as she smiled and greeted him. Denny was coming forward fast and he was just about to start screaming for her to give him the money when all of a sudden the thought came over him that he just might scare her to death, that he might honest to God make that woman have a heart attack and stroke out right there on the floor. He pulled the Snickers bar out from under his shirt and slapped it down hard on the counter.

  He tried to talk, but at first the words stuttered out in some indecipherable garble. He sounded like he was out of breath. “Can you tell me how much that cost?”

  “Are you okay?” she asked. She reached for the candy bar on the counter. Her left hand was in a cast that ran halfway up her forearm. There was a sincere look of concern in her eyes. She looked like she should’ve been sitting in a rocking chair someplace crocheting an afghan. She looked like somebody’s grandmother.

  “Yeah,” Denny said. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

  “That’ll be ninety-six cents, hon.”

  “I don’t think I’ve got that.”

  “Well . . . all right.” Her face scrunched in confusion. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” Denny said. “I’m fine. I hope you have a good night.”

  When he was outside, he felt like he was about to faint. There was sweat on his forehead and the night air hit him cold. He turned and looked through the window and she was studying him curiously. A middle-aged woman in a Jeep Wrangler pulled up to the pumps. There were two kids in the backseat about the same age, a little boy and girl that could’ve easily been twins, and they hopped out in unison, fighting over who would get to pump the gas. The mother handed some cash to the little boy and he shot by Denny in a cowlicked flash. His sister lifted the nozzle off the pump.

  A light blue Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight was parked in front of the ice machine at the corner of the building. There was a seashell necklace hanging around the rearview mirror. Denny slipped away from the store window and leaned with his back against the wall between a newspaper box and a bin of overpriced firewood. The little boy ran out of the store, his sister pumped the gas, and in a minute they were gone.

  When the coast was clear, he walked around to the passenger side of the Oldsmobile. She hadn’t even bothered to lock the doors. The inside smelled like hand cream and cigarettes. He hit all the primary places first—the glove box, the console, the visors, the side pockets on the doors. Aside from some spare change in a cup holder, the car was empty. A pack of Kool 100s was thrown on the dash with a lighter tucked into the cellophane. He took the cigarettes and leaned back out of the car and that’s when he saw a CVS pharmacy bag sitting in the backseat.

  Denny snatched the bag and eased the door closed without even bothering to check the ’script until he was halfway back to his scooter. Some moron doctor had prescribed the old woman Roxi for pain, five milligrams every four hours up to three times daily. The dosage was low, but the bag was still stapled and there were thirty pills prescribed.

  Kneeling in the moonlight on the bank of the Oconaluftee, Denny Rattler popped five Roxis and chewed them up like Pez. He emptied the pills into his hand, then threw the bag and bottle into the river. Slipping the cellophane off the cigarettes, he dropped the other twenty-five pills inside. If the law stopped him, he didn’t want to have anything with the old woman’s name on it because that would catch him a separate charge. He lit one of her cigarettes, rolled the cellophane up, and held the lighter to the plastic to dab it sealed. When he was finished and the plastic was cooled, he hid the pills along his ankle inside his sock and smoked the cigarette down to its filter.

  Though he’d planned on running, he didn’t have to now, and there really wasn’t anyplace to go. He flicked his cigarette butt into the current, picked up a stone from the water’s edge, and skipped the rock across the surface like a kid killing time. All there was in this world was waiting. He hoped it wouldn’t take long for those Roxis to hit.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The first three trips to the Outlet Mall, Rudolph made Rodriguez wait in the car while he went inside. Sometimes it was a matter of an addict playing his hand, not wanting to cut himself out by giving up his connection. Other times it was the dealer’s reluctance to open their door to someone they didn’t know. Rodriguez worked a meth case once with a guy so paranoid he made everyone strip naked in the mudroom to ensure that no one was wearing a wire. If shit wasn’t sketchy, odds are it wasn’t real. There was never any question whether this place was exactly what Rudolph said it was.

  Four trailers stood together, but only three seemed to be moving. The lights were off in the other and every once in a while Rodriguez caught a glimpse of some thick brute pacing the edges like the place might’ve been being used as a stash house. Every visit Rudolph disappeared into a trailer with a sun-bleached green plastic awning over the porch. Scabs filtered
in and out of another trailer like yellow jackets, their eyes stretched wide and glowing.

  Rodriguez dropped the driver’s seat in the burgundy Geo Metro he was driving and smoked a cigarette with the window cracked while he waited. Some skinny girl with hard shadows cutting her face kept offering hand jobs to people who came out of an orange-trimmed singlewide, but so far no one was biting. Every once in a while he caught the sound of people arguing inside, but for the most part things were calm given the circumstances, everything running smoothly. Car doors slammed and engines started. People pulled up while others drove away. The faces changed. The bags kept moving.

  In a couple minutes, Rudolph hopped down the front steps, jogged to the car, and climbed in the passenger side. He slapped hands with Rodriguez and Rod felt the stamp in his palm, a quick trade-off as fingers slid apart as if someone might’ve been watching. Spiking his hair up through his fingers, Rudolph asked if he could bum a smoke and Rodriguez tossed the pack into his lap.

  “Next time he said you could come in.”

  Rodriguez clenched the bag in his fist, then jammed it into the crease of his seat like he was hiding it from the law. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said, the back of his mind racing while outside he played the part.

  Chemists were light-years ahead of where they’d been ten years before. But dope still couldn’t be tested to tell what came from where with any absolute certainty, or at least rarely could a line be drawn from supply to supplier to dealer to addict. If an addict overdosed and there was powder still in the bag, a lab could test the batch against a sample from a known dealer and say with pretty good certainty whether or not they matched, the reason being that addicts never cut what they bought. But you couldn’t trace your way up the food chain with labs. Every hand in the line cut the powder with one thing or another as a matter of profit margins and branding. What started as A in Mexico wound up as B or C in Atlanta, D at the North Carolina line, E, F, or G when it reached Asheville, and Z by the time it reached the needle. The easiest way to tell how close you were getting to the source was to test purity, and the shit coming out of Cherokee was as pure as they’d found anywhere in North Carolina.

  Two days later Rodriguez was inside the trailer counting twenties onto a coffee table while some lanky cat named Jonah flicked the corner of a stamp and watched the dope angle to one side of the bag. The place smelled like Axe body spray, sweat, and cigarettes. All the lights were on and it was uncomfortably bright. It felt like they might’ve been about to get sucked inside a spaceship. There was a revolver on the table, a chrome Ruger SP101 with an engraved frame that shined like a mirror in the house light.

  Rudolph paced back and forth by the door. He hadn’t liked the idea of Rodriguez coming inside with no guarantee that he would get anything out of the deal. He’d been up for a week on crystal. After about a minute, Jonah squawked that if Rudolph didn’t sit the fuck down he was going to shoot him dead and Rudolph took a seat in the background at a small dining room table left of the door.

  Jonah was Cherokee with olive skin and chestnut brown hair. He had a thick accent that struck Rodriguez differently from other people he’d heard in the mountains.

  “You said you wanted a bundle?”

  “What’s it, a hundred?”

  “One fifty.”

  “Rudolph said one twenty-five.”

  “Then why’d you say a hundred? And Rudolph don’t know dick.”

  “All I got’s a hundred.”

  “I’ll give you seven on the hundred.”

  Rodriguez wiped his eyes. He was sitting in a faux suede recliner that felt damp under his forearms. He scrunched down and sank deeper into the cushions, pretending to decide whether or not it was worth holding his ground.

  “You can use a calculator if you want, but one fifty’s fifteen a stamp and I’ve been getting twenty. Seven on a hundred’s generous.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  Jonah took three stamps out of the bundle and straightened his legs so he could slip the bags into his pocket. He tossed the other seven rubber-banded together onto the floor by Rodriguez’s shoes.

  “Can you get your hands on weight?”

  Jonah looked at Rodriguez, surprised and skeptical. “The man who ain’t got enough money for a bundle, who’s been bitching about how much he can get on a hundred, wants to ask about weight?”

  “Some boys I work with are looking for a line. That’s where I used to get fixed, used to just get everything off them, but the shit they’ve got doesn’t hold a candle to this. We get moved around all the time on jobs and wind up working out of motels all over the place. Wouldn’t step on your toes at all. Figured if I could help them, they’ll look out for me on the back end.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know about that. Let’s just stick with what we’ve got going. I’d hate to ruin a good thing.” Jonah smirked.

  “You care if I get your cell number?” Rodriguez pulled a Samsung Galaxy with a cracked screen out of his pocket.

  “There ain’t signal up here.” He rattled a cordless phone in the air and tossed it onto the couch. “Got a landline. It’s 497-3673.”

  Rodriguez repeated the last four digits as he typed, “Three, six . . . seven . . . three?”

  “Yeah. And don’t say shit when you call. Just ask if you can swing by or something, ask if I’m good, you know.”

  “Yeah, I got you,” Rodriguez said, and that was the beginning of the end.

  Despite the way Hollywood made it seem in movies, it wasn’t that tapping cell phones was some crazy technological feat. After the Patriot Act, they could tap right into a microphone and listen while your phone was in your pocket. With 3G and 4G technology they could pretty much pinpoint exactly where you were standing at any given minute of the day. The war on terror had fucked the Fourth Amendment in the ass. But the fact that it was a landline made Rodriguez think that every other trailer there might be running the same. And turned out they were.

  One introduction suddenly gave them ears on everything happening on the property, all four trailers and the house at the back. Their phone lines were tied to their cable packages, so it was as simple as getting a warrant and making one call to the provider, and every conversation was copied at the digital switch, forwarded on to the department as electronic files through email. A few weeks into the surveillance, Rodriguez was dumbfounded by the amount of information and what they knew.

  The Outlet Mall wasn’t the hub, but it was tied directly to the people running the show. Whereas everywhere else the sheer number of middlemen made it impossible to work your way back to the source, here they’d cut out the middleman altogether, feeling so sheltered that their greed got the better of them. They talked openly. There were people involved that would make headlines. The case was coming together and it was going to be big when it broke.

  Rodriguez didn’t want to get ahead of himself. Rush jobs left pinholes that stretched wide in courtrooms, but there was pressure coming from the top to make something happen sooner rather than later. Some dealer in Hot Springs had cut a batch with quinine and poisoned sixteen people, two kids who were just in high school. The community was up in arms. At one point the Madison County Emergency Management sent out a plea over Facebook that they’d answered eight overdose calls in the past three hours, but no one listened. No one ever listened.

  If there was dope, there were needles. If there were needles, there was death. Rodriguez tried not to think about it. You could stay up at night and keep a running tally on your bedroom wall, but eventually you’d run out of room. It was best not to put faces with names, or give names to numbers. A man could get bogged down in the bodies. It was already easy enough to lose sleep. Rod was dog tired.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Prelo Pressley wasn’t actually a veteran of foreign war. He’d never even been in the service. But back before Jackson County passed liquor by the drink, the V
FW was one of the only places where a man could sit down and rattle a glass. He’d sat at the far end of the bar watching the door every evening for decades drinking Heaven Hill Old Style over ice. Ray knew that was where he’d find him.

  In his twenties, Prelo lived in a canvas teepee at the back end of Sugar Creek eating acid on land that belonged to the federal government. Through the week he made an honest living detonating explosives at every quarry within earshot. One time back in the late ’70s he’d packed powder in the ground for four days straight at a job in Sapphire, then pulled the shot on a Sunday morning. A church eight miles down the road in Toxaway said every hymnal in the sanctuary jumped a foot off the pew and that one of the deacons shat his pants. That was the last blast that ever took place on the Sabbath. He’d always been a wild man.

  The parking lot was mostly empty, but Prelo’s truck sat right where it always did, backed tight against the right-hand side of the building. He drove an unmistakable old Toyota Dolphin mini motorhome from the ’80s that he’d taken the camper off and built a flatbed over the dually frame. Ray parked his Scout beside Prelo’s rig and walked around front to find him.

  Cigarette smoke hung eye level in the room. There were only two people at the bar, Prelo and some guy Ray didn’t recognize who was elbowed up beside him. A middle-aged man in a Navy ball cap commemorating a warship was working the bottles and he looked up from wiping down the countertop with a beer-soaked rag as the door slapped closed.

  “Ray, Ray, get over here, come over here a minute,” Prelo yelled in a crackly voice. His words always came out high-pitched like someone was pinching his nose. He motioned theatrically with his hand for Ray to join them.