by David Joy
Every evening around quitting time the concrete walkway in front of the rooms filled up with migrant workers drinking tallboy Estrella Jaliscos. They worked ag fields and construction, made up landscaping teams and road crews. When the work dried up in one place, they followed it on to the next, all of them living as cheaply as they could in order to send what little they earned back home.
Rodriguez’s room smelled like stale cigarette smoke. The bed was neatly made and Holland wasn’t sure whether that was Rod’s military background or whether he’d been sleeping on top of the comforter for fear of what might be hiding beneath the sheets.
“If a man wanted to get eat up with bedbugs I’d say this right here’s the place.”
“Yeah, they take good care of us, don’t they? Luxury accommodations,” Rodriguez said. He was sitting in an armchair across the room, leaned forward with his hands dangling between his knees. All the lights were off, but there was just enough sun filtering through the windows behind Holland to make out his face.
“You don’t look so good.”
“I don’t feel so good.”
“You’ve been going a long time,” Holland said. “If you weren’t tired I’d swear you were on dope.”
“This is more than tired.” Rodriguez rubbed his face hard with the heels of his hands. He stretched his eyes wide and clawed at his throat. A pack of cigarettes sat on the floor between his feet. He lit one and blew the smoke toward the ceiling, stood up and walked over to a small counter where a coffeepot was plugged into the wall. “You want a cup of coffee?”
“I think I’ll pass,” Holland said. He could tell Rodriguez needed a break, but he also knew a vacation was something he couldn’t offer. They were too far along now. Too close to the end for him to come up for air.
Rodriguez stood in the doorway to the bathroom. He turned on the exhaust fan and blew the smoke from his cigarette toward the shower.
Holland had always been a hard-as-nails, no-nonsense kind of boss, and he knew that could take its toll. He also knew what it was like to be standing where Rodriguez was standing—months into an undercover operation, no way to dig yourself out of the darkness you’d created, no end in sight. He’d worked similar cases for similar men. He’d been stuck in an office for years now, but those types of memories never seem to fade. He recalled having thought at the time that things would get better once he rose in the department, but standing there now he wasn’t so sure.
“You’ve done a hell of a lot of good work on this, Rod. Don’t lose sight of that.”
“And most of it just went right down the drain.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Tell me how the fuck that happens? What kind of Hollywood superhero kind of horseshit is that? I keep looking out the window waiting for the goddamn Batmobile to come whizzing through town.”
Holland shook his head and laughed. He walked across the room and poured a shot of coffee. Whatever the hell Rodriguez had in that pot tasted like asphalt.
“The thing is, Rod, even Walter Freeman was small potatoes. He was the ticket into the aquarium, but those taps you got us, the conversations we’ve recorded from that one source, have taken us to some big fucking fish.”
“Yeah, and what do you think the odds of them going back to talking like that are now?”
“I’d say pretty good.” Holland nodded. “The way they’ve talked, it’s like they feel absolutely untouchable. We’ve got one of the highest-ranking officers in the Cherokee Police Department on the phone telling Walter Freeman when things were going to move. Don’t lose sight of that. Don’t lose sight of all the work you’ve put in. I can see the end of the game, friend, and it’s not playing out but one way.”
Holland slapped Rodriguez on the shoulder and it seemed to snap him out of his exhausted trance. Rodriguez wiped his nose with the back of his hand, took a sip of coffee and a long drag from his cigarette. Holland was absolutely certain they were two or three moves away from checkmate. Rod couldn’t see it, but they were almost home free. One more slipup and the walls would come tumbling down.
THIRTY-TWO
Since the night with Watty Freeman, Ray had taken to carrying his pistol. He was driving home from Harold’s Supermarket with two thick-cut, bone-in pork chops on the seat beside him and half a grape soda in his hand. The little snub-nosed revolver he usually kept in the safe weighed down the pocket of his barn coat.
As he came through downtown Sylva, he counted the out-of-state tags lining the sides of the street. Tourists strolled along the sidewalks window-shopping. The place still had that all-American downtown vibe—a white historic courthouse on the hill overlooking brick buildings with awnings over the storefronts, neoclassical cornices and gablets donning the second stories. Some of the buildings still carried the faded names of people and places he remembered, but all those businesses and businessmen had long been traded for chocolate shops and T-shirt stores. When the old hardware store had finally closed its doors, there was nothing left on that stretch that Ray would ever want or need. The only place he came downtown for anymore was the bookstore.
A sheriff’s cruiser dropped in behind him when he passed Spring Street. He glanced back in his rearview, but didn’t think anything of it. They were in front of the Coffee Shop when the deputy hit the lights. Ray’s concealed carry permit had expired, so he fished the wheel gun out of his pocket and laid the revolver on the package of pork chops so the gun was in open view. He slowed as he crossed the bridge over Scotts Creek and swung into the parking lot at the plumbing supply store.
Instead of pulling tight to his bumper, the cruiser wheeled around fast to the passenger side and lurched to a sudden stop. Leah Green killed the blue lights and stepped out fuming. She flung the door closed on her patrol car and snatched at the handle on the Scout.
“Unlock the door,” she said. Her hair was pulled tight to the back the way she always wore it on duty. Raymond stretched across the cab to lift the latch. Leah climbed in and slammed the door so hard that Ray was shocked the window didn’t shatter.
“God almighty, girlie, what crawled up your ass and died?”
“Don’t give me that shit, Raymond. You know exactly what this is about.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to enlighten me.”
She was visibly shaking. “Two years, Ray. That’s how long the DEA said they’d been working that case you just shit all over with that stunt you pulled. Two years of work down the drain.” She closed her hands together over her nose and mouth and breathed like she was hyperventilating. “We’re talking about an interstate drug case responsible for every bit of heroin from here to Asheville, maybe farther. And they fucking had him. More than that, they had the dots connected all the way to Atlanta. You know how I know all this? I know it because the sheriff sat us down this morning and told us. I know it because those agents are down there with the SBI in our office right now trying to figure out how the fuck the man they were watching winds up hog-tied in front of a sheriff’s office with a hundred thousand dollars in drugs and fifty grand in cash sitting in his lap. Why don’t you tell me how that happens, Raymond?”
Ray turned the bottle of grape soda up and let what was left fizzle against his tongue. He swallowed hard and sighed as if that last gulp was something absolutely satisfying. “I don’t have a clue, girlie, but it sounds to me like you and those agents ought to be counting your lucky stars that all of that shit’s off the streets.”
“But he’s not off the streets,” Leah shouted. “And so all that means is that they’re going to change everything up and now we’re going to have to work ten times as hard to catch back up with him. You didn’t accomplish a goddamn thing. All you did was unravel two years of case work in one fell swoop.”
“Well, first off, I don’t know what in the hell makes you so sure I had anything to do with what you’re saying.” Raymond’s palms were starting to s
weat and he slicked them down the thighs of his overalls. “But you’re telling me a guy gets found with enough drugs to poison every addict in western North Carolina and they just up and cut him loose?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Leah was turned sideways in the seat and she leaned back to where the crown of her head rested against the side glass. She had a look on her face that made Ray feel like the dumbest person on earth. “By the time the DEA showed up that boy had a team of lawyers canned up in our lobby threatening to have a habeas petition by end of day. Some of our detectives sat him down and asked a couple questions and he told them he didn’t have a clue where those drugs had come from, that somebody had just up and kidnapped him. Lawyers shut him up before he said another word and out the door he went, a two-year investigation straight down the shitter because some old man wanted to play Barney fucking Fife. Well, I’ve got news for you, Raymond, that ain’t how the law works. That ain’t how cases are built.”
Raymond unzipped the chest pocket of his overalls and took out his cigars. He struck a match from a box on the dash and cracked the window so as not to smoke them out of the cab.
“Who was that with you? The little short fellow? If I’m guessing I’d say it was Prelo Pressley.”
Ray cut his eyes across the cab but kept his face flat so as not to show his hand.
“That’s what I thought. Makes me awfully glad my father ain’t still alive because odds are he’d have been right there with you.” Leah shook her head and massaged at the bags under her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “To your dumbfounding credit, at least you two were smart enough not to drive right up in the parking lot. What the cameras caught was too fuzzy to make heads or tails of unless you knew what you were looking at. Question is what route did you take home, Ray? I’d say you came right down Grindstaff Road and headed through town the same way you just came.” Leah glanced back toward downtown. “What do you bet if I were to pull those SylvaCam tapes from that night off the Sylva Herald’s hard drive I’d see this Scout of yours coming right down Main Street about ten or fifteen minutes after that fellow was left on our doorstep?”
“I think that sounds like a whole lot of digging to me.” Ray took a long puff and held the smoke in his mouth till it burned his cheeks. He blew a thick cloud out the window, exhaled the tail end from his nose, then tapped ash onto the floorboard and squinted his eyes as he spoke. “Even if you did pull those tapes, even if you saw this truck driving through town, what’s to say me and Tommy weren’t taking us a late-night joyride?”
“What I’m telling you, Raymond, is that you better hope and pray somebody else in that department doesn’t come to the same conclusion I did. Right now the only person in our office who knows you gave me information on that house and what was going on up there is Lieutenant Fox, and lucky for you he’s about as dumb as a mouthful of paint chips. But I don’t know who he talked to with the tribe, and this isn’t the type of thing that’s just going to blow over. The Smoky Mountain News, the Sylva Herald, WLOS, they’re all going to be breathing down our necks, and sooner or later somebody’s going to have to give them an answer.”
“Sounds to me like those boys are going to have their work cut out for them.”
“Maybe so,” Leah said. She glanced down at the revolver that lay between them on the seat. “In the meantime, I’d keep that pistol close if I were you. A man loses a hundred fifty thousand dollars, he ain’t likely to let that slide.” Leah opened the door and stepped out. She climbed into her cruiser and sped out of the parking lot without so much as goodbye.
Ray stared through the windshield, unable to make sense of everything that had just happened. He looked at the revolver and pulled the trigger just enough to watch the double action lift the hammer, then slipped the gun into his pocket and started the truck. The cigar hung from the corner of his mouth and smoke burned his eyes. Sooner or later a man had to catch a break.
THIRTY-THREE
There’d been a time when a man could bend the rules. The law had always been littered with red tape and paperwork. That wasn’t anything new. But in the old days, if there was no straight line to justice, you bushwhacked your way through the bullshit to get the job done and the people in charge turned a blind eye knowing the end justified the means. Things didn’t work like that anymore. Raymond Mathis should’ve known better.
He felt like hell for putting Leah in a bad position, but at the time he’d only been able to see things the one way. If the people wearing badges were too busy playing grab-ass and twiddling their thumbs, a man had no choice but to take the law into his own hands. Go back thirty years and the deputies who found that boy sitting outside would’ve replaced the rope with handcuffs and said they found that piece of shit walking down the side of 107 with a backpack hanging off his shoulder like he was headed to school. Bad guy goes to jail, deputies get promoted, and the sheriff looks good standing behind a table of drugs in the front-page snap-and-grins of all the weekly rags.
Deep down he knew Leah would never rat him out. She might’ve been another generation but her mama and daddy had raised her to know how things used to be. If Odell were still alive, he’d have been right there in the truck with Ray and Prelo just like she said. Besides, Ray was family, and mountain people never turned their backs on family. On the flip side, she’d busted her ass to get where she was and Ray hated to think he might’ve compromised her integrity. Someone works that hard they shouldn’t have to carry a guilty conscience on another man’s account. It had never been his intention to put anything on her shoulders, but that’s what had happened just the same.
He was sitting in his driveway staring at the front door of his house, but had yet to cut the truck off. He couldn’t decide if he needed to go tell her what he was thinking and apologize or whether that would just be shoveling more on her plate. She was spitting mad and rightfully so. Probably best just to let her be, he thought as he rolled the key back in the ignition and limped out into the yard, his knees killing him from all the hiking he’d done over the past week.
When he came onto the dirt porch, an uneasy feeling settled in the pit of his stomach. The hairs on his arms stood on end. It felt like someone was watching him. Sometimes that sort of thing happened anymore and there was a part of him that believed Doris might’ve been keeping an eye out, maybe Ricky too now for that matter. He opened the front door and was surprised Tommy Two-Ton wasn’t pawing at his feet, having been cooped up all day.
Stepping into the room, he caught a shadow in his periphery, and soon as he turned he realized someone was sitting with their back to him at the kitchen table. Ray dropped the pork chops he was carrying on the floor and wrestled with his coat to get the revolver free of his pocket. Stringy hair hung between the person’s shoulders and from that vantage Ray couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or man.
“What are you doing in my house?” He squared up his feet shoulder-width apart and aimed the revolver with his elbows locked. His hands were shaking. He blinked hard, stretching his eyes, then took a deep breath to settle his nerves. Fear gave way to anger and he repeated himself, louder and firmer, the words turning from question to command. “Tell me what the fuck you’re doing in my house.”
The man did not move or turn. From where Ray stood he could see that his hands were flat on the table in front of him. Ray was hesitant to take a step closer, knowing good and well that the space between them gave him the upper hand.
“Is this your son?” the man whispered, his words barely audible over the dog barking at the back of the house.
“What?”
“Is this your son?”
“What are you talking about?” Ray lowered and lifted the muzzle a few inches nervously. He couldn’t make sense of what the man was asking. “Who? Is who my son?”
“The boy in this picture.”
“What picture?”
“This picture.” The man’s shoulder
s rotated slightly.
“Don’t you fucking move,” Ray yelled. “You stay right where you’re at or I swear on my wife’s grave I’ll paint that table with the insides of your head.”
The kitchen was just a ten-by-twelve offshoot of the den and the man was sitting at the table along the left-hand wall. Just past the table, a narrow doorway led into a small pantry and on the other side of the doorway the refrigerator stood in the corner of the room. Countertops and cabinets ran the rest of the walls, the sink straight ahead, the stovetop and oven to the right.
There was space on the right-hand side of the room, but Ray hated to give up any distance at all. He thumbed the hammer back on the revolver to lighten the trigger pull. Tommy Two-Ton was howling now and Ray glanced down the hall to see the dog’s shadow pacing back and forth through the crack light along the base of the bedroom door. He slid his feet side to side so as not to compromise his angle, shuffling a wide arc into the kitchen without once lowering his aim. Now that he was at the man’s side, he could see the photo album open in front of him. A long butcher knife lay flat on the table beneath the man’s right hand.
“Push that knife across the table,” Ray said.
The man’s hand tightened around the wooden grip. His head was tilted down and his eyes were locked on the picture.
“I want you to push that knife to the other side of the table,” Ray said. “I’m not saying it again.” Ray watched the man’s hand open over the butcher knife. With the handle flat under his palm, he slung his hand forward and the blade spun across the table, then tipped over the far edge and clanged against the floor.
“Is this your son?” the man said again, and in the time it took those four words to leave his tongue, Ray had traded the revolver to his left hand and cut the distance. Ray’s fist came into the side of that man’s head like a meteorite and his whole body lifted and slammed sideways into the wall. The chair he’d been seated in kicked out away from the table and he curled on the floor groaning. His arms and legs slowly straightened and Ray yanked the chair out of the way so that he could climb on top of him.
