by David Joy
There was a piece of lint stuck to the candy and he picked the fuzz off before popping the sucker into his mouth. There was no flavor, just a dull sweetness like watered-down sugar. He heeled the kickstand down to prop up the scooter and took a seat in the roadside dust with his head rested against the guardrail. The glow from the fire rippled in reds and black like a body of water dancing with sunset, and he sat there with the metal cold against the back of his neck, mesmerized by the surge and swell of fire.
He hugged his knees to his chest and moved the sucker around his mouth with his tongue. He was surprised how quickly the feeling came on. A warm, fluid sensation spread through his body and that inner part that had shriveled down to nothing slowly began to swell. He closed his eyes and welcomed that feeling.
When he blinked, all he could see was the fire smoldering in the distance and he could feel the heat of it, his body taking on that rhythm so that it pulsed through him, running the lengths of his arms and legs, radiating from his fingertips and toes. He held his hands out in front of him and in his mind he could feel the temperature pressing against his palms.
For months, he’d been certain the world was headed for some kind of end, but now that ending gave way to something new. Denny stripped his clothes off and tossed them into the river like a shed husk. He stood in nothing but his boxer shorts and busted sneakers with his arms stretched wide like Jesus. The fire touched his skin. His mind wandered back to an afternoon when he was working construction and had lain on dark shingles with his shirt off, the roof warm on his back, the July sun beating against his chest, a cold beer resting in his hand. This was as close as he’d come to the feeling he’d been chasing in ages and he smiled and laughed with wonderment knowing that it would not last for long, that it never lasted for long.
There were a hundred and fifty miles to go and he’d be lucky to make it by sunrise. He shook his hair back and forth across his shoulders, then pulled the helmet down over his head. The Suzuki shattered the stillness of the night with its loud Weed Eater whine, and as he rode, the world breathed against him, smoke fading, the last of the morphine clicking between his teeth. He glanced in the rearview at the darkness behind, then turned his eyes and would not look back. The mountains slowly gave way to flat land. The headlight stretched shallow and dim ahead.
THIRTY-EIGHT
A week passed without so much as a hint that the levee would break. It was early morning, the tail end of November when the quiet gave way to the flood. The DEA and SBI pulled resources out of five counties including tac teams from Haywood, Macon, and Jackson. The news would later call it the largest single takedown in western North Carolina history, thirteen simultaneous raids synchronized down to the second.
Holland was the maestro of the orchestra. On the day of the raids, he laid his best suit—an all-black job he saved for funerals and pictures—in the backseat of his car. He was afraid he would jinx the whole thing by wearing it, so instead he slid into a pair of khakis and a polo shirt like most days. If things went right, he could change in the bathroom to look halfway decent for the cameras.
It was hard not to be superstitious when you worked a job that put your life on the line. You drink your coffee a certain way. You eat two eggs over easy with toast. You survive. The fact that you’re still alive at the end of the day means something must have worked, so the next morning you wake up and do it again and again and again. He rarely made it into the field anymore, mostly spent his days behind a desk so that he was more at risk of carpal tunnel than hollow points, but old habits were hard to break.
Cordell Crowe had begged Holland to be the one to slap the cuffs on the son of a bitch, so Holland met him and the chief of police at the station when the sun was just starting to break over the ridgeline. For months, Holland had listened to audio recordings of a man who seemed to believe he was untouchable, and now the time had come to finally put a face with the sound of his voice.
Detective Donnie Owle waddled into his office at a half past eight carrying a paper sack lunch and a gas station coffee. There were two chairs in front of Owle’s desk. Holland sat in one with his right ankle propped on his left knee. The chief of police leaned forward in the other with his elbows rested on his thighs. Looking at Owle, it was hard to believe he was the brains or the brawn. He was medium height and fat, his stomach lapping over his belt buckle, his head slick as a melon. A thick gray goatee made a square around his mouth. One of the cords from his bolo tie had caught in the breast pocket of his shirt.
A brief what-the-fuck kind of look swept across his face as he came through the door, but he didn’t say a word as Holland rose to his feet. The chief told him to put his hands behind his back and he did so without a word. Holland could see how much Cordell Crowe wanted that little stumpy sucker to say or do something to give him a reason to plant him flat on his nose, but things went quiet and peaceful.
Truth was, things seldom played out like they did in the movies. Shootouts and bloodshed looked good on-screen, but anybody with half a brain knew to zip their lid, lawyer up, and let the cards fall in the courtroom. Only the guilty or the desperate tried to run, and Owle refused to look like either. A smug expression spread across his face as the chief took Owle’s sidearm and badge from his belt. Empires were built and destroyed by arrogance. Ego was enough to drive men stone blind.
* * *
• • •
For being so tight-lipped outside of Cherokee, the whole operation was surprisingly brazen within the Boundary. The only thing Rodriguez could figure was that they must’ve felt insulated. And, for the most part, they were.
There were eyes and ears tuned to everything that happened outside, and violence dissuaded addicts from turning when they wound up in front of honest police. There were three patrol officers taking cuts and the shipments were timed to the shifts they worked. Soon as the dope crossed the Georgia line it was safe. Off-duty tribal cops working security at the Murphy casino brought it back to the Boundary in the trunks of their cruisers. A couple bigwigs on the tribal council laundered the money. There were always new contracts at the casino, so they moved the cash through shell construction companies and cleaning service firms.
From the phone taps, Rodriguez had learned the shipment that was coming would be nearly twice as big as normal, and that was why they waited the extra week before they moved. Between what was lost the night Walter Freeman was left in front of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, the fact that per cap checks were coming in mid-December, and Christmas being just around the bend, Owle loaded up the supply to meet the ensuing demand. In the end, the conspiracy charges Denny Rattler helped secure would be the icing on the cake at trial. It’s harder to argue for leniency when there’s blood on your hands.
There was a long, vinyl-sided prefab at the head of Grassy Branch. The safe house had belonged to Donnie Owle’s aunt and come down to him when she died. He kept the lights on and the grass mowed and told anyone who asked that he made side money off it as a rental. The neighbors were a quarter mile down the road and had known Donnie all his life. They knew he was a detective, so it never seemed out of the ordinary when patrol cars went in and out to check up on the place.
Rodriguez knew no one was inside the house when the tac team gathered on the porch with their backs against the wall, but that didn’t take the fun out of smashing the front door with a battering ram and tearing the place apart like a group of teenage vandals. The house opened into the den and Rodriguez surveyed the room while deputies cleared the rest of the home. A green-and-white afghan was folded neatly across the back of a beige sofa. The glass-top coffee table had a small porcelain dish filled with peppermints and butterscotch candies. One wall was completely covered in family photos. The air was still and musty, and it struck him as the strangest place he’d ever raided for drugs.
Suddenly a deputy was screaming at the back of the house and Rodriguez made his way down a narrow hall to see what the fu
ss was about. He went into a bedroom where two deputies stood wide-eyed in front of a pair of open suitcases stretched across a twin bed. No matter how many times he saw it, there was always the same feeling when he was looking down at a pile of money or drugs. The inside of Rodriguez’s mouth felt like leather and he tried to swallow but couldn’t. He took a step closer to get a better look, his heart about to come through his chest.
Ten kilos were turned on their sides and lined up in two rows so that they looked like books on a shelf. Under the heroin were gallon bags stretched full of crystal. The second suitcase was packaged exactly the same. From the looks of it, there were twenty kilos of powder heroin and another ten pounds of meth. This was a big score anywhere in the country, but for a field agent working street-level narcotics in the middle of nowhere, it was the type of bust that could alter his career.
Rodriguez smiled and looked at the deputies. He had no words, just stood there laughing, tired-eyed and crazy.
THIRTY-NINE
Over the past week Raymond Mathis had had a lot of time to think. Rather than head out of town to someplace unfamiliar, he’d opted to stay at Leah Green’s while everything played out. Dead men couldn’t go waltzing around town, and until the feds made their move that’s exactly what he was. There wasn’t anything to do at her house but loaf around drinking coffee and reading books, which was fine except he’d never been cut out for idle. After the first day he was restless, and the longer he tried to sit still, the more the thoughts and memories went to tumbling around his head.
That was part of why he always tried to keep busy. Get out in the garden, go walk the woods, work on the truck, mow the grass at the church, do whatever you had to do to keep your mind from wandering into the shadows. Whether it was remembering his wife or blaming himself for what happened to Ricky, Ray’s mind had plenty of hooks in him, plenty of chains to drag him down into the dark. The past few days, though, it was something else entirely.
The DEA hadn’t provided a timeline, and if Leah knew what was going on she’d kept a tight lid on the details. In the end, of course, things could’ve been worse. Tommy Two-Ton was loving every minute. She lay around most the day on a little bed Leah’d fixed her in the corner out of old throw pillows and chased the chickens around the yard every time Ray opened the door. Between the table scraps and treats Leah gave her, that old hound was having the time of her life.
Ray was sitting at the kitchen table with his back against the wall, finishing a pot of coffee and reading the end of his coyote book, when Leah pulled up behind the house. Tommy Two-Ton hobbled over to the door and waited patiently with her tail sweeping back and forth across the hardwood.
The door swung open and almost took the dog’s nose off, and Leah rushed into the kitchen like supper was burning. She didn’t have on her typical uniform, but a pair of olive drab cargo pants and a black fitted T-shirt with the sheriff’s office insignia printed on the left. There was a bandage taped to one of her elbows and as Ray looked her over he realized her clothes were stained like she’d been rolling around in the grass.
“What in the world’s got into you?”
“You not watching the news?”
“No, I was reading a book.”
“Well, turn on the news!”
“What for?”
Leah rushed through the kitchen and by the time Ray followed her into the den she had the television on with the volume up so loud it drove Tommy out of the room. Channel 13 was just coming back from commercial with the six o’clock news. The lead story was the Clinton campaign participating in a Wisconsin recount, a ten-second sound bite of the president-elect declaring the whole thing a scam by a “pack of sore losers.” The country wasn’t a month out from the election and Ray already wanted to huck himself off the side of Mount Rushmore or pack his bags and move.
“Hell, I don’t want to listen to that old peckerhead, Leah. I was doing just fine in there in the kitchen.”
“Just hold your horses.”
Ray hooked his thumbs into his pockets and the next story brought breaking news out of Cherokee.
“This is it! This is it right here.” She mashed at the remote and cranked the volume full blast.
A group of uniformed officers and men in suits were gathered behind a pile of drugs stacked into a pyramid. There was a black sheet draped over the table that the drugs were on, the seal of the Eastern Band displayed prominently on the sheet with its seven-pointed star representing the seven clans. The headline at the bottom of the screen read $1.5M TOTAL MARKS LARGEST DRUG BUST IN WNC HISTORY.
“You seeing this?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“One point five million dollars, Raymond. One point five million.”
According to the reporter, there were twenty kilos of heroin valued at seventy thousand dollars per, and ten pounds of methamphetamine that would fetch ten grand apiece. Thirteen raids had netted thirty-two arrests, including a handful of high-ranking local officials whose names had yet to be released.
The story was just breaking and the details were unclear, but what was stacked up on that table needed little explanation. The reporter claimed they’d have developments at eleven, and the segment broke away to a story that had been going on for months where a community outside of Asheville couldn’t drink the water out of their taps because coal ash ponds had poisoned the ground.
“Hold out your hand,” Leah said.
“What for?”
“Just do it.”
Ray held his hand out in front of him.
“Close your eyes.”
He did as he was asked and felt her place something heavy in his palm.
“All right, open them.”
Ray looked down at what she’d given him. “A rock.”
“That’s not just any old rock. There’s a story behind it and a reason I’m giving it to you.”
“All right.”
“So you heard them say they pulled in resources from five counties? Well, they used our tac team and I was part of one of the raids. Now, guess where we went.”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“We rode back into the head of Big Cove and kicked down the door of that house. Walter Freeman, Ray. I put that greasy-headed sucker in cuffs myself.”
“No shit,” Ray said. He studied the muddied chunk of milk quartz that was about the size of a baseball. “So what in the world’s this rock got to do with any of that?”
“All right, so when they go in the front door they’ve got me and another deputy behind the house, and soon as they make entry that back door slaps open and here he comes running off the porch just as fast as his feet will take him. We’re drawn down on him screaming for him to get on the ground and he hits the woods running wide open.”
Leah had this way of talking when she got excited like her mouth was filling up with spit so that she had to suck back every sentence or two to keep from drowning.
“I take off after him and right about the time he reaches where the mountain starts climbing he gets tripped up in a bunch of dog hobble and I get my hands on one of his ankles. I wrestle him down and we’re rolling around for a minute or two and I’m trying to get my Taser off my belt and he climbs on top of me and starts snatching for my service weapon. He’s got me pinned on my back and I can hear the other deputy coming but I’m running my hands all through the leaves trying to find something to hit him with and I feel this rock laying there. I grabbed ahold of that rock and I brained that son of a bitch right in the side of the head. He slouched off to the side and I flogged him good one more time, caught him right above his lips. That sucker spit blood like I’d knocked out every tooth in his head. Couldn’t even answer questions. Couldn’t do nothing but nod.”
“You all right?” Ray gestured toward the bandage on her elbow.
“Oh, hell, I’m fine. Just scraped up my arm’s all. Didn’t even ta
ke stitches.”
Ray shook his head and chuckled. “Damned if you’re not your old man made twice over.”
“Think so?”
“Both just as crazy as bedbugs.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do.” Ray tossed the rock up in the air and caught it in his fist. He wanted to tell her he was sorry for everything that happened, and that he was proud of her for everything she’d done and what she’d become, but he never had been the type to say those kinds of things, and as he started to speak the words stumbled through his teeth like drunks out of a bar. “I . . . I want you to know . . . I guess what I’m trying to say is . . .”
“You don’t got to say it.” Leah put her hand on his shoulder and Ray pulled her into his chest. She tugged on his beard. “Don’t go getting sappy on me, old man.”
Ray grunted and shook his head. He hated that about himself, that he was so willing to tell people exactly what he thought right up to the moment it came to tell them the things that mattered most. He could show someone he loved them, but he’d always had trouble saying the words.
“I guess this means me and Tommy can head on home here in the next little bit.”
“You sick of me already?”
“No, it ain’t that. I just want to get on home. Besides, if you spoil that dog much more she’s liable to come trotting down 107 and shack up here for good.”
“That’d be fine.”
“I don’t think your chickens would take too kindly to that.”
“Those chickens don’t take too kindly to anything.”
Ray walked back into the kitchen and Tommy Two-Ton pawed at the door. He grabbed his coat off the chair and shoved the book he’d been reading into his back pocket like a billfold.
“You sure pack light, old man.”
