A crowd would shuffle in later. Then trouble would start. Crash was grateful to have the night off, if only technically.
Crash ordered a beer. Mandy, the bartender, was a cute blonde, her hair cooked from processing and skin too dark from the tanning bed.
Crash handed her a five. Mandy shook it away.
“House policy is that cops always drink free.”
“I like your policy. Be careful of that; I’ve known cops who could drink you out of business.”
Mandy leaned against the counter. She was thin but getting soft, wearing a spaghetti strap tank top that showed off a lack of muscle tone. By contrast, Crash’s CrossFit regiment showed off in solid biceps that swelled as she lifted her beer. She’d do extra time to work this off.
“Who you looking for?” Mandy said.
“Who said I’m looking for someone?”
“Never known you to show up unless there was a fight going on, so can’t imagine you’re coming by to blow off steam.”
“You caught me. A guy, he played in the band. Name’s Billy McCoy.” Crash fished Micki’s photo out of her pocket and slid it across the counter top to Mandy. “I think he may be with her.”
Mandy glanced at the picture. “I’ve seen her.”
“She’s missing. She’s seventeen, and her mother’s worried about her.”
“I’ll take your word on that. She comes in and listens to the band. Billy, he played guitar for them until two weeks ago. That’s why they’ve got the new guy playing for them. This new guy, he sounds like he picked his guitar up twenty minutes before he joined.”
“The bouncer said they weren’t any good.”
“They’re not, but no one’s coming for them, anyway. They like that the beer’s cheap.”
“The beer’s watered down too.”
“Yeah, there’s that too. It’s like that joke about the lady complaining about the restaurant. ‘The food’s terrible,’ she says, ‘and the portions are small.’”
The band wrapped up their song, and a few people in the audience set their drinks aside long enough to offer half-hearted applause while everyone else kept on talking and shooting pool and ignoring the band.
The singer said, “Thank you all so much. We’re The Nightside Regulars. We’ll be taking a short break, and we’ll be right back to help you rock on through the rest of the night.”
To Crash, it sounded like a threat.
The singer found his way to the bar and motioned to Mandy. “Bud Light.”
Mandy pulled a can from the cooler and set it on a napkin in front of him, pulling the tab open. For the singer, the stage persona faded, and what remained was a guy tired and fed up and barely hiding a desire to be elsewhere.
Crash would have called him skinny-fat, with a slight build thrown off balance by a bulge rounding out above the belt. He wore ripped jeans that looked like they had earned their distress rather than coming out of the store that way, and a plain black T-shirt stretched too tight over his gut, hanging out untucked. Maybe forty, hairline receding, a healthy amount of gray, and in need of a shave. Not a bad-looking guy if she were in the market for wannabe rockers pushing their bad-idea cover bands into the midst of their midlife crisis. Everyone had a type.
He saw Crash and tipped his beer in her direction. “How you doing tonight, honey?”
“Fantastic. You?”
He shifted himself around to face her better and leaned back a little, digging his elbow into the bar to keep himself upright and hold his balance. “Not bad. How you think we’re sounding tonight?”
“Oh, awesome. It’s like listening to the real bands.”
He smiled and winked at her. “Appreciate that a lot. We put a lot of time into our music. You from around here?”
Crash nodded.
“Haven’t seen you in here much.”
“I’ve been here. You must not have noticed me.”
“Baby, I’d have noticed you.”
Crash pushed back an involuntary gag. “I’m sure all of your groupies get that line, don’t they?”
He gave her a dismissive wave. “You might not know it, but I’m a little past the prime to be chasing groupies and teenyboppers. I’m where I’m more appreciative of a woman with more…I suppose you could say life experience.”
“How much ‘life experience’ you wanting with a woman?”
“How much you got?” He made an assessing glance at the distance between them. “Why don’t you come down here so I don’t feel like I’m yelling?”
Crash hopped off the stool and walked toward him.
He reached his hand out to her. “I’m Kevin.”
Crash flipped open her sheriff’s ID and pushed her badge out until it was two inches from his face. “Chief Deputy Landing, Parker County Sheriff’s Department.”
Kevin groaned. “Fuck me running.”
“I’ll pass, but I appreciate the offer.”
Kevin twisted around, putting his back to her. “I’m on break now.”
“You are, which means you’ve got time to talk.” Crash hopped up onto the stool next to his. “We can talk about my life experience.”
His face soured as his hopes for an easy score spiraled out of control and exploded. He shifted his weight around, away from Crash. “Piss off. I don’t have time for cops.”
Crash set the photo of Micki on the counter and slid it toward Kevin. “This girl’s gone missing. She hung out with your guitarist, Billy McCoy.”
Kevin’s eyes passed over the picture. “Yeah, she’s been around.”
“When?”
“I didn’t mark it down in my calendar or anything. Two, three months back. She talked to Billy after a gig, and then she was back the next weekend. Then she showed up at practice. It’s never a big deal because the guys, they’ve always got a new piece of ass showing up. You stop learning names after a while.”
“Nice attitude.”
“I’m realistic, okay? We play Bon Jovi covers; we are not opening up for Metallica.” He jabbed at the photo. “She was putting it in Billy’s head we needed to do original material, that his stuff was better than what we were hacking out every night.”
“You disagreed?”
“Yeah I disagreed, because coming to a dive like this one, listening to a band, you want to sing along, know what shit the band plays. And no one would show up and listen to Billy’s prog-rock bullshit.” Kevin’s shoulders slumped and his body relaxed, and he looked at Crash. “Billy played me samples one night of his originals. It’s unformed and rough, but it’s also good. King Crimson, or Dream Theater, that kind of vibe. It sure as hell won’t draw a crowd in these parts, but if he got his shit together, moved somewhere with an actual scene, he’d make it. Begin with session work, move on from there.”
“Micki thought Billy could do better?”
He nodded. “There’s always some bitch who’s got to show up and be a Yoko Ono.”
“The bartender said he stopped playing with you guys.”
Kevin looked at Mandy. She’d planted herself on a barstool, staring at her phone, her fingers dancing across the screen.
“Mandy likes to talk, doesn’t she?”
Crash tapped her finger on the picture. “This ‘bitch,’ she’s seventeen, and she’s disappeared. She shouldn’t have been in here to begin with. I can push to shut this joint down for illegal admission of minors, and then there won’t be any Nightside for The Nightside Regulars to play, so if I were you, Kevin, I’d worry less about Mandy and more about what you can tell me to help find Billy and find this girl.”
Kevin drank more of his beer. “Two weeks ago. Billy didn’t show up for practice. I called him, and he said he didn’t want to keep playing the same shit every night. She was going off in the background, rooting him on. I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m too old for this nonsense,’ and told him to have a good fucking life.” He cranked his head around to find the guitarist over at the entrance talking to the bouncer. The two men were a sharp contrast from one anoth
er. They could have been a comedy team in another time.
“Dave over there, he’s lousy, but we didn’t have the luxury of time; we needed someone who could learn the songs. I suppose he’s done that.” He sighed. “He’s got to get better. The manager told me he’s seeing fewer faces in here the past few weekends, and we’re taking those bullets.” He sipped at his beer. “Every dream has to die, I guess.”
Crash took a notepad and a pen from her back pocket. “I need to know where Billy lives.”
Kevin gave her the address. “It’s a garage apartment he’s renting from someone who owes his family some money.”
“You know about his family.”
“It’s Parker County, honey; everyone knows about the McCoys. You can’t buy an ounce of weed around here without them getting something from it. Not that I would ever buy pot, of course.”
“Of course not.”
The stillness of Serenity at night struck Crash. Even with the deadening thump of The Nightside Regulars playing in the background, the town felt quiet and unmoving, like a dog curled in front of a fire, resting and comfortable.
Not much left to the town. Crash knew the stories, had seen the pictures and been told the history of what the town was like decades before, when the mines had kept half the men employed. Shipped them deep underground, three shifts a day every day to churn out coal. The other half of the men, they worked at the railroad yard, sending the coal out of town, fueling steel mills and power plants, filling the sky with white smoke.
In those days, Serenity had a movie theater—an actual movie house, with a marquee and one screen and a stage that doubled every summer as the site for the Miss Parker County pageant. There were restaurants and stores, and people crowded the streets during the day. Those who remembered those days insisted everything had been better then. People had jobs, and the pizza places were better, and the stores took credit in giant ledgers they kept underneath the counter, and everyone smiled more. To hear the stories, it had to have been a goddamn paradise. And maybe it was. To Crash, it was ancient history.
What Crash knew was this: nothing exists in stasis. The rest of the world wasn’t expected to leave Parker County alone. The world never worked like that. What happened was, the coal industry changed. Businesses found cheaper ways to pull coal from the ground. Everything became industrial, and mountaintop removal started, and machines and explosives got to the reserves men couldn’t. Jobs dried up. Fewer miners meant less money to spend. Businesses open for generations closed doors, and what replaced the men’s wear store and the garage and the toy store and the grocery was one big store outside of town. Nothing rushed into Serenity to fill those empty fronts, and the streets became more and more barren. The trickle of change morphed into a downpour.
Then came the drugs. Mining injuries at first. Seemed anyone with a backache could go to the doctor and get themselves an oxy prescription. Some doctors, they handed out prescriptions like the folks were trick-or-treating. You saw people—people who’d never done shit before that moment—breaking into houses to get at pain pills. Rattle a pill bottle? The Parker County mating call. Lots of blow jobs got exchanged for a few pain pills. Because you could crush them and snort that shit. And the high? Motherfucker, until you’ve been there and done it, you would not understand.
When the national news decided there was a problem, things changed again. Because that’s how change worked: someone in authority noticed, and shit got done. This time the authority was the six o’clock news. Stories about drug addiction in Appalachia. Never saying it right, though. Saying “App-ah-LATCH-ah” instead of “App-ah-LAY-sha.” Because you say it the right way, it’s how people know where you’re from—that you understand. You’re a friend if you say it right. You get that iced tea is sweet but corn bread isn’t, that chicken and dumplings are a delicacy, and that there’s nothing better than watching WVU on a Saturday afternoon. Say it wrong, and you’re an outsider—odds were a goddamn Northerner—acting like you could come and fix what’s wrong. Nothing set an Appalachian off like an outsider—some do-good grad student or hippie chick earth mama with a liberal arts degree—showing up and saying “Here’s what’s wrong and here’s how to fix it.” Nothing wrong that mining coal, a few guns, and going to church on Sunday won’t fix.
Nothing got fixed was the problem, Crash figured. She saw the same bullshit, day in, day out. People wanting things to be the way they used to be. Because it had been good for them. Everything else could go to hell. So long as their little patch of grass was green, that was the only thing that mattered. And for Crash, that didn’t work. Because there had to be more. There had to be better than just what was good yesterday.
That was on her head when she saw them, the two silhouettes running out from the alleyway across the street, masks pulled over their faces.
Crash reached to her side, gut instinct, for a gun not there. She crossed the street, yelling as she moved. “You! Stop!”
The pair glanced at her. One stopped and stared straight at her and raised a gun into the air.
Crash froze in the middle of the street. It would be a clean shot. Anyone able to handle a gun could plug her dead center in the chest.
They exchanged looks for a few seconds. Crash felt the drumming of her heartbeat, the furious pulsing of blood in her ears. She clenched and unclenched her hands, flexing the fingers. She wished that she had called her mother that morning.
The other masked figure ran back to the one with the gun, grabbed their shirt, and gave an insistent pull. For the length of a heartbeat, Crash thought for sure the person would pull the trigger.
But they didn’t. They lowered the gun and dashed to a car, an old-time Mustang with a spoiler and an oversized exhaust. Crash rushed toward it, but the engine growled to life and tires squealed by the time she got there. The license plate had been removed from the rear bracket.
Sweat beaded on her face as she watched the car pop onto two wheels hitting the corner down Wilkerson and disappear into the darkness.
She flipped her attention toward the alleyway. The alley split the difference between a beauty parlor and a florist shop. She thought they had been running away from the florist.
The lock on the side door was busted, the door cracked. She nudged the door open with the toe of her shoe. She paused, thinking she should go back to get a gun and a flashlight.
She heard the hissing noise, smelled gas.
Crash raced out of the alley, calling 911 on her phone as she ran. She was almost to the other side of the street, almost to her truck, when the explosion shattered the florist shop’s windows.
The force pushed Crash the final few feet, slamming her body into the hood of her truck. Her cell phone flew from her hand. The heat singed hair on the back of her neck as flames erupted through the broken windows.
She lay in the street, face pressed to the pavement, ears ringing, and didn’t move. She wondered what was broken. Thought there had to be something broken. Craned her neck enough to see up the street as a crowd filtered out from the Nightside.
She pushed herself up to an angle and flipped over—motherfucker, but it hurt, and if shit wasn’t broken, it goddamn sure wasn’t doing great—and watched the flames from the flower shop and listened to the faint sound of the fire department alarm bells way in the distance.
18
There are few things as sickeningly sweet as burning flowers, Crash thought as the Serenity Fire Department worked the fire. The department was small—four full-time, and volunteers making up the rest. Both department trucks were there, with a state police cruiser blocking off the street. Serenity had a police department but no one to respond from midnight to 8 a.m., so the state police and the sheriff’s department handled those calls. Whatever this was would fall under their jurisdiction. Not that they’d want to deal with it.
All of this as Crash leaned against her truck, the blaze barely in the distance. The paramedics offered to transport her to Parker General, and she declined. Nothing broke
n, she figured, though she was sore already and knew it would be worse in the morning. There was bruising across her lower torso along her stomach. Probably a cracked rib too. She pondered whether she should have taken the paramedics’ offer. Wasn’t exactly her first cracked rib, though, and if nothing else, she could wrap it herself when she got home.
Not that she would say anything to Matt as he leaned next to her, his arms folded across his chest. The heat from the fire stretched across the street to them. For Matt, it was probably pleasant. He stayed colder than usual.
“How you feeling?” Matt said.
“Been better.” She pressed her hand against the back of her head. “Singed some of my hair.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
“Got a look at two people in masks.”
“Not four?”
“Not four.”
“There seems no shortage of late of people running around, all hours of the night, wearing masks.”
Crash twisted her torso around from one side to the other.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Matt said.
“Already been blown up tonight, so I’m not sure how doing this is going to make things worse.” She bent at the waist and tried to touch her toes. A sharp pain shot through her. She seized up, everything tightening. She leaned back against the pickup.
Matt said, “You should go to the hospital.”
“I’m fine. Just sore. I’ll take Tylenol.”
“I tried that too. Turned out I had cancer.”
“It’s a thick, heavy line between getting blown up and having cancer, but thanks for the concern.” She watched the fire. “Think it’s the same people who attacked the Campbells and the Carltons?”
The Righteous Path: A Parker County Novel (The Parker County Novels Book 1) Page 10
