Bull Mountain

by Brian Panowich

  “Please, Bracken,” Wilcombe said, “don’t do this. You’ve got it wrong. I had Romeo protect you. You were never in any danger. Please!”

  “This is how my family protects itself,” Bracken said.

  Pinky splashed gasoline into Wilcombe’s face. The acrid taste of it made him gag and gasp for air.

  “Please . . . stop . . . gli.”

  “You remember me, motherfucker?” Pinky said.

  Splash. More gas.

  Splash.

  “Happy trails, you prick.” Pinky set the can down next to the rubber coffin and took a seat next to Moe and Tilmon on the picnic table.

  Bracken tapped out another cigarette. “You were like a father to me, Oscar.”

  “I’m . . . still . . .”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Bracken reached into his pocket and pulled out his Zippo. He looked surprised for a minute, as if he’d just remembered something, and pulled out a roll of cash from his other pocket. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This is a gift from your special agent friend. He said twenty-five hundred dollars would do it. He said you can keep it.” Bracken tucked the roll of bills down in the barrel, lit his smoke, and tossed the lighter onto the stack of gas-soaked tires. The fire burned for nearly nine hours straight.

  CHAPTER

  26

  SIMON HOLLY

  COBB COUNTY, GEORGIA

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  2015

  1.

  It was cold in the apartment. Simon kept himself bundled up in the quilts and sheets like a schoolkid not wanting to face the day. He didn’t. The day was going to be just like the rest of them. Cold, long, and empty. His blood was thick and his joints hurt. He knew the bottle of oxy he’d left next to the couch would even him out, but the trip from the bed to the next room seemed like an insurmountable journey. He pulled the quilt over his head to block the winter-gray sunlight from cutting slices across his face. He had no idea what time it was. He hadn’t known the time since he hit Atlanta. It was either day or night. Cold or hot. His days were filled with absolutes. The details didn’t matter. He needed a shower. A gym. That made him laugh. He didn’t even want to walk into the next room, for fear of getting spent. A gym was just a pleasant memory of a life he had long since buried.

  He wanted coffee—a hot, steaming cup of black office coffee. The kind his secretary used to bring him in the morning as he went over case files. He hadn’t craved that bitter mud in months. He didn’t think he ever would, but this morning, or whatever time it was, the thought of it was making his mouth water. Well, it made his mouth pasty anyway. There wasn’t enough water in his dehydrated husk of a body to produce any real drool. He pulled the quilt back and sat up. The bone ache from lack of hydrocodone in his bloodstream shot up his back and settled in his stiff neck. It wasn’t the thought of coffee that had him craving it. It was the smell. He could smell it. It was strong. Did he make some last night? Did he even have a fucking coffeemaker in this flop? The muted sound of footsteps and a thump from the other room answered at least part of that question. Simon reached for his gun. Then he remembered he had left it next to his pills on the sofa. Stupid. His head was pounding, but he forced himself to his feet. He was still dressed in the clothes from the day before—from the week before. A filthy blue cotton oxford and a pair of khakis complete with a belt buckle that spent the entirety of the night digging a grooved impression into his new soft white beer belly. He scratched at the red marks, half tucking his shirt in, and crept slowly to the door, pushing the throb in his joints to the back of his mind. What he saw in the kitchen made him think for a moment he might still be asleep.

  A woman.

  A tall, shapely woman, standing with her back to him at the kitchen sink. She was drying dishes—dishes she must have just finished washing. Her brown hair obscured most of her face, but for a moment, peering at her through the crack in the door, Simon thought he could see the scars on her cheek. He shook his head slightly and rubbed the thick crust from his eyes. When he looked again, she was still there. She moved from the sink, picked up the coffeepot, and poured the black steaming sludge into two freshly washed mugs on the counter. Simon felt himself shrink down to the size of a nine-year-old who had just woken up in the old house back in Mobile.

  “Mama?” he said, barely audible.

  Kate turned around and shattered the fantasy. “How pathetic,” she said. She picked up her mug, leaving the other to sit, and crossed over to the sofa. She gave it a disgusted once-over but sat anyway, blowing into her mug.

  “What do you want, Kate?” Simon said. The nine-year-old boy was gone, replaced by the forty-one-year-old junkie.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I thought I knew what I was coming here for, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “I know you didn’t come here to wash my dishes and make me coffee.”

  “That’s true. I came here to kill you.”

  Simon looked to find his gun. It was right where he’d left it, but not as he’d left it. Kate had obviously disassembled it and placed it on a dirty sofa cushion in several pieces. He also took notice of the bulge on Kate’s hip covered up by her sweater. The blood pounding in his head was a tidal wave breaking on rock.

  The oxy was missing, too.

  “You change your mind?” he said.

  “About what?”

  “About wanting me dead.”

  “No, I still want you dead. I’ll always want you dead.” She paused and sipped her coffee. “But after seeing you, seeing this place, I’m wondering if I need to be the one to do it. I mean, look at you. I’m not sure if you’re more worried about me being here or that I took your dope. It’s over there, by the way.” She pointed over to the counter by the sink. The old faithful orange medicine bottle was sitting next to the other coffee mug. The look of relief on Simon’s face was too obvious to cover up, and Kate shook her head like a disapproving parent. “Go ahead. Pop a couple of those. Even out. I know you want to.”

  Simon debated waiting it out to prove a point but held out for less than thirty seconds before making a beeline to his stash. He flipped the plastic lid off the bottle, poured four oblong white pills into his palm, slammed them to his face, and washed them down his gullet with the piping-hot coffee. It’s surprising how the confidence of a drug addict can flood back by simply performing the ritual of doping, even way before the dope itself can take effect. He swung back toward Kate, renewed and inspired, but then deflated when he saw she had set her coffee mug on the floor and produced a Ruger nine-millimeter equipped with a homemade silencer and a grip wrapped in duct tape. Bile mixed with the bitter coffee in the back of Simon’s throat.

  “I’m at a crossroads here, Agent Holly.”

  “I’m not an agent anymore.”

  “Right, you’re just Simon now. The Bureau fired your ass. Too many questions that couldn’t be answered is the way I heard it.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Nobody ever asked me. I could have answered all their questions. I could have spelled out what a murdering piece of shit you are for anyone that wanted to know, but nobody really wanted to know anything. They just wanted you to disappear before you embarrassed them any more. That’s what you are now, Simon. An embarrassment. I could have told them how you lied and manipulated everyone you came into contact with so you wouldn’t have to pull the trigger on your own blood yourself.”

  “Well, then why didn’t you?”

  “Two reasons,” Kate said, and stood up. She held the gun loosely but kept it trained on Simon. “One,” she said, “I once told you if you pulled Clayton down a rabbit hole he couldn’t get out of, I’d kill you myself. I meant it. Michael even gave me this gun.” She paused when she saw that the name wasn’t striking a bell with Simon. “Scabby Mike,” she said. “Michael Cummings is his Christian name. He assured me I could put every one of these fifteen
rounds through your miserable black heart and not one of them would lead back to me.”

  Simon smirked at her. “You can’t kill me, Kate. I might be down right now, but I still have friends on the force that—”

  “Friends?” Kate said, cutting him off. “Friends like who? Like your ex-partner, Jessup? Like the guy you fucked over and made an accomplice to all this? How do you think we found you, Simon? Your own people gave us a list of addresses. You think any of the people you manipulated into helping you want any of that shitstorm to get out in court? You’re circling the drain, and your friends aren’t looking to go down with you.”

  “Bullshit,” Holly said.

  “Look at me, Simon. Do I look like a liar to you? You’re a master at it, you should be able to tell.”

  Simon chewed his lip, and Kate drove it home. “Yeah, Simon. Everyone who has ever met you wishes someone would make you disappear.”

  “Yet, here I am,” he said. “Still standing. The only one standing. It’s been what? Three months? And nobody has the balls to kill me.”

  “Is that what you think? That no one has the balls? Here’s the news, Simon. No one has shown up here to kill you out of respect for me. What you did, you did to me. Not one of the men on that mountain was going to rob me of the chance to settle this myself. You’re not the last one standing . . . I am.” She pointed the gun at his face.

  “You think I’m supposed to be scared of you, Kate? I took down Bull Mountain. Me. I did what no one else could do for damn near seven decades, and I did it by myself. So if you’re gonna do it, then get on with it, but don’t think for a second I’m going to be scared of some poor little hillbilly girl with a gun.”

  Kate laughed.

  “What’s so goddamn funny?”

  “You sound just like him,” she said. “Hell, seeing you here, like this, you look just like him. I wish to God I could’ve seen it before.”

  “Like who, Kate?” The pills were kicking in, and Simon was beginning to feel like his cocky self. He licked his teeth. “Who do I look like? Your drunk of a husband? Is that why you can’t kill me?”

  The muscles in Kate’s face tightened and she aimed the gun directly between his eyes. This time Simon took a step back.

  “No, you son of a bitch. You’re nothing like Clayton. You look just like your father. For all your wanting to twist Clayton into what you imagined him to be, he’s nothing like that psychotic old bastard, but you? You’re the protégé he always wanted. You fought so hard to punish him and everyone else for a wrong he did you and your poor mother, and now look at you. You’re the one most like him. He’s the one you made proud, not Marion.”

  Simon looked surprised at the mention of his mother’s name. Kate noticed and smiled. “Oh, your boy Jessup? He gave me a whole box of poor Marion’s journals. They belong to me now. I assume that’s what got you started on this vendetta in the first place, right?” She didn’t let up and kept going. “You’re a joke. I guess that’s the one difference between you and the man that sired you. People on that mountain respected your father, God knows why, but they did. They still talk about him. But you? No one will ever respect what you did. No one will talk about you. You’re no better than Halford or any of the people you claim did you an injustice. You’re exactly the same. And it looks like you’ll end up the same as they did without any help from me.”

  She lowered the gun, but Simon stayed planted against the counter. They stood there in silence for a long time.

  “You said there were two reasons you never talked to the feds,” Simon finally said.

  Kate was tired, it was showing on her face, but she reached down with her free hand and smoothed the front of her baggy sweater over the small bump of her belly. She held the sweater tight for Simon to figure it out. It didn’t take him long.

  “You’re pregnant,” he said. It was more a statement than a question. Kate put both hands back on the gun.

  “I wanted to tell you myself,” she said. “I needed to see your face. For all your plans and years of preparation to end the Burroughs bloodline, it was all for nothing. You failed. Clayton would have found out about his son the day you set him up to die. You took that from him. From me. But you’re done taking things, Simon.” She raised the gun again. “So that brings me to the crossroads I mentioned. Do I kill you? Right here, right now, and be done with it? Do I infect myself with the same sickness you brought into my home, or can I be content letting you rot away in a federal prison, or watching you kill yourself in a hole like this one, one pill at a time?”

  Simon didn’t say anything. The oxy was doing its job and he felt his strength returning to his sore muscles. He’d let her talk just a few more minutes.

  “I needed to see your face,” she said. “I needed to know if you would come after my son. I needed to know if you are that twisted and dead inside that you would come after an innocent child. Or . . . if you could let it end.”

  Simon glared at her.

  “So tell me, Simon. Can you let it end?”

  He took his time answering. He looked down at the bottle of pills he was still holding and rolled it around in his palms. He set them on the counter and met Kate’s eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Maybe it was the glint of sunlight on his teeth, or the slight upturn of the corner of his mouth. Maybe it was the way his left eye blinked just as he spoke. Or maybe it was nothing at all.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, and shot him in the chest.

  2.

  Kate was still holding the gun, standing over Simon’s body, when Val and Scabby Mike came in the front door. Mike slid his hands over hers and after a time she let go of the gun, and Mike tucked it into his pants at the small of his back. “Mrs. Burroughs,” he said in a kind voice. “Are you okay?”

  Kate nodded. “I’m fine.”

  “I think you best be going, Katie,” Val said as he dropped a rolled canvas tarp on the kitchen floor next to Simon’s body.

  “What happens now?” she said.

  Mike gently moved her back toward the door. “We clean this up and you go home.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Mrs. Burroughs. We’ll take care of this. You need to get going now.”

  Val put a hand on Mike’s shoulder and moved him to the side. It was easy to do; Val was nearly twice Mike’s size. “We’re going to take him back to the mountain, Katie. Where he belongs.”

  It made sense. Simon was a Burroughs. But they weren’t going to take him to the lush green banks of Burnt Hickory where his father and brothers were buried, or the garden up near Cooper’s Field that held his grandfather and great-grandfather. They would take him deep into the backwoods by the Western Ridge, out by Johnson’s Gap. Out where the graves went unmarked, unnoticed, and forgotten. She bet they’d already dug the hole. She cupped the side of Val’s cheek and stared at the cracks in his face, dug there by decades of events like this one, and something passed between them like static current. They shared a moment of crushing sadness that tightened her chest and suddenly made it hard to breathe. It was the kind of sadness brought on by turning corners that led you to places there was no finding your way home from. They had both looked deep within themselves and found an ugliness that couldn’t be stuffed back inside. She’d seen that look on the faces of people before, but now she understood it. Now she owned it.

  Mike had already spread the canvas across the linoleum and kicked Simon’s body into the center. He was wiping up blood from the floor with a roll of paper towels from the kitchen with no more thought than if he were cleaning up spilled milk. He smiled at her and she recognized the sadness in him, too.

  “Katie,” Val said, “you need to go. There’s no more reason for you to be here.”

  Kate nodded to Mike, who went back to work on the floor; then she turned and left witho
ut another word.

  She’d only just pulled the hospital-supplied Dodge Caravan onto I-85 when she heard the first noises from her passenger waking up in the backseat. She turned the volume on the radio from low to off and adjusted her rearview mirror to get a better look.

  “Where are we?” Clayton said. His voice was groggy, coarse, and dry from the pain meds, and he wanted to scratch himself all over. An IV bag swung from a special hook above the window and he rubbed at the tubing taped to the top of his left hand.

  “We’re going home, baby. You just rest.”

  “I been resting for three months,” he said.

  “You’ve been healing for three months. Now the resting starts.”

  “I don’t want to rest.” He scratched at the stubble on his chin. The doctors at the trauma center had shaved him. He hadn’t shaved in more than twenty years. He wasn’t happy about that at all. Kate didn’t mind it, though. She liked his face.

  “Clayton, you got shot. Twice. You should be dead. So if the people who saved your life say I need to take you home and let you rest, then that is exactly what I intend to do. And I’m not listening to any arguments.”

  Clayton sipped his ice water through the straw of a huge plastic cup and laid back against the mountain of pillows Kate had him propped on. “Well, how about some singing, then?” he said. “Will you listen to some singing?” After three tortured verses of “Up on Cripple Creek,” Clayton faded back into the oblivion of a morphine drip. Kate left the radio down so she could listen to him breathe over the hum of the highway. After a while she was convinced it was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard. She knew eventually they would have to talk about the things that had happened out here, about the things that happened on the mountain. She knew there would still be questions about whether or not Clayton was guilty of anything. She was sure there would be more federals at their front door with their notepads and sunglasses and their accusations. And she was sure they would deal with it. But not today. Today her husband was breathing. He was alive. He was going to be a father. The right kind of father. They were getting a late start, but they were going to be a family. She didn’t feel one ounce of regret for what she’d done. She’d do it again if it needed doing. Several times she thought about taking a hard left and just going somewhere new. It was a new day. She had a cousin in Augusta, and an uncle she’d never met in Huntsville. They would take them in. They had to. They were family. But she didn’t take any hard turns. She kept the van headed toward Bull Mountain. It was her home. It was Clayton’s home. It would be her son’s home.