Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  “Okay,” Bell said. “Let’s charge him.”

  “Will do. And after that,” Harrison added, “I’m hoping Serena can talk some sense into him. He needs somebody on his side.”

  “Probably figures he already has that.” Bell’s eyes slid over to lock up with Goldie’s. The dog, spread out across the couch, had watched Bell during the phone conversation, brown eyes poised and alert, as if somehow she knew whom Bell was talking about.

  “You mean a lawyer?” Harrison asked.

  “Hell, no. I mean the kind of friend that doesn’t give a damn about billable hours.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “They’re fine,” Bell said. “I’ve talked to the people who are taking care of your dogs, and they’re all good.”

  Royce Dillard looked relieved. He started to say something back to her—perhaps a word of gratitude—but he didn’t. Apparently he recalled that she was one of the reasons he was here in the first place, separated from his animals, separated from his life, such as it was. The questioning light in his eyes shifted back to the flinty black of anger.

  “Go away,” he said. He pulled a sleeve roughly across his mouth, as if addressing her even briefly had left a bad taste. He still hadn’t met Bell’s gaze. Always found a reason to look somewhere else.

  This was early Monday morning, and the reality of life in jail had begun to register on Dillard’s skin. It had a dry, chalky look.

  His new home was a square box with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls painted a tofu-like shade of beige, spiced by the eye-irking scent of industrial-strength cleaning fluid. Dillard was wearing an orange jumpsuit with RAYTHUNE CO SHERIFF’S DEPT stenciled across the back in tall white letters. Jumpsuits came in two sizes—small and XXL—and a medium-sized man like Dillard was out of luck. The XXL suit gave him a clownish look, cuffs crinkling around his ankles, sleeves folded over twice, collar hanging open like an empty sack. Laceless brown shoes completed the outfit; prisoners’ shoelaces were always removed, to alleviate the suicide risk, meaning that when he moved, his shoes flapped and shifted. If he got up any speed, he’d run right out of them.

  Dillard sat back down on the sagging metal cot with the half-inch-thick line of foam that passed for a mattress. He’d jumped up when Deputy Mathers opened the cell door to let Bell in, unable to hide the eagerness in his face, the hunger for news about his dogs.

  “I thought you were worried about them,” she said. His attitude had caught her by surprise.

  “I am. That’s why I want to get out of here.”

  “Well, for the time being, they’re being well cared for, okay? All I came to say.” Bell turned. She raised her arm, ready to call for Mathers.

  “Hold up.”

  She dropped her arm.

  “Thing is,” he said, “I was wondering about Elvis.”

  “Elvis.” Bell struggled to match up monikers and dogs in her head. She wished Rhonda was on hand to help.

  “Little black one. Looks like a cocker spaniel. Probably ain’t, though. Not all the way through, anyways. Gets scared real easy.”

  “Right.” She remembered Elvis. Shivering with fright from the drive and the dislocation, the dog had jumped right up into Hickey’s arms like he belonged there. “One of my colleagues is taking care of him. An assistant prosecutor. Hickey Leonard.”

  “He got a family?”

  “A wife, yes. Kids are grown and gone. Why?”

  “Elvis can be nippy with little kids. They annoy him—all the noise they make and the running around and whatnot. Just don’t want nobody to get hurt. Wouldn’t be the dog’s fault.”

  “How’d he come to live with you?”

  Dillard was hunched over, elbows on knees, legs spread wide. He bounced his legs up and down, causing the cot to shimmy and squeak. He looked at the floor.

  “Long story,” he said.

  “I’ve got time.” Not true. She didn’t have time. She had a million things to do. But she was intrigued by this man and his mysteries. If he wanted to tell her a story, if he was able to, she would listen.

  He waited a second or so, and then something seemed to shift inside him. A knot came undone. “Most of my dogs, see, they show up on their own,” he said. There was an energy in his voice, an eagerness, that surprised her, because it was so different from his earlier sullenness. As long as he was talking about his dogs, Bell realized, he could communicate just fine. The dogs gave him cover.

  “I find ’em in the woods,” he went on. “Or sniffing in a Dumpster near town. Walking down the road or whatnot. They been abandoned by somebody, just chucked out the side door. Like garbage. The county shelter’s always full, seems like—I check there first, every time—and that means that when they get a new dog…” He shook his head. The outcome was obvious. “Some people—I don’t know how they live with themselves. You got a creature in your care, a living thing that looks up to you, depends on you. And you throw it away. You leave it to do for itself.” He shook his head again. “Elvis, though—his story’s different. Belonged to a man named Chalmers Remis. Lived over by Blanton Fork. Chalmers used to take that dog with him on these long, long walks in the woods over by my place. I seen ’em from time to time, him and the dog moving so slow you’d swear they’d had some spell put on ’em, so slow that you couldn’t believe they’d ever make any progress whatsoever. Me and Chalmers, we’d say hello to each other. Nothing more. Anyway, one day last year I get this letter from a lawyer. Turns out Chalmers died from the cancer. And guess what? He left me his dog. Said Elvis was mine. Now, the funny part is, I was never aware that Chalmers Remis even knew my name. But he recognized me, all right.”

  Dillard waited, apparently to see if Bell understood what he was saying. People around here generally knew who he was. He didn’t know them—but they knew him. He was the boy who had survived the Buffalo Creek flood, the boy who’d been saved by his father. A grown man now, all buttoned up with his story tucked inside him, like a message in a bottle. “Lawyer told me that the man’s family got a big laugh out of it,” Dillard went on. “They didn’t want that dog, nosiree. And when that lawyer fella was first reading the will to them all and he started the line, ‘And to my friend Royce Dillard,’ they all stiffened up, because it turns out that Chalmers had a good bit of money stashed away—and they thought that maybe he’d up and left it all to me. Anyway,” Dillard said, “he didn’t leave me no money. But the joke was on them, because you know what? Elvis—he’s a real good dog. I got the prize, after all.”

  Bell waited a moment before she spoke. “Well, you don’t have to worry about Elvis. Hickey says he’s thriving. Got a good appetite.”

  Dillard nodded, satisfied. “That’s Elvis, all right. Some dogs’ll take or leave their food. But others, they’ll knock you down if you stand between them and a chicken bone, you know? Don’t mean nothing by it. Not bad dogs or nothing. Just their way. They got to survive, howsoever they can. It’s in their blood. Instinct. They’d kill you, most likely, if they felt like you was threatening them.”

  He licked his lips. His own words were digging at him. “Know what you think,” he said. “You think it’s the same with me. I had to survive. And so I killed that sonofabitch. Hackel. Well, I didn’t.”

  She quickly lifted a flat hand, like a traffic cop in a crosswalk. “Don’t want to talk about the case, Mr. Dillard. Not without your lawyer present—and like it or not, Serena Crumpler is coming over later today to talk to you about letting her represent you.”

  “Don’t need her. Don’t need nobody.” The belligerence was back.

  Like every prosecutor she knew, Bell didn’t like defendants to represent themselves, even though it generally ensured a win for her side. Lack of legal knowledge on the part of the accused almost always resulted in a guilty verdict. But it left a bitter residue on her conscience. People shouldn’t be punished for pride or ignorance. Or both.

  She looked at him. His hair was greasy. The gray stubble on his chin could’ve doubled as d
irt. The jail provided a supervised shaving time each morning, but Dillard, the deputies had reported to Bell, refused it. Hygiene wasn’t high on his list.

  The real focus of her observation, though, wasn’t his appearance. It was his essence, his spirit. From what she had heard over the years, Dillard’s withdrawal from a normal life—a life that included other people—had come about gradually, bit by bit, the same way the dense woods had closed over the road to his cabin.

  Through his early thirties, he lived just outside Acker’s Gap with his great-aunt Bessie Truax. He held down a job—he worked at Lymon’s Market—and he built the cabin out on his land as a place for weekends. He was briefly engaged, but for some reason, that fell through. Bessie Truax died. He moved out to the cabin permanently. Began to accumulate dogs. The trips into town occurred less and less frequently. Every now and again, on the anniversary of the Buffalo Creek flood, a reporter might show up in Acker’s Gap, asking for directions to the home of Royce Dillard. For a time, he obliged them, and Bell had read the interviews with him in a few newspapers, in a magazine or two. He remembered so little about that day. Just a few hazy details, little shreds and slivers of the maybe–could be kind of memory: His mother’s screams. The high black wall of water. Flying through the air, up and up and up, finally landing in hands that reached out and held on, and then a hectic chorus of yells: I’ve got him! I’ve got him! All he really knew, Dillard would tell the interviewers, was that his father had saved his life. He never knew him, the man who used his last ragged breath to save him. The man who was torn from this world by coal-black water, same as his mother.

  And then, about a decade or so ago, Dillard had stopped answering the knocks on his front door. Stopped waving back at people when they drove past him and his wagon on the road into town. He’d told his story for the last time. Maybe, Bell thought, he wanted to seal it off inside him, to make sure it stayed just the way it was, impervious to time and change, the way you might wrap up a keepsake in an old handkerchief—a lock of hair or a charm bracelet or a pocket watch—and then bury it deep.

  People said Royce Dillard lived alone, but he didn’t, Bell told herself. He lived with his dogs. And he lived with his story.

  “Don’t need nobody,” he repeated, in case he’d not made himself clear, and the compressed snarl in his tone brought her attention back to the small cell and its blank-faced, leg-jiggling occupant.

  “I hear you,” she said. “But can I ask you something? Your place—the outside’s a disaster area, but the inside’s fine. Why’s that?”

  She was sure he’d ignore the question. But he answered.

  “Last few years,” he said, “things have kind of gotten away from me. Stuff just keeps piling up. No excuse. Not proud of it. That’s sure not how Bessie taught me to be. I mean, I know better. I do. It’s just—I can’t—it’s hard to—” He stared at the palms of his hands, as if he’d written the words there but they’d somehow gotten rubbed off. “The inside—well, I’ve got to keep that picked up. For the smaller dogs. Leave a bunch of crap lying around, they’re likely to eat something they shouldn’t.” He swallowed hard. “Got to admit, too, that money’s tight. So I don’t throw nothing away. Thinking I might need it.” Another swallow. “My dogs—taking care of them costs a pretty penny, let me tell you. I keep up with their shots. Feed ’em right. It’s important. Truth is, here lately I’ve done some things for money that I never thought I’d do. Things I’d never have dreamed of doing—except for my dogs.”

  “If you’re short of money, then why don’t you just sell your land to Mountain Magic?”

  “I need that land more’n I need the money. Perfect spot for my dogs. Not another one like it—that’s why I bought it in the first place. Lotsa woods. Big trees and hills and whatnot. One day I’m going to fence it off. Make a place where they can run free—and be safe, too. All kinds of dogs. All together. First I thought it might be okay to sell it—but then I thought, ‘No, no. Ain’t right. I bought that property for one purpose and one purpose only. Got to do what I’ve been fixing to do for a long time now. No matter what it costs me.’”

  His eyes bored into a spot on the wall, as if it had given him an argument. “Folks around here better be careful,” he said, “else all this land’s gonna be taken away. Times get hard—and first thing folks do is start selling land. You gotta hold on to it. You gotta fight for what you love. You gotta hang on even when the thing you love most in the world is being ripped right out of your hands.” He stopped. “Don’t want to talk no more. Talked too long already.”

  “You doing okay in here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’ll leave you be. Just wanted to give you the update on your dogs.”

  “Decent of you to look out for ’em.”

  “I can’t take the credit. It was Sheriff Harrison’s idea. Wanted to make sure your animals were in good homes during the trial.”

  He nodded. “How’s the other fella doing? The other sheriff, I mean.”

  There’s only one sheriff, Bell wanted to say. And that’s Pam Harrison. But she knew what Dillard meant. Nick Fogelsong had been such a big part of law enforcement around here for so many years that he was a little like the mountainous landscape: Any direction you turned, you saw him—or expected to, once the clouds cleared.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Don’t know him personally, but heard plenty. Most of it good.”

  “Imagine so.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Speak of the devil, Bell thought.

  She had dropped into JP’s for a quick cup of coffee, the visit to Dillard’s cell still weighing heavily on her mind. She had interviews for other cases scheduled throughout the day; this was likely her only chance for a break until late this afternoon, when she had yet another errand to run.

  And there he was.

  Nick Fogelsong, big as life. Suit jacket open, elbows spread, making himself comfortable in a booth that the two of them had occupied numberless times during his days as sheriff, when they’d sit across from each other, blanketing their internal organs with the blackest, harshest, foulest, most detestable—and thereby delectable—coffee that the human digestive system could handle, all the while comparing notes on the most difficult cases they were facing. JP’s was less than two years old; it had replaced Ike’s, a diner with a long and motley history that had ended abruptly and permanently.

  “Hey,” Nick said. He raised his hand. A semi-wave. The cuff link on his dress shirt caught the light.

  Bell held back a wince. Nick and cuff links: Nope. Didn’t work for her. Didn’t work at all.

  She paused, and then she moved in that direction, trying to hide the fact that she was rattled. And not on account of the cuff link. She’d just about broken herself of the habit of looking for Nick on workdays, in the courthouse corridors or on the streets of Acker’s Gap or here in the diner. For a crazy second, time itself went a little sideways; she half wondered if she was in JP’s or back in Ike’s, years ago, having just ordered a slice of apple pie from Georgette Akers, causing Georgette to whip out the stubby yellow pencil from behind her right ear so that she could write down the order in her little notebook, even though she didn’t need to, of course—Bell always went for apple—and as Georgette reached for the pencil, Bell’s eyes followed her fingers and she noticed the sparkly barrettes that propped up Georgette’s bright blond hair in a swollen bouffant …

  No. Couldn’t be. Georgette was dead. Dead for more than two years now.

  “Belfa? You okay?”

  She sat down on the other side of the booth.

  “Fine.”

  “Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Fogelsong was more of a mind-reader than he’d ever know. Bell didn’t tell him how close he’d come to being right.

  “Just overwhelmed with work,” she said.

  “It’s not even nine o’clock yet.”

  She shrugged. “Lots of active cases.”

  “Same
as it ever was, then.”

  Two mugs of coffee appeared before them, steam rising from the tops, a gauzy promise of the bitter heat within. Bell and Fogelsong simultaneously looked up at Jackie LeFevre, the diner’s owner, who had sidled over with the mugs.

  “Took a chance on what you’d order,” Jackie said, answering the surprise in their eyes. She wasn’t known for spontaneous gestures. “Never see you anymore, Nick. Guess they keep you pretty busy up at the Highway Haven.”

  “They do. But nothing says I can’t drop by here more often, Jackie. Count on it.”

  “I will.” It wouldn’t happen, and they both knew that, but she was too polite to say so. She turned to Bell. “Anything to go with that? Eggs? Toast, maybe?”

  “No, thanks. Just the coffee for now. I’m going to try to make it in for lunch, though.”

  Also unlikely, but Jackie nodded, anyway. She was a tall, handsome woman with long straight black hair, an angular face, and dark unreadable eyes. People in Acker’s Gap still weren’t quite sure about Jackie; her unwillingness to generate and react to banter was a definite handicap. Her late mother, Joyce LeFevre, had owned the diner that previously resided on this spot, and that gave Jackie an automatic boost—family was important around here—but she refused to build on that natural advantage. She was too quiet. A few months ago her ex-husband had come looking for her and caused a bit of trouble one night. People didn’t mind the trouble—that could happen to anyone—but they did mind the fact that Jackie never talked about it afterward, never turned it into a story to share.

  “Nice as it is to see you,” Bell said to Fogelsong, once Jackie had moved on to another booth, “I’m curious. What brings you to town?”

  Nick took his time with his coffee. He blew on it, sipped it, blew some more.

  “Heard about Royce Dillard,” he said. “You’ve been questioning him about the Hackel murder.”