The Third Hill North of Town

by Noah Bly

  By that time, of course, the whereabouts of the fugitives was anybody’s guess, but Sal was still able to give the police a detailed description of Jon Tate (including several poetic phrases Sal was rather proud of, such as “shirtless, soulless, and sanguinary,” and “angel-faced acolyte of the apocalypse”). The Indiana State Patrol passed on a more condensed version of Sal’s account to the FBI, who in turn relayed the information to various law enforcement agencies and media outlets. Sal’s poetry, sadly, was entirely absent from all these communications, but his call was not in vain: The good news that Julianna Dapper was still alive would be shared with all interested parties.

  Unfortunately, however, the inspired marijuana madrigal running through Sal’s head took an ill-advised turn on the way to his tongue during the phone call to the hopelessly prosaic Indiana State Patrol. He recalled Julianna’s big green eyes staring at him over the counter and belatedly read into those “verdant, Orphic orbs” the anguish of a defiled woman. Sal didn’t go so far as to say he’d actually seen Julianna being violated, but he mentioned that the half-naked boys with her had reminded him of “rutting, lustful centaurs,” and, as such, were clearly chock-full of “carnality, brutality, and the sodomizing semen of sadists.” The result of this embellishment was that yet another damning charge—already suspected by Gabriel Dapper and others, but now confirmed—was added to the long list of felonies attributed to Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate:

  Rape.

  Samuel Hunter hung up the receiver of the pay phone in the parking lot of a mid-Illinois truck stop and hurried back to Mary and Edgar, who were standing beside the pickup, waiting for him. Edgar was smoking a cigarette and shooting worried glances at Gabriel Dapper, who was watching them all from behind the wheel of the red Cadillac, parked ten feet away. Mary, though, had eyes only for Samuel.

  “What is it?” she whispered as he drew close. Her face was grim as she read the expression he was trying to keep off his face. “What did you find out?”

  Samuel took her arm and led her quickly to the driver’s door of the truck. “Not a thing,” he lied, speaking loud enough for Gabriel to hear him through the open window of the Cadillac. “Let’s be on our way.”

  He waved at Gabriel, who started the Cadillac’s engine and rolled up his window.

  Mary got in the pickup quickly, sliding into the middle of the seat. Edgar took a last puff of his cigarette and dropped it on the ground to stub it out with his shoe, then scrambled into the passenger side with another unhappy glance at Gabriel.

  Edgar had spoken to Gabriel several times over the past fifteen hours since they had all left the Stockton Dairy Farm, whenever they’d stopped for gas and food. Gabriel had made it clear each time, however, that he preferred to be left to himself in the Cadillac, insisting that he did not need to be relieved by another driver. Edgar had argued with him at the last stop before this one, telling him that it was unwise to go so long without rest, but Gabriel had merely shrugged and told him to stop worrying before shooing him back to the Hunters’ pickup. Edgar was having difficulty dealing with this rejection—especially on top of Mary’s ongoing lack of interest in him—and he was beginning to wish he’d never asked to come along on this journey.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” Mary’s dark gaze was fixed on the side of her husband’s face as he peeled out of the parking lot and headed for the westbound Interstate ramp as fast as he could make the pickup go. She spoke above the sound of the wind coming through the windows. “What did Sheriff Kiley tell you?”

  Sam had been making calls all day to Red Kiley back in Prescott, Maine, trying to find out what the police knew about Elijah and the others. The foul-tongued Sheriff Kiley had proven to be a good friend, and though Samuel hadn’t told him exactly what they were up to, Kiley had freely shared whatever he’d heard, saying only, “I figure you and Mary are on some kind of damn-fool rescue mission, Sam, but if Elijah was my goddamn kid I’d be doing the same fucking thing.”

  Sam glanced in the rearview mirror at the red Cadillac following them down the ramp and drew a deep breath.

  “Elijah’s been arrested,” he said, his voice shaking a little in spite of his best attempts to control it. “He got caught about forty-five minutes ago in a little town in southern Iowa.”

  Mary’s small hand clamped on Sam’s thigh, but she kept still, waiting for the rest.

  “He’s alive,” Sam continued. “So’s Julianna Dapper, and the other kid with them. But Elijah and the other boy have been charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, arson, grand theft, and”—Sam’s voice broke—“and rape.” He fought to control his anguish, swallowing several times and blinking rapidly. “The FBI is saying Elijah raped Gabriel’s mother, and maybe also the poor woman who got burned to death on that dairy farm.”

  Mary closed her eyes, and Edgar stared in horror at Samuel.

  All the other terrible crimes Elijah had been accused of were nothing next to rape. Mary Hunter knew this charge for a ludicrous lie, of course—knew it as well as she knew her own name—but her spirit was nonetheless broken in a way it had not been before. A young black man accused of raping a white woman would not last two seconds in a white man’s jail cell, and now that Elijah was in custody . . .

  “Oh, my darling little man,” Mary whispered, holding herself together only through a massive force of will.

  Samuel forced himself to finish with the rest of his tidings. “Red said they’ve all been taken to a county jail, a few miles north of where they were arrested.” His lips barely moved as he spoke; his tongue felt like a lump of clay in his mouth. “Some place called Maddox, near the Missouri border. Julianna Dapper’s apparently going to spend the night with the sheriff and his wife, and then they’ll figure out how to get her back home to Bangor tomorrow.”

  Edgar cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t we stop and tell Gabriel?” He flushed as Mary turned her head to look at him incredulously. “I mean, shouldn’t we at least tell him that his mother’s alive?”

  Sam’s brain wasn’t working properly; he couldn’t seem to make heads or tails of this question. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  Mary shook her head as she reached under the seat for a road atlas. “We’re not going to tell Gabriel a God-blessed thing.”

  The firmness in her tone was enough to keep Edgar from arguing, but Samuel glanced down at her, and she answered his unspoken question.

  “Gabriel can go a lot faster in that fancy car of his than we can in this truck,” she said, tugging the atlas out from behind Edgar’s shins and straightening again. The shock of Sam’s news was wearing off, and she found herself becoming almost uncontrollably angry with the steadily worsening situation. “If Gabriel knows his mother’s alive, and where she is, he’ll get there before us, and find out what the police are saying has been done to her.” She looked over her shoulder at the Cadillac. “And if that happens, God only knows what he might take it in his head to do to Elijah.”

  Edgar Reilly was starting to feel manipulated by fate, as if nothing was going to go right for them no matter what. We’re all just pawns in some kind of sick chess game, he thought, tugging an unopened box of Milk Duds from his pants. (He’d been lucky enough to find a vending machine that afternoon and had restocked all his pockets with sweets.) No, it’s even worse than that. We’re puppets. Puppets in some kind of twisted puppet hell.

  He swallowed. “Surely Gabriel wouldn’t become violent, would he?” he asked, accidentally biting his tongue as he crammed one of the chocolates in his mouth. “At least not with Elijah already in jail, and being watched by the police?”

  Mary didn’t answer.

  “Hurry, Sam,” she urged, opening the atlas to the Iowa page and beginning to hunt for the town of Maddox. “Go as fast as you can.”

  Gabriel Dapper knew he was tired, so he was trying to convince himself he was imagining things.

  Things, say, like the sweat stains under the arms of Samuel Hunter’s white shirt as he’d emerged from the
pay phone at the last gas station and returned to his pickup, worry written all over his handsome features. Things like the tension in Mary Hunter’s thin shoulders as she’d almost leapt into the cab of the pickup in her light blue summer dress, and the odd way both Mary Hunter and Edgar Reilly were now glancing through the rear window of the pickup—as if he, Gabriel, were some kind of predator, harrowing them down the highway.

  “If they’d learned something about Mom, they’d have told me,” Gabriel murmured to the empty Cadillac. “Wouldn’t they?”

  The long trip was starting to take a toll on Gabriel. He realized it was sheer stubbornness on his part to keep refusing Edgar Reilly’s offer to spell him at the wheel of the Cadillac, but he didn’t want company—especially Edgar Reilly’s company—and he believed he could last several more hours before he’d need a rest. When he was a soldier in World War II, he’d routinely gone for long periods of time without sleep, and even though he was no longer a soldier, he was still a strong, healthy man in his mid-thirties, and he had more than enough stamina to stay awake and alert until they reached northern Missouri.

  Or so he’d convinced himself.

  He’d spent the lonely hours on the road sorting through memories of Julianna. One in particular was haunting him; he kept playing it over and over in his head, knowing he was fixating on it to an unhealthy degree but unable to stop.

  When Gabriel was in fifth grade, a waspish Little League baseball coach named Doyle Matson had lost his temper at Gabriel for dropping a fly ball during a game, humiliating him to the point of tears in front of a good-sized crowd. Julianna had not been able to be at the game, but after hearing about what had happened to her son, she’d paid a late-night visit to Doyle’s house. Julianna never told Gabriel what transpired during that conversation, but she didn’t have to; Doyle had arrived at practice the next day with several long scratches on the top of his bald head, a haggard expression on his face, and a much-improved disposition toward Gabriel and all the rest of the boys on the team.

  “You scared the crap out of him, Mom,” Gabriel now whispered in his Cadillac, reliving the memory yet again. “I wish I could’ve seen it.”

  Up in front of him, Edgar Reilly turned around once more in the pickup and stared back at him, pulling him out of his thoughts. Gabriel frowned, beset by a fresh wave of suspicion; it occurred to him that it might be a good idea to make a few phone calls himself at the next gas station, just to make sure he wasn’t missing something important. He more or less trusted Mary and Sam Hunter to tell him the truth about what was going on, but the bottom line was that they were Elijah’s parents, and if they’d learned something they didn’t want Gabriel to know it could only mean more bad news about their son.

  And what he might or might not have done to Julianna.

  Gabriel took a slow, deep breath and let it out again. He wanted to believe Mary Hunter when she said Elijah wouldn’t hurt Julianna, but if he found out that the boy wasn’t as squeaky clean as Mary claimed when it came to how he was treating Julianna, things between himself and the Hunters were likely going to get very ugly, very fast.

  The old memory began to play itself for him again, like a home movie set in a perpetual loop on a projector. He thought about how Julianna had always kept him safe, and how much he loved her, and how much he would do to get her back.

  Or, failing that, how he would make anybody who hurt her pay.

  The dearest dream of Ronnie Buckley’s life was nearly within his grasp. After thirty-seven years as the sheriff of sleepy, rural, law-abiding Creighton County, Iowa, he had just arrested two of the most wanted felons in the entire United States of America, all by himself.

  Well, almost by himself.

  His deputy, Bonnor Tucker, had helped some, but Sheriff Buckley—who had spent the bulk of his long career writing speeding tickets and confiscating Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from high school kids—was the one who had first spotted the fugitives as they drove down Mullwein’s Main Street, and it was Buckley who had instantly come up with the plan to trap them on the highway less than five minutes later. The arrest had gone like clockwork, too, and nobody was hurt.

  Well, not too badly hurt, at least.

  Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate both got knocked around a bit by the overenthusiastic Deputy Tucker when they were being cuffed, but Sheriff Buckley figured they had it coming—and then some—and didn’t really mind Tucker bloodying them up a little.

  Deputy Tucker, in Sheriff Buckley’s opinion, was as ornery as an enema bag, but he had his uses. He was scrappy and tough (not to mention huge: six foot four, 245 pounds), and could be depended upon to throw himself in harm’s way during the occasional barroom brawl or violent marital dispute, thereby keeping Buckley himself from having to do the dirty work. And today the sheriff had been more than happy to have his large, aggressive deputy be the one to search the felons and put them facedown on the ground for cuffing, while he himself, revolver drawn, watched the action from a few feet away.

  When Buckley had seen the Volkswagen driving past the Sale Barn in Mullwein, he’d actually hesitated before calling Tucker on the radio. He’d recognized the lime-green Beetle with New Hampshire plates at once, of course; every sheriff, deputy, policeman, and state trooper in the Midwest had been on the lookout for that particular vehicle since early in the afternoon. But the truth was he’d been scared out of his wits to go after it. He felt he was too old and slow to be tussling with hardened criminals like Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate, and it occurred to him that sitting unnoticed in his squad car beneath the shade of a maple tree on a quiet street as he’d been doing when they passed by was a lot more appealing than being shot in the head during a confrontation. But in the end he’d somehow found the courage to tail the Beetle from a distance, and when he contacted Tucker and found out his deputy was already on the west side of town, where the fugitives were heading, he’d breathed a sigh of relief and made a quick decision where the best place would be for a showdown.

  Deputy Tucker was supposed to have been patrolling the town of Maddox, twelve miles away, but had ignored this dull assignment and come to Mullwein that Sunday afternoon instead, hoping for more action. Sheriff Buckley would ordinarily have chewed him out for leaving Maddox unprotected like this—they were the only two lawmen in the county, and had to spread themselves thin—but for once Tucker’s irresponsibility and limited attention span had put him exactly where Buckley needed him.

  Sheriff Buckley still couldn’t believe how absurdly easy the arrest had been, given the nature of the crimes the two young thugs had committed. But they hadn’t even been armed, or tried to put up any sort of a fight, and Buckley had been truly shocked that such bloodthirsty killers could look so innocent and normal. If he hadn’t known the grisly details about what Hunter and Tate had done, he never would have guessed they were capable of such atrocities. The Hunter boy looked like the shyest, sweetest kid you could ever hope to meet, and Jon Tate had a face right out of a goddamn Norman Rockwell picture. Buckley found it frightening that his instincts about people could be so completely wrong—he liked to think of himself as a keen judge of character—and he didn’t care for the implications of such a discovery.

  Strangely enough, the only difficulty in the arrest had come from the woman who had been the boys’ prisoner. Julianna Dapper was large, strong, and uncooperative, and clearly deranged from her ordeal. She was so addled, in fact, that she’d actually tried to come to the rescue of her kidnappers when Tucker had been roughing them up. Luckily, the skirt of her dress had snagged on the front bumper of the Beetle as she ran toward the altercation, causing her to trip and fall, and this had given Buckley time to grab her and pull her to safety.

  It’s a good thing I stopped her, too, Buckley thought, remembering the empty Coke bottle the woman had picked up from the side of the road and started swinging over her head like a mace as she charged straight at Tucker. She might have killed Bonnor’s dumb ass if I hadn’t been there to save it.

  Now t
hat they were all back in the jailhouse in Maddox, however, all Buckley had to do was get Julianna through the steel door separating the jail cells from his own residence in the same building. The Maddox “jailhouse” was a two-story brick structure that was more house than jail; there were four cells and a claustrophobic, closet-sized office that took up half of the first story, but the rest of the place was a comfortable, three-bedroom home for Buckley and his wife. Unfortunately, dealing with the mentally ill woman was once again proving to be more of a challenge than it should’ve been. She kept insisting the kidnappers were her friends, and was dead set against being separated from them.

  “But why are you putting Ben in jail?” she asked, struggling with Buckley, as he tried to lead her away from her captors. “He had nothing do with breaking Günter’s lock!”

  The sheriff held tightly to her arm, not allowing her to approach either Elijah or Jon, who had just been shoved, none too gently, into separate jail cells by Deputy Tucker. The windowless, eight-by-eight-foot concrete cells smelled like stale sweat and mildew, with a hint of sewage from the toilets, which had a tendency to back up. Next to the toilets were rust-stained porcelain sinks, with single, cold-water spigots.

  “Everything’s going to be fine, sweetheart,” Buckley grunted, red-faced and out of breath from the excitement of the past half hour. (Being sixty-two years old and a hundred pounds overweight didn’t help his shortness of breath, either, of course, as his wife, Dottie, was sure to remind him the instant she laid eyes on him.) “You’re safe now, and my little woman is going to take care of you tonight. She’s right through this here door, and she’ll get you cleaned up and fed, good and proper.”