by Jon McGoran
After another quarter mile, it started getting dark, but the sun wasn’t setting; it was just disappearing behind a steep hill as I descended into a wooded valley. As I approached a deeply rutted driveway, I noticed a familiar smell, the acrid mixture of ammonia and acetone and burned house. Weathered strips of crime-scene tape hung from pine trees on either side of the driveway. Beyond them was a small clearing surrounded by blackened branches burnt back like they were recoiling from the scene. I recoiled a bit myself, goose bumps rising on my arms. I’d had a thing about fires, ever since I was a kid. But I had a thing about crime scenes, too, and as I drove up the driveway, I felt my pulse quicken the way it did almost every day on the job.
I slowed to a stop, looking for a house, but all that remained was a blackened rectangle of cinder blocks, maybe twenty feet by thirty, in the center of the clearing. The cinder blocks only came up about a foot and a half, and the charred rubble inside barely rose that high. A blackened toilet slouched in the corner, cracked in two, the exposed porcelain gleaming white against all that black. The remains of several cots sat in the opposite corner, the metal twisted and collapsed.
Nothing else was recognizable, except that smell, the classic bouquet of eau de meth fire. Looked like a bad one, too. The foundation was uninterrupted on three sides; there might have been windows, but there was only one door. Meth fires can start with a bang and spread fast and hot. The fumes don’t help, either. I couldn’t help picturing it, and I suppressed a shudder. Not a good way to go.
Above me, the sliver of sky visible through the dense trees was losing light for real now. It seemed very far away. Closing my window against the smell, I doubled back the way I’d come.
The scene left me feeling even more somber. But even as I was thinking that a few weeks away from the job might not be so bad, my hand had my phone out, calling Danny Tennison.
“Jesus, Doyle,” he said. “You been gone one day. You miss me that much?”
“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean what am I doing?”
“I mean what are you doing? I’m stuck out here in America. Tell me what’s happening in the big city.”
He laughed. “You’re pathetic.”
“Come on, what are you doing? Tell me.”
“I’m at Target, standing outside the dressing room while Laura is helping Julia and Becca try on back-to-school clothes. That make you feel any better?”
“Are you holding a handbag?”
“Two of them. One has pink ponies on it.”
“Then, yes, I do feel better. Hey, you know anything about any meth activity out here?”
“Meth in rural America? Well, gee, I suppose it’s possible.”
“Fuck you, I’m serious. Just came across a burned-out meth lab. Wondering what’s up with that.”
“Well, a lot of it has to do with the disintegration of the American family, deteriorating moral standards, a lack of opportunity for young people.”
“Danny, seriously.”
“Sorry, Doyle, but what does it matter? You’re on suspension, remember?”
“Danny. Don’t fuck with me. You know anything about it or not?” I recognized a barn with a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign, a white disk with red tulips and birds, and I made a left, back on track.
“Dude, you’re suspended.”
“Danny, I’m just curious, that’s all. Like a tourist.”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Stan Bowers could probably tell you. He’s working out near there now.”
Stan Bowers was with DEA. We had worked with him on a few task-force cases. He was loud and obnoxious, but a good guy and a decent investigator.
“Stan’s out here now?”
“Yeah, but Doyle, seriously, leave it alone. What are you, one day into your suspension?”
“Two, including yesterday.”
“Yesterday doesn’t count.”
“I’m pretty sure it does.”
He laughed. “You better figure that out. It’d be typical Doyle Carrick, come back on the wrong day because you lost count on day one.”
I laughed, too. “Fuck you.”
“All right, the girls are coming out. I gotta go. Are you cool?”
“Yeah, I’m cool.”
“Just do good time, and it’ll be over before you know it.”
“Right.”
Just before the phone went dead, I heard him telling Becca how beautiful she looked. It was six o’clock in the evening. I called Stan Bowers.
He answered with a booming, “Hey, if it isn’t Dirty Harry!”
“Hey, Stan.”
“Heard about what happened.” He started laughing. “Heard you sucker-punched Tennison just to make it look good.” He laughed so hard he started coughing.
“Yes, it’s hilarious.”
“Smooth, Carrick,” he said, “very smooth. Anyway, I heard you got twenty days. That sucks. The pricks.”
“Yup.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, turning serious. “And your mom died, right? Or was it your dad?”
“My mom and my step-father. Few weeks apart.”
“Damn, Doyle. Sorry to hear it.”
“Thanks.”
“So what’s going on?”
“Well, I’m staying in my folks’ house in Dunston. My house now, I guess. I heard you were working out here. Figured I’d touch base.”
“Right,” he said. “What do you need?”
“No, nothing. But I heard there was some meth activity out here, figured I’d talk to the man, get the straight scoop.”
“That’s what you figured, huh? You’re on suspension, right?”
“I’m a property owner, concerned about what’s going on in my new community.”
“Yeah, all right.” He laughed. “We got two meth labs that went up. About a month apart.”
“Was one of them on Burberry Lane?”
He sighed. “Yeah, one of them was. Why?”
“Nothing, just that I came across the remains of it, had meth lab written all over it.”
“Yeah, not much doubt about that.”
“Were they related?”
“Looks like. Some crazy-assed Mexican gangbangers out of L.A.”
“Mexicans?”
“That’s what it looks like.” He laughed. “Actually, one of the locals said it was the Russians—bimbo probably wouldn’t know a Russian from a Mexican if he did a hat dance on her head. But we had four crispy critters in each. One of them had a bullet in the head, so they might not have been playing nice, or a gun could have discharged in the heat, who knows. Coroner says they were Mexican. He had to do a lot of work on them, too. Extra crispy, if you know what I mean. Still, he seemed pretty sure of it.”
“And they were from L.A.? That’s a long way from home.”
“Looks like they were part of a gang called the Monarchs, old L.A. street gang. They found a piece of floorboard at one of the scenes, like the only thing left of the house. Had the word ‘Monarchs’ scratched into it. Some crazy asshole did it with his fingernails, like some fucked up initiation or something. The DNA from the board matched one of the crispies. It was the one with the bullet, so I guess he didn’t do it right.”
“There a lot of Mexican gang activity out here?”
He laughed. “If you mean landscapers, yeah. Otherwise I didn’t think so, but there you go. Aren’t you supposed to be on a vacation, anyway?”
“Yeah, yeah. So where was the other place? The other meth house?”
“What, you want the address?”
“Sure.”
He laughed. “Carrick, I’ve never been suspended, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to go.”
“I just want to see how it affects my property value.”
He laughed again, but he gave me the address.
4
As depressing as it was, seeing the burned-out meth house made me feel like I was back in my element, even in the middle of those amber waves of grain. That sense
of familiarity quickly faded, though, when I saw a guy in a hazmat suit in the middle of a cornfield, spraying something from a tank on his back. He looked totally out of place in the middle of all that nature. Maybe he felt me staring at him, because his hooded face turned in my direction and he seemed to be watching me until the road curved away.
I was so focused on the hazmat suit that when I glanced in my rearview I was surprised to see the grille of a black Ford pickup, riding high on a monster truck suspension, filling my back window. Maybe I’d slowed down to watch, but I was still doing fifty in a twenty-five zone. Apparently that wasn’t good enough. The Ford hung back a bit, then accelerated right up behind me again, right up on my bumper. He flashed his high beams, as if I had a slow lane to pull onto.
I like to think that deep down I’m not one of the true assholes in the world, but nothing brings it out in me like someone who is. So when he blasted me with his horn and pulled into the oncoming lane to pass me, I accelerated, too. And I smiled as I did it.
He accelerated even more, and so did I, laughing now. We were approaching a blind rise, and this guy started gunning it; so I did, too, probably doing seventy-five now. Sure, there might have been an eighteen-wheeler barreling up the other side of the hill, but probably not on my side of the road.
Twenty yards from the top of the hill, the Ford surged alongside me, but before he could pull ahead, he hit his brakes and swerved off the road to the left. As he bounced over a dirt field, kicking up a cloud of dust, the high suspension suddenly made sense. I took my foot off the accelerator, but still crested the hill with enough speed that my tires left the asphalt.
As it turned out, there was no eighteen-wheeler coming the other way. There was a police cruiser. And as I flew past it six inches off the ground, its lights began to flash. The driver’s side door said DUNSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT, and I thought, “At least I’m in the right town.”
The truck kept going, lurching back onto the road up ahead and roaring over the next rise.
I considered high-tailing it out of there, too, but I figured a high-speed chase with another police department wouldn’t be the smartest way to start my official suspension.
As I pulled over, I savored the moment of peace before the flashing lights on the cruiser reappeared over the hill behind me. The cruiser approached slowly, and even though I was already pulled over, the guy let his siren whoop once. Just to be a dick.
He looked close to sixty and he got out of the car slowly, like he was trying to look cool but was probably stiff from sitting on his butt all day. His mirrored aviators looked like they came from the Bad Cliché factory outlet.
As he approached the car, I took out my badge and lowered my window.
He looked down at me through his badass shades. “License and registration, please.” His nametag said POLICE CHIEF PRUITT.
I got the registration out of the glove compartment and pulled the license out of my wallet, making sure he saw my badge as I handed it to him.
“You know why I pulled you over?” he asked.
I figured it was for going airborne at three times the speed limit, but I didn’t want to get it wrong by being overly specific. “To give me a ticket?” I held my badge a little higher.
He looked down at it, taking his time and moving his tongue around in his mouth, like maybe part of his lunch was stuck in his teeth.
“Am I under arrest?” he asked dryly, nodding at the badge.
I laughed a little and shrugged. “No, I just—”
“Then put that away, and don’t let me see it in this town again.”
As he spoke, the black Ford reappeared slowly over the next hill and coasted toward us at a respectful fifteen miles an hour. Chief Pruitt waved for him to pass us and turned back to look at me as the truck crept by behind him with the windows down. The driver had a sweaty forehead, a piggish nose, and a big ugly grin on his big ugly face. He made sure I got a good look at his middle finger.
Chief Pruitt was still busy writing out the ticket. He seemed to be writing a lot. I gave the guy in the pickup a smile and a nod.
“You know,” I told Pruitt, “the reason I was driving the way I was, the guy in that pickup was trying to run me off the road. You probably saw him. Surprised you’re not giving him a ticket, too.”
He was quiet for a second as he finished writing the ticket. “I deal with assholes on a case-by-case basis,” he said as he tore off the ticket and handed it to me. “You drive safe now, you hear?”
5
The sun was sinking low by the time I found my parents’ street—Bayberry Road, not Burberry Lane. A few minutes later I pulled into the driveway next to their big old wooden farmhouse. The house sat on top of a small hill, and I paused on the wide front porch and looked around at the farmland spreading out around it. Split-rail fences on either side separated the property from a rolling mass of wild grasses on one side and rows of small, conical evergreen trees on the other. I smiled as the name came to me: Meade’s Christmas Tree Farm. I couldn’t remember anything about it, but I could hear my mom’s voice saying, “Something, something, something, Meade’s Christmas Tree Farm.”
Across the street was a smaller farmhouse. Behind it and to the left were fields with rows of vegetables, to the right a wash line ran across the yard, a pair of butterflies dancing with a bra and a few other scraps of clothing fluttering in the breeze. A wall of tall, dense trees seemed to mark the property line then turned abruptly and followed the road to the west.
Off to the east was a small mountain, hazy and green in the distance.
My face went hot as I put my key into the lock. Frank had given me the key after my mom’s funeral, and I remembered thinking that if he was planning on locking himself out, he might want a key buddy who lived a little closer. I had also thought that with my mom gone, it might be a while before I was out there again.
The house probably appeared the way it always did; I had never looked that closely. The feeling, though, was totally different. Even after my mother’s funeral, her warm presence had still been strong in the house. With Frank gone, too, the place just felt empty.
I put my bag on the living-room floor and walked through the dining room, the kitchen, Frank’s little office in the back. The steps creaked when I went upstairs, a couple of them loudly. On the second floor was a master bedroom, then another bedroom that was nominally my room, although it was full of boxes. In the back was a guest room that seemed somehow more lived-in than my room.
It all seemed tidy and neat and very, very strange. I hadn’t been there enough times to feel comfortable getting myself a glass of water. Now I owned the place.
Back in the living room, I sat on the sofa and listened to the quiet. My breath grew softer as the stillness of the house became part of me. I hadn’t thought about how I would spend the next twenty days, but it occurred to me then that maybe I’d just sit on that sofa.
I thought about finding a nearby watering hole, but it was Saturday night, and I didn’t need that. Instead, I grabbed a glass and a dusty half-full bottle of Irish whiskey from the liquor cabinet in the dining room, and went out onto the small back porch. Sitting on one of the weathered wooden rocking chairs, with my feet on the other one, I poured a couple of inches of whiskey.
The vegetable patch was dense and green, but the lowering sun threw an orange tinge over everything. The shade from the house looked bluish in comparison. A warm breeze slid by, then slid back, the air gently sloshing from side to side.
I closed my eyes and relaxed, enjoying the warmth of the booze on the inside and the air outside. When I opened my eyes, the shadow from the house had crept across the garden and was halfway up the side of the small, barnlike garage. I closed my eyes again, listening as the buzz and whine of the flying insects were replaced by the chirping of crickets. By the time I emptied the last of the bottle into my glass, it was nighttime.
Frank and my mom had said they loved it out here, but they were always complaining about something�
�Frank going on about the neighbors’ hedges, or my mom upset about some crazy Mexicans. She didn’t used to be like that, but I guess people change when they get old. I could never understand why they had moved out here in the first place—other than that Frank was crazy and my mom wanted him to be happy. Sitting here on the back porch, though, drinking into the night, for the first time, I could see the appeal.
6
When I woke up, the late afternoon sun was streaming full-strength into my room. It was the kind of sunlight that penetrates blankets and pillows and eyelids and skulls. Between the overindulgence the night before and exhaustion built up over several weeks, I wasn’t quite done with sleep, and I didn’t feel like I would ever be. But it was late afternoon, my stomach was growling, and apparently sleep was done with me.
I took four Advil from a bottle in the bathroom cabinet. I’d read that taking too much ibuprofen could kill you, but if my head stopped hurting, I was okay with it.
I found an empty can of coffee behind the boxes of herbal tea, but my panic faded into depression when I discovered a jar of instant coffee with a quarter-inch of brown crystals stuck to the bottom. I poured a couple inches of hot water into the jar and took it into the shower with me.
Ten minutes later I was feeling almost human, but as I was pulling on my pants, I sensed something was wrong. The quiet was gone. I grabbed my gun from the nightstand and listened from the top of the stairs to the ambient rustle of movement on the first floor. I crept down the stairs, keeping to the side and stepping over the seventh step and the eleventh; somehow I remembered that they were the loud ones.
The sound was coming from the dining room—a soft whoosh I knew but couldn’t place. As I crossed the living room, it stopped. After a silent count to three, I yelled, “Freeze,” and burst into the dining room with my gun two-handed in front of me.
The kid in the dining room let out a screech, but he froze. He was barely twenty, skinny, with a scraggly beard, wearing a T-shirt and jeans with sandals. He had a broom in one hand and an empty dustpan in the other. A cloud of dust was settling out of the air in a circle around him.
