by Julia Keller
He had won, so he could afford to be gracious. He turned to Bell.
‘You’ve had a hell of a weekend,’ he said.
Bell wondered how he knew about the chase on the mountain – then realized he didn’t. That’s not what he meant. He was referring to the shooting the day before. And the Sheets trial, which she’d mentioned to him in an e-mail. She liked to keep Sam up to speed on her hardest cases. He had excellent legal instincts – even though he hadn’t actually practiced law for years now, preferring to use what he knew about the law to help his powerful clients worm their way around it. She liked to hear his gut feelings about her cases.
Bell shrugged, nodded.
‘I’ve had better,’ she said.
He turned to Carla and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘See you later, sweetie. I’ll tell Glenna the good news. We’ll start getting your room all ready for you.’
Bell watched him go down the front steps. Sam had the same crisply confident way of moving through the world that he’d always had. Even in high school. First time she had really noticed him, first time she was aware of him as something other than just a blur in the hallway at school, he’d been shingling a roof downtown. She heard her name. She looked up and there he was. Raising his hammer high over his head in some kind of weird tribute. Smiling.
If anybody else had done that, it would’ve seemed ludicrous. From the guy up on the roof, though, it somehow struck Bell as . . . gallant. A gallant tribute. Like something out of her favorite novel, Wuthering Heights. Tall and confident, even though he was standing on a roof and wearing filthy pants and cracked work boots and a ratty red T-shirt with MECKLING CONSTRUCTION CO printed on the front in slanty white letters, and even though his hair was spiky with sweat and there was dirt smeared across his face, Sam Elkins was her Heathcliff. Her Heathcliff with a hammer.
‘Hey!’ he’d called out. Just that: ‘Hey!’
She had pretended to ignore him. But she wouldn’t ignore him for long.
Bell shook her head. Memories were a bitch.
The present-day Sam – her ex-husband Sam – was just about out of sight by now. Behind her, Bell heard Carla climbing the stairs, on her way up to her room.
That left Bell alone in the front hallway. Silence was what she’d wanted, ever since she’d arrived home; silence and peace were what she thought she craved, after the wild ride down the mountain that morning. Now that she had it, though, the silence and the solitude felt peculiar to her, unsettling, and she felt an emptiness that she didn’t want to call fear. Bell Elkins would rather be sad than afraid, any day of the week.
Her cell phone rang. She quickly levered it out of her pocket and checked the screen. It was Hick again. Calling her this time, instead of texting. More news on the Sheets case, no doubt. Or news on any of the other cases they were handling. News too complicated to be reduced to a few acronyms in a text message.
She felt a quick surge of relief. Relief that she had her work, her cases, her obligations to the people who had elected her. If Carla moved away to live with Sam and what’s-her-name – was it Julie? No, wait, that was last year – Bell would need something to keep her mind and her heart occupied. She hated the idea of emptiness, of a gap at the center of her life. She was grateful for the heavy caseload in the prosecutor’s office.
Glenna. That was it, right? Yeah.
The name of Sam’s girlfriend was Glenna Saint-something-or-other. Bell would have to get used to the name. This Glenna person would become a daily part of Carla’s life. She’d see more of Carla than Bell did.
Bell would get Skype and e-mail. Glenna would get the real thing.
‘Hey,’ Bell said hurriedly into her cell, trying to keep her voice steady, nonchalant, so Hick Leonard wouldn’t guess at the emotion that had just rocked her with that last realization. ‘What’s going on, Hick?’
16
Chill opened the door of his motel room. He wasn’t tentative about it. He did it with authority – in fact, with a sort of grand flourish, like what you’d see in the movies, so that if it wasn’t who he expected it to be, they’d know he wasn’t scared of them. That he wasn’t scared of anything.
But it was just who he’d expected it to be, even though he’d never seen her before in his life. The woman was as skinny as the leg of a card table. She had flat, lank brown hair. Both greasy halves of it fell away from a crooked middle part. Thin arms dangled at her sides. Each arm concluded in a dirty little scallop of a hand. She was wearing a tight white tank top from which the tiny nipples of her small breasts bumped out like minor imperfections in the fabric. Her jeans, even tighter than the tank top, ended at mid-calf, and the white band of exposed flesh had gone bloody from constant scratching. Clawing, it looked like, as much as scratching. She wore red flip-flops.
The flip-flops bothered Chill. This was fall, and fall wasn’t flip-flop weather. He also thought the flip-flops were disrespectful. This was a job, right? A profession? She was getting paid, and if you got paid for something, you damned well ought to think about the impression you were making to the boss. And he was the boss.
‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘You’re Lorene, right?’
‘I’m Lorene.’ She didn’t move.
‘I said to get on in here,’ Chill said. He was testy. She was pissing him off. ‘Now.’ He looked past her, out into the parking lot, and to the road beyond it. There was nobody there. His car was the only vehicle present. No cars went by on the road. Still, he was nervous.
She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. ‘I gotta see the money first,’ she said. Her voice sounded so bored and generally absent that Chill wanted to smack her just to get a reaction. She was like a goddamned turtle, he thought; she was like one of those big slow turtles with the shells hard as concrete that live for, like, a couple of centuries, and only breathe or twitch once every fifty years or so. You can’t even be sure they’re alive unless somebody tells you they are.
For the first time, he took a good look at her face. Acne had done a number on it, turning the petite surface into a catalog of nicks and bumps and red-rimmed craters. Her eyes were blank. She’d tried to smear on some makeup, but the effect was comical; she looked, Chill thought, like a goddamned clown. Her nose was too big. Her mouth was too small. Well, he told himself, you get what you pay for, doncha?
He’d found her number the night before in a phone booth in front of the Shell station outside Rainey Hollow. The presence of the phone booth had surprised him. You didn’t see so many of them anymore. Everybody had cell phones now. After he’d gassed up the piece-of-shit compact, he’d gone over to the phone booth and pulled open the hinged door and peered inside. It smelled like somebody had puked in there a month ago and then turned around and slapped the door shut, trapping the smell, turning that sour puke smell into a solid block. The smell knocked him back, but he still wanted to look inside, so he did.
The black plastic receiver, its top half missing, was off the hook for good. It hung down on a ridged silver cord that looked like a dead snake. Somebody had maybe smashed that receiver against the side of the booth, because there was an angry-looking starburst pattern in the glass, and the top part of the receiver was, Chill saw, lying on the floor in a couple of pieces. What coulda made somebody mad enough to slam the receiver like that? Coulda been anything. The surprising thing to Chill wasn’t that people got mad enough to do shit like that. The surprising thing was that they weren’t that mad all the damned time.
This phone hadn’t been in working order for a long time. That was obvious. Before Chill backed out, though, he looked at the big black hunky thing bolted to the wall, the part that had the numbers and the rotary dial and the instructions for making long-distance calls printed on a sticker on the little metal plate. And the coin slot. Somebody had used a knife and scratched a message on the side: LORENE SUCKS DICK. And then there was a phone number.
Well, hell. He knew he might have some time to kill on Sunday, depending on how things went with his st
akeout of the lawyer lady, so he’d repeated the number out loud and hoped he could remember it until he got back to his car. He didn’t want to stand out there in the open any longer than he had to. Once he was back in the compact, Chill had dialed the number on his cell. He got a recording. After the beep, he said, ‘Towser Motel out on Route Nine, room fourteen, don’t come before three on Sunday.’ He had nothing to lose, he figured. If somebody showed up, great. If not – well, he’d be checking out Sunday night anyway. Boss said he had to move on. Chill had killed three people, maybe he would’ve made it four by that time – Chill didn’t know how he’d get to Belfa Elkins, but somehow he’d make it happen – and he had to clear out. Lay low. Maybe even head on down to Virginia, or over to Ohio, until things cooled off.
So what the hell. He could have a little fun that afternoon, right?
This woman didn’t look like she knew anything at all about fun. She repeated her request for the up-front cash. Chill started to tell her to go screw herself, he didn’t need the aggravation, but damnit, he was bored. He was antsy. He could use the distraction.
‘How much we talking about?’ he said. He was sure that whomever had dropped her off was waiting just down the road in an old Pontiac with four bald tires and an iffy transmission, hanging close in case the customer got fussy about the price and kicked her ass out of there. In which case the guy – the pimp, Chill corrected himself, although that was a big-city word, not a word he much used – would circle back around and pick her up, probably. She was like a piece of livestock. You let her loose for a while and then you went back to fetch her. She didn’t have any say in the matter. You could put a collar on her if you wanted to. With your name and phone number just under the IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN to line. She wouldn’t fight you on it. She wouldn’t fight you on much of anything, Chill figured.
‘Hunnert bucks,’ she said.
He laughed. It came out like a bark, and she flinched. He was glad to see that she still had her reflexes. ‘I’ll give you twenty,’ he said with a sneer, ‘and I’ll be right quick, so’s you and your boyfriend can party the rest of the night with it.’ Chill loved a good negotiation.
She, however, didn’t. The woman who called herself Lorene appeared to have no energy left to bargain with. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Twenty.’ She stepped into the room. ‘There ain’t no boyfriend, though. It’s just me. Got a lift over here.’
He believed her.
He reached around her, to pull the door shut, and as he swept past she made a tired, halfhearted movement toward his crotch with her tiny right hand. The gesture felt like something she’d read about in an instruction manual and practiced a few times. There was nothing erotic about it. Nothing sexy or spirited.
He’d be doing most of the work himself. Turtle Girl was hopeless.
Door now locked, he nudged her stringy shoulder to get her to move farther into the room. He took another look at her, at what the pills or the booze – who knew which it was, and did it really matter? – had done to her. He’d be working hard to get himself off with this one. Twenty bucks’ll be a gift. A goddamned gift.
17
Albie Sheets had eaten soap.
‘Soap?’
Bell repeated the word back to Hick.
‘Soap.’ Hick’s voice on her cell was matter-of-fact. ‘Irish Spring, I think, although it might’ve been Dove. Or Ivory. Not that they have the fancy stuff in the county jail – can you imagine Nick Fogelsong’s face, if he thought we were giving inmates fancy name-brand soap at county expense?’
Hick chuckled. When Bell didn’t join him, he cleared his throat and went back to his report. ‘The soap came from Albie’s family. They’d brought him some stuff yesterday afternoon. Toiletries ’n’ such. In a little basket. With a ribbon on it. Pink. The ribbon was pink. Way I hear it, Albie’d chewed and swallowed a bar and a half before the guards put a stop to his little between-meal snack.’
Bell shifted the phone to her other ear. By this time, she had seated herself on the bottom step of her staircase, elbows on kneecaps, leaning her head against the mahogany baluster. The pain in her shoulder had faded to a mild ache.
This job. Never a dull moment.
‘Why’d he eat soap?’
‘Nobody knows. Deputies found him sick as a dog in his cell. Throwing up, grabbing his gut, screaming. Judge Pelley postponed the start of the trial a couple of days.’
‘Is Albie Sheets really ill?’
Overhead, Bell could hear the floorboards of the old house flex and moan. Carla must be moving around her bedroom. Was she packing? Already? No. Couldn’t be. Maybe she’s just blowing off steam. Pacing. Bell did that herself sometimes; she kept moving, kept in action, so that her fears and frustrations had to work to catch up with her.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Hick said. ‘Just got a bellyache to beat the band.’
‘I was out at the Sheets place myself this morning.’ Bell considered telling Hick about the episode up on the mountain, about the bastard who’d tried to run her off the road, but then changed her mind. She didn’t want her staff distracted. There were too many things she needed them to do. She didn’t want them wasting their time, fighting her battles. She was used to fighting her battles alone.
The sounds over Bell’s head, the creaks and squeaks, had stopped. Carla was probably stretched out on her bed, clutching her favorite stuffed animal – a purple plush giraffe she’d had since she was a toddler, and which she’d named, for obscure reasons, Mr Gompers – and, Bell surmised, thinking about D.C. and all the cool things she could do there with her dad and with Glenna Saint-Pain-in-the-Ass.
‘Well,’ Hick said, ‘Judge Pelley just wants to be sure, I guess, that Albie’s not going to keel over and die during opening arguments. He wants to hold things up until the end of the week. He told the deputies on jail duty to keep a close eye on our boy Albie – who, after this stunt, by the way, must have the cleanest gol-durned innards of any prisoner in the history of the Raythune County Jail.’
Bell gave a small grunt. By all rights, Hickey Leonard should’ve outgrown his propensity to make bad jokes about their cases, but if it hadn’t happened by now – Hick was fifty-nine – it wasn’t going to happen at all, Bell surmised.
Hick Leonard had maintained a private law practice in Acker’s Gap for more than three decades before deciding to run for prosecutor in the wake of the Bobby Lee Mercer scandal. Oddly, though, losing to Bell Elkins on Election Day had seemed like a relief to him. His motivation for seeking office had been a simple one, he said: Hick wanted, at long last, to be on what he called ‘the side of the good guys’ – the state of West Virginia and the county of Raythune – instead of the side of the bad guys, by which he meant the creeps, bums, thieves, liars, con artists, hypocrites, and low-life punks whose worthless asses he’d kept out of jail for lo these many years. But Hick wasn’t cut out to be the boss, to run a complicated public office. Deep in his heart, he appeared to know that. The voters apparently knew it, too.
The day after her victory, Bell had called Hick and asked him to join her staff. It wasn’t an abstract goodwill gesture. She needed him. He might be a third-rate comedian, but he was a first-rate attorney. And he knew the recent history of Acker’s Gap – the greasy river of quid pro quo that oozed through any small town, the labyrinthine network of favors offered and accepted and parlayed into other currencies – better than anybody else. He knew who owed what to whom and why; he knew whose wife had been stepping out with whose husband and for how long. He knew the contents of prescriptions picked up at the Walgreens pharmacy. He knew the way that a great many customers at Ike’s Diner – the last non-chain eatery left standing in town, although the metaphorical vultures always seemed to be massing on the rooftop with the opening of each new Burger King and Subway out on the interstate – liked their eggs.
Did Hick Leonard resent Bell for ending up in the office he’d sought? She wasn’t sure. And frankly, she didn’t much care. You didn’t have to love your
boss to do a good job. You only had to agree with her priorities. And Hick, like her, seemed to want to rid these parts of the drug dealers who had moved in with such ruthless and alarming speed. He, too, seemed to bounce between deep sorrow and blistering anger when he looked at the wrecked lives left in the wake of the drugs.
Hick’s only misstep so far had been his passionate recommendation of Rhonda Lovejoy for the second assistant’s spot. Rhonda was a disaster. She was chronically late, hopelessly scatterbrained, and terminally disorganized. Bell didn’t know why Hick had pushed so hard for her hiring – did he owe somebody a favor? – and didn’t care. The moment she had time to deal with it, Bell intended to tell Rhonda that she’d need to find other employment.
‘Thanks, Hick. Appreciate the update.’
She was about to click END CALL, but sensed that Hick had something else to say. Bell could imagine his big round face – the Leonards all had big faces to begin with, but Hick enhanced the genetics with a fanatical affection for pulled pork sandwiches and French toast – and the beseeching expression he adopted when he wanted to say something but was afraid to. His eyes had a tendency to bug out. His chin might quiver. Hick’s face could sometimes look like an oversensitive pie plate.
So she paused. She’d give him a couple of seconds to speak his mind. Then she had to go.
‘You know what, Bell?’
She waited.
‘Well, I just wanted to say – I mean—’ Hick took a deep breath, blew it out. The column of expelled air made a rasping sound in Bell’s ear. Clearly, the man didn’t realize how a cell phone mediated certain sounds, making them a painful auditory experience for the person on the other end of the line.
‘What is it, Hick? Kind of a busy day here, you know?’
‘I know, I know.’ Another pause, and then his words came out in a tumble: ‘Shit, Bell, I gotta say this. Okay? You’re gonna hate this but I gotta say it.’
