by Julia Keller
Except that her mother was late. Again.
A shriek sliced through the room. It startled Carla, making her fingers twitch, which in turn caused her to demolish one entire wall of Fort French Fry.
Her head whipped around. A little girl and a man—surely the kid’s father, Carla thought, because they looked alike, they both had broad, squashed-looking noses and stick-straight, dirty-blond hair—were sitting across from each other in a booth in the corner. The little girl was screaming and pounding the tabletop with a pair of fat pink fists, flinging her head back and forth. The dad, meanwhile, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal a pair of aggressively hairy forearms, was leaning across the table, clutching a chicken biscuit with most of its yellow wrapper removed. His face was frozen in a hopeful, slightly crazed-looking smile. The girl, though—she was four, maybe five—was ignoring him and instead just kept screaming and jerking her head around. Threads of dirty-blond hair were stuck in the snot ejected by her nose in two bright tubes of ooze.
The father was panicky, confused, desperate. Gotta be a divorced dad, Carla surmised. Gotta be some asshole out to bank some kid time on the weekend. He was clearly a rookie. An amateur. He made cooing sounds, trying to do something, anything, that would stop the ferocious yowling.
Give it up, dude, Carla thought.
She knew all about part-time dads who wanted to make up for everything in a few short hours on a Saturday morning at the Salty Dawg. She could’ve written a handbook. Offered tips. She could’ve told this jerk that he’d blown it by starting to unwrap the chicken biscuit for his daughter. Never, never, never. The more wounded the little girl was, the more blindsided by the divorce, the more she’d want to do everything by herself from now on. It was survival instinct. She was in training. Getting ready for the day when Daddy Dearest didn’t come around so much anymore.
Carla’s attention swiveled back to the three old men. They were still laughing, still making those horrible old-man-laughing sounds that came out like a whiny scritchy-scratch. One of them was using the back of his brown-spotted hand to dab at a happy tear that was leaking out of his disgusting-looking runny eye. After the dab he reared back his head and peered at that hand, like he wondered how he’d gotten the wet spot on it.
She saw the three old men in their matching black jackets, laughing, mouths open, faces pleated.
She saw them savoring their little joke.
Then she saw them die.
Pock
Pock
Pock
One shot per head.
By the time a startled Carla let go of the french fry she was holding—she’d been rebuilding Fort French Fry from scratch—the three old men were gone.
One slumped onto the little beige tabletop, knocking over his coffee. Blood and coffee, commingled, sloshed across the beveled edge. The friend sitting to his left had been smacked out of the seat by the force of the shot and deposited on the floor, faceup, his eyes and his nose replaced by a frilly spray of pink and gray. The third old man had rocked back in his chair, arms flung out to either side. A portion of his forehead was missing.
Carla turned toward the door.
She saw—she thought she saw—the blur of an arm sweeping up with a flourish, a wild arc, dramatic, like in a movie, and at the end of the arm, a ridged chip of dark gray, an angled chunk of metal, dull gray, not shiny, and her gaze shifted and she saw—she thought she saw—a skinny face, two tiny eyes, pig eyes, Carla thought, it looks like a pig’s eyes, pink and tiny, and the arm sweeping back down again.
Another frantic blur, and the glass double doors flapped back and forth and back and forth in a diminishing swish. Then the doors were still.
Now the other customers realized what had just happened.
And that’s when the screaming started.
Chapter Two
Pale yellow tape stamped with a repeating bleat of ominous black block letters—CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS—stretched across the mouth of the Salty Dawg’s parking lot, bouncing and twisting in the crisp fall wind, bellying and sagging.
Bell Elkins tore through the tape as if it were tinsel on last year’s Christmas tree—as if it were, that is, superfluous, out of place, and certainly nothing that ought, under the present circumstances, to be impeding her progress. She crossed the lot in five long strides, dodging emergency vehicles, hopping over crumble-edged fissures in the blacktop. Her arms were tucked tight against her sides, hands curled into fists, chin tilted up as she charged forward.
The door was blocked by Deputy Charlie Mathers. He was a wide man with slicked-back black hair, a perpetual frosting of sweat on his bright pink forehead, and a small dimple in his chin that looked like the half-moon print of a baker’s thumbnail pressed randomly in a ball of dough.
“Ms. Elkins,” he said, palms held straight up like stop signs, as if she might just take a mind to run him over, “this here’s a crime scene and I really can’t let you—”
“Hell with that, Charlie. My daughter’s in there.”
Bell pressed the crunchy ball of yellow tape against his massive chest and prepared to go right on by. She had run track in college, before she became pregnant with Carla, and while that was almost twenty years ago and she hadn’t kept up with the punishing daily regimen, she still had strong legs and a kind of permanent forward momentum. Her body language, she’d been told too many times, gave off the constant vibe that she was pushing against things: doors, rules, limits, propriety, even the wind. Maybe I am, had become her standard reply, more to shut people up than anything else. Maybe I am. She had springy reddish brown hair divided by a left-side part, a high forehead, thin mouth, small nose. Because she’d bolted from her desk and headed over here in such a hurry, she was still wearing black-rimmed reading glasses, glasses that she would’ve torn off if she’d remembered them. Behind the lenses, her eyes—ferocious-looking at the moment, half-wild, aimed at the place where she knew her daughter was—were light gray.
“Ms. Elkins, you can’t just go bustin’ in here without proper authoriza—”
“Back off, Charlie. I mean it.”
Sixteen minutes earlier, Bell had been sitting in her office in the county courthouse, lost in the thought-maze of a complicated case, when her assistant, Rhonda Lovejoy, had arrived in a frantic dither, the orangey-blond curls of her perm bouncing and shivering, as if her hair were even more frightened than she was.
“Trouble!” Rhonda had squealed. Foamy flecks of spit accumulated in the loose corners of her mouth. “Gunshots … downtown—” She paused to pant dramatically, sticking out a chubby index finger to mark her place in her narrative. With her other hand, she clutched her considerable stomach.
Bell, frowning, had lifted her gaze from the tiny print in the massive leather-bound law book that lay open between her spread elbows on the desktop. The case—she had to decide in two days whether to indict a mentally challenged man named Albie Sheets for the murder of a six-year-old—was a daunting one, fraught with moral and legal dilemmas as tightly tangled as miscellaneous string and single shoe-laces and ancient rubber bands nested in the back of a kitchen drawer. Whenever Bell sat down to tackle it, she lost all sense of time. She had instructed her assistant to meet her here at the office this morning by 9 A.M. Hearing a heavy step in the hall, Bell had rediscovered her watch and realized how late Rhonda was. Ridiculously late. At which point another thought had occurred to her: She, too, was late—late to pick up Carla at the Salty Dawg.
First things first, however. Bell had squared her shoulders, readying herself to be the fire-breathing boss, to address Rhonda in all-out, full-on, rip-her-a-new-one mode.
And then her assistant’s words finally registered.
Gunshots. Downtown.
“Where?” Bell said.
Rhonda, first gulping another spoonful of air, had managed a raspy, “Salty Dawg.” The syllables came out in three ragged gasps. Rhonda’s rapid ascent of the courthouse steps had just about done her in.
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Bell was up and out of her chair so fast that it had startled Rhonda, causing her to tilt back and wobble precariously like a sideswiped bowling pin, nearly knocking over the yellow vase on the bookshelf behind her. Bell whipped past her assistant and flew through the narrow public hall, loafers clicking against the polished wooden floor, hand diving into the pocket of her black linen trousers to fish out her car keys.
She was halfway down the courthouse steps before she was aware of Rhonda’s voice behind her, plaintive, wailing her name, pleading with her to slow down.
“Carla’s there,” Bell said, curt, final, flinging the words back over her shoulder, not breaking her stride. Her runner’s rhythm had, as always, come right back to her, like an obscure fact seemingly forgotten but then instantly available, tucked as it was under the first layer of consciousness.
“Oh my God!” Rhonda had cried. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God. Do you want me to come with you or should I—”
“Go back to the office,” Bell snapped. “Get to work.”
Deputy Mathers knew Bell Elkins well enough to know it was hopeless, but he had to try. Or at least to look like he was trying. As she swept past him, he leaned over and reached out a big hand to pluck at her sleeve. Bell shrugged him off like a bug, then made short work of the restaurant door.
“Don’t touch nothing!” Mathers said to her back. “I know you know what you’re doing, but the sheriff said he’d have my butt if I let anybody—”
“Got it, Charlie.”
Inside, the chaos was receding, like a wild animal tricked back into its cage. The stunned customers had been shepherded into a far corner of the room, away from the carnage. An old woman swayed back and forth like a human metronome, muttering Jesus Jesus Jesus.
A teenaged boy had thrown up, and he was curved over the smelly mess he’d made, sobbing and quivering, his skinny tattooed arms wrapped tightly around his T-shirted torso.
A Salty Dawg employee—you could tell by her black polyester pants and blousy bright white shirt and shiny white HI! HAVE A DAWG-GONE GOOD DAY! button pinned to the front of that shirt—stared at nothing, eyes wild, mouth open, hands dangling, feet spread.
Two portly women had locked arms and were moaning in unison. They might have been best friends since fourth grade or they might have met seconds ago; it was impossible to tell. Their moaning had a rhythmic, purring quality, almost sexual in its soft undulations.
The little girl who’d been in the midst of the chicken-biscuit melt-down was screaming; her dad, instead of trying to comfort her, was screaming, too, as if in such a terrible moment, the kid was on her own and no business of his. Screams also emanated from a pudgy middle-aged man with a round face and a black goatee.
Bell’s hop-skip of a gaze halted near the center of the room.
It was worse than she’d imagined. And she had imagined it, of course, the way everyone does when they hear about violent death, visualizing it, feeling the dark echo of it in the belly as well as the brain.
The victims lay where they had fallen. Deputies had ascertained that the men were indeed dead and then had backed off, leaving everything intact. The bodies had to stay right where they were until the crime scene techs arrived from the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory.
Make it soon, Bell thought. For God’s sake, make it soon.
Small communities such as Acker’s Gap had no facilities, no personnel—and at the root of it all, no budget—to perform the kind of sophisticated, high-tech analysis that was standard procedure in modern forensics. They had to rely on the state. Which meant waiting their turn. Not even Buster Crutchfield, Raythune County coroner, could get down to business until the forensics team had signed off on it. This was a crime scene, and things had to be done the right way. Delicate sensibilities be damned.
One victim was sprawled across the tabletop. Another was faceup on the floor. Each head was angled in a small lake of blood and brain tissue.
A third man was trapped in his little plastic seat. He looked as if he were in the middle of a clumsy, halfhearted jumping jack, arms and legs spread, body caught in an improvised X. The upper half of his head was a red scramble. His jaw was slack, his mouth hanging open like a ladle on a peg.
Bell saw three knocked-over cardboard cups.
She smelled fresh coffee, stale grease, vomit, the astringent nose-prick of urine.
And she was aware, all over again, of how a violent act changes the atmosphere. She could even taste it: a hard, metallic tang brushed the back of her tongue. An extra pressure registered on her skin.
“Mrs. Elkins,” a deputy said.
He nodded to her. He and two of his colleagues had arranged themselves in a ragged inadequate circle around the bodies, thumbs tucked into their heavy black belts. The deputies, two men and one woman, identical in their chocolate brown polyester uniforms and flat-brimmed hats, had no visible reaction to the horror that bloomed just inches from their shiny black boots. They had been trained well. They knew they could not so much as place a napkin over a victim’s ruined face, could not close a pair of staring eyes or pull down a rucked-up shirtfront, or the crime scene would be compromised. Everything had to be kept exactly as it was, which meant the dead men would have to remain on display, frozen in their last ghastly moment, for a while longer.
A man’s voice, clipped, stern, businesslike, order-dispensing, climbed above the other sounds. As she moved toward her daughter, Bell’s eyes shifted briefly in that direction. The uniformed man, clearly in charge of things, stood by the tall glass wall. His left hand was cupped around the back of his neck. His right hand was raised to a point level with his mouth. Talking sharply into the radio lodged in his big curved palm was Sheriff Nick Fogelsong.
Bell nodded at him. He nodded back.
Just before Bell had arrived, Carla Elkins found herself shuffling, zombielike, along with the pack being gently prodded by the deputies, her right thigh bumping against the rounded edge of each little beige table as she moved. She felt as if she were in shock—not the dangerous medical kind where they have to slap you or give you a shot, but the kind in which everything … slows … down … and noises come bouncing at you in big round soft blobs, like colored balloons. Yellow and green and purple and orange. And red. Plenty of red.
She had never heard a grown man scream before, and so she kept sneaking glances at the guy with the goatee who shuffled along beside her. He was hunched over, shoulders shaking, head bobbing, and his screams were like squeals. Animal squeals. His hands were thrust out in front of him and fluttering wildly, with evident desperation, as if the fingers didn’t actually belong to him and he was trying to fling them away, one by one, the way you’d want to get rid of something disgusting. Carla was fascinated, and a little appalled.
Then she’d noticed that the gaudy decoration on Mr. Goatee’s white cotton sweater was actually blood spray, with bits of what had to be brain—pinkish-gray stuff, like chopped-up chunks of pencil eraser—stuck there, too. He’d been sitting at a table right next to the one where the old guys sat, sucking on a chocolate shake, when it happened. He’d caught a chestful.
Well, Carla thought sheepishly, in that case, guess I’d be screaming, too.
She shivered. Then she heard a commotion at the door. One quick glimpse of the figure moving toward her—the figure had paused ever so slightly at the ring of deputies, but then resumed its bold, don’t-mess-with-me stride—and Carla’s heart gave a funny little lurch. She felt a crazy fizz of joy and a spasm of pure yearning. She’d managed not to cry so far, she’d fought against tears, she’d been calm, so calm, but now she knew she could stop fighting. She didn’t have to worry anymore about being strong.
“Mom,” Carla said. Hot tears burned her eyes.
“Sweetie.” Bell Elkins reached out and pulled her daughter into her arms.
At first Bell just held her, oblivious to everything that was happening around them, the screams and the moans and the gagging, and the burgeoning noi
se from outside the restaurant, too, the sirens and the crackling blasts from the bullhorn, urging the world to move back, back, back, and the shouts—muffled by the glass walls, but still audible—from the swelling, swaying, curious crowd that was filling the street in the wake of the police cars and the ambulances and all the excitement.
“It’s okay now, sweetie,” Bell murmured. “It’s okay now.” This was said directly into Carla’s ear, a soft chanting coo, a lullaby on the fly. “It’s okay now.”
“Mom, I—”
Carla tried to alter her position ever so slightly within her mother’s arms, arms that made a circle as rigid as a barrel stave.
“Don’t move, sweetie,” Bell said. “Just a minute.”
It was scarier, somehow, now that she was actually holding her child, now that the reality of what had occurred right next to Carla was so grimly apparent. To keep panic at bay Bell focused on the specific reality of the young woman in her arms, on the fixed dimensions, the visceral details. Bell was keenly aware of Carla’s thin shoulders, of the beguilingly soft texture of her daughter’s short dark shingle of hair, of the jaunty smell of the Herbal Essences Fruit Fusions shampoo that Carla used—all strangely juxtaposed with the solemn proximity of death, death that spread out just beyond this neat little corner into which the customers had been corralled.
“Mom,” Carla said. “Gotta breathe, you know?”
Bell relaxed a bit, but knew she needed to maintain physical contact, knew she could not afford to break the circuit. Hands still clamped on Carla’s shoulders, she moved her head back, so that she could look directly into her daughter’s eyes.
“You’re okay? Really?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
Carla nodded. Her lips were tucked in tight. She was afraid to go beyond single-word answers at this point, afraid she’d start sobbing and not be able to stop. Afraid she’d turn into Mr. Goatee.
