by Julia Keller
“Yeah. Maybe they don’t know what they’re selling—the fact that it’s so deadly, I mean. And if they do know, they probably don’t give a damn. But we can try. Addicts use what they buy within minutes after buying it. More than likely, there’s a single dealer who just finished selling the batch to these victims. We identify that dealer and shut him down.”
The sheriff began speaking again before Bell had concluded her final sentence. “We don’t usually pursue this kind of thing, and you know why,” she said. “One word. Resources.”
“I get it. But come on, Pam—five overdoses.”
“That’s a lot, I’ll grant you.”
“So let’s do something about it.”
Bell was surprising herself. She had not felt this passionate about anything in quite a while, least of all anything to do with concern over addicts and their self-inflicted miseries. She had enough on her plate just trying to achieve justice for the wholly innocent, for the people who hadn’t regularly summoned their own misfortune like someone whistling for a dog from the back porch.
There had been a time, of course, when such a situation would have automatically kicked her conscience into high gear. She would have demanded—not requested, demanded—that they do everything they possibly could to hunt down the local dealer. And she would have rallied others to the cause. But the warrior part of her had diminished over the years. It was still there, but it had been systematically ground down. Trimmed back. Worn away, like a shelf of rock exposed to wind and water and time. Bell had spent too many years trying to fight the problems in Acker’s Gap: bad schools, bad roads, no jobs. Now that drugs were added to the mournful list, she felt even less motivated to jump in, waving her sword. She still did her job, but she did it mostly by the book now, methodically, calmness in her heart. No more wild crusades with fire in her eye.
And yet here she was, asking Sheriff Harrison to find a needle in a haystack. Make that a syringe in a haystack, she corrected herself.
Maybe this was a last-gasp thing. A dramatic sign-off. A final gesture before she pulled up stakes for D.C. and the law partnership with Elaine Mitford. A way of going out with a bang instead of a whimper.
Or maybe it wasn’t so narrowly personal, after all. Maybe she was just tired of the idea that some lives were disposable, that some lives didn’t count as much as other lives did. That addicts, because they were addicts, didn’t matter.
“You find that dealer,” Bell declared, “and I’ll prosecute him.”
Pam’s short silence meant she was contemplating ways and means. “Let me poke around a little bit,” she said. “Collier County’s been going through the same thing in their jurisdiction. I’ll see if I can find some links.”
Bell had another call coming in. She clicked off with the sheriff, who didn’t mind abrupt endings. She actually preferred them, Bell knew, to articulated good-byes.
“Elkins.”
There was no reply. But it was a darkly occupied silence—that is, Bell could sense the living presence behind it. A check of the caller ID confirmed her hunch.
“Dot, I’m so sorry,” Bell said. “I just heard about Sally Ann. I’m so very, very sorry for your loss.”
Suddenly the silence ended. The ensuing noise was like nothing Bell had ever heard before, an eerie shriek that scraped against the outer edge of the recognizably human.
“Oh, my God.” This was followed by an urgent, guttural gasp and a repetitive flurry of words. “Bell. Bell. Bell. Bell.”
“Where are you? Can I—”
Dot interrupted her. “They said—they said she…” There was a hard rasp as she took in a breath and then forced it out again. “My baby. My Sally Ann. She’s gone.”
“Is there anything I can—”
“Yeah. Yeah, there’s something you can do. You can find out who gave those drugs to my little girl. She didn’t know. She didn’t know what she was taking. Do you hear me? She didn’t.”
“Are you at your house? Is someone there with you? I can come over if you need me.”
“I already called my pastor. Reverend Wolford.” Dot’s voice bristled with bitterness. “And he’ll tell me, right? Tell me why God did this to me. That’s his job, right? To explain to me what kind of God would do this—would let Sally Ann suffer. She was a good girl. She just trusted the wrong people, okay? And then it got to be too late. But it wasn’t her fault. She was just a kid.” A sob.”My sweet little girl. What kind of God would be this mean? This cruel? He must hate me. That’s got to be it. He hates me. Well, then I hate him, too. The bastard.”
There was fury in Dot’s tone, a stoked-up anger rich and raw. Gone was the elegant, clipped, even slightly arrogant mien of the bank vice president, the woman whose nails were always perfectly manicured, whose hair was always sculpted and tinted a metallic shade of white-blond, the woman who had always, in Bell’s estimation, held herself apart from her tattered hometown, as if she only stayed here out of pity, and out of a desire to give lesser mortals a glimpse of what they might aspire to. That woman had disappeared. This one had a voice reaching deep into the flinty past of her ancestors from the hills of West Virginia, smearing itself with the mud of coarseness and casual brutality.
“You get them, Bell—you hear me? I mean it. You get those SOBs who sold it to her and then you leave me in a room with ’em, you got that? Just give me a minute. That’s all I need.” Her voice seemed to drop an octave, becoming even darker and harsher. “I’ll rip out their eyeballs, is what I’ll do, and then I’ll saw off their balls and I’ll jam ’em down their throats so hard their balls’ll be popping out their assholes. Swear I will.”
Bell let her talk. She let her rant. She had heard worse, much worse, before. The prosecutor’s office, Bell knew after so many years on the job, was always the low spot in the drain. It was the place where the shock and the hate and the sorrow and the ravenous desire for revenge all collected in a tangled snarl. Bell accepted that. She was only half-listening, anyway, which did not mean she was indifferent, but only that Dot’s anguish had filled her with new sense of purpose.
They had to find out who was selling the tainted heroin and stop it—fast. Sally Ann might have been the first fatality, but she wouldn’t be the last.
Jake
9:12 A.M.
He lifted his face from the basin and stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Water dripped from his chin. He had filled the sink and then used both hands to scoop up the water and fling it repeatedly into his face. Quite a lot had spilled on the floor, and splashed the pale green tiles on the wall between the mirror and the vanity, but he didn’t care about that. His face was burning up. He thought he might have a fever. He quickly overruled that, however. He didn’t have a fever. What he had was a job. A job that was mostly okay, and occasionally deeply satisfying—but that sometimes left him hollowed out with fatigue.
This was one of those times.
After clearing the scene in the Burger Boss parking lot, Jake had taken a short break. He had parked his Blazer at the edge of a steep ridge. He liked to look at the mountains late at night, their darkness set against an older and even more immense darkness—the darkness of the sky. He had given up smoking five years ago but damned if he didn’t miss it at times like these: sitting alone in his vehicle on a summer night, window down, mountains rising up in front of him. The presence of a cigarette, the glittering tip, the slow burn, the hot bitter taste of tobacco on his tongue, would only have enhanced the moment.
He had not had to make the notification, the one that went to the next of kin. Sheriff Harrison had taken care of it. Jake had made plenty of those visits himself, endured the shock, the disbelief, the anger. Once, an old lady had taken a swing at him. It wasn’t personal, he knew; she had formed a fist out of pain the moment she’d heard that her husband was dead. So he knew how to do it, how to deflect not only the blows but also the screams, or the fainting, or the cursing, or the whatever. He knew the ropes. Still, he wasn’t sorry when Harri
son took over this time. Told him she’d handle it. Turns out she knew Dot Burdette personally. Thought it might be better, coming from her. That’s what she told Jake, anyway. He knew the truth: It wasn’t going to matter who it came from.
He’d sat in his Blazer for a good long time, watching the mountains, thinking about the girl on the bathroom floor. And then his radio had crackled. His stomach heaved, right on cue. It was never good news.
Two more overdoses. This time, the victims had been discovered in a culvert next to Sayman Street, near its intersection with Elderberry Road. Jake arrived there in less than fifteen minutes, whereupon he interviewed the driver who had come upon the grisly surprise. The driver had told his story in a shaky voice: As he rounded the big curve, the headlights of his Toyota Tundra had nosed along the side of the road and picked out a couple of ragged lumps that didn’t look like they belonged there. He pulled over. His first clue that these were people and not piles of trash had come when one of them tried to sit up. Nearly scared the bejesus out of me, the driver admitted. Got to go home and change my underwear. Jake wrote it down just like the man said it. Word for word.
Shortly thereafter the paramedics arrived. It was Molly and Ernie again, a circumstance that caused Ernie to look at Jake and mutter the totally expected wisecrack, “Long time no see,” because it had been less than an hour since they had had their little rendezvous in the Marathon bathroom. The victims, a man and a woman, were lucky: They had been found quickly. Molly squirted naloxone up their noses, reviving them in minutes. Soon they were up and talking. Instead of answering Jake’s questions about the source of their supply, they cursed and complained about the naloxone. Along with saving their lives, it had blocked their bodies’ absorption of the opiates, hence they had been robbed of an anticipated pleasure and were thrust immediately into the hell of withdrawal: stomach cramps, fever, the shakes.
Jake gave them the boilerplate warnings. They told him to go to hell. Molly chimed in, explaining that they really ought to let the paramedics take them to the hospital, just to be sure they were okay. They told her to go to hell, too. Jake watched them stumble on down the road. Somewhere along the way he had lost the capacity for surprise about any aspect of human behavior.
Then Jake had put the final flourishes on his report, released the driver, said good night to Molly and Ernie, wishing them a quiet end to their shift. “You, too,” Molly had replied. Jake tried and failed to find something personal in her tone, something special, something more than just one professional being cordial to another. On his way home he had called Evelyn Munden, an ER nurse at the Raythune County Medical Center. The two girls who had overdosed in the Burger Boss parking lot were still hanging on. Their names, he found out, were Patty Mercer and Jewel Kannel. The names meant nothing to him.
Eyes still closed from the dousing he had given his face, he groped for the towel hanging from the towel rack. He rubbed at his forehead, his neck, and his cheeks, feeling the rapid encroachment of his beard, the new black bristles scraping against the towel. He really ought to shave. Save himself the trouble later. But he was too tired right now.
God, am I ever.
Five overdoses. One fatality. A bad night, you bet. But far from the worse he’d ever lived through. So why did he feel the way he felt right now—jazzed-up, jumpy, uncertain, half-afraid to turn the corner of the next five minutes of his life, because something terrible might be lying in wait for him there?
Routine tragedies were part of the job. Jake had been on duty the night a year and a half ago when a Honda Odyssey had crossed the centerline and gotten itself poleaxed by an eighteen-wheeler. Four people in the car. Three dead, one critically injured. The truck driver, too, was severely hurt and later died. And then, a month ago, two teenaged boys had wrapped their Dodge Charger around a tree out on Nash Pike. One died at the scene. The other one’s brain injury would keep him in a coma for the rest of his life. No matter how wildly the comatose kid’s mother wept and caterwauled and demanded that somebody better do something about this and I mean RIGHT NOW, the boy wasn’t going to wake up. Ever.
So, yeah. He knew a little something about dealing with death and misery. He saw them all the time. Somehow, though, the drug overdoses felt different. They took more out of you. Maybe it was because you didn’t really know where to put your sympathy. Addicts craved that sympathy; they used it to get what they wanted from their families. Jake had seen that in action, when he’d taken addicts home. The younger ones, that is. The teenagers. They seemed to love the horrified look in a mom’s or a dad’s eye, the disbelief, the appalled pity. Pity was catnip to an addict. They knew just how to use it for maximum manipulation.
Jesus, I’m as cynical as old Charlie. He’d be proud.
Jake dropped his tired butt down on the seat of the plaid recliner in his living room. He was in his boxers and undershirt. He had stripped off his deputy’s uniform, wadding it up and flinging it down the basement stairs. That was his idea of housekeeping: wad and fling. At the end of the week, he would go down and pick up the items and stuff them into the washer. Throw in a Tide pod. The basement had a cracked concrete floor and cinder block walls and massive platoons of spiders. At one point, when he had first purchased this house, he had made plans to finish the basement; he intended to turn it into a sort of man cave with carpeting and a wet bar and a big sloppy leather couch and a ginormous TV set. But he didn’t. It was one of a thousand things he meant to do but never got around to.
He was thirty-four years old—still a young man—but he had an old man’s sense of regret, of having left too many threads in his life dangling. When he contemplated any sort of change these days, from fixing up his house to asking Molly Drucker if she would like to get a plate of eggs after their shift one of these mornings, he was stymied by a sense of futility. Things seemed rigid in his life, as fixed and permanent as those mountains that he spent too much time staring at in the velvety darkness.
He knew he ought to grab some sleep, because he was on the night turn again tonight. But he was too keyed up for that. His face was still wet from the good soaking he had given it at the bathroom mirror, in a ritual that was, he surmised, probably an attempt to wash off the stain of the night. He understood that because he tended to do it every morning when he returned from his shift. Stripped down to T-shirt and boxers, he felt less naked, somehow, than he had been just a few minutes ago in his uniform. The uniform and the responsibilities it deposited on him—the duties, the knowledge—made him feel vulnerable and exposed.
He had never intended to go into law enforcement. It was his father’s idea. His mother, Pauline, died when Jake was twelve years old. When he told people that fact about himself, the reaction was always the same: A soft light came into their eyes, particularly the eyes of women, as they envisioned a poor motherless boy, far too young to endure such sorrow, forced to face the world without the comfort and guidance of maternal affection. But it wasn’t like that at all. Jake did not correct them, but he felt guilty about reaping their concern under false pretenses. Pauline was a disaster as a mother. She was selfish and conniving. She resented the hell out of him—the unwanted child whose birth had ended her youth and pinched off all her hopes of leaving Beckley, West Virginia. She had gotten pregnant with Burt Oakes’s child when she was seventeen, and everybody told her she had to marry him, and so she did—but she didn’t have to like it. She never mustered the initiative to walk out on him, which is what she very much desired but also very much feared to do, because she had no money and no job skills, and she took out her frustration on Burt and the boy. It was a kind of slow-acting poison, that frustration. Jake’s memories of his mother always involved a billowing tuft of reddish hair, a pair of narrowed eyes, and a cigarette plugged in the side of a scowling mouth, a tentacle of smoke crawling up her lean cheek as if the smoke itself was trying to flee the scene in the quickest way available. When he started fourth grade, his mother got so that she couldn’t keep any food down. The flesh seemed to f
all off her like sheets of mountain ice in the spring melt. By the time she went to a doctor, she weighed less than a hundred pounds.
The diagnosis: inoperable stomach cancer.
Jake remembered the day his father told him the news. He searched his father’s face for a clue about how he ought to react. There was no clue. He was on his own. His mother was dead in two months. His father bought him a black wool suit for the funeral. Jake remembered more about the suit than he did the funeral: The trousers were cuffed, which made him feel like he was wearing ankle weights, and the coat was as heavy across his shoulders as he imagined chain mail would have been on a jousting knight. They were studying medieval times in school.
When Jake was nearing the end of his senior year of high school, his father sat down with him at the kitchen table. He wanted to talk about Jake’s future. It was only the second time Burt Oakes had sat down like that with his son—the first was when he told Jake about his mother’s illness. Both times Burt acted strangely; he moved more slowly than usual, an air of portentousness pushing down on his limbs as if the very air had suddenly become burdensome. Burt was an accountant with the gas company. He and Jake had rubbed along for the half-dozen years that had passed since Pauline’s death. Their interactions were basic, serviceable. Burt Oakes was a quiet man who seemed to draw out the quietness in others, like rice does water; Jake had seen him quell furious emotions in other people simply by remaining calm, by looking at them with a placid, level gaze, a gaze that revealed a mild puzzlement as to what all the fuss was about.
On the day Jake’s future was decided, his father sat with his elbows on the table, fiddling with an empty coffee cup, tracing the shape of the tan ceramic handle with his index finger. “So,” his father said. “End of the month, you graduate, right?” He didn’t say it in a pointed or challenging way. Jake, who sat across from him, shrugged an affirmative. “And then what?” his father said. Jake’s reply: “Don’t know.” His father’s finger had reached the bottom of the handle’s wide curve and now started back up at the top again. “I hear,” Burt said, “that the police are hiring. All you need’s a high school diploma. You’re in good shape. Shouldn’t be a problem.” It was true: Jake played football and baseball. He excelled at both. He was tall and rangy; his long body seemed to hang from his shoulders like something on a hanger, diving in sharply at the waist. His arms and legs worked together in a smooth, natural rhythm.
