Fast Falls the Night

by Julia Keller

  “Okay,” Jake had said. “I’ll look into it.” He was hired right away. He stayed with the Beckley Police Department for twelve years. Gradually he cultivated a new personality: cheerful, outgoing, gung-ho. Quick with the quip. He discovered that people asked you fewer questions about yourself if you seemed happy and chatted with them in an abstract way. They left you alone—whereas if you were quiet and brooding, they were relentless. They poked and prodded and tried to entice you into personal conversation. He married a woman named Nancy Barron, an English teacher at the Catholic high school, St. Joseph’s, but after less than a year they both realized that the marriage was a mistake. She didn’t love him and he didn’t love her. The divorce was simple because there was no emotion and no money; in other words, there was nothing to argue over, nothing to be bitter about. When Jake heard about the opening in the Raythune County Sheriff’s Department, he filled out the paperwork right away. He was ready for a change.

  And now here he was.

  Jake looked down at his right hand. It was splayed on the plaid armrest. An old scar kinked across the back of his palm. When he was fourteen years old he had caught his hand on a barbed wire fence. The cuts had seemed routine, superficial, but they became infected and left him with a quirky line of scars.

  Lesson learned: Like it or not, you wear your life.

  New job, new people. At first he was sure he had made a mistake. He thought Charlie Mathers was a clown and a goofball and a fat, useless fool, and he thought the prosecutor, Belfa Elkins, was a bitchy know-it-all. Her assistants, Rhonda Lovejoy and Hickey Leonard, struck him as incompetent losers. But a funny thing happened as the months passed and as Jake watched them do their jobs. He got it. He began to understand why each of them followed the path they did: Why Charlie presented himself as an easygoing, amiable fellow who sort of rolled and squeaked along harmlessly as if he sported the tiny wheels of a kid’s toy instead of feet, and why Rhonda and Hick were apt to answer a question about courtroom strategy with a long story about somebody’s second cousin and the night his bluetick hound dog had puppies in the back seat of a Pontiac. Law enforcement in a place like Acker’s Gap was fluid and untidy. There were no square corners, only curves. Jake’s hometown wasn’t a large city, either, but it was a city, and the difference between police work done against the backdrop of sidewalks and neighborhoods and a deputy sheriff’s duties in a largely rural county was profound. There were the distances, for one thing. Those nights he parked on the ridge with the engine off, watching the mountains, he was inclined to contemplate the enormous spaces between things out here, the vast gaps and the spreading vacancies. You had to fill those spaces with something. It was your choice, it was each man’s and each woman’s right to pick, but it had to be something: God or sex or money or family or work or food or hopelessness. Or alcohol and drugs.

  He reached for a notebook. He kept one on the table next to his recliner, along with a pencil. He made a list of the small-time dealers he could recall off the top of his head. Jake and his colleagues knew who the dealers were. The trick wasn’t in the knowing. The trick was in catching them in the act, and then deciding if it was worth all the aggravation of hauling somebody in for selling ten dollars’ worth of tramadol. These were not major distributors; these were local people who had been caught selling a few pills here and there, or heroin when they had it, and then went right back to it once they were released from jail:

  RAYLENE HUGHES

  TAMMY KINCAID

  JEB SAWYER

  LEO SMITH

  He drew a line through Sawyer’s name. Sawyer, he remembered, had died four months ago. Jet Ski accident out on Charm Lake.

  He looked at the remaining three names. One of them, most likely, was the distributor of the tainted heroin. He would check them out today, one by one. He sent Sheriff Harrison a short text to that effect.

  The doorbell startled him.

  What the hell?

  He wasn’t expecting company. Anybody who knew him well enough to come by without calling first would also know he had worked the night shift; he would be sleeping now. Ideally.

  Jake started toward the front door. Then he remembered that he was in his underwear. He made a quick detour toward the staircase, grabbing a pair of gray sweatpants that hung over the banister. He yanked them on. Tied the drawstring. Whoever it was would have to deal with his T-shirt; he didn’t have a shirt handy.

  He opened the door.

  Molly Drucker stood on the front porch, her face shiny with tiredness because, like him, she had worked all night. The skin around her eyes was pouched and the eyes themselves were a little cloudy. She had taken off her bandana, and her hair had asserted its fundamental independence. She was still in her work clothes; the polo shirt was rumpled and the knees of her trousers were stamped with dirt. Jake knew the origin of that dirt. She had had to kneel in the ditch to save the last two overdose victims.

  For a quick, strange second he doubted what he was seeing. It felt way too much like an odd and beautiful dream, arising directly out of sleep deprivation and his own deep hopefulness. She seemed to have materialized from the sheer force of his desire.

  Because he realized, as he stood there with his hand cupped sideways on the edge of the open door, that no matter what else he had been thinking about since he got home this morning, he had also, behind the screen of those surface thoughts, been thinking about her.

  But it was real, all right. It was Molly Drucker. Jake’s heart gave a little leap in his chest as reality insisted it be recognized.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” She was embarrassed. He could tell. She raised her eyebrows up and down, in what seemed to be a silent, rueful acknowledgment that her being here was a tad peculiar, and she spun her gaze around the small porch. A corn broom slanted in the corner. The only furniture was a single lawn chair. The floorboards needed repainting. That job was on Jake’s list, along with making the man cave in the basement. And about ten thousand other projects, too.

  “I had your address,” she said, “from that time you invited me. To your party.”

  Right. His party. Back when Charlie had announced his retirement, Rhonda Lovejoy had persuaded Jake to throw a party for him, even though party-throwing was not the sort of thing Jake Oakes did. His decision to host was predicated on the fact that he saw it as the perfect opportunity to ask Molly to his house—Just a small group of us getting together for Charlie, it’ll be people you know—and Molly had said, “Maybe.” He gave her his home address. But she didn’t show. The next time they worked together, she told him that something had come up. A family thing. “Sure, no problem,” he had said, covering his disappointment with breezy nonchalance.

  And now here she was. On his front porch.

  Jake let a crazy idea spiral up from the center of his mind. Maybe she was here to tell him that she had been thinking about him, too, and that she wanted to get to know him better. Sure, it would be tough—interracial couples were not exactly common around here—but dammit, life is short, and if they enjoyed each other’s company then it shouldn’t matter what other people …

  “So I’m sorry to just show up like this,” Molly said, “but I’ve got my brother Malik with me. He wanted to talk to you.”

  Jake leaned to one side, to see around her. A white Chevy Silverado was parked at the curb. A young black man sat in the passenger seat, his right arm hanging out the open window. He wasn’t looking at the house; instead he looked straight ahead. His hair was cut very close to his scalp and his profile seemed soft, tentative, not settled or permanent. Jake was brought up short again by just how little he knew about Molly’s life. He didn’t know she had a brother. Did she have any other siblings? He didn’t know if her parents were still living. Or who her friends were. He didn’t know where she’d gone to school or why she had stayed in West Virginia.

  “Okay,” Jake said. He had no idea what was going on here, but he didn’t need to know. This was Molly. At his house. “Y
ou guys want to come in?”

  “Yeah. Thanks. I’ll get Malik.”

  He watched her descend the porch steps with that grace and rhythm and nimbleness he had admired from the first moment he saw her. Yet he was also annoyed at himself for taking specific note—Here we go again, he thought—of her body and the way she moved through the world. His mind should have been on higher things, right? On hunting drug dealers and saving lives and keeping the peace and all of that. He was a deputy sheriff. But he was also a man, a human being, and a thickness came into his throat while he observed her.

  He realized all over again just how much he was attracted to her—her body, yes, but also the abstract essence of her, and the competent, strong woman she was at her core, a fact of which he was certain because he had worked with her, and nothing tells you more about somebody, he believed, than working with her—and he also realized how much it hurt, this longing inside him, this constant, constant yearning.

  Bell

  10:10 A.M.

  “Carfentanil.”

  Collier County Deputy Kyle Hunsacker said the word slowly and carefully, as if the syllables themselves were dangerous and by all rights should be handled with heavy gloves and tongs.

  She remembered the first time she had seen the word written down. It was two years ago, in a report from the governor’s task force on drug abuse prevention. “Carfentanil” looked instantly sinister, owing to its length and unfamiliarity. Back then, she wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. Part of her wished she was still unsure; she wished she had no need to know anything at all about it.

  “So that’s what we’re dealing with,” Bell said. “Your best guess, anyway.”

  Hunsacker gave her a single solemn nod, like a pulse beat.

  Somebody let out a short sigh. Bell was looking down at her notes when the sigh came, and so she couldn’t be sure of the source; it was a natural response to this new and appalling information delivered at the outset of the meeting she had convened.

  It might have come from Sheriff Harrison, who stood next to the closed door of Bell’s office, arms crossed, the flat brim of her brown hat pulled so low that her chin was the most visible part of her face, or it could have emanated from Deputy Brinksneader, also standing, who occupied the spot on the other side of the door. He, too, still wore his brown hat, and he, too, had crossed his arms, and so the two of them looked like brown-uniformed, black-booted bookends, propping up the wooden rectangle between them. But the mystery sigher also could have been Hickey Leonard, the assistant prosecutor, or Rhonda Lovejoy, the other assistant prosecutor. They sat next to each other on the small couch across from Bell’s desk.

  Or the culprit might have been Bell herself. She had done that once during a county commissioners meeting—let out a sigh of despair without realizing that she had done so, causing Commissioner Sammy Burdette to glare at her and snap, “You got something to say, Mrs. Elkins? I’d thank you to say it, then, and quit with the sound effects. This ain’t Hollywood.” Sammy liked her and respected her. His remark had been sparked by frustration over a shrinking county tax base, not animosity toward the prosecutor.

  Hunsacker cleared his throat, ready for the next question. He had driven over here this morning at Bell’s request, after Sheriff Harrison suggested he be included. Collier had had a rash of overdoses the previous week.

  He stood in front of Bell’s desk like a middle-schooler giving a book report: shoulders back, spine straight, iron set to his jaw when he was listening instead of talking. There was a chair for visitors, angled toward the desk, but no one sat in it; as long as Bell had been a prosecutor, she had never persuaded a deputy on duty to sit down. They always wanted to stand. Hick and Rhonda had chosen the couch, and so the empty chair took on an unnatural importance in the room—far more than it would have, Bell speculated, if somebody had just sat down in the damned thing. What was it about deputies and the necessity of standing at attention all the time?

  If Jake Oakes were here, he would be standing, too. He had offered to come in for the briefing, the sheriff had told Bell, but she said no; they could fill him in later. The office was crowded as it was. And Jake needed to start tracking down dealers, anyway.

  “No doubt in your mind,” Bell said.

  Hunsacker nodded again. He was very young and very blond. His face was so pale it was almost translucent, and it glowed with a permanent pink blush. His uniform shirt had been ironed to within an inch of its life. Seconds after he entered Bell’s office he had pulled a small blue spiral-bound notebook from his breast pocket. He referred to it as he spoke.

  “That’s what the tests showed in our case and this sounds mighty similar,” he said. “We had twelve overdoses in a four-day period. Turns out the heroin had been cut with carfentanil. As you folks know, it’s a hundred times more potent than fentanyl—the usual stuff they use to stretch out the heroin. It’s used to tranquilize elephants, if you can believe that. We were just lucky not to have any deaths.” He swallowed, setting his large Adam’s apple into conspicuous motion. “I hear that wasn’t the case here in Raythune last night.”

  “So where would somebody get it?” Rhonda asked.

  “You can order carfentanil off the Internet,” Hunsacker replied.

  Hick Leonard made a noise of black disdain in the back of his throat. “Always the damned Internet,” he muttered. “You ask me, the devil’s got a new right-hand man—and it’s called the Internet.” Hick was nearly seventy. He remained physically spry, but sometimes his age showed through in his attitude.

  “So let’s review,” Bell said. She needed to keep them focused. “We’ve got heroin coming into Raythune County that more than likely has been laced with carfentanil. We’ll be getting that confirmed by lab tests just as soon as they’re available. From what I’ve read, a flake of it no bigger than your fingertip can kill you. Isn’t that right, Deputy Hunsacker?”

  “Right. In fact, we were told to warn first responders to avoid any skin contact with victims at the scene without gloves on. You can get it into your own system that way. So field tests of suspicious substances are strictly prohibited for the time being. Carfentanil is way, way too potent to take a chance with.”

  Bell started to ask another question, but was sidetracked by the sound of a text coming in on her cell. This was shaping up to be the kind of day in which she couldn’t ignore a text. She picked up her phone and glared at the screen. The message was from Shirley. Her sister wanted to meet for lunch today at JPs. Fine, Bell thought. Whatever. She was annoyed at the interruption, but it wasn’t Shirley’s fault. Bell had encouraged her sister to come downtown more often, so that they could keep in better touch. Shirley didn’t know that Bell was in the middle of a meeting.

  Bell texted back K and returned her attention to the room.

  “Mexico, right?” said Sheriff Harrison. “Same as always.” She pushed herself off from the wall and moved a step or two closer to Bell’s desk, tightening the circle. Her arms stayed crossed.

  “Yeah,” Hunsacker said. “That’s the supply route—they come up from the Southwest. Usually there’s a stop in Chicago and then they spread on down through Ohio and Kentucky and West Virginia.”

  “And heroin’s a hell of a lot cheaper than pain pills,” Hick said, “so that’s what folks turn to now.” He knew that every person present was aware of that fact. Sometimes, though, he needed to speak a truth just to have it on the record. Things that would have seemed astonishing a few years ago—regular, everyday people taking heroin, for God’s sake—were commonplace realities now. Hick, Bell knew, was afraid that if he didn’t declare them out loud every now and again, he and his colleagues would lose the keen edge of their outrage. They would start to accept the unacceptable.

  Rhonda Lovejoy leaned forward from her seat next to him on the couch. She was wearing a hot pink pantsuit and white sandals. She was a heavy woman, and she planted her elbows on the tops of her thighs to accommodate the shift in her center of gravity. “So what did you a
ll do?” she asked Hunsacker. “How’d you let the addicts know about the danger?”

  “We didn’t,” he answered, “because we couldn’t. Not enough personnel. We just waited it out. Let it blow over.”

  His meaning was clear: They had let addicts do what it was that addicts did, and then the paramedics had moved in, administered naloxone to save the lives that could be saved, and then everyone sat back and hoped that the next batch of heroin would be cut with something less deadly.

  Silence held the room for a few seconds. Bell sensed that each person present was contemplating the implications of that strategy in light of her or his personal philosophy of law enforcement. Sheriff Harrison and the deputies—Steve Brinksneader and Kyle Hunsacker—probably approved; they were realists, having given up long ago on the idea that addicts might eventually see the light. They didn’t waste their time or their energy on hope. They dealt with the problems set before them, one by one, working down each day’s grim list. And frankly, the task of warning addicts that the current poison they intended to cram into their sweaty, twitching bodies was a great deal worse than the poison they typically crammed into their sweaty, twitching bodies did seem to reek of pointlessness. People never changed.

  Rhonda and Hick, though, were prosecutors, and prosecutors had to believe, at least theoretically, in the possibility of redemption. They had to maintain a smidgen of hope—or else they would become so bitter, so jaded, and so sardonic, that they could not argue effectively with judges or make deals with defense attorneys or extract pledges of cooperation from defendants. If they operated like cops—believing the worst about people, always—they couldn’t do their jobs.