by Julia Keller
Bell stood up. This wasn’t just a condolence visit. It couldn’t be. There was too much at stake.
“I have to ask you something, Dot. I know Sheriff Harrison has already gone over this with you, but I want to you to think about it one more time. Because it’s getting worse out there.”
No reply.
“You can help us do our jobs,” Bell continued. “We all want the same thing—to get these drugs off the streets. So I need to ask you to think again. Do you have any idea where Sally Ann got her drugs? Any clue at all? Something she said, maybe. A name. A place. An offhand remark. Anything.”
Dot shook her head. “I didn’t talk to her anymore. And she sure as hell didn’t talk to me.”
She wasn’t looking at Bell. She was looking at a spot across the room. There was nothing there. Suddenly Bell was reminded of those times in high school when she would pass Dot Burdette in the hall and Dot would ignore her, would act as if Bell was invisible or—worse—a piece of garbage. Bell was something that had blown in through an open door; you waited for the custodian to pick it up or sweep it away.
How desperately Bell had wanted to belong, and how much it would have mattered to her if, just once, Dot had said hello to her, or made eye contact, or acknowledged in some small way—a way that would have cost Dot nothing—that Belfa Dolan was a human being.
None of that mattered now.
Pam
4:27 P.M.
The tally had risen to twenty. It was time to send Bell another text, hard on the heels of the text that Pam herself had just received. Time to forward the names and ages of the latest overdose victims, a list that had been supplied to the sheriff four minutes ago by Agnes Cooper, an ER nurse at the Raythune County Medical Center:
MELANIE STOVALL, 27
REX SMITHIES, 30
ANN MARIE MCCORKLE, 22
SAM WEEKS, 24
No fatalities in this bunch. At least not yet.
Pam hit the tiny arrow on her screen. She sat back in the driver’s seat of the Blazer. She had just left her office and relocated herself behind the wheel of the massive black vehicle parked in front of the courthouse. It was the first time she had relaxed all day. The respite would last only a few minutes. Maybe less.
The black leather made the interior uncomfortable on summer days. She could turn on the engine and crank up the AC, sure, but that would be a waste of county resources in a place that had nothing to spare.
She could feel the heat on the headrest. It made the back of her scalp tingle. Pam hated hot days. She had grown up in an unheated log cabin in a remote area of Raythune County, miles from any paved road, and she found cold to be a deep comfort. Heat, on the other hand, made her nervous. Things changed in the heat—they melted, they ran together or fell apart or were otherwise ruined. Whereas in the cold, things became more like what they already were, sealed up inside their frozen essence. Hard. True.
It wasn’t just the heat that was irritating her. Bell had asked for constant updates on overdose victims and each time Pam provided one, she was reminded of how profoundly she opposed this strategy. Keeping tabs on addicts, chasing a dealer who probably didn’t know that he or she was selling a lethal form of the usual product—it was a waste of time. There were so many other duties she’d had to put off for this. It offended her on a level so deep that she felt as if she was walking around in a state of low-simmering rage.
Pam and Bell often disagreed—but usually it blew over. They would never be friends, but they respected each other. They had very different personalities. They had very different jobs to do. They would agree to disagree. And then they would move on.
Not this time. This time, the disagreement seemed to have opened up a profound rift between them. It felt as if it might be permanent, lasting long after the current crisis was handled.
Did Pam want addicts to die? No. Of course not. But was it the responsibility of the sheriff’s department to talk people out of killing themselves, if that was what they wanted to do? Carfentanil might be deadly—but nobody was force-feeding it to them. They had already made the decision to ruin their lives.
Pam didn’t like the heat in here, but she relished the quiet. So she stayed right where she was for another minute or so, head still angled back against the headrest. It was an indulgence. She was already late for an emergency meeting with Dr. Vernon Childress, head of the medical center. The squads and their loads of overdose victims would, from this point forward, be diverted to the much larger hospital in Blythesburg, but that presented myriad jurisdictional issues and a whopping load of extra paperwork—which was, of course, exactly what she had signed on for. It was what a sheriff did. Her job was more about solving problems and deploying resources than it was about shooting a gun or chasing down some bottom-feeding scuzzball.
She had learned that from Nick Fogelsong. She had been his chief deputy for five years. When he resigned, she told him she wanted to run for the office. She asked for his blessing. He gave it, although he asked her twice if she was sure that she really wanted the job. She said, “Yeah. I do.” He looked at her a long time. Then he nodded and said, “Well, then, I’ll support you one hundred percent. You’ll be great.”
She was. And she would continue to be. She had been proving herself her whole life, because she came from dirt. That was the only accurate way to put it. The Harrisons were a notorious clan of petty thieves and lazy liars and mean drunks and nonstop troublemakers who lived in a daisy chain of dingy trailers out by Charm Lake. The only one who had made something of himself was Pam’s father; he had joined the Marines the second he was old enough, served in Operation Desert Storm, received citations for marksmanship and commendations for bravery. When he returned from Kuwait he took his daughter—his wife, Sharon, refused to leave the trailer compound—and moved to a small cabin on Indian Ridge, determined to put both geographical and psychic distance between his family and himself and his little girl. He and Pam did fine. The cabin was off the grid: no electricity, no running water. He taught her to shoot. They ate what they killed or trapped. It was good preparation for being in law enforcement: If you don’t hunt, you don’t survive. Her father was a good man, but he was a hard man, too. If he had not been hard, he could never have escaped his family, every single member of which—including his wife—he hated. He would not let them anywhere near his daughter. By teaching her about hate, he taught her about love.
A thought came to her, not for the first time, but more powerfully than before, in the light of the day’s ongoing trauma: Maybe that’s why she had no sympathy for addicts. Because they were weak. They had given up. And the man who had raised her was a fighter. He’d trained her to be one, too.
The rap-rap on the window startled her. The woman doing the interrupting—she had a big smile, a chunky build, and a fussed-over hairdo—was well known to her. After Pam pushed the button to roll down the window, Tina Lawton waved and said, “Hey, Sheriff—how’re you doing?”
The enthusiasm jarred her. So did the smile. Pam’s thoughts were so tightly entwined with the past and the heat and the day’s rush of emergencies that it took her a moment to recover. Most people, she reminded herself, didn’t yet know about what was going on all around them. Most people didn’t work in law enforcement. Most people didn’t live with a radio on their right shoulder. For most people—including Tina, a courthouse employee whom Pam had known for years—it was an ordinary late-summer day.
So far.
“Fine,” Pam said. Her standard answer. This was not the time to get into it. Tina was being friendly; she did not really want any details. “How ’bout you?”
“Doing well. Thanks. Oh, I did want to tell you that the man’s back again. The one hanging out by the bus station. In the Army jacket.”
It took Pam a moment to catch up. “Right. From last week.”
“Yeah. I was coming back from lunch and saw him on the street. He’s all hunched over. Smells bad, too.”
“I’ll keep an eye out. Not m
uch I can do, though, unless he commits a hostile act.”
“He has a stick. Waves it around.”
“Not sure that would be considered a hostile act.”
Tina scrunched up her nose. “He yells at people going by. Something like, ‘It’s coming.’ And he gets a real funny look in his eye. He ain’t right in the head.”
“Maybe not. But still, my hands are pretty much tied until he’s an active threat.” Being crazy isn’t a crime, Tina, she wanted to say. Neither is smelling bad. If it were, I’d have to lock up three-fourths of the county.
“Okay, Sheriff. Just wanted you to know.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Have a good afternoon.” Tina waved and began her slow climb up the courthouse steps.
Pam watched her. In a way, she envied people such as Tina. They did not know. They would know soon enough, because the information was already on the move, as rapid and unstoppable as an injection in the bloodstream, but for now, they were in the brief lull before the storm. They could enjoy their lives for this last little bit.
That was what being sheriff was all about. You never had that lull. You always got the bad news first.
Well, second: It sounded as if the crazy man with the stick had had a little advance notice.
She fired up the SUV. Back to work.
Jake
4:38 P.M.
“Hey. Hey, you.” Jake had pulled the Blazer to the side of the road, next to the skinny kid with the blowsy pants and the flapping red shirt and the bobbing, jittery walk. Dust boiled up from under the Blazer’s tires, on account of the swerve and the sudden stop.
“Hey, you,” Jake repeated. “Hang on, okay?”
The deputy leaned over the passenger seat, trying to talk through the open window.
The kid fluttered to a halt. He put both bone-white hands on the bottom of the window frame and leaned in toward Jake the same way that Jake was leaning toward him. If somebody was watching from a distance, Jake thought, it might look like he and the kid were long-lost lovers about to kiss. The thought was both revolting and funny.
“Yeah?” the kid said. Jake placed his age at seventeen, eighteen. Certainly less than twenty. His eyes had a smeary cast to them, and his body stayed in motion even as he propped himself up against the Blazer. He tapped a rhythmless solo with his thumbs on the frame. He was high on something. Probably pot, Jake surmised. The kid’s step was too springy and his mood was too loose and cool for it to be heroin. In Jake’s experience, pot and pills made them mellow, oozy, whereas heroin made them paranoid, wound them tight. This kid wasn’t tight. If he’d been a watercolor, the reds and blues and browns would be running all over the road.
“Need your help,” Jake said.
“Sure.” Big grin. “Whatcha need?”
“Bad batch of heroin making the rounds today. Folks getting real sick. Any idea where it’s coming from?”
The kid bunched up his face. It wasn’t distaste at the idea of ratting somebody out; it was the arduous effort of thinking. Of answering a simple question, when all he really wanted to do was wallow and boogie in the sunshine.
“Nope.” The kid’s face relaxed. He had done his duty. He had thought about it.
Jake decided to press a little harder. This was the third time he had stopped during his ride out to the Starliner, the third time he had undertaken a spontaneous interrogation of someone who obviously had firsthand experience with the illegal drug trade in Raythune County. Long shots, every one of them, but he had to try. Twenty people had overdosed since midnight, including four more since he had left the courthouse. Steve Brinksneader had just texted him with the names.
“People are dying,” he said to the kid.
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. So have you heard anything about a new supply coming in? Starting yesterday?”
“Nope.”
Jake waved at the kid and sat upright in his seat again. “Okay. Thanks.” He jerked the Blazer into gear and hopped back onto the road. There was no use pushing. He had tried that with the first two people he stopped, and all he got for his trouble was a loogie plastered on the side of the Blazer and a brackish flurry of muttered obscenities. He could wash the vehicle, and the curse words were actually pretty tame when compared with the names he was typically called in the course of a workday, but the point was, it was a waste of time.
And with every minute that passed, somebody else was risking death with the bad heroin.
Wait. As opposed to all the good heroin that’s out there? Jesus.
Jake shook his head. How did any of this make sense? Why were they even bothering?
He must have asked himself that a hundred times so far today. Two hundred, maybe. This isn’t like a river that some greedy company’s filling up with pollution—and folks have to drink the water and so innocent little babies die. This is shit people do to themselves. Voluntarily. Why not let them die? Why not let them kill themselves? Saves us the time and trouble of sending out a paramedic and a deputy every damned time one of ’em keels over.
That was Steve Brinksneader’s view. He and Jake had discussed it briefly back at the courthouse, when Jake stopped in after receiving the sheriff’s summons. Steve was new enough at the job that he still thought in straight lines. He believed the world was a matter of black and white, good and evil. His mind was calibrated to absolutes. Jake recognized his own younger self in his colleague’s implacable hardness. Steve, leaning up against the big humming Pepsi vending machine in the hall outside the jail, had said, “Who gives a crap if there’s one less junkie in Raythune County? Or five less? Or ten? I mean—come on, Jake. It’s called natural selection. World’s better off.” Jake understood. There was a part of him that saw it that way, too. But as he pointed out to Steve, “Last I heard, we don’t get to decide who’s worthy of being saved. We do our jobs.” Steve kicked his boot against the vending machine—it had taken his money but withheld his Pepsi, not the first time it had played that nasty trick—and he grunted, and then both of them went back to work.
The Starliner looked even more slovenly than Jake remembered. In the muted sunshine of late afternoon, it seemed to throb in a sallow, glowering way, like a stubbed toe. There were two rusty cars in the parking lot. Jake recorded the plate numbers in his notebook, just in case.
The office door was open, a circumstance that instantly explained the vast number of flies that lifted off the front counter when he approached it. The manager glared at him. He was used to that. Cops always got The Glare. As in: What’d I do? Usually they weren’t thinking that at all—Jake had, in less stressful situations, asked people why they looked at him that way when they were seeing him for the first time, and a lot of them said, “Habit” and he believed them—but their faces changed, anyway, going from neutral to bothered and resentful. The woman’s short white hair was thin on the sides and even thinner on top. Her weight had pooled around her hips and thighs. She wore a shapeless blue garment that his grandmother, Jake remembered, would have called a house dress. He put her age at about sixty-five. The mean part of him put her IQ in the same general vicinity.
“Whatcha want?” she said in raspy voice. Her lower teeth were brown and yellow and broken. Her upper teeth—well, that was the wrong word, Jake observed. The right word was upper tooth. She embodied every cliché about West Virginia that he had ever heard, which annoyed him. He didn’t like bigots to be right. But sometimes they were.
“I’ll be real clear here, ma’am,” Jake said. “I’ve got no time to beat around the bush.”
She looked nervous now. She snagged her bottom lip with the single tooth remaining on the top row, and then released it again.
“Whatcha want?” she repeated.
“Like I said—I’m in a hurry. I need to know who’s registered here.” Jake reached for the spiral-bound notebook that was open on the linoleum counter. The page featured a list of pencil-scrawled signatures with corresponding room numbers.
The woman snatched it awa
y before he made contact. Jake did not intend to get in a tug-of-war with her. He held up his hands in surrender.
“Can’t letcha see that,” she said.
He sighed heavily, to indicate his disappointment in her. He didn’t have the authority to require her to hand over the register. Usually he didn’t need it. Most people around here well understood that no matter the manner of malfeasance in which they were engaged, the sheriff’s department was so short-staffed and overburdened that a deputy would overlook virtually anything that fell short of murder and dismemberment. So people complied with routine requests for information, knowing that any minor offenses that turned up would be conveniently forgotten.
This woman wasn’t playing along. Yet there was more going on here. Jake sensed that she wasn’t just being stubborn for the hell of it.
She was frightened.
He looked around the office. It was about the size of the front stoop of a trailer, with a single window garnished with a set of bent and age-yellowed blinds. A high wooden stool was jammed in the corner. Next to it was a round particleboard table. A dying plant sat in the middle of the table. Its crispy brown leaves drooped over the edge of the plastic pot in a fatal swoon.
He moved his eyes back to the front counter. Set into the wall perpendicular to it was a half-closed door that looked as if it led into a broom closet. The woman’s head did not move, but her eyeballs shifted in the direction of the door. Then they shifted back to Jake. She was sending him a message:
Somebody was crouching in that space. Listening. She was warning him. The person, whoever it was, must have been in the office with this woman when the Blazer pulled into the lot.
In the next few seconds, Jake made a series of decisions. He had no warrant and no probable cause to get one. Hunches didn’t count. He needed to find the local dealer, the person who could confirm that the Starliner was where a shipment had been picked up. At that point, Jake could get his warrant, giving him full authority to kick down the doors of every room in this misbegotten place, rousting out the gang members. And he’d be sure to bring backup. As urgent as the situation was, as much as he wanted to stop the tainted heroin from hitting the street, he knew better than to challenge a drug gang on his own. They were generally armed, and armed well. And there was enough money at stake to make it worth their while to fight, and fight hard.
