A Killing in the Hills (40 page)

Chill hated guys like Eddie. Guys who got high. It was disgusting, letting yourself reach the point where you were out of control. Chill knew a lot of guys in his line of work who couldn’t keep their hands off the merchandise, but that wasn’t him. He’d tried pot once, just once, and hated it, hated the burning throat and the way it left him: hungry, clawingly hungry, with a bad case of the giggles. The other stuff, the pills, he hadn’t touched. Never would. He needed to keep himself sharp. Mind clear. Ready.

He admired the boss for doing that, too. For never touching the crap he sold. The boss was a businessman. He’d started out dealing pills, same as everybody. He had a good source. Then he’d added heroin, the new kind from Mexico, cheap stuff, and it was smart, because the pills ended up costing too much for the folks around here, once they got going.

That fact turned Chill into the bad guy, showing up and counting the money they handed him and telling them they didn’t have enough, he couldn’t give them anything, or maybe just a few pills, not what they wanted, worse than nothing at all, and then watching them fall apart. The guys’d threaten him. The women’d drop their eyes to his crotch and lick their lips. Like Lorene, they were usually skinny and skanky, and while Chill wasn’t too particular, he didn’t like to mix things that way. Business and pleasure. Or what passed for pleasure.

In the end, lots of the guys, too, would offer to do whatever he wanted,
just gimme them pain pills please please I’m not doin’ so good you can see that cancha
but that disgusted Chill, the idea of some guy sucking him off for a bunch of pills. Okay, fine, so he had let a guy do it to him once, just once, but it was disgusting. After, he’d punched the guy in the face.

Heroin was a better deal. Didn’t cost much, compared to pills. Kids, especially, liked it. High school kids liked the sound of it, the sound of the word, all that it stood for, the history of it, the legend, Sid and Nancy, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, and they liked all the shit that went with it, the needles and the spoons and the plastic tubing and the little Bic lighters. The Bic lighters came in all colors: red, green, black, white, purple, yellow. You could pick your favorite color. They always had ’em in a box at the checkout at the 7-Eleven, all the different colors. The kids liked the swagger, too, that went along with it. With the life.

Even the word
rehab
had a click to it. A shine. Movie stars did rehab. Rock stars. You read about it all the time.

He heard a moan in the backseat. Chill took a quick look over his shoulder.

He’d been driving in the mountains, the piece-of-shit car lurching and grinding up the steep inclines, because there was almost nobody on these roads, and it was getting really dark now, seriously dark, so all he could see in his backseat was the curve of a small body, crushed into a tight ball. She coughed a few times, wet gurgling coughs that went on for a long, long time, coughs that could mean she was choking, not getting enough air, and he thought,
Don’t die on me now girlie not yet
because finally he’d had an idea, an idea about where to go and what to do with her, an idea that had been coiled in the back of his thoughts the same way she was curled in the backseat of his car.

He needed someplace dramatic. Like what you’d see in a movie. Anything less – a motel room or a 7-Eleven – would be embarrassing. This had to be spectacular. He wanted a place that people would remember, so that, forever after, when they passed it, they would look at each other and nod and know that everybody was thinking the same thing.

That’s where Chill Sowards did it. Right there. Big standoff. Hostage situation. He was way outnumbered. Hell of a thing. Guy’s got elephant balls. No question
.

In the backseat, Carla moaned again. Her coat scratched against the vinyl car seat. She was moving. Shifting around. He hoped she wasn’t going to throw up or something. He’d be trapped in here with the smell. Fucking gross, is what it’ll be. Fucking disgust—

Goddamnit
.

Big lights, coming up behind him. Red lights. Filling his rearview mirror. He had to squint. Little
yip-yip
of a siren. The siren wasn’t needed; he’d slowed down right away.

He couldn’t out run anybody. Not in this piece-of-shit car.

Chill yanked the compact over to the berm and waited. His gun was on the passenger seat. He slid it under the pile of other stuff on the seat, under the rattling little city of trash: the Ruffles bags and the KFC boxes and the Dolly Madison wrappers and the packs of cigarettes, everything dumped together.

Thing was, though, he could reach for the Steyr if he needed to, could reach under the trash and swing it up at the window, could give this asshole cop a howdy like he’d never had before. In one second. Less.

If the guy gave him any problem, that’s what he’d have to do. He didn’t want to do it, he didn’t want to take the time, because he’d have to get out then and make sure the guy was really dead and all, but if he had to, he would.

Rolled down his window. Stuck out an elbow. Casual-like.

‘Yeah, officer? Somethin’ I can do for you?’

48

Teddy Wolford had been a deputy with the Collier County Sheriff’s Department for less than a month. Law enforcement was not the career he had dreamed about; that distinction belonged to NASCAR. Not as a driver, but as somebody working in the pits. He’d been told he had good hands. He was strong and he knew cars, so he figured he had a shot.

Never worked out. Nothing ever did, right? Not like you plan it. So here he was, nineteen years old, with a two-month-old baby, Danielle Marie, and he was married to Patty Weeks because there was no other choice. He didn’t follow NASCAR much on TV anymore. No point to it.

He’d heard that the sheriff’s department was hiring and so here he was, Deputy Teddy Wolford. He had to patrol the back roads on the overnight shift – the shit shift is what they called it – and he couldn’t complain because he was new, he was low man on the totem pole.

He was supposed to keep his radio on at all times, but nobody did. The other guys had wised him up. If you had your radio on and you got a call, you had to respond, and while that was okay most of the time, there were nights when you needed a break. So you turned it off for a little bit and if they asked you about it, you said you’d been taking a piss in the woods. That crackling static could get on your nerves. And he liked the quiet up in these mountains, liked to drive on the dark mountain roads and think about nothing.

Deputy Wolford, then, had not been privy to the initial bulletins requesting extra vigilance because a man suspected of felony kidnapping was at large, somewhere between Alesburg and Acker’s Gap.

‘Where you headin’?’ he asked.

The driver was a kid, even younger than Teddy was. Bad skin, toothless grin. Tiny eyes, turned-up nose. He looked like a pig.

Good thing he was a skinny guy, Teddy thought, or the nickname ‘Porky’ would’ve been hung around his neck in third grade and never taken off again. The passenger seat looked like somebody had dumped a trash can on it. The car smelled like cigarettes and sweat. Had it been cleaner, better-looking, Teddy would’ve been more suspicious. This guy, though, was like everybody else he knew. Hell, he was like Teddy himself.

‘Oh, just driving around.’ Chill kept his hands on the wheel, where the guy could see them. He knew that was important.

‘Just driving around.’

‘Yep.’

‘Well, you were swerving a little bit back there. But you don’t look or sound like you’ve been drinking.’

‘No, sir. I leave that to my girlfriend.’ Chill used a head-tilt to indicate the backseat. It was better, he figured, to mention her first, before the officer saw her. Make it clear he had nothing to hide. ‘Got herself shit-faced tonight. Again. Out with her girlfriends. They called and asked me, could I come pick her up? Before she did some real damage to herself.’

Teddy leaned to his right. Squinted at the window. He saw a lump. Heard a moan.

‘She don’t look so good.’

‘Well, officer,’ Chill said, ‘she don’t smell so good, neither.’

They both laughed.

‘Been there,’ Teddy said.

Chill waited. He felt sweat crawling down his neck. Felt like ants.

His fingers twitched. Gun could be in his hand real quick. He thought about the cop’s head, about how it would look when it blew up, the blood and bone and brain, and he thought about how it would all happen so fast that the cop’s face wouldn’t even get a chance to look surprised. Wouldn’t be time for that.

Chill could play it either way.

He could shoot or not shoot. He didn’t really care.

A second passed.

Another.

Officer Wolford smiled. Stood up straight again, after bending over to look in the back window. Two taps on the roof of the car. That was a habit with Teddy Wolford, his way of saying good-bye. Just like the guys in the pit did it, when they’d finished their work and were sending the car back out onto the track, tank topped off, lug nuts tightened.

Tap tap
. Take care. Good luck.

‘Okay, buddy,’ he said. ‘You get that gal of yours to a safe place, soon as you can. And watch yourself on the road. You hear me? Don’t want no accidents.’

‘No, sir.’

‘You have a good night.’

‘You, too.’

And so because Teddy Wolford was new, because he was tired and bored, because he didn’t follow protocol and challenge the sweaty man in the compact car – because of all those things, and other things, too, unknown and unknowable things – Danielle Marie would end up having herself a daddy, a daddy she knew, a daddy who played with her and took care of her, surprising himself again and again over the years with how much he loved her, surprising everybody. She had a daddy, instead of what might have happened. Instead of her having to grow up with just the stories, just pictures of a man in a deputy’s uniform who’d been murdered on a mountain road on a cold November night when she was barely two months old.

Chill passed the peppy little sign on the right-hand side of the road, the white one with green letters and green piping around the edges, that said
WELCOME TO ACKER’S GAP. GLAD YOU STOPPED BY. HOPE YOU CAN STAY AWHILE
.

He passed the post office. The storefront public library. A payday loan place.

The street seemed empty, hollowed out, as if some lumbering piece of heavy equipment had come along earlier that day and pushed everything except the buildings into a big pile and then bumped over the pile, smashing it down. The reason it looked that way, Chill knew, was the cold. It was just too damned cold for most people to be walking around after dark tonight.

He slowed down even more. He saw a man hurrying to a Dodge pickup parked in a No Parking zone, crossing the street in front of Chill’s vehicle, shoulder-length hair swinging every which way in the wind, preoccupied, head down, steps quick but careful, one hand holding his coat closed at the throat. The man didn’t even look up. He arrived at his truck, ripped open the door, slid inside. The truck jumped away from the curb and was gone, engine screaming at the effort needed to get going so quickly in this crazy cold.

A thin layer of frost was smeared across the sidewalks. In the patches where the streetlights reached, the glittering made them look almost magical. Almost like stars, Chill thought; it was as if stars were trapped in the sidewalk. They kind of twinkled.

You stupid-ass
.

Twinkled. Yeah, right
.

He drove slowly past the courthouse. The downtown was a dead place.

Past the Walgreens.

Past a bank, and then a coin laundry.

Past a thrift store called Second Time Around.

Past a bar. Its big front window was dark, covered by a thick rumpled drape, but you could tell what it was by the neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign hanging by two wires.

Past Cappy’s Shoe Repair and Custom-Fit Orthotics. Past a store that sold comic books and video games. The next couple of storefronts were empty, with
FOR LEASE
sloppily whitewashed on their big front windows.

Past the Salty Dawg. Parking lot still blocked off, which pleased him. Yellow tape wound around black barrels, one set in each corner.

Then he spotted it. The square hulking place just down the block from the Salty Dawg. He remembered it from Saturday, remembered flying past the place when he peeled out, trigger hand still trembling a little bit, still vibrating, body so jazzed up and jangling that there’d been a crazy part of him that thought he maybe didn’t need the car at all, that maybe he could fly like a bird or even make himself invisible.

He’d been through Acker’s Gap lots of times, he’d noticed this building, but never cared enough to ask what the hell it was. Big windows on all sides. Biggest one in front. Like a big dead eye.

Perfect.

Just what he was looking for.

He picked up his cell.

His thumb was so greasy with sweat that it kept sliding off the numbers. Finally he got it right.

911
.

49

The sheriff’s cell went off. Bell, sitting at the kitchen table, clasping and then reclasping her hands, watched his face as he listened. It seemed to grow grayer by the minute. He didn’t blink.

‘Okay,’ Nick said. He was standing by the counter, in front of the green plastic dish drainer. He hadn’t taken off his coat or his hat. ‘Okay. Patch him through. And then you know what to do.’ He slapped a big palm over the tiny mouthpiece. ‘It’s the nine-one-one operator. Says a caller wants to speak directly with me.’ A pause. ‘He says he’s the guy who shot up the Salty Dawg.’ Another pause. ‘He’s got Carla.’

Bell bolted from her seat. She stood up so quickly that the violence of the motion sent the chair toppling backward. It bounced and clattered against the kitchen floor, sounding like a small avalanche of lids and saucepans. Bell paid no attention to it.

Just before the call came in, she had poured two big mugs of coffee, one for herself and one for Nick, from the pot she’d hastily made. She’d needed something to do with her hands.

The sheriff had been on the phone constantly since his arrival here, pacing, working through his checklist: law enforcement officials in neighboring counties, hospitals, Carla’s friends and teachers.