Deep Winter (10 page)

T
he trailer reeked something awful. Mindy's body had released a bunch of shit and piss, and the place smelled like a goddamn outhouse. A garbage can propped the front door wide open, but it didn't help matters much.

Sokowski sat at the kitchen table smoking another cigarette. He had found a bottle of Jack in the cabinet and was in the midst of putting a pretty big dent in it. He didn't give a shit. Who would blame him for taking a drink after he found a murdered girlfriend in her trailer? Everybody in town knew that they dated off and on over the years. He planned on playing the victim card and soaking up all the sympathy that it would bring with it. Most folks would be glad that he kicked the shit out of Danny—served the retard right. If he played this thing the correct way, he could come out looking like a goddamned hero.

Sokowski smiled to himself. He knew exactly what he would say.

The son of a bitch killed my girl. Murdered her for no good reason. I knew something was bound to happen. Goddamn retard showed up at the diner nearly every day. Always staring at her, gawking at her. He probably planned this thing for years. If he couldn't have her, he didn't want anybody else having her either.

Sokowski thought he'd even be able to work up a few tears when he delivered his sad-ass speech. Folks around here would eat that shit up. By kicking Danny's ass, he'd provided a little street justice and done a service for every father out there that had lost a daughter at the hands of some murderer. Every man in town would be lining up to thank him and admiring his self-control in not killing the stupid moron.

Carl, on the other hand, needed to keep his big fat yap shut. Sokowski knew that Carl wasn't that bright, and if he got asked too many questions and got too nervous, he would slip up about something. Sokowski wished that he'd had the chance to talk to him before he left with the sheriff, but Lester needed help unloading Danny's fat ass over at Doc Pete's.

Sokowski also wished that Lester would have just brought Danny's ass down to the station and tossed him in the lockup, but the old buzzard wanted Doc Pete to take a look at the retard's jaw. Doc Pete's was closer, Lester said. Besides that, Lester thought Danny wouldn't try anything else. Goddamned Lester. Treated everybody with kid gloves. The old bastard was more worried about how people would feel and what they would think of him than just doing his job right. He wouldn't even let Sokowski cuff Danny, for Christ's sake.

Fucker needs to go and retire already.

He poured another drink and drank it down. His head was buzzing pretty good now. The numbness gave him a sense of calm. It was
all gonna work out. Danny was so fucking dumb that he wouldn't say nothing, and even if he did, who was gonna believe a goddamned retard?

He looked over at Mindy's corpse.

Her and her big fucking mouth. If she weren't such a smart-ass bitch and just gave me a little, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.

She knew about his temper. Wasn't nothing new. She should've known better than to pop off at the mouth. He would have probably ended up getting married to the woman someday and having kids and all that happy shit. He made good money selling weed, and once Lester dropped dead or hung up his hat, Sokowski would step into the sheriff's shoes and make even more money off the county.

It's her own damn fault that she's dead.

Sokowski had witnessed death up close—it wasn't anything he hadn't seen before. Not long after he put on the deputy hat for the first time, he found his own father with his head split open like a smashed watermelon. Found him in the same barn where Sokowski currently grew his weed. The old man hadn't been dead long. Blood hadn't dried, still trickling down the walls, and the shotgun still leaned against the bastard's chest. The ten-gauge had removed the better part of his skull and splattered his pathetic brain across the barn. It was up to Sokowski to clean up the mess after they hauled away his old man's sorry ass. The old bastard was always weak. He was soft. Never had a backbone. Then he got even weaker after his whore of a wife ran off for the last time when Sokowski was sixteen. The old man became a walking shell. Many a night Sokowski could hear him crying like a goddamn baby in his bedroom. Pissing and moaning about losing his wife. Love made the old bastard weak. Sokowski could never understand it—he didn't even love his own goddamned mother. She slept around, drank like a damn fish, and
treated the two men in her life like an inconvenience. Then, on Sokowski's twentieth birthday, the old man couldn't take it anymore. Couldn't take the loneliness and knew that his whore wife wasn't ever coming back. He stuck a ten-gauge shotgun in his mouth—the same ten-gauge he gave Sokowski one Christmas—and blew his troubles away.

Sokowski wasn't weak like his old man. No sir. He'd never let some stupid bitch ruin his life.

The bottle of Jack called his name, and he answered. Poured another drink and looked over the glass at Mindy as the burn went down. Blood still worked its way out of the back of her head, soaking into the carpet. Sokowski snorted a laugh at the thought of Mindy and his old man having something in common after all—the backs of their heads split open at the end of their sorry lives.

Sokowski looked over at Mindy's phone and had a thought. Maybe he needed to stir the pot a little more. Make sure this thing looked like what he wanted it to look like.

He drank some more, then stood and dropped his cigarette into the sink. He searched through her kitchen drawers and finally found what he was looking for—a thin Yellow Pages book, dog-eared and dirty. Mindy had doodled a few flowers on the cover and written down a couple of phone numbers.

Probably some guys she's been fucking.

Sokowski considered calling their sorry asses and finding out who the hell they were, but he wanted to stay focused on the task at hand. He'd deal with them later. He thumbed through the phone book and squinted at the names and numbers that were blurry spots of ink from the whiskey. He found the number he was searching for and reached for the old rotary phone and dialed a number. After a few rings, someone on the other end picked up.

“Red's.”

“Hey, Bobby. It's Mike. Is Johnny Knolls drinking tonight?”

“We're closed, Mike.”

“Hell. I know that. But I figured that you hadn't kicked Johnny out yet. So is he there or not?”

Bobby didn't answer. Just banged the phone down on the bar and Sokowski waited and could hear the din of drinking and laughing on the other end of the line. After a long minute, a man got on the phone.

“Hey, Mike. What's up?”

“Johnny. 'Fraid I got some bad news. Been an accident out here at Mindy's. Might want to head out this way.”

Johnny asked a few questions, irritation in his voice. Sokowski said yes to a few things and reached for the bottle of whiskey.

“Best you come out and see for yourself. Gotta go. Sheriff will be here any second.”

He returned the phone to its cradle and decided to skip the glass and drink straight from the bottle. It bubbled a few times before he set it back on the counter.

Damn. Bladder's full. Have to piss like a racehorse.

He stepped over Mindy's body like she was a piece of furniture and made his way toward the bathroom.

L
ester's truck rumbled and bounced on Tokach Road back toward Mindy's trailer. He had the wipers going on high as a heavy layer of snow started coming down pretty good. Big, wet flakes pelted against the windshield from the hard wind, covering the road and making it a bitch to see. Now, with the dropping temperature, he'd have to worry about the dirt roads icing over. When they did that, they were going to be slicker than bacon grease. Like the missus always said,
When it rains it pours.

Lester had called up to the state troopers' office in Towanda from Doc Pete's office. Told dispatch about the situation he had on his hands so that they'd send a cruiser down his way. They had asked him if he had a suspect, and he told them that he did. He didn't tell them about Danny's broken jaw. He figured that could wait.
Put out one fire at a time,
as Lester's grandfather used to say. The Towanda dispatch told him to hold tight and help would be on the way.

This whole thing was a damn mess. He knew he'd be the one to have to make the call to Mindy's folks. Probably best to do something like that in person, but he didn't know if he was up to that. How exactly do you tell two parents that their daughter was beaten and strangled and killed in cold blood? Johnny Knolls was a big son of a bitch, too. Temper like a hound with ticks. Mindy was his baby girl, and Lester knew what he'd want to do in Johnny's situation: hang Danny up by his bootstraps and gut him like a deer. And, to make matters worse, Mindy had a pair of older, overprotective brothers. Nothing like their old man. Not mean and unpredictable like Johnny, but two no-nonsense kind of men who would want an eye for an eye.

“Hell.”

Murder wasn't something he signed up for. He'd grown used to dragging drunks out of bars on payday. Breaking up fights. Domestic stuff. Housewives taking a bottle or a frying pan to the side of a drunk or cheating husband's head. But at the end of the day, it was usually just a broken nose or a few stitches. Not anything like this nonsense.

And the cherry on Lester's turd sundae was that his deputy lost his cool and went apeshit and broke a man's jaw. Danny probably deserved it, but it wasn't their job to give payback. Lester knew that Sokowski had dated Mindy off and on for a while now. He didn't even try to keep track if they were currently an item or not. The fact was that Sokowski stuck his weasel in near everything that moved in Wyalusing, and everyone knew it.

Lester had been wanting to take the wife up to Niagara Falls for a few days in a week or so. Their forty-fifth wedding anniversary was approaching, and Niagara was where they had spent their honeymoon. It was only a four-hour drive up that way, and he figured
that the missus would like that pretty well. Bonnie deserved a special weekend. The woman earned it. She was a damn good wife who had lived a life full of disappointments; not being able to bear any children was definitely the biggest. Still to this day, he could see her inner longing for kids and grandbabies every time they were out at a restaurant watching other families together. Eating and laughing and enjoying themselves. At least Lester had had his job over the years to fill the emptiness. All Bonnie had were the cats and sewing and tending to her garden. Yet she never complained none. God bless her.

A nicotine craving started to crawl all over him, so he found his cigarettes and lit one up. Unrolled the window despite the freezing cold outside. The breeze felt mighty good on his face.

“Hell,” Lester muttered again as he blew out a cloud of smoke. Up ahead he saw Mindy's trailer and took another, deeper draw on his cigarette.

T
he exam room was in sore need of a patch-and-paint job. The ceiling peeled in a few spots from years of rain damage, and the walls weren't in much better shape. A long counter with a stainless-steel washbasin was lined with jars of cotton swabs, wooden tongue depressors, bandages, ear- and eye-exam lights, and the like.

Carl fidgeted in a small chair and looked around the room at everything except Danny, who now sat upright and on the edge of the exam table. Flecks of dried blood stuck to Danny's face and neck, and his jaw had swollen up and hung open, slack and to the right. The inside of his mouth wasn't much better—a mess of loose teeth and torn-up gums. Danny looked down at his hands and said nothing to Carl.

Outside the exam room, they could hear Doc Pete moving around and probably fixing himself a pot of coffee.

Carl kicked some mud off his boots and cleared his throat. “It
was an accident, you know?” His voice came out sounding small and uncertain.

Danny picked at a rip in his work pants and was quiet for a second before responding. “Where's Mindy now?” Saying just these three words caused Danny a world of hurt, and they came out sounding like he was talking with a mouthful of marbles.
Wharths Mindee na?

Carl looked over at him, then turned away and shook his head. “She's gone, Danny.”

Danny finally looked up at him. Tears welling in his eyes. “What do you mean she's gone? What happened to her? She's really
dead
?” The words came out sounding like,
Wha ya meen sheez gon? Wha hapin to har? Sheez reelly ded?

Carl fidgeted in the seat and ran his hands over his bald spot, near tears himself. “We'd been drinking, and Mike wanted to see her.” He bit at his fingers again. “Shit o'mighty.”

Everything was moving fast in Danny's head. The notion of Mindy really being dead and gone didn't quite seem real. He could still see her smashed-in head and her swollen throat and all that blood.
What kind of accident could make all that happen?
He wanted to understand.

“How . . . ?” was all he could manage.

The question made Carl stand up like he'd just sat on a piece of glass. He crossed to the window that looked out from the back wall of the exam room. He peered outside, seeing a cornfield covered in snow that led to a tangle of thick trees and brush. Beyond that, the trees faded into the blackness of the Endless Mountain range that surrounded the entire town.

A phone rang from somewhere in the doctor's office. A set of heavy footsteps walked quickly toward the source of the ringing, and Doc Pete's muffled voice could be heard talking on the phone.

Carl turned around and finally faced Danny.

“Look, Danny, I know I ain't never done shit for you, and I was like everybody else in high school, picking on you and making fun of the way you talk and act and shit. I guess I never cared about how all that stuff made you feel, but I was just a kid, you know?” Carl stopped and thought for a moment before continuing. “The fact was, I didn't think you and I were that different.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve, leaving behind it a snail trail of wet snot. “Every class has to have a kid to pick on and get their balls busted. I didn't want it to be me, so I joined right in with the other kids and made you the butt of the joke.”

Doc Pete stopped talking, and the office outside the exam room went quiet.

Carl noticed this and kept on talking. “And I'm sorry about what happened to you and your folks back then and all, but that wasn't my fault.” He ventured another step closer to Danny. “This shit that happened at the trailer between Mindy and Mike, there's nothing we can do to bring her back. It's done. She's gone. You understand?”

Danny usually had a hard time looking at folks when they spoke to him. He always looked at his hands or his feet or up into the sky, but right now he kept his eyes on Carl, listening to everything he said real careful.

“I got a little boy and a little girl at home, and they're all I really care about. They're just youngsters, and they need their old man. I feed 'em and keep a roof over their heads. If they go and put me in jail for this thing, my kids won't have nothing. You know? They won't have no one to take care of them.”

Tears rolled down Carl's rutted face. He wiped them away, but they kept flowing, and he never took his eyes off Danny. He waited to see what Danny would have to say.

Danny felt real thirsty all of a sudden. His throat was dry, and when he swallowed, it hurt his jaw something terrible. He looked away from Carl—other than Uncle Brett when he was getting ready to go up to heaven, Danny had never seen another grown-up man cry. Sometimes when Danny got to thinking about his folks, he would cry a little even though he knew he wasn't supposed to.

“They're gonna blame you for killing Mindy, and I know it ain't right or fair, but I don't want to get locked up.” Carl was really crying hard now. His hands hung at his sides, and he just let the tears and snot run over his lips and chin.

“I'm sorry, Danny. I really am. Shit.”

Danny didn't know what to do. If he didn't hurt Mindy, why would he get blamed for doing such a bad thing? He would never do anything to Mindy. Nothing at all. She was his friend.

“They're gonna come for you, Danny, and take you away from here.” Carl turned and walked back to the window again. Snow was picking up steam and blowing horizontally outside.

“Goddamn it all,” Carl muttered softly. He peered outside for another minute, then turned and slinked out of the room. He didn't look at Danny. Didn't say another word.

The door closed, and Danny kept sitting on the exam table. He heard Carl say something to Doc Pete out in the office. His throat clicked from the dryness again. He had never been so thirsty. He stood up, wincing at the pain that even standing made his jaw feel. Stepped over to the small sink and turned on the water. Cupped his trembling hands under the stream of water and put the cold liquid to his lips. He sucked in a little of the water and let it run down his throat. He did this a few more times, then turned off the water.

He caught his reflection in the mirror above the sink and stared at what he looked like now. Face swollen and splattered with dried
blood. His jaw flopped open like a dog panting in summertime. Even his eyes were different—red and glassy. He looked like a monster—the kind that hides under your bed at night and waits for you to stand up so that it can grab you by the ankles. Danny brought his fingers to his cheek just to make sure that it was him looking back from the mirror—it was. His hand. His face. It was what he had become.

He stepped over to the window and stared at the falling snow slapping against the glass in layers, getting thicker and thicker until the view of outside grew hazier and hazier, the world going white. The snow was pretty. Calming to him—made him forget about turning into a monster. Lots of times Danny would stand outside in a heavy snowstorm with his head turned up and let the frozen flakes land on his face and tongue. He liked rain, too, but snow was his favorite. Looking up into the sky and watching the snow fall around him made him forget what might be troubling him.

He put his hand on the pane of glass and watched the condensation form around his fingers. He wanted to forget about what had happened to Mindy. Wanted to forget about the blood and her dead eyes. He wanted to be in the snow again.