Hellbox (Nameless Detective) (21 page)

Bedroom. That was where he kept his laptop, and when he saw it sitting on the desk, he thought again about taking it along. But it just wouldn’t be smart. They had ways of finding you when you used your computer. Cut all his ties, don’t leave any traces—that was the only way to do it. And don’t take anything along that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

He got his suitcase out of the closet, the big one Charlotte had bought him right after they were married so they could travel around, see the country, as if he’d cared to take any kind of trip with that fat cow. He packed it up with pants, shirts, two heavy sweaters, underwear, and shaving gear and a few other things from the bathroom. Stored that in the camper shell, then went and got his hiking boots, both pairs, the old Marlboro Man jacket he’d bought secondhand in Placerville, the rolled-up camp bed and two wool blankets.

What else?

Food, right. Not too much, just enough to hold him for a few days so he wouldn’t have to stop at restaurants or fast-food places. Do his eating and sleeping at rest stops or campgrounds, no other stops except for gas. Straight on through.

He filled a flour sack, added his last two bottles of Jack Daniel’s, and took that to the truck. Then he went and got a frying pan, a couple of cook pots, the old tin coffee pot he took on his hunting trips, a few other things. All of that pretty much filled up the camper. Just enough room left.

Bruno was yapping again, but it wasn’t because anybody’d showed up. Yeah, he’d figured the detectives right. Dog was just barking because he was a dumb mutt that liked to hear himself make a lot of noise. Or maybe he was hungry, but the hell with that. No time to feed him. Didn’t make no difference what happened to Bruno now anyway.

Back inside, he used a screwdriver to pop off the baseboard on one bathroom wall. The hole he’d cut out behind it was just large enough for the two cigar boxes he kept in there. His stash. All the cash he’d been paid for construction work and never reported to the IRS; screw the IRS. A little over seven thousand, mostly tens and twenties, nothing larger than a fifty—he’d counted it two nights ago, after he had his plans all worked out. Last him a long time if he was real careful. He put three hundred in his wallet, stuffed the rest into one cigar box, took that out to the pickup, and hid it under the floorboards on the passenger side. Somebody’d have to be looking for it, strip-searching, otherwise they’d never find it.

Just about done. He quick-checked his list to make sure. No, he hadn’t forgotten anything.

One last thing to do and he’d be loaded and ready to roll.

23

KERRY

She lay marinating in heat and the stench from her soiled body. Drifting in and out of consciousness now, a floating limbo. Wrapped in tape from neck to feet this time, a gray mummy stretched out on its back on the dirty floor, unable to move even a little because more tape held her immobile against one of the bench stanchions. For a long time, there had been agony—cramped muscles, sensations of suffocation, shoots of pain in her jaw where Balfour had hit her after she missed stabbing his eye with the tack weapon. Fear and hate, too, rising like tides, receding, rising again, receding again. Then resignation had set in, followed by a return of the apathy, followed by a numbness both physical and mental.

Now, she felt as if her mind had become detached from her body, her spirit already hovering just outside her body. The spirit withering, losing sentience, drifting for long periods in a trancelike state where nonfrightening images swam and darted like creatures beneath the surface of a calm sea. Then it would stir back to life, send out little pulses of awareness—heat, pain, thirst, hunger, the death odors as if her body had already begun to decay. And the fear and the hate would come again, but only briefly and with less and less intensity. Even the desperate will to live had become muted, begun to give way to a desire for the peace that lay beyond the floating limbo.

Adrift again.

Aware again.

Sounds. The dog barking, always barking. Damn the dog.

Something else then, a roaring noise. Car engine. Outside, close.

Door slamming. Balfour, coming back.

She didn’t care anymore. Let him come.

She tried to will the hovering spirit to take her back into the nowhere place. But awareness remained. Spasms of pain, thirst, hunger, fear, hate. Fragments of thought. And more sounds. Key scraping in the door lock. The truck engine, louder, throbbing. Heavy steps moving toward her.

His voice: “Didn’t get loose this time, did you?”

Words came to her, bright and clear, as if they were being held up on a sign:
Fuck you.
But she couldn’t say them. Her throat was closed tight, her vocal chords shriveled and frozen.

Bending over her, putting a hand on her.

Don’t touch me!

Snick.
Knife, he had a knife in the other hand.

No, don’t. Go ahead, get it over with. No, please don’t!

He didn’t. Ripping sounds … he was using the knife to saw at the tape that held her against the bench support.

Another
snick
and the knife disappeared. His hands on her again then, pulling her away from the bench, turning her onto her back. A gurgling whimper came out of the hollowness inside as he bent over her, worked his hands under her and lifted her up tight against his body.

“Jesus, lady. You stink.”

His breath was no better. The sour spew of it in her face jerked her head aside.

Grunting, he carried her out through the open door. The glare of sunlight was like needles poked into her eyes; she squeezed them shut. The dog was close by, its barks and growls loud.

“Shut up, Bruno. Shut up!”

The animal noises stopped and Kerry could hear the engine rumble again. She opened her eyes to slits. Blurred images settled into focus.

Pickup with a camper top, the camper’s rear door open. He brought her up to it, lifted her inside, shoved her roughly across a hard floor. The back of her head thudded into something, her arm scraped against something else—cuts of pain that she barely felt. Things were piled up all around her … tools, camping equipment. And guns, big guns, rifles, automatic weapons, shoved into a space beneath a side-wall bench.

Balfour crawled in, up over her body, until he was kneeling astride her. He put his ugly face close to hers again, a white-and-black smear of beard-stubbled skin.

“Now you listen to me, lady. We’re going for a ride. Gonna be a long one, maybe, depends on you. We stop anywhere and you thrash around back here, make noise, I’ll kill you dead on the spot. You understand?”

She tried to tell him yes with her eyes. He didn’t get the message. Slapped her, hard—more pain that she barely felt.

“Understand?”

The gurgling whimper.

“Okay. You do what I say, maybe I’ll let you go later. Drop you off in the woods some place.”

Liar. You’re going to kill me.

He took something from his pocket, a roll of duct tape. Tore off a piece with his teeth and stretched it tight across her mouth.

Why don’t you just get it over with? Why torture me like this?

Another piece of tape torn from the roll, larger than the first. This one, he stuck down over her eyes.

Blind, now. Mute and blind.

Another slap, not as hard, and he slid back off her.

Sounds: Him dropping out of the camper. The hinged door slamming shut. The pit bull barking again. The cab door opening, banging shut. The engine revving up, gears meshing.

And they were moving, jolting over uneven ground. Then stopping again. Then moving. Then stopping. Then moving, winding left and right over a smoother surface. The constant shifting motion bounced her up and down, but the tight-packed space held her where she lay.

Gray-wrapped, living mummy trapped in a moving sarcophagus driven by a madman.

Hot, hotter than the shed. Exhaust fumes choking the air, making breathing difficult through congested nostrils. Dulled hurt in her head, all through her body every time the wheels passed over a bump.

Bill
, she thought once. And imagined his face, his hand reaching out to her. Then he was gone, swallowed by darkness.

Body and spirit seemed to separate again. The spirit once more withering, losing awareness, until she drifted into the floating limbo state—deep into it, to a place where there was no pain, no fear, only mercy.

24

It took us a while to track down Ned Verriker. The first place we went was to the sheriff’s substation, but Broxmeyer was out somewhere, and the deputy manning the desk didn’t know or wouldn’t tell us where to find Verriker.

The man Runyon had talked to in the Buckhorn Tavern last night, Ernie Stivic, seemed to be the next best bet. We hunted up a public phone booth at one of the gas stations and looked him up in the directory. Listed, but there was no answer when Runyon tried his number.

Third stop: the Green Valley Café again. The plump blond waitress we’d talked to earlier knew where Verriker was, but wouldn’t give out the information no matter how much we pleaded with her. “I know you’re real worried,” she said to me, “and I feel for you, but how could Ned know anything about your wife? The man’s grieving bad, just wants to be left alone.” But we did get one thing out of her, the name and address of the place where Ernie Stivic was employed—a restaurant called Burgers and More, near the high school at the north end of town. He worked there as a fry cook.

Burgers and More turned out to be a cafeteria-style restaurant, small, with a lattice-covered patio area along one side. There were no customers when we walked in, just a young tattooed guy getting the patio tables ready for the lunch trade. A second man was visible through an open kitchen window behind the service counter. Stivic. Runyon called out to him, and he came out wiping his hands on a clean apron.

Sure, he remembered Jake from the Buckhorn. Even before I opened my mouth, he knew who I was, gave me a nod of what appeared to be genuine sympathy. He was willing enough to talk until we asked him for Ned Verriker’s whereabouts, then he closed up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Ned’s in pretty bad shape. He don’t want to be bothered right now.”

“It’s important we talk to him,” I said.

“Why? He was at work all day Monday, he can’t help you find your wife.”

“We think maybe he can. Answers to a few questions is all we want from him.”

“What kind of questions?”

“The private kind. Please, Mr. Stivic. There’s a lot more at stake here than you realize.”

“Like what?”

He’d already tried what was left of my patience. Before I started snapping at him, Runyon stepped in. “Like a criminal act, maybe more than one,” he said. “That’s all we can say at this point, except that Ned Verriker hasn’t done anything wrong and we mean him no harm. All we want from him is information.”

Stivic chewed his underlip, thinking it over. “Criminal acts, huh?” he said at length.

“That’s right. You wouldn’t want to impede our investigation?”

“No, hell no. Okay. Joe Ramsey’s letting Ned stay at his cabin up at Eagle Rock Lake.”

*   *   *

Eagle Rock Lake was the one in the mountains south of Six Pines that Kerry and I had driven around on Sunday, a lifetime ago. A mile or so in circumference, ringed by pine forest and roughly kidney-shaped like a giant’s swimming pool. Cabins and cottages, half hidden among the trees, dotted its shoreline at widely spaced intervals.

The Ramsey cabin, Stivic had told us, was on the southeastern shore. We found it all right from his directions and description—small, plain, built of pine logs and redwood siding more than a generation past judging from the weathered look of the place, with a distinctive front door painted a rust red. A newish, dirt-streaked Ford van was parked in a cleared area in front, visible from the road, the same van that had barreled up to the scene of the conflagration on Monday afternoon and disgorged Ned Verriker. Runyon parked next to it, and we got out into blistering heat. Temperature must already be pushing ninety.

Nobody answered my raps on the door. There was a discernable path along one side; we followed that to the rear. A short dock jutted out into the glistening water, and near the end of it, a man in T-shirt and Levi’s sat in a canvas sling chair staring out at the lake. Back straight, knees and feet together, hands resting palms up on his thighs—the rigid posture of a condemned prisoner about to be executed. Runyon and I made a little noise walking out onto the spongy wooden dock, but the man didn’t seem to notice until we looped around to stand in front of him and block his view. Then he blinked and focused on us. Otherwise, he didn’t move.

He was about forty, well built, lantern-jawed, with sparse ginger-colored hair cut close to his scalp. The face that had stared out at me from the bathroom mirror this morning had been haggard enough, but Verriker’s was worse: gray and ravaged, lifeless red-rimmed eyes half buried in sacks of puckered flesh. The difference between fear of terrible loss and certain knowledge of it.

“Mr. Verriker?”

“Yeah. Who’re you? What you want?” By-rote questions, without spirit or curiosity. I answered both, but I could have told him we were space invaders from another galaxy and gotten the same lack of reaction. His obvious grief was too great to permit concern for someone else’s troubles.

“I don’t want to talk to anybody,” he said. “I lost my wife, my house, everything a couple days ago.”

“We know, and we’re sorry for your loss. But I may lose my wife, too, if we don’t find her soon. You know, if anybody does, how desperate I am.”

“I can’t do nothing for you.”

“You can answer a few questions about Pete Balfour.”

Nothing for a few seconds. Then, “What about Balfour?” in the same dull, cracked voice.

“Does he own any other property besides his place on Crooked Creek Road? Hunting camp, cabin, anything like that?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Know of any place he goes regularly to hunt, fish, camp?”

“No.”

“He have any relatives in the area?”