Hellbox (Nameless Detective) (25 page)

“It’s not that Kerry’s already dead. I won’t believe that.”

“No. Whatever it is, hurting him won’t make him give it up.”

Maybe not. But if we didn’t find anything out here, I’d work him over anyway. And this time, I wouldn’t let Runyon stop me.

We were at the road now. I said, “Vehicle that went by a few minutes before Balfour showed up must’ve been his pickup. Heading south first, then back to the north.”

“Right. Figures to be hidden off the road in that direction, and not too far away.”

It took us twenty minutes to find it, each of us working a side of the deserted road, and when we first uncovered it, it didn’t look like the right vehicle. Dirty white Dodge pickup, but with a bulky camper shell on it and different license plates. But it was Balfour’s, all right. He must’ve put the camper and the new plates on this morning—the reason for the open workshop on his property.

The driver’s door was locked. I held my light up against the window long enough to be sure that the cab was empty. We went around to the back. The second key Runyon tried unlocked the camper door. I dragged in a breath as he pulled it open and shined his flash beam inside. Nothing to see except jammed-in goods and weapons, and a narrow open space on the floor in the middle, but the human body odor that came rolling out had the force of a blow to the face.

My empty stomach convulsed; I spun away, gagging. It took a few seconds for the sickness to pass. I sucked in more of the cold night air, leaned a hand against the side of the pickup away from the open camper door.

Runyon was still working the camper’s interior with his light. He said in heavy tones, “Empty.”

“She was in there. Today, tonight.”

“Yeah. Unloaded her somewhere before he came here. He wouldn’t waste time doing it before he went after Verriker.”

“Take a quick look around anyway.”

We looked. All around the pickup, up and down along the road, over on the other side. The trees and ground vegetation grew thickly in the area; Balfour couldn’t have gone far carrying a heavy weight, and our lights would’ve picked up signs and there weren’t any.

Back at the truck, I said, “I’ll check the cab, you look in the camper. I can’t go in there, Jake.”

“I know. I’m on it.”

I got the driver’s door unlocked. Some of the body smell was in the cab, too; I locked my sinuses against it, breathed through my mouth. There was nothing on the seat except a light denim jacket, nothing on the floorboards. Usual papers and crap in the glove box, none of it that told me anything. I felt around under the seats, found a small box on the passenger side, and hauled it out. Cigar box with a rubber band looped around it. Inside was a lot of cash in small bills—Balfour’s run-out money. I closed it up again, stuffed it back under the seat.

When I laid my free hand on the steering wheel to push myself back out, the rubber felt sticky, grainy. I put the flash beam on the wheel. Gray flecks adhered to it, the same kind I’d noticed on Balfour’s hand. I picked off one of them, rolled it between my thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t mud. Felt faintly moist, like clay or putty, but it didn’t look like either one.

Runyon’s light came bobbing around to where I was. “Nothing back there,” he said, “except a one-man arsenal.”

I showed him the flecks on the steering wheel, watched him rub one the way I had. “What do you make of it?”

“Not sure. Seems fresh.”

“Balfour has the same stuff on his fingers.”

“And under his fingernails. Something else I noticed, too, on one knee of his pants. Sawdust.”

“Where the hell could he have been to get clay or whatever this is and sawdust on himself?”

“Wherever he left Kerry, maybe.”

“We’ll get it out of him,” I said grimly, “one way or another.”

The distant sound of a car engine cut through the stillness. We stayed put with the torches switched off as headlights flickered through the trees and the vehicle rattled past heading south. Passenger car of some kind, not a sheriff’s cruiser. We waited another few seconds after its taillights disappeared before we hurried out along the road.

In the frigging perverse way of things, that car and those couple of waiting minutes cost us dearly. Because we’d just reached the driveway when the muffled popping noise came from inside the cabin.

Once you’ve heard a gun go off in a closed space, you never mistake the sound for something else. It had the surge effect on us of a track starter’s pistol firing: we both broke immediately into a run, Runyon dragging the Magnum free from his belt. He was a couple of paces ahead of me when we pounded up to the door. Closed, the way we’d left it; he twisted the knob, shoved it wide, and went in in a shooter’s crouch with me crowding up behind.

Sweet Christ!

Balfour was on the floor, one side of his neck a gushing red ruin, the pole lamp toppled into a slant across his body. A few feet away, Verriker stood staring down at him with a long-barreled target pistol in one hand.

Runyon shouted, “Put it down, Verriker! Now!”

Verriker must have obeyed, but I didn’t see him do it. I was past Runyon by then and down on one knee next to Balfour. Still alive, but the way the blood was pumping out of the wound, he wouldn’t be for long; the bullet must have clipped his carotid artery. There wasn’t anything I could do, anybody could do.

He clawed at his neck, the whites of his eyes showing, bubbling sounds coming out of him that made the blood froth on his mouth. But not just sounds—a disconnected jumble of words. I could make out some of them when I leaned forward.

“… bastards … payback … asshole valley…”

A strangled noise then, that might have been laughter. Another word that sounded like “hellbox.” Then his body convulsed, jacknifed upward, fell back. And the wound quit spurting.

Our luck had just run out.

I scrambled back away from the body, staggered upright, sidestepped the spreading blood pool, and went after Verriker. Not thinking, goaded into action by a raging stew of emotions. Runyon had stripped Verriker of the target pistol, had it in his left hand, the Magnum still clenched in his right … two-gun Jake. He saw me coming, tried to stand in my way, but I dodged around him. Verriker was backpedaling, but he didn’t have any place to go; I got my hands on him, drove him up hard against the fieldstone fireplace.

“No, listen, he tried to jump me, I had to protect myself—”

I hit him. Looping right, not quite flush on the temple. His head whacked into the stones, bringing a grunt out of him and buckling his knees; his sagging weight broke my grip. I let him fall, stood over him with my fists clenched.

He wasn’t badly hurt. He shook himself, then crawled away until he was sitting with his back against a low burl table. “Self-defense,” he said heavily, “it was self-defense. He didn’t give me any choice.”

Runyon had come up beside me, the guns put away and his hands free. “Balfour?”

“Dead.”

He said to Verriker, “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from him?”

“He started calling me names, yelling crazy stuff.” Talking to the floor, his chin down on his chest. “I wanted to shut him up, that’s all, but I got too close and he jumped up and swung the lamp at me. I had to defend myself, didn’t I?”

“Where’d the gun come from?”

“It’s mine, I keep it in my van. Figured I might need some protection tonight—”

“Protection, hell,” I said. “You snuck it in here hoping you’d have a chance to use it.”

“No, I told you, it was self-defense.…”

He’d probably get away with that claim, true or not, with no witness to dispute it. I didn’t care about that, it just didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was Balfour lying over there dead.

Verriker lifted his head, looked up at me with dull eyes. “I’m not gonna say I’m sorry. He killed my wife.”

“Yeah, and you may have just killed mine.”

28

JAKE RUNYON

Morning.

After a long, bad night. Two and a half more hours at Eagle Rock Lake with Verriker, Deputy Broxmeyer, and a crew of other sheriff’s department people. Another hour at the Six Pines substation with a departmental investigator from the county seat named Sadler. Questions and more questions, a lot of finger-pointing and milling and scrambling around that didn’t lead anywhere because nobody knew what the hell to do about Kerry. The FBI? Sadler hemmed and hawed on finally calling them in. They still weren’t completely convinced Balfour had abducted her. And even if they had been, there was the usual jurisdictional bullshit: county law, especially small county law, always balked at relinquishing control to the feds because they usually got trampled when the FBI took over. Sadler did say he’d notified the ATF of the illegal weapons stash in Balfour’s camper, but the ATF wasn’t in a position to do Kerry a damn bit of good.

To make matters worse, the local law was miffed at the way Bill and Runyon had handled things, berating them for not reporting immediately after they’d caught Balfour. But there was as much embarrassment and frustration at the department’s own bungling mixed in, at least on Broxmeyer’s part, and enough concern for Kerry and how the media would react to the whole sorry business, to keep the browbeating to a minimum.

Verriker had been arrested, mandatory in a fatal shooting without eyewitnesses. But as far as the law was aware, he and Balfour were the only ones who’d broken any laws. There was no real cause to hold Runyon and Bill, so they’d finally been released. With nowhere to go at three
A.M.
except back to the rented house.

By then, Bill seemed to have settled into a zombielike melancholy, staring glassily into space and not tracking well, his voice flat and lifeless when he spoke at all. Plain enough that he blamed himself for leaving Verriker alone with Balfour, just as he blamed himself for not searching Balfour’s property sooner; Runyon bore the same guilty weight. But at the same time, he knew they’d handled the situation as best they could under the circumstances, with their focus on finding Kerry and their emotions in turmoil. There just hadn’t been any warning signs that Verriker might’ve smuggled in a gun or that he’d wanted revenge on Balfour as much as Balfour wanted it on him.

Bill had almost literally collapsed into bed when they got back to the house. Exhausted. Sick, too, maybe. His color wasn’t good, his breathing heavy and labored.

As tired as Runyon was, he couldn’t sleep except in fitful dozes. Once he got up to make sure Bill was all right. The rest of the time he lay staring into the darkness, listening to the throbbing night rhythms of crickets and tree frogs and sorting through the fragments of information they had on Balfour.

The dark gray, sticky stuff on Balfour’s fingers and the pickup’s steering wheel. Nobody had been able to identify it. It wasn’t mud, and there were no clay deposits in the area. Broxmeyer: “It looks like modeling clay.” Being sent out for analysis ASAP, but with the holiday weekend, that meant sometime next week at the soonest.

The sawdust on Balfour’s pant leg. He’d worked construction and lived and traveled within hundreds of square miles of timberland. He could have picked it up kneeling anywhere.

His dying words. “Bastards. Payback. Asshole valley. Hellbox.” Bill was sure of all the words but the last. And fairly sure that Balfour had laughed with his final breath. None of it seemed to make much sense. Bastards … Runyon and Bill and Verriker? What kind of payback? Did “asshole valley” refer to the mayor tag Verriker had hung on him, or to Green Valley? Assume Bill had heard correctly and “hellbox” was the last word Balfour had uttered. A hellbox was a receptacle where old-fashioned cast-metal type was tossed after printing, but an uneducated carpenter and handyman wasn’t likely to have known that. What else was a hellbox? That sheet metal–roofed shed where he’d kept Kerry was a hellbox in the middle of a hot summer, but even if that was how Balfour had thought of it, why would he say the word? And why would he laugh with his last breath?

Runyon sifted through what else they knew about the man. Dishonest loner at odds with most of those who knew him, wife abuser, coward. Paranoid psychotic driven by hatred and revenge. Devious schemer: the blowing up of the Verrikers’ home, the attempt on Verriker’s life, the camper full of survival gear and weaponry … and the probable secret he’d been harboring that had kept him from breaking under pressure at the cabin. Kidnapper, but not by design—he’d grabbed Kerry because she’d seen him coming back from rigging the gas leak, an act of panic.

Why had he held her captive for four days? The obvious answer was rape, torture, only that didn’t fit the revenge-obsessed profile. The fact that Balfour had beaten his ex-wife didn’t necessarily make him a sexual sadist. If anything, according to those who knew him, he seemed to have shunned relationships with women. Kept Kerry as some kind of sick trophy? That didn’t fit his profile, either. Unsure of what to do with her or her body? Squeamish about murdering a stranger in cold blood?

Pretty obvious why he’d taken her out of the shed yesterday morning: hadn’t wanted her found there, alive or dead. All right, but why the decision to run in the first place? There was no proof that he’d booby-trapped the Verriker house, and if Verriker had been alone at the lake cabin and Balfour had succeeded in killing him, no proof that Balfour was the guilty party. Another panic reaction, maybe. Except that his actions yesterday and last night had been too calculated. The decision had to be connected to, or motivated by, whatever he’d been up to during the ten to twelve hours he’d been missing yesterday.

He’d kept Kerry in the camper for most of that time—the odor wouldn’t have permeated everything inside the cramped space if she’d only been in there a short time. As a hostage, as they’d surmised? Or for some other reason that was also connected to that secret plan of his? Wherever he’d left her, it couldn’t have been very long before he showed up at the cabin or very far from Eagle Rock Lake.…

Runyon had had enough of the lumpy bed. His watch told him it was a little after seven—time to be up and moving. The plumbing in the adjacent bathroom made loud grumbling noises; when he was done in there, he went again for a quick check on Bill. Still asleep in the same facedown sprawl, his breathing heavy, congestive. He needed to see a doctor pretty soon, before he suffered a complete breakdown.