A Killing in the Hills (12 page)

She had visited Albie Sheets in jail shortly after his arrest. He was clearly terrified. Not of her, not of the justice system, not of the dire punishment that might await him – but of the bug he’d seen that morning in the corner of his cell.

‘Big bug,’ Albie had said to her.

With a thick, wobbling finger, he pointed into the corner. The bug was long gone, but Albie wanted her to know about it. ‘Big, big bug. Bad.’ A tear rolled down one of his round cheeks. It stalled in the rolls of fat that gathered in poofed-out rings around his neck like a flesh-colored muff.

When he gestured toward the corner, his whole body shook, and greasy black ringlets moved across the massive shelf of his shoulders.

The cell was a small gray box. There was a bunk, a sink and a toilet, and a tiny barred slit of a window high up on one wall that let in a tantalizing lozenge of light. Because the individual cells were arranged in a straight line down a long corridor, you couldn’t see the other cells, but you could hear the prisoners who occupied them, courtesy of the coughs and the sneezes, and sometimes the singing and the cursing or the simple rhythmic muttering of the men held here. A dense, compacted smell of pure humanness: sweat, feces, and urine, sometimes cut with the astringent odor of an ammonia-based cleaning fluid with which the cells were rinsed out every other day.

Bell had tried to distract Albie, to talk about other things, but the bug obsessed him. He licked his lips and muttered, ‘Bug, bug.’ His sluglike tongue looked unhealthy to Bell, speckled and scaly, too pale. Albie was a big man – the XXL orange jumpsuit issued to prisoners by the Raythune County Sheriff’s Department was too small, and the inner seam along his left thigh had already split, allowing a wad of white flesh to bulge out of the slit like the stuffing from a ripped mattress – and he rarely stood up straight. He hunched. When he walked around the cell, he obsessively dragged one foot behind him. Prisoners in nearby cells had complained about the scraping sound.
All night long
, they griped,
it goes on. He drags that damned foot behind him. Racket’s killing us
.

Bell had checked with the deputy. A doctor had been summoned to examine Albie’s foot; there was nothing physically wrong with the limb. He just wanted to drag it.

Maybe, Bell had speculated, the scraping noise was soothing to Albie. Maybe he could fool himself into thinking that somebody was coming up behind him. Maybe – just once – somebody was trying to catch up to him and not the other way around. Somebody wanted to play with him, just as much as he always wanted to play with other kids. Kids like Tyler Bevins.

Could this man, Bell had asked herself, looking at the crooked figure in the small cell, lips vibrating, eyes empty, have known what he was doing when he tied a garden hose around the neck of a six-year-old?

Bell rearranged her grip on the steering wheel. Time to stop thinking about the law and start paying attention to the road.

She was getting ready for the most treacherous curve on the entire stretch. If you overshot this one, your next stop would be the bottom of a tree-spiked canyon some 1,600 feet down. Mountain roads, she’d preached to Carla while teaching her to drive, were like a constant series of tests of character; if you got cocky, if you hadn’t learned from experience, you could be in trouble, fast. On the other hand, if you were too cautious, if you held back, you’d never get up the kind of speed required to make it around these steep and unforgiving angles. You had to be both bold and careful, both spontaneous and calculating. Nothing revealed a person’s psychological weaknesses more thoroughly than a mountain road.

So focused was Bell on her driving, so preoccupied, that she hadn’t seen the compact car that had waited just off the road a half a mile back, screened by a tightly woven wall of trees and brush and climbing kudzu. Once the Explorer swept by, the gray compact had oozed from its spot and followed.

She slowed down to prepare for the curve. Without moving her head, her eyes flicked up to check the rearview mirror. Her heart gave a panicky lurch.

There was now a car right behind her.
What the hell
? she thought. She checked the mirror again. No mistake. The car wasn’t slowing down. It seemed, in fact, to be speeding up. And it was right on track to smash into the back of the Explorer, just as Bell’s momentum slung her into the nastiest curve on the mountain.

11

I gotta tell her. I gotta tell her
.

The sentence rode around in Carla’s head all morning long, like a rock in her shoe, annoying her no end. But it wasn’t just a matter of reaching down and digging it out. It was a lot more complicated than that.

She hadn’t deliberately lied. Not at first, anyway. When she told the deputies and then her mom that she didn’t recognize the shooter, she was telling the truth. It was only later, when she started putting certain things together – when she thought about being at that party a while back with Lonnie, and about how this weird guy had shown up, a friend of a friend of Lonnie’s, or something like that, and about how the guy had drugs, some pills and stuff, and he was giving the stuff away, and everybody was real happy – that Carla realized: That guy was the shooter.

The guy at the party.

Piggy eyes. Turned-up nose. He didn’t go to Acker’s Gap High School. Carla was sure of that. She’d only seen him for, like, minutes at the party. That’s why she hadn’t made the connection right away. The party was crazy-crowded. And sticky with sweaty, pressed-together people. Too many people, shoved too close, and music that was way,
way
too loud, so you couldn’t really think or focus. The guy was in the center of a mob, with people pushing to get at him, to get what he was handing out, the pills, because they were free.

Everything was so different that morning at the Salty Dawg. And it happened so fast, and nobody knew what was going on, and the lighting was totally different, it was
bright
, and there was the screaming, and all the blood.

‘No, sir,’ she’d said to the deputy, just like the other witnesses had. ‘Never saw him before.’ And she believed it.

Until she remembered.

But how could she tell her mom? If she told her mom that maybe she recognized the guy, Bell would want to know how and from where – her mother always had questions,
God, it’s like a regular courtroom around here, Mom, it’s cross-examination time 24/7
– and Carla would be forced to confess she’d been at a party with drugs.

And that would be it.

No more parties. No more social life. No more life, period. Her mother would probably restrict her after-school activities to, like, the chess club. Or, God forbid, 4-H. She couldn’t hang out with her friends anymore.

She’d already lost her car. Now she’d lose everything else.

Carla checked the clock on the mantel. Almost noon, but she had barely moved from the couch. She was mired here, stalled here, pinned here, by the thought of what a freakin’ mess her life had suddenly become. She’d gotten up once to pee, but that was it; that was the only move she’d made. All of her energy was fueling the desperation of her thinking.

I gotta tell her. I mean, it’s the right thing to do. I gotta tell my mom about that guy
.

Don’t I?

Carla pulled at the cuff of her long-sleeved T-shirt. She yanked restlessly at the blankets that were bunched around her hips.
God
, she thought.
I hate my life. Hate it, hate it, HATE it
. She wondered, as she always did when things got complicated, about maybe going to live with her dad in D.C. He’d made the offer. He repeated it in just about every phone call:
You know, honey
, Sam Elkins had said,
this is a big city. A big, beautiful, exciting city. If you come and live here, you’ve seen your last plate of biscuits and gravy. Promise
. Carla had laughed at his little dig against West Virginia, as he had intended her to, and then she’d felt guilty about laughing.

Truth was, her father had grown up here, too. So when he made his cracks, his jokes, Carla always wondered how you could make fun of where you’d come from, and she wondered if she’d end up doing that, too, one day, and if people would see through her as easily as she saw through him. Maybe he picked on West Virginia not because he was certain he’d left it behind – but because he was afraid he hadn’t.

When her parents had divorced five years ago, Carla returned with her mom to live in Acker’s Gap. She had no choice. She was only twelve. But her mom had promised her that once she turned sixteen, the decision would be hers. Carla could stay in West Virginia with Bell, or she could go back to live with her father in D.C.

The summer before, when she was visiting him, Sam Elkins had pressed her. The spare room in his condo? It could be her bedroom. And his latest girlfriend, Glenna St Pierre, would be like a big sister, he explained, not like a mom who’d be nagging her all the time, telling her what time she had to come home at night or which friends she could hang out with. And he could probably get Carla a great summer job before she went off to college, he added, at his lobbying firm.
All you gotta do, honey
, he’d said, smiling, waggling his eyebrows,
is figure out how the CEO likes her Starbucks every morning. Then you’re a rock star around that place
.

She’d only talked to her father briefly so far about the terrible events at the Salty Dawg. Her mother had insisted she phone him right away, right when she’d gotten home yesterday. First thing. ‘If he hears about it on the news,’ Bell had said, ‘he’ll be frantic.’

Carla had given him only a few details during that call:
I’m fine. Really
.

But she wasn’t fine. She was in a hell of a mess. She could probably help her mom and Sheriff Fogelsong track down a killer. But if she did that, she’d be grounded for life. Her mom would forbid her to see her friends, the friends who’d taken her to a party with drugs.

She’d be spending every Saturday night from now on right here on this stupid couch watching stupid TV. She’d never get out of the house again.

Carla reached for her cell on the coffee table and, thumbs flying, quickly texted her dad:

Need 2 talk

Maybe her life didn’t have to be over, after all.

Maybe there was a way out.

12

Bell felt the jolt. The gray compact had rammed her rear bumper, backed off, then rammed it again.

Startled, she slapped the horn three times – not polite little toots, but sustained and angry blasts – and her meaning was clear:

Cut it out, asshole
.

She couldn’t look over her shoulder to make eye contact with the other driver; she couldn’t risk taking her eyes off the road. Not here. Not now. Even checking the rearview mirror again when she’d felt the first smack had been a bad idea.

Fleetingly, Bell wondered if this was some kind of a joke, if maybe the mystery driver thought it was funny to kid around on the sharpest curve at the highest point in four counties. But she knew better. Nobody joked like that on mountain roads. The driving was too treacherous, the potential consequences too severe.

Could it be some jerk she’d pissed off on a recent case? A vengeful family member, maybe, who thought that a black sheep brother-in-law or a renegade cousin had gotten a raw deal from the law? Doubtful. She’d been threatened – every prosecutor had been threatened – but the nastiest threats always came from those least likely to follow through. From swaggering loudmouths who were cowards at the core. Show-off tough guys. All talk and no action.

The next jolt was harder. So hard that Bell pitched forward in her seat, feeling the vibration travel in a split second from the back of the Explorer up through her pelvis and then branch into her hands, which clutched the steering wheel with growing fervor. The attack had escalated from a nudge to a homicidal punch. This was personal.

The wicked curve splashed up ahead of her now, a harshly abrupt twist to the left. If you missed it – the road that continued on after the curve was virtually perpendicular to the stretch upon which Bell was traveling – you would fly straight off the edge of the mountain.

Into wide, airy, endless space.

After which you would plummet into the gorge.

If you were lucky, you’d be killed in the fall. Otherwise – if you survived it and stayed conscious – you’d surely know from the smell that your gas tank had ruptured upon impact and your vehicle would shortly be swaddled in flames and you’d burn to death.
God bless blunt-force trauma
, she thought.
Oblivion’s definitely the best-case scenario
.

Bell’s initial response had been to brake and brake hard, fighting him off, letting her speed drop from forty to thirty-five to thirty to twenty. She jammed her foot against the pedal as hard as she could and held it there, leg straight, shoulders reared back, so that when she hit the curve she’d have a chance of maintaining some small bit of control even with the bastard riding her bumper. Each time she’d cut her speed, though, the other car countered by pressing harder and still harder, as if the vehicle itself – not just the driver – wished her ill, wanted to make her miss the curve and jump the road, wanted to fling her off the side of the mountain.

The slower she went, the harder the other car bored in, its force propelling her toward the curve.

Who the hell
is
this guy?

As the end approached, as her momentum critically escalated, Bell all at once stopped thinking about the road or the curve or the other driver and she thought about Carla, she thought about her sister, she thought about her father, a man dead for three decades now but still in her mind, especially in moments that mattered.
So it’s true
, Bell mused, astonished that she had time to think, time to picture Carla’s face, when she was just a few seconds away from hurtling headlong into the curve.
You really
do
see your life in front of your eyes, thirty-nine years flashes past, it’s all true
. She carved out, deep in the center of her desperate panic, a small niche of calm.