Last Ragged Breath (2 page)

Goldie, sensing his shock, not sure what she ought to do about it, went from barking to a kind of eerie, sirenlike crooning, an ancient song of lament that was as mindlessly instinctive to her as was her earlier devotion to the voluptuous smell of death.

 

Chapter Two

The Highway Haven truck stop occupied six and a half acres of asphalt at Exit 127 along the major route linking Acker's Gap, West Virginia, with points east and west. It was divided into two distinct halves, with six rows of pumps—two pumps per row—on either side. One side was marked
TRUCKS ONLY
. The other was designated
ALL OTHER VEHICLES
. On the trucks-only side, the lanes between the pumps were wider, allowing the drivers of the eighteen-wheelers to maneuver with relative ease as they lined up their famished vehicles for lengthy refills. The heavy odor of diesel fuel was like a truth you couldn't turn away from.

Belfa Elkins parked her Explorer in front of the glass-walled building, a combination snack bar, coffee shop, convenience store, video-game arcade, lavatory, and, for truckers, shower facility. The building divided the truckers' side from the other side. She had made the drive here from Acker's Gap in a surprisingly quick fifteen minutes, but knew better than to chalk it up to skill or even luck: There was always a lull between 5 and 6
A.M
. on this stretch of interstate, and the clock on her dash told her it was just before 6. Later this morning the place would be packed, crammed with buglike compacts and massive RVs and only slightly less massive SUVs that had turned off the highway and swung hungrily toward the pumps, along with all the big rigs driven by the professionals, the men and the very few women who could handle an eighty-foot length of steel and chrome and momentum—a vehicle that weighed forty tons even before its load was factored in—with apparent ease. After fuel, the next most-desired items for travelers were bathrooms and food, and so most of the drivers of the regular vehicles, after they'd finished their business at the pumps, nosed their cars into parking spots in front of the store. If it were any later in the day, there would've been no open slots left; Bell would have been forced to use the spillover lot in the back.

She was an attractive woman with a slender build, medium-length wavy brown hair, and a quiet intensity in her gray eyes. Those eyes seemed to take in everything all at once, filing most of it away for later; there was nothing cursory or slack about her gaze, nothing casual. She was closer to forty-four years old than she was to forty-three, but she looked younger than that, owing in part to an edgy restlessness, a sort of spirited impatience, in her manner. She wore jeans, a taupe barn coat with a dark brown collar, and a blue cable-knit sweater. The thin strap of a black leather purse made a diagonal slash across the front of that sweater.

Just before she opened the double doors with the giant red
H
painted on each side of the glass, she glanced to her left. The last parking place on that side was occupied by a white Chrysler LeBaron. Nick's car. She felt a slight but definite pang. In years past, when she arrived at a crime scene and looked around for his vehicle, her eyes would search automatically for a black Chevy Blazer with an official Raythune County seal on both sides. This wasn't a crime scene, but she'd automatically had the old expectation. Since November, however, when Nick had handed over the Blazer keys to his successor, he had been driving his own car. He had decided not to stand for reelection. His deputy, Pam Harrison, had won easily.

She gave the car a quick going-over with her glance, same as she'd done the three previous times she'd come out here to see him. The Chrysler didn't suit him. Nothing suited him but the Blazer.

On the curb in front of his vehicle was a pert warning delivered in red stenciled letters:
RESERVED N. F.
He had his own spot. Unreasonably, that also bothered her; it gave his new job an aura of permanence, of finality. This wasn't some temporary gig—which she already knew, of course, but seeing it spelled out that way forced a firmer kind of knowing.

Nick Fogelsong worked here now, as head of security for the Highway Haven chain. He wasn't coming back to the courthouse.

She and Fogelsong had worked together for six years. She was the prosecutor; he was the sheriff. They had been friends since Bell was ten years old—he was one of the few people she allowed to call her by her given name, Belfa—but it was as colleagues, as professionals, that they had truly bonded. They had solved difficult cases. They had faced death together, more than once. They had sparred and argued. They had gone long days without speaking after especially intense quarrels over tactics or priorities or ethical issues—and then resealed their friendship over long chats while chain-drinking cups of black coffee at JP's, a diner in Acker's Gap. They'd run the justice system as best they could in this beautiful, beleaguered patch of West Virginia.

All of that was over now. In the fall, after his testimony at a trial that concluded one of their most challenging cases—the middle-of-the-night murders of two defenseless citizens, and other revelations that had shocked a town whose residents thought they were well beyond that kind of dark astonishment—Nick Fogelsong announced he was giving up the sheriff's post. He didn't notify Bell before he did it. He was afraid, he told her later, that she'd talk him out of it.
And I would have, too,
she'd snapped back at him.
You bet your ass I would've done just that
. She was still upset when she said it, still mourning the loss of him as her comrade.

She'd had an inkling he was losing his enthusiasm, losing his keen edge, losing his relish for the job—but who didn't, from time to time? Who didn't occasionally falter, wondering if it was all worth it? This was a place that would challenge anybody's optimism. It featured, after all, a steady cascade of falling-down shacks and crumbling roads and slow slides into alcoholism and drug addiction, along with red spikes of random violence. To believe in the future around here required a unique kind of fire. You needed your anger, an anger that initially had to be directed at the long line of public officials who, throughout the last century, had sold out the state and its uniquely bounteous natural resources to unscrupulous corporations. An anger that was creative instead of destructive. A vigorous, motivating anger. A righteous anger. Without it, you ran the risk of sinking down into the same sticky pit that had swallowed up the very people you were trying to help.

Fogelsong, though, had given up. That's how Bell saw it, anyway: He knew as well as she did how much was at stake around here, how much they were needed, and he'd put a
Gone Fishin'
sign on the front door of his life. He'd shed his sheriff's badge and his hope that things could ever change, and he'd walked away.

“Excuse me, ma'am.”

Bell stepped aside, realizing that she was blocking the narrow sidewalk and thus impeding access to the store. Moving past her, a heavy man in a green plaid wool coat pulled at the ragged bill of his Peterbilt cap. “Ma'am,” he repeated.

She followed him in. Rolling off his shoulders was the odor of nonstop tobacco use and truck-cab staleness, a sour, adhesive smell that seemed to be a distillation of everything she was feeling about the day that lay before her.

*   *   *

The store had few customers at this hour on a Saturday, but still felt crowded on account of all that it stocked: stairstepped wire racks of candy, mini doughnuts, gum, cookies, mints, nuts and sunflower seeds; bright rows of crackling bags of chips and pretzels and popcorn and two-liter plastic bottles of soft drinks; barrels filled with discounted DVDs of John Wayne movies and complete seasons of
The Andy Griffith Show
; waist-high freezers featuring ice-cream bars and Popsicles. On account of the snapped-in tubes of fluorescent lighting that hummed overhead there was a bright, sunrise feel to the place, an atmosphere bound to eventually surrender its taut freshness over the long course of the day but that had yet to begin that unraveling.

Nick was over at the self-serve coffee section, topping off his chipped gray mug. Bell knew that mug. She'd seen it on the desk in his courthouse office every day—including Saturdays and Sundays, because neither she nor Fogelsong were inclined to take weekends off—for the past half-dozen years, which meant that she'd started her morning with that mug as part of her visual landscape at least two thousand times, give or take.

It didn't belong here in the Highway Haven, any more than Nick did.

Alerted by the two-note chime that cheerfully did its job each time the glass doors popped open, he looked up and saw her. He waved and tilted his head. She got it, and nodded. He wanted her to meet him in his office at the back of the store. She lifted an imaginary cup to her lips; now it was his turn to nod. She'd be there as soon as she'd fortified herself with some coffee.

His office was located down a linoleum-floored corridor, past the squat red
YOUR WEIGHT AND FORTUNE FOR A PENNY
machine and the knockoff brand-name cologne dispenser and the locker room and the waiting area for the shower facilities. At peak times, this hall was packed with truckers waiting for their assigned numbers to be called over the public address system; the summons meant it was their turn for a shower.

“Good to see you, Belfa,” Nick said.

“Likewise.”

He edged his way behind the black metal desk, turning sideways to do so. He had a large square head topped by sprinkles of short-cut gray hair and a linebacker's body—wide shoulders, big hands, but with a certain nimbleness, an essential balance, in his movements. As he sat down, he placed his mug on the blotter so that he could grip both arms of his chair and lean back. Both sides of his suit coat fell open, revealing a snowy expanse of snug-fitting white shirt. Bell noticed the beginnings of a belly on him. Maybe, she thought with a sour little grimace, he ought to spend a penny now and again to keep tabs on that.

The observation was mean and small and unworthy of her, but Bell couldn't help herself; she was mad at him and she needed to get it on the record, even just in the privacy of her own ruminations. She knew the truth of the old West Virginia aphorism:
Hit dogs howl
. If you felt like someone had done you wrong, you reacted. You had to. Didn't you?

The office was small but neatly organized. It had been a mess when Fogelsong first took over: file cabinets askew; monitors linked to the ancient security cameras stacked up every which way, their cords twisted and dangling; dirty cinder-block walls dotted with taped-up notes that constituted a never-ending to-do list. Nick's wife, Mary Sue, had helped him restore order here over a couple of weekends. The man who'd held the job previously was a retired West Virginia state trooper named Walter Albright; at the company's insistence, he had agreed to give it up after seventeen years. Nick couldn't figure out how Albright had gotten anything done—hell, he told Bell, he didn't know how the man had been able to think straight—amid the frantic, impossible jumble that had seemed to churn around one's ankles back then, bubbling up like storm water from a backed-up sewer drain in a deluge.

“Cold as all get-out this morning,” Bell said. She took the only other seat in the room, a black metal folding chair facing the desk.

“Thought it might be warmer by now,” he said, by way of agreeing with her. “Never sure if spring's really coming. Every year about this time, I start to worry. What if it just stays like this? What if somebody somewhere decided that we don't deserve that pretty spring weather and we get stuck year-round with the cold and the sleet?”

“Know what you mean.” Bell pulled off her jacket and twisted around so that she could hook it over the chair's rounded back. Seeing Nick Fogelsong in a suit and tie was something she had to get over in stages; she couldn't assimilate it all at once. His suit was light gray, with a narrow black tie. Even with a couple of extra pounds, he looked good. Dapper, even. Professional. She couldn't deny it.

But it still wasn't right for him. He ought to be in a sheriff's uniform, in the ugly brown polyester pants and shirt, topped off with the broad-brimmed hat and the thin band of gold braid encircling the sweat-darkened crown. There was a part of her that wanted to tell him so right now, to bust through the crust of all the politeness and the nice greetings and the talk of weather—weather!—and to lean forward and say,
For Christ's sake, Nick, stop this nonsense and get back to the courthouse.

To be sure, most people thought Nick Fogelsong's move a wise one. He was getting older, and this was a sweet deal. Highway Haven's president had read about his success in a number of cases and made him a generous offer: Fogelsong would oversee security procedures and personnel screening at the company's eight locations in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, and he'd still be able to keep his home in Acker's Gap. The tiny office was only in use when he was visiting this location. His real office—a spacious one, Bell had heard, with a secretary and a wet bar and pictures on the wall, all frills that Sheriff Nick Fogelsong would've disdained—was at the chain's headquarters in Charleston.

Nick pointed toward her Styrofoam cup. It sported a pattern of interlocking red
H
s around the white circumference. “Coffee suit you?”

“It's fine.”

“Good. How's Carla?”

“Confusing the hell out of me, but otherwise—she's great.” Bell's eighteen-year-old daughter lived in Alexandria, Virginia with Bell's ex-husband, Sam. Carla had graduated from high school the spring before, but decided—just for the time being, she'd said, just for now, adding
Really, Mom, I promise
—to put off college. Carla had explained that she didn't know what career she wanted to pursue, and then further explained that it was totally pointless to spend a boatload of money on tuition until she'd made up her mind.