The White Mountain

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Copyright © 2013 by Ernie Lindsey.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the
prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses
permitted by copyright law.

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination.
Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any
resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies,
events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

The White Mountain / Ernie Lindsey. -- 1st ed.

For Chris

CHAPTER 1

The old chicken coop, wood
gray and wires rusted, had been around since 1902, but the ragged hole in the
door and the body lying face down in the petrified chicken droppings had been
there for a few hours, according to the eyewitnesses.

Mary Walker, private
investigator and former officer on the Smythville police force, shook her head
as she stuffed her left hand into a pocket and readjusted the grip on her cane
with the other.  She watched the crew while they catalogued the scene.  And the
term
crew
was a slight misnomer.  Travis Tucker and Bill Gordon, a
rookie detective and an aging patrolman, scoured the ground with wet knees and
muddy palms.  Horace Baumgartner, the senior medical examiner who’d likely
broken bread with dinosaurs in his youth, leaned up against a cherry tree and
offered lazy suggestions from a distance. 

Detective Henry Walls pulled
a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the sheen of sweat from his
forehead.  “Twelve-gauge,” he said.  “Blew a hole in the door and the vic at
the same time.”

He’d taken off his jacket
already, but the wet patches under his armpits refused to dry in the syrupy
humidity.  When they hadn’t been besieged by a deluge worthy of building an
ark, normal July mornings in the Blue Ridge Mountains were bearable, but, the
thunderstorm barreling through at 5AM dumped three inches of rain, leaving the
topsoil soggy and the air like liquid as it evaporated in the heat.    

Walls said, “Feels like we’re
breathing water, don’t it?  Jesus.”

“At least you’re breathing,” Mary
said.  “Any idea who he was?”

“I was hoping you could tell
me since they called you first.”

“Walls...seriously?  Are we
going down that road again?”  She had already explained it to him.  He’d 
already questioned her nephew and her sister.  There was nothing left to tell.

“What road?  I’m just
saying—”

“What could’ve possibly
changed in the last half hour?  My nephew saw it from his window, my sister
called me.  Nephew sees murder, sister calls sister.  I can’t break it down any
further than that.”

“It’s my job to ask
questions.”

“You’re not asking the right
ones.  Alice called me and I was here in ten minutes.  I didn’t touch a damn thing,
and then I called you.  End of story.”  Mary shrugged.  “She’s never seen him
before and neither have I, but from the looks of his clothes, he’s not from
around here.”

“No I.D. on the body, so I
don’t reckon we can make that assessment, Miss Walker.”

“Tell me the last time you
saw somebody around town wearing a suit and a watch that cost more than the car
you drive.”

“Your flip-flops cost more
than my car.  It ain’t that difficult.”

“For the love of God—”

Walls held up a hand to stop
her.  “One more time, tell me
exactly
what Jesse saw.”

“Are you gonna take notes
this time?”

“I might.  I might not.”

“Your birthday is coming up,
right?  Maybe I should get you a recorder.”

“Mary—”

“I’m kidding, don’t get your
panties in a bunch.  Jesse said the thunderstorm woke him up.  He went to the
bathroom, got back in bed, and was watching the lightning out of his bedroom
window.  That one up there,” she said, pointing toward the farmhouse.  “See it?”

Walls nodded.

“The lightning flashed, and
he sees this guy running up their driveway.  About the time he ducks into the
coop, there was a break in the flashes, and all he saw was this—I think he
called it a ‘shadow man’—saw this shadow man run up and then
boom
,
shotgun.”

“And he didn’t see which way
he went?”

“Like I said, he’s
six
years old.  He ran into Alice’s room.  She said it took him fifteen minutes to
convince her that it wasn’t thunder.”

“So she comes down, sees the
body, and then calls you?”

“Right.”

Walls sighed, gave his
forehead another pass with the drenched hanky.  He shifted his body around with
some effort.  Bad knees, too many years of
not
chasing criminals, and
on-the-go meals had left him with a diameter that nearly equaled his height. 

With a standard-issue
mustache, a standard-issue buzz cut, a big, round belly and no distinct
separation between his cheeks and his neck, he reminded Mary of an oversized
Russian nesting doll.  Pop him open around the middle and you’d find a smaller
version on the inside, over and over, all the way down to a miniature version
that could fit in the palm of your hand.

Mary knew he was a capable
detective, but
competent
was a stretch.  Luckily, nature had blessed him
with an infectious laugh and a toothy smile that could charm anyone when he
wasn’t on duty, so she tolerated him whenever he bulldozed his way over any private
cases she was working on, claiming the matter to be police business.  Walls was
one of the few that escaped the wrath of Sledge back in the day—the
sledgehammer-toting murderer, and Mary’s bane, that had disposed of a number of
Smythville’s finest over five years ago.  To say that he’d
earned
his
position as a detective was true and false at the same time.  He earned it by
not dying, and had it handed to him because officers that were more qualified rested
under layers of topsoil.

Walls said, “It don’t add
up.”

“Excuse me?”

Walls glanced down the gravel
driveway, back to the body, across the hayfield toward the tree line, and with
jowls wobbling, he flicked his head around to Mary and said, “Say they’re both
on foot.  It’s five in the morning and this shadow man is chasing the vic here,
for whatever reason.  Drug deal gone bad.  Dead guy got caught laying some pipe
with the shooter’s wife, who knows.  Now, the perp’s got his shotgun out, ten
acres of open field—”  He motioned toward the rain-soaked hay, then waved
toward the driveway.  “An open road...if he’s coming from the direction you
said he was coming from, there’s a clear line of sight no matter how you look
at it.  He’s got a twelve-gauge with an effective range of thirty to forty
yards, so here’s what I don’t get—why in the hell would he chase him all the
way to right
here
before he cut down on his target?”

Mary pulled her cane from the
wet, sucking earth and angled to face him.  Her right leg, the one Sledge had
demolished with a well-placed swing, had been redlining on the pain meter
lately, and Walls’ tone and insinuation pushed her agitation one notch higher. 
She hobbled closer to him, enough to make the distance uncomfortable, and then
narrowed her eyes.  “You tell me.”

Walls pointed up to her
nephew’s window.  “From what I can see, those cherry limbs don’t exactly
provide the clearest view from the crow’s nest.  And what I’m hearing from you
is that a six year old boy witnessed a murder through some pretty thick cover,
in the pitch-black of a gully washer, and then it took your sister at least twenty
minutes to call somebody other than the police.”  He heaved a couple of his chins
toward the coop.  “All that dried chicken shit over there smells more like
bullshit to me.”

Mary wanted to smack him. 
Instead, she jammed a finger into the soft blubber of his chest.  “You think
I’m making this up?  Covering for Alice?  Are you out of your mind?”

He retreated a half step. 
“Hang on now, look at it from—”

She poked him again, shoved
his shoulder.  “You opened the door, buddy, now walk on through.  Tell me what
you think
really
happened, because I can’t wait to hear what nut-job
idea your pigeon brain has come up with.”

Walls shouted, “Hey!” and
pointed his chubby finger at her face.  “Stand down, Mary.  I repeat,
stand...down
.”

Mary saw Gordon and Tucker rise
up from the ground in her periphery.  Over Walls’ shoulder, Baumgartner grinned
and crossed his arms, enjoying the show.

Walls said, “Take a deep
breath, you hear me?  Relax.  Last I checked, you’re not flashing a badge
anymore and I don’t give a damn what that concealed-carry permit of yours
says—you touch an officer of the law like that again and you’ll be taking a backseat
joyride with some shiny new bracelets.”

Mary ground molar against
molar, stood up straight, and spat out an acknowledgment before backing away. 
Her leg throbbed but she refused to show another sign of weakness in front of
Walls.  And internally, she wrestled with the fact that he was right, in a
way.  From an outside perspective, her story, her
sister’s
story, held
less water than a sieve.  An obstructed view.  Horrible weather conditions. 
The word of a sleepy six year old.

She hadn’t considered the odd
timing of the shooter’s delay.  It
didn’t
make sense.  Mary cursed
herself more for overlooking it than the fact that Walls had one-upped her. 
She could handle him and his accusations.  What she couldn’t handle was the
embarrassment of missing a simple detail.  She was better than that.  Better than
him. 

And it
stung
.

Walls waved off Gordon and
Tucker, told them to get back to work, then asked Baumgartner if he actually
planned on doing any work.  He turned to Mary and said, “You good?”

“Yes,” she lied.

He held his hands up and
offered something resembling an apology.  “I’ll admit those weren’t exactly the
right words.”

“You think?”  Mary shoved her
cane into the ground and shifted her weight to her good leg.  She put her hair
up into a ponytail, allowing the subtle breeze to dry her neck.  With her mass
of brown locks sufficiently contained, she added, “Look, I don’t know what else
to tell you.  My hand to God, Alice doesn’t have anything to hide.  Hook us up
to a poly and we’ll tell you the same.  And as far as what Jesse saw?  Kids lie
when they think they’re gonna get in trouble, not when they see something that catches
their attention.  Same goes for the twins, right?”

Walls huffed.  “Mine?  Shit,
they’re a couple of heathens.  Swindle you out of every last penny in your
pocket, just like their mama.”  Evidently he was still bitter about a divorce
that had made it to the headlines of the local paper.  Take a small town with a
slow news day, add in a screaming match on the courthouse steps, you’ll get
more attention than you want.  “But,” he said, “you’re probably right.  They’ve
embarrassed me more than once by being too damn honest.”

“For the record,
on
the record, whatever...I believe him, Walls.  I know you’ve got a job to do—”

Tucker called out from inside
of the chicken coop, “Detective?” and motioned for Walls to come over.  “Found
something weird.”

Walls waddled toward him. 
Mary followed.  They trudged up the slight incline.  Walls broke into a fresh
layer of sweat and labored breathing from the exertion, and Mary used her cane
to push herself up the little hill.  Wet, soggy flip-flops squishing as she
went, glad she was wearing shorts in the thickness of the summer’s humidity.