A Killing in the Hills

10


When she stepped off the front stoop of the Sheets trailer, Bell was relieved to see that her Explorer was intact. It hadn’t been sideswiped by a coal truck. Hadn’t rolled off the edge of the mountain. The side mirrors had survived.

She slid in behind the wheel and slung her briefcase onto the seat beside her. Backing slowly onto the road, looking anxiously and repeatedly over her right and left shoulders to check and double-check for any lurking coal trucks, she finally was able to straighten the wheels and tackle Route 6 again, heading for home.

Alone at last, and grateful for it, Bell reviewed the final few minutes of her time with Deanna and Lori Sheets. Bell had politely declined Deanna’s request to give her a makeover. But when Lori scolded her daughter – Deanna, honey, you just don’t say such things to people, you’re hurting Mrs Elkins’ feelings, and by the way, Mrs Elkins, Deanna didn’t mean that she’d ask you to pay, it’s all free, ’cause she don’t have no license yet and by law she can’t charge for her services – Bell had assured Lori that she wasn’t offended. Not in the least.

The answer, though, was still no. She was happy with her hairstyle just the way it was.

As Bell drove down the mountain, the trees on both sides of the road seemed to do what they’d done on her way up, which was to close in slowly over the top of her SUV, leaning in, branches intersecting. Creating a dark and solemn arch. She loved these mountains, loved their raw beauty, but it was a wary, cautious love, the kind of love you might have for a large animal with a vicious streak. You could love it all you liked, but you couldn’t ever turn your back on it. You had to respect the fact of its wildness. It was a wildness that would outlast your love.

The steep grade made the Explorer’s brakes work harder than they wanted to. Held back, the engine lapsed into a frantic, incensed grinding that made Bell think of popping neck muscles and snapping hamstrings, as the SUV tangled with one tight curve after another.

She tried to keep her mind exclusively on the road, but it was difficult. Bell was thinking about parents and kids, about how far a mother would go to protect her child. She remembered the feeling she’d had the day before, when she had barreled her way into the Salty Dawg, knowing only that there had been a shooting and that Carla was in the vicinity. She would’ve done anything to protect her child.

Same as any mother.

So what would Lori Sheets do? How far would she go? Would she lie about Albie’s mental capacities? About his understanding of what happens when you loop a hose around a small boy’s neck and tighten it? Would she try to protect him however she could? And if Albie had acted innocently, how could his actions be considered evil?

Most people thought a prosecutor’s main workplace was the courtroom. But the bulk of Bell’s labor occurred elsewhere. The meat of it had nothing to do with a judge or jury. It happened when she made decisions – decisions about whom to indict, about what to charge them with, about which crimes she should focus on and how to deploy the resources of her office – just as she was having to make in the Albie Sheets case. Those decisions always came outside the courtroom, before a trial began. Bell liked to compare it to sports. Everybody enjoyed watching the game, but for the athlete, the real moment of truth came on the practice field or in the weight room, in the long afternoons of repetition, of fatigue. By the time the game came around, the outcome was all but assured. The game was only the coda. The shadow of the main event. By the time Bell walked into a courtroom, most of the real drama was long over.

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.