A Killing in the Hills

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, a*shole.

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.

And in that place she saw Carla, she saw her child, her baby, and Bell thought, She’ll be okay. Everything will be okay now.

She had an idea. Abruptly she slid her foot from the brake to the gas. Instead of trying to slow down, she shot ahead. Instead of fighting the other car’s force, she suddenly separated herself from it, and the Explorer – Wish I could kiss that big old V8 engine – leaped forward like a panther spotting prey.

If I’m going down off this mountain, I’m going down fighting. Not riding the goddamned brake. ’Cause I’m not ready for my Thelma and Louise moment.

A small gap sprang open between the compact and the Explorer.

The curve roared up in front of her windshield. It’s not even a curve, that doesn’t do it justice, it’s as sharp as a damned T-square. But what the hell. Here goes. Bell yanked the wheel to the left so hard that she felt something pop in her shoulder. The back half of the Explorer whipped sideways in a vicious arc. Her left rear tire – the last thing that could stop her from flying off the top of the mountain – skidded to the edge.

If she was going over, it would happen in the next one-one-hundredth of a second.

Like, now.

The big vehicle teetered. It tipped over the lip of the road, hanging in space, tilting, tilting, and then it righted itself with a savage bounce.

Abruptly she was back on the road again, still going at an outrageous rate of speed. She wasn’t thinking, wasn’t breathing, just driving. Fast.

She risked a glimpse in the rearview mirror. The other car was well behind her now. The mystery driver was just rounding the bad-ass curve; he was bright enough to realize that a runty compact couldn’t overtake a Ford Explorer going at top speed. He wasn’t chasing her. His only advantage had been the element of surprise.

Bell gripped the wheel as if she fully intended to wrench it off the steering column. She was seized by a black desire for vengeance, for payback, and the sudden wild surge of emotion made her tremble worse than had the close call. He’d tried to kill her, for God’s sake. To murder her. She wanted to spin the Explorer around and she wanted to go charging after him, she wanted to chase him and push him off the goddamned mountain, she wanted to see him fly off the side of the road and end up in pieces. She wanted to do to him what he’d tried to do to her.

You bastard. You f*cking f*cker, you f*cking f*cking bastard. When I get you, I’m going to—

She knew this part of herself – the part that could turn ugly in an instant, the part that had nothing to do with pale blue cardigans and linen slacks and briefcases – and it scared her. It always had. Because she knew where it came from.

It came from her father, Donnie Dolan. King of all the rat bastards. His temper lived in her. Boiled in her veins.

Flying downhill, she repeatedly scanned both sides of the road with quick back-and-forth jerks of her head. Searching for a spot for a tight U-turn so that she could flip around and go after him, chase him down.

The berm was too narrow. If she tried it now and a heavy coal truck lumbered by as the Explorer made its swift pivot, its rear end hanging out as she ripped through the gears – well, she’d seen the results of accidents like that on mountain roads.

The paramedics would need a Shop-Vac to suck up the body parts.

So Bell kept driving. Going forward.

She sneaked looks in the rearview mirror every quarter mile or so. There was nothing to see. The sonofabitch was either deliberately hanging back, staying out of sight so she couldn’t get a read on his plate or a better look at his face, or else he’d pulled off the road somewhere, waiting for her to clear out.

She thought about calling Nick on her cell, but didn’t. By the time anybody got up here, the guy’d be gone.

She was breathing fast and shallow now, and the hot breaths hurt, they felt like tiny needles, as if she’d inhaled the contents of a pepper shaker somewhere along the way. The blackness inside her, the desire for instant vengeance, gradually began to fade. She relaxed her grip on the wheel.

Now she was aware of how much her fingers ached, from the pressure of holding on so frantically. Her shoulder throbbed. Her eyes burned. A headache smashed and roiled behind them.

Home, she thought. Just let me get home.

Bell slowly mounted the steps to her front porch. Only a few hours before she had left in a brisk professional hurry; she’d been fresh and pressed and focused, intensely preoccupied with the Albie Sheets trial and its precedents in West Virginia case law. Her steps were light and quick.

Now she covered the same ground in reverse. But there was no quickness. She wasn’t gliding. She was trudging. She was shaky and exhausted. And the reality of what had just occurred – the fact that someone had tried to kill her – kept coming back to her, filling her with rage. It was like a fever spiking over and over again.

Reaching the top step, she felt better. This old house did the trick. It was settling her down. Steadying her.

She loved this place, every ancient, crumbling inch of it. On the outside, she loved every mustard-colored stone and every crooked line of mud-hued mortar that anchored those stones, and she loved the gray slate roof that cost a bloody fortune to maintain. Inside, she loved every solid plaster wall and every strip of crown molding and every inch of the wide-planked, wooden-pegged floors.

At this moment, she had a single goal. It was a simple one. She wanted to lower herself forthwith into the big broken-down armchair in her living room. An itchy dampness bloomed under each arm. She was thinking about how good it was going to feel to shuck off her shoes and close her eyes.

Bell froze.

The front door hung open a good inch and a half. Her weariness vanished. Instantly alert once more, a cold panic swept over her. Maybe the lunatic who’d tried to kill her on the mountain had beaten her home – and now waited inside, ready to finish the job.

She pushed warily at the heavy door, wincing at the tortured, coffinlike shriek. She was ready for anything.

‘Carla?’ she called out. ‘Carla? Sweetie?’

Two figures suddenly appeared in the foyer, one short and one tall.

The short one was Carla. The tall one was Sam Elkins. Her ex-husband.

He smiled. Bell didn’t.

‘Heard you pull in,’ he said. His smile widened. He specialized in smiles.

Oh, fabulous. Her fatigue returned in a steep gray wave, almost knocking her over. What a weekend. My daughter witnesses a massacre. Some crazy bastard just about runs me off the road. And now my ex-husband shows up unannounced.

It’s the freakin’ trifecta.