A Killing in the Hills

14


Chill was impressed. He was also pissed.

She was a hell of a driver, and he respected that. But he was also annoyed that she had outfoxed him. It made his job a lot harder.

Following her up the mountain and then back down again had been his own inspiration. When Chill finally got around to telling the boss about it, he might like it, might not. Chill couldn’t predict. But he knew that the boss would’ve been a hell of a lot happier if it had worked. A car accident was perfect. Nobody would question it.

Chill was back in the motel room. It was a good hour-and-a-half drive from Acker’s Gap. Needed to be. He had to be more careful now, in case somebody recognized him from the shooting. Going after the Elkins bitch that way, in broad daylight, had been risky, sure. But risk was his specialty. He had a reputation. Or was getting one. Gradually.

Chill was sitting on the bed. He hadn’t bothered to yank off his boots when he came in. He’d just slammed the door shut behind him, headed for the bathroom to take a piss, then stumbled out into the crummy little room and heaved himself down on the bed.

He turned and scooted around and angled his back against the pillows. He’d bunched them up, both of them, mashed and pummeled them against the headboard so that he could sit up and smoke. He’d already had a warning from the management. One of the maids must’ve ratted him out. So sue me. The cigarette wobbled on his lip. He took a long, slow pull on it and then blew out the smoke from the opposite corner of his mouth, and the cigarette wobbled a little more. Chill could smoke an entire cigarette and never touch the damned thing.

God, he hated Sunday afternoons. They were the worst. He’d always thought so. Even as a kid, he hated Sunday afternoons. His daddy would sleep all day, usually, because he’d been out all of Saturday night, and then he’d fall in through the front door on Sunday morning and just lie there on the floor in a swamp of his own piss and puke, drunk as a goddamned skunk, and if you talked too loud or turned on the TV – well, the memory made Chill shudder. He’d done that once, as a kid. Eight years old. He’d come in the living room and tried to move real quiet and he’d turned on the TV set because he wanted to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers game. It was after 2 P.M., for Christ’s sake, and you would’ve thought that was okay, but his daddy rolled over and woke up and before Chill knew what was happening, before he even realized that the snoring had stopped, his daddy had picked up one of his boots, the big, heavy kind of boots, size 14, and he’d flung it at Chill’s head. Chill didn’t see it coming. It caught him on the side of his head and damned near took out his eye. The sharp part of the heel hit the little crease in the corner of his left eye and hooked something there, tore something, and for a couple of months Chill couldn’t make out a goddamned thing with that eye. Everything looked mushy and cloudy, like he was trying to see through a plastic bag or a dirty window. Plus, that side of his head was all swollen up, all yellow and purple, and when he went back to school on Monday, he had to say he’d run into the open truck door. That was what his daddy told him to say. Don’t want no goddamned meddlers coming round and telling me how to raise up my own kids, his daddy had said. So you tell ’em that you done run into the truck door, you hear? You got that, Charlie?

Chill knew that none of the teachers believed the story about the truck door, but he also knew that nobody was going to challenge him on it, either. Who wanted the aggravation? His daddy was a violent man, big, prideful, easily riled, like a saucepan kept on a low boil, always hoping somebody will come along and crank up the flame and give him an excuse to blow. Nobody messed with him. Lanny Sowards didn’t have a real job; he mainly just picked up metal scrap on the road and sold it to the recycling place in Piketon. And he got drunk. That was his job. That was what he devoted himself to.

There was never enough money in the house for shoes or food or other regular things. One day when Chill was six years old, he had argued with the man from the gas company who’d come to turn off the gas. Chill ran out into the side yard and called the man a goddamned f*cking sonofabitch and kicked at the man’s left shin, hard, over and over again. The man was so startled to hear that kind of language coming out of a little kid – startled, and amused, too, because it really did sound funny, that kind of garbage-mouth on a kid, a kid so small that the kicks didn’t even hurt – that he stopped what he was doing and just stood there. Then he left. But he came back the next day, when Chill was gone, and turned off the gas anyway.

His daddy ended up not mattering for very much longer, though, because when Chill was ten years old, Lanny Sowards wrapped his truck around a tree on one of those crazy Saturday nights when he was driving blind drunk, and there wasn’t a piece of him left that was big enough to bury. That was how Chill’s brother Steve had put it, saying the words gleefully, almost in awe: They couldn’t find a whole piece of him nowheres. He was spread out all over the place. Looked like a bag of laundry somebody’d dumped along the road. Dang. It was a while before Chill could believe that Lanny Sowards was really dead. It didn’t seem possible. He was afraid that if he believed it too readily, if he let his guard down, his daddy would show up again, take him by surprise, bushwhack him, having heard everything Chill had said about him in the meantime, and he’d make him pay. It took months for Chill to accept it. His daddy was too big for something as small and weak and dumb as death to get the better of him. When he thought about his daddy, Chill still had to resist the strong urge to duck. He could still sense that big boot flying at him, sharp edge leading the way, and hear his daddy’s bull roar, a sound as big as the world itself.

So Chill still hated Sunday afternoons. Always would.

There was a knock at the door.

Startled but not surprised – he was expecting it, but didn’t know just when it would come – Chill mashed out his cigarette on the jar lid that he kept on the nightstand. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up, buttoned his jeans. With his right hand he smoothed back the hair on one side of his head. The hair felt greasy and clotted beneath his palm.

The knock came again.