A Killing in the Hills

17


Albie Sheets had eaten soap.

‘Soap?’

Bell repeated the word back to Hick.

‘Soap.’ Hick’s voice on her cell was matter-of-fact. ‘Irish Spring, I think, although it might’ve been Dove. Or Ivory. Not that they have the fancy stuff in the county jail – can you imagine Nick Fogelsong’s face, if he thought we were giving inmates fancy name-brand soap at county expense?’

Hick chuckled. When Bell didn’t join him, he cleared his throat and went back to his report. ‘The soap came from Albie’s family. They’d brought him some stuff yesterday afternoon. Toiletries ’n’ such. In a little basket. With a ribbon on it. Pink. The ribbon was pink. Way I hear it, Albie’d chewed and swallowed a bar and a half before the guards put a stop to his little between-meal snack.’

Bell shifted the phone to her other ear. By this time, she had seated herself on the bottom step of her staircase, elbows on kneecaps, leaning her head against the mahogany baluster. The pain in her shoulder had faded to a mild ache.

This job. Never a dull moment.

‘Why’d he eat soap?’

‘Nobody knows. Deputies found him sick as a dog in his cell. Throwing up, grabbing his gut, screaming. Judge Pelley postponed the start of the trial a couple of days.’

‘Is Albie Sheets really ill?’

Overhead, Bell could hear the floorboards of the old house flex and moan. Carla must be moving around her bedroom. Was she packing? Already? No. Couldn’t be. Maybe she’s just blowing off steam. Pacing. Bell did that herself sometimes; she kept moving, kept in action, so that her fears and frustrations had to work to catch up with her.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Hick said. ‘Just got a bellyache to beat the band.’

‘I was out at the Sheets place myself this morning.’ Bell considered telling Hick about the episode up on the mountain, about the bastard who’d tried to run her off the road, but then changed her mind. She didn’t want her staff distracted. There were too many things she needed them to do. She didn’t want them wasting their time, fighting her battles. She was used to fighting her battles alone.

The sounds over Bell’s head, the creaks and squeaks, had stopped. Carla was probably stretched out on her bed, clutching her favorite stuffed animal – a purple plush giraffe she’d had since she was a toddler, and which she’d named, for obscure reasons, Mr Gompers – and, Bell surmised, thinking about D.C. and all the cool things she could do there with her dad and with Glenna Saint-Pain-in-the-Ass.

‘Well,’ Hick said, ‘Judge Pelley just wants to be sure, I guess, that Albie’s not going to keel over and die during opening arguments. He wants to hold things up until the end of the week. He told the deputies on jail duty to keep a close eye on our boy Albie – who, after this stunt, by the way, must have the cleanest gol-durned innards of any prisoner in the history of the Raythune County Jail.’

Bell gave a small grunt. By all rights, Hickey Leonard should’ve outgrown his propensity to make bad jokes about their cases, but if it hadn’t happened by now – Hick was fifty-nine – it wasn’t going to happen at all, Bell surmised.

Hick Leonard had maintained a private law practice in Acker’s Gap for more than three decades before deciding to run for prosecutor in the wake of the Bobby Lee Mercer scandal. Oddly, though, losing to Bell Elkins on Election Day had seemed like a relief to him. His motivation for seeking office had been a simple one, he said: Hick wanted, at long last, to be on what he called ‘the side of the good guys’ – the state of West Virginia and the county of Raythune – instead of the side of the bad guys, by which he meant the creeps, bums, thieves, liars, con artists, hypocrites, and low-life punks whose worthless asses he’d kept out of jail for lo these many years. But Hick wasn’t cut out to be the boss, to run a complicated public office. Deep in his heart, he appeared to know that. The voters apparently knew it, too.

The day after her victory, Bell had called Hick and asked him to join her staff. It wasn’t an abstract goodwill gesture. She needed him. He might be a third-rate comedian, but he was a first-rate attorney. And he knew the recent history of Acker’s Gap – the greasy river of quid pro quo that oozed through any small town, the labyrinthine network of favors offered and accepted and parlayed into other currencies – better than anybody else. He knew who owed what to whom and why; he knew whose wife had been stepping out with whose husband and for how long. He knew the contents of prescriptions picked up at the Walgreens pharmacy. He knew the way that a great many customers at Ike’s Diner – the last non-chain eatery left standing in town, although the metaphorical vultures always seemed to be massing on the rooftop with the opening of each new Burger King and Subway out on the interstate – liked their eggs.

Did Hick Leonard resent Bell for ending up in the office he’d sought? She wasn’t sure. And frankly, she didn’t much care. You didn’t have to love your boss to do a good job. You only had to agree with her priorities. And Hick, like her, seemed to want to rid these parts of the drug dealers who had moved in with such ruthless and alarming speed. He, too, seemed to bounce between deep sorrow and blistering anger when he looked at the wrecked lives left in the wake of the drugs.

Hick’s only misstep so far had been his passionate recommendation of Rhonda Lovejoy for the second assistant’s spot. Rhonda was a disaster. She was chronically late, hopelessly scatterbrained, and terminally disorganized. Bell didn’t know why Hick had pushed so hard for her hiring – did he owe somebody a favor? – and didn’t care. The moment she had time to deal with it, Bell intended to tell Rhonda that she’d need to find other employment.

‘Thanks, Hick. Appreciate the update.’

She was about to click END CALL, but sensed that Hick had something else to say. Bell could imagine his big round face – the Leonards all had big faces to begin with, but Hick enhanced the genetics with a fanatical affection for pulled pork sandwiches and French toast – and the beseeching expression he adopted when he wanted to say something but was afraid to. His eyes had a tendency to bug out. His chin might quiver. Hick’s face could sometimes look like an oversensitive pie plate.

So she paused. She’d give him a couple of seconds to speak his mind. Then she had to go.

‘You know what, Bell?’

She waited.

‘Well, I just wanted to say – I mean—’ Hick took a deep breath, blew it out. The column of expelled air made a rasping sound in Bell’s ear. Clearly, the man didn’t realize how a cell phone mediated certain sounds, making them a painful auditory experience for the person on the other end of the line.

‘What is it, Hick? Kind of a busy day here, you know?’

‘I know, I know.’ Another pause, and then his words came out in a tumble: ‘Shit, Bell, I gotta say this. Okay? You’re gonna hate this but I gotta say it.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Well, it’s just that – well, listen. You know how much I admire you, right? And the stand you and Fogelsong have taken against illegal pharmaceuticals and the bastards who sell ’em around here – it’s heroic, really. Nothing short of heroic.’

‘Heroic. Got it.’

‘No, listen. I’m serious here. I’m in awe, Bell. Lots of us are. But – believe me, this isn’t a criticism. Not at all. But the shootings yesterday – they’ve got us all pretty upset, Bell. Pretty scared. This is serious shit going down. Somebody is maybe trying to make a point.’

‘Could be. So?’

‘The “so,” Bell,’ he said, a little irked at what seemed like snippiness on her part, ‘is that maybe yesterday was a warning. Somebody is telling us – telling us pretty damn clearly – to back off. And maybe we ought to pay attention. Maybe we ought to just lay off on all the heavy talk about stopping the pill traffic. Just for a while. Till things settle out. Hell, we’ve got plenty else to worry about. You know that better’n anybody. Maybe we could just dial back on the chatter about busting up the drug rings. Just for a bit. I’m thinking about our safety here, Bell. Our well-being. All of us. Including you and that girl of yours.’

Silence.

Finally, in a tentative voice, Hick said, ‘You still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Hope you’re not mad. Just had to say it.’

Silence.

‘Bell?’

‘Couple of things here, Hick, for you to get straight.’ Her voice began its journey with ominous calm. ‘First of all, don’t you ever – ever – bring up my daughter in this kind of conversation. You hear me? Never. You will never do that again. My family is my own business.’ The intensity in her tone was escalating, slowly but surely. ‘Second, if you don’t agree with the priorities of this office, if you’re not fully committed to the work we’re doing here, you’re free to leave. Anytime. Pack up your desk and get out. Today. This goddamned minute. Have I made myself sufficiently clear to you? Is there any part of this about which you’re confused?’

Hick chuckled.

Bell gripped the phone tighter. ‘What the hell are you laughing at? What’s so damned funny?’

‘Nothing, boss. Nothing at all. I’m behind you one thousand percent. Always will be. Just had to find out, though, if you were still in this thing. Still in the fight. Had to challenge you. Had to smoke you out.’ He paused. The jocularity vanished. ‘Some people were kind of wondering. After what happened yesterday, with Carla being there and all – sorry, boss, I had to bring her up – and with what happened when you were a kid, well, they worried that maybe you were thinking about backing off, maybe you wouldn’t want to—’

‘Understood.’ She cut him off. She didn’t want to talk about this.

Not with him. Not with anyone.

‘I know Acker’s Gap,’ Hick went on, unwilling to let it go, as his boss plainly wanted him to. He didn’t care what she wanted right now. He needed to speak. ‘Plenty of good people here, Bell. You know that, too. Good, decent, law-abiding people. Just like us, they want to get rid of the drugs and all the trouble you get with that filthy crap. Absolutely, they do. They can see what it’s doing to this place. But it’s hard, Bell. Once there’s violence involved, it gets real hard. The shooting – well, it’s got everybody jumping at their own shadow. Most folks around here are scared shitless. They need somebody to lead ’em. Somebody like you. If you’re in, they’re in.’

Bell didn’t answer right away. She needed a minute to absorb the compliment – she didn’t do well with compliments – and she used the lull to stand up. She was tired of sitting down.

She was also tired of conversation. She needed action. She wanted progress, not speeches.

‘Keep me posted on Albie Sheets’s medical condition.’ She knew Hick would take her meaning: Let’s get back to work.

She cut off the call. Then she initiated another one. With a light flick of her thumbnail, she touched No. 2 on her speed dial. No. 1 was Carla’s cell.

‘Yeah,’ said the answering voice.

‘Nick, can you meet me at Ike’s?’

‘You bet.’

‘An hour from now?’

‘Fine.’

‘Nick?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Pie rule’s still in force, right?’

‘Far as I’m concerned.’

They had made the pact long ago – almost three decades ago, in fact – during the very first time they’d ever talked. They had sat across a booth from each other at Ike’s. It was the worst night of Bell’s life. It would always be the worst night of her life, no matter what else happened to her. In a flash of violence, she had lost everything. She’d been left with no home, no family, nothing.

All she had was the young deputy she’d met for the very first time that night, a man named Nick Fogelsong, who had insisted on driving her over to Ike’s after the state police had finished taking her statement, while they waited for the social worker to show up and fill out the paperwork that would dump her in the foster care system. That deputy had sat across the chipped red table from her and said, We’re going to be friends, okay? You and me. For a good long time. This’ll be our special meeting place. So here’s the rule. From now on, whoever gets here second has to buy the pie. Agreed?

Bell, restored to the present, had one more thing to say to him before she shut off her cell. In case he beat her there, she didn’t want any misunderstanding.

‘Apple, if they have it. And coffee.’