A Killing in the Hills

28


Chill saw the bedroom light go out.

He was parked at the far end of the alley. There were a lot of other cars around, new ones and clunkers too, old beaters, and garbage cans, so he felt safe. They screened him. Hard for anybody to notice this car and remember it.

No lights in any of the houses.

He knew he was taking a chance, pushing his luck, but there was another part of him that loved it just because of that very thing. Risks kept him from getting bored.

The boredom. That was what people didn’t understand: how goddamned boring it could be. He wished he could say to people You think it’s cool, you stupid f*cking loser, because you’ve seen way too many movies, you think you’re Johnny F*cking Depp in Blow or something, but you don’t get it – it’s boring. Okay? Most of the time, you know what you’ll be doing? You’ll be sitting around waiting for stuff to happen. Waiting for a delivery. Waiting for the boss. Waiting for somebody to show up. Waiting to get paid. Waiting.

Hell, they’d figure it out for themselves. Everybody did. He never got much chance to meet the other people, anyway. The boss kept everybody separated. Like, maybe the boss was afraid that if they got together and compared notes, they’d be harder to deal with.

Chill had been parked out here in the alley a long time, at least a couple of hours, ever since it got dark. Waiting. Watching her. Getting a sense of her schedule, of what she did when, of who else might be around.

He’d seen her come home. He knew she lived here with her kid. A daughter, he’d heard. There was no husband, no man, which was a big relief.

He’d watched a light come on in the kitchen, then the living room, then her bedroom on the second floor. Then he saw the bedroom light snap off. The house was dark now.

Chill checked out the neighborhood. Looked left, right. Forward, backward. He couldn’t see much, on account of the darkness, but he could get a sense of it, all the same. Older homes. Older, but nice. Real nice. Big and nice. The kind of houses he’d seen sometimes when he was a kid – they’d be driving, him and his dad, looking for scrap metal, and they’d take a wrong turn and end up in a decent area – and he’d wonder who lived in those places. There wasn’t any junk stacked on the porches. Just a kid’s bike, maybe. Or there’d be a swing hanging at one end of the porch, the kind of swing you could sit on while you talked to somebody, and they’d listen to you. The yards were clean and neat. Curtains in the windows. Somebody gave a damn.

He shook his head.

Christ, his legs hurt. He wanted to stand up, stretch out, maybe run a little bit, but he couldn’t. Couldn’t get out of the car. It was too risky. As long as he sat here, slumped down, engine off, he was pretty much invisible. He could watch. Watch and learn.

He didn’t much like the new motel, the one he’d found after leaving the other one. Had to, after what he’d stuffed in the Dumpster, a little present, a little calling card. You’d think they were all alike, the motels, but they weren’t. The new one had a smell to it that disgusted him. Couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was old, like old vomit, mixed with this air-freshener crap. Plus, the TV remote didn’t work.

Damn.

He sat up, peering up through the windshield, trying to see. She was at the bedroom window. It was her. Wasn’t it? Had to be.

No light in the room behind her, but he’d seen the sash go up. Now she leaned out. Elbows on the sill. Jesus. What if she looked down here? Saw his car?

He calmed himself. No way. It was too dark.

He watched her, wondering what she was thinking about.

Night noises, West Virginia style. Bell had always loved them. In the summer, it was tree frogs, cicadas, crickets, that springy chorus that sounded like sleigh bells. Any season, there was the soprano yell of a train whistle in the distance. The yap and snarl of an animal fight, off in the woods. Could be raccoons, possums. If a skunk was involved, you’d know it soon enough. Too soon.

She leaned out of her bedroom window. Chin propped up with her fist. She’d concluded the call with Sam but was still too keyed up to sleep.

Wilderness loomed just beyond the sidewalks. That’s where the racket came from, the screeches and the rustlings, all endless, mysterious. If you weren’t used to it, it could keep you awake all night. If you were used to it, it was a lullaby. A lullaby you found yourself longing for, when you were separated from it.

In D.C., in their first apartment on Capitol Hill, she’d had to accustom herself to a different set of night noises: sirens, revving engines that popped and snarled more obnoxiously than any wild animal, occasional screams, scraps and jabs of laughter. More sirens. Many times, she heard gunshots in the middle of the night; she’d check the paper the next day, ask the neighbors, but she rarely found out what had happened. Gunfire was not all that remarkable.

And we’re the backwoods rednecks? Bell had often asked herself. We’re the gun-toting hicks?

Once, after she and Sam had just met, they sneaked away from their respective houses in the middle of the night and spent it together – but not in the way that would intrigue most teenagers. They ended up doing plenty of that, too, God knew. But on that first night, they took a long walk, winding up in the woods. They found a massive tree, so wide that even the two of them together, with their arms outstretched, bark scraping their skin, couldn’t make it all the way around the circumference to graze the other person’s fingertips. Then they each found a spot within the giant gnarled roots that had broken through the earth in an ancient upheaval, now frozen in elaborate contortions, and they lay there, letting the night noises rise up all around them like a homemade symphony, hearing the same noises they would’ve heard in this place a hundred years ago. Two hundred.

Bell looked down at the alley that unrolled beneath her window like a dark carpet. Across the narrow dirt strip was the backyard of a house on Brandon Street, one street over from Shelton. The Clarks lived there. Ernie and Maybelle and Maybelle’s mother, Holly. Beyond Brandon was a brief succession of other streets, all laid out straight and neat and narrow until the neighborhood abruptly ended at the wood’s edge.

She couldn’t make out many particulars. Darkness had reduced the world to crude blocky shapes: Houses. Trees. Mountain.

The night noises should have been familiar, soothing. But something was bothering Bell, even beyond all the other somethings she was dealing with these days. Something closer. Closer than a stone’s throw. She couldn’t figure out what it was. She felt a chill of foreboding on her bare arms.

She shut the window.