A Killing in the Hills

47


Eddie Briscoe was a moron – and now he was a dead moron – but his question had merit.

What the hell are you gonna do with her?

Chill would kill her in the end. He had to. She could ID him as the killer, so naturally he’d have to get rid of her. No question about that. The question was what he’d do in the meantime. How he’d use her.

They’d been driving for at least an hour now. Back at Eddie’s, Chill had dumped Carla in the backseat of the piece-of-shit car. Thank God she was skinny.

She was out cold. He’d thought about taking advantage of that fact, but he didn’t want to waste the time. He wanted to get the hell out of Eddie’s house and get the hell out of Eddie’s neighborhood.

Chill hated guys like Eddie. Guys who got high. It was disgusting, letting yourself reach the point where you were out of control. Chill knew a lot of guys in his line of work who couldn’t keep their hands off the merchandise, but that wasn’t him. He’d tried pot once, just once, and hated it, hated the burning throat and the way it left him: hungry, clawingly hungry, with a bad case of the giggles. The other stuff, the pills, he hadn’t touched. Never would. He needed to keep himself sharp. Mind clear. Ready.

He admired the boss for doing that, too. For never touching the crap he sold. The boss was a businessman. He’d started out dealing pills, same as everybody. He had a good source. Then he’d added heroin, the new kind from Mexico, cheap stuff, and it was smart, because the pills ended up costing too much for the folks around here, once they got going.

That fact turned Chill into the bad guy, showing up and counting the money they handed him and telling them they didn’t have enough, he couldn’t give them anything, or maybe just a few pills, not what they wanted, worse than nothing at all, and then watching them fall apart. The guys’d threaten him. The women’d drop their eyes to his crotch and lick their lips. Like Lorene, they were usually skinny and skanky, and while Chill wasn’t too particular, he didn’t like to mix things that way. Business and pleasure. Or what passed for pleasure.

In the end, lots of the guys, too, would offer to do whatever he wanted, just gimme them pain pills please please I’m not doin’ so good you can see that cancha but that disgusted Chill, the idea of some guy sucking him off for a bunch of pills. Okay, fine, so he had let a guy do it to him once, just once, but it was disgusting. After, he’d punched the guy in the face.

Heroin was a better deal. Didn’t cost much, compared to pills. Kids, especially, liked it. High school kids liked the sound of it, the sound of the word, all that it stood for, the history of it, the legend, Sid and Nancy, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, and they liked all the shit that went with it, the needles and the spoons and the plastic tubing and the little Bic lighters. The Bic lighters came in all colors: red, green, black, white, purple, yellow. You could pick your favorite color. They always had ’em in a box at the checkout at the 7-Eleven, all the different colors. The kids liked the swagger, too, that went along with it. With the life.

Even the word rehab had a click to it. A shine. Movie stars did rehab. Rock stars. You read about it all the time.

He heard a moan in the backseat. Chill took a quick look over his shoulder.

He’d been driving in the mountains, the piece-of-shit car lurching and grinding up the steep inclines, because there was almost nobody on these roads, and it was getting really dark now, seriously dark, so all he could see in his backseat was the curve of a small body, crushed into a tight ball. She coughed a few times, wet gurgling coughs that went on for a long, long time, coughs that could mean she was choking, not getting enough air, and he thought, Don’t die on me now girlie not yet because finally he’d had an idea, an idea about where to go and what to do with her, an idea that had been coiled in the back of his thoughts the same way she was curled in the backseat of his car.

He needed someplace dramatic. Like what you’d see in a movie. Anything less – a motel room or a 7-Eleven – would be embarrassing. This had to be spectacular. He wanted a place that people would remember, so that, forever after, when they passed it, they would look at each other and nod and know that everybody was thinking the same thing.

That’s where Chill Sowards did it. Right there. Big standoff. Hostage situation. He was way outnumbered. Hell of a thing. Guy’s got elephant balls. No question.

In the backseat, Carla moaned again. Her coat scratched against the vinyl car seat. She was moving. Shifting around. He hoped she wasn’t going to throw up or something. He’d be trapped in here with the smell. F*cking gross, is what it’ll be. F*cking disgust—

Goddamnit.

Big lights, coming up behind him. Red lights. Filling his rearview mirror. He had to squint. Little yip-yip of a siren. The siren wasn’t needed; he’d slowed down right away.

He couldn’t out run anybody. Not in this piece-of-shit car.

Chill yanked the compact over to the berm and waited. His gun was on the passenger seat. He slid it under the pile of other stuff on the seat, under the rattling little city of trash: the Ruffles bags and the KFC boxes and the Dolly Madison wrappers and the packs of cigarettes, everything dumped together.

Thing was, though, he could reach for the Steyr if he needed to, could reach under the trash and swing it up at the window, could give this a*shole cop a howdy like he’d never had before. In one second. Less.

If the guy gave him any problem, that’s what he’d have to do. He didn’t want to do it, he didn’t want to take the time, because he’d have to get out then and make sure the guy was really dead and all, but if he had to, he would.

Rolled down his window. Stuck out an elbow. Casual-like.

‘Yeah, officer? Somethin’ I can do for you?’