A Killing in the Hills

52


Bell kneeled down beside the dying man.

The first team of paramedics had taken care of Carla, scooping her up and then pushing the gurney rapidly toward the door. ‘She’ll be okay, Mrs Elkins,’ one of the paramedics had called to her, sending the words over his blue-jacketed shoulder, giving her a thumbs-up sign.

She’d follow the ambulance in Nick’s Blazer – but there was something she needed to do first.

She leaned over the fallen body.

Dirty T-shirt, jeans, steel-toed boots. He smelled like sweat and blood and something else, too, something she couldn’t name, something darker. The hands at his sides made plucking motions, as if he were reaching for something, and then it was as if he’d given up on it, as if he’d decided he didn’t need it anyway, whatever it was.

His eyes found Bell’s face. Stopped there. His own face had relaxed. Gone was the frantic stamp of someone fighting for life, pressing and reaching, hanging on at all costs. His features had smoothed out. He was letting go.

He was so young. She remembered what he’d said: Keep your f*ckin’ noses out of our business. It had to be drugs. It was always drugs. That was the business people like him meant when they talked about business.

But this kid wasn’t in charge of anything. This kid was an employee.

She touched his cheek. It was greasy with sweat. She saw the chicken-scratch of acne scars on his cheeks. She’d never seen him before, but she felt like she knew his life story, start to finish. She’d seen a lot of kids just like him.

‘Who is it?’ she asked him softly. ‘Who hired you? Tell me.’

There was a gurgling sound. It came not from his mouth but from the wound in his chest, from the blood that popped and sucked in and out of the hole when he tried to breathe. It was a matter of a minute or two now. Maybe not even that.

His small squinty eyes were still open but they had stopped moving, stopped reacting to light.

‘You can do this,’ Bell said. ‘I know you can.’

She had no idea if he could understand her, or if he would be able to respond, even if he wanted to.

‘Just tell me. Your boss – who is it? A name. Give me a name.’

His lips twitched. He opened his mouth. He was trying. She could see how bad his teeth were, brown and broken off.

She lowered her head and turned it sideways, so that her ear would be close to his mouth. She felt his breath, smelled its sourness, felt the faint puffs of air tickling the fine hairs along her jawline. Leaning down so close to him, she could smell the hot ammonia stink of urine; his body was sinking, relaxing in a mortal languor, everything was spreading out, letting go. His body was weeping, even if his eyes weren’t.

She listened. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. She leaned in closer. Her ear was touching his mouth now. His lips were so dry and cracked that they felt like steel wool against the delicate skin of her ear.

‘Easy,’ she whispered to him. ‘Slow and easy. Just a name.’

He tried again.

She still couldn’t understand what he was saying. There was so little time left. Bell slowly began to lift her head. He had tried. She would always remember that he had tried. In the years to come, she told herself, she would remember that this young man – whom she’d started out hating, because of what he’d done to Carla, wishing he were dead, hoping he would suffer horribly – had ended up trying to help. He had failed, but that didn’t matter. He had tried, and she wouldn’t forget him. It was all she could do for him now: promise to remember.

The paramedics had held back, letting her work, but they were restless. They needed to do their job. She could feel them moving in behind her. She, too, was running out of time.

The young man’s lips, after falling still, were twitching again. His tongue was moving. What was he doing? It looked, Bell thought, as if he was using the tip of it to touch the places in his mouth where his teeth should be. And trying to speak.

Once more, one last time, Bell turned her head and lowered it to his mouth, listening. He made a final attempt to say words she could understand. She strained to make out the meaning. And this time – perhaps because she expected nothing, because she’d reconciled herself to the fact that he would die with the secret – she was able to catch the rhythm of his gasps, she could interpret the brief hurried syllables as he hissed them.

It took less than a second for him to say the name, whispering it so softly that only she could hear it.

At the sound of it, at the identity of the person who had masterminded all of this sorrow, Bell suddenly felt sick. A black hole opened up in the center of her mind, vaster than this room, larger and darker, overwhelming her with the endless rippling shock of what she now knew, with the immensity of the betrayal.

The name he’d just given her – could it be true?

His blank eyes, eyes from which the spirit had just fled to wherever it was that spirits like his went, offered up the answer.

Yes.

Sheriff Fogelsong and Deputy Harrison loomed above her. Because her knees were flush with the floor, Bell could feel the vibrations from the paramedics as they converged, the quick-step crunch of boots, the humming roll of gurney wheels.

Too late, Bell thought. Way too late to help this kid.

It would have been too late years ago. Too late, maybe, from the day he was born.

The sheriff and Harrison guided Bell to her feet. She didn’t need them, not really, she could’ve gotten up on her own – but it was good, just now, to feel the firmness of their grip, the sureness. She needed to be in touch with something solid. Because everything else Bell had thought she could believe in, everything she’d trusted, had just been obliterated by what the young man had told her.

By a name.

She watched the paramedics work on him, snapping through their routines, ignoring the hopelessness of it all. They probed and they jostled and they set up a portable IV, readying his body for transport. They fought on because, Bell knew, it was what they did.

‘Bell.’

The sheriff was beside her. He still held her arm, from when he’d helped her up. Harrison had stepped forward to assist the paramedics, but Nick was still there, still holding her. Centering her.

‘We’re through here, Bell. We can meet them at the hospital.’

‘No. There’s one more stop we have to make.’

‘There is?’

‘He told me, Nick. Just before he died. I know who he was working for. I know who’s running the drug operation. And who must’ve ordered the killing of Dean Streeter.’

The sheriff’s face was as cold and dead as an abandoned house in the middle of winter. He tightened his grip on her arm.

There would, she knew, be a bruise there tomorrow. That was how hard Nick Fogelsong clutched her. That was how fiercely he was concentrating on every word she said.

‘Where, Bell? Where do we need to go?’

‘To Ruthie and Tom’s.’