5
I worked quickly, taking down my shower curtain and wrapping the body up before heaving it into the back of my truck. I wore gloves, of course, and was careful not to let any blood get on my clothes or skin. Once Joe (God, knowing his name made it so much harder) was in my truck, I went to my shed and got out my lawn mower. I gassed it up and put on the grass catcher I’d never used. Then I rolled it around to the spot near where his body had been. I turned my headlights on and mowed the entire yard on the lowest setting.
It took me nearly a half hour before I felt like I’d done all the mowing and collecting of gore I was likely to do. Morning would tell the story of how much I’d missed, but for now, I had to call it quits. I pushed the mower into the shed and started around to my truck, carrying the grass catcher. I stuck it in the passenger’s side floorboard, shut the door, and turned to consider the man’s sedan.
I’d hide it for now. Getting rid of it was important, but not as important as getting rid of the body. I drove it into the woods behind my house, guiding the front end slowly into some pines until the entire vehicle was completely out of sight.
From there, I went to grab Goose, and he jumped into my truck, excitedly, before noticing the bag of grass and blood. He whined and sniffed at it as I started the engine.
Just as I was about to pull away, I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. That was one of the advantages of living on the top of a mountain. I usually had plenty of time to prepare for visitors. I could hear an engine powering its way up the steeper inclines a mile or more away. And the last half mile to my place was a doozy of twists, turns, and sharp rising hills that could take an inexperienced driver as much as ten minutes to navigate.
But now this knowledge put me in a quandary. If I started down, I’d pass whoever it was, and on the off chance it was a sheriff’s deputy, I might be pulled over for questioning. That wasn’t something I was prepared to deal with while I was carrying a dead body in the back of my truck. I eased the truck forward, between the two live oaks where I liked to park. I kept going, nudging the front end over some small brush and into the trees until most of the truck was hidden in the woods behind my house, not too far from where I’d parked the sedan.
I killed the engine and the lights and waited, patting Goose’s head reassuringly. A long time passed, but I could still hear the sound of the engine revving as it worked its way up the mountain.
I thought of the whiskey I kept under the seat. A nip would go a long way toward easing my nerves. I picked up the bottle, wishing it wasn’t here with me because, as any drunk will tell you, having alcohol nearby is a sure way to make sure you drink some. I unscrewed the lid and took a sip, just enough to wet my lips and tongue, just enough to feel the sweet burn.
A light appeared in my rearview. I turned and saw a Coulee County sheriff’s Durango cresting the ridge. The bottle went to my lips and I took a real swallow, the kind that wasn’t a tease. The warmth spread out across my body, all the way to my fingers and toes, and I felt steadier, more clearheaded than before.
The Durango came to a stop and the lights blinked off. Two doors opened and two men stepped out. One was in a deputy’s uniform and the other wore a pair of blue jeans and a leather jacket. Based on his imposing size, the former was a deputy named Hub Graham. The man in the leather jacket was Preston Argent. I could tell just by the arrogant way he walked. Hub tossed a cigarette butt into my yard and they looked around. Not seeing anything of interest, they walked to my front door. I lost sight of them, but I imagined them standing there, knocking, waiting for somebody to answer. Would they notice anything amiss? I didn’t think so. The murder had been surprisingly clean, and I felt like I’d hidden the blood well enough, at least in the dark. Besides, Argent had had no real experience in law enforcement before winning sheriff, and as far as I could tell, there were actual police dogs smarter than Hub, whom Argent had clearly recruited for his intimidating size and brute strength.
Still, it was nerve-racking not to be able to see what they were doing. For all I knew they were in the house now. I’d taken care to clean up after myself, but what if I’d left a glove out or something else that would give them pause, make them look a little closer until they noticed my truck parked out underneath the pine trees?
A few minutes later, I let out a long sigh of relief when the men came around the corner. Both of them were smoking now. And laughing. I watched them, sure they were headed for the Durango, but they surprised me. Instead of returning to their truck, they turned and headed toward my shed. I was parked maybe five yards away. One of them was bound to see my truck.
As they approached, I could hear their voices through the open window.
“Jeb don’t care for his friend, neither, that blind joker, Rufus something or another.” That was Argent. I’d recognize that slow, willfully uneducated drawl anywhere.
“Traffic accident,” Hub said. “That’s the way to do it.”
“There’s lots of ways to do it,” Argent said. “The secret is doing it clean. Jeb don’t like to rush shit. Besides, that’s too impersonal for Jeb.”
“Impersonal?”
Argent grunted. “Most people don’t know, but Jeb’s not immune to getting his hands dirty. Especially with the real assholes like this one.”
“Well, shit. He needs to get on it, then. I’m just saying. If you want somebody gone, get ’em gone. Don’t make an ordeal about it. Where the fuck is he anyway? I mean at this hour?”
“Probably at the African Queen’s hut down in Atlanta.”
I squeezed the steering wheel so hard, my knuckles turned white.
“Shit, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t hit that, Sheriff.”
“Of course I’d hit it, but that don’t mean I’d date it.”
“I’d date it,” Hub said, “as long as she let me hit it whenever I wanted.”
“Open that shed door and shut up,” Argent said, shining his flashlight at the shed.
Hub yanked the shed door open much too hard, nearly pulling it off its hinges. Argent shined the light in. “I’d kill to find something illegal in here,” he said.
“You could plant something,” Hub suggested. “Wouldn’t be much to it.”
Argent didn’t respond but instead waved the flashlight around, looking into the shed.
“You hear me, Sheriff?”
“I heard you. Listen, do you really think you’re going to come up with a way to deal with this asshole that Jeb ain’t already thought of?”
Hub shrugged. “Just trying to help.”
“You wanna help? Just do what you’re told, and don’t try to be smart. You ain’t smart, okay?”
“Whatever.”
“Shut it back.”
Hub slammed the shed door and said, “You reckon that woman really heard a shot from up here?”
“I doubt it. She was so drunk she wouldn’t know a fart from a gunshot. Let’s go. He’s probably neck deep in dark meat right about now.”
They walked to the Durango and pulled out of the yard and onto the gravel road. A few minutes later, their taillights were gone and the sound of their engine had nearly faded away. I wiped sweat off my brow and cranked the truck. I put it in reverse as Goose licked my hand on the gearshift. I patted his head, and he smiled that open-mouthed smile some dogs have. He seemed to intuitively know we’d dodged a bullet.
* * *
I drove over to Ghost Creek Mountain, where I’d grown up and where my father’s original church had been. I took the long way to the hidden meadow in order to avoid the church, but not because of the bad memories. Well, not only because of the bad memories. The main reason was that I wanted to stay as far away from Rufus as possible.
Because of Rufus’s blindness, he’d learned to recognize the sounds of vehicles. He was never surprised when I showed up at the old church to pay him a visit. “I recognized the sound of your truck,” he’d say. So I didn’t want to pass too close to his place at the risk of him wanting to know why I was in the area, especially considering I’d dropped him off just a short time ago. Then I’d either have to tell him about my present clusterfuck or lie, and I’d never been much good at lying to my friends.
I went up the backside of the mountain, following an old logging road overgrown with weeds. Twice I stopped the truck to move fallen branches out of the road, and once I came to a complete stop, not sure I could go any farther because the road was so narrow. On one side of the road was a creek and on the other a sheer drop. Fifty feet of free fall that ended in a field of boulders and green moss.
I ended up putting two tires in the creek and working my gear shift to gain purchase until the road widened. From there, the drive mostly went straight up. I switched to second and then first, then prayed my truck wouldn’t flip. Hell, there was a moment or two when I felt like I’d gone nearly perpendicular to the pull of gravity, and I was sure the dead man was going to fly off the back of the truck and down the mountain. But he didn’t, and I eventually eased over the last rise and into the hidden meadow where Daddy had once tried to plant tomatoes and okra. There was no sign of any gardening now, just a flat stretch of tall grass waving darkly in the night breeze. The meadow was broken by a half dozen scattered trees. I aimed the nose of my truck toward the largest of these, a massive oak whose branches seemed to overspread the whole field.
Once parked, I took a look around. Dark woods surrounded me on three sides. As far as I knew, nobody came up this way anymore. This land was owned by the power company but protected from exploitation by some government regulations. I had a hard time keeping up. The important thing was it would be a long time before anybody came up here to do any serious digging.
I got right to work, breaking a sweat despite the cool air. My hip started to hurt nearly immediately, but I pushed through the pain, my mind already obsessed with what had happened and what I was going to do about it.
There was always the Wild Turkey option, but as enticing as that sounded, it felt like a betrayal somehow. Not of my values or my own life, but rather of the man I was about to bury. Joe. He’d come to find me. Me. God knew why exactly, except he’d already tried with Argent and had obviously been turned away. If I just buried him and returned to my drunken fog, what kind of man would I be? How long would I remain haunted by the questions his presence in my life posed? Did I know him from some dark place in my past? Hell, did I even know myself, for that matter?
The other option was to take his case. It was something I’d done hundreds of times in the past, but I’d rarely taken on a case with this little information. Or for a dead client.
A phone number, a bookmark, and a letter scribbled on a piece of folded paper.
It was a mystery. Who knew where it started or how I was involved? I only knew, for better or worse, that I was a part of it now, that the dead man’s mystery and my own had become intertwined.