All morning Ray’d been clearing out the garden, something he should’ve done a month ago if he wanted to get seed in the ground. He’d always worked a big plot in summer, turned the dirt over, and dialed it back when the weather got cold, usually carrots, onions, collards, and cabbage. The past few years it’d stayed warm enough that the greens overwintered. Snow didn’t fall like it used to.
Ray was pulling up dead tomato vines when the patrol car swung into the yard. He’d figured it would only be a day or two before Leah came back to hound him for information. Wound up being almost a week, but here she was and he couldn’t blame her.
The car door slammed and Ray’s back was turned to her as he carried the dried vines hugged against his chest to the edge of the woods. When he turned around there was a look about her that stopped him cold. Leah’s hair was backlit by sun so that the light made a gold-colored halo around her face. He met her eyes and she glanced away, and right then he knew without her having to say a word.
Raymond stuck his hands inside the bib of his overalls with his thumbs hooked outside. He traipsed over with eyes fixed on the ground and didn’t raise his head until he was standing a few feet from her. Her face was twisted to the side and she squinted hard and clenched her jaw. Her cheeks flushed with color. When she turned to face him, those bright green eyes were glassed over and there was a pained look on her face like she was doing everything she could to keep from letting those tears fall.
“I want you to take me,” Raymond said.
Leah wiped her eyelids with the back of her fist, and coughed to clear her throat. “He’s at the coroner’s.”
“No,” Raymond said. “Not there. I want you to take me where y’all found him.”
For so long he’d imagined what that place would look like that he just had to see it for himself. When Ricky was living over in Haywood County the law kept finding folks dead in the creeks. Junkies would slip under bridges to shoot up and then roll down into the water with needles in their arms. Raymond had a dream one night of Ricky lying flat on his back in a river. That was how he’d always imagined it.
Neither Raymond nor Leah said a word on the forty-minute ride from Wayehutta to Whittier. The distance was only twenty miles, but two-lanes weaving through steep terrain made even a trip to the store a burden.
All week the sky had been overcast, a yellow gray made not by clouds. Smoke veiled the mountains so that he could not see much more than what lay close to the road—crowded tables lining the flea markets, army surplus tents scattered like an olive drab carnival, RV campgrounds, and roadside memorials. The bay doors were open at the Qualla fire building. The parking lot was filled with dark green Forest Service trucks and mismatched cars and pickups that belonged to volunteer firemen. Two men were sitting on the front bumper of an E-One tanker with their feet dangling. They wore red suspenders over navy blue T-shirts, mustard-colored turnout pants soiled with soot and ash. The wildfires had every department in western North Carolina stretched thin. The Forest Service was flying firemen in from out West.
They took 441 toward Cherokee, then turned up a road to the left a mile or so farther and into a campground within earshot of the highway. Normally the mountains were full of tourists this time of year. The Blue Ridge Parkway would be a standstill, bumper-to-bumper traffic as out-of-state tags bowed up in the middle of the road to break out cell phones and snap pictures any time a view opened through the trees. People came from all over the country to see fall color, but the fires had done a number on the leaf lookers. The campground was a ghost town.
By a fenced-off collection of dumpsters, Leah hooked left and wound past fifteen empty RV hookups. Through the trees, Ray could see a playground and basketball court, what looked to be a swimming pool, but no one was outside. A few teardrop campers lined a side street, and from the looks of things, the owners had set up permanently. Plastic pinwheels, a concrete birdbath, a pair of pink flamingoes, and a tin rooster decorated the yellow patch of grass around an old Lark trailer. A Chihuahua was chained to the birdbath, the tiny dog having worn a grassless clock face into the yard.
Ray could see the police tape up ahead. A small cabin had been staked off and a light breeze twisted the yellow ribbon into corkscrews. Leah pulled the car up close. She left the engine running and waited for Ray to make the first move. He opened the passenger side door, walked around the front of the car, and stepped over the barrier. In a second, he felt Leah’s hand at the small of his back.
In all this time, he’d never expected that this would be the hard part. But now that he stood here, his legs were shaking. He could not will himself to move.
“Come on,” Leah said. “Let’s go inside.”
The room was small, maybe fifteen by twenty, so that standing at the threshold Raymond could survey everything. Large, square tile linoleum stretched across the floor and warped at the walls. Sloppily finished drywall had been hung, but only to the ceiling joists, exposed two-by-four rafters making a two-pitch angle up to the ridge. To the left of the entrance, a small countertop held a sink and television, a microwave propped on a shelf above the TV. A queen bed with a rumpled turquoise comforter and two stained pillows was the only furniture in the place.
There was a toilet on the far wall and Ray walked over to the commode and lifted the lid. A bright red ring circled the toilet bowl and scum floated on the water. He slapped the lid shut and said without turning, “Where was he?”
“Over here by the door.”
Ray crossed the room and stood at the foot of the bed.
“He was laying right there when the deputies got here.” Leah pointed and drew a line across the floor.
Raymond stared at the narrow strip between the bed and the door. He tried to picture his son’s body stretched across the grubby tiles. He just couldn’t believe this was where Ricky wound up.
“You know,” Ray said, “I thought about this day a whole lot of times.” He swallowed hard. His mouth was dry. He’d taken a seat on the edge of the bed and had his forearms balanced on his knees, his hands limp at the wrists and dangling between his legs. His voice cracked and he stopped himself from going any further until he was sure he could say what he needed to say without breaking. “I thought about this day a whole lot of times. You know? I mean I imagined it. I used to dream about what it was going to look like. And I don’t know.” He shook his head and pressed hard into his right temple with the tips of his fingers. His gaze was stretched wide, his gray eyes darkened by the absence of light. “I just never thought it would be in someplace like this. I mean I don’t know what I thought. I guess I just always figured when that time come I’d be shown a little bit of mercy.”
The air in that tiny space was suddenly too small for words. There wasn’t enough room for so much as a syllable. For a long time, no one moved and no one muttered more than a breath. Minutes passed and Ray just kept sitting there staring at the floor. Leah held still in the doorway, her back to the sun. She had her hands rested on her belt, a habit a lot of deputies had to keep their service weapon and tools from digging into their hips. Finally the room seemed to open enough that there was space.
“You have any idea who Ricky might’ve been with?” Leah asked.
“I just figured you found him alone.”
“We did,” Leah said. “When we got here, it was just him. Wasn’t nobody else around, but he wasn’t alone. There was at least one person with him when it happened.”
“How do you know?”
“For starters, we got a call from a pay phone outside the Quality Plus down the road. That’s how we found him. Someone called it in. Now they’ve got some surveillance cameras outside the gas station, but the pay phone’s a good ways off and there’s not a camera really pointed in that direction. Other thing was a bit strange to be honest.”
“What’s that?”
“There was an Evzio injector on the floor beside him. Somebody had shot him full of naloxone.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Ray said.
“Those injectors are what some of the deputies carry nowadays in case they run up on an overdose. You pop that thing into somebody’s leg and it injects a drug that counteracts the heroin, same as Narcan. I don’t know exactly how it works, but what I’m getting at is that someone else had to be in the room because they tried to save his life.”
“And where do you get something like that? Is that something you can just pick up at the drugstore?”
“No.” Leah shook her head. “At least not around here you don’t. Outside of law enforcement, maybe some doctors’ offices or medics, you don’t run across these every day. They’re expensive. I think they’re close to eight hundred dollars a kit. Only way we got ours was on a grant.”
“So where do you think it came from?”
“That’s the thing,” Leah said. “We’re pretty sure we know at least one of the people Ricky was with. A kid named Terrance Lovedahl. Family calls him Terry, but he goes by Turtle.”
“That don’t sound familiar.”
“Well, he’s whose name is signed to the room,” Leah said. “His dad’s a deputy. Everybody in the department knew the kid was messed up, but he hasn’t really gotten into all that much trouble. Got caught in places he shouldn’t have been a time or two, usually just riding along with people he didn’t have any business being with. Shit like that. We never got any dope off of him. But about two weeks ago his dad was on a call helping out the Sylva PD. Someone was OD’ing in the bathroom right there at the Enmark in town and he ran out to the car to get that Evzio injector and couldn’t find it. We’re pretty sure that’s what we found in here. Pretty sure his son got ahold of it somehow.”
The cabin they were in was less than ten miles from the head of Big Cove, where Ray’d gone to save his son’s life that night. Whatever dope wound up in this room came from one place, sure as the world. Ray thought about what little information he had. He didn’t know whether any of it was helpful. What he did know was that any code he was holding on to that would’ve kept a man quiet didn’t matter much anymore.
The way of life he’d grown up with, where a man paid his debts and kept his word, was gone. There was little about this place he even recognized. Things had changed and were changing still. First came the pills and then came the meth and now came the heroin and after that there was bound to be something else. The world was closing in from the outside and there was no way of ever going back.
A part of him wanted to do exactly what he’d promised that night. He wanted to go back to those trailers and that house and burn the world down. But there was another part that kept telling him that this was bigger than him or Ricky or any backwoods justice he could deliver. Next time it might be that deputy’s son or someone else’s boy or little girl sprawled out in a motel room or found under a bridge somewhere, because every addict came from someplace. They had families, and some of those families were comprised of other addicts, but a whole lot of them weren’t. A whole lot of addicts came from places that didn’t make any goddamn sense. Ray didn’t want anyone else to have to hurt.
He decided to tell Leah everything that happened that night—the phone call, the money, where he’d gone, what he saw, how he found Ricky beaten within an inch of his life. He knew that just as soon as one place was shut down another place would pop up and that in the end what he was telling her wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans, but that didn’t matter. Right was right. That’s how this whole place had fallen apart to begin with, by good people seeing the boat was taking on water and refusing to plug their fingers into the holes. Too many people had stayed quiet and done nothing, just stood back and let the world go to shit. Raymond Mathis was sick of watching it sink.