Since the night with Watty Freeman, Ray had taken to carrying his pistol. He was driving home from Harold’s Supermarket with two thick-cut, bone-in pork chops on the seat beside him and half a grape soda in his hand. The little snub-nosed revolver he usually kept in the safe weighed down the pocket of his barn coat.
As he came through downtown Sylva, he counted the out-of-state tags lining the sides of the street. Tourists strolled along the sidewalks window-shopping. The place still had that all-American downtown vibe—a white historic courthouse on the hill overlooking brick buildings with awnings over the storefronts, neoclassical cornices and gablets donning the second stories. Some of the buildings still carried the faded names of people and places he remembered, but all those businesses and businessmen had long been traded for chocolate shops and T-shirt stores. When the old hardware store had finally closed its doors, there was nothing left on that stretch that Ray would ever want or need. The only place he came downtown for anymore was the bookstore.
A sheriff’s cruiser dropped in behind him when he passed Spring Street. He glanced back in his rearview, but didn’t think anything of it. They were in front of the Coffee Shop when the deputy hit the lights. Ray’s concealed carry permit had expired, so he fished the wheel gun out of his pocket and laid the revolver on the package of pork chops so the gun was in open view. He slowed as he crossed the bridge over Scotts Creek and swung into the parking lot at the plumbing supply store.
Instead of pulling tight to his bumper, the cruiser wheeled around fast to the passenger side and lurched to a sudden stop. Leah Green killed the blue lights and stepped out fuming. She flung the door closed on her patrol car and snatched at the handle on the Scout.
“Unlock the door,” she said. Her hair was pulled tight to the back the way she always wore it on duty. Raymond stretched across the cab to lift the latch. Leah climbed in and slammed the door so hard that Ray was shocked the window didn’t shatter.
“God almighty, girlie, what crawled up your ass and died?”
“Don’t give me that shit, Raymond. You know exactly what this is about.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to enlighten me.”
She was visibly shaking. “Two years, Ray. That’s how long the DEA said they’d been working that case you just shit all over with that stunt you pulled. Two years of work down the drain.” She closed her hands together over her nose and mouth and breathed like she was hyperventilating. “We’re talking about an interstate drug case responsible for every bit of heroin from here to Asheville, maybe farther. And they fucking had him. More than that, they had the dots connected all the way to Atlanta. You know how I know all this? I know it because the sheriff sat us down this morning and told us. I know it because those agents are down there with the SBI in our office right now trying to figure out how the fuck the man they were watching winds up hog-tied in front of a sheriff’s office with a hundred thousand dollars in drugs and fifty grand in cash sitting in his lap. Why don’t you tell me how that happens, Raymond?”
Ray turned the bottle of grape soda up and let what was left fizzle against his tongue. He swallowed hard and sighed as if that last gulp was something absolutely satisfying. “I don’t have a clue, girlie, but it sounds to me like you and those agents ought to be counting your lucky stars that all of that shit’s off the streets.”
“But he’s not off the streets,” Leah shouted. “And so all that means is that they’re going to change everything up and now we’re going to have to work ten times as hard to catch back up with him. You didn’t accomplish a goddamn thing. All you did was unravel two years of case work in one fell swoop.”
“Well, first off, I don’t know what in the hell makes you so sure I had anything to do with what you’re saying.” Raymond’s palms were starting to sweat and he slicked them down the thighs of his overalls. “But you’re telling me a guy gets found with enough drugs to poison every addict in western North Carolina and they just up and cut him loose?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Leah was turned sideways in the seat and she leaned back to where the crown of her head rested against the side glass. She had a look on her face that made Ray feel like the dumbest person on earth. “By the time the DEA showed up that boy had a team of lawyers canned up in our lobby threatening to have a habeas petition by end of day. Some of our detectives sat him down and asked a couple questions and he told them he didn’t have a clue where those drugs had come from, that somebody had just up and kidnapped him. Lawyers shut him up before he said another word and out the door he went, a two-year investigation straight down the shitter because some old man wanted to play Barney fucking Fife. Well, I’ve got news for you, Raymond, that ain’t how the law works. That ain’t how cases are built.”
Raymond unzipped the chest pocket of his overalls and took out his cigars. He struck a match from a box on the dash and cracked the window so as not to smoke them out of the cab.
“Who was that with you? The little short fellow? If I’m guessing I’d say it was Prelo Pressley.”
Ray cut his eyes across the cab but kept his face flat so as not to show his hand.
“That’s what I thought. Makes me awfully glad my father ain’t still alive because odds are he’d have been right there with you.” Leah shook her head and massaged at the bags under her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “To your dumbfounding credit, at least you two were smart enough not to drive right up in the parking lot. What the cameras caught was too fuzzy to make heads or tails of unless you knew what you were looking at. Question is what route did you take home, Ray? I’d say you came right down Grindstaff Road and headed through town the same way you just came.” Leah glanced back toward downtown. “What do you bet if I were to pull those SylvaCam tapes from that night off the Sylva Herald’s hard drive I’d see this Scout of yours coming right down Main Street about ten or fifteen minutes after that fellow was left on our doorstep?”
“I think that sounds like a whole lot of digging to me.” Ray took a long puff and held the smoke in his mouth till it burned his cheeks. He blew a thick cloud out the window, exhaled the tail end from his nose, then tapped ash onto the floorboard and squinted his eyes as he spoke. “Even if you did pull those tapes, even if you saw this truck driving through town, what’s to say me and Tommy weren’t taking us a late-night joyride?”
“What I’m telling you, Raymond, is that you better hope and pray somebody else in that department doesn’t come to the same conclusion I did. Right now the only person in our office who knows you gave me information on that house and what was going on up there is Lieutenant Fox, and lucky for you he’s about as dumb as a mouthful of paint chips. But I don’t know who he talked to with the tribe, and this isn’t the type of thing that’s just going to blow over. The Smoky Mountain News, the Sylva Herald, WLOS, they’re all going to be breathing down our necks, and sooner or later somebody’s going to have to give them an answer.”
“Sounds to me like those boys are going to have their work cut out for them.”
“Maybe so,” Leah said. She glanced down at the revolver that lay between them on the seat. “In the meantime, I’d keep that pistol close if I were you. A man loses a hundred fifty thousand dollars, he ain’t likely to let that slide.” Leah opened the door and stepped out. She climbed into her cruiser and sped out of the parking lot without so much as goodbye.
Ray stared through the windshield, unable to make sense of everything that had just happened. He looked at the revolver and pulled the trigger just enough to watch the double action lift the hammer, then slipped the gun into his pocket and started the truck. The cigar hung from the corner of his mouth and smoke burned his eyes. Sooner or later a man had to catch a break.