There’d been a time when a man could bend the rules. The law had always been littered with red tape and paperwork. That wasn’t anything new. But in the old days, if there was no straight line to justice, you bushwhacked your way through the bullshit to get the job done and the people in charge turned a blind eye knowing the end justified the means. Things didn’t work like that anymore. Raymond Mathis should’ve known better.
He felt like hell for putting Leah in a bad position, but at the time he’d only been able to see things the one way. If the people wearing badges were too busy playing grab-ass and twiddling their thumbs, a man had no choice but to take the law into his own hands. Go back thirty years and the deputies who found that boy sitting outside would’ve replaced the rope with handcuffs and said they found that piece of shit walking down the side of 107 with a backpack hanging off his shoulder like he was headed to school. Bad guy goes to jail, deputies get promoted, and the sheriff looks good standing behind a table of drugs in the front-page snap-and-grins of all the weekly rags.
Deep down he knew Leah would never rat him out. She might’ve been another generation but her mama and daddy had raised her to know how things used to be. If Odell were still alive, he’d have been right there in the truck with Ray and Prelo just like she said. Besides, Ray was family, and mountain people never turned their backs on family. On the flip side, she’d busted her ass to get where she was and Ray hated to think he might’ve compromised her integrity. Someone works that hard they shouldn’t have to carry a guilty conscience on another man’s account. It had never been his intention to put anything on her shoulders, but that’s what had happened just the same.
He was sitting in his driveway staring at the front door of his house, but had yet to cut the truck off. He couldn’t decide if he needed to go tell her what he was thinking and apologize or whether that would just be shoveling more on her plate. She was spitting mad and rightfully so. Probably best just to let her be, he thought as he rolled the key back in the ignition and limped out into the yard, his knees killing him from all the hiking he’d done over the past week.
When he came onto the dirt porch, an uneasy feeling settled in the pit of his stomach. The hairs on his arms stood on end. It felt like someone was watching him. Sometimes that sort of thing happened anymore and there was a part of him that believed Doris might’ve been keeping an eye out, maybe Ricky too now for that matter. He opened the front door and was surprised Tommy Two-Ton wasn’t pawing at his feet, having been cooped up all day.
Stepping into the room, he caught a shadow in his periphery, and soon as he turned he realized someone was sitting with their back to him at the kitchen table. Ray dropped the pork chops he was carrying on the floor and wrestled with his coat to get the revolver free of his pocket. Stringy hair hung between the person’s shoulders and from that vantage Ray couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or man.
“What are you doing in my house?” He squared up his feet shoulder-width apart and aimed the revolver with his elbows locked. His hands were shaking. He blinked hard, stretching his eyes, then took a deep breath to settle his nerves. Fear gave way to anger and he repeated himself, louder and firmer, the words turning from question to command. “Tell me what the fuck you’re doing in my house.”
The man did not move or turn. From where Ray stood he could see that his hands were flat on the table in front of him. Ray was hesitant to take a step closer, knowing good and well that the space between them gave him the upper hand.
“Is this your son?” the man whispered, his words barely audible over the dog barking at the back of the house.
“What?”
“Is this your son?”
“What are you talking about?” Ray lowered and lifted the muzzle a few inches nervously. He couldn’t make sense of what the man was asking. “Who? Is who my son?”
“The boy in this picture.”
“What picture?”
“This picture.” The man’s shoulders rotated slightly.
“Don’t you fucking move,” Ray yelled. “You stay right where you’re at or I swear on my wife’s grave I’ll paint that table with the insides of your head.”
The kitchen was just a ten-by-twelve offshoot of the den and the man was sitting at the table along the left-hand wall. Just past the table, a narrow doorway led into a small pantry and on the other side of the doorway the refrigerator stood in the corner of the room. Countertops and cabinets ran the rest of the walls, the sink straight ahead, the stovetop and oven to the right.
There was space on the right-hand side of the room, but Ray hated to give up any distance at all. He thumbed the hammer back on the revolver to lighten the trigger pull. Tommy Two-Ton was howling now and Ray glanced down the hall to see the dog’s shadow pacing back and forth through the crack light along the base of the bedroom door. He slid his feet side to side so as not to compromise his angle, shuffling a wide arc into the kitchen without once lowering his aim. Now that he was at the man’s side, he could see the photo album open in front of him. A long butcher knife lay flat on the table beneath the man’s right hand.
“Push that knife across the table,” Ray said.
The man’s hand tightened around the wooden grip. His head was tilted down and his eyes were locked on the picture.
“I want you to push that knife to the other side of the table,” Ray said. “I’m not saying it again.” Ray watched the man’s hand open over the butcher knife. With the handle flat under his palm, he slung his hand forward and the blade spun across the table, then tipped over the far edge and clanged against the floor.
“Is this your son?” the man said again, and in the time it took those four words to leave his tongue, Ray had traded the revolver to his left hand and cut the distance. Ray’s fist came into the side of that man’s head like a meteorite and his whole body lifted and slammed sideways into the wall. The chair he’d been seated in kicked out away from the table and he curled on the floor groaning. His arms and legs slowly straightened and Ray yanked the chair out of the way so that he could climb on top of him.
Ray swung down hard with the revolver one good time, the sharp hilt of the handle catching two inches behind the man’s right ear. That was all she wrote. The man’s body was limp, and the only sounds were Tommy Two-Ton sniffing at the base of the bedroom door, his owner in the kitchen gasping for breath.
The photo album was open exactly how the man had left it. Ray was sitting on the other end of the table tapping his fingernail against the edge of the butcher knife. He’d gotten zip-ties out of the junk drawer in the kitchen to secure the man’s wrists and ankles, then run out to the truck for rope to tie him down. There were seven or eight wraps around the man’s torso and Ray’d woven the line through the spindles of the chairback. The revolver rested on its side with the barrel drawing a line across the tabletop into the man’s chest. His head was down. His eyes were closed.
Ricky was seventeen years old at the time the picture was taken. He’d graduated from Smoky Mountain in 1993. It was one of those hazy blue background Olan Mills jobs and the boy was shrug-shouldered in a black-and-white tux. His dark hair was greased back and his eyes were barely open. Acne made red splotches of his forehead and chin. Every tooth in his mouth was visible, a smile like he was chewing penny nails, and though Ray hadn’t thought it at the time, looking back, he figured the boy was probably stoned out of his gourd.
Ray glanced at the clock on the stove. The man had been unconscious for almost fifteen minutes. Usually when the lights cut out, the curtain didn’t stay down more than thirty or forty seconds. Five minutes was the longest Ray’d ever seen anyone out, and that was some cocky flatlander with a glass jaw who bit off more than he could chew at a place called Burrell’s. He’d always wondered if that boy hadn’t played dead just to keep from catching it worse.
Tommy Two-Ton clawed at the front door and Ray went into the den to let the dog inside. When he slammed the door, the man let out a long, low sigh. His head rocked from side to side and his eyes blinked sluggishly. He held his lips like he was about to whistle and drew two long breaths into his mouth. Ray came back to the table and took the revolver in his right hand. He raised the gun and closed one eye. Focusing on the front sight, he could see the man watching him through the haze.
Ray opened both eyes and studied the man’s face. He had a wide nose and a thick mustache that didn’t connect in the middle. He was dark skinned and his hair was parted straight in the center so that his bangs made a heart shape on his forehead, the back of his hair grown long. He had his chin to his chest and his eyes tilted up watching Ray limp-jawed like he might’ve been nothing more than a figment of his mind.
“You ever watch wrestling?”
“Huh?”
“I said you ever watch wrestling.”
“I don’t know,” the man stuttered. “I guess. Maybe. When I was a kid.”
“You look just like Eddie Guerrero, but skinnier.”
“Who?”
“Never mind,” Ray said. “It doesn’t matter.”
The man looked down at the rope that was holding him tight to the chair, but he didn’t fight. Instead, he stretched his eyes as if trying to wake up from a dream. Rolling his head in a slow circle, he winced in pain when his neck was tilted back. “What in the world did you hit me with?”
“I checked your pockets for a wallet, but couldn’t find anything.”
“What?”
“What’s your name?”
“Denny,” the man said.
“Like the restaurant?”
“Like the restaurant.”
“Denny what?”
“Rattler.”
“Rattler.” Ray racked his brain. “I don’t think I ever met any Rattlers. Don’t think I ever met any Dennys for that matter.” He tapped the end of the barrel against the tabletop. “So what exactly were you doing in my house, Denny Rattler?”
Denny didn’t say a word. He sniffled and dropped his head. His eyes were locked on the photo album and the picture.
“That is my son,” Ray said.
“What?”
“In that picture. That’s my son in that picture you’re looking at. Ain’t that what you asked?”
Denny nodded.
“So now that I’ve answered your question, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing in my house?”
“Your son’s named Ricky?”
“Yeah,” Ray said. His mind worked to unravel how this fellow might’ve known him. The obvious reason was written up and down the man’s arms. Ray’d seen the track marks when he tied him up. But that still didn’t make sense. If he’d come to break in on some tip Ricky’d given him, he’d have known whose house it was when he came through the front door. And if he wasn’t here on some tip, then how the hell did he wind up happening upon a house in the middle of nowhere? None of it added up unless that Freeman fellow sent him. “How’d you know my son?”
“I didn’t,” Denny said. “Not really.”
“Why are you in my house, Denny Rattler?”
“I was with your son when he died,” Denny said. He gazed empty-eyed at the photograph. “I was in the room with him. I saw him put the needle in and I watched him conk out. He just dropped to the floor like his legs come out from under him. I watched it happen. I watched it happen and I tried to save him.”
Raymond remembered Leah telling him about the naloxone injector they’d found at the scene, how that’s the way they knew someone else had been in the room, that someone had tried to save Ricky’s life.
“You the one made that call from the gas station then.”
“Yes, sir.”
A weird emotion came over Ray right then. He couldn’t put a name to it. He was angry and confused but thankful, a tangled emotional dissonance that made it hard for him to piece together words. What the man had just said might’ve been the farthest thing from where he’d imagined the conversation going, and he didn’t know what to make of it, or where to go from here. There was still the same question, though. “What are you doing in my house?”
“Do you believe in God, Mr. Mathis?”
The question struck Raymond like a stone. “What?”
Denny looked up glassy-eyed. “I asked if you believe in God.”
“Yeah,” Ray said. “Of course I do.”
“I don’t go to church.” The dog wandered into the kitchen and Denny turned his head to see. “I mean I grew up going. My uncle even made me and my sister sing gospel when we were little. I used to pick guitar sometimes for the choir on Sundays. But I don’t know that I ever believed. I mean I never really believed any of it.”
Ray let the gun down to the table. It was like every bone in his body melted. He was transfixed by the way the situation had suddenly turned and what was being said. There was no sense to be made of it, and maybe that was the beauty of a moment like that, the dumbfounding nature of it all. Wonderment arose from an inability to sort out what the senses were taking in, and that’s exactly what it felt like right then. Like absolute wonderment. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Ray said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because that’s the only answer I can come up with.”
“For what?”
“For why I’m here. Why I’m here in your house. If there’s not a God, the two of us don’t wind up sitting across from one another at this table.” There were tears wetting the man’s cheeks but he wasn’t sobbing or hysterical. He had his wits about him. He was calm and collected as he spoke. “The way these mountains have been burning, I knew there was some kind of end coming. I knew it. I just couldn’t see it. I came here to kill you, Mr. Mathis.” Denny locked eyes with Raymond and there was an uneasy feeling that settled into Ray’s throat. “Somebody sent me here to kill you.”
Ray didn’t speak.
“I come inside your house and I sit down at this table and this book’s opened to a picture of you and your son,” Denny said. “I turn the page and see the very face that I can’t quit seeing. What are the odds of something like that? You think that’s coincidence? You think things like that just up and happen?”
“I don’t know,” Raymond said. The words dribbled out of his mouth.
“If that’s not God, Mr. Mathis, then He never existed.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I what?”
“Kill me.”
“Because of that picture there. Because of your son. Who you are. I ain’t been able to sleep from thinking about him, the way he looked on that floor. The way he fell. I ain’t been able to get his face out of my head. I haven’t been able to quit thinking he was some sort of sign or something.”
There’d been a question eating Ray alive ever since he’d stood there in that tiny cabin trying to imagine what Ricky must’ve looked like lying across that grubby tile. Until right then he hadn’t had the courage to say it or even linger on the thought for more than a moment because it was just too painful. It hurt too much to think that he might’ve been the reason it happened.
“Do you think my son did what he did on purpose?”
Denny stared at the old man confused for a moment, trying to piece together the question. “No, I don’t think that,” he said. “Not the way it happened. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you decide standing in a room full of strangers.”
“So what happened?”
“Same thing that could happen to me. I think he thought he knew what his body could take and he thought he knew what was in that bag, wound up cooking down more than he figured. A man never really knows.” Denny’s brow lowered and he shook his head. “People always think addicts are hell-bent on dying, but I don’t think that’s it at all. At least I know it’s not for me. I don’t want to die, Mr. Mathis. I don’t want to die any more than you do.”
“I don’t think you can know what a man like me wants.”
“I guess you’re right. You’re right about that.” Denny paused. “But there’s something brought us here, and it’s something bigger than me or you or anybody else could fathom.”
“I don’t know about that,” Ray said. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“So where do we go from here?”
Ray stood from the table and walked over to the cabinet. He took a glass jelly jar and filled it with ice, then poured whiskey till it was almost spilling over. Draining half the glass in one long slug, he wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and sat back down in the chair. Tommy Two-Ton pawed at his leg and Ray stared for a long time into the grayish haze clouding the dog’s eyes. His mind whirled with questions that carried no easy answers. All he knew for certain was that the straight way was long since lost.