It took Calvin Hooper all of five minutes to find Dwayne Brewer’s address using an online property finder provided on the county’s website. In the age of the Internet, a man could find anybody he wanted with little effort at all.
When Sheriff John Coggins stomped into the jail that morning shaking his head, he said he had no idea what had gone on the night before aside from a chicken-brained clusterfuck left on his desk like a lunch sack stuffed with shit. Calvin rushed out of the Justice Center and called one of the men who worked for him, a Hispanic named Miguel who could skin a tomato with a trackhoe blade. Miguel didn’t ask any questions. He gave Calvin a ride to his truck and Calvin went home only long enough to grab the .45-70, throw the brush gun in the cab, and head back to town.
A dozen NO TRESPASSING signs marked the head of Dwayne Brewer’s driveway, but Calvin eased past and motored on around the next bend. The road was cut into a hillside strangled by kudzu on both sides. He parked the truck in a shallow pull-off carved where dead vines lay over the ground like mats of tangled gray hair. A groundhog stood tall and watched him from a mound of red clay that marked its burrow in the kudzu patch. Calvin grabbed the gun and headed back the way he’d come.
He didn’t know if Dwayne Brewer had made it home or not. All he knew for certain was that Dwayne had tromped out of the cellblock a good hour before the sheriff cut him loose. Either way Dwayne had a head start and odds were he was already home, but if he wasn’t and he came up the road and saw Calvin’s truck sitting in the ditch, there’d be no chance for surprise and that’s why Calvin had driven past and parked up the road.
Tall jack pines stood on both sides of the driveway, the gravel washed-out and rutted with deep red-clay veins. A deer skull was screwed into one of the pines at the mouth of the road, a young cowhorn with thin green moss staining patches of milk-white bone. Calvin pushed into the woods to follow the driveway. Thick undergrowth strangled the forest floor the way it did everywhere in the mountains anymore, the hills no longer allowed to burn the way they would naturally so that briar and shrub grew almost impenetrable. He used the short barrel of the lever action to push his way through blackberry bramble and honeysuckle vine along the right side of the drive. Darl’s rifle was made for country like this, for a quick swing in thick cover when black bear and hog decided to charge. Thorns scratched at Calvin’s arms and beggar’s lice specked his clothes, but soon enough he was close.
When he could see the house through the trees, Calvin knelt to the ground and peered through a veil of saplings and brushwood. The trees were loud with birds and the whipping sound of a pileated woodpecker flapping heavy through the forest on wide-set wings. The weather had turned funny, a cold front coming in and bringing on fall a month ahead of schedule and now an Indian summer the last of October when the leaves were already gone. The sun beat hot against his back, the dark camouflage shirt he’d thrown on soaking up the heat. He sat still and quiet waiting for any movement, any sound from the house, but nothing came. When he was sure no one was outside, he climbed the hillside for a better vantage.
The house sat in the bottom of a shallow bowl, the land rising on all sides but the front. Calvin crept up the slope in a wide arc above the home. A tall, craggy-barked locust had fallen downhill with its base ripping the ground into a vertical barricade of mud and gnarled white roots. He could see the house clearly from here and decided to use the deadfall as a sort of ground blind to scout the property. The front yard was open, no windows on this side of the house, and a brown painted tin shed stood at the back of the property along the edge of the yard.
For a long time, nothing stirred except small, gray juncos flicking around the bushes and boomer squirrels racing back and forth from the pines. Calvin was antsy to move, already fearing the worst, but then he heard the sound of something coming through the woods on the opposite hill. Leaning around the roots, he saw a man coming through the trees. The man looked naked from such distance but as he came into the yard, Calvin could see that Dwayne Brewer had no shirt or shoes, a light pair of denim jeans being the only thing he wore.
There were only seventy-five, maybe a hundred yards between them, Calvin never having been a good judge of distance. He shouldered the Marlin rifle, rested his cheek on its gray laminate stock, and used the roots to brace his aim, to center the target through ghost ring sights. Easing the lever forward and back, he chambered a 300-grain Beartooth with little more than a dull click. There was something in Dwayne’s hand, maybe a knife or a machete, but from such distance he couldn’t be certain. Calvin’s heart raced, his palms sweaty. He followed Dwayne with the sights to where he disappeared behind the house. A few seconds later, Dwayne emerged in the backyard and headed to the shed at the back of the property.
The metal door clanked and banged as Dwayne wrestled his way inside. Calvin couldn’t see him once he went into the building and at that moment he was overcome with how ill prepared he was for this, how there was no way to know what lay ahead. Dwayne came back out with a camouflage tarp folded under his arm, a coil of rope in one hand, the knife held with its point to the ground. He headed back the same way he’d come and Calvin knew he must’ve been holding Angie somewhere off in the woods, that that’s why the deputies hadn’t been able to find her when they raided the house. When Dwayne came into the front yard, Calvin had the rifle pointed at the sky, struggling with his free hand to get his cell phone out of his pocket. He found the number and dialed, keeping his eyes on Dwayne as he headed back into the trees. The phone rang and no one answered and in a second it cut to voicemail.
“Pick up the phone,” he muttered under his breath as he hung up and dialed again. “Pick up your fucking phone.”
The line kept ringing and then he heard someone answer.
“Hello.”
“I know where he’s got her,” Calvin said. “She’s in the woods. He has her back in the woods behind his house.”
“Who is this?”
“Listen to me, Michael. He’s got her off in the woods somewhere behind his house. He’s going there right now.”
“Calvin?”
“Yes, goddamn it. You need to listen to me. Dwayne Brewer has her in the woods. I just watched him come out of there and now he’s going back and I’m going after him. You need to get up here right now. Get up here to his house right now.”
“Calvin, you need to slow down and tell me what you’re talking about. Tell—”
“Get up here, Michael. He’s got her in the woods behind his house. Do you hear me? I don’t have time to keep saying it. Get up here now. She’s in the woods and I’m going after them. When I find her, I’m going to do what I should’ve done in the beginning, Michael. I’m going to blow his fucking brains out.”
Calvin hung up the phone without waiting for a response. Dwayne was already almost out of sight. He knew if he waited any longer he wouldn’t catch up, that a man could lose track of what he was chasing in a hurry in these mountains and never see it again. Things had a tendency to disappear like ghosts in this place, into the trees, over the ridge, then gone.
He stumbled down the hill and hunched low as he crossed the yard trying to move fast but stealthily. The leaves crackled under his steps and he weaved through a maze of saplings standing thin as river cane. The hillside rose steep ahead and Dwayne had already crossed the horizon. This is the end, Calvin thought. This is where it all ends. Right on the other side of those trees. Just over that hill.