1

Multiple homicides can be a public relations headache.  We’d had three in a week in our homely little town, and even Verle couldn’t make them seem benign.  Lord knows, he tried.  He kept the details stoppered up and made out like people dying was just a natural kind of thing, but then somebody cultivated Fido or that boy from the IGA, and word got around that Rita hadn’t choked, in fact, on a bundt cake, gotten taken by a heart attack, or fallen off her porch.  People got wind instead that an amateur surgeon had been at her.  It was all over the place by the time me and Kate hit town the following day.

First we’d had to make arrangements for Rusty.  I’d persuaded Everett to take him.  His backyard was fenced in because he’d had a couple of dachshunds once.  He’d had to tell us all about them—Gunther and Heidi—and he went on at some length on their unsavory dachshund decrepitude which, to hear Everett tell it, involved all sorts of leakage.

“Hard to want a dog after that,” he told me.

“Think of it as witness protection.”

“What’s he eat?”

“Any damn thing.”

“Well, all right then,” Everett said. 

When we finally got to the station house, we found Verle handling things in his usual way.  Folks would march in to tell him what they’d heard, ask him about the blood and the giblets and the pieces of Rita gone missing.  They were keen to know was it true she’d been carved up by some bastard.  “Now I wouldn’t,” Verle told them, “say that.”

Verle invited us to join him on the sidewalk where he cadged an Iroquois from Kate. Before that, I’m sure I’d never seen Verle smoke.  He usually coped with stress by eating M&Ms and turtle clusters, but this was an entirely different category of upset.

We were standing there, me and Kate, listening to Verle’s account of his morning when the boy from channel nine rolled up in the channel nine Subaru.  It was a regular Subaru, truth be told, with a magnetic 9 on the hood and a cameraman in the passenger seat about the size of a pulling guard.

Verle toked on his Iroquois so violently that he nearly swallowed it.  He sucked in his gut and adjusted his pants. 

“Here we go,” he said.

We had our lists and we had our angles, but we visited our situation room first. They were always making hay from this sort of thing on TV shows I’d seen, but looking at the photos and forensic reports didn’t do a lot for me except make me wonder about somebody who’d dedicate his life to taking organs out of people and putting them in jars. 

Kate collected the forensic reports and slapped them in a file. “Chop shop boys?”

“Might as well.  I’ll call Ronnie.”

We ran across Doug downstairs.  He was looking a little anxious, especially for Doug who was new enough still to be on his best behavior.  Any cop, however, worth his salt doesn’t want to be chalking tires, writing citations, and rattling doorknobs when there’s homicide afoot.

“What can I do?” he wanted to know.

“Verle’ll need you,” I told him.  “People are going to be coming in here with all sorts of shit they’ve seen or think.  About their neighbors.  About their in-laws.  About their husbands probably.  Talk to them.  Sort them.  Can’t ever say what might walk in the door.”

“All right.”  That seemed to satisfy Doug.

“Seen Ronnie?” Kate asked him.

Doug nodded.  “He left this.”  He handed her a yellow Post-it.  Ronnie had pencilled “Homer” on it.  Kate showed it to me.

“I guess we’re having breakfast.”

Homer’s was over the mountain and out of the county.  Those chop shop boys probably had the sorts of ideas about jurisdiction that criminals the world over cultivate and entertain.  Who can reach me where and why and who can’t lay a finger.  In my experience, they’re usually wrong about everything they think.  But if they felt safe at Homer’s—and if you avoided the hash you might live—then crossing the mountain was perfectly fine with me.

I was tempted to stop in and check on Leslie.  His building was right on the way, but Kate still had her perfume headache from the day before and so persuaded me to drive on by.  That is to say she grabbed the steering wheel and said, “The hell you will.”

Homer’s had been about fourteen joints before the latest crew bought in.  They left the name like everybody else had done because the sign was already up.  Homer’s had been a waffle shop, a fish house, a dairy bar, a hair parlor once, a knitting emporium, a bakery, a hamburger shack, and now it was kind of a diner that specialized in breakfast.  They were known for their sausage scramble—a half dozen eggs and a third of a pig.  It came on a platter the size of a birdbath and would have fed a family or two, but I’d only ever seen a few blubbery farmers in overhauls shoveling it down.

I couldn’t speak for Kate, but I was still suffering the after effects of dinner.  I had pizza and Hot Pocket fermentation going on apace.  Kate just looked hungover.  She was blaming Leslie’s perfume, but the Kroger wine probably hadn’t helped things any.  So we were a ragged pair and stepped into Homer’s with no good humor to speak of.  Ronnie had them all there, those five chop shop boys, spread out at a table in the back. 

“About damn time,” the big boss told us.  “We was all but rolling out.”

Kate suggested, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up.”

“I told them it was friendly and all,” Ronnie said.

“It’s not.”  I slid in beside the boss. 

Kate pulled up a chair and put herself hard next to the shot one.  “How we doing?” she asked him.

“Still fucking shot.”

“That?” she said and pointed to his puny square of gauze on his forearm.  Then she pulled up her shirt and showed him her scar where she’d been shot in Newport News.  “You got nothing to whine about.”

“I could have died!”

“Still might.”

“This ain’t friendly at all,” the boss man told me.  He started to fidget and shift like maybe he would just get up and exit with his crew.  He had that cocky I’m-not-in-your-county air about him.

I could have explained it all to him, given him a considered lesson on jurisdiction, but I opted instead for Kate’s approach and just pointed my gun at his head.  Everybody in the place left off chowing for a moment.  You didn’t get that much in Homer’s, when the cutlery was still and there wasn’t any smacking going on to speak of.  It was eerie quiet, so everybody heard me tell that chop shop boy, “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Now, Ray,” Ronnie started.

“Zip it,” Kate told him.

“I want to hear about that Skylark,” I said.

“What Skylark?”

“The blue one out back of your shop.  All of it, chapter and verse.” 

“All right,” that fellow told me and watched as I holstered by sidearm.  He had that look on his face that told me that he’d like to see me dead.  That he’d like to help me get that way.  I’d seen that look enough in the county, a but-for-your-badge-and-gun sort of glare.

“You’ll get your chance,” I told him.  “I’m awfully fair that way.”

He smiled.  He knew just what I meant. “Fellow towed it in,” he said.

“What fellow?” Kate asked him.

He glanced at his colleagues.  The one with the worst haircut, and that was saying something in this crowd, told his boss so I could hear it, “Pope.”

“Tell me about him,” I said to the boss.

“Kind of different.”

“How?” Kate asked him.

“Don’t talk much,” he said, exclusively to me. 

“How’d you find him?” I asked.

“Didn’t. He come up one day with a Mustang.  Knew all about us, wouldn’t say how.  We tried but couldn’t drive him away.”

“How long’s he been with you?”

“Going on two, three years.”

“Ever see him out in the world?” Kate asked.

He started in with me again.

“Hey, fucker,” Kate said, and he gave her his I’d-like-to-see-you-dead glance too.  I had to think she probably got that sort of thing far more than I did.  A woman with a badge and a mouth.  She must have seen it all the time.  “I’m right here,” she told him.

So he said kind of at her, “I ain’t never seen him nowhere.  Lives in a goddamn cave for all I know.”

“How do you get in touch with him?” I asked.

He fished out his wallet and pulled from it a square of paper in with his folding money.  It was like a bookie’s chit sheet, his entire chop shop 411.  He seemed to think he’d have the option of just reading the number to me, but I reached over and snatched it, so he gave me the evil eye again.

Like his shot colleague had told us, he had three tow-truck guys.  The one identified as Pope had a phone number with an 802 area code.   I rattled off the number for Kate.  “Where’s that?”

She pulled out her phone and started digging.  She didn’t need thirty seconds before she could tell me back, “Vermont.”

“Got a body there?” I asked her.

She nodded.  “Laconia. 1994.”

“How about these other two?” I asked the boss.  “Local?”

“Buddy’s from down by Danville.  Goose is from back in there."  He pointed with his forehead mostly nowhere much.

“And the rest of these guys?” I waved the careworn slip of paper at him.

“Customers,” he told me, “and they all know what they’re getting.”

“I’m going to keep this,” I told him.

“Thought you might.”

“Where does Pope live?”

The boss man didn’t know.  He looked down the line at his colleagues who all scratched or shrugged or something.

“So none of you’ve ever seen him,” Kate asked them, “outside of the shop?”

“Saw him at the IGA one time, buying a big old tub of ice cream.” That was the chunkiest of the chop shop boys, next to the guy with the haircut.  It was the first words we’d had out of him.  “I said ‘Hey’ or something.  He didn’t pay me no mind to me at all.”

“What’s he drive?” I asked them generally.

“Truck,” they all sort of told me at once.

“What truck?”

“Some kind of Ford,” the boss man said. “All rebuilt and pieced together.”

“Something he could have done himself?” Kate asked the whole pack of them.

The one with the haircut nodded.  “He fixed his fender once at the shop.  Wasn’t nothing in there he couldn’t use.”

“Got a full name for him?” Kate asked, but they only knew him as Pope.

“What’s he look like?” I wanted to know. 

They couldn’t settle on his size.  He was tall but not too tall.  They all said he wasn’t fat, but not fat in this part of the world covers an ambitious range of thickness.

“Hair?” Kate asked them.

They told her, “Yes.”  It wasn’t long or short and didn’t seem to be any color to speak of.  Not brown, not gray, not black, not blonde.

“Does he have a family?  Ever mention a wife or something?” I asked the head man chiefly.

“There’s people around that don’t talk much, and then there’s him.  He brought cars in, and I paid him.  If that was how he liked it, that was how I liked it too.”

“All right,” I said and pushed back my chair.

“Ronnie said you’d get breakfast,” the head man told me.

I looked at Ronnie, and he reached for the greasy ticket on the table.  “Might have said you,” he told me, “but I meant me.”

“If you can go into straight business,” I told all those boys at once, “now’d be about the best time for it.”

They smirked like fellows do who are bound and determined to end up doing three to five at the lockup in Deep Meadow.

We reconvened outside on a grassy patch at the head of the lot.

“Here’s your chance, sport,” I told the boss as I offered Kate my gun.

“Uh uh,” she said and gave me hers instead.  Just the sight of her drawing it from its holster caused the shot boy to quiver and dance.

“Let’s have it,” she said to the boss man.  He grinned at her.  He grinned at me.  He had a smirk for his buds as he said to Kate, “I ain’t going to swing on you.”

“Too bad,” she told him and kicked him with such violence and precision that all six other men in the immediate vicinity and one guy in the lot yodeled involuntarily and covered up our parts.

The boss man just turned scarlet.  He leaked a little spit.

“Not much point,” Kate told him, “in being a gentleman now.”

Then she took her gun out of my hand, shoved it in her holster. 

“We going or what?”

I followed her to the car.

***

I made her let me stop at Leslie’s on the way back, told her I’d back her up with Verle when he came around wanting to know who’d crushed a fellow’s nuts and why.  She stayed in the car.  I went up alone, found Leslie in a sundress.  He feared I’d come to fetch him for another day of carnage, and he most emphatically didn’t want to go.  His flip-flops had rhinestones on them.  He had a child’s bow in his hair.

“Stay right here,” I told him.  “Call me if anybody you don’t know comes around.”

“You’re scaring me, Ray.”

“You got a gun?”

“I’m a felon.”

“Right.  Got a gun?”

Leslie reached behind a drapery swag and pulled out a 20 gauge. 

“That looks better on you than it ought to.” I waggled a finger at Leslie’s sundress.  He might have been a big doughy ugly man, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t blush.

Kate had tried the Vermont number by the time I got back to the car.

“Disconnected,” she told me.

I pulled out heading toward Charlottesville.  My plan was to find my trebuchet guy—Lomax at the college—and tell him just enough so he and Onyx would watch what they were about.  Then we could check with Gaylord and see if he needed us over in Richmond since we’d be heading that way already and twenty miles closer than where we were.

“I’d say we were playing catch-up,” Kate said, “but I’m not even sure we’re in the game.”

“We’ll work the list, but Lomax first.”

When I couldn’t find him in his cubicle, one of his colleagues directed me to The White Spot, a greasy burger place across the street.  He was there all right. Onyx was with him, and they were having a Harry Potterish sort of quarrel.  Something about the various permutations of a spell, who could cast it and how exactly and under what circumstances.  We stood by them for half a minute before they even looked up.

“Oh,” Onyx said when she finally saw me.  “Hey.” 

We sat at the table alongside them.  I pointed at Kate.  “Agent LeComte.  FBI.”

Lomax said, “Shit.”

“We’ve got some trouble over our way.”

“Trebuchet?” Lomax asked more than a little hopefully.

“Garden variety homicide,” Kate told him.  “There’s some crazy fucker on the loose.”

“Why are you telling us?” Onyx asked her.

“Just want you paying attention,” I said.

“To what?”  Onyx took a bite of what looked a tofu patty.  You had to figure she was far too pale and waifish to ever consume actual meat.

“Some guy,” Kate told her, “is kind of running wild.”

“On a spree,” I added.  “Killing people.”

“What people?” Lomax asked us.

“People he’s run across,” Kate told him, glancing at me.  “That’s the theory we’re working with anyway.”

Lomax shoved a fry in his mouth.  He nodded.  He told us, “Cool.”

“What do you want us to do?”  Onyx asked.

“We’re looking hard at a couple of guys from out toward Wintergreen.  Might drive a tow truck.  Back hollow sorts,” I told them.  “We want you to pay attention to who’s around you for a while.  It’s probably nothing.  They won’t come way out here, but we figured you ought to know.”

“What if they followed you?” Onyx asked us.  “What if they’re waiting for you to go?”

“They didn’t follow us,” I told her.

“You don’t know that.  What are they doing to these people? How are they killing them?” Onyx wanted to know.

She was so agitated by this point that Lomax laid a hand to her shoulder.  “Dawg” he said.  She shirked to shed him and glared at us, glared at him a little too.

“How?” she asked me.

“Some kind of knife.”

Onyx all but whimpered, not what I expected from a creature with chalice of blood tattoos.

“I’m not staying here,” Onyx told Lomax.  “Who’s going to protect us? You?”

Lomax made a show of taking offense, but he was hardly the sort to fancy himself a tough guy.  He built scale model trebuchets and read medieval fantasy books.

“Listen,” I told them, “this is probably nothing.  We just wanted to come by and . . .”

“Scare the shit out of us.”  Onyx was wrapping her tofu burger in her greasy napkin by then.

So now instead of Leslie, we had Onyx and Lomax in the back, and the scent of fried tofu in nutritional yeast sauce wasn’t much of an improvement on White Shoulders.

“Where are we going?” Lomax wanted to know.

Kate wheeled around to face him.  “You can’t be asking us shit.”

“What’s with her?” Onyx directed that at me.

I told Kate, “Why don’t you call Gaylord.  See if he needs us in Richmond.”

Dr. Gaylord, as it turned out, had just left Richmond heading for Rita’s.  He wanted another look in the daylight to see what he could turn up.

“He says he’s been calling your coroner,” Kate told me.  “Can’t raise him.”

I pulled up L’s home number on my phone.  I got five rings and voicemail.  The same thing with his cell.

“We can swing by.  It’s in Crozet.  On the way back out.”

L lived in a condominium.  There were a blue million of them out near Crozet.  Developers had cleared out apple orchards and taken over farms to build stand-alone faux Tudor mansions and a world of attached townhouses.  I’d been to L’s once for a Christmas party, had found it by L’s reindeer flag.  I couldn’t imagine that would be hanging in June.

So we pulled into Wayland’s Grant with its nest of cluster homes, its bandstand and scenic pond, its coffee shop and wine bar, its overabundance of traffic circles (Wayland must have hated stop signs).  The trouble was that the roads all looked the same, and the townhouses were identical.

They’d done a lot of building since I’d last been out to L’s.  Townhouses and faux Tudor mansions, the odd boutiquey shop, and each little enclave had its own founding fatheresque name.  Monticello Woods. Ashlawn Place. Madison Circle.  I knew L had bought on Continental Way, which had ended in a drainage pond the last time I’d been by.  Now it was a full-blown thoroughfare packed on either side with condos.

I just had to say, “Hmm,” on a second pass through to touch off an insurrection.  They were carsick in the back from the sweep of the roads, and Kate was ill and impatient, so I stopped to talk to a woman who was gardening in front of her townhouse.

The whole development was remarkable for how few people were around.  This woman was a rarity in with her ranunculus.  She was kneeling on a foam pad, had on a proper hat and gloves.  She was turning the soil with what looked to me like the Maserati of trowels—burnished steel with ergonomic hardwood for a handle.

I pulled to the curb in front of her unit, and everybody piled out.

L’s neighbor, as it turned out, didn’t like the way we looked.  I showed her my badge but that hardly served to make her fonder of me, and she didn’t seem inclined to help at all until Kate wandered over. 

“You’d think,” she told Kate, “if he worked with Logan he’d know where he lived.”

“I hear you,” Kate said, and together they eyed me in a dire sort of way.

“Hey.” It was Lomax.  “There’s a goat over here.”

I held up a finger to let the neighbor know I’d be back in a minute and walked to the street where Lomax pointed to a goat in fact.  He was horned and whiskery and caked with mud.  I could smell the glandular goatstink of him from over where we were standing.  He was chewing on petunias cascading from a hanging basket while he gave us his best what-the-fuck-are-you-looking-at stare. 

“Ma’am,” I called to the neighbor woman, “do you know whose goat this is?”

“That rascal,” she said and came down my way to tell him, “Shoo!”  He shot her the same look he’d favored us with. 

She reached into her gardening apron and pulled out what proved a golf ball.  She threw it about how you’d expect a woman of her age and station to throw it.  It bounced on the sidewalk.  It hit the front steps.  It rolled back toward the curb.  That billy goat left the petunias to chase that golf ball down.  He plucked it up off the manicured grass with rugged goat teeth and ate it.

That goat took a tentative step our way, which was all Lomax and Onyx needed to pile back into the car.

The neighbor finally pointed out L’s condo with her trowel.

“See him this morning?” Kate asked her.

She nodded.  “Left about an hour ago.”

“Say where?” I asked.

The woman snorted and told me, “Not my business.”

I was heading for L’s front porch by then.  His potted plants were all dead.

Kate joined me as I rang the bell and peered in through the door light.  I dialed both of L’s numbers again.  We heard the phone in the condo ring.

“Go in?” I rattled the doorknob.  The door clattered in the jamb.  The place was stickbuilt condo claptrap through and through.

“She said he left,” Kate reminded me. “Might be on the links or something.”

“L’s not the sort you can’t ever raise on the phone.”

I had my Kroger card out by then.  It was bendy in just the right way.  I slid it in and caught the bolt.  You would have thought I had a key.  I swung open the door, and the potpourri scent kept us both on the porch for a time.  It was citrus and musk and rose hips in blinding concentration.  I had a headache before I’d crossed the sill.

That’s about when we found out L had a dog.  A Lhasa or something, all bangs and hanging fur.  It came tearing down the condo stairs and bolted past us out the door.  It went straight for the goat and set in to circling it, barking.

I heard Lomax from the backseat informing both of us, “Hey!”

At first L’s place looked upset and disordered, but it turned out he had a taste for Victorian bric-a-brac and clutter, so his design scheme was everything all over the place.

There was antiquey junk everywhere, not just furniture but unending nic nacs and trifles.  The tables were all freighted, and there were hassocks and umbrella buckets and ancient wooden boxes on the floor.  It was a version of Rita’s decor without the heedlessness and squalor.  We ventured upstairs, admired L’s canopy bed and gaudy Biedermeier dresser.  His den was full of putter heads, mounted on plaques and hanging on the walls. I kept looking for his landline and hoping for an answering machine.  We finally found it in a lacquered basket on the kitchen counter. 

L had fourteen messages, and since we couldn’t between us figure out how to work the machine, Kate and I got to hear all of L’s business from two weeks back to now.  Most of the messages were from a guy named Kiki who just said, “Pick up.  Pick up. I know you’re there.”

He’d grown a little more ragged and agitated over time.  We finally got to a “Logan, dammit!” message near the end of Kiki’s run as he worked his way, via answering machine, through the stages of rejection.  Bemusement.  Irritation.  Wounded indignation.  He capped the whole thing off with a freshet of drunken abuse.  There was a call from L’s dentist to remind him of a cleaning. A call from his mother or an aunt or someone who didn’t know how to leave a message.  A call from Ronnie with a rambling question about putter technique.  And then something from that very morning.

The voice was high and constricted and slightly phlegmy like it came out of a man with his testicles in a vice or a woman with a cold.  “Body out by Horseshoe.  Harper’s Creek.  Verle’ll meet you at the turn.”

And that was it.  We tried to play it again but instead got Kiki irritated, and we were a little afraid of erasing it, so left well enough alone.

“Horseshoe?” Kate asked me.  “Is somebody dead?”

I was calling Verle by then.  He gave me a “What?” by way of greeting.

“Have we got another body?”

“First I’m hearing of it.”

“Harper’s Creek.  You didn’t get a call?”

I heard Verle yell out to Ronnie, I guessed, if he had something at Harper’s Creek.

“Nothing,” Verle told me.  “Up to our necks in damned unhappy civilians.  What’s this about?”

“Probably nothing.  I’ll call you in a bit.”

He hung up like he does.  We unplugged L’s phone and took it.  L’s dog was still out in the road barking at the goat. 

“I’ll get him,” I said, and I tried to.  I honestly did, but that dog didn’t want to be got.  So I asked the gardening neighbor to watch him, but she told me she certainly wouldn’t.  She said if she wanted a dog, she guessed she’d have one wouldn’t she.  She was still talking in that vein as we drove off.

2

“Where’s Horseshoe?” Kate asked me.

Lomax piped in.  He confessed he had a passion for cartography, enjoyed pouring over maps.  “Out past Wintergreen,” he told Kate.  “Just below Three Ridges.  Near the A.T.”

Kate looked at him and then at me.

“The Appalachian Trail,” I told her. 

“Anybody on our list back in there?”

I shook my head.  “Nobody much back in there at all.”

I found Horseshoe on my first attempt.  The entire community consisted of a sign and a service station, long shuttered and with the gas pumps carted away.  Lomax studied my gazetteer and pointed us up toward Harper’s Creek.

“Here’s the turn,” I said as we reached a fork, “where they told L to meet Verle.”

We stopped and looked around.  There were tire tracks all over the place.  I’d long been surprised by how much traffic those back hollow country roads got.  The locals didn’t just take them to dump their settees in the woods but used them as shortcuts and didn’t much mind the clouds of dust and the potholes.

But after only a mile up Harper’s Creek Road, we rolled out of civilization. Not just no more side tracks and tumble-down double-wides, but no more Icehouse cans and Hardee’s sacks, no more antifreeze jugs and scraps of carpet.  No shopping bags snagged in the undergrowth.  This was unspoiled wilderness.

We reached another turning, mostly straight or to the left.  “Pick it,” I told Lomax.

He poured over the map.  “That one circles back around.  That one just gives out.”

So we rolled nearly straight up the one that ended.  “How far?”

“A mile maybe.  Little less.”

We were climbing and passed a sign on a tree at the national forest border.  The canopy thickened, and the rhododendrons on the roadside got dead shiny and exceedingly lush.  Kate saw it first, caught a flash of bumper chrome as the canopy shifted.  I stopped twenty yards short and told Onyx and Lomax, “Stay here.”

It was creepy to see L’s burnt umber Boxster in the middle of nowhere much.  The driver’s door was standing open.  The headlights were both burning, and the car was ding-ding-dinging to beat the band.  Two deer came crashing out of the scrub and shot across the road.  Only then did we both unholster our guns. 

“Truck,” Kate said as she pointed out tire tracks in the gravel.  “Waiting here, it looks like.  L rolled up on him.  Somebody he knew?”

“Didn’t have to be.  L gets called out on a body, he just goes.  You end up where you end up.  You talk to who you find.”

“But wasn’t he supposed to meet Verle at the turn off?” 

“Everybody knows Verle doesn’t always show.”

“Everybody who?”

In a case like ours, not that I’d ever had a case like ours exactly, it was certainly a growing temptation to suspect most every damn body at once. 

“Anybody who knows Verle.  Anybody who knew his daddy.  Verle comes from people who can’t be anywhere on time.”

The truth was I didn’t know what might have tempted L back here.  Some seedy cracker in a half-assed pickup could have met him at the turn and told him Verle and Fido were already on the scene.  “Go on,” was all he’d need to hear, and that’s just what he’d do.

“I’ve gotta pee.” It was Onyx calling to us.

“So pee,” Kate told her.

We had just relaxed a little.  I was looking in L’s car.  He had a map on the seat, a cold half cup of coffee in the cup holder, dry cleaning laid out on the backseat.  Everything looked pretty standard to me.  Kate had continued on to the rear of the vehicle.  She was lighting an Iroquois and sizing up the tire tracks when we heard a shotgun blast from up the slope in the woods somewhere.

We both flinched but didn’t do much else until the pellets started raining down.  We could hear them slapping the leaves, tearing through the canopy.  We crouched by the Boxster.  There was no need to speak. Onyx had that covered for us.  She was running for my Crown Vic saying, “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”

“Some fucker’s shooting at us,” was all Kate could manage.  She said it more in wonderment than anger.

I nodded.  Some fucker was shooting at us all right.  Then he fired again, and I could see the buckshot bouncing in the road.

Lomax was yelling at us now, “Let’s go!”

I was torn myself.  You could make a fairly decent case for going.  Kate, of course, was of another mind entirely.

“This won’t do,” she said and went sprinting straight into the woods, heading directly for whoever was firing that shotgun.

I took a moment to pray for our deliverance, or to say at least, “Oh hell,” and then took off after her, fought my way through a clutch of mountain laurel and had just stumbled into the forest proper when the damn fool fired again. 

He was aiming high.  I could tell that much.  He was letting the shot rain down instead of pouring fire on us from wherever he was up slope.  That meant I wouldn’t kill him outright, but I’d sure flog the hell out of him, provided I didn’t have a coronary chasing Kate up toward the ridge.

Some people shrink and cower when they get shot at in the field.  Kate, as it turned out, got profoundly pissed.  I couldn’t even see her at first, she was so far up ahead.  And when the shotgun let go one more time, she fired at the sound of it.  She squeezed off a good five rounds while scrabbling up the slope. 

All that did was make the asshole aim at us directly, so the next shell he let go sent the shot screaming at us down the hill.  I flattened out behind a rock and got as small as I could get.  I could hear Kate yelling so that I thought she was hit, but she was just madder still.

I went crabbing low and scrambling. I caught up with her at an oak, a massive red oak with just trunk enough to keep us both from harm.  Another load of shot went sailing by above us.  It was maybe ten feet up and sounded like a swarm of bees.

“Dead cracker walking,” Kate told me and then went dodging on ahead.

“FBI, asshole!” I don’t know how she had the breath for that.

That got her another blast, and I finally saw him up the rise.  He was moving too now, blundering through the leaf litter and stumbling over rocks.  He had on a loud yellow t-shirt, which didn’t help him any.  There wasn’t much chance we’d lose sight of him now.

“There he goes,” I told Kate, but she’d locked in on him already.  He tried to turn and let another shell go, but she was firing all around him.  You could hear the bullets thunking the timber and singing off the rocks.  She was calling that fellow everything she had as she ran him down.  I was falling farther behind with every bound she made. 

I couldn’t quite imagine what Kate would do if she actually closed and caught him, but I got to find out sooner than I ever thought I might.  That boy was in even worse shape than me, and he made the mistake of taking a moment to catch his breath and clutch his knees.

She left her feet and hit him like a free safety might.  I was still churning to close and help her, but she was wailing on him good.  I could see her swinging on him, even heard him whimper a bit.  Then he got mad.  I guess he felt a manly obligation.  He pitched her off and kicked her once.  I was nearly there by then.  She was holding an ankle.  I watched him pick up his shotgun by the barrel.  He was racking in a round and wheeling when I leveled off and fired. 

I was aiming for his head. I wanted the bastard down, but because I’m me, I hit him in the shoulder.  He lost his gun in all the upset and just sat down on the ground.  Kate couldn’t really help herself and kicked him hard by way of payback, a solid boot to the ribcage that served to lay him out.

“You okay?”

“I’m shot, goddammit.”

“Not you,” I told him and picked up his shotgun so I could eject all the shells.

“I’ll do,” Kate said.

Then Lomax and Onyx called, “Hey!” to us from the roadway.

“Stay down there,” I told them.

I heard Onyx say, “No shit.”

“I’m bleeding here,” the cracker said. 

Kate grabbed him by his t-shirt and yanked him up so he was sitting more or less.  His yellow t-shirt had the words “Yeah, Baby!” in cartoon letters across the front.  It was torn and grimy and frayed at the collar.  His jeans were greasy and fragrant.  He looked like the sort of yokel who lived in a corn crib or a trough.

“What the hell are you thinking?”  I showed him my badge.

“Aw, fuck,” was all he could manage.  “Figured you was more of them.”

“Them who?” Kate asked him.

He did some country pointing, down toward the road I had to guess.

Kate poked him with her foot.  “Them who?” she asked again.

“Crowd down there.  Made me jumpy.”

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Jerry.”

“How long you been up here, Jerry?”

“A while.”

“What are you doing?”

He thought for a bit, sifting through his options.  “I guess I’m hunting,” he told us.

“Guess you’re hunting what?”

“Squirrels maybe.”

“You sure?” Kate asked him.

“Birds too,” he told her.  “Love to shoot me some birds.”

“Wrong time to be full of shit, Jerry,” Kate suggested to him.

“My arm hurts,” Jerry told us.  “I’m maybe not thinking straight.”

“Let’s try this again,” I said.

“Can I bleed to death or something.”

Kate and I together assured Jerry, “Yes.”

That agitated him. I could tell.  He shook his head and exhaled like crackers do when they’re put upon.

“Wasn’t doing no hunting,” Jerry told us. “Doing that.”  He pointed again, this time up across the slope.  We looked where he was looking. 

“Farming, Jerry?” I asked him.

“Yeah.  Kind of.  I guess.”

It looked like the tropics had taken hold there in a clearing in the Blue Ridge.  Jerry had him a stand of lush, shiny pot, as healthy looking a clutch of plants as I was sure I’d ever seen.

“Wow, Jerry,” I told him.

Even Kate was impressed.  “You’ve got a hell of a green thumb.”

“Chicken manure,” he said.  “A little fish meal too.”

“So you were up here and a crowd came rolling in and made you nervous?”

He nodded.  “Don’t nobody come back here.  Road don’t go nowhere.”

“What were they driving?” Kate asked him.

“First one was in a truck.”

“What kind of truck?”

He tried to shrug, but it proved agonizing what with the bullet hole in his shoulder and all.  He pitched over and whimpered. 

“Hey.” It was Lomax. 

He’d come into the woods.  I could see him down in the trough of ground where I’d sprawled behind that rock.  He moved like a geeky gazelle, too awkward to be graceful but still agile somehow and quick.

“Onyx is kind of . . .” he started in and then saw Jerry and said, “Who’s he?”

“Guy shooting at us,” Kate told him.

“What the hell for?” Lomax put it to Jerry directly.

Jerry had learned better than to shrug, so he just shook his head.

“My girlfriend’s down there.”  Lomax pointed in an actual direction, proof positive that he wasn’t from around here.

“All right,” Jerry told him.

That wasn’t remotely what Lomax had hoped to hear, wasn’t even lightly flavored with remorse.  So Lomax got stirred up and went stalking on a circuit to spend some exasperation.  That’s when he caught sight of Jerry’s crop shining in the sun across the way.

“Fuck, man.”  Lomax was flabbergasted.  He pointed again.  “That you?”

Jerry nodded with a touch of pride.

“Jesus.”  Lomax went blundering across the slope like the stuff was magnetized.  “Just a bud,” he said to me and Kate.  “A sprout.”

We both watched him pinch one.  Two or three actually.  “Dude!” he said. 

Jerry even smiled a little.

“Go on,” Kate told him.

Lomax was shouting, “Baby!” before he was even halfway down the slope.

“Tell us about the truck,” I said to Jerry.

“Some kind of rig.  Green, I think, or maybe blue.  Looked like a rollback. I don’t know.”

“How many in it?” Kate asked him.

“Three,” he told us.  Maybe four.”

I glanced down toward the road.  In truth, I couldn’t see much, just bits and pieces of L’s orange Porsche that the shifting leaves would allow.

“What did they look like?”

“Nothing special.  Overalls.  Caps.  She was wearing some green kind of dress.”

“She?” we asked him together.

Jerry nodded. 

“Three guys and a woman?” I asked him.

He nodded again.

“All right,” Kate told him.  “Green dress.  What else?”

“One of them had a cough, kept spitting and shit.”

“One of the guys?”

“I guess.  Like he was bringing up a lung.”

“And the woman?” Kate kept at him.

“Couldn’t really see her.”

“Did she talk?” I asked him.

“Probably, but the wind was up.  Couldn’t hear a lot.”

“So the truck pulls up.  Parks where?” Kate asked him.

Jerry did more country pointing.  “Turned around.  Heading out.”

“Just sat there?”

Jerry nodded.

“Until what?” Kate asked him.

“Another car come up.  That orange thing.  Loud as hell.”

“Then what?”

“Guy gets out.  Woman comes over.  Looks like they’re dancing or something.”

“And then?” I asked him.

“They all went off together,” Jerry said, “and that damn car’s down there beeping and shit, enough to drive a fellow nuts.”

“How long before we pulled up?”

“Hour.  Probably more.”

“Get up,” Kate told him.  She grabbed Jerry’s good arm and helped him off the ground.

On the way to the road Jerry went on about all the help he’d provided and how much mercy he figured that ought to buy when he stood before a judge. 

“I was just confused,” he told us.  “And I get nervous something awful.”

“We’ll put in a good word,” I told him.

Onyx and Lomax looked about half baked by the time we got back to the car, and they did the usual execrable job of pretending to be straight.

“You couldn’t wait until you got home?” Kate asked them.

They both said together, “What?”

***

I called Fido and Verle who broke the news to Ronnie, Ronnie who held Logan Faulconer III in uncommonly high esteem.  He and the EMT truck came rolling in at about the same time.  I’d called Toad as well.  He was a quarter hour behind them with the tow.  Me and Kate had already scoured the place and photographed everything while Lomax and Onyx quizzed Jerry on horticulture.  Ronnie showed up in a state and did a lot of stalking around.  He described to anybody who cared to hear it what he’d do to the sons-of-bitches who lifted a hand against L and caused him any pain or grief.

Once Toad had hooked up the Boxster and eased it down the road, we found a folded square of paper towel where the car had been.  It didn’t take much of a sniff to smell the ether on it.

“What is it?” Ronnie asked us.

“Trash, I guess,” I told him.  “Why don’t you take these two back to Charlottesville for me, stop in at L’s and check his place.”

“Might be there.” Ronnie brightened up.  “Maybe some asshole stole his car.”

Me and Kate nodded like that was likely, and Ronnie suddenly was in more of a hurry than Lomax and Onyx could accommodate.  Just watching them move I had to think Jerry grew awfully powerful weed.

“Through and through,” Fido told me.  He’d cut Jerry’s t-shirt off, which Jerry was still quarreling with Fido about.

“It ain’t like I couldn’t take it off.  Bad enough I went and got shot.”  Jerry was fondling his yellow t-shirt in his good hand, clutching it to his bare chest.

Fido showed me the wound, front and back.  “Lucky,” he said.

“You don’t know.”  I tapped Jerry’s forehead.  “I was aiming here.”

Fido hauled him off to get patched up and locked away which left just me and Kate there on the road by Harper’s Creek. 

“Pretty soon,” I told her, “they’ll be up to two-a-days.”

“Going out with a bang, I guess.”

“Damn well better be going out.”

“Would you come back in here?” she asked me.  “Just you on a call?”

I looked around.  It certainly felt like ambush country. 

“Maybe,” I told her.  “I’d sure be on edge, but L didn’t know any better.  Particularly if they’ve got some woman doing the meet and greet.”

With that we climbed into the car and headed for the blacktop.  Kate put in a call to Gaylord as I tried to figure out where to go, how exactly to look for L, how best to discover if anybody had seen him.  Doug and Verle were already working the tow trucks registered in the county and trying to track down anyone named Pope.  So I was just sitting there at the intersection waiting on a logging truck to pass, when Kate hooked with Dr. Gaylord.

Apparently, he just told her, “Get over here.”

Gaylord’s four-by-four was parked in Rita’s yard.  Gaylord and Miss Song came out when they heard us roll up.

“These bastards,” Gaylord said, a little surprising coming from him. 

Miss Song handed us smocks and booties. I followed Kate inside.  The first thing I noticed was it didn’t smell right.  I was expecting the usual hard, metallic day-after-a-murder odor.  I’d smelled it in shacks and roadhouses, in barns and cars and trailers.  It was guts and iron oxide blended together to make a particular stink.  This was something else.  This was yesterday’s aroma today.

“Kitchen?” Kate said to Gaylord.

He just nodded, and we went in.  It was like the room had been freshly painted but with gore instead of paint.  Everywhere blood had been the day before, it was today except fresh and sticky.  You could tell by the sheen it was drying still, pooling and barely scabbed over.

“What is this?” I asked just generally.

Gaylord told me, “Somebody else.”

“They came back?”  Kate was outraged.

Gaylord nodded.  “Up on the table, like before.”  He relieved Miss Song of some sample bags and vials she had been holding.  He showed them to us.  More blood.  More giblets.

Me and Kate shared a glance.

“What?” Gaylord asked.

“We’re missing a coroner,” I told him.

“Try the woods?” Kate asked.

“I guess.”

We made the pilgrimage again, around back and through the underbrush into the forest proper.  We went straight to the spot where we’d found Rita, but there wasn’t anything there.  I could hear the loaders at the quarry, a hawk squawking overhead.  I checked the treetops just in case they’d worked their way somehow back to flinging, but there was no sign of L around, just some stains where Rita had been left.

“What are they going to do? Just kill everybody?”

“Can’t say it’s not a plan,” Kate told me.

She was calm now and maybe half admiring that people could go so wrong.  It was getting pure now.  Even a nut would be hard pressed to find any method in this.

“Ever seen anything like it?” I asked her.

“Read about a guy once up in Minot.”  We were walking back to Rita’s house.  “Trapper.  Hunter.  Something.  I don’t know.  Back in the twenties, I think.  He just went a little cracked and killed every damn body he came across for a full two weeks.”

“With what?”

“Pole axe, I think.  It was full-blown frenzy.  Killed two dogs and a mule as well.  Killed everything he met with and didn’t even tidy up.  A neighbor finally shot him.  There wasn’t a thing else he could do.”

“A frenzy,” I said.  “This seems a little too . . . contemplated.”

“Was for a long time,” Kate allowed.  “Isn’t anymore.”

When we got back to the house, we sought out Gaylord in the kitchen.  He and Miss Song were standing together on the last unbloodied patch of floor.  She had her tackle boxes.  He’d crossed arms over his chest and was scanning the kitchen, looking from one grim quarter to another.

“Find anything?” Kate asked him.

“In all this?”  Gaylord shook his head and blew a breath.  “Trying to work out if I should drink or pray.”

3

A poet found him.  She claimed to be a poet anyway.  She showed me what she called a sonnet, but it didn’t rhyme anywhere and only had (I counted them) eight lines. 

“Thought he was asleep,” she told us, and we figured she probably could have if she’d never seen anybody either actually dead or sleeping before. 

L was stretched out on a picnic table on a bank of the Tye River in a little park, I guess I’ll call it, with barbecue pits nobody used.  There was a kind of latrine only a Hot Pocket poisoned civilian might resort to and a cork board with a scrap of map on it—just the legend mostly—along with a flyer from a guy selling square bales of hay and woman for hire as both a cat sitter and a psychic.

“I said ‘Hey’,” the poet told us.  Her given name was Tammy. Her nom de guerre, she called it, was Ariadne. “I come out here to think and stuff.”  Stuff seemed to consist chiefly of smoking Kools and applying more eyeliner than a girl could possibly need.

“Most days?” Kate asked her.

Tammy nodded.

“When did you get here?” I asked her. 

She showed me her bare wrists.  “Time’s kind of like, you know, relative and all.”

“Nine?” I tried.

“Wasn’t up,”

“Ten?”

She shook her head.  “More like noonish.”

I checked my watch, time being relative and all.  It was half past one by then.

“Anybody else here?” Kate asked her.

“Him,” she said and pointed at L.  “And a woman down by the water.”

“What did she look like?”

“You know.  Regular.”

“Hair?”

“Yeah.”

“Ariadne,” I said, “how would you describe her in a sonnet.”

“Oh, man,” she started and then paused, I guess, to think about her meter, “About my size but way older.  Had some kind of shoulder bag.  Green dress, I think.  And not a good green.  How do you get to be a psychic anyway if you start out sitting cats?”

“What was she driving?” Kate asked Tammy.

“That’s the funny thing,” Tammy told her.  “Nothing.”

“So where’d she go?”

“Down there somewhere.”

She pointed toward the river.

“Just walked off?” I asked her.

“I guess.”

“Anybody else come by?”

Tammy shook her head.

“So how long was it just you and him,” Kate wanted to know.

“I like that one,” Tammy told us and pointed at a picnic table about twenty yards over from where L had been laid out.  “I could have sworn I heard him snoring or something.  Wasn’t but me and him for a while.”

“How long?”

Tammy shrugged.  “He’s really dead, huh?”

Me and Kate both looked at L, watched for a moment as Dr. Gaylord examined L’s bloodless torso.  We could see the incision just above his naval, girding him round like a belt.

“Can I write about this?” Tammy asked us.

“Just in verse,” I told her. “So nobody’ll read it.”  I’m reasonably sure I didn’t say that second part out loud.

“Cool,” she said.

“And that woman?” Kate asked her.  “Down here?” Kate pointed toward the water.

Tammy nodded.

“Which way?”

Tammy country pointed back where we’d come from on the road.  “Must be a path or something,” Tammy told us.  “She went on through, but I could hear her coughing.”

That got our attention.

Just then Verle came rolling up in a radio car with Doug.  He popped out and asked us, “L?”  His hat was looking like shit.

We nodded.

“Her?”

“Found the body.”

“Where’s Ronnie?” Verle wanted to know.

“Probably in Crozet by now.  We sent him to check on L’s place.  He doesn’t know.”

“It’ll tear him up,” Verle allowed.  “He had a thing for L.”

I heard Tammy suck air.  Not just death but romance.

Gaylord didn’t want us.  He said we’d trample everything, so we set Doug scouring the parking lot, left Verle to take a run at Tammy, while me and Kate tried to figure out where the woman in the green dress had gone.

The Tye River ran modest and shallow down by the wayside park.  There was kind of a path, likely a fine trail in winter, just between the riverbed and the leggy weeds on the bank.

I liked to think I was scanning for clues and such, but it was all just the usual trash.  Beer cans and burger boxes, drink straws and lids.  The farther you got out in the county, the more the locals just threw stuff down. 

The path passed under the county roadway hard beside the river, and we followed it to a pullout at the end of a dirt track where it looked like people dropped their flatboats into the water.

“Parked over here maybe?” Kate suggested.

It was certainly possible.  There were tire tracks all over the place.

“Carried him from here?”

It was maybe fifty yards from where we were to the picnic table where L had ended up.

“Makes sense,” Kate said.  “Park over there and everybody can see you from the road.”

“Then they must have a stretcher or something.”

“Or maybe just another blanket.”

We were scouring the pullout and the edges of the road.  Just cigarette butts of unknown vintage, more fry holsters and beer boxes and such.

“Where does this come out?” Kate asked me of the road.  It wound up through some standing timber and disappeared around a bend.

“Back toward Covesville or somewhere.  I’ll have to take a look.”

When we returned to the wayside, Tammy was reading to Verle from her composition book.  He was spinning his hat while he listened. 

Doug had laid what he thought to be interesting parking lot rubbish on the hood of my Crown Vic. Fido’s wagon had rolled in, but Fido wasn’t with it.  It stood to reason he didn’t work all the damn time.  It was the boy from the IGA and a guy I recognized from the woods, the fellow who’d come with Fido for the guy up in the tree.  That seemed like last year.

I went over and had a look at L.  He wouldn’t have liked the way they’d left him.  Disheveled and sagging about the mouth.  Not just dead but unsightly.  He was wearing a flannel shirt with stripes from the Eisenhower era and the sort of rough twill trousers L would only have been caught dead in.  They even had him in sneakers, for Godsakes.

That’s about when I heard it.  The Marvelettes.  Don’t Mess With Bill.  Me and Kate went scrambling.  It was coming from somewhere over near the toilets.

“Don’t mess with Bill.  Leave my Billy alone.”

It was kind of subdued for Motown and hard to trace there at the wayside.

“Don’t mess with Bill.  Get a guy of your own.”

The phone was in the stinking toilet.  And I do mean stinking toilet.  The men’s side where somebody had sat there and read a copy of The Daily Progress.  It was a glorified outhouse with a lime bucket in the corner so you could dust your evacuation yourself.  Of course, people who pitch recliners and side tables into the woods are much more likely to just wipe and walk away.

The phone was up on a header in that raw plank structure.  I plucked it down and gave it to Kate.  She answered and listened as we stepped back outside. 

She shrugged.  “Farsi maybe.  Can’t say.” 

I was looking at the surrounding hillsides, all thick with trees and rising up from the streambed.  The chances seemed good one of them was up there watching what we did.  I almost wished they’d just start shooting at us from the trees.  At least then we could have made a fight out of it, but they were just up there watching and making us play along. 

Kate clapped the clamshell phone shut and dropped it in a bag.

“Does any of this make any sense to you?” I was still scanning the wooded slopes.  Nothing but full June canopy and the odd songbird taking flight.

“I’m going to kill some fucker, I know that,” she said.  I turned and looked at Kate.  “I just don’t want you saying I didn’t tell you first.”

Gaylord was overseeing those boys hauling L to their truck. 

“Heading back to the lab,” he told us all.  “Safer over there.”

“Tomorrow?” Kate asked him.

“I’ll have something for you.”

He and Miss Song piled into their four-by-four and left us on our own.

“Did you tell her about keeping a lid on this?” Verle asked us of Tammy/Ariadne.

That’s just when Ronnie came whipping off the road and into the lot.  He jumped out of his car before he’d shoved it into park, so we got more excitement than we wanted.  His front grill came to rest against the map stand with the square bales and the cat-sitting psychic.  It didn’t push it all the way over, but it made it lean quite a lot.

“Is it L?” Ronnie yelled at me and Verle and Kate together.  “Is it?”  He turned to put that one to Doug out in the lot.

“Now, Ronnie,” Verle told him with a spot of gloomy hatwork.  “This is Tammy, by the way.” Verle was always courtly like that.

“Him, isn’t it?  I heard it on the scanner.”

Kate told him, “Yeah.”

Ronnie sobbed.  I never would have guessed him capable of it.  You had to figure a fellow who could torture cats wouldn’t have a warm spot in his heart for a Putt Putt champion, especially one who would hardly give him the time of day.  But Ronnie was authentically wrought up, more wrought up than I’d ever seen him. 

Ronnie was usually the one we had to ask to stay away from car wrecks because he could rarely work up the compassion to be appropriately grim.  Strangers, I guess.  And that was the difference.  L was a foppish master of the carpet links he knew.

So Ronnie wailed and stalked around.  Me and Kate went searching for . . . well, anything really.

“How did they get him?” Ronnie yelled at us from down along the water.

I gave him the short version of where we’d come across his car.

“Who the hell are these people?”

“Kind of the core question,” Kate said, but she was only talking to me.

Ronnie’s grief evolved once he’d picked up some rocks and thrown them into the water.  He must have seen a snake or a turtle or something that he could try to kill, because he took to gathering ever more rocks and firing them into the water.  After about a quarter hour, he wasn’t even sad.

Me and Kate didn’t find a thing near L’s table or anywhere else.  We sent Tammy on her way, consulted with Verle about the list we’d drawn up and the people we wanted to visit.

“Goddamn bloodbath,” Verle told us and shook his head.  For the first time I got the feeling he wasn’t fretting about how to manage it, how to spin it to reporters, how to keep it all tamped down.  He was finally fixed on the carnage as an alarming local evil. 

We looked at all the trash Doug had laid up on my hood.  Napkins and wrappers and cans and butts, a flyer from the Dollar Store.  Everything sun baked and faded.  Nothing fresh and new.

“That it?” I asked Doug.

He nodded.  He shrugged.  Me and Kate just climbed on into the car.  By the time I’d gained the road, that trash had all just blown away.

4

It was the Blevins clan first.  We were half past two arriving in their hollow, and not this time because I got lost but because they were all packed back in a crease on a road it didn’t look like the state knew existed.  I couldn’t figure a motor grader had touched it for probably a couple of years.  It was all washouts and gullies and heaps of crusher run. 

So it was slow going, not just bumping along but climbing as well.  Past junked cars and abandoned tractors, a couple of oil tanks tossed in the woods.  There was a D9 sitting by the road that looked to be operational.  Somebody had dug a garbage pit with it that was nearly Gruber worthy.  The trench was as long as a boxcar and about as deep. 

We were a good mile beyond the garbage before we saw our first Blevins house.  It was one of those dwellings you see fairly often in this part of the world, started as a trailer and then the occupants got ambitious.  But instead of building a dwelling next to it, they just kind of swallowed it up.  It had a front porch and a side den and a bunch of ramshackle shit on the back. 

There was a birdbath in the yard made out of a Pepsi sign.  It was full of Busch cans along with stagnant water.  Somebody had planted geraniums once and they’d run away with the place, all gnarled and woody and flopped and climbing, just sprawled on everything.  There was a plastic deer for bow practice, a couple of cement ducks, a painted tractor tire around a poplar tree with busted pavers in it. 

Smoke was pouring out of the stovepipe right here in the middle of June, and a Chevy was parked in the driveway with plywood and duct tape for a hatchback window.  There was some kind of hound underneath it.  He never came out, but he surely barked. 

“Who you?”

The voice was high pitched and sour.  Me and Kate had climbed out of the Crown Vic and were standing near the headlights by then.

“Police, ma’am,” I shouted, and that did the trick.

A shirtless troll came charging out of a shed, I have to guess.  I’d taken it for a some sheeting and lumber leaning against a tree, but it turned out to have a door and framing and probably a nail or three.  He was wiry and warty and hairy all over.  He had on shorts and bedroom shoes, and he tumbled out into the yard to ask me, “Who you calling ma’am?”

“Don’t hear so good,” I told him.  “Sorry.”

He spat and said, “Uh huh.”

The hound kept barking until he plucked a hunk of paver from the tractor tire and threw it.  He was aiming for the dog, I have to think, but he hit the Chevy instead.  It worked.  The dog went silent.  Nothing on the Chevy seemed to break.  Then he dredged and spat like he was expiring.  A viscous ooga! followed by a soggy mortar round.

“Who you?” he said to Kate this time, so we were back where we started.

We pulled out badges.  He spat some more and listed for us all the lockups he’d ever passed a night in.  Told us what he’d been caught doing, closed on us as he talked.  He was surveying the contents of my car, the way his type always does, before he said, “I ain’t ashamed of nothing, and I ain’t finished yet.”

I was intending to chat him up the way I like to do it.  You circle everything in these parts, usually for longer than you’d prefer, and then you spiral in on whatever nugget you’re after.  But this one wasn’t about to do the dance.  I’d ask about some trifle, and he’d say back, “You ain’t got no business here.”

“How many Blevins back up in here?” Kate asked him.

He told Kate something rude.  I think it was something rude anyway.  After a while it just sounded like screeching.  More importantly, Kate decided it was something rude in fact, so she did what she liked to do with men.  She crowded him close and forced him back, tempted him to lay a hand upon her. 

He’d learned, though, in his tour of lockups who exactly he’d better not touch.  So he took a step back.  She closed.  He eased back a little more, jawed at her freely all the while, and she let him.

“Don’t have to tell you nothing.”

“Right,” Kate said.

“Know my rights,” he told us.

“No doubt.”

“So you can just fuck the hell off.”

“Are we going to do that, Ray?” Kate asked me.

“Probably not.  Wasn’t easy to get here.”

“You hear that?” Kate said to our Blevins.

He dredged again and looked primed to spit.  Since Kate was crowding him still, she was in genuine danger of splatter, and that fellow didn’t seem to care exactly where or how he let loose. 

So I was ready for her to lay him out by way of sensible preemption, but instead she just grabbed a healthy fistful of that fellow’s wiry chest hair.  She tugged it a little, and he became remarkably agreeable. He made one bid to grab her wrist but reconsidered when she yanked.

“Now then,” Kate said, and that was really all he needed to hear.  We found out his name was Donald and he’d passed some bad checks lately, had a date with the judge in Lynchburg that he guessed he ought to keep.  His wife, he told us, was inside down with piles.  He had a brother up the road and a couple of cousins beyond him, a nephew doing time at Bland.

“Who else is up in here?” Kate wanted to know.

He cataloged the entire clan.  He gave us names and ages and pedigrees.  They sounded a trifling, petty lot.  Given to various strains of thievery but no violence Donald would own up to.  He let us know they were enterprising just in a shady sort of way.

“Tow truck?” Kate asked him.

He told her, “No thank you.”

She shifted her hand enough to make him stamp his feet like a toddler with a bladder to the brim.

“Anybody up here got one?”

“Winch maybe. Bobby, I think.”

“How about a rollback?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I’d asked him if they had a Ferris wheel.  A rollback was for working, an investment in a hauling career.  Blevinses, Donald seemed to be implying, weren’t given to that brand of calculated foresight.

“Got a chipper,” he told us.  “Tree boys left it down by Grayson.  Seemed to be done with it.  Fit our hitch.  Sitting up there somewhere.”

I recalled the missing chipper caper.  We’d thought the culprits were Larsons who’d pinched a backhoe off a building site.  They’d gotten all shirty when we’d come around to ask about that chipper.  What the hell did they need a chipper for, the pack of them wanted to know.  They’d taken the backhoe to rework their septic system.  Couldn’t do a thing with a chipper but make mulch. 

“You’re going to take us around to see everybody,” Kate informed that Blevins.

He kind of nodded in that way Blevinses only ever kind of nodded so you couldn’t be sure if they’re telling you yes or nothing at all.

“Own a shirt?”

He nodded again.

“Get it,” she told him and turned his chest hair loose.  “If you’re not back in thirty seconds, I’m burning this shithole down.”

He ran, in as much as he could run.  He was bandy-legged and a little arthritic.  He had his chest to rub as well.

“You probably hear this all the time,” I said to Kate, “but you’ve got a way with people.”

She looked around at the crap and the clutter.  Considered, I guess, the promise of more of the same just up the road. 

“Our guys aren’t going to be shiftless trash.  I can tell you that,” Kate said.

“Still worth a look?”

She nodded.  “But we’re blind to anything short of homicide.”

He made his deadline.  His wife came to the door.  She had on a housedress and knee socks and a Braves cap.  She said something to us, but she talked as low as he did high.  It was some manner of threat or caution.  We could be sure of that. 

Donald proved an enthusiastic tour guide now that he’d cozied to us.  It smelled like he’d fetched his shirt out of a shoe.  He hadn’t bothered to button it, so Kate had plenty of persuasion at hand, but Donald had decided to serve as a Blevins ambassador for us.  He first directed us back down the road a bit for a Blevins we’d blundered by.  The track up to the house was overgrown.  The structure was swathed in vines and long unpainted. 

Donald yelled out the car window, “Momma!” which almost made me laugh out loud.  He looked eighty to me.  I’d assumed him and his lovely bride were the old hands back in the hollow.  But a tiny woman in a sweat suit drew open the front door.  She had a walking stick in one hand and a beer can in the other.  She didn’t appear delighted to see her son, though she heard him out a little.  He was still talking when she shut the door.

We told him what we were up to just to concentrate the tour.  We left the homicide out in favor of a need to find a tow truck or something on that order just to straighten a local mess out.  That put Donald on various local messes he had instigated.  I heard him admit to a half dozen felonies he’d never so much as been questioned about. 

He got expansive there in the backseat on the topic of his life of crime.  Clearly, he was a thief and a con man and proud of his something-for-nothing existence.  He was also a little down on the younger Blevins generation.  As we headed deeper into the hollow, Donald laid out his disappointments and his patriarchal complaints. 

The kids were lazy and inattentive, squandered their money on junk, had more babies than any human had a need for, and they didn’t take care of anything the way Donald insisted he did.

That last bit was a little hard to take since we’d been to Donald’s house.  In truth, though, the subsequent Blevins houses were even more ramshackle and the yards—weedy clearings mostly—were chock-a-block with junk. 

We talked to seven Belvinses in the course of the next hour.  They were all sullen and reluctant to tell us anything until Donald weighed in to shake them up. 

Two of the boys we met had actual jobs.  One of them hauled tires to a retreader out in Staunton, and the other one washed dishes at one of the buffets in Charlottesville.  There wasn’t anything resembling a tow truck back in there that we could find, nothing close to a rollback either.  Just broken down coupes and half running Geos.  I didn’t even see a pickup truck with all four tires still on it. 

This was not a passionate pack of people, and as best we could determine, the ones who’d left had stayed gone for good and all and the ones who hadn’t had never gone anywhere.  It only got interesting once we started to ask for Donald’s opinion of all the other dastardly and treacherous sorts about.

Fullers came up straightaway.  We were told they put on airs.  Word was they’d killed a fellow or two and buried them back in the deep woods.  One of them went around with a stock trailer stealing thoroughbred horses at night.

“Not that those assholes would know a goddamn warmblood from a mule.”

“Who’d they kill?” I asked him.

He couldn’t say.

I finally asked Donald Blevins as we were driving him back to his house if somebody was killing a bunch of people in a recreational sort of way, just doing them in for no good reason, slicing them up and all, was there anybody who sprung to mind that he’d think might could do it.

He was silent for a bit, appeared to be giving the question some deliberate thought.  When we stopped in his rutted track of a driveway, he shoved open the back sedan door.  He’d settled on his answer.  He nodded and told us, “Niggers.”

***

It wasn’t any better with the Fullers.  They were putting on airs in a fashion.  They had actual lawns and factory built homes and loftier criminal ambitions.  There wasn’t a check kiter among them, and they wouldn’t steal a wood chipper on a bet.  Fullers sold timber they didn’t own, got start-up money for construction work they never showed up for, and they’d even secured a couple of paving contracts from the state with no license or expertise or crew or equipment.

They robbed and connived on a scale a Blevins could only resent and envy, and we talked to four or five of them.  They welcomed us cordially enough.  We had coffee and ginger snaps with a couple of Fullers at once, a father and son who I knew for a fact had plundered a Batesville sawmill, had made off with three pallets of walnut ordered special for a house, destined for a renovated study out in Louisa.  Word was they’d sat on it for two months and, walnut being scarce, had sold it back to the original customer at four times the original price.

They had an elegance to them, the Fullers did, and a decided sense of calm that either argued for or argued against them being the sorts of people who could pass whole decades touring the country collecting organs for sport.  We knew they were criminals.  They all knew we knew it, so we could pass a perfectly cordial hour chatting each other up. 

While the Blevinses had a bail bondsman, the Fullers had a lawyer, and one of them must have called her when he’d seen me and Kate roll in.  We were probably only a half hour into our visit when she joined us at the table, and the Fullers were pleased to introduce her, proud of how enlightened they were to have retained a woman of no relation to keep them out of jail.

They’d glance at her when we asked them a question, and she’d nod or she wouldn’t.  Mostly she would because we weren’t getting any sort of murderous vibe.  The Fullers were all about money, not even the thrill of crime but just turning a lawless profit with as little fuss as they could manage.  So chiefly we were using them as a local lowlife resource, and it helped that they seemed to look upon everyone otherwise with contempt.

To their credit, they didn’t seem aware that Blevinses existed.  Or Pratts or Sadlers or Philpots either.  They knew a couple of county commissioners, a mayor or three, they told us, and more developers than they decided they could count.  But scoundrels?  We couldn’t persuade them to admit they knew a one, but they did pass along a thing or two they’d come by second hand.  It turned out they didn’t like the Grubers and told us all about some black sheep.  They thought his name was Danny and he was a cousin or nephew or something. He belonged in the lockup, they told us.  Better yet, in the ground.

They’d heard he’d gone off on a fellow.  They’d heard that fellow was a Jessup, and they’d heard Danny had cut him up with a draw knife for no particular cause.

“Ever seen a draw knife?” the elder Fuller asked primarily of Kate.

She shook her head, so he sketched one on a corner of his newspaper.  The Wall Street Journal, I couldn’t help but notice, which they’d have to go to some trouble to get.

“Doesn’t have a tip.  Handle on each in.  You have to mean a lot of harm to cut a man with one of those.”

That didn’t ring any bells with me.  “When did this happen?” I asked him.

That Fuller had heard, he told me, it happened a month or two ago.

“Where?”

He named a roadhouse between North Garden and Scottsville.  “No deputies,” he told me.  “You know how those Grubers work.”

“That Jessup okay?”

That Fuller had heard he got sewn up and paid off.

“Where does Danny stay?”

That Fuller had heard he was back in an orchard somewhere.  “They ran the Mexicans out and gave him the house.”

“Where’s he been before now?” Kate asked him.

That Fuller hadn’t heard one way or another.  But his son, who was sitting there having coffee and ginger snaps too, had heard that Danny had come up a while back from Georgia or somewhere.

“Loose cannon?” I asked them.

It was the elder Fuller who said, “None looser.” He told me that’s what he’d heard anyway.  “Read about your trouble,” he added.  “Saddens us, doesn’t it?” 

The nephew nodded.  He must have heard he should be saddened.

“I’d be looking at the people around here who’d just up and do any damn thing.”

“Know a guy called Pope?” Kate asked them out of the blue, and suddenly everything was different.

The Fullers looked at their attorney.  She rose to her feet and said to us, “We’re through.”