Little Falls

by Elizabeth Lewes

  “Sorry to hear that, Billy,” I said quietly. “Two years isn’t much time to make a profit.”

  He stopped, grimacing mid-jeer. Then he laughed, grinned like the Big Bad Wolf. “Okay, Camille. For old times’ sake. For Oren,” he said quietly, his lips half open, salivating, those narrow canines pressing against his bottom lip. “How is the old bastard anyway?”

  “I’m not here to talk about Oren.”

  “No,” he said, all matter-of-fact. “Ain’t seen him for fifteen years, have you? That how old the kid is, right?”

  I must have flinched then, because his grin grew wider, redder in his pale face.

  “He found my money yet?” Billy said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

  “You do,” he said, nodding, still grinning. “I bet you know where he put it too. Hell, maybe you took it after he blew out of town.”

  I clenched my jaw and on my lap, my fist shook, it was curled so tight. “I’m not here to talk about Oren,” I growled.

  He laughed again, a laugh like a bark, like a coyote snuffling around the door on a hungry night.

  Then he said, “What d’ya wanna know?”

  “Who’s in the business back there?” I said it quietly so my voice didn’t tremble, didn’t rage.

  He leaned back, rested his free hand on his sunken belly, his smile widening. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Patrick was into something—something big. I got an idea, but you know better than me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he repeated.

  “Who—” I started, but it was clear Billy was just going to protest again. He was toying with me. He was going to play the laughing con, deny everything until I had something solid, then he would deny that too. What had I expected? He hadn’t changed, wasn’t ever going to.

  “I mean, if you had to guess, what do you think he might have been into?” I tried.

  “Who says he was into anything?”

  I put the phone down, pulled my backpack onto my lap, and pulled a piece of paper out of the front pocket, unfolded it, pressed it against the glass with one hand. With the other, I grabbed the receiver. “What about them?” I said and watched Billy focus on the photo, watched his eyes widen, his eyebrows arch, then knit, his lips press thinly together.

  It took just a glance, less than a moment, and then he was looking away like nothing had happened, like he hadn’t seen King standing at the pump in front of the mart or Nick in the front seat of the truck or Sophie, her head turned, in the back.

  “Where’s that?” he said, his chin jerking ever so slightly toward the photo I was still holding against the glass.

  “You don’t recognize my mart?” I simpered. “I’m hurt.”

  “Looks like LA,” he mumbled into the phone. “Like fucking Compton.”

  He shrugged, looked over my head to the room behind me. I watched the wheels turn behind his flat blue eyes and I waited.

  “What’s this really about?” he finally said. The receiver was back in the crook of his neck, and he was picking at his fingernails again. A little smile had crept back onto his lips, but his voice was low and cautious.

  I folded the photo, put it on the ledge between my chest and the window. “You tell me.”

  “Do you know who those guys are?” Billy said quietly.

  “I’ve got names.”

  “What you got?”

  “You know them?”

  “Tell me,” Billy demanded.

  But that didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Billy broke first. He glanced around, shifted the receiver to his other ear, slouched, and watched me, studied me. “You don’t have any fucking clue what you’re into, do you?”

  “I’m looking for Patrick Beale’s murderer. That’s what I’m into.”

  “And you think King and Victor put him down?”

  I must have betrayed myself, looked confused or surprised or shocked or something. But I stopped myself from asking, “Who?”

  “Yeah,” I said instead.

  Billy smirked, unconvinced. “How come?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Personal?” he said doubtfully.

  “If you’d seen what they did …” I shook my head. “It lacked elegance, Billy. It was messy.”

  “You saw it?”

  I nodded once.

  “That why it’s personal?”

  I shook my head, rolled my eyes. “I can tell it was personal, why they killed him. You don’t do that kind of damage unless it’s personal, unless you’re trying to make a point. Otherwise, it’s one shot—bam—you’re done.”

  “And you’d know,” he said, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t move a muscle; he didn’t even blink. Just sat there, smirking.

  “Yeah,” I said, letting the insult go. Then I bluffed; it’s what I had thought until that morning anyway. “I think he was into the business with them, and then he did something wrong. Pissed them off somehow. Lost a shipment, lost a client. Something.”

  Billy smiled, those yellow canines almost piercing his bottom lip. “Or maybe they were just having fun with all them electrical cords.”

  I leaned forward, my fist in my lap quivering—angry, too angry—and growled, “Or maybe Patrick was gonna turn them in.”

  I shouldn’t have said it. I know I shouldn’t have. I’ve wondered so many times about what would have happened if I hadn’t opened my mouth, if I’d only kept my suspicions about why Darren’s files ended so abruptly to myself. If I had stopped long enough to wonder why Billy Boykin knew anything about electrical cords in the context of Patrick Beale, why he would ever tell me he knew these bastards and knew how they operated, how they handled infractions. Why he’d tell me where he had seen them before. But I didn’t and I hadn’t: the words were spoken, and there was no taking them back.

  Billy blinked once, ponderously. Then a slow smile spread like melting tar across his face, and he chuckled. He actually chuckled. “What do the cops think?”

  I shrugged.

  Behind the glass, Billy grinned viciously. He looked down, scraped imaginary dirt from under his pristine pink nails. “Why do you want to know about the kid? You ain’t a cop.”

  “I just do.”

  “What’s it about, Camille?”

  I sat back, tried to read the expression on his face, but it was a blank wall. “I’ve seen it before. What they did to him. I’ve seen it before.”

  Billy’s grin widened. “So, it’s personal to you. It ain’t personal to the kid.”

  “They fucked him up, Billy,” I spat, blood pounding in my ears, pulsing at the edge of my vision. “They fucked him up bad.”

  Billy leaned into the glass, so close he might have kissed me through it. “What does it matter to you, little sister? What does it matter to you?”

  “He was a kid, Billy. Christ, he was Sophie’s friend.”

  He leered. “How is my sweet little godchild?”

  “She isn’t your godchild.”

  “Yeah, but Oren always said she would be.”

  “He was a fucking heathen, Billy. He never went to church a day in his life.”

  “Maybe so,” he said, leaning back as much as he could on the crappy stool. “Maybe so,” he said again. “But he fathered a pretty little thing.”

  I slammed my hand against the glass and stood up fast—too fast. A guard’s voice—firm, clear—from behind said, “Ma’am. You need to sit down, ma’am.”

  But I barely heard him. I couldn’t hear anything except Billy laughing, taunting me; Billy telling me, in a singsongy little voice, “You gonna play the game, Camille,” as he stumbled from the glass, dragged backward by two guards with their hands clamped around his arms, “you gotta learn the rules. You better learn ’em fast, little sister.”

  * * *

  Omak at seven thirty was brown and orange, the sky that deep blue you get after a storm, when the air has been scrubbed clean.

  I went to Patr
ick’s apartment again. I sat there behind the wheel in the parking lot and stared at the building, waited for the stained yellow brick to reveal the secret, for Patrick’s ghost to come down the stairs and tell me what the hell was going on. It didn’t.

  I thought about Christine Beale and her horror and pain. I tried to feel it too, tried to figure out how I’d feel if I were in her shoes. I imagined the ache I should have in my chest. I imagined the rawness I should have in my throat, the sting I should have in my eyes. The hollowness in my soul. But as much as I missed Sophie, as much as I thought I loved her, wanted to protect her … I couldn’t. Not that day. It was like a whole part of my soul, my heart, was numb. Forgotten. Fragmented.

  For a while, I waited. I told myself I would talk to a neighbor. I would see if someone—the devil, maybe—would show up and tell me I was right, that this was Havers again, this was all a repeat of history, my history, and that if I kept pushing, if I didn’t back down, if I put a bullet in the right brain this time, it would all end. That the nightmares would stop and Sophie could come home. That I would feel something more, something better than numbness and fear and anger. That I would be whole.

  Instead, I drove, the Bronco rattling at low speed through Omak’s tidy residential streets, rattling even more up the hill toward the highway. And then I parked in a blacktop lot too big for half the town, got a burger, and sat down in the front window of the restaurant, a jet of air-conditioning blowing down my shirt. Around me were more fast-food places, all fluorescent lights and play structures and plastic cheese. And teenagers hanging out in clusters, texting and laughing like idiots, like Sophie. But she wasn’t with them. I looked away and past the parking lot, past the traffic light, watched semis tearing up the highway to the Canadian border and the eastern horizon darkening as the sun fell below the mountains.

  After a while, I went out to the truck and watched the restaurant in reverse, from the outside looking in. The dark-haired girl behind the counter exhausted, her face lined with every one of her twenty-odd years. The kid flipping burgers in the back, his eyes rimmed red from pot, his hands slow, a sloppy smile on his face. They were just like the people at the prison that morning. Strung out, strung up, nowhere to go but inside.

  I wondered whether it was all really so ugly or if it was just like that through my eyes.

  I wondered what the point was.

  Sleep. I needed sleep.

  I got into the Bronco, shifted it into gear and adjusted the rearview. Halfway out of the parking space, I hit the brakes hard, stared into the rearview harder. In an alley between a service station and an old strip mall, in the dim wash of the surrounding lights, a Chevy Suburban—black and red and beat up—idled. Someone tall and lean slipped into its back seat, and then it rolled out of the alley, out under the lights, and into the street, slow and steady, its turn signal blinking like a sleepy old man. As it passed, I saw a familiar silhouette through the partly rolled-down window: buzz cut, chiseled jaw, thick shoulders. A soldier’s silhouette.

  I followed the Suburban from a distance, gave it a good quarter-mile lead, pulling back and forward randomly, like a normal person on their way home, a normal person paying more attention to the radio than the road. But I watched the truck carefully, waited for it to turn off onto one of the county roads, go east to the Res or west over the river, and up into the mountains huddled by its shores. When it finally did, it was dark, but I saw its headlights cut left and strafe a dirty white shack beside the road.

  Maintaining my distance, I followed, the Bronc’s rumble echoing off the river below the metal grid of the low bridge, then deepening to a dull roar as I pulled it right and powered up the hill. I crept closer and closer, trying to keep the Suburban in sight as we climbed into the hills. Eventually, it turned onto a long gravel path, a driveway soon enough hidden in the woods. I kept going through the next bend and then the next, then stopped, my mind racing. Following would be reckless, probably stupid too, but if I let it go, if I was right and I didn’t do anything, it would haunt me for the rest of my life. So, when I had a story and the M9 ready in the door panel, I went back.

  A quarter mile up the gravel road and past the first few trees, crouched a low hut sprouting a long CB whip that swayed like a drunk in the breeze. And beside the hut, waiting, a sentry in a brown T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and an old pair of camo pants stuffed into scuffed black boots, a rifle—an AR-15—held loosely in his left hand. I stopped the truck.

  “This is private property, ma’am,” he said, a wad of chew in his lip.

  “I’m so sorry,” I gushed, and pushed my hair behind my ear. “I just— Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t get a signal out here, and I’m really late getting home. The kids are with a sitter, and I was supposed to be there half an hour ago.”

  His sun-browned face softened just a little, but he still said gruffly, “Where you headed?”

  I blurted out the first place I thought of: “Loomis.”

  “You shouldn’t have turned onto the road. Shoulda kept going up the highway.”

  “I know. I got stuck behind a line of semis, thought this might be faster.”

  He spat a long brown stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “It ain’t.”

  “I know, I know. It was stupid. But listen”—I pushed my hair back again—“I just need to use a phone, call my sitter and let her know I’m on my way.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Come on, this is the first place I’ve passed in five miles. Please? Listen, I can pay you for the trouble.”

  “Sorry. There ain’t no phone here,” he said and spat again.

  “What?” I said more angrily than I meant to, too angrily to keep up the act. “Really, I’ve got to get in touch with her.”

  “Sorry, lady.” He shifted the rifle to his right hand. “You’re gonna have to try somewhere else.”

  I revved the engine a little, played with fire, just to see what he would do. He sighted his weapon and backed away in the same movement, like clockwork, like a clockwork soldier. And suddenly the smell of dirt and pine and sweat filled my nostrils, the dust pricked at my eyes, the heat crushed my chest. And I needed to feel the weight of an M16 in my hands, feel the trigger nestled under the skin of my index finger, needed it like I need to breathe.

  But it was too late. Too late to draw my weapon before he pulled the trigger.

  “Hey, hey,” I said shakily, my voice unrecognizable, distant in my ears. I lifted my hands up high. “I’m gonna back away, okay?”

  He nodded slightly and I threw the Bronco into reverse, then let it roll slowly, slowly, down the drive, one eye on the sentry, the other on the rearview mirror. When the wheels touched tarmac, I swung the truck around and flew back the way I’d come.

  * * *

  Late that night, I sat on one of the hard wooden chairs in my apartment, my jaw set, my head pounding. I stared at the wall, at the big black-and-white assessor’s map of the county held up with packing tape, at the locations marked with different colors. Blue for Patrick Beale’s known movements. Green for Jimmy King’s properties and his and Nick’s—Victor’s, Billy had said—known movements. Red for damage: the burnt meth house, the bleached torture chamber, my mart. And circled so many times it looked like a tornado had hit, the boundary line between Jeremy Leamon’s ranch and Don McEnroe’s old place, over the place where Patrick Beale breathed his last.

  On the table in front of me, my notes were stacked high, piles of paper covered in my neat block handwriting. Notes about where and when and how. What I’d seen. Where I’d been. What I’d been told. Who told me. The sheets of paper were creased and wrinkled, read and reread, mangled in trying to find the bombshell that would blow King away.

  I pushed a stack of papers to one side, pulled another toward me, and scanned the top sheet.

  Paul Havers: 19

  Narcotics: theft, distribution

  Associates: unknown, infantry, Kingman?

  Patrick Beale: 19

&nb
sp; Meth: distribution, cooking

  Associates: Nick (Victor Calzón?), Jimmy King (Kingman?), Sophie

  Sophie.

  I hadn’t spoken to her since Sunday, since she’d called from the airport. I had heard someone laughing in the terminal near her, and I remember thinking that was fucked up, like the lady on the other end of the phone had no right to laugh, had no fucking right to be happy.

  Later that day, there had been a text: here. I asked if she was with Martha, my mother’s sister, the one who had stayed in Michigan to mind the family orchards when my mother fell in love and moved to Washington and had a kid she left to fend for herself while she did sit-ins with students and protests with office workers and strikes with factory workers, and devoted herself to everyone else. Martha, the one I told when I got pregnant my first term at the University of Michigan. The one who told me to not pack my bags, that she’d help me, that blood is thicker than everything else. The one I didn’t listen to.

  Sophie texted me back, said she was with Martha, that they were on the way home.

  Home.

  I hadn’t responded.

  I was a shitty mother. I know it now. I knew it then. Protection makes sense; it’s just another mission. But everything else—the nurturing, the teaching, the joy … I just couldn’t.

  But I still felt—still feel—the guilt. It’s like a lead ball you swallowed, a concrete block poured around your legs, and you’re drowning, sinking deeper and deeper into the deepest ocean because you know you can’t do anything about it now and you have to live with it, you have to just keep going, knowing that you—you, not your kid, only you—fucked up. And she paid for it.

  My work phone was on the table. For those long minutes I sat there staring, I wanted nothing more than for it to ring, for Sophie’s phone number—my personal cell phone number—to appear on the screen. But it didn’t.

  I could have dialed. I should have dialed.

  But I didn’t.

  19

  In real life, it happened in a town in the north; not even a town—more like a cluster of mud-brick houses with dirty children running through alleys caked in yellow dust. In real life, it went down like this: me, the medic who asked too many questions, who didn’t get her head straight, banished to the front line with my M16 and my emergency kit, waiting with the driver while the real soldiers went through the houses, confiscating weapons those people needed to protect themselves from the raiders, from the insurgents, the real enemy. And because I was not green, because it was not my first time at that rodeo, I watched the people watching us. I watched the houses, the cars, the dead dog crawling with flies on the side of the road. And then I saw them, the pinpricks along the upper wall down the street: a jagged row of Kalashnikov barrels and behind them, tossed in the wind like a kite, a fringe of camo netting hiding our assassins.