But in my dreams, in my dream that night, all I can see is the black barrel of a rifle winking at me, and all I can feel is the stock of my M16, firm and heavy against my shoulder, my finger firm and steady on the trigger. And I fire round after round, tearing the camo netting, blasting through the mud bricks, hoping like hell to see a spray of blood.
Instead, out of nowhere, there’s a bullet. And I’m thrown back against the doorframe of the Humvee and I can’t breathe, but for a moment, I can see the chaos, see the patrol pour into the street and storm the buildings where the snipers are holed up, see the grimy children scatter, crying, see the explosion when the last of the soldiers goes in. And I hear someone, somewhere close, screaming. Maybe me.
And then: nothing.
Nothing.
20
When I stopped running that Wednesday morning—exhausted, sweat pouring out of my skin—Darren was there. I saw the cruiser first, then him, his mirrored Top Gun sunglasses dull and dark in the shade of the mart. He was sitting behind the wheel, watching, waiting for me.
My first thought was that he was there to arrest me, that the feds were pressing charges for my little outburst at the prison or that the sentry from the night before had reported me for trespassing. But when he stepped out of the car, his hands were empty, and he strode toward me with long, loose steps. When he took off his sunglasses, he looked relieved.
“Hi,” I panted, hands on my hips.
“Hi.”
Darren stepped closer and I swear every muscle under his dark brown uniform moved like they had two nights before, like they had when he was—
My cheeks burned hotter, my jaw tightened. I turned away, walked over to the wall of the mart and steadied myself, stretched my quads. He stayed where he was.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are you here?”
He frowned. “I’ve been calling you.”
I frowned in return, then remembered. “Oh, right. Sophie has my phone.”
“What?”
“She busted her phone before she left. I gave her mine.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“You just—” He stepped toward me again, lowered his voice. “You left so early yesterday and …”
“Yeah. I had something to do.”
He drew his head back, his nostrils flared: shocked, annoyed, I don’t know. I didn’t care.
“The coffee should be ready,” I said, then unlocked the door, climbed the stairs. In my kitchen, I poured a cup for him, set it on the counter, then pulled off my shirt.
“I need a shower.”
When I returned, one towel wrapped around my hair, a second around my body, he was leaning against the counter, his arms crossed, watching something out back behind the mart. Then his head turned and he was watching me, his eyes curious, hungry, but wary, as though I were a caged beast, one that might leap through the bars if he got too close.
I went to the sink, filled a glass of water, drained it, filled another.
Darren still hadn’t spoken, just turned around, one hand lightly touching the handle of his coffee cup, the other loose, relaxed, resting on the counter. But his eyes …
“So, what’s going on?” I asked again.
“Nothing.”
“That’s why you’re here at five thirty in the morning. Because of nothing.”
Darren held his ground, remained grave. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“You were upset,” he said levelly, his hands still loose, relaxed on the counter. “Your truck, your computer. I thought you might … I don’t know.”
“I might what?” I said, clenching my glass of water so tightly it should have shattered.
“Look,” he said and glanced at the door. “I know you’ve been asking around about the kid, about Patrick Beale.”
I didn’t answer.
“You talked to that lawyer, Jack Wyatt,” Darren said.
“Not about Patrick.”
Darren nodded. “And you’ve been talking to Lyle.”
I balked. “I’ve been talking to Lyle for almost twenty years, Darren. Whether I wanted to or not.”
Darren sighed, looked away. “Where did you go yesterday?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Where did you go?” he said again.
I shrugged. “Seattle.”
“Seattle.”
“Yeah. Went to see a friend.”
“I didn’t know you counted Billy Boykin as a friend.”
I tried to calculate what he knew, how he knew it. Goddamnit. The files. The feds. Boykin must have been on some watch list.
Briefly, Darren closed his eyes. When he opened them, they had this urgent look, this fear. “You need to be more careful, Camille.”
I tightened the towel around my breasts, tightened my jaw.
“This is bigger than you realize,” he said.
I cocked my head, raised my eyebrows. “Big enough for the feds?”
I picked up my water glass, watched Darren out of the corner of my eye while I drained it again. His eyes were dark and deep, but the muscles of his face were smooth, untroubled. If he suspected I had read his files, he wasn’t letting on.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, then cleared my throat, tried a different approach. “You think Victor is going to have me picked up. Or King. One of the two.”
And he did react, just a little. He was surprised I knew those names, or at least surprised I’d said them. “Who are they?” he asked carefully.
“You know,” I said just as carefully.
“Billy tell you about them?”
“No,” I lied.
“Jeremy Leamon?”
“You mean before or after they blew his head off?”
“It might have been suicide,” Darren said softly, then frowned when I laughed.
“Suicide?” I said and laughed again. “Like hell.”
“Doc Fleischman hasn’t finished the autopsy.”
“Why? Not enough of his head left?”
“That’s not funny.”
“No. But there’s no way you’re going to convince me that level of response was for a suicide.”
Darren’s eyes narrowed. “Response?”
“I saw it, Darren.” I nodded, glad for a trump card, any trump card. “Sat there for five minutes chatting with Deputy Walker while the EMTs brought his body out.”
He clenched his jaw, looked away, his eyes now stormy and black. “Camille,” he said, his voice low and threatening.
“It wasn’t suicide.”
“You shouldn’t have been there.”
“It wasn’t suicide.”
“We don’t know that.”
I didn’t think Leamon was scared enough to pull the trigger himself. I figured he knew the writing was on the wall, but I also knew—knew in my gut—that the old man wouldn’t go down without a fight. But then I remembered sitting in his kitchen that day with the whiskey and the dirty curtains and the shotgun leaning against the wall by the back door. There had been a wedding picture in the front room, the silver frame polished, the only thing in the house that was clean. But no wife. She’d been in the ground for years now. I remembered how good the barrel of a gun looked during my own bad times. And I doubted myself.
“Have you spoken with them?” Darren said.
“What?” I said, startled.
“Victor and King.”
“Don’t you already know?” I said, my lip curling. “I would have thought you’d heard.”
Darren looked away and when he looked back, his face was hard, forbidding. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, Camille. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
I snorted. “I’ve already been hurt, Darren. They broke into my place, they blew up my truck while my kid was sleeping thirty feet away.”
“And if you would leave it alone, they’d stop.”
“Leave wh
at, Darren? I can’t leave it alone if I don’t know what it is.”
“Stop asking questions,” he said quietly. “Stop talking to people.”
“Then tell me this,” I said and leaned into the counter. “Tell me where he fits into soldier boy’s little network. What was he doing for them? Why did he have ephedrine caked into his jeans? Because he was cooking for them, right? But if that’s all, why kill him? Why string him up, why fry him with a fucking car battery?”
Darren stared at my fury and rage, and absorbed it all and didn’t open his mouth once, just held his jaw tightly, blood pumping, roaring through the vessels in his neck.
“And while you’re at it, tell me this: Why was he in here looking anxious a few days before he died?” I continued. “Why were King and Victor here a couple of days after that? Were they out at the place behind Jeremy Leamon’s? Were they burning down a lab?”
I waited for his reaction, but his face was blank, chiseled stone.
“And why,” I said, well aware that I was shouting now. I lowered my voice to ask, “Why was my daughter with them?”
“I can’t …” Darren said, his mouth barely moving.
“What? You can’t what?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“But you know.”
Darren looked down at the counter, looked at his fist balled up and resting on it.
“Or do you know?” I shouted. “Am I the only one asking questions anymore? Is that the problem? Are you trying to cover something up? Are the feds trying to cover something up?”
“It’s a live investigation, Camille,” Darren said evenly.
“And I found his body, Darren,” I breathed. “I found Havers.”
Darren’s chin jerked up, his brow creased. “Who?”
I stopped, stepped back, stunned. Confused. “Patrick,” I said quietly. “I found Patrick.”
“Who is Havers?”
But I was already gone, back in Iraq, back with the heat and the dust and the flies buzzing in that dark, mud-brick room, the stench that hit me in the face as soon as the corporal kicked open the door. I was standing to the side while the other guys went in, rifles at the ready. And when the first soldier put his arm over his mouth and stepped to the side, when the second dropped his weapon and started to heave, I saw him—Havers—hanging from a heavy metal hook screwed into the ceiling; hanging, bloated, blackened, unrecognizable, his chest bare, his feet bare, the strings of his BDU pants loose around his ankles in the spotlight of one soldier’s headlamp, a soldier who stood there transfixed. Horrified. And when that soldier looked away, there was nothing but—
“Camille?” Darren said softly. His hand was on my shoulder, the skin of his palm cool and dry on my still-damp skin. I jumped, looked up quickly, wildly.
“Tell me what happens if I stop asking questions?” I said fiercely. “How long before the next one? How long before Sophie ends up hanging in a barn?”
Darren wrapped me in his arms, but I stood there stiffly, my spine like iron, my chin dry against the abrasive cloth of his uniform.
“I’m not afraid,” I said, my voice solid, icy. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen things.”
Darren’s lungs filled and then emptied, his breath hot against my neck. “This isn’t Afghanistan, Camille,” he said. “These guys make the Taliban look like Boy Scouts.”
I shook my head. He held me closer.
“They’ll kill you, Camille,” Darren said, his lips on my hair. “They’ll kill Sophie.”
I clenched my jaw and pushed him away.
* * *
Rhonda fed me that morning, made me stand there like a little kid in front of the counter in the mart while she watched me eat a cinnamon roll and drink a cup of coffee.
“You look like hell, boss,” she said. “When was the last time you slept?”
“Where did you see Patrick Beale?” I asked.
She frowned, wiped my crumbs off the counter for the fifth time. “You mean up in Oroville?”
“Yeah, with that guy.”
“That restaurant on the way into town.”
“The pizza place?”
“No, the north end of town. It’s a diner or something.”
“On the way in from Canada,” I muttered.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
I ate some more of the cinnamon roll, waited for her to keep talking. When she didn’t, I asked her what Patrick and the other guy—Nick, Victor, whatever his name was—were doing.
“Eating.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. I just saw them through the window.”
“Were they talking?”
“Maybe,” Rhonda said, got snotty with me. “It’s not like I stood there and watched them.”
I sighed, looked over at the door, looked through it at the road baking in the early sun.
“They were just eating,” Rhonda said more patiently. “Patrick looked kind of scared and the other guy looked sort of … I don’t know, preoccupied.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You know, sort of pissed off and thinking hard about something.”
Rhonda picked up a pair of plastic tongs and rearranged the cinnamon rolls on their red plastic platter, filled the hole from the one I had taken, and scraped up the frosting that had dripped off.
She shrugged, then said, “Maybe he was just tired. It was—God—a month ago, I think.”
“There wasn’t anyone else with them?” I asked.
“No,” she said, then tilted her head. “Well …”
“What?”
“There was a lot of food on the table.”
“So?” I said. “They’re guys.”
“No, like a lot. Like there was another person with them.”
“But you didn’t see him?” I said, then remembered the video and my daughter in the back seat of that truck. “Or her?”
Rhonda shook her head, then stopped like she thought better of it. “There was someone walking toward the table. A blond guy. Looked like an asshole.”
“Tall, buzz cut?”
“Yeah. Pretty ripped too.”
Captain Jimmy Kingman. I would have bet anything it was King.
“And the other one?” I said. “You said he had dark hair.”
Rhonda nodded, then pointed to her neck, right where it sloped down into her tanned shoulder. “And a tat, right here.”
And that was Victor. Or Nick, depending on who you asked.
I nodded, shoved the last of the cinnamon roll in my mouth. When I had swallowed it, I borrowed Rhonda’s car on the excuse that the Bronco was acting up, but really because no one had seen me in it before. Then I slipped out while the mart was still empty.
Ten minutes later my phone rang. I glanced at the number and slammed on the brakes, jerked the wheel to the right, and just as the car shuddered to a stop—
“I need a favor.”
“Well, thank you, Camille. I’m doin’ just fine. How you doin’, friend?”
“Harry,” I said sternly. “I’m not fucking around.”
Laughter, Harry German’s trademark rumble, deep and bassy, like he was at the bottom of a barrel. “You never do, woman.”
“I need a service record.”
Silence.
“Camille—” Harry said quietly, his voice cautious.
“I need it, Harry. He was Army. Discharged as a captain in 2010. I’ll send you a photo of the DD-214.”
“You know I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. I know you still have the contacts.”
“I can’t, Camille. I wish I could, but—”
“This is important. Life or death.”
Silence.
“Harry?”
A longer silence.
Then: a sigh, big and deep.
“What’s so important about it?” he asked.
“You know those properties? The ones you found? He’s behind it. Meth. And it’s big time. It’s vicious.”
“So what? Let the cops
deal with it. This ain’t your—”
“No,” I snapped. “Don’t tell me to—”
“That’s what they do, they—”
“No!” I shouted.
“Whoa,” Harry said quickly. “Whoa.”
I was clenching the phone in my fist; it was smashed against my cheek. But my eyes were closed, my throat was closed. And the tears burned when they traced down my cheeks.
On the other end of the line, a chair creaked, a door closed. Then Harry said, “What’s this really about?”
“Sophie,” I said, my voice choking. “She’s in it … somehow. I don’t know how. But she’s involved; she knew that dead kid, and he’s … this guy has got her involved.”
Harry was quiet then, but it was a busy sort of quiet. He breathed rapidly in short, sharp bursts. And in the background, a pencil tapped on a wooden surface.
“Give me the name,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper.
“I’ll send you the photo.”
“No,” he said quickly. “No photos. No emails. No records. Just give me his name.”
“Kingman. James Kingman, Captain.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” I said, but Harry had already hung up.
Alone in the car on the side of the road, I rolled down the window, listened to the wind, felt it scour my face. Sweat trickled between my breasts. A single question preyed on my mind: Why was I alive?
Darren had said they would kill me. He was right. I had gotten close enough for threats, for intimidation: the laptop, my truck, maybe even the asshole who tried to run me off the road the Friday before. But I hadn’t gotten close enough to try to kill. Not yet. That meant I hadn’t gotten close enough to the truth about Patrick Beale.
Little Falls Page 20