Little Falls

by Elizabeth Lewes

  “You said you hadn’t been to his apartment.”

  Todd’s eyes narrowed. “No, I didn’t.”

  “You did: at the mart that Monday after I—” I stopped myself abruptly. That wasn’t something I was ready to tell. “After Patrick was found.”

  That’s when he threw his punch. Sweat sprayed from his hair, caught the golden early light like a halo. But I caught his fist and pivoted, twisted his arm up and around his back, secured it between his shoulder blades. He struggled, thrashed; I held him tighter.

  “He’s dead, Todd,” I said, my chin lodged into the back of his sweat-slicked neck. “It’s over.”

  Todd laughed then, that kind of thick, throaty laugh like he was really sobbing. So when I let him break free, when he turned on me, I expected to see grief in his eyes. Instead, there was anger there, shining like a hot coal. And gloating. And pride.

  Todd lunged forward. I stepped back and to the side. He fell to his knees, then shot up like a wrestler and came for more. I caught his fist again, swung him in a wide arc and, my other hand twisting his shoulder, pushed him to the dirt, ground my knee into the small of his back, his face into the thick grass, still damp from the sprinklers.

  “What else did you see, Todd?” I barked.

  He groaned. “Fuck you.”

  His arm was locked in the crook of my neck; I leaned into it, forced his shoulder until he screamed.

  “What else did you see?”

  He yelped. “Nothing!”

  “Did you see Vic—” I remembered what Sophie called him. “Did you see Nick?”

  He shook his head, then thought better of it, said too quickly, “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Who else? Who else did you see?” I lessened the pressure on his shoulder. “Sophie? Other girls? King?”

  His hips bucked as he tried to throw me off. When he was done screaming that time, when he had learned to submit, he glared at me from the ground, dirt smeared over his face, a gash over his eye seeping blood, hate blazing in his eyes. He still hadn’t confirmed anything. Hadn’t denied it either.

  So I took a stab in the dark. “Lyle?”

  Todd glowered, spat.

  I took another stab. “Sergeant Moses?”

  The corners of Todd’s mouth flicked up, a wicked light entered his eyes. Fear? No. Triumph.

  My stomach dropped. He didn’t. But the notes in the files, the ones sitting on Darren’s coffee table, swam in my memory. Information about a lab, about trafficking routes. Records for King and Victor and a dozen other men. And an encounter with the terrified criminal informant on August 6, then nothing. Blank. Until August 13, when I found him, wrecked. Patrick was the informant. He had to be. Todd had ratted him out; he’d tattled on his big brother. And he was still smiling about it. You sick fuck.

  Then: voices. Shouts.

  I leapt up, stepped away, pulled my gun out of its holster and didn’t bother to hide it.

  Todd Beale laughed. He sat back on his haunches, massaged his shoulder, wiped the blood from his eye. And laughed.

  “How much do you know?” I said urgently.

  Like a golden-haired lizard, Todd swiveled his head toward me. “Where is she?” he parried, razors in his voice. Then he stood, unfolded his wiry arms and skinny legs. “No one at school knows where she is.”

  Behind him, on the road from town, other kids, all of them in gray shirts like Todd Beale’s, were running up the hill. I slid the gun behind my back.

  “Who did you tell?” I said, my voice rising, panicking.

  “Where is she?” he said more loudly. I glanced at the runners again. A few had crested the hill; the leader was approaching the cemetery gates. Todd followed my eyes, stepped toward me, his rage electrifying the space between us. “Tell me where she is or I’ll—”

  “Did you know they would kill him?” I said. “Is that what you hoped?”

  The lead runner—a female—was in the cemetery now. She was small and slight, her brown hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail. The girl from the funeral, the one holding Todd’s hand. And now she was calling his name.

  He glanced over his shoulder, shouted cheerfully, buoyantly, “Go on to the Milgards’ orchard. I’ll catch up in a minute.”

  The brown-haired girl nodded, waved, a pretty smile blooming on her plain face. She bounded over to the rest of the group, half of them leaning on their knees, then passed them. A couple of the girls broke off, then more followed, and soon there were just a few kids standing around, watching, staring. One of them shouted to Todd, said it was getting late. But Todd waved and yelled that he’d still beat them back to the school.

  When they were gone, Todd spun around like a tornado and lunged. But this time, I just tripped him up, watched him sprawl on the ground. When he rolled over, he was at the wrong end of my gun.

  “We’re done,” I said, suddenly exhausted. “You’re done.”

  From the ground, his head a few inches from his brother’s gravestone, Todd shook his head and grinned. “You have no idea.”

  * * *

  Todd.

  I watched him down the barrel of my gun. I watched him run. When he’d gone beyond the orchard down the road, when he’d disappeared, I lowered my weapon.

  Todd.

  Was it that simple? Patrick was the informant. Todd was the jealous younger brother. Sophie was the chip in their little game.

  It couldn’t be that simple. If it was that simple, I’d be dead. And even if it were that simple, there still wasn’t anything to tie it all to Jimmy King. And I knew—knew like I knew my name—that he was holding the strings.

  But Todd had given me something important, something vital: my sanity. I couldn’t prove he tipped off Jimmy King. I couldn’t prove anything. But his anger and viciousness toward me meant I wasn’t wrong, despite what the records didn’t say. Now I just needed proof. There had to be something I had missed somewhere out there. Even if they could change the records, they couldn’t clean everything up that quickly.

  I started retracing my steps way back in the county, to the place where Patrick Beale had been tortured. But where a gutted vehicle had been melting into the undergrowth the week before and a double-wide had squatted low, there was nothing. Now there was only an empty clearing dappled with the first rays of the weak morning sun, dotted with patches of brown grass, padded with long pine needles. And there was me: prowling the perimeter, scrutinizing the dirt, and finally crouching in the middle, head in my hands.

  I drove again, farther out into the other corner of the county, out to that place with the smart-ass supervisor and what I figured would be a pot farm someday. But it was deserted, the coils of electrical wire and the piles of steel piping for the fence gone. Even the postholes the crew had been drilling when I was there had disappeared into the dust and the tall, dried-out grass. And the house next door, the one the man on the highway had said was his, was deserted, curtains drawn against the blazing sun, the driveway empty, no sign of the battered truck he had been sitting in.

  By the time I got to Jeremy Leamon’s place, it was getting bad. Adrenaline was ripping through my bloodstream, my brain was buzzing like a wasp’s nest. I watched everything, every blade of grass, every branch that jumped in the dry wind sweeping in from the east. In my right hand, I clenched the Beretta M9 I’d bought two weeks after I was discharged, that I had slept with under my pillow until my father took it from me and hid it in his safe. Those were the bad days, the days when he wasn’t sure who I’d use it on, when he was afraid it would be on me. The days when I didn’t know when the demons I had tried to leave in Iraq would be back.

  And now … now, they were coming for me.

  I was sure Todd Beale had squealed again, sure he’d made another visit to Victor to tell him I knew too much. I wasn’t afraid; that’s not why I was waiting. I’m still not sure what I was. Ready, I guess. Ready for the attack, ready to fight. Or ready for Victor’s or King’s or somebody’s bullet to crash through
the windshield and penetrate my skull. Ready for the darkness. For the end. No matter who pulled the trigger.

  I looked down. My hand—tanned and dirty skin, ragged fingernails—clutching the Beretta was steady, but my trigger finger twitched. I stared at the black barrel, the rich, brown wood on the grip, the gold lettering … It was beautiful, in a way. A beautiful way to die.

  Oh my God.

  Slowly, fearfully, I put the gun down and withdrew my hand.

  I was cracking up.

  I took a deep breath, all the way to the bottom of my lungs, and glanced up at the house beyond my windshield.

  Cracking up like Jeremy Leamon.

  I swung the car door open, stepped out, and filled my lungs again and again with that dry, hot air that smelled like pines and dust and fertilizer. Like the Okanogan. Like home. I closed my eyes and leaned into the wind.

  I wouldn’t end it, but they still could. They could kill me. Then. There.

  No.

  They could try.

  My eyes flew open. The hills in the distance were golden, studded with narrow trees, black and green like onyx and emeralds. The sky was blisteringly blue. And I was alive. For now. For the fight.

  * * *

  That night, Mike Havers finally came through for me.

  I had asked him to send copies of his brother’s records: personnel, medical, whatever he had. I had told him I wanted to see if anything rang a bell, if something would jog my memory. I wanted to fill in the gaps. I wanted to see if I remembered what was real.

  The personnel record Mike sent was unremarkable: boot camp at Benning, training at Fort Sam. Deployed less than three months later. Service record terminated not long after.

  The medical record was brief and ended abruptly with a death certificate: cerebral hemorrhage. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them, and looked again.

  Decedent: Paul Kerry Havers

  Rank: Private

  DOB: 04/29/86

  DOD: 08/13/05

  Cause of death: cerebral hemorrhage

  Not asphyxiation.

  I paged through the document again, but there was nothing else except his boot camp physical and a round of vaccines before he deployed. The trauma I recalled, the viciously inflicted damage I had seen so clearly in my dreams, was nowhere.

  But records can lie.

  No one would tell me if I was right about Patrick Beale, but someone could tell me if I was right about Private Havers: Major Jack Brittan, the man who had gotten me reassigned for my own good, who had said that work would set me free.

  Online, Brittan’s obituary said he was killed when a mortar hit the base. The article by his hometown newspaper said he was missing in action, presumed dead. His name was on the official list of the fallen.

  The first sergeant then. But an obit said he had died of natural causes the year before, in the hospital in his hometown in Florida.

  The pretty undertaker? But I never knew his name, or that of the doc who did the autopsy. And neither one was listed in the file.

  Goddamnit.

  The chair crashed to the floor when I rocked to my feet. Papers were spread over the surface of the table: I swept them onto the floor. Maps were displayed on my laptop screen: they flickered and faded to black when I threw the machine against the wall. Photos I had pulled off Sophie’s phone, stills from the video camera, shots I had taken since the whole thing started were sorted and stacked tidily—I shoved them into one pile, picked them up, held them above my head, and—

  The photos.

  We all had photos in Iraq. We all took photos too, back in the day when you’d use a disposable point-and-click and send the whole thing home. To your family.

  I lowered my arms, stared at the photos in my hands. Mike Havers had said he hadn’t heard the name Jimmy or Kingman or King. Said his brother didn’t know any officers, just a bunch of infantry guys who took him out to the field to shoot up shit. But maybe he had seen King and just didn’t know who he was looking at.

  I dropped the stack back onto the table and pawed through the images until I found the still from the mart’s video that I had left on the table for Sophie to find the week before. Then I retrieved the laptop, prayed silently while the screen righted itself, then pulled up that moment on the video record and emailed a screen shot to Mike Havers: Do you recognize these men?

  Ten long minutes later, Mike Havers responded with another photo, a cell phone photo of an old glossy of three guys in cheap sunglasses and brown tees standing in front of a blown-out truck.

  Got this the day they told us he was dead, the next message said. The one on the right. He your man?

  Even with the sunglasses, even with his BDU blouse off, even without his name tape stretched across his chest, there was no way the tall blond bastard with his hand on Private Havers’s shoulder wasn’t Captain James Kingman.

  That’s him, I typed. That’s who murdered your brother.

  22

  Dawn.

  I stood in front of the window, one hand on the kitchen counter, one hand around a cooling cup of coffee, watching the sun rise trembling and furious and raw over the Res.

  It was time.

  I had been avoiding it—I knew I had. I kept telling myself I needed a plan, needed a strategy. Kept telling myself it wasn’t likely anyway: one sighting of that black and red Suburban meant nothing. It didn’t have the same weight as a property record I could tie back to Jack Wyatt, which didn’t exist. And, hell, I hadn’t met a trigger-happy sentry at any of the other properties, so that was another good reason to save the place out in the foothills for last.

  I finally found the driveway just after noon. I had gone looking official, in case the sentry was posted during the day, in case they had tightened security even more. And if that strategy failed, I had decided to storm the gates, so to speak, just gun the engine of Rhonda’s sedan—which they hadn’t seen me in before—up the hill and take my chances, bad as they were.

  After I turned off the road, I pulled my ball cap down low over my eyes, checked that the strap of my holster was loose, the safety was off my Beretta, my county ID was still tucked under my thigh. Then I took it slow down the gravel drive, slow and respectful. Let them get a shot of me on the video cameras I was sure were hung out there somewhere. Let them get a shot of the binder I’d casually left on the dash. Let them see the county seal and the inch-high letters that spelled out “Okanogan County Assessor’s Office” in gold across the front.

  It had been dark the first time I was there, so I hadn’t noticed that the first part of the drive was surrounded by brown fields studded with wheat way past its harvest date, the stalks bent over from the weight of the golden brown kernels that had spilled out of the seed heads to litter the ground. To the right of the drive, an irrigator stood idle in the center of the field, like its operator had abandoned it mid-season, mid-thought.

  Past the field, a thick stand of trees began: ponderosas, their long green needles tipped with brown, caked with dust. But the drive had been graveled recently: the thin trail that rose behind Rhonda’s little red sedan disappeared within moments. Any time now, any second, I’d stop at the sentry post, give the asshole my line about county business, wait for him to radio to the guys in charge, learn if they recognized me, discover whether I was likely to be shot down that day.

  I turned at a slight bend in the drive and slammed on the brakes.

  The car ground to a stop inches away from a tree lying across the drive like a dead drunk. Off to my right, a few feet back into the woods, was its stump, split and splintered, jagged and damp. It was a new wound, a new carcass.

  Damn. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I tried to think of a plan, a wise alternative, but my sleep-starved brain was blank, empty as a chalkboard in summertime. I needed something that would avoid their sight lines, just in case someone was watching. Or … I could give them a show.

  I killed the engine and stepped out of the car, binder in hand, Beretta in its holster under a
light jacket. I inspected the tree, walked up and down it and back to the car. I opened the binder on the hood, made a couple of notes, shut it. Then I opened the door, tossed the binder onto the passenger seat, and grabbed a roll of toilet paper from the back. I looked left, right, and then plunged into the woods, toilet roll held prominently in my hand. But I didn’t stop at the first bush or the second; I kept going deeper and deeper and then farther up the hill, skirting the gravel drive as closely as I dared.

  There was no note in my binder about the flattened hut, the shards of lumber just visible through the lower branches of the fallen pine, or the bite of a chainsaw on its trunk. There was nothing about the CB whip that someone had too hastily tried to cover with fallen leaves a few feet back into the woods. And there sure as hell wasn’t a note about the tiny black video camera wired to one of the branches that pointed straight at the sky. Why give them anything interesting to read in my absence?

  Fifteen minutes. I figured I had fifteen minutes to see as much as I could of whatever the sentry had been guarding. I could explain that much time with a strategically placed pile of crumpled toilet paper, and I could explain my presence away from it as confusion, disorientation: Sorry, sir. I guess I went too far into the woods. Didn’t want to give anyone a show. It would probably work for a little while, long enough to get out of there. And maybe it would be worth it.

  I had been slogging through the undergrowth for five minutes when I saw a clearing up ahead. I hunkered down, crept closer. Trees and scrub gave way to a shady opening about a hundred feet across, but a lot longer than that. Within it sat a long, low, metal-sided building with a camera above a solid metal door. A wooden barn several yards away had cracked windows and weather-beaten wood, but no camera as far as I could see. The clearing was still, no sign of any people, sentries or otherwise.

  Cautiously, I picked my way around the perimeter to the rear of the metal shed. Twenty feet away I got my first whiff: chemicals, thick and toxic, blown out by a line of fans that studded the building up near the roofline. My eyes watered, the inside of my nose burned. Meth—had to be. So this was the new cookhouse. I snapped a few photos, but that was all I could do. There were no gaps in the walls, no windows. And there was no way I was going to walk into that camera’s view.