“Who’s that?” Zipping up, squinting into the rain. Christmas lights flickering and blowing back and forth in the wind.
Rice knew this wasn’t fair play. As if he were imitating the scream of a dying rabbit to lure coyotes and bobcats, he spoke in a slurred Turpin County accent, describing a nonexistent female biker helplessly inebriated, a woman who took her pants down to piss and passed out, her imaginary genitalia exposed to DeWayne’s eager gaze.
Forty-Two
Rice faced in the direction of the trailer and watched the dark forest. He had his knife out and was absently whittling by feel a point on a thin green beechwood stick. The music from the party was barely audible over the rain and wind. No hollering, no crashing through the brush, no stabbing flashlights. He turned back to the beech tree and pressed the switch twice on his own flashlight. DeWayne Stiller hung there, his hands and arms duct-taped to his body, dancing on his tiptoes, trying to take the tension from the climbing rope noosed around his neck. A dark goose egg had raised up under his ear from the improvised sap. In the light he started screaming into the tape over his mouth and snorting wet, bloody tendrils from his nose.
A memory intruded, DeWayne and the others sitting sour-faced with their beers in Wanless back in early September. The day the mushroom picker had shown him the first dead bear. The day all this started. He’d assumed they worked at the sawmill, but even then they’d been laid off for weeks. No seniority. He’d seen DeWayne at his father’s store but he didn’t seem to work there. He was an unemployed delinquent who had bloomed into a small-time drug dealer and wannabe outlaw biker. He poached bears and he sold the galls. Rice doubted he’d finished high school. He wondered if he had a girlfriend, maybe one of the girls in the trailer.
Rice hadn’t spoken since DeWayne had come to, and he hadn’t bothered with a blindfold because of the pitch darkness. He stepped closer and stripped the tape from the man’s cheek. DeWayne spit snot and blood onto the ground and spoke in the strained, high-pitched voice of a man teetering on the edge of a complete breakdown.
“You fuckin’ greasers! Fuck you!” A string of partially coherent curses and promises of retaliation followed.
Rice paused. Greasers? He had expected confusion, anger, fear, but DeWayne was spasming with terror.
“You gonna cut my fuckin’ head off?” The question had started off defiant but ended on a whimpering, plaintive high note. Now he was hyperventilating, struggling to balance on his toes.
Rice still didn’t speak, wondering who DeWayne thought had captured him. He’d never heard of any Latino gangs active in this part of the state. It was possible the MC had been buying wholesale from one of the cartels, but a nobody like DeWayne wouldn’t be involved. Unless he’d tagged along with Mirra for some reason. It seemed far-fetched. After a pause, DeWayne found his voice again.
“You fuckers think everyone’s scared of you. We ain’t. Diddy coulda shot you, he almost did. He got a good look at you. We told the club. They’re on their way.”
“You told the club what?” Rice asked his question in a harsh whisper, but on second thought, he didn’t care if DeWayne knew who he was, so he followed up in his normal voice.
“You little boys been putting out hits on people, DeWayne?”
“No! Mirra said not to. He said not to do anything till he got back.”
“You talked to Mirra? Where is he?”
DeWayne didn’t reply. If he’d recognized Rice’s voice, he hadn’t shown any surprise. He was about to pass out anyway. He bobbed on the rope, leaning and righting, shuffling his feet in the leaves. Rice was curious about Mirra, but he didn’t have much time. Someone might see his truck and wonder about the Arizona plates. It was even possible, though unlikely, that they’d notice DeWayne was missing from the party and come looking for him. DeWayne was a hoss, had to be pushing 240, and Rice had only dragged him so far into the forest.
Rice took a breath, let it out with his eyes closed, steeling himself, then he shouldered DeWayne against the trunk, pushed his head into the smooth bark with his forearm. In this position the noose was tight and DeWayne probably couldn’t breathe at all, but Rice cupped his hand over the man’s mouth anyway. He fit the point of his sharpened stick into DeWayne’s left ear and stabbed twice into the wall of his ear canal. DeWayne jerked like a fish and his high-pitched scream went on for a while, muffled by Rice’s hand.
Rice leaned in and spoke close to the other ear smashed up against the bark. He said something to the effect that if DeWayne didn’t tell him who raped Sara Birkeland, next time he was going to keep pushing until he poked a hole in his walnut-size brain.
He pulled the stick, made sure the bleeding wasn’t too bad, and let him swing back to where he could take his weight on his toes again. DeWayne nodded spasmodically, moaning and whimpering. His calf muscles were starting to fail. He stank from shitting and pissing himself.
Rice walked back to the stump where he’d set up STP’s camera, pressed the button that started the video recording. He shone his flashlight on DeWayne’s face—his eyes scrunched shut against the beam—so he could be identified. After that it was mostly going to be audio. Rain dripped steadily from the leaves overhead but he understood the camera was more or less weatherproof. STP had said she was afraid he’d drop it in a creek.
He backhanded DeWayne across his mouth, prompting a quiet, high-pitched keening. Then he was weeping, shaking his head, trying to say something. His voice was hoarse, whispering, his larynx in spasm against the pressure of the rope.
“They’ll kill me.”
“Who’ll kill you?”
“Mirra and them. The club.”
“You saying Mirra and the bikers did it?” He opened his knife near the man’s good ear, a loud click, and whittled a rough wedge point onto a new beech branch. “I think it was you.”
“No! I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
Rice waited a few moments, walked away, whittled on the stick some more, came back. Softened his voice. “Or maybe you just watched, D. Maybe it was that ugly Jesse fucker down there at the party wondering where your lost ass ran off to? Or was it your brother? Alan Mirra’s your fucking hero, did you do it to impress him? Was he there? Did he tell you to do it? Maybe it wasn’t your fault. Was it some stupid initiation for the club?”
Rice laid the point of the sharpened stick gently on DeWayne’s good ear and he twisted away and slipped so that the rope tightened on his throat, shutting off his air again. Rice let him scrabble in the dirt, righting himself, getting some slack in the rope. The knots must have loosened. While he waited for DeWayne to stop retching, he considered whether he should tighten the rope. Probably not. He was nearly out of time. It was going to work or it wasn’t.
“DeWayne, this is easy. You tell me the truth and I let you go. And you know damn well I can’t go to the law with what you say. It’s just for me. Was it them? Mirra and Jesse and your brother?”
“It wasn’t us. They was staying at Mirra’s place.”
“The rapists were Mirra’s houseguests?”
DeWayne panted and swallowed before trying to speak again. “Me and Jesse swore not to say nothing, Mirra made us swear, he said if we told anyone they’d kill us.”
“DeWayne, I’ll fucking kill you. Look at yourself. You think I won’t?”
DeWayne sagged into the rope. He’d given up. In the light from the flashlight his face was dark, turning blue. Rice stepped over to the branch where he’d tied off the end of the rope and gave him enough slack so he could lean back against the tree. With the pressure off his larynx he hacked and wheezed. Rice waited. DeWayne would talk now. In between retches he said Mirra had been hiding out in Philly the past couple of days, with the club. “He didn’t even tell us he was alive till tonight.” He said he and Nardo and Jesse used to hang out at Mirra’s place, back before they moved up here. Mirra gave them meth to sell when he could get it, and they helped with the bear poaching. Using bait was his idea, crossbows at night, poison
pods, killing all those radio-collared bears. Mirra had a guy, Jonas, who bought the galls, paid good money.
DeWayne and Jesse showed up at Mirra’s one day last fall and these three bikers were there, “badass fuckers, enforcers, officers way up in the club, bragged about killing people, blowing away cops.”
They were pushing Mirra about training club members in military tactics, and Mirra was bargaining, wanted the club to take over the bear parts market, export the parts to China or someplace, make a bunch of money. DeWayne was fuzzy on the particulars. He and Jesse were trying to impress the guys from the club and had got pretty messed up sucking on the meth pipe they were passing around. Jesse bragged about killing bears, and the three enforcers were from the city, they were interested. They said they wanted to go hunting with the hounds, shoot a bear out of a tree.
“We said we could take ’em up on Turk Mountain, lots of big bears there, but we had to watch out for the caretaker ’cause she’d called the game warden on us, we had to wait till she left that night, we knew her schedule. These guys called us pussies for worrying about her, they start asking questions, where the place was, if she lived by herself, shit like that. They said they’d help us teach her a lesson, we could all go and wait for her to drive out. Mirra told us to shut up. Kicked us out.”
The next morning, DeWayne and Jesse went over to see if the bikers still wanted to go hunting, but they were gone, and Mirra looked like he’d been up all night. They’d heard about the girl and asked Mirra if he and the enforcers had done it. Right then “Jonas” drove up and he and Mirra started yelling at each other like DeWayne and Jesse weren’t there, he was mad about the enforcers and the girl, wanted to know why didn’t Mirra stop them, Mirra said they stole his truck, they punked him for trying to tell club officers what to do. Mirra’d been out all night on his Harley looking for them, and when he came home he’d found his truck there and the enforcers and their bikes gone.
“Jonas asked all of us where we’d been, said to make sure we had alibis, witnesses. He knew what all to do, he’d brought a vacuum cleaner and made us vacuum inside Mirra’s truck while they took a hose and washed the outside, underneath. They changed the fucking tires. Mirra made us swear not to tell anyone, not even Nardo, said he’d kill us if we did, the club would find us and kill us. Me and Jesse swore we’d keep our mouths shut and we fucking meant it. That’s all I know, I swear it.”
“I need their names. The three bikers.”
“I don’t know. They never said!”
“Are you ready to die for those fuckers, DeWayne?”
“Y’all are gonna kill me anyway.”
“There’s no one else here, D. I’ll just let you go back to your party.”
“That Mexican’s here, I can fuckin’ smell ’im.”
Again with the Mexican. “DeWayne, you’re delusional. You’re smelling your own damn self.”
DeWayne was frustrated now. “We know what y’all are doin’! You think we’re stupid? We always knew you was in with them, we knew you was gonna try and take over the county.”
“Who is ‘them,’ D? Who the fuck are we talking about?”
“Diddy saw him. He come by the store looking for you. Diddy run ’im off and called me and Nardo.”
Oh hell.
“You’re full of shit. Nobody came looking for me.”
DeWayne’s certainty about what was happening finally started to drain away. For the first time he sounded confused. “You go ask Diddy. He’s still at the store movin’ shit up to the loft.”
Yeah, Rice thought, feeling weary. I’ll do that.
“I need those names.”
“They never told us their names!”
He smashed his forearm into DeWayne again, pinning him against the tree, and hauled on the rope, taking up the slack, lifting his head and torqueing his spine. He held the flashlight in his teeth and laid the flat of his knife on DeWayne’s cheekbone, pricked the lower eyelid with the point, lifting it away from the eye. DeWayne made no sound, his air was cut off, but his legs began scissor-kicking. He let go with another long, blatting bowel evacuation.
Rice let the point of his knife pierce the lid but kept it away from the man’s eye.
“You know what they called each other.”
Forty-Three
Ahead in the gloom, the warm yellow lights in the front windows of Stiller’s Store looked homey and welcoming. He pulled off the highway and parked in the gravel lot, got out, and looked through a window. Mr. Stiller was carrying a heavy-looking blue plastic bread box stacked with canned vegetables up a set of steep retractable steps to a loft. He looked exhausted. Wasn’t much merchandise left downstairs, but he seemed to have saved the heavy stuff for last, maybe hoping his sons would come help.
DeWayne sure wouldn’t be coming, though Rice had cut most of the duct tape away before leaving him propped up against a wet tree trunk, and he was probably back at the trailer by now.
Rice had promised DeWayne that if he kept his mouth shut Rice would make sure the Sinaloa cartel stayed out of his motorcycle club’s territory. He’d also promised he would show the club his recording of DeWayne ratting out the three enforcers if DeWayne had the temerity to do any one of a long list of things, including reporting Rice’s assault on his person to the sheriff or anyone else in the world, attempting any sort of payback against Rice, harming or threatening, or allowing anyone else to ever harm or threaten, Sara, or ever again setting foot on the Turk Mountain Preserve without Rice or Sara’s explicit permission. He suggested DeWayne tell everyone back at the party that he’d been pissing in the forest and had fallen over drunk, hit his head on a tree.
The Closed sign was facing out but the glass-paneled door was unlocked. Rice pushed it open as the wind blew up again outside. Rain spattered on the metal roof and on the south-facing windows. When he saw Rice, Stiller widened his eyes and faked a big grin, like it was a pleasant surprise to have Rice walk into his store. Stiller was a stout man, not tall, probably still strong in his late fifties. A balding, scaled-down version of his sons: the ruddy freckled face, the close-set, suspicious eyes. Rice knew him as a reticent, hostile fellow mad at the world, especially outsiders like Rice, upon whom he had to depend for a large part of his business.
“Lookee who’s here.” Dumb happy expression on his face, his voice flat. Bilton Stiller was doing irony.
“Hello, Mr. Stiller. It’s been a while. I’ve been meaning to stop by.”
“I bet. Too bad it’s goddamn past midnight and we’re closed.”
“You need a hand?” Stiller had disappeared through the hole in the ceiling and didn’t reply. A small television on a shelf behind the counter played a news program; a satellite loop of eastern North America’s weather showed a broad gyre spinning north from the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Julia crashing into the Florida Panhandle and engulfing parts of Alabama and Georgia, losing some of its coherence but not much speed as it rode northward up the Appalachians into Virginia.
Stiller spoke, coming back down the steps. “That shit is here already,” he said. “Gonna knock down all them big old trees up by you. They’ll lay on the ground and rot, doin’ nobody any good at all.”
He said this with a kind of resigned certainty, as if he didn’t have much to show for his life besides hard-earned wisdom. Rice had been in the store a dozen times, but this bit about the storm was the most the man had ever said directly to him. When he turned around, Stiller was coming slowly off the bottom step, grinning and carrying an old short-barreled pump shotgun alongside his leg.
Rice smiled back when he saw the gun. “Hope not,” he said. “You sound like Dempsey Boger. He hates seeing all that timber go to waste up there.”
Rice watched to see if suggesting that Stiller had anything in common with Boger would stir him up, but he just stood at the bottom of the steps with his shotgun, the portrait of redneck swagger.
“You need to leave now, honeybun.”
Instead, Rice lifted a case of Mrs. Fea
rnow’s Brunswick stew and carried it up the steps, realizing he was hungry, had hardly eaten all day. A bare bulb in the loft showed a clean-swept inventory room that was larger than he’d expected, boxes and bags and crates stacked on the floor and arranged on shelves against the far wall.
Bilton came up behind, glaring now, leaning forward, up on his toes, the shotgun canted at an angle so it would cut Rice’s legs off if he fired. Rice saw another similarity with his big son DeWayne, an innate violent reflex: when in doubt, pick a fight.
“The hell are you doing?”
“I’m helping.” He set the case down. “How come your boys aren’t here?”
“’Cause they’re allergic to work.”
“They seem to be having a hurricane party up at their place. Is that your beer they’re serving?”
Stiller frowned but didn’t answer. Rice brushed past him and headed back down the steps, loaded up again with big cans of fruit cocktail, the contemplation of which quelled his appetite. When he turned around, Stiller was lifting a case of various soups in serving-size cans with pop-top lids. The shotgun leaned against the wall at the base of the steps.
“I hear Alan Mirra went a-hunting up on Turk Mountain and jest disappeared off the face of the earth. They cain’t even find his motorbike.”
“I heard the same thing.” Apparently DeWayne hadn’t shared with his dad the news of Mirra’s resurrection. Just as Walker had guessed, Mirra had holed up with some club members in Pennsylvania.
“You got you a secret cave where you put the bodies? Anybody gets close to your drug patch or what-all you got going on up there gets bushwhacked? You got Alan Mirra laid out in the mud next to my hounds?”
Rice decided Stiller was only half-serious. “You called Sheriff Walker and accused me of doing something to your dogs. I think it’s pretty funny that you called about the dogs but didn’t say anything about me knocking down your son.”
That seemed to surprise him. “Hell. That boy needs a knocking down ever’ now and then. An ol’ Michum done give you some knocking down right back.”
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