Drive Like Hell: A Novel

by Dallas Hudgens

  After Brute finished his business, I padded down to the 7-Eleven to buy a box of Krispy Kremes. It had become a Saturday-morning ritual for me and Rachel’s mom. We were always up before Rachel, so Mrs. Coyle would make the coffee, and then we’d sit at the little table off the kitchen, eating doughnuts, drinking beans, and reading the newspaper.

  “Look at this,” Mrs. Coyle said. She was sitting there in a baggy Illinois sweatshirt, eyeing the front page of the Green Lake Gazette with weary amusement.

  I glanced up from the Sports section. “What is it?”

  “It’s the lead story.” She sipped her coffee and set the mug back down on the table. “They misspell the word trafficking twice, and in two different ways.”

  “You mean, like drug trafficking?” I craned my neck to get a peek at the article. Sure enough, Chuck was back on the front page. The headline read: DOPE PILOT GRANTED BAIL—TRIAL PUSHED BACK.

  The doughnut that I’d just eaten ceased its downward journey and lay heavy against my windpipe. Chuck had struck a deal.

  “Are you okay?” Rachel’s mother looked over the top of the paper.

  I tried to swerve my thoughts back between the lines of our budding conversation. “Yeah, I was just thinking that kind of stuff must drive you crazy, seeing how you’re an English professor.”

  “No, I just thought it was funny.”

  Her gaze remained fixed on me. I couldn’t help wondering if she held me in the same bemused light as a misspelled word. We both sat there staring at each other until it seemed inevitable that one of us would speak.

  “I know about your and Rachel’s plan,” she said.

  She didn’t sound mad or anything, just matter-of-fact about the whole affair. I didn’t see any reason to play dumb, so I nodded. I felt I owed her that much.

  “She’s done this before, you know.”

  “Done what?” I asked.

  “Made plans to run away,” she said. “With a boy.”

  The doughnut tightened its grip on my windpipe. “When?”

  “About a year and a half ago,” she said, “right after we moved to Ohio.”

  She folded the paper and laid it on the table between us. Chuck stared up at me, appearing as stunned as I felt. I could imagine how fast his heart must have been pounding when that mug shot was snapped.

  “There was this boy,” she said. “His name was Ward. Rachel met him at the university.”

  “You mean he was a college student?”

  “No, he and Rachel were taking advanced placement classes together.”

  “Is this about Rachel being smarter than me?” I asked.

  She smiled and stared down at the mahogany tabletop. She traced one of the knots in the wood with the tip of her finger.

  “Trust me,” she said. “You’re a lot smarter than Ward.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. “What kind of plans did they have?”

  She bit her lip and looked back up at me. “They took Ward’s car and drove to Champaign. Rachel was planning to get a job, and Ward was going to start a band. He already had the name picked out and everything: Ass Disaster, or something like that.”

  “Ass Disaster?”

  I had to admit, it was a pretty good band name.

  “But then Rachel turned up pregnant,” Mrs. Coyle said. “So Ward disappeared. He was so scared he drove all the way to North Dakota. I was the one who went down to Champaign and picked up Rachel. I took her in for the abortion and looked after her.”

  My head crackled and buzzed as if I’d just run into another tree. I had no idea what to say or do.

  “You have to understand,” Mrs. Coyle went on, “that Pete’s death was hard on me, too.”

  “So his name was Pete?” I realized that I’d never heard either of them speak the man’s name.

  Mrs. Coyle nodded, then she gave me this look that begged for reassurance. “I hope you understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Understand that I don’t want to lose her.”

  The doughnut had finally begun to sink. My hopes were racing along ahead of it, clearing a path. “So, I guess you’re expecting me to talk her out of it.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped to reconsider the words.

  “I can’t stop her,” she said. “Not after I ran off and left her and Pete at the worst possible time.”

  I lifted the Sports page and gazed dumbly at it for a few seconds, finally dropping it on top of Chuck’s photo. I trumped him with a picture of a high school place kicker. The kid was booting one through the uprights from forty yards out. The caption read: LIGHTS OUT FOR GREEN LAKE.

  “Maybe you and Rachel need to talk about this stuff,” I said. “I mean, instead of me and you.”

  Mrs. Coyle shook her head. “This man who runs the AA meetings I attend, he was talking about how hard it is to win back a person’s trust. It takes a long time, years maybe, especially when you’ve disappointed someone again and again.”

  Wade Briggs. I could see him sitting beside Danny in the truck, trying to start a conversation with his angry, crippled son. It must have felt like playing Ping-Pong with a person who keeps catching the balls and slipping them into his pocket.

  “I’ve only had six months,” Mrs. Coyle said. “I haven’t even begun to make up for things. But now I’ve got a job offer at Vanderbilt. It’s more money, we could rent a house. I just need more time, because she’s all I have. I can’t lose her.”

  My head went back to buzzing again. It felt like birds were pecking at my skull. I had no idea what I was going to do about any of this. All I knew was that I had to get out of that apartment. It felt as small as it was, all of the sudden. I needed to take a drive.

  I stood up and looked back across the table at Mrs. Coyle. I opened my mouth, but nothing would come out. It was like I’d forgotten how to speak, forgotten how to spell my own name.

  29

  I wasn’t really expecting the siren and the blue lights, but I suppose my heart lacked the motivation to jump up and down about much of anything after my little talk with Rachel’s mother. And so I pulled over into the weeds and waited for the routine to begin. Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in Muskgrave’s office.

  “Well, well. If it ain’t Mario Andretti, himself.”

  Muskgrave burst into the room, carrying a cup of coffee and acting all sunny, like a man who didn’t have a care in the world. It was quite a contrast to his red-assed mood back in the spring, and I can’t say that I didn’t envy him for it.

  He parked himself behind his desk, right across from where I was sitting. His deputy had gone to the trouble of cuffing my hands in front of me.

  Muskgrave leaned forward and gazed into my lap. He was grinning like a jackass, his blond hair blown back from his face, feathered and firmed with hair spray.

  “Kind of hard to drive a car that way, ain’t it?”

  I flipped him off, ever so casually. He sat back and chuckled, as though we’d just shared a joke.

  “Ah, I’m just kidding with you,” he said. “Here, let me take those off.”

  He walked over from behind the desk and proceeded to unlock the cuffs. I’d already had plenty of time to look around the office, to view the infamous bulletin board that hung on the wall behind his desk. There must have been thirty photos tacked to the corkboard, mostly mug shots. Nick and I were situated about halfway down, near the middle of things. I was still wearing my long hair in the picture.

  The rest of the office was pretty much what I would have expected. The requisite photos of the wife and kids atop the desk, a big American flag in the corner, and a bevy of framed awards and citations. There was also a wall devoted to photos of Muskgrave coupled with more successful people: folks like Senator McHugh, Vince Dooley, Jimmy Carter, and Anita Bryant.

  “So, I hear you’re working for the T-Bone King.” Muskgrave tossed the handcuff keys onto his desk and settled back into his big leather chair.

  I didn’t see any need t
o confirm the obvious. So I just sat there.

  Muskgrave shrugged. “What? Are you taking the Fifth or something?”

  “I’m not saying anything until you tell me why I got hauled in here.”

  Muskgrave scratched his chin in a gesture of deep thought. “Hmm. Let’s see, now. If my memory serves me correctly, Judge Knox and her flying monkeys suspended your driver’s license for six months.”

  I could never understand why people only seemed to remember your worst lines.

  “You know damn well I’ve been driving on a suspended license. Hell, your boys have been following me around for three weeks. I don’t think that’s got anything to do with this.”

  Muskgrave gave me this disappointed look, like I’d gone and spoiled all the fun. Then he reached into a cardboard box sitting atop his desk and pulled out a nearly empty bag of pot. I recognized it as my own stash.

  “Is that enough reason to haul you in?” he asked.

  “There’s barely enough there to roll a joint.”

  Muskgrave reached into the box again and produced a wad of cash and my pager. He lifted his brow as if he’d just produced a royal flush. “This right here,” he said, “is a recipe for possession with intent to distribute.”

  He sat there expectantly, with a grin plastered to his face, all of the evidence piled in front of him. But I still didn’t say a word. Even in the face of all this, I couldn’t help thinking about Rachel and her mother, lying together on the sofa that day, listening to Pete Coyle’s records.

  Finally, Muskgrave’s smile melted away. He actually fixed me with a concerned expression.

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway? I don’t recall you being the gloomy type.”

  “It’s nothing you’d want to know about, seeing how it doesn’t have any bearing on your reelection.”

  Muskgrave reached back and closed the office door. He sighed, leaned forward, and set his arms on top of the desk. When he started talking, it was in a quiet voice.

  “I’ve got a proposal I’d like to float.”

  I didn’t offer up any sort of reaction. I just sat there and waited for him to lay it all out. Needless to say, my expectations were pretty low.

  “Listen,” he said, “I take a lot of shit from people about not being a real cop, about being a politician. They just think I’m some pretty boy who wants to go to the state capitol. But let me tell you something, I paid my fucking dues. I was a police officer for seven years before I ran for sheriff. I did a lot of investigating in that time. I honed my skills.”

  “So what are you getting at?”

  “What I’m getting at is this: I’m pretty sure that I know what happened that night when we brought in the pilot. I know what happened to one of those bags of cocaine.”

  My heart suddenly caught its second wind. It jumped right up and started flapping away inside me.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Bullshit, you don’t. We had helicopters up there. They saw Mr. Sosebee circling over the Grimes horse farm. The GBI boys said he dropped something out of the plane. But when they got there, it was gone.”

  Muskgrave leaned back and fixed me with a hard stare. “Now I had been thinking all along that Nick was probably involved in bringing this stuff into the county. Naturally, he would have been the one out there to pick it up. But to my surprise, I found out that he’d been sitting right here in the station during all the excitement.”

  Here, Muskgrave leaned forward again. The slightest of smiles formed at the corners of his mouth. “Now, Nick made one phone call while he was here. And come to find out that phone call was to you. Of course, you didn’t come to bail him out. No, sir. You sent that bondsman over here to take care of things. Which leads me to believe that you were the one who covered Nick’s ass on the pickup.”

  He was full of himself, that’s for sure, just sitting there smiling away. He might as well have been posing for another picture with Anita Bryant.

  I didn’t want to give anything away with my reaction, so I tried to imagine Nick’s poker face, how he could smoke a cigarette and appear totally at ease even in the face of serious criminal allegations.

  “So, prove it,” I told him.

  I fed Muskgrave a smile of my own. It caused him to blink hard.

  “I can’t,” he said. “In fact, it looks like I’m pretty much shit out of luck. I mean, if Sosebee didn’t know that you were making the pickup, and if you got rid of the goods, there’s not much I can do about it, really.”

  “Then why the hell have I been sitting here for the last thirty minutes?”

  “That’s a good question,” he said. “And here’s the answer. First off, I can still send your ass away for what’s lying here on my desk, not to mention your little driving habit. And number two, your big brother’s going away for a while no matter what. He already missed his arraignment on the possession charge. And when Sosebee starts crowing, Nick’s gonna have even bigger problems.”

  “Then I guess it looks like you got what you wanted: the Fulmers in leg irons.”

  Muskgrave let his shoulders sag. “Contrary to what you might believe, I’m not an asshole. And here’s where it all comes back around to us helping each other out. Now the way I see it, Nick’s going to jail, no matter what. There’s not much I can do about that, even if I wanted to. But you, I can help. We can forget all about what happened today. I might even be willing to have a word with Judge Knox, maybe get your license reinstated a couple weeks early and have this stuff wiped off your permanent record.”

  “And what’s the favor?”

  He paused and stared at the wall, appearing to reflect on his many awards. “I want you to tell me where Nick is hiding.”

  “You’re fucking crazy,” I told him. “I’m not gonna be a snitch. Especially against my own brother.”

  Muskgrave sighed. “I understand how you must feel. But you need to take some time and think through all of this in a rational way.”

  “There’s nothing rational about it,” I told him. “If you’re so sure that Nick’s going to jail, then why do you need my help?”

  “Because,” he said, “I wanna break this thing open before the Feds do it.”

  And then it dawned on me. “Has this got anything to do with Morley Safer and 60 Minutes?”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Maybe I’ve done some investigating, myself. Speaking of which, aren’t you the one who begged the FBI to get involved in the first place?”

  “That was a mistake,” he said. “Sons of bitches froze me out. I did all the shit work in the beginning, and then they come in here with their little candy-ass windbreakers and reap the fucking rewards.”

  “So, why Nick?” I asked. “Why do you think he’s some sort of key to whipping the Feds’ ass?”

  “Because he’s the only one smart enough to be working with the top people. I’ve talked to this guy Sosebee, and he’s a fucking dumb-ass. Certified, grade-A. I don’t even know how he got a pilot’s license. I sure as hell wouldn’t fly with him.”

  I had to admit that Muskgrave’s investigative skills were impressive. Of course, his understanding of me lagged far behind.

  “I’m not gonna be a snitch,” I told him. “I wouldn’t even do it if he wasn’t my brother.”

  He nodded as if he understood. But then he clucked his tongue and smiled in a satisfied way.

  “So, tell me about your girlfriend, Miss Rachel Coyle.”

  I couldn’t see where he was headed with all of this. “What are you, the fucking school counselor all of the sudden?”

  Muskgrave chuckled a little. Then he opened the desk drawer, pulled out a file, and opened it up. “I can see what y’all have in common,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, she’s got a rap sheet almost as long as yours.”

  I sat up straight. This had been a day of far too many revelations on the Rachel front.

  “What the he
ll did she do?”

  Muskgrave slipped a pair of reading glasses onto his nose. “Well, it’s all from out of state,” he said. “Illinois and Ohio, mainly. Mostly shoplifting stuff. She must have some sticky little fingers. Let’s see, here. She took some record albums, makeup, earrings, a hair dryer. Oh, yeah. And here’s my favorite. A Girl Scout uniform from Sears.”

  He closed the file and laughed. By that time I’d abandoned any attempt to appear unfazed by the day’s proceedings.

  “Oh, and you might want to take a look at these,” he said.

  He slid a stack of black-and-white photos across the desk. They documented a recent weed purchase that Rachel and I had made from Stan in the back of the Holiday Inn parking lot. I gazed up at the bulletin board, scouting the field for Stan. Sure enough, I’d overlooked him the first time around. He was stuck way down in the lower left-hand corner, a bit player until now.

  Muskgrave brought my attention back around to the matter at hand. “Seeing how she’s still on probation with the juvie courts in Illinois and Ohio, I think that a prosecutor might try to tie her in with you on this trafficking thing.”

  I felt a little wobbly, my head buzzing again.

  “I’d say that you have some things to think about,” Muskgrave said. “It’s a lot to consider, so I’m gonna give you a week to get your head around it. And just in case you’re thinking of running off somewhere, don’t forget that I’ve got friends with windbreakers.”

  He pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the door, stopping to consider me one last time. “I’m here if you want to talk about things. My door’s always open.”

  30

  “Little faster,” I told Rachel. “Step, slide.”

  Somehow, I’d coaxed her onto the floor for a two-step lesson. We’d come to the fish camp for the Saturday-night dancing, the special occasion being Claudia’s forty-third birthday. The Green Lake Gang was playing “Why Don’t You Love Me?” on the stage above us, Wade singing Hank’s goofy lyrics as the herd shuffled in circles down front.