County Line

by Bill Cameron

  He’s shed layers down to a denim shirt over a white tee, jeans and Doc Martens. His brown hair hangs in shaggy clumps, as if he went after his own scalp with a set of Bella’s shears. I can’t see a trace of his mother in his lean, boyish face, except perhaps in the blue of his eyes.

  Taya stands nearby, holding her own shotgun, watching Ringo—she’s only halfway here. The kid’s lips pull back, revealing straight white teeth.

  “You’re Biddy Denlinger.”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am.”

  “The police know I’m here.” The words taste foolish in my mouth.

  “We saw the deputy. I didn’t get the idea he left with any reason to come back.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t check the barn.”

  He rams the gun stock into the meat above my collarbone. As I gasp, he pulls the cell phone from my pocket. “You’re lucky you’re not with her.”

  Beside him, Taya flinches. He turns to her. “Take him up. I’ll be right there.” He gestures with the shotgun, then tucks the stock under his arm. It’s a double-barrel side-by-side with external hammers. Old enough I wouldn’t be surprised if it first saw use on a stagecoach a century earlier.

  When I meet Taya’s gaze, she turns away. “Come on.” Her weapon is newer, a weighty single-barreled twenty-gauge. It may lack the punch of the twelve-gauge monster in Biddy’s hands, but at this range, it’s enough. She points toward the far end of the garage. I get to my feet and hobble across the driveway. Taya’s footsteps behind me sound like the popping of small caliber arms fire.

  Beyond the garage, the yard opens into a broad fan-shape with trees to either side and the bluff ahead. Thirty paces away at the edge of another fenced pasture, there’s a weathered grey shack flanked by a pair of Norway maples. “Over there.” The nose of Pete’s baby pickup is visible from behind the shack. The air cools noticeably when we move into the shadow of the trees. I can smell vomit. The scent moves with me onto the low, plank porch of the shack.

  “Could I have some water?”

  Taya shakes her head and gestures with the gun barrel. The door barred by a two-by-four. As I lift it free of the brackets, I contemplate its concussive effect on Taya’s forearm just above the wrist. Hard to fire a shotgun with a snapped radius and ulna. But when I turn, Biddy is approaching from around the garage. I prop the board against the wall and pull the door open.

  The interior is dim and dusty. One room, with a pot belly stove and a plywood counter in the back. There’s a deep basin sink in one end of the counter. The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling is off, as is the old lamp on the table under the lone window.

  Pete lies on a cot against the side wall. He’s not gagged, which surprises me until I realize he’s unconscious. I move closer. His mouth is bruised, and threads of dried blood run from his split lip and nose. There’s a red welt above his left eye. The orbit is swollen and bleeding. His hands and feet are bound with clothesline. Only the ragged sound of his breathing offers any reassurance.

  “I guess you get the chair.” Taya tilts her head. There’s a coil of clothesline on the table.

  “You going to tie me up by yourself?”

  “Just sit down.” She points the gun at me and I sit. Her voice is weak, almost too soft to hear. The shotgun speaks loud enough.

  “Taya, you can stop this before it gets any worse. Nobody else has to get hurt.”

  She shakes her head. “Don’t talk to me.”

  “Are you going to let us to rot out here like Bella in the stable?”

  “He wouldn’t let me move her.”

  “Not easy to face the body of a woman you’ve murdered.”

  “Nobody murdered anyone.” Her eyes flare. “She just died out there. He said leave her, so I left her.”

  “You do everything he says?”

  “You’re not allowed to talk to me.”

  “Even if he didn’t kill Bella, he killed her son in San Francisco. And he tried to kill me and my friend here.” I have no way of knowing who is responsible for Bella Denlinger, if anyone, but I hope she’ll take the lifeline I’ve offered and pin the death on her boyfriend.

  But at that moment, he comes through the door. “I told you not to talk to them.”

  Taya fades back against the wall. “I didn’t say anything. He was the one talking. All I did was tell him to stop.”

  He’s clearly not convinced, but he turns his attention to me. “I don’t know what the hell your story is, but I’m getting sick of you showing up all over the place. So how about you shut up before I shut you up for good.”

  “You might find it’s a lot harder to shoot a man than to run one down in the street.” The words are bolder than the man behind them. Biddy responds by dropping the shotgun and slamming his fist into my jaw.

  My head snaps back and he hits me again, stomach and throat. The floor is worn smooth, a sudden, unsettling observation I make when my cheek slams against a grey plank. I scrabble for the shotgun, but Biddy picks me up by my shirt and throws me down again. I see the spatter of blood on my pants, on wood, on his furious knuckles. I have no power to stop the mewling rising from my throat.

  “Please, stop.” I think it’s Taya’s voice.

  “Maybe he’ll take me seriously now.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “Shut up.” But something changes; he stops hitting me. I hear footsteps. The floor vibrates against my face. When the door slams, the whole shack trembles.

  It’s a long time before I can do more than lie on the floor and try to breathe. A pocket of fear presses up into my lungs. Flies tick against the window and the shack creaks in the heat. My nose is clogged with snot and blood. I’m pretty sure I’ve bitten my tongue. My face has lost sensation, but the rest of my body feels like an open sore. I try to catch my breath, and manage to lift my right arm and wipe away some of the blood with my sleeve.

  “They don’t have her.” Pete’s voice is thick and muffled, as though his mouth is stuffed with cotton. I wonder when he came to. Or when I did.

  I roll onto my side, then to my knees. “Are you sure?” He’s barely able to open his eyes.

  “They asked me about her.” He takes a pained breath. “Well, he did. That girl just stood there.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Money. He thinks there’s some big stash somewhere.”

  I stumble to the basin. The pipe groans when I turn the spigot, but after a moment a thin stream of rusty water flows. I let it run until it’s relatively clear, then wash the blood off my hands and face. There are no towels or rags, so I strip off my outer shirt and soak it with water. Pete winces and moans as I clean the blood from his face. Then I work at the clothesline. The knot is a problem at first, but with a little patience, I’m able to work it free. His arms fall onto the cot. I hear his tongue working inside his mouth. “Bastard loosened one of my teeth.”

  My eyes burn. I think of Nash’s old police file. Mae Whittaker’s bank account drained, Dale Whittaker gone, two old toolboxes and a revolver buried in the woods on Preble County Line Road. Is that what this is all about? Has Biddy Denlinger appeared, nearly twenty years later, to claim a long lost inheritance? Or did he wake up one day and decide it was time to take something back from the mother who gave him away?

  I start on the cord binding Pete’s feet. “Ruby Jane is on the island.” Pete doesn’t seem surprised. “When did she get here?”

  “I don’t know. I found her car, abandoned. The police wouldn’t do anything. Biddy and Taya caught me sneaking around the barn.”

  He breathes noisily. “He yanked me out of my car. I was watching the house from the road, but never saw him coming.”

  “A couple of old pros.”

  We fall into an uneasy silence. I free Pete’s legs, but he doesn’t move from the cot. There’s not much point. I can see Biddy and Taya through the window. They argue for a while, then Biddy heads off. Taya looks back toward the shack, doesn’t appear to realize I’m watching her. I try
the door, but they’ve barred it. The window is four panes in a hinged frame, nailed shut. If I broke out the glass, Taya would hear me. She doesn’t look too comfortable with the shotgun, but I’m not ready to take the chance she won’t pull the trigger.

  I move the chair next to the cot and sit down. I put my hand on Pete’s arm and look through the window. The house is framed against the deepening blue sky. The air grows hotter and stuffier even as the light fades. Pete’s breathing sounds like a two-stroke engine. I catch myself imagining life in this shack, sleeping on the cot, cooking on the pot belly stove. One plate and one cup. A spartan existence, but in a different life perhaps not so bad. Ridiculous dreaming. But I’ve got nothing else, unless I want to spend the crawl toward nightfall trying to make sense of a sequence of events about which I know almost nothing. It’s a swirling mess in my mind. Ruby Jane takes off without explanation. A man—her father—dies in her bathtub. Another man, her brother, dies outside a San Francisco sports bar. Pete and I almost join them both. We’ve criss-crossed the country, asking questions and getting answers which only lead to more questions. For all I’ve learned—about Ruby Jane as a high school girl, about missing money and jewelry, about a child I never suspected—I’m missing the crucial piece.

  “Pete, There’s something you need to hear.”

  “Mmmm.” I can’t tell if he’s awake, or lucid.

  “Biddy Denlinger is Ruby Jane’s son, born when she was in high school. She gave him up for adoption.”

  My breath catches in my throat. When Pete speaks at last, his voice remains muddy and indistinct, but I can hear the resignation. “I guess that figures.”

  She never told him either.

  I close my eyes and a moment later the hairs in my nose twitch against the sharp scent of urine. Pete snuffles and as the sound increases, I realize he’s crying. Shame floods through me. “Pete, I’m sorry.” He doesn’t respond. “I’m so sorry.”

  “He should have finished me.”

  “Don’t say that, Pete.” I lower myself down beside him. “Don’t say that.” I hold him until he stops trembling.

  After a while, I open my eyes. Full dark now. I put my hand on Pete’s chest and feel the thud of his heartbeat, the rise and fall of his breath. From outside, I hear voices. Biddy and Taya are arguing again, close enough now I can make out snatches of words.

  “… don’t like this …”

  “As soon as we get the money, we’re …”

  I stand, cringe when a floor board creaks beneath my feet. Their silhouettes move outside the window. The sky is a carpet of stars, Bella’s house a looming shadow beyond the garage.

  “… about them?”

  “Who cares about them?”

  “We can’t—”

  A light comes on in the house and they fall silent. After a moment, I hear whispering, then the bar comes off the door. Taya steps through, the gun aimed at my chest.

  “I need you to sit down on that chair.”

  I move back and sit. “What’s going on, Taya?”

  In answer, she edges along the wall until she reaches the table. Eyes still on me, she feels for the lamp. Ten years and a thorough beating earlier, I might have taken my chances and gone for the gun. As it is, all I can do is sit. Pete groans. She flips the lamp on, a pale light which does more to cast shadow than illuminate the shack’s interior. “Skin, what’s happening?” When I look away from her, Taya all but disappears. I take Pete’s hand. He pulls on me, and I help him into a sitting position.

  “Someone’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone in the house.”

  “Ruby Jane?”

  Taya gains substance in response to the name, but says nothing. We wait. Pete breathes heavily, as though the act of sitting upright takes all his energy. I look at Taya.

  “He needs a hospital.”

  “Be quiet.”

  “Biddy hurt him bad. He needs help.”

  “There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Call the police. You don’t have to identify yourself. Tell them he’s holding hostages. I’ll say you helped us.”

  “You don’t know him.” She blinks, and for a moment I think something has changed, that she might help us. The translucent skin of her face stretches into a grimace, and a rim of tears forms in her eyes. But then a clatter of footsteps sounds at the door, and Ruby Jane stumbles into the shack. She catches herself on the end of the cot. There’s a fresh cut on her cheek.

  Biddy arrives two steps behind her, his face flush with excitement. “Look who I found going through Bella’s dresser.” He grins at Taya. “Pack up, baby. We’re going for a ride.”

  I move to rise, but he points the shotgun at me and I freeze.

  “What’s happening? Ruby Jane—”

  She seems no more surprised to see us than I am to see her. She’s wearing a nylon pullover, olive hiking pants, worn athletic shoes. Her face is tan, her auburn hair pulled back, like she’s spent a long day outdoors. Her brow furrows at sight of my face, a fright mask the best of times, but an extra special treat after Biddy’s ministrations. When she turns to Pete, her lips fall open with shock. She raises a hand to her chin.

  “You weren’t supposed to be here, Skin. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me, darling.”

  “But I do.” She pulls herself up straight and takes a breath. When she looks at me again, I can’t understand the lack of fear in her gaze. “I’m taking him to where my treasure is buried.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Does it matter?” Her voice shakes. “Just another mess to clean up.”

  - 51 -

  Buried Treasure

  In April 1989, right about the time Ruby Jane was breaking Clarice Moody’s nose, a fellow I went through the academy with was found shot to death in his patrol car outside a strip club on Powell Boulevard. Officer Lee Ragland had made no report of trouble, hadn’t requested cover. After roll call, I’d jawed with him over coffee before we headed out to patrol our districts. Four hours later, he was dead.

  I was not yet a detective and over a decade away from Homicide. But I worked the case. When a cop dies on the job, no one rests until we find the killer. No discussion, no argument.

  It’s common practice to check tags on vehicles at strip clubs—something about jacking a car makes a lot of dipshits want to watch some titties jiggle. Our best theory was the shooter slipped up on Lee while he was writing down license plate numbers, a thief who didn’t want to get caught or a gang banger bagging himself a trophy. But the evidence was thin. Small caliber slug from an untraceable gun. We heard no chatter, received no credible tips, turned up zero witnesses.

  Months later, I ran into Lee’s son at Coffee People, the one between MLK and Grand near the I-84 overpass. It’s a Starbuck’s now.

  The kid—Lee Jr.—was drinking one of those twenty-four-ounce barrels of sugar, milk fat, and caffeine. He was a gangly kid, tall for his age, but still possessing the soft edges of childhood. I asked him how he was doing, and he shrugged, his eyes fixed on the traffic on Grand. His mind was somewhere else.

  I couldn’t fault him. His dad was dead, we had nothing to offer him. I got watery-eyed and felt myself contract under the weight of my guilt and failure. I offered stuttering explanations, made hollow excuses. Following every lead, hammering every informant. Something will break, I promise. I think I even apologized, as if I was somehow personally responsible for our institutional failure to find his father’s killer.

  “We won’t give up, buddy.”

  He drank from his giant cup. I remember thinking he seemed so lost. Just a kid, thirteen years old. Heartbreaking.

  “I shot him.”

  Around me, the cafe grew quiet. Lee Jr. looked up at me, and his eyes were like a well you look into expecting to see the reflection of the sunlight on the surface of the water below. But all you see is a void.

  “I still have the gun. It was my birthday present. Do you wa
nt it?”

  We later learned Lee had taken away his goddamn Nintendo. Bad grades.

  Biddy shares with Lee Jr. that same emptiness. He has a story—we all do—a life history which might explain how he arrived at this moment with a shotgun in his hands and a mounting body count in his wake. Maybe it was abuse. If Chief Nash can track down his adoptive parents, we might discover a long, sad tale of neglect and beatings, affection withheld. I don’t want to hear it. I want to ram that shotgun through Biddy’s teeth and blow his spine out his back.

  He walks two paces behind Pete, who is moving like a drunk. Taya is behind me, Ruby Jane between us both. The night has grown cold, and I can see our breath billow in the light shining from the house into the yard. Biddy leads us to the garage, has me open the door in front of the pickup.

  There’s some confusion about how to proceed. Two guns and three hostages don’t add up to math Biddy likes. He and Taya discuss their options while the three of us cluster together at the bed of the truck.

  I look at Ruby Jane, my eyes a question. She frowns and shakes her head. Pete’s head sags, and his breathing sounds like a clogged drain. I pull him over to me. Ruby Jane’s manner, remote and strangely calm, leaves me more unsettled than Biddy’s shotgun. I’d like to think she has a plan. I’m all out of ideas myself.

  In the end, Biddy has us climb into the truck bed and sit with our backs to the cab. He looks at Ruby Jane.

  “Where to?”

  “Do you know where Woodlawn Cemetery is?”

  The idea of going to a cemetery fills him with glee. “Sick!” He tosses Taya a nod. “You drive. I’ll ride in the back with the cargo.”

  “I’m not driving this piece of crap.”

  “Jesus. Fine. Whatever.”

  Ruby Jane points to the rack of tools hanging at the back of the garage. “You’ll need a shovel.”

  That makes him laugh. Taya climbs aboard and rests her back against the tailgate. Through the scratched window, I see Biddy carry the shovel to the cab. As we pull out, Ringo comes to the fence to watch us pass. Biddy has to drive around a bike in the driveway and I realize why Ruby Jane left her car. She rented the bike, probably at the landing, so she could arrive in silence. I don’t know if she meant to slip up on Bella unawares, or anticipated Biddy and the shotgun.