Smiley

by Ezell, Michael

  “I’m just gonna shoot straight, Bradley. I saw a bruise on Angela’s back last time she was here. Long, like a belt makes. I’m here to tell you, young man, you shouldn’t be whoopin’ on a little girl.”

  Faced with someone who didn’t buy his bullshit, Bradley changed in an instant, the placating smile turning into a bully’s sneer. He glanced back at the truck to make sure Angela still faced forward, then stepped up close to Smiley.

  “Is that right, old man? How we discipline that kid ain’t none of your business. She spilled juice in a seven hunnerd dollar laptop. Who’s gonna pay for that? Her idiot mother, working at the diner?”

  The girl under the barn would have recognized the smile. She would have told Bradley he never-ever-ever wanted to see that smile.

  “You can give everyone else your shit-eatin’ grin, Smiley, but I got your number. You’re hoping that hot young thing will see how good you treat her daughter, how you help her out with money, and just maybe she’ll move out here and take care of your old ass.”

  Bradley completely missed the change in Smiley. But then, Smiley had been hiding his real face much longer than this kid had.

  “I said that wrong, I guess. What I meant to say was don’t whoop on that young girl no more,” Smiley said.

  “Or what?” Bradley grabbed Smiley’s collar. He stopped cold when the Smith and Wesson’s barrel poked him just above the belt buckle.

  “We ought to have more manners, but for some reason, men can’t talk to each other these days without pushin’ and shovin’. Let’s not do that,” Smiley said.

  “No, sir. You’re right,” Bradley said. He let go.

  “A kid that young doesn’t deserve to be beat on for making mistakes. But grownups, well they most likely deserve what they get for theirs. Take her home, Bradley. And treat ‘em both right, you hear me?”

  If a breeze came up when Death called on you and his hood blew back, surely he’d have pale blue eyes just like Smiley’s.

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, I just—“

  “Get on your way.”

  And he did.

  7

  The last two pills rattled in the bottle. Garrett washed them down with tap water. At least now that everyone knew, he wouldn’t have to drive so far to get his prescription refilled.

  He’d known cops who worked on antidepressants for years. No one really asked. Sort of the police department’s own version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

  He knew damn well it didn’t affect his decision-making process, but Whit Abercrombie had been lobbying for Garrett’s job from day one. This gave Samuel Redding a good excuse to push Garrett out. In these mountains, sometimes people saw certain laws as flexible. Samuel had told the truth. Plenty of families in Artemis had made their way through a winter by poaching a deer now and then. For those people, Robert Lee Withers and Tom Poston’s deaths were unnecessary. And of course, Garrett’s fault.

  Pretty much everyone in town had loved Chief Lamar Evans, including bartenders and truck stop girls. After the accident, the entire town had been numb with grief. Garrett coming in with all his experience, willing to leave the big West Coast department and fill his Dad’s shoes, felt like the perfect choice. A choice based more on heart than anything else.

  The smell from the toaster hit Garrett and jogged something hidden in a back corner of his mind and suddenly he stood over a young kid in the parking lot of a McDonald’s. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air and the kid coughed a bubble of dark blood. Maybe sixteen, skinny, with gang tattoos. Little bastard took a shot at Garrett and his partner, so they put him down.

  Garrett went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face, pretending it helped get rid of the memory. That had been the most justifiable shooting in the world. So why did it still pop up out of the blue like a fucking blood-soaked jack in the box?

  He left the toast cooling in the toaster, not hungry anymore. He walked into the living room and started putting all the odds and ends back in The Box.

  Last night had been filled with bad decisions. One of them was switching from beer to the distilled stuff on top of the fridge. Rarely a good idea. He wasn’t really sure what time he dragged The Box out of the closet, but he could see the drunken progression of his self-flagellation.

  First the pictures of him and Michelle with a group of friends at a Halloween party. Frankenstein’s monster and Ripley from Aliens. Their first date.

  Then came random stupid things. Her old ID card, a goofy photo booth picture of them at her sister’s wedding, wrist bands from Disneyland. The damn ring box. They buried her wearing the ring, so why didn’t he throw the box away?

  He never went to see her at the morgue. Didn’t go to the viewing, either, and never walked up to the casket at the service. They’d fixed her face, of course, those masters of artifice at the funeral home. But it still wasn’t her.

  He’d rather not go through life remembering her the way his mother looked in her casket. Too much makeup, face not looking quite right, stiff hands across her middle.

  Nope.

  Two last pictures, both taken at work. Her in uniform, him in plain clothes with a ridiculous handlebar mustache.

  In the first picture her eyes were dry, the next they shined with tears because he’d just popped the question. Right after she and a squad of uniforms had assisted his robbery team with a warrant service. Okay, not the most romantic setting at first glance, but how many girls could tell their friends their fiancée proposed at the scene of a high risk warrant service?

  He gathered up his medals from LAPD, which were scattered around the trashcan in the kitchen. He must have gotten to the point of no return and tried to throw them into the trashcan from the living room. Usually, he could put at least three of them into the can. Last night, he’d missed them all. He stuffed The Box back in the closet, not bothering to have the mental conversation about throwing it out someday.

  His appetite came back from the grave and he decided to celebrate with proper biscuits and gravy at May’s Diner instead of toast in his lonely kitchen. Throw in some hash browns with a liberal dose of Louisiana Hotsauce and you had the best hangover cure this side of menudo.

  The old farts were parked on the bench outside Davis Hardware as usual. Garrett had hoped the cold would drive them inside, but the day had dawned bright and clear, prompting the old farts to come out and sun themselves like lizards. He steeled himself as he parked in front of May’s. He tried heading straight inside.

  Melvin Davis and Earl Hunsacker glared at him in silence, but Poor Boy Willis wasn’t about to leave it alone. “Say there, Quickdraw, I heard you saved Bambi’s mother from that desperado Robert Lee Withers.”

  Any other day, Garrett would have ignored it. Or maybe he would have found a joke to sling back. Today wasn’t the day for it.

  Garrett stopped cold and fixed them with a gaze none of them had seen from him before. He’d presided over the death of more than one human being in his time, and that can give you a chilling way of looking at the living.

  “Any time you old farts wanna peel your asses off that bench, strap on a gun and badge, and give it a shot yourselves, you’re welcome to. Until then, you can keep your bullshit opinions about how I do the job to yourselves.”

  He strode into the diner before they could recover. Later, he’d feel like shit for jumping the old goats, but right now the fire in his gut made him warm. Eunice Smith, great granddaughter of May herself, worked behind the counter.

  “Misty take the day off?” Garrett said.

  Eunice looked a little sad, and maybe a little embarrassed too. “Between folks eating at the truck stop and the new buffet place, we just don’t have the business to keep her going full time. We had to cut her back to weekends for now.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Garrett placed his order and sat down at the counter. He figured he might as well eat there. If you let white gravy cool down, it turned into a gelatinous cap on the biscuits that never tasted right after bei
ng heated in the microwave. He stared at the soda fountain behind the counter while he waited, feeling the eyes on his back, pretending like he didn’t give a shit. When his food arrived, the smell actually made his mouth water.

  He dug right in, the black-peppery goodness of Eunice’s gravy doing more good than a herd of therapists with fistfuls of Xanax.

  ***

  The beans were especially good tonight. Probably the second day since they were made. In Smiley’s perfect world, red beans were at least two days old and had slices of red onion on the side. The way Ma used to eat them.

  Tucked into a booth by the front window of Burton’s Truck Stop diner, Smiley didn’t give much cause to be noticed. Off duty, he didn’t wear the khaki uniform, but the dark gray Dickies and lighter gray work shirt might as well have been a uniform. Quiet, unassuming, with a big smile for every waitress, Smiley let his eye wander over the girls outside the plate glass window.

  Whores. Some city, some country, all poor. And stupid. And filthy.

  They wandered around under the bright lights at the gas pumps. He could see garish green eye shadow on one of them. He thought she’d look nice in his trophy room if he kept her face intact.

  A trucker called his name and said goodbye on the way out. Smiley grinned so fierce his cheeks burned with it.

  Like Papa taught him to read a game trail, Smiley knew the worn path these girls would take. Between here and the rest stop out by the “new” highway, as anyone over forty called it. If a trucker didn’t get his spot in Burton’s lot, he’d get gas and food, then sleep for a few hours over at the rest stop. Or not sleep for a few hours, depending on how much extra cash he had.

  Some nights the rest stop would be packed, and the girls tried to negotiate a ride back down the mile of blacktop between Burton’s and there. But some nights there just weren’t any trucks headed this way. Those times the girls would walk down the lonely black road, past the woods, back to the truck stop and more customers.

  There were many nights of patient waiting, going home with nothing, holding out for the perfect scenario, when the prey walked alone, separated from the rest of the herd. He’d learned long ago to choose ones on the fringe, the ones the other members of the herd didn’t care about.

  Like any responsible hunter, he tried to limit himself. Lately though, it seemed he couldn’t control the Hunter as well. He’d been twenty-four when he took the first. He waited two years until the next. In that time, he learned from his mistakes with the first one. After an exhausting day of replacing blood-soaked floorboards in his barn, he hit on the idea of an underground shelter of some sort, like those damn militia fools over in Braxton County.

  A cellar/bunker would also help with the screaming. He’d had to kill the first one way too early. Even though he lived a good mile from the Heideman farm, sounds carry at night.

  One of the whores outside struck a deal and climbed into the cab of a truck. She had thick red hair like Ma. The desire to have it bunched in his fist overwhelmed Smiley. He imagined the chicken frying in the kitchen to be the smell of her flesh when his branding iron touched her and he felt himself stir down there.

  “Poor young things.” Nadine Pearson had snuck up on him while he mused.

  “Oh. Yeah. Runaways, nowhere to go, I guess,” Smiley said.

  She’d caught him looking and they both knew it. Of course, she only thought she knew why. She judged him from behind those ridiculous damn frames with no lenses. He waved a hand at the empty seat across from him. “Have a seat, Nadine.”

  “Thank you, Smiley. Maybe next time. I just came out to minister to the girls a bit. You out for a late supper?”

  “Yup. I watched little Angela for Misty today and I was too darn tuckered to cook. I think I’m gettin’ old.” He gave her his biggest smile. The one he used to save for the Sunday School teacher, even after he patted Smiley on his bruised back.

  “Oh please, Smiley. If you’re getting old, I don’t know what that makes me.” Nadine gave him the cocked eyebrow that always preceded gossip. “What do you think of this Bradley Wentz boy Misty’s taken up with?”

  “Not worth much, honestly. But you can’t tell young ones anything,” Smiley said.

  “Sad, but true. And now I hear she’s pregnant. You don’t watch it, Smiley, you’re going to be running a daycare out there.”

  He smiled because he knew he should show emotion. But inside, a pilot flame whooshed into a full-blown fire. Pregnant by that little shit. Which meant they’d probably get married and make Bradley a legal guardian of Angela.

  “Smiley?”

  He came back to find Nadine giving him an odd look.

  “Sorry, what was that?”

  “You lost your smile for a second there.”

  “Did I? Just thinkin’ about how the poor girl is gonna make ends meet, I suppose.”

  “I know. There’s a lot of that going around,” Nadine said.

  She looked out the window at a lone girl trolling past the trucks with sleeper cabs. Nadine patted her bible. “Let’s just pray all these young girls figure a way out of this.”

  “Yup,” Smiley said. “Let’s pray they do.”

  ***

  Fascinated by the selection, Garrett thumbed through the shirts hanging in LaSalle’s motel closet. “You’re worse than a woman with shoes.”

  LaSalle glanced up from his laptop. “Believe me, you do not want to see my collection of shoes. Now come look at this.”

  LaSalle spun the laptop around. A map of West Virginia with red dots along Route 45.

  “Okay. Lots of cases of missing girls in West Virginia. You pull up a map of the whole United States with red dots for missing girls, it’d look like the country had measles,” Garrett said. “Besides, the dates on some of the cases you’re using are from before your girl was born, much less went missing.”

  “Who says she has to be the first?” LaSalle said.

  “Wait a minute. The first what? For all you know your girl is in California, shacked up with some guitar-playing surfer.”

  LaSalle retrieved some papers from a worn briefcase and handed them to Garrett. An arrest report and a booking photo of the girl in LaSalle’s flier. Santini, Britney.

  Garrett looked at him over the photo. “Georgia?”

  “Closest I ever got to her. Flew in a day after they issued her a summons and let her go. She still has a warrant there.”

  “So what does this have to do with your map?”

  “I talked to a guy in Georgia who remembered her. Said she got herself a road daddy who was headed to West Virginia, but then taking a trip all the way to Cali for some high-pay gig. I found that dude, but he said he left her in West Virginia. Got tired of her fucked up attitude.”

  “She known for her bad attitude?” Garrett said.

  “She’s got some Daddy issues.”

  “Yeah, well, doesn’t everybody? Who’s to say she didn’t find herself another road daddy and head on out?”

  “Nobody. But these,” LaSalle pointed to the red dots along WV Route 45. “These give me a certain feeling.”

  “Such as?” Garrett said.

  “This part of 45 runs through maybe seven or eight different jurisdictions. Nobody talks to each other, nobody compares notes. Nobody’s looking that hard, anyway, right?” Not for a missing hooker. LaSalle didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

  Garrett pointed at the two cases that were the farthest apart. “So you’re saying somebody’s been working a twenty-five mile stretch of highway, snatching up girls but never ever leaving a body behind.”

  “Except one,” LaSalle said. “He got interrupted.”

  “Okay, so one. One in what, about fifty here? Someone killed fifty girls and only one body turns up?”

  “I’m not saying all of the twenty-five mile stretch of road,” LaSalle said. “So it wouldn’t be all these missing girls. If you ask for detailed information from the written report, you can find out where the girls were actually last seen, includi
ng Britney.”

  He hit a key on the laptop. Out of all the red dots, a small group turned blue. Twenty-eight, in all, spread over forty years. All last seen at Burton’s Truck Stop.

  “Damn,” Garrett said. “Still, this would have to be a family business. A couple of these cases are forty years old.”

  “The Green River Killer operated from the Eighties into the Nineties,” LaSalle said.

  “And he littered the place with corpses. When DNA testing technology caught up with him, he got nailed,” Garrett said.

  LaSalle shrugged. “So he was stupid. But what if he knew about the DNA stuff back then? What if he’d been careful, put the bodies somewhere where nobody could ever find them? He might still be killing people today if he had.”

  “Maybe,” Garrett said. “But a guy like that needs to be anonymous. Get lost in the crowd, you know? Not exactly something you can do out here in the sticks. The closest city a guy like that could hide in is over an hour away. I guess it would throw off suspicion, if he came all the way out here to do his thing.”

  “He could also be a trucker.”

  “True,” Garrett said.

  “Feel like taking a ride out to the truck stop with me? I figure the crowd has turned over by now. New faces to see,” LaSalle said.

  “I guess so. I’m suspended, though, so I’m only there as an observer. Last thing I need is trouble with the ‘new’ chief.”

  8

  The big trucker gave LaSalle’s ID the once-over. Garrett wouldn’t have thought it possible to make LaSalle look small, but this guy went six-six easy, six-eight in the boots he wore against the slush in Burton’s gravel parking lot. And he didn’t look impressed.

  “So? New York private eye. That supposed to mean something to me?” The trucker said.

  “If you’re not impressed by that, I also have one that says I’m a cab driver.” LaSalle grinned, but for some reason Garrett didn’t think he was kidding. “I’m not trying to give anyone a hard time, sir. I’m just looking for a girl who was last seen at this—“