by Scott Blade
“Bikers,” Bridges said, “You know rough guys on motorcycles, like a gang.”
“Last night there was a fire out in the woods.”
Widow asked, “You think the bikers started the fire?”
“No idea. Haven’t seen the fire yet. I just got the report this morning.”
Wagner said, “That’s why I’m here. We’re going to go check it out now.”
“No one went to have a look last night?”
They said nothing.
Widow said, “There might’ve been someone in need of help? ”
Wagner said, “I don’t know what part of the state you were in last night, but here it was pouring rain.”
Widow could see that. He already noticed the puddles. There was one not far from him.
“Still, isn’t it your duty to protect and serve?”
Bridges raised a hand and rested it on her holstered sidearm, like a signal telling Widow to watch his mouth.
Wagner noticed it too but didn’t repeat the action. Maybe he was more willing to think for himself than Widow had given him credit for.
Bridges didn’t respond with a direct answer to Widow’s comment.
“Most likely it’s a meth lab that got too hot.”
“Meth and bikers do go hand and hand. They usually are in the business of addictive, illegal substances.”
Bridges said, “It happens out here at least once a year.”
Wagner said, “Small community. Bikers take up residence here. Some of them come from local families. Families with nothing to do. Bills to pay. They cook meth.”
Widow said, “Sounds like it’s a family business. Sounds like you already got a suspect.”
“No suspects. Not till we take a look. But the thing is the motorcycle gang that used to be here. We haven’t seen them in months.”
“So what happened to them?”
Bridges shrugged .
“They up and left. Probably expanding business to better grounds. Not a lot of money to be made out here. Not compared to other territories. But we still got some folks out here cooking.”
“Why haven’t you cracked down on them?”
Bridges shot Widow a look that said: Who the hell are you to ask me that?
“There’s a fine balance in a small community like this. Like an ecosystem. A certain amount of criminal element is tolerated. It’s expected. It’s the way things are.”
Widow didn’t like that answer, but he said nothing. Not his town. Not his job. Not his problem.
Bridges said, “Besides, they keep to themselves, mostly. There are the people who cook it and the ones who buy it and it stays that way. A cycle. We don’t have it in our schools or nothing. It stays out there.”
She pointed with her free hand and waved it over an area of wilderness to the north and swept it over the east.
“As long as it stays out there, I don’t really care. I’m only one cop. I can’t be starting a drug war on my own with the families out there. They’d win anyway.”
Widow said, “So, call the DEA?”
“We’ve tried.”
“And?”
“They’re busy. This is small time. And the agencies of the government see us as a bunch of backwoods people. The DEA won’t lift a finger for a bunch of backwoods people.”
Wagner said, “Plus, they keep blowing themselves up.”
“Sounds like they’re not good meth cooks. If they keep blowing themselves up.”
Bridges smiled and moved her hand away from her gun.
Widow noticed.
Silence.
In the distance, Widow heard the backfire of a truck and tires on pavement and the wind rustling between the buildings.
He looked at Wagner, thought back to when he was first picked up at the crossroads.
Wagner was on the phone with someone. He’d bet it was Bridges. Probably telling her that a stranger was walking to Hellbent.
Widow turned to Wagner.
“Let me guess. You’ve got an influx of bikers coming in for the first time. New faces. And you thought I might be one of them? That’s why you brought me here. So, that she could get a look at me?”
Wagner said, “Don’t take it personally.”
“We just needed to know what we’re dealing with here.”
Widow said, “I’m not a threat. I’m not part of a biker gang. Or a meth business.”
He paused a beat. They waited.
“You know how you can tell?”
They both looked at him with suspicion still all over their faces .
“I don’t have a motorcycle.”
They said nothing to that.
Widow stepped back, noticeably. He got five feet away and stopped and looked at Wagner.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said.
And he turned to walk away.
Wagner started to protest, but, in the end, he didn’t.
There was nothing to say.
Widow walked away into the sunlight.
Chapter 5
S ITTING IN A BARBER’S CHAIR, Widow had a clear line of sight out the barbershop window to the street outside and to the storefronts and roads mapping the terrain beyond that.
Most of Hellbent’s streets were old, but clean and maintained from their original, New England gothic style. Everything had a lived-in feel.
Widow stared at cars passing and looked over freshly cut grass and small bricked storefronts. He saw a post office, a dentist, a bakery, a nail salon, and one lone building with a glass-blowing business.
There was one empty plot that was a small playground for kids.
He saw young children playing.
Like the town’s streets, the playground equipment was old. The equipment was all metal and dated. There were bare bones monkey bars. There was a swing set with a small section of plastic animal swings, one horse, and one lion. The slide was metal and the seesaw was made of wood .
All of it old, but with fresh coats of paint.
To the east side of the park, was a single building, a train depot. It was equipped with a platform, all wood. It was set up on a hill.
Widow asked the barber two simple questions, just making small talk. And right then, at that moment he asked them. They were both answered without the barber having to say a word. But he did anyway.
Widow asked, “The train ever come through?”
“Oh, sure.”
“It ever stop?”
Right then, they both heard the sound of a train whistle, faint and distant at first until it bellowed again and again.
The barber stayed busy at work, trimming the grown-out hair that was like weeds.
Widow angled his head to get a better look.
“Keep still,” the barber said.
Widow stayed quiet and stayed angled.
He looked at the train. Maybe it was his overpowering sense of curiosity that made him look. Maybe it was the cop instincts that never seemed to go away. Maybe it was boredom from sitting in that chair. Or maybe it was just that he wondered who the hell would come out here?
Why would Amtrak even have a stop here?
The train slowed. The rails sang, winding down to a slow rhythmic pulse, and then to nothing.
The train crawled forward past the platform until the third car was lined up at the end of the station and the train stopped completely, rocking forward once and shifting back into a safe disembarking position. It tarried there, still for a long moment as if the engineer was making a hard choice and having second thoughts about it.
The barber started on the sides of Widow’s head with a pair of clippers. The clippers hummed and buzzed in Widow’s ears. The buzzing overrode the train’s slowing sounds, and he heard no more from it.
He watched as the train doors on the third car finally opened. No other doors opened. And no one got off for another long moment. Finally, someone did.
He watched a petite figure step off the train, carefully, not as though the steps were hard for her to take, but more
out of caution. Once she set foot on the platform, she moved fast and gracefully like a ballet dancer. No problem.
Still, there was something different about her. Something a little awkward about her step, a little off pace, a little off-kilter. She moved like a ballet dancer who just got off a long horse ride, or like she might’ve been hit in the head, and she was still getting used to dancing with a head injury.
She moved like a Marine humping gear up a hill, and it was getting too heavy for him to carry.
With his head angled the way it was, and with the barber moving in and out of his line of sight, it was hard for Widow to put his finger on what her deal was, at first .
The barber continued to clip the sides of Widow’s hair until finally bringing out the scissors and using both tools at once.
The train rocked back on its wheels for a moment, and then the engine droned loud enough for Widow to hear over the clippers. The horn blasted a couple more times and the train rocked forward again. This time it moved away from its stop.
No one else got off the train.
Widow watched it roll away.
The tracks boomed, and the rails sang for a long second more. Eventually, the train moved clear out of sight.
The lone, disoriented ballet woman stood there, scoping out the town. She scanned the buildings and the streets, looking like she had no idea where she was or what direction she would go in.
Then Widow noticed. She had a carry-on bag, small and hooked over her shoulder by two straps. It wasn’t a purse. Just an everyday, black canvas bag. Nothing fancy.
There was still something out of the norm about her. Suddenly, she looked right and looked left, like she was deciding and she chose to walk left.
She turned and walked.
Widow saw from her profile the thing that was causing her to walk a little uneven, the thing that made her like a Marine tired from humping heavy gear. He saw that she was humping extra gear after all .
By the time the lone ballet woman stepped off the train, Widow saw why she had taken slow steps. Why she had been a little off balance.
He watched her walk, steadily to the middle of the platform. She stood there, looked left again, and looked right again, then she pulled her left hand out and up above her breasts and twisted her wrist and stared at a watch that she wore upside down, which struck Widow with a sense of military familiarity.
After checking the time, she lowered her wrist back down to her side and repeated the scanning of left and right process a third time, perhaps searching for someone who was supposed to meet her. Someone who was supposed to pick her up. That, someone, wasn’t there, not where he or she was supposed to be.
Cars passed on the street in front of the barbershop, blocking Widow’s view every so often. But the woman stayed on the platform longer, in sight.
She was small in stature. She stood maybe five-foot-nothing with a long neck, looking like she had spent a lifetime staring up at people taller than she and her body grew the neck to accommodate, like a giraffe needing to have a long neck to reach the tops of trees.
For being so short, the woman was almost all legs. She had long, toned legs that doubled Widow’s suspicions that she was some sort of dancer or runner or gymnast, or all three.
She had medium-length, black hair that looked to be in the process of growing out. As she turned, Widow saw that one side of her hair was shaved above and behind her ear, right down to dark stubble. It was what he’d call a punk rocker look, only her clothes weren’t the same style, not really.
She wore a pair of blue jean overalls with shorts instead of pants, all underneath a black leather jacket.
The jacket served sixty percent for style because it was summer, but also New Hampshire summers up in the mountains were quite windy. And this summer was no different. The jacket served forty percent for the function of keeping her warm.
There was something else very notable about her. It was the factor that made her walk a little awkward, a little cumbersome.
The woman on the platform was very pregnant.
Widow watched her for another thirty seconds while she walked to the stairs off the platform and down to the street. No one appeared to meet her. No driver waiting to pick her up. No husband waiting to greet her. No family. No one.
After another moment of standing there with a lost look on her face, she turned left and vanished from sight.
Chapter 6
T HE DRIVE OUT to the reported cabin fire took Bridges and Wagner more than thirty minutes. Partially because it was way out in the mountains. Also partly because the rain from the night before had muddied the ground and most of the roads out that way were dirt, which promptly turned to mud which was drying back to soil.
The other reason was that the wilderness was immense. There was lots of land with few signs of life.
Hellbent was a small town, but Bridges’ jurisdiction was a massive section of the county because it was wilderness, mountains, small lakes, and not much else.
Most of the citizens of Hellbent lived in or near town. Most of the farms were within the first ten miles back to town.
Rural people lived this far out, including low-income families, meth heads, and misers, people who just wanted to be left alone.
Bridges knew all of them. She made it a routine to call the ones who had phones and the few who didn’t she’d drive all the way out to visit once every other month. One guy lived the farthest out. He was so far that she only saw him once or twice a year. And he usually came riding down one of the mountains on horseback into town. He would stop in and say hello.
All the guys who lived way, way out were men. No families. No women. No children. Just lonely men who liked being alone.
They rode out in Bridges’ truck. No way would Wagner’s Charger make it out on the rockier roads. Plus, if they happened to get stuck in the mud, Bridges’ truck had a winch mounted on the front.
Wagner peered forward and said, “I still don’t see any smoke.”
“The rain put it out last night, I guess.”
The pickup truck’s tires dragged them easily over wet dirt and loose gravel. The windows were rolled down. They were up in altitude over the town. Cold, dry air blew in from the mountains.
“How many cabins are out here anyway?” Wagner asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
Wagner smiled and reached over to a cup holder on the console. He pulled up a coffee thermos and drank from it.
“Can’t believe you don’t like coffee,” he said.
Bridges didn’t look at him. She kept her focus on the bumpy terrain coming up. Her hands were covered by driving gloves. Wagner didn’t understand that. Her truck wasn’t anything special. But he didn’t question her about it because he knew a lot of officers who wore gloves. He always chalked it up to being germaphobes.
He couldn’t blame her. In their line of work, sometimes they dealt with the lowest common denominator, like the meth head bikers she’d mentioned to that stranger, Widow. And meth heads weren’t known for being the most sanitary citizens.
They drove on, and Wagner asked, “So what’s the next cabin on the list?”
She looked over at him this time.
“Actually, I’m not sure.”
“Not sure?”
“A fire in the middle of the wilderness, at a log cabin, we assumed it was meth.”
“And, what? It’s not?”
She shrugged, looked back at the road.
“We’ve already seen almost a dozen cabins.”
“And?”
“And those are all the ones that the bikers used for cooking. Plus, I haven’t seen that gang in a while.”
“Are they still operating out here?”
“I don’t know. The only two left are the vape boys.”
Vape wasn’t their name. It was a nickname because their family owned a vape store in town.
“Maybe they cleared out. Maybe it’s just some new local outfit, trying to make money and having
no clue how dangerous it is.”
“Maybe. ”
“Maybe they have a cabin you don’t know about?”
“Maybe.”
They were quiet for a moment.
Bridges said, “Maybe, it’s not a meth lab.”
“In that case, one of our more upstanding citizens could be in real trouble.”
She nodded and said, “There’s a hunter’s cabin up here. Let’s stop there.”
Chapter 7
A FTER THE HAIRCUT and a close shave, Widow wanted to grab a late breakfast. He was starving. He thanked the barber and tipped him and asked for the best diner in town with the best breakfast. Judging by the barrel of a stomach the barber was sporting, he would know the answer to that question. He’d know about the best breakfast, the best lunch, and the best dinner. And it seemed he did because he pointed Widow south, back part of the way he had come and a little west, claiming that a local diner had the “best eggs scrabbled this side of the Mississippi,” his words.
Afterward, the barber thanked Widow for the tip. Nothing too polite or beholden, the guy just expressed the amount of politeness and gratitude that was expected. No more. No less.
Widow left the barber shop and followed the man’s instructions and turned left and walked in a southern direction. The buildings, the streets, even the gutters, were all picturesque and quaint as if they came from a poem about nineteen-fifties America .
He passed a coffee shop that was tempting, but he was eager to try the recommended diner and compare the scrambled eggs with the ones from his memories.
He walked past an ice cream shop, law office, a food stop, and another haircut place, but this one was a salon and had women inside near the front windows, curlers in their hair and some under dome helmet industrial dryers.
Two of the women approached the window, pressed their hands against the glass, and stared at him like he was a gorilla who had escaped from the nearest zoo.
He carried on and passed a sports bar that was closed. There was a pet grooming place that doubled as a kennel. He heard dogs barking from behind the brick walls and double-glass doors.
All the shops were attached at the walls like brownstones. They were painted different shades of the same four colors. All of them were brick.