The Nicotine Chronicles

by Lee Child

  “Gotcha interested that time, huh?” he says. “Betcha that kind of shit don’t happen much up in New York.”

  “Not to me,” I say.

  “Yeah, well,” he drawls, “you ain’t even heard the kicker yet.”

  The dust starts to swirl now, all around the construction site, and in the distance I can see the first work crew heading in toward the makeshift lean-to structure of the tool shop. It’s a huge space, supported by an array of tree trunk braces. On the side nearest the impending storm, a carpenter is unfurling a canvas tarp and securing the corners, tying everything down.

  And on Bugler’s face, the leer is back, all traces of his former reticence brushed clear by the wind. It’s as if, now that he’s told someone, the bullets are really gone, no more a threat to him than a dream. Now it can be just a story to tell, now he can laugh . . .

  Which is exactly what he does, laughs again and exhales a burst of smoke that gets caught in the tangle of the wind. It moves like a ghost, not quite shapeless but not quite formed either, swept back over Bugler’s shoulder toward the lean-to in a pattern of movements like an underwater dance. I’m starting to feel submerged too, not from the water in the air but because I can’t escape, because he’s got me now, I gave him an opening, and he knows I’m his, and he can draw his moment out.

  At the same time, work has stopped, suspended not by weather but by this strange and loaded dance that we are doing, as if there were anything between us, as if we weren’t adversaries. I light another Marlboro, not asking, just trying to take hold of my own small piece of the moment, the way the wind is taking hold of the smoke.

  “See,” Bugler tells me, “it was early, and I didn’t have nowhere to go. So I drive around for a while, and then I go home. But when I get there, the house is dark. There’s no one around. I come inside—nothing. No noise, nothing. And now I’m starting to get a little angry, you know what I mean?”

  Bugler peers in close again, and I get another whiff of his deadly breath. I want to pull away, but he’s speaking so softly that his words flee across the angry air.

  “I don’t say anything. I don’t make a sound. Then I see a sliver of light coming out under the bedroom door.”

  The rain is close enough now that I can hear it, like the patter of hooves, of the cavalry.

  “And low voices,” Bugler adds. “Coming from inside.”

  A little smile starts to twitch around the edges of my lips. Bugler waits, and the moment expands between us like the coming storm.

  “So I creep up to the door. There’s a man’s voice, and I can hear my wife laughing, and . . .”

  Now I start to laugh. It’s not a good thing to do, I know that: Bugler’s opening up here, and this is serious business. But with the storm brewing and all, there’s little else to do. The situation is so absurd. Bugler looks at me funny, his cheeks balled like dough and his eyes almost obscured behind the massive roiling of his cheeks. And as he does, I get a flash, as if lightning had lit up the sky.

  “The husband, right?” I ask, and strike a casual pose over my shovel, cigarette in my mouth like I belong here, like we’re just two good old boys shooting the shit.

  What that question does is it takes the space between us and bursts it, just as the first stripes of rain begin to cut the earth at our feet. I can almost hear the bang, can see it in the way Bugler’s face blows from confusion to rage in the time it takes for the words to come out of my mouth.

  “What?” he asks. “What’d you just say?”

  I don’t utter a word.

  “You think you’re being smart? Well, let me tell you something, boy, you’re one dumb piece of shit.”

  Bugler’s right hand shoots out, the hand with the Winston in it. It’s a thick, meaty hand, scarred and stubby, and it grabs me by the collar of my T-shirt and pulls me in until my face is no more than two inches from his. My cigarette falls to the dirt between us as the tip of his darts dangerously close to my left eye. Water sweeps across the work site, falling in thin, sharp drops. Already, the lean-to is getting hard to see.

  “You don’t never want to talk back to a man about his wife,” Bugler growls. “You take my meaning?”

  I hold my ground. The deluge blots out both our cigarettes; his disintegrates in his hand. Water streams down our faces. In the distance, a roll of thunder explodes like timpani.

  “Hey,” someone yells from somewhere, “y’all better get under cover!”

  All around the site, people are running for shelter. Bugler looks once at the horizon, then back at me.

  “I don’t know what it is with you, boy,” he hisses, releasing me. “You came down here, not the other way around.” He spits into the wet ground, steps back.

  The thunder sounds again, closer, and the air fills with the smell of ozone. And Bugler turns away.

  “I’ll tell you something, though,” he says, looking back over his shoulder. The rain is falling so hard that he has to yell to be heard. “You’re just trying to rile me up, but you’re too damn dumb to do it right. ’Cause you know what? That wasn’t no man in the room with my wife.” He snorts, cracks a thin, venal little smile. “It was the TV. And let me tell you, she was glad to see me.”

  It takes a moment for his meaning to come clear through the tumult. Then I understand. Bugler must see it on my face, because he spits that harsh yap of a laugh and curls his lip even more, belly jiggling like he’s some out-of-work Santa Claus waiting for the rain to turn to snow.

  He waits a second, to see if I have anything to say. When I don’t, he chuckles to himself, then steps away from me and through the storm. I stand there and let the rain fall, washing off the ditch-digger’s sweat. It’s cold, but not too bad, and it’s such a relief to be alone. In the ditch, the PVC pipe lies half-submerged in rising water, and I know I’m going to have to do the whole thing again tomorrow, but for now, it’s okay. I just want to stand here, feel the weather blow by.

  I don’t move until the storm has passed.

  God’s Work

  by Bernice L. McFadden

  When Officer Fox dug into his trouser pocket for the soiled handkerchief he’d been swabbing his nose with since the start of his shift, his wilted pack of L&M Filters fell to the floor.

  He’d only had two cigarettes since breakfast. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He’d had six or seven puffs of two cigarettes since breakfast.

  He was currently fighting a cold, or maybe it was the flu because every time he lit up, his lungs exploded.

  Fox stooped over, retrieved the pack, and stuffed it back into his empty pocket. “’Scuse me,” he muttered, turning away from the grieving woman to blow his nose. After that, he carefully folded the handkerchief into quarters and shoved it back into his pocket. Clearing his throat, he touched the back of his hand to his forehead to check for fever.

  When he turned back to meet the tearing eyes of Gigi and the bowed head of her daughter, his lips were curled into a reassuring smile.

  Her youngest daughter was the fifth child to go missing in a year.

  Runaway?

  Abducted?

  Dead?

  Nightly, the local news reported on the missing Kilduff and Mihalko girls.

  Have you seen these girls?

  They resembled each other so much they could have been sisters. Both were fair-complexioned with hair the color of corn silk, except the Kilduff girl had brown eyes and the Mihalko girl had eyes the color of wet sapphires.

  Little girls with those particular features were highly desired and well sought-after on the black market.

  Black market.

  He didn’t like that term. He only used it because that’s the expression Father Mann used. But when the priest said it, it didn’t sound dirty.

  * * *

  The first girl who went missing was seven-year-old Maria Lopez. Three and a half months later, ten-year-old Chantrelle Washington vanished. Their disappearances hadn’t raised too much of a fuss among the residents of Annunciation. T
he families were upset of course, and to be fair, the local news had reported on it, although it was less of a report and more of a mention, a blip that was severed by a True Filter cigarette commercial. You know, the commercial with the male and female singing duo?

  Ain’t it the truth when you smoke True, you get all of the flavor and the filter too . . .

  Fox’s wife smoked those True cigarettes. She didn’t break out into song, but she seemed to like them just fine.

  Anyway, it’s not that the people of Annunciation didn’t care about those first two little girls, it was just that they didn’t care about those first two little girls as much as they did the ones who followed. You see, the Mihalko and Kilduff girls were real, true blood members of the Annunciation community, a community of European immigrants stretching back two hundred years.

  That said, the business owners did agree to post flyers of the missing Maria and Chantrelle in their storefront windows:

  Have you seen Maria Lopez?

  Have you seen Chantrelle Washington?

  After seven days the flyers were replaced with what the proprietors felt was more relevant information.

  When the families of Chantrelle and Maria saw that their flyers had been replaced with announcements about the church bake sale and the official crowning of the Spring Flower Queen—well, they felt as if their already missing daughters had gone missing for a second time.

  But then Rose Mihalko didn’t come home after school, and, three days later, Laura Ann Kilduff’s mother walked into her daughter’s bedroom and found Laura Ann’s teddy bear in her bed, but not Laura Ann.

  Flyers bearing photos of both Laura Ann and Rose were posted in windows of every business between Annunciation and Devonville. That covered a good eighty-seven miles.

  Later, when the photos on those flyers faded and the edges curled, they were quickly replaced with crisp, bright new ones.

  Initially, a search party had been dispatched. Residents scoured the surrounding woods, shouting the girls’ names. They kicked through piles of dead leaves, turned over logs; Josh McNamare even sent his twin hound dogs, Jake and Judd, into the cave at the base of Abbey Mountain.

  The hunt went on for several days, often stretching into the night. Frightened children watched from porches and bedroom windows as long yellow cylinders from the flashlights sliced through the darkness like Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber.

  They hadn’t done any of that for Chantrelle and Maria.

  In the midst of searching for Laura Ann and Rose, a mysterious fire consumed Ike’s Ice Cream Shoppe. Some people thought it might be arson, some sort of retaliation from the parents of those “other” missing girls, because Ike had been the only business owner in Annunciation to flat out refuse to post a flyer of them.

  No one was really surprised. I mean, Ike never tried to hide his thoughts and beliefs where the Negroes were concerned. Hell, he didn’t even sell chocolate ice cream! Ike said he didn’t believe in it, said it was an unnatural and inferior flavor.

  That’s just how Ike was.

  But then there was some talk that maybe Ike himself had burned down his business for the insurance money because he was flat broke on account of his wife having cleaned out his bank account.

  Seems as though she’d met some man through the “Lonely Hearts Club” column in the local paper. Some Frenchman. At least that was the talk. People said that she’d emptied Ike’s bank account, bought a first-class ticket to Paris, and that was that.

  Figures.

  Fox never did like her. He thought she was a sidity type of woman—conceited. Stuck-up. Fox believed he could tell a person’s character by the type of cigarette they smoked. Ike’s wife smoked Djarum Black. Clove cigarettes?

  Who in the world smoked cloves? Stuck-up sidity people smoked cloves, that’s who.

  Anyway, with those flyers all around like they were, people seemed to see the missing girls everywhere. Someone thought they saw the Mihalko girl at the pizza parlor in Henderson, another claimed they’d spotted Laura Ann dressed like a boy in the back of a pickup truck cuddling a puppy in her lap. Fox followed up on each and every so-called sighting, but always came up empty.

  A few weeks after Laura Ann disappeared, federal agents descended on Annunciation in a fleet of dark sedans. Outfitted in neat blue suits and shiny black shoes, the agents swarmed Annunciation like locusts. They questioned the parents of the missing girls as well as the residents, and then demanded from Fox every piece of evidence he had. Every piece. Abduction was a federal crime, one agent told Fox, as if Fox didn’t know the law. “And anyway,” the federal agent had added with a smirk, “you yahoos would probably just screw everything up.”

  That comment had hurt Fox’s feelings.

  The federal agent’s name was Donald L. Smiley. Funny thing was, the man was as stone-faced as a wall. Not once did Fox catch him smiling, not that missing girls were anything to grin about. But still, imagine having a last name like Smiley and not ever smiling? It’s weird, don’t you think? Now, that Agent Smiley rolled his own cigarettes. He kept his tobacco in a pricey-looking brown leather pouch with his initials embossed in gold on the hide.

  Fox didn’t know what he thought about people who rolled and smoked their own cigarettes. Maybe they didn’t trust folk. Maybe they themselves were untrustworthy. It was one or both of those things.

  Anyway, the feds dragged the lake; divers clad in scuba suits sank themselves into the water towers and long-abandoned wells.

  They’d found some things—a rusted tricycle covered in moss, headless dolls, plenty of beer cans, and several onion sacks containing whole litters of kittens—well, the skeletal remains of kittens. They found all of those things but not those little girls.

  Fox wondered about the heart and soul of a person who could drown one innocent animal, let alone six or seven at a time. He wondered what type of cigarettes the murderer of innocent animals smoked.

  Father Mann had said that the world was full of monsters, and Annunciation was in the world, wasn’t it?

  Not too long after the feds left town, a correspondent and crew from CNN arrived and set up cameras on the courthouse lawn and in front of McDougal’s Diner on Main Street. They ran down residents coming out of the hair salon and the hoagie shop, shoving microphones into their startled faces.

  Did you know the girls?

  Are you afraid for your own children?

  Even when CNN reported on the disappearances, they didn’t mention Maria and Chantrelle.

  So, if CNN didn’t mention Maria and Chantrelle and the feds didn’t come running when they went missing, then it was clear to Fox and anyone else paying attention that Maria and Chantrelle didn’t matter enough to count, right?

  Anyway, the last time CNN had come to Annunciation was back in ’84 when Vera Singer picked up a jar of fruit preserves and saw the face of Christ etched into the fleshy half of a peach. Of course, you had to hold it to the light just the right way to see it. After that, people traveled to Annunciation from all over the country just so they could witness the miracle with their very own eyes.

  Yes, they’d called it a miracle, and Fox didn’t doubt it. Annunciation was blessed and especially favored by God. Father Mann had always claimed it was, and that peach half was proof.

  * * *

  Fox glanced out the window. He could see the blue and yellow lights whirling silently in the glass cone atop his cruiser. Beyond that, Eddie Larson, his towhead deputy, was puffing on a cigarette as he shot the shit with the flip-flop-wearing, graphic-T-shirt-clad trailer-park trash.

  Some of the people gawked and pointed at the trailer, while others stood a safe distance away as if the trailer itself were diseased or dangerous.

  Now, that Eddie Larson was a Marlboro man. But he smoked Marlboro Lights, which in Fox’s opinion wasn’t as manly a cigarette as the full-flavored Marlboros in the red-and-white box. Fox believed Marlboro Lights were what women smoked, manly women, like Eileen Shepard who drove a tractor trailer and
had three children, but no husband. Eileen Shepard wore her hair cut short like a military man.

  And no one had ever seen her in a dress or heels. She never wore lipstick, but she did sport a pair of diamond stud earrings.

  Fox thought that women acting like men smoked Marlboro Lights, but couldn’t figure out why a man would smoke Marlboro Lights, unless of course he was a man who liked men.

  * * *

  It was still bright outside, but already evening mist was gathering over the pine trees that dotted the mountains like pushpins.

  Autumn was just around the corner. In a few more weeks, Abbey Mountain would start to sing.

  Abbey Mountain was the second piece of evidence that Annunciation was blessed and favored.

  A scientist had published an article in the Scientific American claiming that the elevation, the mineral content of the soil, and the spacing of the trees and power lines on Abbey Mountain all contributed to the chorus that sailed off of it when the seasonal winds came through.

  Fox thought the scientist had gone to great lengths to disprove God’s existence. Sometime back, he’d watched a PBS special with yet another scientist who claimed to have disproved Moses’s burning bush. Apparently, the scientist had stated, there was a species of bush that could self-combust if the sun was hot enough. They showed a bush bursting into flames as evidence of their claim, but Fox seriously doubted it was real. Hollywood, after all, was known for creating magic. Movie magic.

  For instance, Godzilla was just a man in a Godzilla suit. Just an average-sized man in a Godzilla suit, but on the screen that prehistoric terror looked taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago, and everyone knew that the Sears Tower was the tallest building in the world.

  If Hollywood could do that, then creating a bush that erupted into flames all on its own couldn’t have been too difficult a hoax to pull off. Fox supposed he could rig a bush to do the same if he had the time and the know-how. Those Hollywood folks were not to be trusted, they were charlatans the lot of ’em.