Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,98

made him do it,” she says. Voice quiet. Again Whitey growls.

“Not really. I just marched him to the door and gave him a reason to walk through it.”

“You forced him,” she seethes. Tears wet her cheeks. “You pointed a gun at him. Made him listen. Made him climb up there and hang himself.”

“The gun was just to get him in the car and to the tree. Then the recording became my weapon and so I holstered my piece. I was right. It was enough. I didn’t make him do it. I just gave him a reason.”

“That’s the same thing. I’ll get you for this.”

“I figured that might be your response. You’re missing the big picture, Atlanta. You’re not thinking. Why am I telling you this? Why play that recording?”

“To torture me like you tortured him.”

He shakes his head. “Wrong. To show you. Like I showed him. I’m showing you that I can get to anybody. I can hurt the people you love. You’re a troubled girl and troubled girls make more trouble for everybody else. I can’t have that. We can’t have that. This is a warning. It may not be my last, but you’re nearly at the end of your rope just as Chris was at the end of his. Cross me and get in our way and I will hurt everyone around you. That’s how I hurt you. You want to blame anybody for Chris Coyne’s death, blame yourself. You had to go poking sleeping dogs with a sharp stick. Now the dogs are awake, Atlanta. And they’re not very happy with you.”

She growls, cries out in grief and rage, bangs the heels of both hands against the wire.

Then Atlanta buries her face in her hands.

Petry says nothing, and backs the car out of the dirt lot and back onto the road, leaving the burned out building behind and heading back toward Boxelder Road.

* * *

Atlanta sits at Holger’s desk, waiting. Trying not to shake. Trying not to scream. Her hands hold onto the detective’s desk, fingers gone bloodless like she’s holding onto the safety bar of a rollercoaster.

When they arrived at the station, Petry left her alone. Just walked off like it was no big thing. Another officer—a young buck with wispy non-mustache mustache took the dog away toward the basement steps. Whitey didn’t want to go but she knelt and kissed his brow and promised him they’d get someone to look at his shoulder soon. Here under the lights the wound didn’t look too bad—she hoped a few antibiotics would be good enough.

Whitey rested his head on her shoulder and made a small sound in the back of his throat—a growl of sorts, but not aggressive, not really. She took it to be a promise, or something like one: he’s got her back.

“Go on,” she told him, and the officer—Landis was his name—took the dog away.

Down the hall, Petry stood by a coffee machine and gave her a look and a small, sinister nod. A reminder. I can get you wherever you are.

Now here she is. In Holger’s office. Waiting for the woman to arrive and trying her damndest not to grab a stapler off the desk, march over to Petry, and staple his mouth and nose closed.

In her mind’s eye she can’t help replaying Chris’ suicide. The march to the tree. The slow creeping realization afforded by that recording. The rope. The decision. Choking and kicking and emptying your bowels and then—

Holger enters.

“You okay?” she asks Atlanta.

“Fine,” Atlanta says. She knows that one word doesn’t sound fine, and that the very word may be the only one in the English language that everybody says but never means—if you meant it, you’d say good, but when you don’t mean it, you say fine like it’s a joke that everybody’s in on but never admits. “Just fine.”

“I want to talk to you about how all this… went down.”

“Okay.”

“There’s gonna be some questions, and you might have to talk to a district attorney. Someone may want to coach you about things to say.”

“You telling me to get a lawyer?”

Holger shakes her head. “Not at all. It’s just that this is a big deal. Big operation like this gets busted, there’s gonna be accountability. And a man like Ellis Wayman may seem like some drunken redneck rube, but he’s going to lawyer up in a big way. And those lawyers are going to look at you…” Here her voice trails off.

“I’m a troubled witness. Given the things that have