A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,15
what, Nick? Truth is, I don’t know what I’d do without Ruthie and Tom,’ she said. ‘Or Dot Burdette, either, for that matter, even though she’s being a pain in the ass right now. Caught me on my way back into the courthouse and offered the Casserole Cure. But she wanted the skinny, too. Like everybody else.’
‘You’ve got a lot of good friends in this town. Ruthie and Tom and Dot are three of them, for sure. But they’re not the only ones. Don’t forget that.’
Bell lowered her gaze. She touched the front of his desk, using her index finger to follow an L-shaped scratch in the metal. The moment had passed; he could tell how badly she wanted to get back to business.
‘Friends are great, Nick, but what I really need are a few more assistant prosecutors, you know? I’ve got the Albie Sheets trial coming up next week – and now this.’
‘Yeah. Now this.’
She sat back in her chair. ‘We’ll get him,’ she declared, but it sounded hollow.
They both knew how easy it was to get lost in the hills surrounding Acker’s Gap. They knew how many nooks and creases and crevices were hidden out there, how many rough, wild places inaccessible except on foot, and only then when you’d grown up here and knew the land, knew it in all seasons, all weathers.
‘What’s your instinct, Nick? Robbery gone bad? Shooter panics?’
‘Coulda been that. Or coulda been some crazy fool out on a spree – a random thing, I mean, and those three old boys were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Damnit, Bell,’ the sheriff suddenly said, his big fist bouncing on the desktop, making the pile of notebooks shift and slide. ‘When’d this kind of thing start happening around here? Wasn’t always this way. Was it? Or am I turning into one of those nostalgic old bastards, going on and on about the good old days? I just don’t know anymore. But something tells me – it’s a feeling, only a feeling – that we’re losing something real important here. Something precious.’
He sucked in a massive chestful of air and blew it out again before continuing.
‘You know what, Bell? Sometimes I think – Oh, hell. Forget it.’
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Nothing. Just a lot of nonsense, is all.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Well,’ the sheriff said.
He grunted, changing the position of his hips yet again. The swivel chair was too old to be comfortable. Its springs were shot. The black plastic pads on the armrests were cracked. One of its tiny wheels was prone to flopping sideways if he scooted more than half an inch in any direction. Still, he refused to replace it. When Bell had urged him to visit Office Depot in the mall out by the interstate to pick out a new chair, the sheriff had snorted and said, What’re we now – kings in a palace? Just be glad I don’t make us all sit cross-legged on the damned floor. Count your blessings.
He shifted his chin back and forth a few more times.
‘It’s like this, Bell,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I just wonder if it’s worth it. Pushing like we do. I know some sheriffs and prosecutors in other counties who take things a lot easier, and they sleep real good at night.’
‘Don’t know what you mean.’
‘Sure you do, Bell,’ he said quietly. ‘Sure you do.’
And she did. She couldn’t help but know, because they’d talked about it so many times. Talked – and argued. He wished she would ease off, wished she would ratchet down the pressure and not be so zealous and inflexible when it came to narcotics cases.
They weren’t like anything else they had ever faced, because the drugs – not street drugs like cocaine or crystal meth, not drugs that promised glamour and good times, but drugs that eased sore backs and sore lives – almost seemed like a natural part of the landscape. They seemed, insidiously, to belong here. To fit right in. Fighting these drugs felt like pushing back against the mountains themselves.
Bell, though, wouldn’t back down. She had a clear-eyed and wild-hearted hatred for the illegal suppliers of prescription medications, and for the drugs that, she believed, were poisoning the people in these mountains like arsenic dumped in a well.
Used to be, the sheriff was right there beside her, her strongest ally, following every tip and carrying out raids on big-time dealers and small-time ones, too, the ones who operated out of their pickups and off the stoops