A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,17

harsh texture. It was a thin, coarse towel – not much better, really, than an old two-by-four yanked from a porch floor. He wouldn’t have been too surprised to find a knothole in it. These towels were a piece of crap to begin with, he knew, and then they went and washed them in the cheapest laundry soap they could find and dried them until they were stiff as jerky. The towel, he was sure, would leave his face red and sore.

He grinned.

When he lowered the towel, he saw the ragged checkerboard leer coming back at him from the faded mirror. He had three teeth missing, one right up front, two on the side. He liked that; he thought it tipped people off that he’d been in enough fights to not care about getting in one more, and that maybe they ought not mess with him.

Actually, he’d lost the teeth the old-fashioned way. Nobody had ever taken him or his brothers or his sister to the dentist. Couldn’t afford it. He was nineteen years old now and the Mountain Dew he’d been drinking all day, every day, ever since he was a kid had done a real number on his teeth. Still did.

Well, so what? he’d ask himself, every time he thought about it. Nobody he knew had very many original teeth left. Maybe you weren’t even supposed to anymore. Everything was artificial these days. Fake. This was the modern world.

He finished rubbing his face with the piece-of-shit towel, still looking in the mirror. He had a turned-up nose and tiny eyes – pig eyes, a girlfriend of his had called them once, and he’d oinked and grunted when she said it, waggling his ass, making her laugh, and then he’d hit her in the mouth, hard, with a closed fist, which stopped her laughing, right quick – and a bad-looking beard, a scraggly, runty thing. Patches of pinkish-red hair alternated with patches of rusty-colored fuzz. He’d grown a beard two years ago, in high school, to cover up his acne, but it never really took. Back then, you could spot the acne through the wispy mess of the beard. You still could, only the beard had faded to a dingy color in too many places.

He flung the towel on the bathroom floor. He shuffled back out into the motel room. He was shirtless. He hadn’t zipped his pants yet.

He picked up one of the cell phones on the bedside table. His personal one. He always kept two; this one, plus a throwaway, a pay-as-you-go. So certain calls couldn’t be traced. He was savvy that way.

He flicked it open with a dirt-edged thumbnail.

‘Hey,’ he said, when the man answered. ‘Done.’

‘Any problems?’

‘Nope. Well, one little snag, but it don’t matter.’ He laughed. ‘Happened too fast for ’em. Nobody saw nothing.’ Truth was, it had happened fast for him, too; he hadn’t seen much of anything, either. No faces. He couldn’t tell you how many people were there, or what they were doing. He’d been too focused. Single-minded.

‘Snag?’

‘Like I said, it don’t matter none.’ He belched, not bothering to cover the phone first.

‘Nice.’ The voice on the other end of the line sounded disgusted. ‘Real polite. You really are a pig, you know it? You look like one and you act like one. You’re a damned pig.’

Chill laughed again. The pig thing seemed to be a trend. ‘Well,’ he said, still cocky from having pulled off the job and gotten away clean, ‘this here pig just did a real good thing for you. And this here pig would sure as hell like to know when he’s gonna get paid for doing it.’

‘We’ve been through that already, Charles.’

‘It’s Chill, okay? I go by Chill.’

Chill was his nickname. He’d given it to himself, on account of how cool he was under pressure. People meeting him these days, people who hadn’t known him back in high school, maybe thought it was his real name. He hoped so. He hated his real name.

‘Fine. Whatever.’

‘So,’ Chill said. ‘My money. We was talking about my money.’

‘No. We weren’t. You know what the agreement was.’

‘Yeah. But that was before I done it.’

No reply.

‘You still there?’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Still here.’

‘So how ’bout it?’

‘How about what?’

Chill snorted. ‘How ’bout my money.’

‘When the job is finished. As we discussed.’ The man’s voice had a persnickety edge to it that Chill didn’t like. He’d had to get used to it, though. The boss was a businessman, after all, and businessmen were like