were getting squeezed in a lot of different directions. There was more competition out there. It wasn’t the way it used to be, just a while ago. Things were relatively easy then. No more.
Silence. Chill wondered if the boss had hung up.
No. He hadn’t. He was, as always, strategizing. Sizing things up. Planning ahead. The boss was very, very smart.
‘Okay,’ the boss said. ‘I’ve made my decision. I’m sick of this. Sick of the aggravation. We need to quit fooling around and just go right to the top. One bold strike. Put them on notice – they’d better stay out of our way.’ Another pause. Chill imagined he could see the boss thinking, stroking his chin with a finger. ‘Although,’ the boss continued, ‘I’m not sure yet about how or when to do it. Because once it’s done, that’s it. I can’t use you anymore, at least not around here. It’s far too risky. And it’s not like it’s going to be easy. What you did today – that was a piece of cake. This’ll be a lot tougher. Especially if you use firearms. So I want you to become a bit more creative.’
Chill grinned. With the tip of his tongue, he touched each empty socket where a tooth should’ve been. He did it twice. It was a ritual with him now. His lucky charm. ‘No worries, man. So who’s next?’
‘That bitch. Belfa Elkins. The prosecuting attorney.’
6
Bell pulled into her driveway and shut down the engine. She’d driven through a dark town to get here. Night fell blunt and heavy in the mountains, like something shot cleanly out of the sky that drops to earth with a whisper.
The big stone house with the wraparound porch reared up on her right, massive, imperturbable. Peppy yellow light filled the first-floor windows. No lights burned in any other house on the block. People in Acker’s Gap went to bed early and got up early; you’d find more lights on at 4:30 A.M. than you would at 9:30 P.M.
She opened the door of her Ford Explorer and felt a mean pinch of cold. If it was already this chilly in November, a hard winter was waiting for them. Hard and long. Standing on the blacktopped driveway, Bell reached back into the vehicle, scooping up her briefcase in one hand and her empty coffee mug in the other. She shut the door with a cocked knee.
In the distance, a dog yodeled his protest. He’d probably smelled a coon, and now strained painfully against a stake-out chain. Each elongated bark ended in a series of high-pitched yips. The yips bounced and echoed, hitting the cold air one by one with a ping! like a strike by a tiny bright hammer.
And then the sounds abruptly stopped, which meant the dog had either given up on the coon or was just taking a short break.
Bell hoped it was the latter. She didn’t like the idea of anybody giving up on a chase these days, no matter what the odds.
It was later than she wanted it to be. Much later. She’d planned to get home to Carla a long time before now, but as the meeting with the sheriff had gone on and on, she’d resigned herself to the necessity of being painstakingly thorough. To getting a jump on the case. To doing things right. She’d explain it all to Carla. And Carla would understand.
Of course she would. Wouldn’t she?
Bell paused a moment at the bottom of the porch steps, looking not at the house but above it, beyond it, back up at the mountain, as if it had, just now, softly called her name.
It knew her name very well.
It knew because the past was always present here, no matter what time your wristwatch tried to tell you it was. Time was like a mountain road that wound around and around and around, switching back, twisting in a series of confusing loops, so that you were never quite sure if you were in forward or reverse, going up or going down, heading into tomorrow or falling back into yesterday, or if, in the end, it really made all that much difference.
Before she’d left the courthouse, she and Fogelsong had gone over the preliminary forensics and ballistics reports from Charleston, which had finally come stuttering out of the fax machine. They’d fielded a call from Floyd Fontaine over at Fontaine’s Funeral Home about the timetable for releasing the bodies, referring him to the county coroner’s office. They’d conferred with Nick’s