A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,36

scraping noise was soothing to Albie. Maybe he could fool himself into thinking that somebody was coming up behind him. Maybe – just once – somebody was trying to catch up to him and not the other way around. Somebody wanted to play with him, just as much as he always wanted to play with other kids. Kids like Tyler Bevins.

Could this man, Bell had asked herself, looking at the crooked figure in the small cell, lips vibrating, eyes empty, have known what he was doing when he tied a garden hose around the neck of a six-year-old?

Bell rearranged her grip on the steering wheel. Time to stop thinking about the law and start paying attention to the road.

She was getting ready for the most treacherous curve on the entire stretch. If you overshot this one, your next stop would be the bottom of a tree-spiked canyon some 1,600 feet down. Mountain roads, she’d preached to Carla while teaching her to drive, were like a constant series of tests of character; if you got cocky, if you hadn’t learned from experience, you could be in trouble, fast. On the other hand, if you were too cautious, if you held back, you’d never get up the kind of speed required to make it around these steep and unforgiving angles. You had to be both bold and careful, both spontaneous and calculating. Nothing revealed a person’s psychological weaknesses more thoroughly than a mountain road.

So focused was Bell on her driving, so preoccupied, that she hadn’t seen the compact car that had waited just off the road a half a mile back, screened by a tightly woven wall of trees and brush and climbing kudzu. Once the Explorer swept by, the gray compact had oozed from its spot and followed.

She slowed down to prepare for the curve. Without moving her head, her eyes flicked up to check the rearview mirror. Her heart gave a panicky lurch.

There was now a car right behind her. What the hell? she thought. She checked the mirror again. No mistake. The car wasn’t slowing down. It seemed, in fact, to be speeding up. And it was right on track to smash into the back of the Explorer, just as Bell’s momentum slung her into the nastiest curve on the mountain.

11

I gotta tell her. I gotta tell her.

The sentence rode around in Carla’s head all morning long, like a rock in her shoe, annoying her no end. But it wasn’t just a matter of reaching down and digging it out. It was a lot more complicated than that.

She hadn’t deliberately lied. Not at first, anyway. When she told the deputies and then her mom that she didn’t recognize the shooter, she was telling the truth. It was only later, when she started putting certain things together – when she thought about being at that party a while back with Lonnie, and about how this weird guy had shown up, a friend of a friend of Lonnie’s, or something like that, and about how the guy had drugs, some pills and stuff, and he was giving the stuff away, and everybody was real happy – that Carla realized: That guy was the shooter.

The guy at the party.

Piggy eyes. Turned-up nose. He didn’t go to Acker’s Gap High School. Carla was sure of that. She’d only seen him for, like, minutes at the party. That’s why she hadn’t made the connection right away. The party was crazy-crowded. And sticky with sweaty, pressed-together people. Too many people, shoved too close, and music that was way, way too loud, so you couldn’t really think or focus. The guy was in the center of a mob, with people pushing to get at him, to get what he was handing out, the pills, because they were free.

Everything was so different that morning at the Salty Dawg. And it happened so fast, and nobody knew what was going on, and the lighting was totally different, it was bright, and there was the screaming, and all the blood.

‘No, sir,’ she’d said to the deputy, just like the other witnesses had. ‘Never saw him before.’ And she believed it.

Until she remembered.

But how could she tell her mom? If she told her mom that maybe she recognized the guy, Bell would want to know how and from where – her mother always had questions, God, it’s like a regular courtroom around here, Mom, it’s cross-examination time 24/7 – and Carla would be forced to confess she’d been at a