A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,47

prosecutor’s office.

Glenna. That was it, right? Yeah.

The name of Sam’s girlfriend was Glenna Saint-something-or-other. Bell would have to get used to the name. This Glenna person would become a daily part of Carla’s life. She’d see more of Carla than Bell did.

Bell would get Skype and e-mail. Glenna would get the real thing.

‘Hey,’ Bell said hurriedly into her cell, trying to keep her voice steady, nonchalant, so Hick Leonard wouldn’t guess at the emotion that had just rocked her with that last realization. ‘What’s going on, Hick?’

16

Chill opened the door of his motel room. He wasn’t tentative about it. He did it with authority – in fact, with a sort of grand flourish, like what you’d see in the movies, so that if it wasn’t who he expected it to be, they’d know he wasn’t scared of them. That he wasn’t scared of anything.

But it was just who he’d expected it to be, even though he’d never seen her before in his life. The woman was as skinny as the leg of a card table. She had flat, lank brown hair. Both greasy halves of it fell away from a crooked middle part. Thin arms dangled at her sides. Each arm concluded in a dirty little scallop of a hand. She was wearing a tight white tank top from which the tiny nipples of her small breasts bumped out like minor imperfections in the fabric. Her jeans, even tighter than the tank top, ended at mid-calf, and the white band of exposed flesh had gone bloody from constant scratching. Clawing, it looked like, as much as scratching. She wore red flip-flops.

The flip-flops bothered Chill. This was fall, and fall wasn’t flip-flop weather. He also thought the flip-flops were disrespectful. This was a job, right? A profession? She was getting paid, and if you got paid for something, you damned well ought to think about the impression you were making to the boss. And he was the boss.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘You’re Lorene, right?’

‘I’m Lorene.’ She didn’t move.

‘I said to get on in here,’ Chill said. He was testy. She was pissing him off. ‘Now.’ He looked past her, out into the parking lot, and to the road beyond it. There was nobody there. His car was the only vehicle present. No cars went by on the road. Still, he was nervous.

She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. ‘I gotta see the money first,’ she said. Her voice sounded so bored and generally absent that Chill wanted to smack her just to get a reaction. She was like a goddamned turtle, he thought; she was like one of those big slow turtles with the shells hard as concrete that live for, like, a couple of centuries, and only breathe or twitch once every fifty years or so. You can’t even be sure they’re alive unless somebody tells you they are.

For the first time, he took a good look at her face. Acne had done a number on it, turning the petite surface into a catalog of nicks and bumps and red-rimmed craters. Her eyes were blank. She’d tried to smear on some makeup, but the effect was comical; she looked, Chill thought, like a goddamned clown. Her nose was too big. Her mouth was too small. Well, he told himself, you get what you pay for, doncha?

He’d found her number the night before in a phone booth in front of the Shell station outside Rainey Hollow. The presence of the phone booth had surprised him. You didn’t see so many of them anymore. Everybody had cell phones now. After he’d gassed up the piece-of-shit compact, he’d gone over to the phone booth and pulled open the hinged door and peered inside. It smelled like somebody had puked in there a month ago and then turned around and slapped the door shut, trapping the smell, turning that sour puke smell into a solid block. The smell knocked him back, but he still wanted to look inside, so he did.

The black plastic receiver, its top half missing, was off the hook for good. It hung down on a ridged silver cord that looked like a dead snake. Somebody had maybe smashed that receiver against the side of the booth, because there was an angry-looking starburst pattern in the glass, and the top part of the receiver was, Chill saw, lying on the floor in a couple of pieces. What coulda made somebody mad enough to slam the receiver like that? Coulda been