Devil's Oven (10 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Tripp pulled onto the highway from the sheltered driveway in which he had been waiting, and brought the truck up to the SUV’s quickly increasing speed. Lila was alone. He flicked on the emergency lights behind the truck’s grill. She took so long to pull off onto the shoulder that he thought she might be ignoring him.

“What in God’s world do you think you’re doing?” she said when he walked up to the window. “What if Bud was with me?”

So she was all right. She wasn’t lying in a hospital or her bedroom, sedated out of her mind, or being questioned by the police with a lawyer sitting next to her. He was relieved to see her even if she was pissed off. Which she definitely was.

A sedan slowed as it approached them so its elderly driver could get a good look at what might be going on. Tripp gave a terse nod and waved it off.

“Baby, if you’d answer your phone, this wouldn’t be necessary,” he said. Standing on the side of the road, he wasn’t about to go into how he hadn’t been able to get her off his mind, how he had spent another night alone, alternating beers with aborted calls to her cell phone. He had left four or five messages, and as it got later and later he had gotten more and more worried. By the time he fell into bed, he had felt like a fool.

“I want to talk,” he said.

Lila took off her sunglasses. Her vibrant green eyes were red, strained. She looked exhausted.

“Shit,” she said. “Not today. Please, Tripp.”

“You want me to get in, or should I follow you?” he said. “Doesn’t matter to me.”

•  •  •

Hawk’s End was one of the lesser-used hiking trails on Devil’s Oven. Tripp parked his state truck in the lot and unlocked the gate to the service road so that Lila could drive on through. He got in the passenger seat of the SUV, and she didn’t say anything as they drove the half-mile to the place where they had a habit of parking. And having sex. This morning, she put the truck in Park, but left it running.

He knew he should be careful with her, but his head still ached with the memory of Claude Dixon’s body. He couldn’t let it go.

“What did you tell them?” Lila said, staring ahead at the trees. The ten-minute drive had calmed her. “Nobody asked me anything. Not even Bud.” At her husband’s name, did her voice get that much quieter, or was Tripp imagining it?

“Poor sonofabitch,” he said.  “That psycho killed him and brought him all the way to my place. Why all the way up there, do you think?”

She turned to face him.

“I bought Christmas presents for his kids every year. Bud dressed up like Santa, and the little girl got scared and hid in the break room,” she said. She put her face in her hands.

He knew then that she couldn’t get the image out of her mind, either.

With her head bent, he could see more than a few silvery roots along her purposely messy part. It occurred to him, for the first time, that they were almost exactly the same age. For some reason he had always thought of her as being younger, even though they had known each other forever.

“You ever seen a dead body before?” he said.

“What?” She looked up, letting her hands drop to her lap.

“They aren’t supposed to look like that,” he said. “Somebody blows his own head off, it doesn’t look like that. His neck was, I don’t know, it was like taffy, like it came off one of those pulling machines they used to set up at the fair.” He imagined the killer’s hands like the metal arms of the machine, stretching Claude Dixon’s neck until the skull broke out of the top of his head. It was fascinating somehow, animal in its brutality. “I don’t know why it reminded me of that. It was like the killer thought it was some kind of joke. Like he was showing off.”

 “Jesus, Tripp,” she said, shifting away from him, putting her back against the door. “That’s not funny.”

Reading the fear in her face, he knew he had let his mind drift too far into the dark places he had visited over the past fortysome hours.

“No. No,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to scare you. But doesn’t it seem like we were meant to see what happened to Claude Dixon? You and me?”

“You’re reading way too much into this,” she said.

“It can’t be a coincidence,” he said.

“I’m not talking about this anymore. I’m not talking about Claude Dixon,” she said, her voice rising. “Is this why you’ve been calling me, because you want to
talk
about it? Did you take pictures, for God’s sake?”

“This happened to
us
,” he said. “You can’t pretend like it didn’t.”

He understood she was vulnerable. He knew for damn sure she was afraid. A person couldn’t walk away from that kind of trauma without being affected by it. But why wouldn’t she let him help her? She was on the edge of something, maybe breaking down in front of Bud. Maybe she had already told Bud. The thought twisted Tripp’s guts. They had to get through this together, to keep it between the two of them. He reached for her.

“Stop it,” she said. “Don’t even.”

He recognized her tone. Once, when they were high school seniors, he had seen a freshman boy trip with his lunch tray, sending chocolate pudding and lasagna flying across the ten feet separating him from where Lila sat with her clique. The sleeve of Lila’s white sweater had been splattered with brown globs of pudding. When the trembling boy tried to apologize and offered to clean it up, she didn’t even look at him, but ordered a girl beside her to get the backpack from her locker and meet her in the bathroom. It was the girl who looked like she was about to pee herself.

 “Treating me like shit isn’t going to help you get over this,” he said.

“Why don’t you get that I’m already over it?” she said. “Starting now, as far as either of us is concerned, I wasn’t there.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“No,” she said, jabbing a finger at him. “
You
made the mistake when you let that slut get into your truck. That’s where you stand. I’m just married to the boss of a guy who happened to get murdered. Get out of my car.”

Shit.
It was back to the girl, Jolene. She had been the reason Lila—a mad-as-hell Lila—came to see him that night.

“She needed a ride,” he said. “She was sick.” Even as he said it, he knew it sounded like a lame excuse. The kind of excuse guilty men gave their wives or girlfriends every day.

“Oh, yes. They’re all sick, aren’t they?” she said. “Or broke.” She began to tick off on her fingers. “Or pregnant. Or twelve-stepping. Or lonely. And just like Bud, you’re the knight in shining fucking armor.”

He winced at her profanity. His mother had never cursed, telling him that women who cursed lacked imagination. He wasn’t worried about Lila’s imagination. She was inventive enough when he got her alone in his bed, or on his couch or in his backyard under a starry sky.

“She’s also one of Bud’s employees,” he said, unable to curb the edge in his voice. Sometimes she pushed him too far. He turned sarcastic. “Thought you cared about all of them.”

“Get out,” she said, shoving him away. “Out!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t fair.”

“Get away from me or I’ll go out to the road and flag down the first trooper I see and tell him there’s a psychopath who won’t get the hell out of my truck.”

He wanted to tell her that she had a good chance of making it all the way down to Alta before she would see more than two cars of any kind. He wanted to grab her and hold her and make her understand that she needed to trust him. Only him.

Before he could say anything more, she had the door open and was out of the truck, her purse bouncing against the doorframe as she hoisted it onto her shoulder. She slammed the door.

“Lila, wait!” He tried to climb over the console separating the two front seats and fell, jamming his chest against the steering wheel. As he righted himself, he accidentally hit the horn, sending its cheerful blast into the surrounding woods. By the time he was able to get out, she was a good way down the road.

“Listen to me, please.”

She turned around, walking backward for a few steps.

“You think you know every damn thing,” she shouted back at him. “We all knew you were the one who snitched about us having the answers to the chemistry final. You always were a loser! I don’t know why I ever let you come near me.”

Every step was another hammer pound on his headache. Why wouldn’t she listen? He’d just wanted to see her, to comfort her. But he’d ended up sounding like a needy idiot. What was she saying? She was running now, unsteady in the heels she wore with her snug-fitting jeans.

Tripp began to run, too.

“Damn it,” he said. The sun glinting through the trees was pure and white as moonlight.

She took a sudden right into the woods. If they had been farther up the mountain where the fallen pine needles swallowed every footstep, her detour would have been silent and he might have lost her. But down here, he could hear her rustling progress through last fall’s sodden leaves.

“Stop,” he called. She was headed for the trail, but he knew she could easily lose her way. The trees weren’t crowded here, but as he ran, the sunlight faded so that he couldn’t see more than twenty feet ahead. The day seemed to be moving backward, the two of them running toward the early dawn.

Tripp stopped, listening. Knowing how the first hundred yards of the trail paralleled the service road, he took a hard left, almost colliding with a boulder that rose up without warning in the dimming light.

When he could no longer hear her, he guessed she might have reached the trail. He thought of the wolf he had seen near his cabin. Worse, he thought of whoever had killed Claude Dixon. Where was he/it hiding?

“Lila!” His voice sounded hollow in the silent woods.
No birdsong. No quarreling squirrels.

He jogged a little farther and the trees thinned even more. The bright blue bench that sat just a few hundred feet from the trail’s head broke out of the gloom. He slowed, breathing hard. His footsteps were silent on the trail’s hard-packed dirt.

Why couldn’t he see? For a moment he wondered if it wasn’t his eyesight. Maybe the headache had burst some blood vessels in his eyes.

He called her name again. By now she might even be back at the SUV.

Rounding a hard curve around a blistered oak tree, his foot caught on something and he nearly fell.

A woman lay in the middle of the trail. The pure, waxing moonlight spread over her alabaster skin. A lock of thick black hair curled against her cheek, and her eyes were closed. She hugged her knees to her chest as though for comfort.

“Jolene,” he whispered, wanting to wake her, but knowing at the same time that he shouldn’t.

She opened her eyes, which were as black as her hair, and turned her head just
that much
so she could look up at him. She smiled the smile of an angel and extended her arms to him like a child.

Tripp was certain he had been here before, but he couldn’t remember when.

He knelt to take her in his arms. Sliding one arm beneath her neck—her skin was as cool as marble against his arm—and the other beneath her knees, he lifted her. She weighed almost nothing, as he had known she would. Beef jerky and corn chips, Dwight had said, and obviously not much of either. She nestled against him, resting her head on his biceps. As he carried her down the trail, he breathed in the scent of her. She smelled of the woods—green, fragrant, deep woods—after a heavy rain. But there was something else, too. Woodsmoke.

Neither of them spoke.

He wasn’t sure where they would go. He only knew there was a building sense of urgency in his chest.

The trees fell away behind them as they reached the trail’s head. Tripp looked to the sky, stunned to find it was once again filled with bright sunlight.

The girl tensed in his arms and began to struggle. When he looked down at her, he saw that her eyes were now green and she was no longer smiling. Her hair, which had been soft like ebony silk, was now red and coarse against his skin.

“Put me down,” Lila said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Bud grabbed the ostrich-leather briefcase he had never much cared for from the truck’s passenger seat. Like any gift from Lila, he made generous use of it and kept any unflattering opinion he had about it to himself. But given that it contained a hundred and fifty thousand in cash at that moment, he would have preferred it to look less expensive, less conspicuous.

He felt like hell after the long, restless night with Lila. After the troopers left, she had spent most of the day in bed, watching television and reading. She had no interest at all in what the police had asked him. It was as though she wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. But when they both went to bed that night, she had struggled in her sleep, constantly talking beside him as she slept. The words were unclear, but she sounded angry, sometimes frightened.

The scene at the trucking office was similarly chaotic. The two secretaries were doing their best to keep up with the tight logistics schedule that Claude had set up for the week. Everyone was grateful at how organized Claude had been, but it didn’t make them feel any better. Claude was the guy everyone liked.

Bud crossed The Twilight Club’s back parking lot, anxious to get inside. Beneath his jacket and sport shirt, his skin wore a layer of cooling sweat. If the manager of the Mountain Fidelity Bank’s main branch weren’t one of his hunting buddies, he knew he would have been in much rougher shape. Not just anyone would have cashed that kind of check with only a day’s notice. Another bank officer would have hinted that Bud should get caught up on the loans the bank had already made to his businesses before he walked out of the building with that much cash.

In many ways he felt lucky, despite the fact his entire life was imploding. He had even gotten the money from his old man with a smaller-than-usual amount of bullshit harassment. His father’s low-key response might have had something to do with dropping testosterone levels and his shrinking frame. Old age wasn’t being kind to him.

He let himself in the club’s back door and found Dwight headed into the office with a box of lightbulbs. Dwight squinted against the flare of sunlight from the open door.