Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (15 page)

The rider groaned, a piteous sound choked by pain. That’s when I knew he was a she, and I clutched my head, unbelieving.

Holstering my .40 and taking a quick inventory, I found I was mostly undamaged. By the time I made it to the rider, whose faceguard had failed her to the tune of a mouthful of blood and a broken tooth, the shock had worn off and the pain had settled in. She hissed as I removed her helmet the rest of the way and tossed it aside.

“Jennie Lyn,” I said. “Wiggle your toes for me. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Now let me see your right arm. Move it for me.” She did so, and I pulled her glove off and snapped a cuff on her wrist. “Now your left.”

Having secured the youngest Stiobhard, I sat down in the dirt beside her and let out a long breath. “Who’re the other two? Danny with you?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’ll find out anyway.”

“Henry. We need to go. You need to let me go.”

“You been smoking tonight? Got any sharps, anything on you I shouldn’t find?”

Grunting in frustration, she said, “Clean sober. Got a gun in the ATV and a knife in my jacket. Folding knife. You going to let me go?”

She spoke between short, shallow breaths. Enfolded in her pain, she didn’t wrestle with her restraints.

“Where you headed in such a hurry? You got no time for the trooper?”

“Not for you, either.”

“Well. Nice night.” I looked around. Jennie Lyn wheezed. I asked her, “You think you might have a broken bone in there somewhere?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“You ready to find out, I help you up?”

“Might as well.”

I lifted her to her knees, and from there she was able to stand. She limped over to a rock and sat. I patted her down, pulling a folding knife from her jacket pocket.

“Jennie Lyn, here’s what. We’re going to visit your place.” Last I knew, JL was living with a small group in a turquoise school bus on a scrubby patch of land belonging to the absentee mother of one of her crank-time friends.

“No—”

“We’re going to your place and you’re going to search it for me while I watch. And then I’m going to dig up your neighbors, your old boyfriends, your old girlfriends, and everyone you ever thought of, until we turn up your brother.”

“Henry—”

“I got you on vehicular assault, Jennie, seriously, on a police officer, with everything—you fucked yourself here.” Jennie Lyn shook her head despairingly. I asked, “Can you help me in any way?” She didn’t answer. “Okay, come on.” I pulled on her arm.

“Wait, wait. Please.” The “please” caught me up short. She moved her tongue around in her mouth, winced, and spat blood. “Ma and Dad’s. That’s where. It’s your fat-ass buddies after my folks. We weren’t going to stop for any fuckin statie. It’s my folks. Take me anywhere you want, long as we head there first. Now.”

I helped her limp to the truck, retrieving a battered Springfield 9mm from a compartment in the four-wheeler on our way.

I drove for Mike and Bobbie’s fast as I could, the cab smelling like blood and burning plastic and a hint of gasoline. JL had time to talk. “I don’t know who killed George. If I did, I’d tell you,” she said. I didn’t buy that. “But you might like to know it was kids who stoned the sheriff’s deputy.”

“Oh? That makes sense.”

“Yeah, you heroes dragged a lot of people out of bed last night. Moms and sisters and little fuckin brothers. You made insults to the people here. Anyway, they’re just kids, so I’m not saying their names.”

“As your conscience dictates.” We turned on to Old Account Road. “I’ll tell you what: any more attacks on police up here, I’m coming straight to you.”

Jennie Lyn shrugged. “Just you play fair, Officer.”

“Always.” We had a minute or so left in the drive. I looked at JL sidelong. “You hear from Alan lately?”

“No, why?”

I couldn’t tell whether to believe her. “I don’t know.” Another silence fell. I said, “That kid we found up on the Dunigan ridge.”

She didn’t meet my eyes. “Aub probably did him.”

I wasn’t expecting that. “Why Aub?”

But Jennie Lyn’s face had closed. I sensed a different kind of anger in her, slower and colder—didn’t know what it was about, but it was clear I wasn’t going to hear any more on that subject, not then.

We rounded a bend and saw several trucks parked half off the road on either side of Mike and Bobbie’s driveway. “Motherfuck,” JL said. “You got to uncuff me, Henry.”

“You need to stay here.”

“You kidding?” Hands behind her back, she twisted toward me, displaying a dark bloodstain—chin to chest—that almost disappeared into her camouflage jacket. “You can’t leave me cuffed, Henry! I heard something about George. I did hear something.”

A rifle shot cracked, followed by two more.

“What? Be quick,” I said.

“You’ll uncuff me?”

“You’ll stay in the fuckin truck if I do?”

“I’ll stay here. I swear it.” Jennie Lyn turned, presenting her shackled wrists, which I freed against my better judgment. “Brother Danny said he had an idea who. Someone close.”

“That’s it, ‘someone close’?”

“Someone George was fuckin, some girl? I don’t know, I didn’t know George.”

“Lock the doors and get down. I won’t bring you in tonight, but I need to hear more. If you want to help your brother—”

“I’ll be waiting.”

It was dark on the road. The raised voices I heard changed the night into something smaller. I made for the lights of Mike and Bobbie’s house through the trees—electric lights and something flickering like a torch, but brighter, what looked like a road flare. I didn’t trust my eyes. Since Alan had whacked me one on the head, my relationship to light had changed. Sometimes I saw too much, and it felt like I was seeing my own pain. Other times, what should have been plain before me was shrouded and confused. As I trotted up the driveway, a shadow stepped out of the forest and into my path. A man—a large one—asked me who I was. I took note of the rifle barrel over his right shoulder.

“This is Officer Farrell,” I said, stepping closer, and put my hand to my hip. “Lay it down.”

“Oh. Just got this deer rifle. Ain’t got the magazine in. It’s Barry,” he said. Up close Barry Nolan’s eyes looked more pink and puffy than ever before, and I smelled a barley scent of beer on him. “Jesus,” he said. “Glad you’re here. This is turning into a goddamn mess. It ain’t what I had in mind. Anyway, you caught me on the way out.”

“How many of you are there?”

“The five of us went out looking for Danny Stiobhard. Then we got two woodchucks just pulled up on ATVs behind the house. It’s somewhat of a standoff. Shit, I came in—I came in someone else’s truck, but he’s about to get left.”

“Just wait right here,” I said, and continued up the drive.

Nolan shrugged. “Like I said, it wasn’t what I had in mind.”

From the house, two shots thwacked out. They sounded close enough that training and instinct kicked in and I hit the dirt.

I stood, and when I reached the edge of the yard, I saw that I had been right, that the pulsing light was a road flare, bright white and searing a black patch in the middle of Mike and Bobbie’s lawn. Nearer the perimeter of the woods, there were fresh sprays of dirt in the half-frozen grass. Something didn’t look right about the house; all the lights in the living room were out, and it took me a moment to realize that where the flare should have been reflecting on the big picture window, there was only darkness.

A voice in the woods to my right called out, “Listen, fuckhead, just give us John and we’ll go.”

Another rifle shot erupted from the dark window, and was met with curses from the trees near the edge of the yard. Someone whispered loud enough for me to hear, “Shut up your mouth. You’re giving him a target.”

I walked to the middle of the lawn and stood close enough to the flare that my eyes stung. I held up my badge and turned in a slow circle, announcing myself. “Everyone lay your weapons down and come out of where you are,” I called. No answer came from the woods. And then I heard several men crashing through the brush toward the road. Keeping squarely in Mike’s field of fire, I turned to chase them down.

From the house, Mike called out, “Henry-boy? Got a friend of yours in here.”

I stopped before I hit the tree line. As the pickups’ engines started, I made my choice. “Okay, Mike. Coming in. Better lay your weapon down.”

As I climbed the steps, a movement to the right caught my eye. Without having made a sound, a gaunt young man dressed in camo emerged from the trees on the east side of the house; not looking at me, but not exactly looking away, he returned a blade to his boot. As he did so, another face, hollowed out by drug use and hard labor, emerged from the darkness in the trees and stared at me frankly. The two young men turned and melted back into the woods. I reckoned they had been a minute away from giving the county several more bodies to keep cool. I stepped inside, giving the dog straining against its chain a wide berth.

Mike met me in the living room, looking regal in a tartan bathrobe that almost reached his knees. A gently smoking .30-06 stood up against the wall near the busted window. The living room was dark, but the kitchen was lit, and framed in the doorway I saw township mechanic John Kozlowski sitting at the table, a picture of calm.

“Move slow, now,” Mike said.

As I stepped into the kitchen, I saw why. Pressed up against the base of John’s skull were the barrels of a shotgun; at the other end of it stood Bobbie Stiobhard in bare feet and a patched nightgown. She looked stern and matronly as ever, but her arms were shaking.

Somewhere behind the house, two ATVs kicked off; through a window I watched their lights meander into the trees and gone.

“Bobbie,” I said, “I’m going to sit here across from John, and you can lower that.”

She looked at her husband, who reached out and gently pulled the shotgun away from her. She excused herself to find a sweater to cover up.

“Now,” I said, “what’s all this?”

Here is what happened: Mike and Bobbie were settled in and watching a movie when a stone passed through their front window. Mike sent his wife to the rear of the house, while he retrieved his .30-06 and the road flare. Lighting and flipping the flare out of where his window used to be, he caught the forms of several men lurking in the yard, and sent warning shots in their direction. The men retreated to the trees, and from relative safety began to fight with their mouths. Bobbie was able to reach a friend of Jennie Lyn’s on the phone. Meanwhile, John Kozlowski, emboldened by drink, tried a flanking maneuver to see inside the house, and wound up sitting at the kitchen table. Without Bobbie’s shotgun barrel improving his posture, he looked defeated.

I asked Mike, “Did anyone fire at you, fire at the house, show any weapons?”

“I like to not give them the chance,” he said. “They seem to think Danny shot your deputy, too. How’d they get that, I want to know?”

“Not from me.” In the kitchen, a birdsong clock struck ten with a cheery recording of a nightingale. “So what do you want to do?”

Mike pondered his prisoner, while John sat, arms folded, and wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I can get a man up to fix the window. He don’t work for free, though.”

“Send me a bill,” John said. His tone turned plaintive. “The rock, it wasn’t me . . .”

“But we got you and we don’t got them.” Mike leaned over the table so he could force eye contact with Kozlowski. “Surely you had some rifle with you when you came, a custom Weatherby, maybe, big hunter like you? I don’t see one here. You leave it in the backyard, maybe?”

It took John a while to answer. “No,” he managed, “no rifle.”

Mike looked pleased. “Don’t come up here again or you may not come down. I’m easygoing but I can’t speak for my sons or them they run around with.” Bobbie reappeared in the kitchen. “You find some cardboard for the window? Where the hell is Jennie-girl, anyway?”

AS IT HAPPENED
, Jennie Lyn had disappeared from the truck where I’d left her, and the only sign she’d been there was a wadded-up paper napkin soaked in her blood. She could have been anywhere in the Heights by now. And Nolan had evidently connected with his friends on their way out and found a ride, leaving me and John Kozklowski to limp away in the township truck. I got behind the wheel and we began the long process of leaving the Heights.

After a period of silence, John said, “You going to arrest me? Charge me?”

“I would have if Mike had wanted it. You dumb shit.”

There was another silence. John said, “My truck’s probably at the bar.”

“I don’t care where your truck is. I’m going to the station. You can get home from there however you want.”

We encountered the two state troopers assigned to the area; they had rendezvoused at the initial checkpoint and looked a bit befuddled. I leaned out the window to talk to them. The smile on my face did not come easily.

French asked me, “You hear any shots fired? We couldn’t find the place.”

“I checked; it wasn’t anything. A celebration.” I turned to the other trooper. “You ever catch up with those four-wheelers?”

“That was you up in the clearing?”

“Yessir. Henry Farrell. Sad to say, I let mine get away.”

“No way we’re catching them up here.”

“Suppose not. Good night.”

French gave John Kozlowski a funny look, but let us go.

John and I drifted over country roads and eventually fetched up at the garage. The reporters had given up on me and gone home. I kept the truck idling and John slid under the wheel. I said, “I saw Nolan out there. You going to tell me who the others were?”

Before closing the door and pulling away, he said, “Sorry, Farrell. You can probably guess, so I don’t really need to say, do I? Couldn’t believe my luck when you showed up.”

It comforted me to be back at the station, and before I knew it I’d taken off my boots and socks. I found a plastic bag and dropped JL’s pistol and knife in it, labeling it with her initials and the date, and stowing it in the gun locker. There was a phone message from the sheriff asking me to check in the next morning, and letting me know that one of the roustabouts on a well pad near Midhollow had not made it home to Texas for Christmas, and neither the company that employed him nor his family had had any word since. The tremor of excitement in his voice was unmistakable.