Unearthed (5 page)

Reeve dangled the line, fiddled with the reel a little, drawing it in slowly. He had a good lure on it, one that had caught him a fair few fish over the years. He felt the heat radiating down on his arms, which were already tanned a golden brown after a long, lovely summer. It was October now, and the weather had shown a few hints that those glory days were drawing to a close for fall, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the Caledonia.

Reeve turned his head to glance downriver toward the reservoir that backed up behind the dam. He’d heard his momma tell stories about how the Tennessee Valley Authority had to evacuate some little towns and settlements when they’d built the Tallakeet in the thirties. He’d grown up seeing the top of a silo sticking out of the reservoir, wondering why anyone would build one of those in the middle of the water. Brick and stone, top collapsed God-only-knew how many years ago, it was a remnant that had stood the test of time.

Now he could see the exposed bottom of the thing, along with an old collapsed barn, and some other structures down by the water’s edge. It was off in the distance some considerable ways, but it was there, no doubt. He hadn’t seen the banks of the river this low in his lifetime. Hell of a thing.

Reeve took a breath of the fresh air and finished pulling in his lure. It popped out of the water with a gentle sucking noise, the sound of the reel making a low hum as he finished bringing it back. He flipped the bail without thinking and threw out another cast and listened to it fly through the air, hook catching the sunlight and then landing with a gentle plop on the surface of the river. He let it sit there for a minute, rippling out in little circles before he started reeling it in again.

“Why don’t you try and catch a glimpse of what’s really going on around here?”
he muttered under his breath. He’d repeated the words often over the past six weeks, since the night the Summer Lights Festival in Midian had turned into a fucking turkey shoot, rifles blaring off a hillside, some nut in a cowboy hat and duster climbing the Ferris wheel. And his number one deputy, the kid he’d thought for sure had the guts and the stones to take over for him someday, right in the middle of it all.

Reeve thought about that moment every day. Six weeks later, his exchange with Archibald Stan still burned his ass like a burrito from Surrey’s. It wasn’t the spice that did it, either; it was the incompetence of the making. And it was the same with him and Arch, that little dance they’d done that night. Arch had been up to something, knew something about what had been going on this town.

He sure as shit wasn’t willing to share it, though. Whatever it was, it made him look dirty. Damned dirty. And it left Reeve a man short at a time when he needed all the help he could get.

“I’m gonna catch up with your ass sooner or later, Arch,” he said quietly, a vow he seemed to keep making and repeating, like it would reassure him. “Then I’m gonna stuff you like a—” Reeve felt his face screw up. That didn’t sound right, when he said it like that. “I’m gonna catch you,” he said to the river, the sound of his reel slowly turning breaking the slow drift and ambient noise of nature.

Then again, six weeks on the hunt and he had nothing to show for it. No Arch. No sign of the cowboy. He couldn’t even find Arch’s wife, Alison, or the man in the suit that witnesses had reported helping the cowboy escape.

“Like a goddamned conspiracy against me,” Reeve muttered as the lure popped out of the water again. He cast again out of rote habit, as his mind was miles away. Didn’t even hear the plop of the landing.

What he did hear was the trill of his cell phone ringing on the default setting. He glanced down at the bulky thing on his belt and let one hand off the fishing rod to fumble for it. He ripped open the pouch with the signature sound of Velcro tearing, then fished out the little silver device and checked the faceplate. It was the first thing he’d caught today, and it was just the office calling.

Reeve sighed. He’d left his wife in charge there, answering phones and directing calls, so that he could have a day off, the first in recent memory. He had more open murder cases on his desk right now than even New York City got in a slow month. It was eating at him, watching his little slice of paradise go straight to hell in a handcart. On his watch, no less.

There was nothing for it, though, so he pushed the talk button and held the phone up to his ear. “Yes, dear?”

“Well, that is very informal greeting, Sheriff,” came a smooth, irritating voice from the other side. It probably wouldn’t have been half as irritating if he hadn’t know the jackass it belonged to—County Administrator Pike. That Yankee carpetbagging motherfucker.

“I figured my wife was calling,” Reeve said without much humor. A day wasted, now ruined. “Clearly, I erred.”

“Well, it’s not exactly the first time in recent memory, is it?” Pike was a smug motherfucker, always seemed like he was putting on airs. Took a little too much joy in that particular pronouncement for Reeve’s taste. It got under his skin, big time. “I know it’s been a few weeks and we haven’t had our meeting yet, so I dropped by to talk.”

And he couldn’t have done it any other day in the last weeks, of course, when Reeve had been at the office. “Taking a little break today,” Reeve said instead of opening up on the bastard with both barrels. “It’s been a long month or so.”

“Oh, I know,” Pike said, still smug as fuck. “I think we need to have a face-to-face, talk things over. Get on the same page.”

Sort of like Reeve had called the administrator’s office to suggest, twice a week for the last six weeks. “That is not a bad idea at all,” Reeve said, letting his contempt drip all over that one. “Why don’t you put something on the calendar with Donna while you’re there, and we’ll talk later this week?”

“Oh, I’m not planning on coming back this way for a while,” Pike said.

“I can come to you,” Reeve said. It wasn’t like Calhoun County was a huge place, and the County Administrator’s office was—by a bizarre quirk of county history— in Culver, about thirty minutes from the sheriff’s office. “I haven’t checked over the substation out that way in some time—”

“Why don’t you come on back right now?” Pike said, and there was no mistaking the steel edge in the way he said it. Not a polite request but a firm command. Inflexible and rigid, like the six foot steel pipe the fucker carried up his ass everywhere he went. “We can have our meeting today.”

“Well,” Reeve said, letting the contempt drip because why the fuck not? “I suppose I could be back in an hour or so.”
You’re not the boss of me, sonny, you goddamned Yankee cocksucker
.

“Go ahead and do that,” Pike said. “I’ll just sit here and wait with your missus, look over the station, do all the administrator-ing things I’m supposed to be doing while supervising you.” He made it sound like it was no great imposition, like he was being gracious by making this allowance. Smug. Fuck. “I’ll see you in a little bit, Sheriff.”

The line went dead, Reeve still steaming with the phone next to his ear, and then the other line—the one attached to his fishing pole—went real live, real fast. It jerked in his hands, prompting him to drop his phone. It clattered in the bottom of the boat as he grabbed hold of the rod, gently tugging on the reel to test the strength of what he had on the hook, see if it was set yet.

It damned sure was, he realized as the tip of the rod bent almost into a C-curve by the strength of what he’d gotten. “Better not be a fucking spare tire,” he said out loud. If that was what he caught before having to meet with Pike, he’d send the damned thing to the lab in Chattanooga and have them track down where it had been bought and who bought it, then ticket the shit out of their ass for improper disposal.

The whizzing of the line as he cranked in slowly filled his ear, along with the pounding of his own heart. His arms burned with the effort of holding the rod upright. He wasn’t used to this lately. He was out of shape; it was uncomfortable. “Strong bastard,” he muttered as he continued to reel. The tip of the rod zipped left, then right as the fish tried to escape the inevitable.

It broke the surface about ten feet from the boat’s edge, and looked like a bass for the moment it appeared before submerging again. Not a tire, thank God. That would have been the perfect capper to this shitty day. At least it had been peaceful up until the phone call, just him and his thoughts.

He kept reeling.

The fish broke the surface again, now for the final time. It was flopping as he dragged it out of the water, a big damned bass, bigger than he’d caught before. He used the fishing pole like a crane, just dropping the big bastard in the floor of the boat, not worrying about a net. It heaved, trying to get back to water that was nowhere in sight, gills opening and closing even as it started to settle down.

Reeve held onto the rod and sat back heavily on his chair. This was a keeper, that was for sure. Looked good enough he could put it on the wall in his den. He leaned on the old, smooth fabric of the chair. It felt like leather, but he knew it wasn’t. The padding was worn, but still felt good, and he stared at the bass as it gasped for air.

What would it feel like to live in the same place your whole life, be used to it being one way, and then get jerked out of your comfortable existence to find that just a few feet away from where you’d been doing your thing, there was a whole ’nother world, one you couldn’t survive in? All you could do was flop around and gasp, trying to draw breath, trying to survive in this new place, this new order.

Reeve reckoned it wasn’t that dissimilar from what he felt like at the moment. He wasn’t dying, though, not yet. Just flopping around a lot.

He watched the bass struggle, relating it to his own struggles of late, and eventually the movement subsided, the gills stopped flapping, and it lay still in the bottom of the boat, twitching. Yep, Reeve figured, that was about he felt.

Dr. Lauren Darlington sat in her car out by the freeway, in the parking lot of Fast Freddie’s. In the realm of dives, this one was close to the top of her list, beating out a horde of bars she’d visited in her med school days. It was the sort of shithole that gave other shitholes a bad name, attracting the sort of unwashed masses that were also assholes that she couldn’t imagine finding even at a place up in the hills like the Charnel House. At least those guys were nice. She’d been up there a couple times, and everyone was so damned friendly, even to a city-slicker doc like her.

The sun heated her car to oppressive temperatures as she sat there baking, the engine and air conditioner off, and she wondered why October sucked so much this year. Was it just the natural state of the weather? The warm climate of Midian seemed to match the eighteen manners of hell that the town had been through lately, with death and tragedy permeating the culture of the place.

Or was it that she was seeing demons everywhere she went, hiding behind the eyes of every person she talked to, every patient she treated at the ER?

Lauren was inclined to the think the latter was the culprit; she’d dealt with tragedy before, after all. Being a single mother going through med school and a residency had been a sort of tragedy all its own, especially now that her daughter was a teenager.

She stared at the door of Fast Freddie’s, willing it to open and disgorge the one person she wanted to actually see, but the door stubbornly refused to comply. Even the door here was an asshole.

Giving up on the idea that she was just going to be able to sit in the parking lot until things worked out her way, she opened the door to her car and stepped out into the hot air. The parking lot was dusty and unpaved, a condition unlikely to be remedied anytime soon. She crossed the parking lot, her shoes kicking up an orangish-red cloud with every step. Her white coat trailed her, and she suddenly wished she’d left it in the car, if for no other reason than it proudly proclaimed her as Dr. Darlington, M.D. on the right breast pocket. It had been a gift from her momma when she’d completed her residency, and here in Fast Freddie’s it would stick out like an erection at an all-girls school.

She paused at the door and took a breath, hoping that at least they’d have air conditioning here. She pushed open the door and found that even in this most modest of expectations, Fast Freddie’s had once again failed her.

It was sweltering in that pit, neon beer signs the décor of choice, a pitted and stained bar the biggest draw, set up in the middle of the room. Worn and battered tables filled the majority of the room with the exception of a small corner set aside for a dance floor, she presumed. The jukebox was playing low, a wailing song that she didn’t know—she didn’t listen to country music—coming out of hissing speakers above.

She found her target within seconds of walking in. It was afternoon, it was Midian, and only the hardest of the hardcore drunks were at work on their hobby right now. Them and the warehouse workers that did graveyard shifts. Well, she supposed that the person she was here to see was working graveyard shifts lately, too, which accounted for why she had to come here right now to catch her.

Lauren thought about ordering a beer and discarded it as a bad idea. Not only because the bartender had a sort of wary look in his eye that probably wouldn’t translate well in his interactions with strangers, but because she had no desire to swill whatever amber pisswater was sold in this establishment. Instead she ignored the barman and sauntered over to the table where her target sat, giggling, with a couple other fellows for company. “Can we talk?” she asked as she moseyed up, drawing looks from her target’s companions. Big guys. Warehouse workers. They had the shoulders for it, and the beer guts to match.

“I don’t really have anything to say.” Erin Harris gave her an irritated, half-lidded stare that made Lauren think of a petulant child. Sullen would be another way to put it.

“Well, I’ve got a few things to ask,” Lauren said, pulling a wooden chair out from the next table and scraping it across the old wooden floor to put it next to Erin.

“Hey, lady,” one of the warehouse workers, who had plenty of sullen of his own, “she said she didn’t want to talk.” He was slurring. “Why can’t you just leave us in peace to have our fun?”