A Grant County Collection (94 page)

'But not in Elawah?'

'Not in Elawah, and not with the Brotherhood,' Nick confirmed. 'How the Fitzpatricks work is, they get a handful of key people in town and if there's a problem, they send in out-of-state help to take care of it. That way, nobody gets their hands dirty and nobody knows who to rat on if they get caught. They're real serious about this Armageddon shit. Jesus is gonna come and wipe out darkie and Carl and Jerry Fitzpatrick are gonna inherit the earth.'

Jeffrey felt his uneasiness grow. It was always the true believers who felt they had nothing to lose. Christ, what had Lena gotten herself mixed up in?

Nick told him, 'There's a couple or three henchmen in Elawah doing the dirty work. Don't ask me their names because I've got no idea. We've kind of poked around, but everything ran cold. Whoever's running them is keeping himself to himself. Playing the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. That's how the organization works. It's not about flash or showing your piece or banging the hos, it's about money and control.'

Jeffrey sat back in the booth, watching Nick add more sugar to his coffee. 'What about the sheriff?'

'Valentine?' Nick shook his head. 'No way Jake's running this. It's too sophisticated. Somebody with a lot of patience and a lot of control is pulling the strings.'

He meant someone older, more mature. 'Cook?'

'I'd buy Cook taking some cash to look the other way, but being a part of it?' Nick shook his head again. 'Might be, but I'd be surprised.'

'Pfeiffer, then? Maybe he got greedy and that's why they threw the firebomb?'

'That'd make sense if there'd been a vacuum. You know how it is – take out the guy and all the cockroaches scramble to take his place. There wasn't a scramble. Matter of fact, you trace back the purity levels and they actually spiked after Pfeiffer left.'

Jeffrey knew that drug agencies tracked their effectiveness through the purity of the drugs on the street. The weaker the mixture, the better they were doing at shutting down the supply line. The higher the concentration, the more likely it was that the bad guys were winning the game.

Jeffrey asked, 'How much money do you think's involved here?'

'Just in Elawah?'

Jeffrey nodded.

'Shit, hoss, more money than you or me's ever gonna see in our lives unless it's in the evidence lockup. They just did that bust up in Atlanta, right? Caught two guys driving a U-Haul packed to the rafters with crystal meth. Paper says the street value's upwards of three hundred million.'

Jeffrey could not even fathom that kind of money. 'The sheriff before – Pfeiffer. Why didn't he call in the GBI?'

'You'll have to ask him yourself.' Nick reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of damp notebook paper. 'When you told me you were in Reece, I assumed you might have some questions I couldn't answer. Sorry it got wet,' he apologized, unfolding the page. 'Old guy lives a far piece out, so you're gonna need a good map. I'll let you borrow mine if you promise to get it back to me.'

Jeffrey scanned the address, noted that the town was at least four hours away from Reece. 'He doesn't have a phone?'

'He's so far off the grid I'd be surprised if he's got electricity.'

Jeffrey looked again at the piece of paper Nick was offering him. Elawah wasn't his county. These weren't his people. Jake Valentine hadn't said word one about needing any help, and even if the man had, it wasn't Jeffrey's job to bail him out. He was here to help Lena, not take on a bunch of skinheads. The problem was, he didn't have much else to go on. Short of following up on Sara's idea and going to the county courthouse to look up the property deed, there was nothing else Jeffrey could think to do.

Sara. He couldn't leave her alone in the motel room while he drove to within spitting distance of the Florida border. Of course, she might make the trip look a little less official. Nick mentioned that Pfeiffer had a wife. Sara could help get the woman out of the way while Jeffrey asked the man some hard questions.

Nick was still holding out the paper. He asked, 'What's it gonna be, hoss?'

Jeffrey hesitated again, thinking about the terror in Lena's voice as she'd told Sara to get out of town. He wasn't fooling anyone, especially himself. 'I'm going to need to borrow your map.'

The Home Sweet Home motel on the outskirts of Reece had been Lena's only option the night before. The two-story cinder block building looked like a slasher movie set out of the sixties. Even as a kid, she'd thought of it as the Whore Hotel, the kind of place where people who didn't want to get to know each other too well met to fuck. At the age of sixteen, Lena had pretended to lose her virginity here. The guy, Ben Carver, was thirty-two, which was about the only thing she'd found attractive about him. He was dull and stupid to the point of being possibly retarded, and she'd been on the verge of breaking up with him until Hank had found out they were seeing each other. Hank forbade her to see Ben again, and the next night, Lena had found herself flat on her back at the Whore Hotel.

She wouldn't say it was the most boring three minutes of her life, but it came close. It was safe to say that when Ben didn't call her the next day, she was far from heartbroken. Lena had been too terrified to think about anything but her fear of being pregnant. Ben had said he would use a condom, but she had been too embarrassed to check. Lena had been completely powerless when it came to protecting herself. The only pharmacist in town refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. As far as she knew, the pharmacy was still owned by the same man today. She bet the bastard had no problem selling Viagra to unmarried men at ten bucks a pop.

Not that birth control pills were a hundred percent effective. There was always that less than one percent chance, that one time when the pill failed and the condom broke, and then before you knew it, you were sitting on a hard plastic chair at a clinic in Atlanta, waiting for your name to be called.

Lena could still remember everything about that day – the texture of the chairs, the posters hanging on the walls. Hank had waited outside, mumbling to himself, pacing the parking lot. He hadn't agreed with Lena's decision, but in his fucked-up Hank way, he had supported her through the whole thing. 'I'm not in any position to cast judgment,' he'd told her. 'We all make mistakes.'

Was it a mistake, though? Most everybody was quick to say that abortion was okay in cases of rape, as if the fact that the woman didn't enjoy the sex negated any squeamishness they might have about the procedure. Lena's relationship with Ethan was a lot of things: tumultuous, violent, brutal ... but then sometimes it could be tender, loving, almost affectionate. The truth was that most of the time, she had willingly had sex with him. Most of the time, she had put her hands on his body, welcomed him into her bed. Could she trace back the conception of their mistake to a specific night, a specific time, and say whether or not it had been consensual or the other kind? Could she separate what it felt like to be beaten by him from the way it felt to be loved by him?

Could she really say that their baby had been a mistake?

Lena sat up in bed, not wanting to think about it anymore.

She made her way to the sink area and took her toothbrush out of her bag; she had not wanted to leave it by the sink last night. God only knew what people got up to on the cracked, plastic basin. The room was even more disgusting than she remembered; the carpet cupped the soles of her shoes as she walked across it and the sheets on the bed were so nasty that she had slept in her clothes. She had basically lay there all night, falling in and out of sleep, startling at any noise, afraid that the creepy night manager would use his passkey and try to catch her off guard. This was just the kind of place where that sort of thing happened.

She had slept with her gun by her hand.

The photograph from the newspaper was seared into her brain, and when she wasn't worrying about being raped and killed, she worried about her mother, the lies she and Sibyl had been told. It was clear now that Angela Adams had not died after two weeks spent lying comatose in the hospital. She had lived at least six months past Lena and Sibyl's birth. On the day the picture had been taken for the newspaper, she had held them in her arms, posing for the photographer as she told the reporter that she thought it was a travesty that her husband's murder had gone unsolved. 'I loved Calvin more than my own life,' she had told the reporter. 'He should be here now being a father to these precious little babies.'

Her words were much more saccharine than Lena would have liked, but the sentiment hit home. Her mother had loved them. She had been devastated by the loss of their father. She had held them in her arms.

Lena walked around the room as she brushed her teeth. When had Angela really died? And how? Hank had said that the thug leaving his house was the man who had killed Angela Adams. The drugs had let down Hank's guard, and she was certain that he had been telling the truth, or at least the truth as he saw it.

But did Hank mean the man had actually, physically killed her mother? He was certainly old enough to have been around when Calvin Adams was shot and killed. Had the thug been the one who ordered the hit on Calvin all those years ago, leaving Angela with no husband and two twin daughters to raise on her own? Had it been too much for Angela to bear? Had suicide seemed like the only way to make the pain stop? Lena could understand the draw. There had been many times in her life when she had considered the option herself.

Suicide might explain why Hank had lied about the timing, the mode, of Angela's death. He didn't want the girls to be burdened with the legacy of their mother's suicide. Lena could understand – if not forgive – that. At least there was some kind of logic to the lies.

If her mother had killed herself, it would also make sense that Hank was trying to do the same. Lena had seen it many times as a cop: suicides ran in families. Without a doubt, if Hank maintained his present lifestyle, he would be dead before the month was out. Whatever he was doing to himself, it was completely and entirely deliberate. Lena had never thought of Hank as anything but a survivor. You didn't shoot junk into your veins for twenty years and still keep breathing if you had a death wish. You didn't suddenly stop hanging on to your life by your fingernails unless someone gave you a damn good reason to let go.

Lena spat into the sink, then used a bottle of water to rinse her mouth.

Hank had always been careful, as if he could distinguish himself between being a user and an abuser. For all his blackouts and open sores, he was careful about one thing. If speed was Hank's religion, he prayed at the altar of his veins. This was where the dope entered his system, and he was rigorous about making sure he took care of them. He never cooked with the same needle he injected with because the spoon or cotton could kink the tip and leave a bigger scar. He always used new needles, fresh alcohol swabs, and vitamin E to keep the tracks down. He didn't smoke before he shot up because that made the veins harder to find, the needle less likely to hit at the right spot.

Sure, there were times when his need overcame his logic; the track marks scarring his forearms, the way he sometimes lost feeling in his hands and feet because the veins couldn't get enough blood to his extremities, betrayed that fact. But, as drug addicts went, he had always been fairly careful.

Until now.

Lena turned on the water in the shower, then changed her mind, thinking she would feel even more filthy if she stepped her bare feet into the soiled, gray bathtub. She checked the lock on the door, then quickly took off her clothes, changing into a fresh pair of underwear and slipping back into her jeans from the day before. She found a T-shirt in her bag and kept her eyes on the door as she put it on.

Hank wouldn't talk to her. He had made that clear yesterday. Whatever his reasons, she knew that he was stubborn – as stubborn as she was. No matter what she said, how much she begged or beat him, he wouldn't talk until he was damn good and ready. The way he looked yesterday, unless a miracle happened, he would more than likely take his secrets to his grave.

Lena caught her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. It was tilted down toward the bed, spidery lines meant to give the appearance of lace framing the corners. She didn't see Sibyl anymore when she looked in the mirror. Sibyl would forever be trapped in a particular time that would never allow her to move on. She wouldn't have tiny lines around her eyes or the faint trace of a scar on her left temple. Her hair wouldn't get those few streaks of gray Lena had found in the bathroom mirror last week and, much to her shame, had plucked out with a pair of tweezers. Even if she'd lived, Sibyl would never have gotten that hard look to her eyes, that flat, cold stare that sent out a challenge to the world.

Sibyl would never know that their mother had lived however long – at least long enough to hold them. She would never know that just as Lena had always predicted, Hank had finally given in to his addiction. Nor would she stand at his graveside, cursing him for his weakness.

Hank was going to die. Lena knew there was no way he could pull himself out of his current condition without some kind of medical intervention. Yet, every time she thought about him, she didn't see the Hank from the last twenty-five years, the one who dutifully attended his AA meetings and ran to Lena's side whenever she called him. She saw the addict of her childhood, the speed freak who chose the needle over his nieces. When Lena thought of his state of decline, she felt the rage only a child can feel toward a parent: you are all I have in the world and you are abandoning me for a drug that will destroy us all.

That's what addicts didn't see. They weren't just screwing up their own lives, they were screwing up the lives of everyone around them. There were some nights of Lena's childhood when she had actually kneeled on the side of her bed and prayed that Hank would finally mess up, that the needle would go too far, the drug would be too potent, and he would finally die. She had envisioned adoption, a mother and father to take care of her and Sibyl, a clean place to live, order in their lives, food on the table that didn't come out of a can. Seeing Hank now, knowing the state he was in, Lena could not help but recall those sleepless nights.

And part of her – a very big part – said to let him die.

Lena sat on the bed as she tied her sneakers. Thinking about Hank wasn't going to get her anywhere but back in bed feeling sorry for herself. She wasn't sure what she was going to do today, but her top priority was getting out of this dingy room. The library's microfiche archives didn't go past 1971. The newspaper office was based out of the back room of an insurance company, so Lena didn't have much hope that they kept old issues. Still, she would try to get in touch with the weekly's editor, a man whose full-time job was picking up roadkill off the interstate.

Lena supposed she could find her mother's death certificate through the proper state office, but she would need Angela's Social Security number, place of birth, or at the very least her last known address in order to help her narrow the search. She knew both her mother's and father's birth dates from her own birth certificate, but beyond that, there was nothing. The hospital might have kept a billing address or other pertinent information, but she would need a warrant to get that information. She had thought about trying the county courthouse, but according to the message on their phone, they were closed while asbestos tiles in the floor were being removed.

Since the motel was right next door to Hank's bar, Lena decided she might as well start there. Technically, the Hut was not in Reece's city limits. Like a lot of small towns all over America, Elawah was a dry county. If you wanted to buy liquor, you had to cross the county lines into Seskatoga, which explained why the Elawah sheriff's department spent most of its weekends scraping teenagers off the road that led out of town.

Lena opened the door to her room and immediately closed her eyes, her retinas screaming at the sudden light. She blinked several times to regain her vision, staring at the floor of the concrete balcony. Just to the left of her foot, she saw a small, red X chalked onto the ground, maybe three inches square.

She knelt down, running her fingers along the red mark, wondering if it had been there when she checked in last night. It had been dark, but the ancient sign outside the motel cast enough light to see by. But, Lena hadn't been looking at the ground as she walked into the room. She'd been concentrating on the basics: bringing in her bag, finding her toothbrush, falling in to bed.

Lena looked at the tips of her fingers, saw that the chalk had transferred to her skin. The chalk mark didn't mean anything except that the maid didn't clean much. Judging by the state of Lena's room, the woman wasn't exactly thorough.

Still, Lena glanced around as she stood back up. No one jumped out at her, and she went to the balcony and scanned the parking lot. Except for a motorcycle parked in the handicap space, her Celica was the only vehicle there.

She looked back at the ground. An X. Not a swastika, not a cross. Just a red X to mark the spot.

Lena wiped her hand on her pants as she strolled across the balcony toward the stairs. She kept her eyes on the ground, looking for other marks, trying to see if any of the other rooms had been singled out. There was nothing out of the ordinary, just cigarette butts, trash, and a few leaves, though the closest tree to the motel was about twenty feet away in the forest that ran behind the building.

She stopped in the front office to get a cup of coffee. There was a box of change by the pot, requesting fifty cents for each cup. Lena dropped a dollar in the box and stood looking into the parking lot as she poured herself a cup.

'Nice morning,' a man said. She turned toward the front counter and saw that it wasn't a man, but a teenager – the redheaded would-be gangsta she had seen in the Mustang outside the school yesterday.

She said, 'Shouldn't you be in school?'

'Work release,' he told her, leaning against the wall behind the counter. His T-shirt was so big the shoulders lapped around his elbows. He had a belly on him, but she could tell from his large hands and feet that he would lose that in the next few years as he grew into his body. He would still have that carrot-colored hair, though, and those freckles would never go away.