Hellbox (Nameless Detective) (22 page)

“Only relatives he’s got live under rocks.”

Runyon said, “We understand you’ve had some trouble with him.”

“I’m not the only one. He’s an asshole.”

“So we’ve heard. The Mayor of Asshole Valley.”

“Yeah.” Verriker’s mouth twitched. “I nailed him good with that.”

“And he didn’t like it.”

“Not anymore than I liked what he done to me one time.”

“What was that?”

“Tried to cheat me on some repair work.”

“Where? At your home?”

“My home. Yeah.”

“And you confronted him,” I said. “Then what happened?”

“Come skulking around one night, slashed all the tires on my van.”

“How do you know it was Balfour?”

“Just his kind of mean trick, but I couldn’t prove it. Lied through his teeth when I called him on it.”

“Come to blows with him then, or any other time?”

“No. He won’t fight a man, always backs down.”

“But he’ll beat up on a woman.”

“His ex-wife, yeah. Goddamn coward.”

“He ever hurt another woman that you know about?”

“Never had another woman. Too ugly, too mean.”

“Violent. A violent coward.”

“Cut your throat if he thought he could get away with it.” Verriker stirred, showed a little animation for the first time. “Why you asking about Balfour? What’s he got to do with your wife being missing?”

“We don’t know that he has anything to do with it.”

“But you think he might, or you wouldn’t be here. Why?”

“He lied to us about his whereabouts the afternoon it happened. Told us he was working at the fairgrounds, but he wasn’t.”

“Where you think he was?”

“There’s an old logging road in the east hills a few miles up-valley. My wife was walking there Monday afternoon—the house we’re renting isn’t far away.”

“That’s where she disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“I know that road,” Verriker said. “Nobody uses it much anymore. Balfour wouldn’t have any reason to be up there.”

“We don’t know for sure that he was.”

Silence for a stretch of seconds. Then Verriker blinked, blinked again, and said, “Wait a minute. Monday afternoon. That’s when my house blew up, late Monday afternoon.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did Runyon.

Verriker’s gray face was mobile now, the dead eyes alive again. He gripped the wooden arms of his chair, lifted himself to his feet. “Accident, that’s what everybody said, but I couldn’t figure how it happened. We never had any gas leaks. I checked the lines and fittings regular.”

Nothing for a few seconds, while he went on connecting the dots. Then, “That logging road runs near the south edge of my property. Be easy to slip down through the trees from the road. Easy to get inside the house, too. Nobody home during the day, nobody around.” Blood-rush had darkened Verriker’s face. He made a fist of one hand, slammed it into the palm of the other. “Balfour. He did it, didn’t he. That son of a bitch made a death trap out of my house.”

“It’s possible,” Runyon said, “but there’s no proof—”

“The hell with proof. He killed my Alice, he tried to kill me—that’s how you figure it, and how I figure it now, too. I’ll fix him, I’ll tear his fucking head off!”

Verriker pivoted away from us. Runyon and I hustled after him, got in his way as he came off the dock. I said, “No, let us handle this.”

“He murdered my wife!”

“And my wife is still missing. Balfour may be responsible for that, too, but if he is, we don’t have any idea where he might be holding her.”

“She could be dead like Alice—”

“She’s not dead. She’s alive and we’re going to find her, but it has to be done our way. I feel for you, I share your rage, but if you try to go after Balfour on your own, we’ll have to stop you.”

The words got through to him. He looked at me, at Runyon, saw that we were dead serious. Battle of wills for a few seconds, then the aggressive anger melted and he said, “All right. But I ain’t gonna sit around here doing nothing.”

“You won’t have to. You can help us.”

“How?”

“We’re going back to the fairgrounds for another talk with Balfour. You come along. We’ll put him in a three-way vise and squeeze him, hard. If he’s guilty and as much of a coward as you say he is, we’ll break him.”

Verriker thought that over, nodded. “What if he doesn’t break?”

“Then Jake will keep an eye on him and you and I’ll take our suspicions to the county law.”

“Broxmeyer? He wouldn’t listen.”

“We’re wasting time. Are you coming or not?”

“… Okay. I’ll follow you in my van—”

“No. I’ll ride with you and we’ll follow Jake.” I didn’t want him changing his mind on the way in, veering off half-cocked on his own.

He went into the cabin for his keys and we got moving. Verriker and I didn’t exchange a word on the drive into town. There was nothing more to say. From the grim set of his face, I knew the kind of thoughts that were tumbling around inside his head—they wouldn’t be much different from the ones I was having.

It was a long fifteen minutes until we trailed Runyon through the open fairground gates. When we neared the construction site, my fingers dug tight into the palms of my hands. The same two cars parked in the same spots as earlier, that was all. No sign of Balfour’s pickup.

The gray-haired Latino, Eladio Perez, and the red-haired kid were eating an early lunch in the shade under one of the trees. Runyon drove up near them, got out in a hurry. Verriker and I followed suit. I heard Jake asking where Balfour was, and Perez’s answer as I ran up.

“He leave right after you talk to him, don’t say where he goes.”

“And he hasn’t been back?”

“No. He don’t come back.”

Verriker said, “Shit!” a half-second before the same word jumped out of my mouth.

25

Balfour’s front gate was still closed and padlocked. But he’d been there. I could tell that as soon as Runyon pulled into the driveway, confirmed it when I crossed the bridge to the gate and squinted through the chain links. The doors to the workshop had been shut when we’d stopped by earlier; now they stood wide open. And there was no sign of any vehicle on the property other than the stake-bed truck. Come and gone.

Jake hurried up. He’d taken his .357 Magnum out of the locked glove box, was stuffing it inside his belt; sunlight shone on its polymer frame. Just the two of us again—we’d sent Verriker to the sheriff’s substation, to see if Broxmeyer was back from his north valley call and if he was, to try to convince him we were right about Balfour. We didn’t tell Verriker where we were going; if the time had come to start breaking the law—and it had—it was our business.

Runyon said, “What do you think?”

“Balfour knows we’re on to him. He wouldn’t have come here if he didn’t.”

“After money, maybe, if he’s panicked enough to run.”

“And Kerry.”

“If this is where he’s been holding her.”

“Where the hell else?”

“He didn’t have to’ve taken her with him. She could still be here.”

“Pray to God he’s that scared and that stupid.”

The gate and fence were eight-feet high, but not topped by anything like barbed wire that would’ve made for a difficult climb-over. Runyon gave me a boost up; I clawed my way astride the top bar, managed to slide down the other side without doing myself any damage. I was already running toward the workshop by the time he scrambled over.

Now that we were inside, I could see that a long length of staked-down cable had been strung in the grass between the workshop and the house. Dog-run line. Runyon spotted it, too, pulled the Magnum and held it down along his leg as we ran—defense against the guard dog if it attacked us. The animal was making a hell of a racket from behind the house, but it didn’t come charging into sight. We were near the open workshop doors before I saw it: a big black-and-brown pit bull dancing around and half strangling itself in savage lunges at the end of long lead looped over the ground cable. Some sort of stake-hold in the line kept it from coming any closer than the house’s rear corner.

The workshop’s interior was cavernous, choked with the smells of heat and sawdust. The middle was open all the way to the rear, a space large enough for a couple of small trucks to park end to end. We split up to search among the rows of power tools, piles of lumber, construction business odds and ends. No sign that anyone other than Balfour had ever been in there. Both door halves standing open said that he’d driven inside today, but there was nothing I saw that told me why.

We made tracks for the house. The pit bull’s leash let it come about halfway around one side, not far enough to keep us from going up onto the porch. The animal was in a frenzy now, yowling and snarling. The collar around its neck was one of those thick spiked jobs, the lead appeared to be more of the same type of cable, and the stake-hold must have been driven deep into the ground. If the dog had any chance of tearing loose, it would’ve happened by now.

The front door was unlocked; Runyon went in first. Half a dozen rooms plus one bathroom, all of them empty, all of them cluttered and unclean. My gorge rose when I stepped into what had to have been Balfour’s bedroom, but not because of the smelly pile of unwashed clothing in one corner. The bed was a mess, blanket and sheets all twisted together. I made myself untangle them so I could examine the sheets. Gray, dirty, but without the kind of stains I dreaded finding.

Runyon was at the rear window in the other bedroom when I went in there, pulling the curtains back so he could see out. I took a look at the bed even though I knew he’d already checked it. Unmade, the bare mattress free of both stains and body marks. When I pushed down on it, a little cloud of dust puffed up. If anybody had ever lain on that mattress, it had been months, even years, ago.

Jake said my name, motioned me over to the dirt-streaked window.

I peered out. Another outbuilding sat across the rear yard to the right, small, squat, with a sheet-metal roof that threw off daggers of sunlight. Some kind of shed. A door in the facing wall stood open, but the distance and the angle of the sun kept me from seeing inside. The pit bull was back there now, racing frantically back and forth along a section of the ground cable that stretched to within a few yards of the shed; its lead was long enough to let it roam up close along the front wall.

I swallowed a reflux of stomach acid before I said, “That’s where he had Kerry.”

“How it looks.”

“Staked the dog back there so it could guard the door in case she managed to get out. Sick son of a bitch! Be like an oven in there with that sheet-metal roof.”

“Yeah.”

Bad enough thinking of Kerry imprisoned in a sweatbox, but the likelihood that she’d been in there this morning was like a knife in my gut. I slammed my fist against the wall beside the window. “Goddamn it, if we’d come here right after we talked to Balfour, we might’ve found her.”

“My fault,” Runyon said. “I talked you out of it.”

“No. I talked myself out of it. Too damn many years of playing it straight, staying within the law.”

“You want to go over there now?”

“You’d have to shoot the dog first, and we’d just be wasting time. If she was still there, the door’d be shut.”

He didn’t look at me, didn’t say anything. I knew what he was thinking: the door wouldn’t need to be shut if Kerry was lying in there dead. No way, Jake. No way. I’d’ve sensed it by now, I’d be a basket case.

“He took her with him,” I said. “Alive.”

“Hostage.”

“Yeah. Hostage. And that’s why he’ll keep her alive.”

The pit bull’s ceaseless racket echoed and re-echoed inside my head, making it pound, and scraping like sandpaper on my raw nerves. I turned away from the window, hurried back into the front part of the house.

In the living room, on a scarred table next to a food- and drink-stained easy chair, I spotted a pad with heavy block printing on the top sheet. Pad of business invoices headed B
ALFOUR
C
ONSTRUCTION.
The same inked words scrawled over and over in a vertical line like column entries, with such angry force that the point of the pen had torn the paper in four or five places.

Verriker dead

Verriker dead

Verriker dead

Verriker dead

Verriker dead

VERRIKER DEAD!

I showed it to Runyon. “We’ve been chasing around looking for evidence … all right, here’s some even Broxmeyer can’t ignore.”

“Can’t tell him we found it on an illegal entry.”

“I’ll claim we picked the pad up at the fairgrounds, it must’ve fallen out of Balfour’s truck. He can’t prove any different.”

We finished up a quick search of the rest of the premises, wading through clutter—stacks of dirty dishes, spilled food, empty beer and whiskey bottles, other crap strewn around on tabletops and countertops and furniture, scattered over the floors. There was nothing else to connect Balfour with the death of Verriker’s wife, nothing at all to connect him with Kerry.

But the search told us one thing: Balfour had no intention of coming back here. On the first pass-through, the place had seemed like the home of a typical bachelor slob, but there was too much disorder for it all to be the result of sloppy housekeeping. Drawers pulled half out of the bureau in his bedroom, several empty coat hangers in the closet and on the floor; cupboard doors hanging open and dropped utensils and food items in the kitchen; an empty glass-fronted gun cabinet in a room full of dead animal trophies—all indications of a hasty packing job. He’d stuffed that pickup of his with a full load while he was here: food, clothing, camping gear, weapons.

“Heading for the woods someplace,” Runyon said as we beat it out of there, “maybe his favorite hunting ground. And getting ready for a siege. That was a big gun cabinet, and he’s the type that keeps an arsenal—rifles, handguns, God knows what else.”

Heading for the woods someplace. Which woods, where? Hundreds of square miles of timberland in this county alone, thousands more all across the state.

Where?