Sewerville Read online

“Yes. Most of it,” she said.

  Boone felt like he’d said enough. He looked over at his passenger and saw that she was staring at him without expression or judgment. He didn’t know if it was what she wanted to hear, but it was exactly what he wanted to tell her. If Carla Haney WTVL Live On Your Side was digging for a story, he could lead her to one: the one he wanted her to find.

  “Who was the third person?” she asked.

  “Where?”

  “At your brother’s funeral.”

  “Oh. Harley Faulkner. The coroner. He doubles as the funeral director around here. Who’d you think?”

  “I don’t know.” She stretched her legs out in the floorboard, brought her right up and folded it beneath her. “Your mother, maybe?”

  “Right,” Boone said, and offered another half–chuckle. “My mother. Maybe I wasn’t clear about what she thought about us.”

  Before Carla could figure out her next question, Boone’s cell phone rang. He picked it up, saw that the call came from John Slone, and let it ring three more times. “I need to take this,” he said.

  “No problem,” said Carla.

  Boone put the phone to his ear. “What can I do for you, sheriff?

  ”I need you to meet me up the road.”

  “Where?

  “Up at Elmer’s place. We gotta do this one little thing.”

  “One little thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  Boone shook his head, frowned at Carla but kept talking to John. “When?”

  “Thirty minutes. I’ll see you up there.”

  The call ended. Boone laid the phone back on the seat of the truck, took a deep breath, stared out the windshield. Then he said to Carla, “Looks like I gotta cut this short.”

  “I guess you’re not going to tell me why,” she said.

  “You guess right. Sorry.”

  She understood. He turned the truck around, and they headed back to the Bears Den, so Carla Hainey WTVL Live On Your Side could get in her car and drive herself home. He thought that maybe they could meet again soon, and finish this conversation – perhaps he could be her Anonymous Source, and she could run a serious expose of life in Sewerville, and the TV people could actually do some work for Sewardville just this once.

  But coming events would prevent that from happening.

  ROGERS

  After he left the sheriff, Deputy J.T. Rogers changed into jeans and a green and yellow t–shirt with the John Deere logo plastered across two–thirds of his chest. He drove home and traded the sheriff’s department cruiser for his white Jeep Grand Cherokee, then headed back out.

  At three quarters past midnight, Highway 213 led Rogers back out of town, all the way to Brush Creek Road. There, he cut a sharp right on to the narrow two–lane road, which was barely wide enough for his Grand Cherokee by itself. He drove until he came to a gravel driveway that slanted downward so sharply that it was practically hidden from passersby unless passersby were looking for it. It went back into the woods a half–mile a pothole–ridden gravel driveway that was curvy as a rattlesnake’s back, lined on both sides by thick trees whose limbs hung over the road like sagging, elderly appendages.

  At the end of the driveway stood Elmer Canifax’s farmhouse. The downstairs was lit up by strobe lights, just as Rogers had envisioned when Elmer called him. A steady beat of electronic dance music thumped into the deputy as he pulled up to the house, then around back.

  There, the deputy parked his Jeep under a craggy old oak tree, nestled tight between a Chevy Cavalier and an old brown conversion van. If anybody unexpected showed up – say Sheriff Slone, or Walt Slone, or even Boone Sumner – they’d have to put in some real effort to find his vehicle.

  Soon enough Rogers found himself wading in a sea of young humanity, across the kitchen and then through the large living room. Nearly all of the furniture in Elmer’s farmhouse had been moved into back rooms so that all of the guests both expected and unexpected could be accommodated (the unexpected always outnumbered the expected at Elmer’s parties). No matter. The rabble rousers still jostled against each other so closely that at times the place seemed like a single shimmering mass of wet skin and hair, dressed in clothes much too skimpy for early spring, adorned by a thin sheen of sweat and glitter. They grinded against each other in careful time with the steady beat of the electronic music, some sliding back against back, others locked eye to eye. The silver and green strobe lights added a stop–motion effect.

  Rogers remembered a haunted house he’d been to in the 6th grade.

  A young girl approached him, almost his height, with long blonde hair tossed casually to appear as if little care had gone into its style when in fact he knew she’d spent an hour making it fall just so. Dark indigo makeup in the corners of her eyes gave her a faintly Egyptian appearance. For a second Rogers wondered how old she might be, but before he could say anything, she spoke first instead, in a slight voice, unencumbered cigarettes and cheap liquor.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m me,” he answered. “Who are you?”

  “I’m me,” the girl smiled. She was thin; she swayed gently in her space, as though she might start floating at any moment. She didn’t answer his question, though. Instead, she offered him her empty hand.

  Rogers looked at her long, delicate fingers and saw they were frosted with glitter and white powder. He couldn’t decide if the dust was cocaine, meth residue, or evidence of crushed–up pain pills. One seemed as likely as the other.

  From one side, someone else took her other hand, and pulled her away. It was Elmer. He wore flip flops and a silky bathrobe the color of seaweed, and nothing else. The robe swung wide open and he didn’t seem at all bothered.

  “Come over here, darlin’!” he howled, drawing the vaguely Egyptian girl close, nuzzling her slender neck. After a moment, he let her go again, and again she stood there, swaying in place, smiling at the moment they shared.

  Once more, Rogers found his attention drawn to the glitter and the powder on the young girl’s fingers, both of which twinkled in the flashing strobe lights.

  Elmer looked at the deputy. “I see you met Alice,” he said, pointing at her.

  Rogers checked the girl over, not finding anything that really impressed him. Then, he asked her, “What’s that white stuff on your fingers?”

  Alice didn’t hesitate. “It’s what’s left of the pain pill I just snorted,” she said. “Why, you want some?”

  “I don’t think so, honey. I’m a cop,” said Rogers, hopelessly trying to project an air of authority.

  “You ain’t no cop,” Alice giggled. “You’re just some dude.” She laughed. “Fuck you, dude.” She laughed again.

  Rogers gave no reaction.

  Amused to the hilt, Elmer wrapped Alice in his arms and gave her a light kiss on the cheek. “Come with us,” he said to Rogers. “Come on, deputy. Alice brought her friend, and she is mighty sweet. Let’s make this a private party, what about it.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “We’re going upstairs,” said Elmer. “I lead, all you gotta do is follow. There’s two of them. There’s two of us. You do know how that works, right?”

  Without another word, he took Alice’s hand and led her away, through the human sea and up a staircase at the other end of the living room. Halfway up the steps, he stopped, and looked back over his shoulder at the deputy, and smiled. Then he continued his ascent, with the young lady at his fingertips.

  Rogers hesitated for just a second. For just a second.

  Five minutes later, they were upstairs in Elmer’s bedroom. Five minutes after that, Elmer had his tongue down Alice’s throat and both of his hands cupped on her small naked breasts.

  Nearby, Deputy Rogers sat on a small brown leather couch with Alice’s friend, not quite sure what to do next. She had chemically–altered black hair just past her shoulders, with a lime green swath that started in the front and ran back behind her ear. She was tall and thin, just like Alice, an
d also every bit as fucked up on the same white dust. Rogers knew that because a dab of it frosted the edge of one nostril.

  The girl slumped back into the corner of the couch, sat there with her arms loose at her sides and both palms up. She gazed at minor details: the dim lamp in the corner, the strands of carpet, the designs dappled into the ceiling drywall, the molecules dancing in the air.

  “What’s your name?” he asked the girl with black and green hair and fairy dust on her nose.

  “Kristin. What’s yours?” she said, again looking at the ceiling.

  Rogers felt the need to tell a lie. “My name’s Pablo.”

  “You don’t look like a Pablo.”

  “You don’t like a Kristin.”

  “What’s a Kristin look like?”

  “I dunno,” he laughed. “What’s a Pablo look like?”

  The girl shrugged. Rogers shrugged, too, and awkwardness settled back in between them. The deputy felt the thump of dance music through the floor. Writhing bodies. Sweat. Zombies.

  Before the conversation could plumb further depths, Elmer joined them, while Alice went into the bathroom. By that point, she was completely unclothed. Again, Rogers wondered about the age of these girls. The more he saw of them, the younger they looked. Twenty–one? Doubtful. Eighteen? Hopefully.

  “They’re nineteen, dude,” said Elmer, as if he were reading the deputy’s mind off of a flashing electronic cue card.

  “Nineteen, huh?” Rogers said. He turned back to Kristin. “Really?”

  She nodded, then laid her head over on the arm of the couch and closed her eyes.

  Elmer squeezed the deputy on the shoulder and sat down on the couch between him and Kristin. “Don’t worry about it, man. Every girl up here’s street legal, no problem. Sit back. Pull your panties out of your crack and have a little fun.”

  Rogers wasn’t quick to believe. “How do you know they’re of age?”

  “Nineteen,” corrected Elmer. “I said they’re nineteen. And I know because I ask them, that’s how. I ask every girl that walks through that door, ‘How old are you?’ And they tell me the truth.”

  The deputy didn’t believe him. “They tell you the truth.”

  “You bet.”

  “And nobody’s underage?”

  “Nope.” Elmer winked, opened up his robe for all the world to see what he had hidden beneath it, which was only his pasty body. He lifted his balls with one hand, in the deputy’s direction.

  “You oughtta loosen up, J.T.,” he cackled. “Hell, it don’t matter how old they are, long as you’re the one gettin’ it. Pussy ain’t red wine, you ain’t gotta let the shit age ‘fore you partake. Am I right or am I goddamn right?”

  “I really don’t know how to answer that,” said Rogers.

  “Aw fuck it,” Elmer huffed. He waved away the doubts of his guest like he was waving away a bad smell. He poked Kristin in the side, just to see how she would react. She didn’t react at all. Rogers thought for a second that she might have died on them, but soon he noticed her still breathing, which brought him some small comfort.

  Elmer pulled a pipe out of his seaweed–colored robe, followed by a silver flip–top Zippo lighter and plastic bag filled with dingy, crystalline clumps.

  Rogers recognized the meth immediately. “Don’t smoke that shit with me here,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to be around it, that’s why.”

  “Okay, Mr. Clean,” Elmer laughed. He filled his pipe with the drug and lit it up. After a deep draw he offered it to Rogers, who rolled his eyes and declined.

  “You’d probably feel a lot better if you took a puff every once in a while,” said Canifax. “What do you do for fun, anyway?”

  “I ain’t here to have fun,” Rogers shot back.

  “Then what the fuck are you here for?” said Elmer.

  Rogers shook his head, and stood back up. He said, “How about you put your nutsack away and shut that damn bathrobe? I didn’t come up here to smoke, I didn’t come up here to get with some young girl I never met before, I didn’t come up here to look at you hang your balls out. I came up here ‘cause you said we was gonna do us some business. Now, you tell me. Are we gonna do us some business, or what?”

  “J.T., your problem is, you ain’t no goddamn fun,” muttered Elmer, as he stood up to join the deputy.

  About that time Alice walked out of the bathroom. She asked Elmer if he wanted the two girls to kiss each other, and without even attempting to camouflage his disappointment, Elmer shook his head and told the ladies to go back downstairs and enjoy the party.

  BUSINESS

  Rogers and Elmer exited the party, exchanging the strobe lights and writhing young bodies for the rickety chill of the outbuilding at the edge of the back yard. They stood on the peeling wooden floor of the meth shack, quietly pontificating amongst the Freon jugs, the cans of Red Bull energy drink, the rock salt, the hypodermics, the light bulbs and bottle caps.

  Open in front of them was the crate full of drugs and weapons, still stacked on another crate full of drugs and weapons.

  The same crate Boone Sumner viewed earlier that day.

  The same crate that belonged to Walt Slone.

  Behind them in the main house, the party raged on. White luminosity flashed in the downstairs windows, creating tangled shadows, arms and legs and heads en masse. The steady drive of bass electronica thumped so hard that Rogers and Elmer could feel it pumping against their chests, even from fifty yards away.

  Elmer reached into the crate and took out a bag of OxyContin, filled with little tablets of multiple colors: blue, green, red, or orange, depending on the size of the dose.

  “So when do you think Walt’s gonna miss all this?” he said.

  “Won’t be too long now, you can count on that,” said Rogers. He grabbed the bag of pills out of Elmer’s hand and threw it back into the crate. The irritation he’d shown inside, with the girls, flashed again to the forefront. “I told him everything was there like it was supposed to be, same as always, but it won’t take long ‘fore him or the sheriff figures out that not all the deliveries got made to the dealers like they expected. When they figure it out, they’re gonna come ask me what’s what. Hell, they prob’ly got it figured out already. I better have a good story to tell or else we got big problems.”

  Elmer shrugged, walked away, knew full well that it didn’t matter when Walt found out his merchandise was missing. Sooner or later, he’d find out, all right. And Rogers was exactly right – he and Elmer needed to be ready, needed a truth they could sell Walt Slone when the old man came looking for his goods. When Walt found out, he’d come straight to his delivery man to get the truth.

  “We could always just kill the bastard,” said Elmer.

  “We ain’t killin’ nobody.”

  “I’m just sayin’. We could do it.”

  “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?”

  “No.”

  “Killin’ Walt Slone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re out of your fuckin’ mind.”

  “I’m not. No, I’m not. Might make things go a little better for all of us if he weren’t around. Look at it that way. Just an idea, I’m offering it up.”

  Rogers faded out, thought it over, came back to the conversation. “You keep goin’ on with shit like that, somebody’s gonna end up dead all right, only it won’t be Walt Slone. Hell fire, if it gets out that you’re talkin’ that way, we’ll both turn up in a ditch somewhere.”

  Elmer said nothing. The two men stared at each other, and Rogers quickly became convinced that Elmer wasn’t kidding with his murder talk. More than pure hypotheticals were in play. Reality settled into the bottom of Rogers’s stomach, heavy, like a medicine ball filled with foul shit. He felt a green queasiness wash across him, as he realized that Elmer was feeling him out, floating the idea to see how the deputy might react. Wondering if J.T. could be a killing partner.

  Rogers wanted n
o part of that. He needed to physically get away from it, so he strolled across the room and sat down in a metal folding chair, a couple feet away from Walt’s crate.

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Canifax,” he said, with his hands folded in his lap. “You are absolutely, positively, tee totally one hundred percent out of your ever lovin’ motherfuck mind, my friend.”

  Elmer let out a sound from the back of his throat, half laugh and half snort. “Yeah, I know. It’s a beautiful thing, ain’t it?”

  He closed the lid on the crate, rubbed his palm across the thin sheen of stubble atop his bald head, and sat down on top of the wooden box. The box with all the guns and drugs inside it. Walt Slone’s box.

  For an awkward time, the two of them sat in their places, Elmer on the crate, and Rogers on the folding metal chair nearby.

  “Alright,” said Elmer. “Killin’ Walt might be a bit much. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. But the fact remains, you got a problem here.”

  He smacked the side of the crate with his palm.

  “This here crate, it belongs to Walt Slone. He paid for it, looks at it as an investment, I’m sure. And I’d imagine he expects a return on his investment. Which means if he don’t get that return, he’s probably gonna be a little pissed off. You and me both know what happens when Walt Slone gets pissed off.”

  “It ain’t good,” piped in Deputy Rogers. He rubbed the back of his neck, which had developed a kink during the course of the conversation. “Fuck no, it ain’t good.”

  “Uh–huh. Fuck is right,” said Elmer. “But it’s hard to back out now. How you gonna explain yourself anyways, if all of a sudden this missing crate turns up, like you just accidentally forgot to unload it with the rest? Hell, J.T., you’re an old pro at this, you don’t make rookie mistakes. Walt knows that. This crate turns up and he’ll sense the shit goin’ down. Won’t be long after that he’ll find out you were tryin’ to make a deal with me, and when that happens we’re both pretty much in a shit heap.”

  Rogers nodded. “A shit heap. Hell yeah. So what next?”