Offutt The Killing Hills

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-85730-505-3
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can't handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer's increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife. The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal - sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers - and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt has delivered a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling novel of murder and honor, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.

Chris Offutt is the author of the short-story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, four novels The Good Brother, Country Dark, The Killing Hills, Code of the Hills, and three memoirs: The Same River Twice, No Heroes, and My Father, the Pornographer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Offutt, Chris

Leseproben

Chapter Two

Mick Hardin awoke in sections, aware of each body part separate from the rest as if he’d been dismantled. He lay on his arm, dull and tingling from hours of pressure against the earth. He shifted his legs to make sure they worked, then allowed his mind to drift away. A few birds had begun their chorus in the glow of dawn. At least it hadn’t been a bad dream that woke him. Just birds with nothing to do yet.

Later he awakened again, aware of a terrible thirst. The sun had risen high enough to clear the tree line and hurt his eyes. The effort to roll over required a strength that eluded him. He was outside, had slept in the woods, with any luck not too far from his grandfather’s cabin. He pushed himself to a sitting position and groaned at the fierce pain in his skull. His face felt tight as if stretched over a rack. Beside him, three rocks formed a small firepit beside two empty bottles of whiskey. Better the woods than town, he told himself. Better the hills than the desert. Better clay dirt than sand.

He walked slowly to a cistern at the corner of the old split-log cabin and brushed aside a skim of dead insects from the surface of the water. Cupping his hands, he drank from it, the cold liquid numbing his mouth. He’d read about a scientist who talked to water then froze it and examined the crystals, which changed depending on what was said. Kind words uttered in a gentle tone made for prettier crystals. The idea sounded far-fetched but maybe it was true. Humans were about sixty percent water and Mick figured it couldn’t hurt to try. Nothing could hurt much worse than his head anyhow. He plunged his head into the water and talked.

When he needed to breathe, he lifted his head to gulp the air, then shoved his head back in the barrel and spoke. He’d spent the evening telling himself terrible stories about his past, his present, and his future – a circular system that confirmed his wretched sense of self, requiring alcohol for escape, which fueled further rumination. Now he struggled to find generous things to say about himself. As he spoke, bubbles rose to the surface and he tasted dirt.

The third time Mick came up for air, he saw a vehicle at the edge of his vision and assumed it was something he’d imagined. He wiped water from his eyes. The big car was still there, and worse, there appeared to be a human coming toward him. Worst of all, it was his sister wearing her official sheriff’s uniform. To top it off, she was laughing.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Linda said, ‘checking on your hygiene in general. Looks like you’re bathing regular. Taking a bug bath, that’s what Papaw called it. How you doing?’

‘Feel like I been shot at and missed, shit at and hit.’

‘At least your head is clean.’

Mick nodded, the movement sending stabs of pain along his body. His head felt like the top of a drum tightened bolt-by-bolt until any pressure might rip his flesh. He’d overdone it, all right.

‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘Want some?’

He went in the house, water streaming along his torso and light blue chambray workshirt. He filled a blackened four-cup espresso pot with grounds and set it on a camp stove – a propane tank with stabilizing fins – and ignited the flame. Linda inspected a tin pitcher of water for bugs.

‘Where’s this from?’ she said.

‘Papaw’s well.’

‘How long you aiming to live out here?’

‘I need to change clothes.’

Linda nodded once, a single curt movement of her head she used with most men. Everyone had their little ways, their routines. Mick’s were odd, a product of living with their grandfather in this cabin as a child followed by fourteen years in the army. He’d been a paratrooper then joined the Criminal Investigation Division, specializing in homicide.

Linda moved languidly about the main room as if the space itself rendered time obsolete and slowed her motion. A homemade shelf bolted to a wall held the treasures of Mick’s childhood – a trilobite, the striped feather of a barred owl, a mummified bullfrog he’d found in a shallow cave. A rock with three horizontal sections that resembled half a hamburger. Her grandfather had tucked blankets around her and pretended to take a bite – a moonlight ration, he called it. Linda grinned at the memory.

She went outside and followed a path to a wooden footbridge that crossed the creek to the next hillside. As children, she and Mick had built elaborate structures from sticks and leaves beside the creek, imagining it as a river town with a mill, rich families, wide streets, a hotel, and a movie house. Then they sat on the bridge and destroyed everything from above with rocks, delighting at a direct hit. The game was among her favorite memories but as she sat there now she realized that it marked a distinct difference between Mick and her. She’d liked creating the town while her brother had enjoyed its destruction.

He joined her with coffee and they sat with their legs dangling off the edge of the bridge. As usual, he waited for her to speak, aware that it wouldn’t be long.

‘That creek looked further away when we were kids,’ she said.

‘We probably added another two feet of creek bed with the rocks we threw.’

‘I was just thinking about that.’

‘I know.’

‘So you can read my mind?’ she said.

‘Nothing else to do but sit out here and remember.’

‘You like the past that much?’

‘Not lately,’ he said.

‘What is this, some PTSD thing?’

‘Right now it’s a bad hangover.’

‘You think you’ve got PTSD?’ she said.

‘Probably. Dad did. Papaw, too.’ He blew on his coffee and took a sip. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t exhibit any sign of PTSD.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like denial for starts.’

She glanced at him, a sidelong shot of eyeball, trying to be circumspect but knowing he didn’t miss a thing, not one damn thing, even hungover. His preternatural alertness made life hard for everyone, especially himself. She decided not to bring up his pregnant wife.

‘You thinking about Peggy?’ he said.

‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘It’s logical is all. But she ain’t why you’re here, is it?’

‘No, it’s not. Since you’re so good at knowing things, you tell me why I’m visiting you.’

‘That’s easy, Sis. You came up here in uniform, driving the county vehicle, then waited around. You want something.’

‘Damn it.’

Mick nodded, amused. He loved his sister, particularly her foul language. She’d been the first girl in the county to play Little League baseball, the first woman deputy, now she was the sheriff.

‘I’ve got a dead body,’ she said.

‘Bury it.’

‘They want me out.’

‘Who wants you out of what?’

‘All the big shots in town,’ she said. ‘The mayor wants the Rocksalt police to take over so he can get credit at election time. The County Judge said he didn’t like anybody in our family going back fifty years. He wants the State Police to investigate. It’s jurisdictional bullshit. Pisses me off. The real reason is they don’t like a woman being sheriff.’

‘So what. They don’t have authority over you.’

‘No, but they answer to Murvil Knox, a big coal operator. He’s slippery as chopped watermelon. Funds both sides in every election so he’s owed no matter who wins. I had the awfullest meeting with them first thing this morning. About like three roosters in fancy clothes. I hate how men act around each other.’

‘To hell with them.’

They stared at the creek. A breeze rustled the poplar, its leaves the size of hands turning their palms to the wind. ‘This kind of murder,’ she said. ‘It never happened here before.’

‘What do you mean, Sis?’

‘There never was a body in Eldridge County that most folks didn’t already know who did it. Usually a neighbor, a family, or drugs. Maybe two drunks who argued over a dog. This is different. Everybody liked her. She lived clean, didn’t have enemies, and didn’t get mixed up with bad people.’

‘Odds are a man did it.’

‘I agree. You’re a homicide investigator. You know the hills better than I do. People will talk to you.’

‘You asking for help?’

‘Hell, no,’ she said.

He nodded, grinning.

‘What have you got?’ he said.

‘A forty-three-year-old widow up on Choctaw Ridge. Off the fire road past Clack Mountain. Veronica Johnson, went by Nonnie. She was a Turner before she got married. Her husband died. Nonnie and her boy moved in with her sister-in-law. They both married Johnsons who died young.’

‘Go talk to them. Find out what the son knows.’

‘Done did. He’s a wreck. Somebody took his mom up in the woods and threw her over the hill like trash.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Three days ago,’ she said.

‘It rained yesterday and half the night. There’s nothing to see at the scene. Rain washed all the tracks away. That’s why I was outside.’

‘You like drinking whiskey in the rain and sleeping in it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I couldn’t do it in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria. No whiskey. No rain.’

Linda walked to her car and returned carrying a manila envelope stamped with the official insignia of the county. Mick nodded, a habit she recognized from their grandfather. With the two of them...