Smiley Page 5

  “Uh, Chief Evans, we have received a statement from the West Virginia State Police that Robert Lee Withers’ death has been ruled a Justifiable Homicide. However, before we return you to duty, the Council has a few questions for you in regards to your decision-making process which led to the shooting.”

  “Okay. Go right ahead,” Garrett said. His teeth clinched so tight he heard them grind. These fuckers were going to sit behind a table and question his— He choked that down. Irrational anger. What had the damn shrink in California said about it? Never mind, he’d already missed half of what Dorothy Martin was saying.

  “... at best a possible identification of a green pickup and a deer with an arrow wound. What made you think that was enough to go out and confront the man?”

  “Past history, I guess,” Garrett said.

  “Yours or his?” Samuel Redding said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Your father and Smiley were good friends for many years. We know how much poachers upset Smiley; you sure you weren’t just going out there on behalf of an old friend?”

  “Look, you hired me to be the Chief of Police. I see a deer shot with a bow out of season, hear of an ID on a truck matching a local guy on probation for poaching, in my mind it’s worth at least talking to the suspect.”

  Samuel tented his dry, pale fingers. “Maybe in Los Angeles, Chief. But around these parts, folks feel like you need a lot more than a maybe to go on a man’s private property. Poaching is a law on the books, that’s right. But feedin’ your family off the land goes back in these parts long before the law got here.”

  Garrett had always been one of the smarter kids in his class. Did well on standardized tests in school, which got him accepted to UCLA in the first place. He saw what was coming, so fuck it. He looked Samuel in the eye. “And I’m sure all of this has nothing to do with the fact that your family and the Withers go way back.”

  Samuel gave him a wintry smile. Dorothy and Fonda looked down at their papers.

  “Chief, may I ask you a question, point blank? Are you on psychiatric medication?” Samuel said.

  “What? Look, you hired me—“

  “We did, Chief. We hired you to fill in after your father passed. There were other applicants, as well.”

  Garrett flicked his gaze over to Whit Abercrombie, a veteran officer hired not long after Tom Poston. He wore Sergeant’s stripes, but didn’t get the pay. In Garrett’s book, any man who wanted the power over the pay was the wrong guy for the job.

  “What does that have to do with your question?” Garrett said.

  “Honestly, Chief, we didn’t do our usual background on you because you were a hometown boy and we figured we already knew it all. But we have heard you were under the care of a psychiatrist in Los Angeles before you came back. Doesn’t matter who told us, the fact remains that we know. And so I have to ask. Are you taking psychiatric medications?”

  “Yes.”

  Everyone just sat quiet for a second. They all looked like they’d been prepared for more of a fight. “Oh,” Samuel said. “Well... Sergeant Abercrombie, could you step forward?”

  Whit stepped up with the tiniest tug of a grin on his lips. He’d always considered Garrett a smartass kid anyway. And Garrett knew Whit hadn’t been happy when the Council went with Lamar Evans’s kid out of sympathy.

  Samuel looked at Fonda and Dorothy, getting a nod from each. He spoke for them all.

  “Chief Evans, it is the decision of this Council to temporarily suspend you as Chief of Police. We are requesting a psychiatric evaluation before you return to duty.”

  “And if I don’t take one?”

  “If you don’t take one within thirty days, you will be dismissed.” Samuel nodded to Whit. “Sergeant Abercrombie, you will serve as Interim Chief until such a time as Garrett Evans is certified as fit for duty, or the city of Artemis officially hires a new Chief.”

  Already stalking toward the door, Garrett heard Whit clear his throat. “Uh, Garrett? I’ll need your sidearm.”

  Whit’s eye twitched just a bit at the smile on Garrett’s face when he turned around.

  “Chief Abercrombie, this gun wasn’t issued to me by the Artemis Police Department. In fact, it belonged to my father. If you figure you can take it, you’re welcome to it.”

  The air in the tiny council chamber grew still.

  “Well... you can’t carry it in city limits,” Whit finally said.

  “I’ll try to bear that in mind.”

  Garrett gave them his back without another word.

  ***

  He got a few strange looks standing in May’s Diner in his uniform pants and tee shirt. He’d stripped off his Chief’s shirt and gun belt in the parking lot of City Hall. Even though a brisk wind brought news of more snow, he didn’t feel the cold, didn’t feel much of anything.

  Misty brought his food in a Styrofoam container. “Anything else, Chief?”

  He didn’t bother correcting her on the title. “Nope. Thanks, Misty. How’s Angela?”

  She propped up a smile. “She’s great. Staying at Smiley’s again.”

  “Old Smiley’s a good guy. That girl loves him to pieces,” Garrett said. He shoved the change back across the counter. “So. How are you doing these days?”

  “Oh, you know. Okay, I guess.” Her lower lip trembled just a little but she got it under control. “I’m pregnant. Bradley’s gonna be a daddy.”

  “Oh. Uh, congratulations.” The polite thing to say, but Garrett knew it couldn’t be good news to a woman who could barely afford the child she had.

  “Thanks. Bradley’s working real hard right now. He’s putting together some money for a business deal in Oklahoma. We might move there in the summer,” Misty said.

  Sure. Any business deal involving Bradley Wentz meant methamphetamines. He wasn’t smart enough to do anything else. Hell, he barely had what little brains it took to deal drugs.

  “I hope it works out for you guys, Misty. I really do.”

  He propped up a smile of his own and left. There were days, like today, when Misty’s hair looked extra tousled from long hours at work, she reminded him of Michelle in the morning. Hair frazzled from sleep, no makeup.

  Tears rolled down his cheeks on the drive home. He repeated his mantra out loud in the empty car, but it didn’t do much but make noise.

  He ate standing in the kitchen, like his old man after he came home from a late shift. LaSalle’s flier looked up at him from the kitchen table. Garrett reevaluated the girl, with the knowledge her family could afford to keep a guy on her case for two years. Her haircut came off a fashion magazine cover, gold chains hung around her neck. He tried to figure what would make this girl run away with some idiot to live on the street.

  What would a father who kept a guy like LaSalle on the payroll be like? How many boyfriends wound up being “interviewed” by LaSalle or someone like him? Garrett’s own father might have had something, or everything, to do with him leaving for UCLA. Were they kindred souls, he and this girl?

  Garrett grabbed his cell and called the number. LaSalle answered on the first ring.

  “You feel like having a beer?” Garrett said.

  ***

  Just like high school. Standing under the stars behind the truck stop with a six-pack on the hood of his car. Trucks rumbled through the slush as they left the pumps on their way to destinations local people dreamed about. To the drivers, Artemis represented one tiny dot in the supply line that fed the country.

  “Look, man,” LaSalle said. “Big city, small town, politics are the same no matter what. I’ve known a few cops in my day. If they had a bad dude in the neighborhood, they went to see him when shit happened. Most of the time, they’re right. I would’ve done the same thing if I gave a damn about deer poaching.”

  He took a long pull off his beer. Garrett saw scarred up knuckles and a crooked pinkie finger on the left hand. “Nice one.”

  LaSalle followed his gaze and held up the lit
tle finger. It broke ranks with the others around the second knuckle.

  “Yeah. These are what I got instead of family photos,” LaSalle said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Kind of like normal people have pictures of birthday cakes and swimming parties from when they were young, I got these. That pinkie finger reminds me of the first time I ever broke somebody’s nose. Broke the hell out of my hand, too.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen. The OG’s in the park used to bet on us young dudes in bare-knuckle fights, see? It’s how I made my first real money. I had some talent for it, took some boxing lessons to back it up, but I was too much of a hardhead to stick with training. The streets didn’t make me work hard like that. It came easy, you know?”

  “Sounds like a Lifetime Movie. ‘I Was a Teenage Prize Fighter,’” Garrett said.

  LaSalle laughed, a deep rumble. “I don’t know if I’d call a couple of skinny kids swingin’ wild at each other prize fighting.”

  “Did you always make your money in the ring?”

  LaSalle took a long pull. That one needed no answer. After a while, he said. “Younger times, dumber times. Probably redundant to say it that way.”

  They clinked beer bottles.

  “You got somebody waiting back home?” Garrett said.

  “Nah. Good woman ain’t gonna put up with me.”

  “Maybe you should stick to bad women.”

  They clinked bottles to that one, too.

  A couple of working girls smoked cigarettes out by the gravel lot where the truckers slept in their cabs. “You could transplant those girls to LA right now. Just leave them right there and kind of shuffle the world past behind them and stop it when you hit Hollywood Boulevard. They wouldn’t look any different,” Garrett said.

  “Tell me something funny about those days,” LaSalle said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I never met a cop who didn’t have a funny story about some dumbass he met on the job.”

  Even though he recognized LaSalle’s intent, Garrett indulged him. “Okay, a quick one. I was a boot, riding with my FTO. We go to this call about a GTA. Guy’s beside himself because somebody stole his ‘68 Camaro. We roll up, he meets us at the curb, waving his arms like this shit just happened or something.”

  Garrett pantomimed the guy, getting into it now.

  “But come to find out, he can’t even tell us when it happened. He saw the damn thing yesterday, and then it was gone, you know? Even as new as I am, I can see he’s tweaked out of his mind. I can barely see any fuckin’ color in his eyes, his pupils are so big. My FTO says, ‘Yeah, that’s all fine. We’ll take a GTA report. But, uh... is that your meth lab behind you?’”

  “No,” LaSalle said.

  “Oh yeah. Guy’d been up for three days cooking and cooking. Got into such a panic about his Camaro, he totally forgot he left his garage door open with his lab all set up.”

  Garrett shook his head and took a drink. “If people only knew how much law enforcement depended on dumb shits like that.”

  “You miss LA?” LaSalle said.

  The smile died instantly. “Not for a minute. Not for a second. There are stories like that, you know, they’re funny. But there are others. And they’re not so funny.”

  “I hear you,” LaSalle said.

  Garrett took LaSalle’s empty and stuck it back in the cardboard pack. He handed over another and cracked open his second.

  “So, what, you give your client a discount rate by the month? The hourly for a guy like you has to be pretty sweet,” Garrett said.

  “What about me says expensive?”

  “Seriously? With those clothes?”

  That nailed him. LaSalle laughed and waved him off. “Okay, okay, officer, you got my profile. Look, this is a family favor kind of thing. The girl’s grandfather is a friend of mine. I knew Britney personally.”

  “You mean you know her,” Garrett said.

  LaSalle took a drink. His eyes went to the two girls across the lot. One of them held an animated conversation with a trucker. They seemed to reach an agreement. The girl hugged her friend goodbye and headed off toward a big Volvo rig.

  “For some time now I’ve considered the fact that I may not be looking for a missing girl, but for the last person to see her alive,” LaSalle said.

  “What happens if you find out she’s dead, but you get a lead on the guy who did it?”

  “I believe I’d have to turn such information over to local authorities, wouldn’t I? Whoever they may be.”

  Garrett tipped his beer toward the big man. “Here’s hoping they’re in Arizona.”

  LaSalle grinned and returned the mock salute.

  “Had any luck interviewing other drivers?” Garrett said.

  “Not really. But I met a girl who told me there’s a forest ranger, or somebody, who eats here a lot. He might have seen Britney.”

  “Forest ranger?”

  “She wasn’t sure. Something about his uniform.”

  “Hmm. We don’t have any rangers stationed close. Maybe she means Smiley. He works for County Animal Control and wears a uniform. I know he likes to eat out here. He loves Burton’s old school cooking.”

  “You suppose I could meet Smiley?”

  “Sure. If you don’t mind being seen with the disgraced former police chief, I’ll introduce you sometime.”

  6

  Artemis, West Virginia - 1961

  The pop-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-pop of the old hit-and-miss engine stutters across the still barnyard.

  Smiley’s skinny legs poke out of his short pants, bare feet caked with mud from helping Papa fix the well pump. At eight years old, folks in Artemis already call him Smiley because of the mask he wears when he goes to town with Papa or Ma. When Ma was alive.

  Folks can’t see the stripes on Smiley’s back.

  Papa’s nose is starting to rot away. They got new doctors who can close the hole, but a body doesn’t ever look right after. Like some geek you’d pay a nickel to see at the circus. Even though Ma is gone, she’s reaching back from the grave to punish him. Leastways, that’s how Smiley sees it.

  “You payin’ attention, boy?”

  “Yessir.”

  Papa shows him how to switch the engine over from gasoline to kerosene. Start it with the good stuff, run it on the cheap. Papa sounds like he’s talkin’ through a duck call.

  Ma slipped on the ice last winter and cracked her head on the steps. Right about the same time Papa said he’d caught the devil’s fever from her. He’s always been quick with his hands or a belt on Smiley, but since last winter it’s gotten worse.

  Papa holds out a wrench, but Smiley’s daydreaming. The wrench falls into the mud—

  Back in the barn again, the smell of hay and dirt hot in his nose.

  The rawhide straps hold his bony wrists against the whipping post. Swish-crack of the leather strap that Papa likes to use. By now, Smiley knows screams don’t help. There is no mercy for the weak. And so he endures the punishment, only letting out the occasional grunt when one catches him good in the ribs.

  At the age of twelve, he’ll kill a litter of puppies three farms to the west and Papa will knock his teeth out.

  Five years later, the old man will fall out of the hayloft, drunk as a lord and snap his neck clean in two. Most folks won’t care about it enough to run a big investigation. Smiley had been the only other person there, and heavens, Ol’ Smiley would never do somethin’ like that.

  ***

  Faded yellow paint flaked off the antique hit-and-miss engine, but the young picker looked like he’d landed a private viewing of the Mona Lisa.

  “This is a beauty,” he said. “How much you need for her, sir?”

  “I’d like to get around three.” Smiley grinned down at Angela in her puffy snow suit. “Sound about right, Angie?”

  “Wow, three hundred dollars? That’s a lot of money,” she said.

  Both men laughed. The picker brushed d
irt off his knees and looked around the barn. Everything in its place, tools hanging from hooks on the walls, hay bales stacked neatly by the rear wall. He was probably used to junk piles and glorified lean-tos some folks called barns.

  “Can I offer you two-fifty?” the young man said.

  “You sure can,” Smiley said. “But I wouldn’t hear ya unless you said two seventy-five.”

  They shook hands on the deal. Smiley let Angela ride on the Bobcat with him while he loaded the engine into the picker’s cargo van. With the engine gone, only one other thing Papa had put in this barn was still there. The stump of the old whipping post. About two feet of it stuck out of the lone square foot of dirt left from the original packed earth floor. The stump looked like a maniac had been at it with an axe.

  Smiley and Angela waved goodbye as the young man drove away with his antique treasure. She insisted they wave until the picker’s van went out of sight, and even though his shoulder joint developed a burn he knew would keep him awake later, Smiley would pay anything for her smile.

  He even jogged alongside her when she wanted to race him back to the front door. Thoughts of another time running through the snow after another girl tried to intrude, but he crushed those predator dreams.

  By the time Misty’s truck splashed through the slush on the road out front, Smiley had Angela’s stuff all packed and ready to go. Instead of Misty’s pretty face, Smiley saw Bradley Wentz climb out of the pickup in pants drooping so low most of his boxers were visible.

  They went through the minor pleasantries for Angela’s sake and Smiley waited by the tailgate while Bradley got her situated in the truck, waited until her door shut.

  “Can I talk at ya for a second, Bradley?” Smiley waved him back by the tailgate, out of Angela’s sight.

  “Sure, Smiley. Hey, Misty said to tell you she really appreciates you taking Angela on short notice. She couldn’t turn down that shift. We’re putting together some money for a move.”

  “Yeah, I heard all about it. I actually wanted to talk to you about Angela.”

  Smiley couldn’t miss the giant pupils, the redness around Bradley’s nose, the jittery fake smile. Stupid druggie kid. Smiley saw plenty of them during his time as an Army medic. Except they were on heroin in those days.