Cold Black Earth Read online

“I don’t think anybody noticed except me.” Matt took a drink of beer. “I thought this wasn’t going to happen.”

  “So did I.” Rachel sat down. Here we go, she thought. “Matt, what’s wrong?”

  He looked up at her and said, “Billy’s in jail.”

  20

  “He got scooped up with a bunch of other lowlifes at a bar in East Warrensburg, after a fight. Apparently he took a swing at a cop.”

  “Oh, no.” Rachel put a hand to her face.

  They sat in silence. Matt drank beer and said, “Beyond the underage drinking, they got him on aggravated battery. I don’t think anybody’s going to cut him a break this time.” He looked up at Rachel but his eyes quickly fled hers.

  “Where is he, Warrensburg?”

  Matt nodded. “Dearborn County jail. Not the institution I hoped my son would graduate from.”

  The clock ticked a few more times; Rachel frowned. “So what happens next? Can’t we get him out on bail?”

  “He’s got a court date next month. He wanted me to come bail him out. I told him no.”

  Rachel sat frozen. “You told him no?”

  Now Matt looked at her. “I’m through, Rachel. I’ve had enough. It’s time for him to face the consequences.”

  She nodded a few times, slowly. “You don’t think criminal charges are consequences?”

  He made a dismissive noise. “Sure. Whatever. I’m just done, Rachel. I just couldn’t go down there and bail the damn kid out. I’m too God damn angry. I give up. He’s an adult and I can’t do anything with him, or for him, anymore. He’s made his bed and all that.”

  Rachel sat and watched Matt drink for a while. When he finished the third bottle he sat staring at the empty, a defeated man. Rachel had not moved, had not taken off her coat. Finally she said, “I’m not trying to undermine you, Matt. I would never second-guess you about how you handle Billy. But it seems harsh to me to let him sit in jail for a month. Even real criminals get bailed out. If I drive down there and bail him out with my money, would that be a problem for you?”

  He gave her a sharp look and said, “Don’t bring him back here.”

  Rachel nodded. “He can probably find a place to stay.”

  “I’m through with him.”

  “You’re angry and nobody can blame you. But don’t do anything you’ll regret while you’re so mad you can’t see straight. He’ll always be your son.”

  “Fuck, you get along with him so well, you try handling him for a while.”

  Rachel stood up. “I think we’re through trying to handle him. Like you said, he’s an adult now. You’re right to kick him out. It was probably past due. But don’t write him off. Not yet.”

  Matt threw up his hands in surrender. “Whatever. Go bail him out if you want. You’ll need a hundred bucks. But I don’t want to see him.”

  Crisis on top of crisis, thought Rachel, heading south on the highway toward Warrensburg. Her tryst with Dan already seemed like a hallucination. It had given her a glimpse of the well-being she had once taken for granted, but the effect was fading. The menace was back; it had cost her an effort to go back out into the night and get into the car.

  I’m all right on the highway, she thought. It’s the back roads that are dangerous. That’s where he is. Back there where we live.

  The lights of Warrensburg ahead had never looked so welcoming.

  Dearborn County had built a new jail and courthouse complex in the eighties; Rachel had never been in it. She had never bailed anybody out of jail, either. She had heard you could use a credit card these days, but to be on the safe side she stopped at an ATM at a drive-through bank. She found the county building, which looked more like a post office or a high school than a jail, and parked on the street.

  Just in time she remembered the Smith & Wesson in her purse. She extracted it and put it in the glove compartment. She got out, locked the car, and went in.

  Inside was the expected fluorescent glare with desk and uniformed officer behind it. Rachel was directed down a hall to an office, where she explained herself to a couple of sheriff’s deputies who appeared startled to see her. They were happy to take her money, gave her paperwork to fill out, and then sent her back into the hall to wait. Half an hour later Billy appeared, ushered through a metal door by a stone-faced deputy.

  He looked as if he could use a shower and a good night’s sleep but did not appear to have been beaten, Tasered, gang-raped, traumatized or particularly intimidated. He did not seem surprised to see her. “Does he know you’re doing this?” was the first thing he said.

  “He knows.”

  Billy barely slowed; he looked as if he knew his way around the building. She followed him out into the night.

  Rachel started the car and said, “You got a place you could stay? Your dad’s kind of mad at you right now.”

  “To hell with him. I’m done with him.”

  Rachel looked out the windshield for a while. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. Wait till you calm down before you make any decisions about the future of your relationship.”

  “I’m calm. I’ve just had five hours to calm down.”

  “OK. That’s all I have to say. Where am I taking you?”

  Billy heaved a sigh. “Just a second.” He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. “Hey, I’m out,” he said. “Can I crash at your place for a while? I been kicked out of my house.” He listened for a moment. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he said. “Well, that’s just fuckin’ great. All right, I’ll be there in a little bit.” He clicked off and said, “East Warrensburg. Go out Main Street.” He shook his head as Rachel put the car in gear, then let his head fall back, eyes closed.

  “What now?” Rachel said.

  “Somebody trashed my car. Probably the dudes that jumped us. Slashed the tires, smashed the windows. It ain’t going nowhere for a while. I am like, messed up.”

  Rachel drove in silence, fighting the urge to try to fix things. Offering him the Chevy was a nonstarter; she needed it, and it would enrage Matt. A small cash loan made more sense, but she knew even that was better kept secret from her brother. “I can lend you a little money,” she said.

  A few seconds passed and Rachel was having second thoughts, thinking about tough love and foolish indulgence. Billy said, “Thanks, I really appreciate that. But I’ll be OK. I got a place to crash for a while, and I’ll figure something out. You’re not responsible for any of this shit.”

  That was indisputable, and Rachel found nothing to say to it.

  Warrensburg had never seemed big enough to Rachel to have a suburb, but there it was, on the wrong side of the interstate and hard by the railroad tracks, not much of a town with not much of an excuse for being there beyond having been cheap land near the county seat. East Warrensburg was a haphazard grid of curbless blacktop streets laid out on wooded ground that was too broken by streams to be much good for farming. Beneath the trees, widely spaced, were flimsy ranch houses dwarfed by their garages, tumbledown shingle-sided shacks and a few mobile homes that had come to rest, with a paltry block of storefronts passing for a downtown. Two of the storefronts were bars, and their neon beer logos were the only sign of life. “Slow down a second, will you?” said Billy. “This joint here, that’s where it happened. I want to look at my car.”

  There was a graveled lot just past the building, and as Rachel slowed she saw that one of the three cars parked there was Billy’s Dodge, slumped low on four flat tires, the windshield spider-webbed and long scratches running the length of the body. “Shit,” Billy breathed as Rachel eased to a stop. “Those pricks.”

  “Oh, Billy. I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck it. You win some, you lose some.”

  “Who were you fighting?”

  “Just some assholes. Some Mexican guys. There’s Mexicans moving in around here and there’s a lot of fights. Stupid shit.” He pointed. “Go up to the end of the street here.”

  Rachel pulled out. “Did you really
hit a police officer?”

  “I didn’t know he was a cop. Somebody grabbed me from behind and I just turned around and swung. I thought it was one of the guys that jumped us.”

  “Well, if you were in the middle of a fight, a judge might consider that a mitigating circumstance. You’ll need a lawyer.”

  “They’ll give me one. I ain’t spending any hard-earned money on a lawyer. And my dad sure as hell won’t.”

  Rachel gave it a beat and said, “I might.”

  “Save your money. I’ll take my chances. Make a right here.”

  Rachel followed Billy’s directions to the edge of town, not a far stretch in any direction, where a fairly primitive-looking ranch house, a featureless box with a roof, sat at the foot of the railroad embankment with light showing behind curtains, a satellite dish on the roof and a Dodge Challenger parked on the lawn. When she eased to a stop Billy already had the door open. “OK, thanks,” he said.

  “Billy.”

  That stopped him with one foot on the ground. “What?”

  Rachel had opened her mouth to deliver another platitude about parental love and reconciliation, but stopped herself in time. “You’ll need some stuff, won’t you? Clothes and things? Let me know what you need and I’ll bring it by.”

  “Yeah, that would be good. Just go up to my room and throw some clothes in my backpack. Look in my dresser. And maybe the closet, a couple of shirts. And my toothbrush.”

  “The blue one, in the bathroom.”

  “Yeah.” He got out of the car and bent to look in at her. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll try and come by tomorrow. Be good.” Rachel watched him as he walked up to the house and rapped on the door. She was curious to know who was taking Billy in, but he disappeared inside without her getting a glimpse of the person who had opened the door. Rachel turned the car around at the end of the street and headed back.

  It was not a nice-looking town, even with darkness hiding the detail; her headlights swept over junked vehicles and derelict sheds and sagging porch roofs. It depressed her to think of Billy washed up here, nowhere else to go. There were so many things to depress her that her mind fled them all.

  It startled her to think that she had been lying in Dan Olson’s arms just a few hours before. Suddenly she wanted him. She wanted to be in that embrace; she wanted to laugh at that easygoing charm. Going home to deal with Matt’s drunken gloom was not appealing. But it was past midnight, and she knew the best way to ruin a nice comfortable fling was to push it too hard too fast.

  The interstate offered a quick way back to the northern part of the county; she had passed an entrance ramp on her way out of Warrensburg. If she got off at the next exit fifteen miles north she would be close to home.

  Flying past the sleeping farms, passing long-haul semis rolling through the night, Rachel became aware that her stomach muscles were clenching, her anxiety level rising. The dread was returning as she approached the part of the county that was most familiar to her, the area where she should have felt most comfortable. She had the same feeling she had always had flying back into Baghdad after furloughs, feeling the pall descend.

  Just keep going, Rachel thought. All the way to the junction with Interstate 80 up at the Quad Cities; go east and you will be in Chicago in three hours. You can get a room at the Drake, sleep all day tomorrow, go out for a nice meal on Rush Street in the evening and think about what to do with your life. You can leave this bad dream behind.

  The gas station at Alwood was an oasis of light. Rachel put on her signal and eased onto the exit ramp. The food mart was open twenty-four hours a day and briefly she wanted to pull in, go inside and buy something, just to talk to someone, just to put off heading away into the darkness. She had four miles to cover along roads where the only light would be from her headlights.

  You have a gun in the glove compartment, she thought. Nobody can hurt you. Just drive home and go to bed. She rolled past the gas station and turned south onto the county blacktop.

  The bright lights receded in the mirror. She passed a couple of houses set back from the road and then there were only distant points of light, the farms widely spaced in the rolling land of the north part of the county. Under her headlights the road dipped and rose. Rachel’s heart had accelerated. She was hunched forward, leaning over the wheel, concentrating on her driving, prey to a chaos of images crowding at the edges of her mind, intense and conflicting: coyotes tearing flesh, sweet carnal indulgence in the dark. Integration and disintegration, repulsion and lust, horror and ecstasy. None of it seemed real.

  You need to sleep for about a week, Rachel told herself.

  She had just topped a rise when the tire blew, the sudden juddering and the tug on the wheel unmistakable. Rachel swore, corrected the swerve of the car, and coasted to the bottom of the hill. She came to a stop and sat in shock for a moment, looking out at the little patch of road and ditch in the radius of her headlights and the vast blackness outside it. “Shit,” she said.

  From the feel of it, it was the left front tire that had gone. A few seconds’ reflection told her that drunks barreling home along country roads were still a more likely peril than escaped madmen, and she pulled the car to the side of the road, two wheels in the shallow ditch. Now it was decision time.

  On the morning she had cleaned out the car, she had made sure there was an inflated spare in the trunk. What she had neglected to provide was any kind of light. She was going to have to change the tire in the dark, by touch, on a deserted country road not too many miles from where a psychopath had cut a man’s throat by the side of the road a few days before.

  Call Matt. Rachel pulled her purse across the seat toward her. He can be here in fifteen minutes.

  Matt’s drunk. He’s passed out in bed by this time.

  Call Dan. Dan lives less than two miles from here. Rachel reached into the purse.

  She had the phone in her hand when she stopped. If she called Dan, it was an admission of weakness. It was relying on a big strong man for help. And in the past Rachel had sweated blood to prove she could handle a crisis.

  Change the damn tire, she told herself.

  Rachel let go of the phone, turned off the headlights and cut the ignition. The world became very dark and very quiet. Remembering the drunks, she turned on her emergency flashers. You are going to have to get out of the car and do this, she thought.

  She opened the glove compartment and took out the revolver. She held it in her lap, telling herself that the odds against Otis Ryle coming along in the old blue Ford pickup just as she was changing a flat tire were overwhelming. And there was nothing about schizoid personality disorder and psychopathic narcissism that made a man bulletproof. And yet the night was black and Rachel knew that the things it hid were real.

  Get out of the car and change the tire.

  She popped the trunk and got out of the car, leaving the gun on the driver’s seat and leaving the door slightly ajar. She looked up and down the road; there was just enough light from a feeble moon, reflected by the snow, to show her the lay of the land. A stream passed under the road through a culvert just ahead; the streambed was wooded, brush and small trees black against the pale slope beyond.

  A man could hide in there, Rachel thought.

  Heart pounding, Rachel moved to the rear of the car and raised the trunk lid. She shoved junk aside to get at the cover of the wheel well. She froze when she heard the car approaching, behind her.

  Rachel spun to see the glow of headlights over the rise. She watched for a few seconds, long enough to determine that the car was coming along slowly, unlike a speeding drunk.

  Like a man cruising for victims? Rachel hurried to the driver’s side, tore open the door and snatched the gun off the seat. The car was a few seconds from topping the rise.

  Get in the car and lock the door, Rachel thought. Then she had a vision of roadside collisions and after a second’s hesitation ran around the car and made for the ditch. The car was just to
pping the rise when she hopped across it and, in full panic now, made for the streambed.

  Rachel slid down the short slope toward the stream and, lying on her belly, twisted to watch the approaching car come slowly down the hill. She held the gun out in front of her, aiming at nothing, her thumb on the hammer ready to cock it.

  You are a fool, Rachel thought. Your imagination has run away with you.

  In the next instant she thought, He will follow your footprints in the snow.

  The Chevy’s flashers were lighting the night in hypnotic pulses. The other car slowed and eased to a halt behind it. Rachel exhaled heavily and let her head sag. The rack of emergency lights and the sheriff’s department logo shone intermittently in the flashes.

  She watched the driver get out and walk along the side of the Chevy. A flashlight came on and played over the inside of the car. The man holding the light walked to the front of the Chevy and shone the light on the ground in front of it, then beyond, over the verge of the road. In his other hand he held a gun at his side.

  Rachel had regained her voice. “Officer?” she called.

  The light jerked toward her. “Rachel?”

  Rachel let go a single sob of relief. “Roger? Oh, God.”

  21

  Rachel clambered up out of the streambed.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I was just scared. I had a flat tire.”

  “I can see that. Do me a favor, will you? Just take your finger off the trigger of that gun, will you?”

  “Oh, shit. I’m sorry Roger, I was scared. Here, take it if you want it.” She held it out toward him, grip first.

  “That’s OK, I just don’t want any accidents.” Roger holstered his gun. “What are you doing out here?”

  “I was on my way home from the interstate. Oh, God, am I glad to see you.”

  She was close enough now to make out his features in the eerie light; he was peering at her with concern. “You sure you’re OK?”

  “I’m fine. Let me . . . let me put this away.” Rachel went and put the gun in her purse on the car seat. “I was going to change the tire and then when I heard you coming I got scared. I mean, maybe it’s silly, but . . .”