McKindrey reckoned it sounded like a faggot’s name.
“Well, Beau,” he said. “Why don’t you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t drag your black ass to jail for insultin’ an officer of the peace?”
Without hesitation, the man nodded. “I’ll give you two.”
McKindrey felt himself tense as the man reached behind his back and produced a handgun, which he held up for the Sheriff to see as he cocked it. “This is one,” Beau said, then nodded at something over McKindrey’s shoulder, something the Sheriff realized much too late was the sound of more footsteps, coming at him fast. He cursed.
“That’s two,” the black man said, and McKindrey turned. He had the impression of a pale-face looming in his vision before something struck him hard between the eyes and he went down into the darkness.
He awoke with a groan and almost immediately two things dawned on him:
First, his nose was broken and throbbing like a teenager’s pecker at the prom. He tasted blood on his lips. The tops of his cheeks were stiff and unyielding when he tried to gauge the extent of the damage by grimacing.
Secondly, he was no longer at the creek. The absence of sound was his first clue. The smell and the gloom confirmed it. Slaughterhouses had a similar odor, like shit and rotting carcasses. Automatically he tried to wrinkle his nose but the flare of pain stopped him and he spat a wad of blood and phlegm that landed with a smacking sound on the stone floor between his feet. He blinked to coerce his vision into cooperating, and a moment later, the room in which he sat with his hands bound behind him and his feet tied to the legs of the chair came into focus.
A kitchen, dirty and abandoned, the windows caked with dust, the floor littered with trash, broken dishes, and mouse droppings.
The kitchen of the Merrill place. He had never been inside the house before, but the procedures he’d been required to follow had occasionally brought him out this way, and more than once he’d peered in through the grimy glass to see if anyone was inside. Even when the Merrills had lived here, it hadn’t been any tidier than it was now. Hygiene had never been a priority for that clan.
“What am I doin’ here?” he croaked, every word scraping its way out of his raw throat.
A few feet away, the black man—Beau—leaned against the kitchen table eating a bag of Doritos. His gun rested on the table. Standing directly opposite McKindrey was the man he assumed had struck him.
“Nice of you to join us, Sheriff,” he said.
This one was white, his hair coarse and dark above brilliant blue eyes that were almost manic. He was unshaven, a few days worth of stubble framing thin lips in a gaunt, narrow face. He wore a wrinkled black T-shirt and jeans.
“Who are you people?” McKindrey asked, and spat again, the bitter expression on his face intended to let them know the action was only partly out of necessity.
“This is Finch,” Beau said around a mouthful of chips.
“That don’t answer my question,” McKindrey said. “But I hope you boys know the shit you’re wadin’ into by doin’ this.”
Finch appeared to be mulling this over, then he shrugged. “Not a whole lot I’d imagine, considering the way things tend to get forgotten, or breezed over in this town. People vanish all the time in your jurisdiction, don’t they? So why would you assume anyone will miss you?”
“I got a wife,” he told them. “Couple of hours and she’ll have the state police out lookin’ for me.”
“You think?”
McKindrey nodded. “If I was you, I’d cut me loose and get goin’ before you bring more trouble down on yourselves.”
“We’ll take that under advisement,” said Finch, and stepped close to the Sheriff. “First I have a few questions. I suggest you answer them quickly and truthfully or your wife won’t recognize you even if you do make it home, you understand?” While he spoke, he cocked his gun and aimed it at the floor, squinting through the sight. “Because unfortunately for you, we can’t leave without some information, and my gut tells me you have it. So…” He dry-fired the gun, then retrieved a magazine from the table. “The sooner you tell us what we want to know, the sooner you’ll get out of here.” He slammed the clip home and leveled it at the Sheriff. “But for every question you don’t answer, I’m going to shoot you somewhere that will hurt unlike anything you’ve ever felt before, but it won’t kill you. And Beau here makes a killer tourniquet. I could cut off your head and I bet he’d be able to keep you alive long enough to answer our questions.”
“Don’t know about that,” Beau said and upended the Doritos bag. Rust-colored crumbs filled his palm.
Finch smiled at him. It faded when he looked back at McKindrey. “So what’s it to be? Are you gonna be a hard ass and make us get tough with you or what?”
“You boys are fools,” McKindrey replied with a sour grin. “You think this is the way to get someone to cooperate? Y’all can go fuck yourselves way I see it.”
In two steps Finch was up close and shoving his palm against McKindrey’s broken nose. The agony was unbearable and the Sheriff writhed against it, the ropes digging into his hands as he clenched his teeth to keep the scream behind them. Unconsciousness loomed and was denied as Finch slapped him across the face, once, twice, and then a third time. “Listen to me you redneck fuck,” he said, “You pass out and when you wake up there’ll be pieces of you missing, got it?”
McKindrey took a moment to swallow the pain, to steel himself, though it was an enormous undertaking. “Go to hell,” he said when he finally found his voice.
Finch shot him in the left foot. The bang was like a wrecking ball through the kitchen. McKindrey screamed.
“Fuck,” Beau said, rubbing crumbs from the legs of his jeans. The Doritos bag was lying on the floor by his feet. “Warn me when you’re gonna do that shit, all right?”
“How about now?” Finch asked, glaring at the Sheriff. “You sensing the rhythm we have going here?”
“Okay, okay,” McKindrey told him, shutting his eyes as blood filled his boot. “Shit…” He was awash in sweat. “What do you want to know?”
“The Merrills,” Finch said. “I want to know all you know about them. Who they are, where they went, and lastly, how they’ve managed to turn this town into the Bermuda Triangle without anyone taking them to task for it.”
“I don’t know,” McKindrey said, spitting blood onto his shirt. He jumped at a sudden hiss, but it was only the black man, who had twisted the cap off a bottle of Orange Crush. Beau smiled at him as he took a sip.
“Wrong answer,” Finch told him, and stepped back, gun aimed at the man’s right foot this time. He cocked the hammer.
“No,” said the Sheriff. “Wait. What I meant was I don’t know everythin’ you’re askin’.”
Finch didn’t lower the gun. He waited.
McKindrey went on.
“They run this town, not me. That’s the first thing you gotta understand. They run it because they own it. However it were done, whoever they kilt to get it, they own more than sixty-five percent of the land around here, mostly unpopulated, old farms, woods, that kind of thing. But even if they didn’t, people here have learned to coexist with ’em best they can. They stay out of anywhere’s got the Merrill name on the deed. No one interferes with their business, and they don’t interfere with ours. You probably seen what happens when that changes.”
Finch nodded. “Wellman and the farmer.”
“They’ve been around long enough to know better. Should’ve just stayed out of it.”
“And let a girl die.”
McKindrey knew he had to be careful. He did not yet know what connection this man had with the girl that had escaped the Merrills. “That was unfortunate,” he said.