“I don’t know where he is.”
Eighteen wheels rumbled over the snow-packed asphalt, an endless parade of trucks downshifting, chugging, rumbling bellies of braking semis belching diesel fumes into the lot. Hard gusts raced over the peaks of Lamentation Mountain, swooping down brae to brow. Whipping through tightly crowded, manmade spaces, flecks of snow and tiny ice chips kicked up and stung exposed skin. I blew on my hands, red and raw.
“You need to try to find him,” Turley said. “There’s a lot of pressure coming from on high.”
“On high?” repeated Charlie. “What are you talking about? You got a police force of what, half a dozen?”
“That’s the thing,” Turley said, inching closer, peering back at a man in a suit.
Crisp overcoat, leather gloves, glistening shoes. The man stood talking to Sheriff Sumner and a deputy, Ollie Gibson, scribbling something down. It’s funny, when you spend your whole life in a small town, people who don’t belong stand out like ten-foot aliens belting show tunes.
“Came up from the city,” Turley said. “Detective.”
“Why is a Concord detective up here investigating a dead junkie behind a truck stop?” I asked.
Turley shrugged.
The detective briefly glanced my way. Aromas from the crappy fried food they served in the Peachtree drifted over, mixing with the cigarette smoke and diesel emissions; it smelled nauseous.
I gestured toward the detective, who’d already returned to jotting notes. “Is he going to want to talk to me?”
“Eventually, I guess,” Turley said. He looked me squarely in the eyes. “I’m granting you a courtesy.”
“A courtesy?”
“Yeah,” Turley said, testily. “A courtesy. A favor. Now do yourself a favor. Find Chris. Get him to come down on his own so we can straighten this out. I don’t know why they sent a detective all the way from Concord. But you’re right. It’s weird. The drug shit must really be getting folks riled up. Last thing Michael Lombardi’s campaign needs is a drug-related murder in his hometown.” Anticipating what I was about to say next, Turley quickly added, “No one is saying Chris is guilty of anything. But Naginis was killed. And your brother was heard making threats. It’s hardly a leap.” Turley looked me dead on. “I know what you think of me, Jay. I’m not stupid. But I’m doing you a solid here. I hope you see that.” He thumbed back at the scene and the Concord detective. “That guy isn’t messing around. He’s treating this like a big deal investigation. I don’t think you want us finding your brother first.”
“That was fucking weird,” Charlie said as we pulled away from the TC.
I fiddled with the knob, trying to dial in some music, news, sports, car talk-anything to put noise between my racing thoughts and the ramifications. Nothing but static, frequencies jammed, signals lost almost immediately.
“What did he mean by that last part?” Charlie asked. “‘You don’t want us finding him first’-what the hell?”
“Turley’s watched too many cop shows, I think.”
Charlie chuckled, but it wasn’t funny, and neither of us thought Turley had been blowing smoke. I considered Turley a self-aggrandizing jackass when it came to most things law enforcement, but this was for real. As much as I wanted to dismiss his warning as chest puffing, I couldn’t. Chris had really fucked up this time. I knew my brother didn’t kill Pete; he didn’t have that kind of violence in him. But what he could do was to seriously make a mess of things. He’d made a career of it. And this was a perfect shit-storm: the wrong thing said at the wrong time, heard by the wrong person, and aided by the worst possible circumstances. My brother had threatened to kill a dead man. I needed to find him before I was powerless to help him.
Ashton may not have been New York City, but the town was hardly a stranger to violence, especially at that truck stop. A couple summers back, a prostitute had been found badly beaten and left in a dumpster. But there’d never been a detective up from Concord to investigate before. This was bigger than some run-of-the-mill lowlife fished out of a river.
I hadn’t mentioned the strange phone call to Turley. Charlie had obviously been listening. We’d talked about it and Chris’ visit on our way to the TC. Last night, I’d believed the computer story was another one of my brother’s myriad delusions-Chris suffered fits of paranoia like some people get heartburn after eating spicy food-but following that bizarre phone call and the discovery of Pete’s body, I knew his conspiracy theories weren’t going to be so easy to write off this time.
If the cops were looking for Chris, that computer shop of his would be the first place they’d check out. But dope fiends and crack-heads aren’t going to be as forthright with the police as they might be with someone else. I offered to drop Charlie home first. He insisted on coming along. Fine by me. I didn’t want to deal with this freak show all on my own.
Turley was right, I knew the spot. Taking the old Pearl Street exit off the Desmond Turnpike, we dipped into a heavily forested gully, and the surrounding scenery began to take on a vaguely familiar appearance, like the edges of a repressed, unpleasant dream. When a dilapidated red shack came into view, I clearly recalled driving by the place on the way to Coal Creek. Never ate the food, though. Even back then, you’d have to have had a death wish to go in there.
It always had been an odd location for a restaurant, since there were few other stores in the vicinity, and you’d have to be literally wandering, starving in the woods to stumble upon it. You could barely see it from the road with all the overgrowth around it.
As we pulled in the small parking lot, a big man with a shaved head, slathered with tattoos and dressed in only a tank top, flicked his cigarette butt in the snow and ducked inside. As the door closed he caught it with his hand and eyed my truck, before gently easing it shut.
The shack projected that creepy-crawly, frenetic energy of amphetamine abuse and long nights spent picking at invisible bugs. Grinding, industrial music droned inside. I could see single tire tracks, like the kind a motorcycle leaves, etched through high snow, curling around back. Long slivers of faded red wood curled from the exterior like whittled plastic.
In a particularly depressing touch, someone had actually taken the time to set out a sandwich board, using portable letters to spell “Computer Solutions,” and, below that, “Electronic Recycling.” Only, instead of the letter t, they had substituted the number 7, and the word “Recycling” was missing the y.
The entire setup played like a rabid, ugly porcupine, whose quills and foaming mouth said, in no uncertain terms, stay away.
Charlie and I sat in the parking lot. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. Certainly not this.
“What the fuck is your brother into?”
I knew a little about the local drug scene, only because I had to, but I didn’t know what these people did behind closed doors, and I wasn’t itching to find out.
Chris would inject, inhale, or imbibe anything you put on the table, although he seemed to have a special affinity for uppers, primarily speed, one of the many sordid particulars I had gathered from all the times I’d brought him into rehab, stuck as I was playing the parental role. Talking to doctors and psychotherapists about my brother’s various treatment options, I learned that methamphetamine wasn’t mass-produced up here or controlled by organized crime like it was out West or in the South. Meth up here consisted mostly of the bathtub variety. Small, independent pockets of ambitious individuals who cooked batches in toolsheds or suburban basements, crushing antihistamines to strip pseudoephedrine from over-the-counter cold medicines, before cleaning it with acetone and plopping copper pennies into stainless steel bowls to reverse polarity, in order to bond the right ionic charge. Like a science project for sleep-deprived zombies. Gun bluing and industrial-strength ammonia, miner’s coal and jet fuel, corrosive chemicals you find under a sink. Basically, the very last kind of ingredients you want to put in your body, and this had been my brother’s primary diet for years. No wonder his brain was oozing out his ears. In a few years, he’d be draped in garbage bags and talking to beer cans at the bus station.