They flew direct to Atlanta and were in a rental car and northbound on I-85 by 2 p.m. There had been no four-wheel drives available at the rental counter; everyone was scared of the storm that hadn’t arrived yet. There was no snow, and the temperature was near 50. Which wouldn’t have been a poor Memorial Day in Cleveland.
But the air promised that was changing.
Changing to what nobody seemed to know, although everybody agreed it was going to be a mess.
The only thing they could find on the radio was dire news about the storm that was blowing up from Cuba and through Florida and what havoc it might wreak on Georgia overnight. That, and some goddamn song called “I Will Always Love You” that was the only thing more annoying than listening to meteorologists talk about barometric pressure shifts. They made it maybe twenty miles before Joe shut the radio off for good.
Once they were outside the perimeter, traffic opened up and they made good time heading north, the city and suburbs falling away behind them and the rural mountains opening up ahead. A light, misting rain was falling, trying to turn to ice. Farms, trailers, and churches dominated the roadside. They angled northwest and climbed higher in the mountains, and a pickup truck with a lifted suspension and oversized terrain tires growled past them, its tailgate a mud-splattered collage of bumper stickers pledging allegiance to God, guns, and the Confederacy. Perry began to whistle the dueling banjos bit from Deliverance, but Joe thought about that forecast and wouldn’t have minded having the truck. Or anything that sat higher than the rented Chevy Malibu.
The road curled up and over a ridge and then they descended into Helen and Joe pressed on the brake.
The town was lined with Bavarian-style, multicolored chalets. Every home. Every business. He and Perry stared first at the town, then at each other.
“I wasn’t paying attention,” Perry said. “Where’d we pass through the wormhole?”
Joe drove slowly down the town’s main street, looking for the sheriff’s department. They passed a Wendy’s, which featured the same exterior as the rest of the place.
Bavarian building code strictly enforced, apparently.
“Okay,” Perry said, “so what’s the plan? Do I distract the Nazis while you escape with the Von Trapps, or do you want to do it the other way around?”
“Maybe it’ll be easy,” Joe said. “Maybe every hour all these places pop open like cuckoo clocks and we just sit on the car and wait for Antonio to roll out onto a porch, fire his gun a few times, and get sucked back in until the next hour.”
Perry pointed to the right. “There’s a sign for the PD. Turn on, um . . . Alpenrosen Strasse. No shit, Joe, that’s what it says.”
“We gotta find some sauerkraut before we leave. God, I love good sauerkraut. If they don’t have that, this place is nothing but a fraud.”
“Maybe at the Wendy’s?” Perry suggested, and Joe smiled.
The kid was all right.
Of course, Joe hadn’t seen him under pressure yet. And if Antonio Childers was still anywhere near this place, they might run into pressure sooner than later.
They found the police located in a shared municipal office. They got out and walked through the rain to the building, and Joe noticed the temperature had dropped since their arrival in Atlanta. They were up higher now, and maybe that explained it, but, still, the air felt strange, and an uneasy wind blew the rain at them in gusts.
Inside, a black woman in a police uniform sat alone behind her desk. If there was any other presence in the police department, they were well hidden. Joe introduced himself, showed his badge, and asked to see the chief.
“He’s up in Cleveland,” she said, and he blinked at her, thinking for a moment that seemed like a definitively federal operation, sending Cleveland police to Georgia and Georgia police to Cleveland, before she added, “It’s not far, just fifteen minutes. That’s where the county sheriff is. And the jail.”
“Cleveland, Georgia,” Joe said. “Got it. Right. Did they handle the Nora Simpson shooting this morning?”
She seemed to puff up with righteous indignation. “No, they did not. That was our police department.”
“My mistake. Which officer handled that scene?”
“All of them.”
Joe glanced at Perry, who looked back at him with a cocked eyebrow as he said, “How many would that be?”
“Three,” she said.
Joe considered that and said, “Nobody else has shown up? Feds, Georgia Bureau of Investigation?”
“Nope.”
He sincerely doubted that the DEA’s corruption concerns stemmed from a three-man department in a tourist-trap village, so if the GBI had been kept at bay this long, it suggested they were of interest.
“Is there someone we could speak to who was at the scene this morning?”
“Not right now. They all went up to Cleveland to talk to the sheriff. We got bigger problems ahead of us than this thing you all are so interested in, you know. There’s a storm coming, supposed to be the all-time record. There was a public safety meeting in Cleveland. I expect they’ll be back soon, though.”
“In the meantime, who polices the town?” Perry asked.
She gave him a stone-cold stare. “That would be me.”
Joe figured she’d do a fair-enough job of it, too.
“If you think they’ll be back here soon, we’ll hang out for a bit,” he said, thinking that this was actually a hell of an opportunity to ask some questions around town without having the local law breathing down their necks.
God bless the blizzard.
“Fine by me. They won’t be much longer, I’m sure.”
“What happened to the guy you arrested, the cop from Alabama?”
“Still got him in a holding cell. And as far as I’m concerned? He ought to stay there.”
“Yeah? You think he shot her?”
“I don’t know about that.” She looked at him primly. “But that man ran right through town in nothing but his underpants. Now, you tell me, isn’t that some kind of crime?”
“Some kind,” Joe agreed, and then he and Perry left and walked out into the cold. A few stray snowflakes were falling now.
“So we head for the closest Cleveland?” Perry asked.
Joe caught one of the snowflakes in his palm, watching it melt, and thought again that he would like to have rented a four-wheel drive. He didn’t know what the all-time record storm was in Georgia, but it didn’t sound encouraging.
“We could do that,” he said. “Or could take advantage of a little time in town without a local deputy at our sides.”
“I vote for the latter,” Perry said. “I don’t know what in the hell brought Antonio to a place like this, but my guess is, he stuck out once he arrived. People are likely to remember him.”
“Agreed.”
They didn’t have to go far to find their first eyewitness, and they didn’t have to interview her long to determine that she wasn’t an eyewitness at all, but since she’d heard all about the shooting from someone who had talked to someone else who had probably seen it, she basically felt like she had herself, you know?
Pritchard assured her that of course he understood this, but all the same they’d like to talk to someone who actually had seen things. Police protocol and all that. It was a bitch that they couldn’t just take her word for it, but, you know, it was the law.
“Ain’t nobody going to say a single word different,” she said with a pout. “He ran out of that motel in his underpants, and then came the shooting. He told the police she was trying to steal his car, but it wasn’t even his car, so you tell me whether he’s guilty or not? Answers itself. And doesn’t matter if I saw or heard it, all of that’s gospel, mister.”