The Mountain Read online

  Mark turned to Thel, who was smiling up at him. “What,” he said. “Was that about?”

  “He’s just being… overprotective,” Brenda spoke up, and Eddie was glad, because for a while there he was wondering if the only thing she could do was sit there and giggle.

  “Overprotective is one thing,” Eddie said. “But that was way off the charts.”

  “No shit,” Mark said.

  “Well,” Brenda said. “A girl went missing around here a few days ago. Got mad at her daddy and stalked out of the house. Nobody’s seen her since and folks are worried about her.”

  “Most folks, that is,” added Thel, and Brenda nodded.

  “Most folks?” Eddie said.

  “Yeah,” Brenda again. “Some people think she ran away ‘cause she’s got a messed up family, daddy always beating on the boys, sometimes on her, too.”

  “She didn’t run away, she wouldn’t,” Thel said, as Farley came through the door, cussing and raising hell about what he was going to ‘do to that little bastard when he got his hands on him’. He made his way behind the bar, his club thumping and rolling on the floor when he threw it down, a lump on the side of his head and a thoroughly disgusted look on his face.

  Farley grabbed a dishtowel, and stood for a moment staring toward the street.

  “Goddamnit,” he said, and then took the towel and stalked through a set of doubles doors that stood off to the left behind him.

  “Maybe we should go,” Brenda said.

  “Maybe we should,” said Thel.

  “Hold on, we’ll walk you out,” Mark said, as Farley came bursting through the double doors, wincing and holding the bulging towel against his head. He moved his hand and an ice cube squirted out of the dishtowel. “Dammit, Thel,” he said. “I’m not puttin’ up with this shit, not in my own place, I’m not.”

  “Farley,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s gonna be sorry when I call the cops on his ass.”

  “C’mon, Farley,” she said.

  Farley lifted the towel. The lump didn’t look any smaller than when he’d first stormed back inside. It seemed, in fact, a great deal larger.

  Eddie turned to hide the grin spreading across his face, and Farley said, “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna call the police. But I’ll tell you what: I will kick his scrawny little ass next time I see him.”

  “You know he didn’t mean it.”

  “I don’t give a shit if he meant it or not, the next time—”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “If I hadn’t ducked…”

  “Yeah, that’s right. If you hadn’t ducked I wouldn’t be standing here holding a bag of ice to my head. Maybe I oughta kick your ass, too!”

  “Ho!” Mark called out, grinning, hands held out in front of him.

  “Aw, fuck it,” Farley said, wincing as he put the ice back in place. “Just get the fuck outa here—all of you.”

  Outside, on the wooden porch of Farley’s Shack, Mark checked his watch. It was four o’clock. Soon his mother would be home. They’d have dinner and chat with her a while before borrowing her car to do a little scouting. A cherry-red convertible Camaro roared up in front of the place, whoops and hollers and clouds of dust rising behind the car as it began turning doughnuts in the dirt lot.

  Brenda’s jaw dropped, and Thel’s eyes grew wide.

  “Farley’s gonna have a fit!” Thel said.

  “Gonna?” Mark said, as the Camaro stopped its circular spin and hauled ass out of the parking lot. “He already did.”

  Chapter Five

  Tom Traber leaned forward in his chair, eyes straight ahead, his forearms resting on the desk, his brown hair neatly-trimmed. He had the taut, muscular body of someone who had grown up on the farm, even though it had been years since he’d worked one. At thirty years of age, he was a boy in a man’s body, and what passed for law and order in the small mountain community. When Mary Jackson sat down, he gave her his undivided attention, and even though his mind was already made up about what had happened to her daughter, he offered her a genuine look of concern when she told him that Cindy had still not come home.

  “Have you called your kinfolk to see if she might have gone to one of them?”

  “They would’ve called me if she showed up. She ain’t gonna show up… something’s happened to her.” Mary pulled a tissue from her open purse and dabbed it to her eyes. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Cindy didn’t run off. She—”

  “But Mary, that’s exactly what you said she did when you came by here Wednesday morning. That the school called because she was playing hooky and Merle got after her about it and she ran screaming out of the house.”

  “Something’s happened to her! I know it! I can feel it!”

  “Mary.”

  Mary sighed. She looked tired and drawn, as if she’d been up all night, her frail shoulders slumped under the weight of wondering what had become of her daughter. The expression she wore was one Traber had never seen her without, a weariness from never knowing what kind of mood her drunken husband would carry through the door, or who he might take it out on. When she spoke, her voice carried a soft, almost defeated tone:

  “I’m just so worried about her.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I know this ain’t the first time she’s run off, but she’s always come back before.”

  “Look, just because nobody’s seen her, that doesn’t mean she’s met with foul play. Maybe she figured she’d had enough of Merle’s mess. He rides ya’ll pretty hard over there, you know.”

  “But she ain’t got no money, no clothes, nowhere to go. It doesn’t make any sense for her not to come back.”

  Traber shifted in his chair. A backfiring car caught his attention and he glanced at the window, and then back at the distraught mother. “Mary, I know you’re upset, but she’s not the first little girl to take off around here. Some come back and some never do—hell, there’s not a whole lot to come back to ‘round here. She probably hitched a ride with some trucker headed off to the big city. I imagine she’ll get in touch pretty—”

  “But what if she ain’t, Tom? What if she took off up the mountain and she’s wandering around lost in the woods, or that goddamn Johnson clan got hold of her?”

  Mary straightened up. Eyes narrowing, she gave Traber a cold, hard stare. “She could be anywhere, and it seems to me instead of sitting around doing everything in your power to convince me my daughter ain’t in no trouble, you’d get off your ass and make an effort to find her. You are the law around here, aren’t you?”

  “Now hold on, Mary. There’s only two of us, you know—me and Ralph. I’ve talked to her friends, the neighbors. What else do you think I should do?”

  Mary stood up, put her hands on the desk and leaned forward. Eyes still locked on Traber, she said, “My daughter turns up dead in those woods, you’re gonna wish you’d done somethin’.”

  Chapter Six

  Harry beat the bushes for thirty minutes before pulling his two-headed coin from the overgrown brush. He tramped through the weeds, back to his dirt lot, sweat beading along his brow as he knelt to brush away the briars and burrs clinging to his pant-cuffs. He stood up and took off his hat, scrubbed his shirtsleeve across his forehead. The breeze blowing through the valley felt great, and he stood quietly for a moment, savoring it.

  He wasn’t happy about Charlie getting the better of him, but it wasn’t the end of the world, not even close. Harry’d taken his shot. One more turn of the coin would have netted him an eight-thousand dollar profit. But, hey, he could live with twenty-five hundred for driving that stolen rig back from Asheville. You win some you lose some. That’s why they called him The Horse Trader. And Horse-trader-Harry Edwards had won a lot more than he’d lost. He could afford to take a hit on this one.

  Still chafed his ass, though.

  It was five-o’clock, and he’d had just about enough for one day. Maybe he’d lock up and head over to Farley’s for a
beer and a burger, hang around and check out the young poon. The place should get to hopping in a little while, and by then he would be good and lit. Just the way he liked it. Who knows, maybe one of those little tomcats would find her way back to Harry’s place. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened, nor, Harry hoped, would it be the last.

  A vehicle pulling into the lot stopped Harry dead in his tracks as he started for the trailer. He turned to see an old beat-up Army surplus jeep rolling toward him. And that could mean only one thing: Elbert Johnson and his brood of inbred miscreants had misappropriated another vehicle, and since they had no earthly idea of how to turn a stolen car into cash money, they were forced to bring it to the only person they knew who could: Horse-trader-Harry. But it wouldn’t be Elbert driving the jeep—the eighty-something-year-old patriarch, who never left his mountain, always sent his eldest son to attend to family business.

  Harry made his way to the jeep, which had rumbled to a stop in the middle of the lot. The old relic was a rusted-out mass of blistered and peeling camouflage paint, faded under thick splotches of mud covering the chassis, a diagonal crack running across the middle of its windshield. Harry wondered how the hell they kept the damned thing from falling apart. He stood for a moment, eyeballing it, before finally saying, “You ever wash that thing?”

  Willem Johnson, his head cocked sideways, long brown hair draping the shoulders of the buckskin jacket he wore, cut the engine, and said, “The hell’d I wanta do a fool thing like that for?”

  “No reason, I guess. So what, you lookin’ to trade that thing in?”

  “Same answer.”

  Harry laughed.

  “Got somethin’ for ya.”

  “Yeah, I figured. What is it and where is it?”

  “Brand-spankin’ new SUV and Arley’s got it parked behind that barn of your’n.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Same place I got the last-un.”

  “Figures.” Harry didn’t know for certain where or how they had gotten any of the vehicles he’d acquired from them, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. But he wasn’t about to pass up easy money, so he said, “Let me lock up and I’ll meet you over there.”

  Willem fired up the jeep and Harry made his way to the trailer, up the steps and inside to his desk as Willem rumbled onto the highway. Charlie Rodgers’ contract lay on the desk where Harry’d left it—wasn’t much of a loss now, not with Willem’s offering. He opened a drawer, pulled out a silver-plated revolver and laid it on the desk. His jacket hung on a set of deer antlers decorating the wall. He lifted it free and put it on, slipped the gun into a pocket and walked out the door, to the pick-up parked at the end of the trailer. Once inside, he turned the key and the engine came to life. Then he was out of the lot and onto the highway.

  Harry had a good thing going. With a cousin in the chop shop and one in the DMV, he had a real good thing going. And those mountain men just made it better every time they showed up. Twenty vehicles they’d given him in the last seven years. Twenty cars and trucks and SUV’s, all for a thousand bucks a piece—and why not, who the hell else were they going to sell them to? All carted off to Asheville for Cousin Chuck to slice and dice and make the Edwards boys a pile of money.

  Harry downshifted as he pulled into Cary’s Holler. Moments later he was rolling down his driveway, past a two-story log cabin to a red and white barn butting up to the wilderness at the back edge of his property. Willem and one of his kin sat in the jeep. Beside them was a silver Saturn SUV. A chick’s car, Harry thought, and wondered briefly what might have become of whoever owned it. He parked beside Willem, got out and walked over to the SUV, opened the door and the new-car smell washed over him, his pulse quickening a bit, because he knew he was going to make a bundle off this one.

  He left the door open and returned to the jeep, around the side until he was standing at Willem’s shoulder. “You done good this time,” he said.

  “Damn right I did,” Willem said, cutting his eyes toward Harry, then, “Two-thousand.”

  Arley Johnson turned in his seat. He looked enough like Willem to have been his son. Harry thought he probably was his son, and his nephew, maybe his brother, too, for all Harry knew about it. He had the same long brown hair, the rugged features and brown eyes. Except while Willem looked fairly normal, there was something very off-putting about his young kin’s eyes. One of them, drooping and lazy, looked cock-eyed toward the barn, while the other stared directly at Harry.

  “Yeah, well,” Harry said. “You’re gettin’ one. Just like always.”

  “Let me tell you somethin’, old man,” Willem said. “I’m about tired’a you cheatin’ us outa—” Harry put a hand in his coat pocket as Willem swiveled and swung his feet onto the ground. An unmistakable sharp metallic Click stopped Willem in mid-sentence. He stared at the bulge in Harry’s jacket—it could’ve been a stiff finger pointed beneath the fabric, but Harry was pretty sure Willem didn’t think it was a finger.

  “You know that noise, mountain man?”

  “Yep.”

  “You got two choices. Take a thousand dollars and leave that truck behind, or take the truck and your… whatever the fuck he is, and haul your asses back up the mountain. I don’t much care what you do.”

  “I’ll take the money—this time,” Willem said, lifting his feet back into the jeep and looking hard at Harry. “But I tell you what: one of these days—”

  “What, you gonna kill me? Then who’ll you sell your shit too?”

  Eyes still locked on Harry, he said, “Whoever takes your place.”

  “Look, Willem.” Harry took the edge off his voice, as if he were talking to an old friend, because he was taken aback by Willem’s tone and the implication of his words. “I made this deal with your daddy a long time ago, and as long as Elbert’s around I’m gonna honor that deal.” It didn’t make a bit of sense, but he figured Willem was too stupid to know it.

  Harry eased the hammer back in place, stuck his hand into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills, counted out ten C-notes and handed them to Willem, who crammed them into his pocket and fired up the jeep. Then he was backing up and heading down the driveway, leaving Harry alone with his brand new SUV as the sun disappeared behind the mountaintop and dusk began creeping over the land.

  Chapter Seven

  While Horse-trader-Harry was retrieving his two-headed coin, Tom Traber was roaming the back roads of Weaverton, North Carolina, looking for Cindy Jackson. Not that he expected to find her, or even gave a damn about where she might be. But because Mary was right: he was the law around here and he hadn’t lifted a finger to locate her child. No one had been out to the school and no one had talked to the neighbors. He’d just told Mary that to get her off his back. Maybe tomorrow he’d ask around the church for volunteers to comb the woods, just in case. The last thing he needed was Mary calling the state police. He sure didn’t want those boys roaming the mountainside, not with all the shit he was into.

  Traber was a big fish, but his pond was a mud puddle and no one cared much about him one way or another. Which was fine for Traber, who somehow had been handed his father’s job on a silver platter after the old man passed away. Nobody cared and nobody kept an eye on him, and he didn’t much keep his eye on anyone else, either. He spent his days roaming the old mountain roads, stopping a speeding car, or a truck every now and then. Most of his evenings were spent with Laurie Miller, whose husband was kept busy night-hauling loads across the state for the Preston Textile Mill. Traber did what he wanted with whoever he wanted, and if he broke a law or two in the process—God’s or man’s—so be it.

  Traber punched the cigarette lighter in his dash, reached into his shirt pocket and fished out a clear plastic baggie, which had a thin joint resting atop a small amount of pot that lined the bottom of the bag. Much too small an amount, Traber thought, as he clamped the joint between his lips. The lighter popped up and he snatched it and touched it to the joint, took a drag and held it in. The smo
ke tickled his lungs as it expanded. He blew it out and sucked in another lungful, smiling as the pleasant marijuana buzz settled in around him. Traber made his way up the long and winding road. Rounding the bend, he noticed a yellow Ryder truck stopped on the shoulder of the oncoming lane. Two guys stood beside it, staring up at the mountainside. Traber wondered what they were doing, but he didn’t really give a shit, so he took another hit and passed them by. Moments later, the truck was in his rearview and he was veering off the highway, onto a straight stretch of County Road 121. The road banked left and up, and he followed the curving incline halfway to the mountain’s top, until he came to a dirt road that would lead him to Cary’s Holler. Houses were few and far between out here. A stream ran along the left side of the road, the hills and woods on the right. Passing a farm house, Traber took one last hit and tossed the smoldering nub out the window, hit the siren and bubble lights and stomped the gas pedal. Moments later he took a wooden bridge across the burbling water. On the far side of the road, row upon row of firs of various heights stretched their way up a long and sloping hill. At the top of the hill loomed the deep woods and trails of Rickert’s Mountain. Siren howling and dirt spraying, he came to a fishtailing stop in front of Butchie Walker’s double-wide trailer.

  Two men spilled from the mobile home, out onto the wooden deck, eyes wide and wild in the strobing blue and red lights.

  Butchie stepped through the front door, tall and lean, his head clean-shaven, his face beet-red. “Goddamnit!” he yelled. “The fuck’re you makin’ all that racket for?”

  “Hey, it’s an emergency,” Traber said. “I’m almost outa pot!”

  “Turn that shit off!”

  Traber, laughing, leaned into the car and flicked off the lights and siren, smiling as the wailing ground slowly to a halt.

  “Traber, you fucking moron. I got Bobby standing over the toilet with an ounce of coke.” Butchie looked at his friends. The toilet flushed and he yelled, “Goddamnit!”