MatchUp

WHEN KARIN SLAUGHTER AGREED TO be a part of this anthology, she had two provisos. The first was the story would take place in the 1990s and, second, her partner would be Michael Koryta.

I readily agreed to both.

Thankfully, Michael agreed too.

The challenge here was for each writer to take their worlds back in time, to a point when their characters were much younger, just starting out in their respective fictional careers. Karin wanted to provide a look at Jeffrey Tolliver as a young man, from 1993. While writing him before, she always knew some things about his early years, but intentionally kept those close.

“It’s fun to keep secrets from readers,” she jokes.

This story allowed her an opportunity to share a few of those tidbits.

For Michael, this was the first time he’s ever written from Joe Pritchard’s point of view. He actually hasn’t written about Lincoln Perry or Joe in eight years, and those stories were always told in the first person, from Lincoln’s point of view. This story provided a chance to not only move the characters back in time but also to change the lens.

Michael notes that a pattern developed during the process. He would write something and hand it off to Karin. Then she’d write something a lot better and funnier and hand it back. It came to a point that he didn’t want the story to end, because it became a lot of fun. One of the major characters is named after a bet he lost to the novelist Alafair Burke. I won’t tell you which one, but the studious reader will know.

And here’s the best irony.

Word-wise, this is the longest effort included in this anthology.

Yet it carries a curious title.

Short Story.

SHORT STORY

HELEN, GEORGIA

FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1993

5:46 A.M.

THIS WASN’T THE FIRST TIME Jeffrey Tolliver had stumbled around a dark hotel room looking for his clothes. His bare feet cut channels into the musty shag carpet. His hands blindly reached into the shadows. Alcohol permeated the air. And sweat. And sex.

Rustling came from the bed as the woman rolled over. She snored lightly, which might have been endearing if he knew her name.

Rebecca?

He smiled past his hangover.

Delta flight attendant. Ex-cheerleader. Long blond hair. Five nine, which was a good height for his six three. She had good numbers everywhere else, too, but then Jeffrey remembered that Rebecca had stood him up.

For two weeks, he’d worked double shifts so he could take a long weekend off. He had made the nearly four-hour drive from Birmingham only to find a phone message waiting about a storm coming through, the airline moving planes around, and that was how a hot weekend in the north Georgia mountains had ended with him slinking off alone to the hotel bar and drinking too much, then talking too much, then ending up in bed and doing too much with—

More snoring.

She was a slip of a thing under the sheets. A waist he could almost wrap both hands around, which had its pluses and minuses. Not as tall as Rebecca. Not as smart. Did smart matter? He’d like to think not, but then after a while, you needed someone with an imagination.

Shayna.

That was the woman in the bed. She was so country sticks came out of her mouth when she talked, but she knew that the hotel’s name, the Schussel, was missing an umlaut—and she knew what an umlaut was—and that Schussel was German for “key.”

Jeffrey found his boxers by the closed curtains. He slipped them on as he rustled the curtains, looking for the rest of his clothes. A sock made itself known. His sock? He made like a stork and shoved his left foot into the tube. He wriggled his toes. Definitely his sock.

This was what guys in his business would call a clue.

Jeffrey widened his search pattern from the last known sock. Bed, dresser, TV, chair. The Schussel Mountain Lodge was like every hotel room he’d ever awakened in, but done in a Bavarian style. Or Georgia’s idea of Bavarian style, because for reasons unknown, the whole town of Helen was made to look like an Alpine Village dropped down in the foothills of the Appalachians.

His fingers brushed his wallet on the dresser. His keys. His pager. ChapStick. His shiny new detective’s badge and somewhat older gun were locked in the wheel well of the trunk, though he’d had both out on the drive up from Birmingham in case of cops or robbers.

“Shit.”

He hissed out the word a split second before a searing pain shot through his big toe, which had caught on one of the metal bed legs. He leaned heavily on the mattress. His hand gripped into a fist, and he realized that his fist was holding something that wasn’t part of the sheets.

T-shirt.

“Y’all right?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” he told Shayna.

Not Shayna.

Shayna was last weekend.

Jeffrey remembered a necklace with the name spelled out in script. Custom made, she’d told him, given to her by her stepfather to commend her high school graduation. He’d pretended this was a normal conversation for a twenty-six-year-old man to have with an eighteen-year-old girl in a downtown bar, and that he wasn’t a cop, a newly minted detective, who should arrest her for underage drinking instead of having sex with her in the backseat of her Cadillac.

Her stepfather’s Cadillac.

He fumbled for the switch in the bathroom, shutting the door as the fluorescent light flickered on. He checked his reflection in the mirror. He looked slightly more hungover than he felt. Or maybe he was getting better at being hungover, which was a skill that twigged off all the branches of his family tree.

He turned on the faucet. The handle came off in his hand. Water squirted sideways, up, down. He fumbled to fit the handle back on the nut. He watched the stream turn from brown to yellow to something close to clear before splashing his face with cold water.

Jeffrey looked up at the mirror again.

His T-shirt was soaking wet. A wet Maginot Line cut across his boxers where he’d leaned against the sink basin. His underwear was bright orange with blue-and-white AU’s all over it.

Auburn University.

Rebecca the flight attendant had been a Georgia cheerleader. He’d worn the boxers as a joke but now the joke was probably on him because he hadn’t packed a lot of clothes for the four-day retreat and he was pretty sure he was wearing his only underwear.

“Y’all right in there?”

She said “there” like “thar,” which wasn’t an indictment, especially to a man from south Alabama, but something in her tone set his teeth on edge.

He said, “Just gonna take a shower.”

Before she could offer to join him, he reached behind the lank shower curtain and turned the handles. He stood in the middle of the small bathroom with his eyes closed. The hangover tapped at the bridge of his nose like an accusatory finger. How long could he keep doing this? He wasn’t a kid anymore. It wouldn’t be too long before his youthful indiscretions turned into full-blown, irreparable mistakes.

His eyes opened.

He cocked his head at a noise.

Outside the bathroom, but inside the room. Or maybe not inside the room so much as outside in the hallway, because he could’ve sworn he heard the door to the room click closed.

Jeffrey turned off the shower. He opened the door and turned on the light. No girl in the bed. No pager. No wallet. No keys.

She’d even taken his ChapStick.

“Motherfuck.”

He could see every corner of the room, but he still checked on the other side of the bed, under the bed, looking for anything, but especially his pants. He found his right tennis shoe under the desk and jammed his foot into it on his way out the door.

Which closed behind him.

He patted his pockets for the key, but there were no pockets.

Somewhere not far away, a door opened on squeaky hinges. He looked up the hallway, which T-d off at the end, one side going to the elevators, the other to the exit stairs.

The door closed with the heavy, metal clunk of a fire exit door.

He bolted up the hall, lopsided on one shoe, each step jarring some truth into his hungover brain. That he wore wet, orange boxer shorts, a soaked white T-shirt, one sock, one shoe and no wallet, no pager, no ID, no car keys, and no fucking ChapStick.

He rounded the corner on his shoed foot, the waffle sole ripping shag from the carpet. He shouldered open the exit door and grabbed the metal railings of the stairs so that he could slide down on his palms.

Fourth floor, which meant that the sound of feet hitting the treads two floors below was the girl not named Shayna. He glanced over the side and saw two things. Her hand on the railing and the leg of his jeans flapping as she barreled down the stairs.

“Stop.”

Jeffrey swung around the landing like a monkey in a Tarzan movie.

“Stop,” he bellowed again, using his cop voice, which should be just as effective with thieves here as it was back in Birmingham.

Not-Shayna had hit the bottom floor. He saw the door close as his socked foot slipped across the last landing. He caught himself before he slid down the stairs. He pushed himself off the last step, exploding against the exit door, lunging into the lobby, ready to keep running in whatever direction the girl led him, but was stopped cold by a group of missionaries. Or he guessed they were missionaries, because their bright blue T-shirts shouted, ASK ME ABOUT BEING A MISSIONARY FOR JESUS.

“Jesus,” he mumbled, because that was the word that stuck in his head.

There were at least thirty of them crowding the lobby, all blond with eyes as blue as their shirts, all teenagers, both men and women with cherubic cheeks lit up red with zeal for the Lord. He tried to look over the crowd, to discern which direction to go next, but there were no telltale swinging doors or arrows pointing the way.

One of the missionaries said, “Holy crap, mister. You’re in your underwear.”

“Running shorts,” he said, resisting the urge to cover himself. “Training for a marathon.”

“With just one shoe?”

“Half marathon.”

Jeffrey made his way through the crowd of blue shirts, stepping over suitcases and duffel bags, scanning the floor for his jeans or his wallet in case these missionaries, by some miracle, were going to save him.

The woman at the front desk already had her lips pursed when he approached. He’d never met her in his life, but she said, “You again.”

“Me again,” he echoed, switching up the inflection so that it could be a statement or a question.

The corner of her lip trilled, but not like an old lady pucker, more like what you’d see from a pit bull right before it ripped off your nut sack with its bare teeth.

“Whatchu doin’ down here in your underwear again?” she asked.

He chose to ignore the “again,” asking, “Did you see that woman I was with come through here?”

“You mean my daughter?”

Jeffrey took a moment to collect his thoughts.

He’d taken reports off idiots who’d been rolled by women. At least Not-Shayna hadn’t been a prostitute, though then again he’d had sex with her and she’d taken all his money, and on the other hand as a cop himself, he knew that no cop believed the guy in his boxers who said he was rolled by a woman who wasn’t a prostitute. But goddamn, he’d never paid for sex in his life. He’d played football at Auburn for two years. He was pretty much guaranteed sex until they carted him off to the old folks home, and even then he was pretty sure there’d be some Tigers who would take care of his War Eagle. Though it pained him to say this, for right now, at this moment, the football didn’t matter. Half of policing was knowing how to lay down a threat.

He could talk his way out of this.

He was in the process of opening his mouth when he heard the distinctive, guttural roar of a 1968 Mustang with a hole in the carburetor and a length of twine holding up the muffler.

“Shit.”

He turned toward the front door.

The missionaries parted like the Red Sea for everybody except Moses, which was to say not at all. He shoved them out of his way, going faster than he ever had up the football field, which likely was why he’d only played two years for Auburn.

He ran through the parking lot, arms and legs pumping under the clouded glow of the receding moon. The Mustang had a healthy head start. It was already making a right onto the main road.

Jeffrey kept running, even as he became aware of three things.

One was that it was pointless to chase a car on foot. Even with two shoes, the car was always going to win.

Two took longer to register, and that was the knowledge that the temperature had dropped about thirty degrees from the day before. This didn’t come as a revelation so much as a series of contractions. The muscles in his legs cramped. His abs cramped. His arms cramped. Other things started to shrink from the cold, too.

But none of this distracted from number three, which was the real killer. The Mustang was not his Mustang. It was likely a ’68, and it had the same mixture of faded paint and primer, but his Mustang was sitting exactly where he’d parked it last night.

Somehow, Not-Shayna had stolen the wrong car.

He slowed to a jog.

The Mustang that wasn’t his Mustang was turning again, this time into the adjacent parking lot. Another Alpine hotel. Another German word for its name. He checked over his shoulder. The moon was squinting over one lone peak, blue early morning sky casting an ominous shadow over the full parking lot. Every pant of breath out of his mouth showed a puff of air in front of his face.

The Mustang slowed as it weaved through the next door parking lot. Not-Shayna looked distracted, which was good because he ran parallel to the car, head low as he shielded himself behind a bunch of other cars. He ended up crouched at the front wheel of a big blue school bus that must have belonged to the missionaries because it too said ASK ME ABOUT BEING A MISSIONARY FOR JESUS.

The Mustang turned a third time, heading down an alleyway that separated the Schussel Mountain Lodge from the Schloss Linderhof, which was done up like a cardboard castle had thrown up on a Motel 6.

Footsteps.

A young black man holding a steaming cup of coffee was leaving the Linderhof lobby. He tipped his Cleveland Indians hat at Jeffrey as he continued down the sidewalk. You didn’t see many Cleveland fans in Helen. Or black people for that matter. He nodded back like it was perfectly normal to be crouched in a parking lot wearing one sock and one shoe and orange underwear in a town built like an Alpine village.

He waited until the man was out of sight, then kept his knees bent low as he headed around the back of the Schussel Lodge on the opposite side of the alleyway. Without the parking lot lights, he could barely see more than a few yards in front of him. His entire body shuddered from the cold. The grass was wet because of course it was wet. His one sock got soaked, basically becoming a cube of ice as he made his way to the rear of the building. He saw the nose of the Mustang peeking out from the alley. Maybe fifty yards away. There was a dip in the pavement, a downhill dive to three giant green Dumpsters that stood sentry. The entire area was bathed in light from the xenon bulbs overhead. His ears tensed in that weird way that reminded him that Darwin had been right.

In the alley, there were some familiar sounds, not a car door opening or closing, but the dragging of a metal Auburn keychain across the rear panel of a car as a key clicked into a lock and clicked and clicked, because for whatever reason, the key to his Mustang had worked in the ignition of the Mustang that was not his, but it would not work in the not-his-Mustang’s trunk lock.

But then it worked.

The trunk opened, the hinges squealing the same way they squealed in his car.

He moved fast because all he had was the element of surprise. He wasn’t worried about getting shot. There were far, far worse things that could happen. Three months he’d had a gold shield. Three months he’d been in suits and ties instead of short-sleeved polyester uniforms with sixty pounds of equipment around his hips that beat into his legs and abs like a pile driver every time he chased some idiot perp through the streets of Birmingham.

He loved his gold detective’s shield more than he’d ever loved a woman. Taken better care of it, too. And his lieutenant hadn’t wanted to give him the promotion because he didn’t trust Jeffrey, and Jeffrey didn’t trust his lieutenant because he was an asshole.

Forty yards away.

He heard the solid thunk of a car door closing. He clip-clopped on his one tennis shoe, the cold in his socked foot working up his leg like a python. The sunrise was two scant hours away, but the temperature felt like it was dropping by the minute. How was that even possible? Two days ago, the thermometer had been in the seventies and now he felt like he was standing inside a commercial freezer.

Thirty yards.

Suddenly, he dropped flat to the ground, face and palms pressed to the asphalt.

Muscle memory.

His body had reacted faster than his brain could process the sound of a gunshot cracking like thunder in the thin, cold air.

Had Not-Shayna found a gun?

And accidentally fired a shot?

The reports he’d have to fill out on that one. Not that he didn’t know how to fill out those reports in his sleep because he was a fucking vice detective and for the last three months, at least once a day, he’d taken a report from a stupid John who’d had his shit stolen by a hooker.

He pushed himself up.

Twenty yards.

Ten.

He crouched again, this time in front of the Mustang. He put his palms flat against the hot metal, trying to soak up the warmth. She had a gun, and the gun had been fired, and he was a cop so he had to do something about it.

Tires screeched in the alley.

He stood, shoulders hunched, so he could sneak a look over the top of the car. A blue Ford pickup, older model, peeled backward up the alley, leaving smoke and burned rubber in its wake.

He looked down.

His left foot was no longer freezing cold. Blood streamed around his sock, forming a lake, wicking into the material, soaking everything in its wake.

Steam came off the hot liquid.

He lowered himself down into a push-up and peered beneath the car.

Not-Shayna stared back, but not really.

She was caught in the in-between where life or death were the only questions going through her mind.

He’d seen the look many times before.

He scrambled around the car, head down as he made his way toward the woman because she had stopped being Not-Shayna the thief and had started being the victim of a gunshot wound.

He scanned the empty alley as he ran into the open. The woman was gut shot, one of the worst kinds of injuries. His Glock was in her hand. He touched the muzzle. Cold as ice, so she hadn’t shot herself. He took the gun and pointed it around the alley again, looking up for fire escapes or bad guys climbing into open windows.

The blue Ford truck.

Two people in the cab, one obviously the shooter. He’d seen them both—not their faces, but their shapes. One of them was wearing a baseball cap.

“Help. Me,” the woman begged.

The hotel windows were closed, but there were guests inside who must have heard the gunshot.

He raised his voice, “Somebody call the police.”

“Help,” she repeated.

Her hand covered her belly. Blood rolled out between her fingers, a steady river of red that indicated an artery had been opened. He pressed his hands on top of hers, trying to stop the bleeding. She screamed from the pain, and he screamed over her, yelling, “Call the police.”

She grabbed his wrist. Her mouth opened to cough. Blood sprayed out. Warm drops splattered his cold skin. Jeffrey laid his hand to her cheek. He looked down at her, aware that he had been above her like this last night, that just a handful of hours ago everything between them had been different. Her eyelids fluttered. He inhaled and the heat from her body reached into his mouth, traveled down his throat, and spread its fingers into his chest.

He shouldn’t have drunk so much.

He shouldn’t have talked so much.

He should have remembered her name.

“Don’t move.” The man’s voice had cracked on the second word. “I mean it, mister. Just—don’t.”

Slowly, he turned his head.

A skinny beanpole of a kid riding high tide in his cop uniform was pointing a gun. Or at least trying to. The revolver shook in the boy’s hands. His pointy elbows were akimbo. His knees kept locking and unlocking. He had to be at least six five, maybe one fifty after a good meal. His gun belt hung cowboy-style loose around his slim hips, but his eyes were wet with tears.

“Please don’t move.”

“It’s all right.” He read the man’s name tag. “Paulson, I’m gonna put down my gun, all right? That’s all I’m gonna do.” Slowly, he laid his Glock on the pavement. Even more slowly, he raised his hands. “Paulson, you’re holding that revolver the right way, with both of your hands in a standard grip, pointing at my center mass, but maybe move your finger off the trigger?” He waited, but the officer didn’t move. “That’s not how they taught you at the academy, is it, Paulson? What’d your instructor say? Keep your finger on the side, just above the trigger, so you don’t make a mistake.”

The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a mermaid.

“Paulson, just think about what your instructor said. What’d he tell you about only putting your finger on the trigger when you’re ready to shoot somebody?” He indicated his raised hands with a nod. “Are you ready to shoot me, Paulson?”

Carefully, with painstaking slowness, Paulson snailed his finger off the trigger.

“That’s good.” He felt his lungs finally relax enough to take a full breath. “Now radio your boss. Tell him you’ve got a dead woman and an unarmed man in custody, and that he needs to put out an APB for an older model Ford pickup, blue, two passengers, one likely African American, wearing a Cleveland Indians ball cap.”

The kid started to do as he was told, but then Jeffrey made the mistake of relaxing his shoulders.

“Don’t,” Paulson screamed, his left hand going back to his gun, his finger tapping the trigger. “Don’t move. I mean it.” He seemed to realize his voice was more like a plea than an order. “Please, mister. I don’t wanna shoot you.”

“I don’t want you to shoot me, either.”

The statement gave them both pause.

A scuffling sound echoed down the alleyway. Another officer, this one more senior, came trotting toward them on what looked like a bad set of knees. His gun was out, but with a hell of a lot more self-assuredness. The chief of police, judging by the stars on his collar. He was barking into his radio, calling in the codes, alerting all available to get the hell over here.

“Don’t fucking move,” the chief ordered, sighting him down the nose of his revolver. “You try anything and I’ll—”

“I’m a cop,” Jeffrey said. “Birmingham, Eighth Precinct, Vice. My lieutenant is—”

“This ain’t the time for talking.” The old guy wasn’t open to suggestions, and he couldn’t blame him. None of this looked good for anybody. “Slow as molasses, I want you to lace your fingers on top of your head.”

He did what the cop told him to do. “Please listen to me, sir.” He talked to the chief because Paulson was leaning his shoulder against the wall like he was about to pass out. “You need to find a blue Ford pickup—”

“I cain’t throw a rock without hittin’ a blue pickup truck. Shit, my son drives a blue pickup.” The chief was already reaching into the open trunk. Then he removed and held up a brick of cocaine. “You wanna tell me about this?”

His bowels turned liquid.

“Hoo-ee.”

The chief had dollar signs in his eyes. Thanks to new federal laws, arresting agencies were allowed to keep proceeds from drug seizures. “You gotta ’bout ten grand worth of guns, a stack of cash, a hundred grand worth of coke.”

“He killed Nora,” Paulson said.

A small town like this, the young cop probably had gone to high school with the victim. He was crying for real now. His gun had stopped shaking. But his finger stayed on the trigger.

“You murdered her in cold blood.”

“Steady now.” The chief peeled his eyes away from the booty in the trunk. His smile said he fully understood the situation, or at least what he thought was the situation. “That why you shot her, boy? Come down here to peddle some guns and blow, but she got greedy?”

“Down?”

Jeffrey glanced at the car.

He’d seen it at the time but hadn’t registered the fact until now.

Ohio license plates, front and back.

The cop dropped the brick of cocaine back in the trunk, then walked to the side of the car and opened the door and glove box. A stack of cash held with a rubber band fell out. The cop eyeballed the cash but didn’t say a word this time.

“I can explain,” Jeffrey said, the same three words he had heard from every criminal he’d ever arrested. “Please let me explain.”

“Shut up until I ask you a question.”

The chief bent down to search the car. His old knees popped, and he groaned as he pulled jeans from the floorboard of the backseat. He tossed them onto the ground, then a newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The chief looked at Jeffrey. “Cleveland, huh?”

All he could do was shake his head as the chief reached back into the car. The older guy groaned again as he bent his knees deeper to yank something out from underneath the seat. The cop grinned when he showed his prize.

A greasy brown paper bag.

The logo on front read “Duke’s Grill.”

The chief squinted at the receipt stapled to the bag. “Says here that six days ago, you were in East Cleveland on Eddy Road at 3:42 in the p.m.” He nodded at Paulson. “Stretch, put the cuffs on this scumbag.”

Like most cops, Jeffrey had a terror of being handcuffed. He worked to keep the quiver out of his voice. “That’s not necessary. I’ll cooperate fully.”

“Shut up, you Yankee fucker.”

Paulson walked toward Jeffrey, struggling to unsnap the handcuffs from his utility belt, but the belt kept shifting. The buckle was pulled to the last hole, but it was still loose because his hips were basically like a woman’s.

“Gimme your hand.”

Jeffrey didn’t move.

Paulson wrenched Jeffrey’s left hand off his head and twisted it around. Technically, the officer should’ve grabbed the right hand, and he should’ve cuffed it first, but teaching time was over. They were really going to push this? Arrest him for being some coke-dealing killer from fucking Cleveland?

Cleveland?

Motherfucker.

“Hang on, there was a black guy in the—”

“This ain’t Ohio, buddy.”

The chief nodded for Paulson to ratchet down the cuffs tight to the wrists.

“You can’t just grab your nuts and blame the black guy.”

CLEVELAND, OHIO

9:27 A.M.

THE DEA ARRIVED WITH PLANE tickets to Georgia on the first day Joe Pritchard had with his new partner, a kid named Lincoln Perry.

You were supposed to get to know your partners by working with them, but Joe had actually been watching Perry for a week, and not feeling optimistic about the pairing. Every night, Perry went drinking alone at a bar on Clark Avenue called the Hideaway. He was drinking alone because two weeks earlier he’d busted his childhood buddy, a guy named Ed Gradduk, on cocaine-dealing charges on the very streets where the two had grown up more like brothers than friends. To say that Perry was now persona non grata in his old neighborhood was an understatement. Given the chance to choose badge or buddy, he hadn’t hesitated.

Thus the promotion.

Joe had heard the story and was impressed by it, but as he sat running surveillance on his own partner-to-be, watching Perry sip beer and stare into the middle distance as if unaware of the building rage his presence was creating in the bar, he was worried. Coming back down there, insisting on sitting down in the lion’s den, was baiting trouble, and for what?

So on Friday morning he had a plan for the day, and the plan was his “no cowboys” lecture. Then the DEA showed up and told him he was packing Perry along to Georgia, cowboy or not, to try to find Antonio Childers.

Antonio Childers was a viral plague of Cleveland’s crime scene, an east-side banger who’d spread his empire wide, pushing across town. He sold everything he could, from stolen cars to physical enforcement, but lately he’d made his name on Colombian cocaine. He was a suspect in more than a dozen murders in the past two years alone.

He’d also been missing for nearly a month.

For a week, maybe ten days, investigators had entertained the hopeful notion that he was dead and his body would turn up in the trunk of a car on Eddy Road, or maybe wash up in the Flats of the Cuyahoga River, or the Lake Erie breakwater. Joe hadn’t shared that enthusiasm. None of his informants gave the slightest indication that there had been a power shift, or a power vacuum. The system purred on, and Antonio Childers remained at the wheel.

From where, though?

They’d heard a lot of rumors. Georgia wasn’t in the mix. But here were two DEA agents with plane tickets. One of them was a stocky white guy with a crew cut who chewed Nicorette for the entire briefing, popping in fresh pieces but never removing the old ones, so that by the end of things he was working on a damn golf ball in the corner of his jaw. He didn’t say much, but he nodded a lot and occasionally made a finger-gun pointing gesture when he agreed with something. The other was a tall woman named Luisa who had packed the brains while her partner packed his gum.

“The coke Antonio is moving has come through Atlanta for about nine months,” she explained. She held a folder in her hands but kept it closed. “He’s one of four, maybe five players working off the same supply. But they always transported it to him. When that stopped, he decided to head south himself.”

“Why’d it stop?”

“We think they got a little uneasy about surveillance.”

“That would be DEA surveillance?”

She nodded.

Joe thought this made sense. Antonio was not the type of guy who’d give up on a good thing when he found it. He’d be more inclined to go down and sort it out. If you stayed untouchable in your own neighborhood long enough, you could begin to think the same rules would apply elsewhere.

“You’ve known this for a while,” Lincoln Perry said.

They nodded.

“You also know we’ve been looking for him for a while. Yet you didn’t think it was worth sharing?”

“Let her finish,” Joe said, but he didn’t disagree with the kid. Still, feds were feds. He’d spent too many hours in too many meetings like this to want to debate what they should have shared and when.

All he wanted was Antonio Childers.

“Where is he?”

“He was in Atlanta,” she said. “Blew out of town three days ago and our team down there figured he was northbound. They were partially right. He went north, but not far. Ended up in a small town up the mountains a couple hours northwest of the city. Best guess is he was waiting on a courier, or he was testing his back trail to see whether he was being followed. We’re not sure.”

“But he’s still there?”

“Possibly.”

That didn’t sound encouraging.

“His car is there. This morning, local police found that for us. With a few bricks of cocaine, some cash, a half-dozen semiautomatic handguns, and . . .” She paused and opened the folder for the first time. “One Nora Simpson, now deceased, of Helen, Georgia.”

She passed them a photo. It had come through on a fax and the image quality was grainy but you didn’t need any better clarity to see the gunshot wound to the stomach.

“This happened this morning, or the car was found this morning?” Joe asked. “Or both?”

The crew-cut guy made the finger-gun gesture.

Joe figured that meant it was both.

“So you think our boy Antonio did the shooting, but now he’s missing,” Perry said.

Luisa nodded.

“Then the locals are also looking for him,” Perry said. “Yet you want us to go to Georgia. With a warrant for a lesser charge. Explain that?”

Joe explained it for her. “They don’t want him jailed in Georgia. Not yet, at least.”

Crew Cut gave him the finger-gun again.

More points for the home team.

“We’ve got questions about the local police,” Luisa said. “Not only that, but we have another officer in custody for the situation. A Detective Jeffrey Tolliver of Birmingham, Alabama. Originally from a little town called Sylacauga. Played football for Auburn. His lieutenant hates him, but he has a good reputation for the most part. A sheriff named Clayton Hollister speaks highly of him, too. Doesn’t seem likely he was running cocaine with Antonio Childers.”

“So what was he doing in Georgia with the dead woman?”

“Before she was a dead woman, she was a live woman with a hotel room,” Luisa said. “It seems that even Mr. Tolliver’s staunchest defenders will admit that he has a proclivity for finding his way into hotel rooms with women who may be, um, recent acquaintances.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Perry said, and Joe gave him a warning look.

“Listen,” Luisa said, “what we need is to get Antonio Childers in custody in a hurry, but also in the right cell. We’re giving the lead you’ve been looking for. Hell, we’re even giving you plane tickets for the cause.”

“Why so important that it’s Ohio?” Joe asked.

She chose her words carefully. “Because we believe he has friends in Georgia who are a lot more important to us than he is, and we don’t want them to get early chances with him.”

“Police?” Joe asked. “You think your supplier involves police?”

If there was anything he loathed more than the Antonio Childerses of the world, it was a cop who’d help them.

“We just want him in Ohio,” Luisa said without elaborating, but it was all she needed to say.

“So do we,” Joe said. “Let’s get to Georgia. How far is the drive from Atlanta to this town, Helen?”

“About two hours, usually. But there’s snow coming in. Might slow things down.”

“Hell,” Joe said, “this is Cleveland. There’s always snow coming in. We’ll be fine.”

He’d remember that statement often in the hours to come.

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.”

“It sounds authentic,” Joe agreed, and then they thanked her and crossed the street to where she’d indicated the shooting had happened, an alley that angled downhill, behind the hotels. Outside of a hotel called the Linderhof, a guy wearing a long denim jacket that flapped around his legs like a duster was spreading snowmelt on the steps and smoking a cigarette. Maintenance man, probably.

“Want to see whether he, too, has heard the gospel?” Perry asked.

“I expect it spreads fast around here, but it might have some variations,” Joe said. “We might as well hear them all.”

They went up and badged him and he looked at them sourly while he smoked the cigarette.

“Cleveland, you say?”

“Cleveland, Ohio, yes.”

“You interested in the black fella? I don’t say that ’cause he was black. I say that ’cause he drove the car in.”

“The car where Nora was shot?” Perry asked.

“That’s the one. Sweet car. Older Mustang, maybe early ’70s. Nah, that ain’t right, not with those taillights. Late ’60s.” He took a long drag and then repeated, “Sweet car.”

“Where was it impounded?” Joe asked.

“It wasn’t. They just left it right where it was. There’s police tape on it. I assume it’s likely locked, too.”

Perry glanced at Joe, clearly impressed by this police work, and said, “Was there anybody working here who might have had a view of what happened this morning?”

“Nope.” Another puff on the cigarette, then, “I keep meaning to watch the tapes and see if there’s anything useful on them. But, hell, with this storm, the manager keeps busting my balls about getting ice-melt down.”

“You’ve got security cameras here?”

“Sure. A couple pointed right at the alley. I figure they might be of some use.”

“I figure you’re right,” Joe said. “Let’s take a look.”

The security footage that hadn’t been reviewed or even requested by the three-man Helen Police Department, currently occupied with plans for snowplow routes, offered more than a view of the car.

It showed the shooting.

“I’ll be damned,” the maintenance man said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

Joe was starting to get a headache. He wondered how many homicides had been investigated in this town in the past century. Whatever the total was, it had to be matched exactly by the number of cold cases.

“Probably going to want to pass this along to the guy they’ve got in jail,” Perry said as they watched the grainy-but-indisputable image of Antonio Childers opening fire on Nora Simpson. “It seems potentially useful to the defense team, what with the video of someone else doing the killing and all.”

“How about the girl, though?” Joe said. “She’s driving like she’s expecting someone. Cruising slow through that alley. But she sure as hell wasn’t expecting Antonio. She’s cruising, and he’s running. She seems surprised by him. If she just stole his car, that doesn’t jibe.”

“Remember what the girl who was spreading the gospel told us,” Perry said. “The cop they locked up said Nora Simpson stole his car, but that he was lying about that, because—”

“It wasn’t his car,” Joe finished. “Right. Could be some of Detective Tolliver’s testimony had been bent around the edges by the time it got to her. So let’s say Nora sleeps with him, and then she steals a car. Problem is, it’s Antonio’s car. All fine. But how in the hell does she start it?”

“Hot-wire, maybe?”

“If she’s hot-wiring cars, she doesn’t need to steal keys.”

“We need to chat with Detective Tolliver,” Perry said. “I’d rather hear his version of things first. And alert him to the presence of this video. Seems like the kind thing to do, before they send him to the electric chair.”

“Hang on,” Joe said. “Can you go back?”

He had been focused on the shooting the first time through, but now as they watched it again he’d seen that just after Antonio Childers left the frame and just before the guy in one shoe and his boxer shorts arrived, there had been a blur of motion that looked like another vehicle pulling in. Pulling in too close to the scene not to have been part of it.

The maintenance man rewound and played it again. Joe put his finger on the corner of the screen. “Right there, Lincoln. You got better eyes than me, what’s the make on that truck?”

Perry leaned forward and squinted. “F-150, I’d say. It’s in and out awfully fast, but we can grab a still image and blow that up. Looks like an older Ford, though. Exhaust is custom. They don’t have those big dual pipes coming out of the factory.”

“Hell,” the maintenance man said. “That’s Paulson’s truck.”

Joe said, “You know who owns that thing?”

“Pretty sure. Like this fella said, those pipes stand out. Double Simpson put those growlers on. I remember that, because people said it should have been a, what do you call it? Noise ordinance violation, I think. But since it was Paulson’s truck, and he wasn’t likely to give himself a ticket, who the fuck cared how loud it was, right?”

They both stared at him.

Lincoln Perry spoke slowly, as if he had to use a second language with this guy. “That’s a police officer’s truck?”

“Sure it is. Matter of fact, it is that police officer’s truck.” He pointed at the screen where the surveillance footage was still running, and a tall, skinny, uniformed officer had a gun pointed at the guy in his underwear. Other than the gun and the badge he might’ve been mistaken for a telephone pole. He would’ve been the butt of the joke even in a movie. Despite his considerable height, he didn’t look old enough to shave and probably had needed to add holes to his duty belt to cinch it up tight enough to hold the weight of the gun without his pants falling off his ass.

Joe said, “So Paulson’s truck was in motion, but Paulson wasn’t driving it. Who do you think was, mister?”

“How in the hell do I know?”

“Because you’re batting pretty well already,” Joe said. “So if you don’t mind, keep swinging.”

“I don’t know. Paulson doesn’t have a wife or a girl, lives by himself. I got no idea who’d be driving his car at the ass-crack of dawn while he’s on duty.”

“What about the guy you mentioned earlier, the one you said customized the exhaust on that Ford?” Perry asked. “Said his name was Double?”

“His full name is Thomas, I guess, but nobody around here has called him anything but Double since he was a kid. Not sure why, exactly. I think it’s because whatever trouble you had in your life before he showed up, it doubled on you the moment he got there, you know? Matter of fact, I’ve heard it said it was his first-grade teacher who started that nickname. You know a kid is a problem when a teacher tags him like that.”

Joe said, “Does Thomas, or Double, or whatever the hell he’s known by, move drugs?”

“Probably.”

“Coke?”

“I don’t know. That boy walks down the sidewalk and I cross the street, right? I ain’t exactly in his inner circle. But it surely wouldn’t surprise me.” The maintenance man grew reflective. “Matter of fact, I recall one story about him. Highway patrol stopped him somewhere north of Valdosta, and he was running something, I think maybe it was coke but I can’t say for sure. Anyhow, between the time they ran his license and the time they made him get out of his car, he keistered it. The car search came up empty and they let him go with just a ticket for the expired plates.”

“Keistered it,” Perry echoed.

“It’s when you shove the drugs right up your asshole.”

Perry lifted a hand to ward off any further imagery. “I followed the mechanics, thanks. I was just unfamiliar with the term. I’ll file that one away, though. So he does have a drug history, and he’s close with the local police, particularly the officer who was first on the scene. Correct?”

“I wouldn’t argue that. He runs a chop shop, everybody knows that, and Paulson surely does, but he hasn’t done anything about it. In exchange, Paulson got a thousand-dollar set of pipes put on his truck, and a pretty bitchin’ grill that you can’t see in the video. It doesn’t match the rest of the truck, but still, it looks tough.” He said it with admiration and envy, and Joe cut in to bring his mind away from the truck and back to the murder scene.

“What are the odds this guy would have given Antonio Childers, that’s the shooter’s name, the black guy from out of town, a ride away from that scene?”

“Pretty slim, I’d think. Because he’s Nora’s brother.”

There was a pregnant silence, and then Joe said, “The guy who worked on that truck was the victim’s brother?”

“That’s what I said.”

“How many people live in this town?” Perry asked. “Five?”

“Just over three hundred.”

The video was still running.

On the screen, Paulson and another officer, one who appeared to hold rank over him, were searching the Mustang and cuffing the guy in the one shoe, Detective Jeffrey Tolliver of Birmingham, Alabama. Every now and then Paulson would glance sideways, but his gun never traveled with him. Could be that he was checking to make sure there was no other threat in the area. Could be that he was checking to make sure his truck was long since out of sight.

“Somebody got Childers away from that scene in a hurry,” Joe said. “But maybe we’re looking at it backwards. We can’t see what happened. The truck comes and goes, and Antonio comes and goes. Maybe with a friend. But maybe not.”

The maintenance man had that reflective gaze going again. “You know, that’s not a bad point.”

Joe had never felt less validated by a positive review of his police work, but he pressed it. “Supposing that girl, Nora, was intending to steal the car, then her brother is the likely recipient, right? You said he runs a chop shop. So he’d be the guy who takes over once she’s snagged the car.”

The maintenance man nodded.

“Let’s imagine her brother is waiting on her and sees what happens. Watches Antonio shoot his sister in the stomach. He’s not just driving away then, is he? A guy like you described, he’d be all over the screen right now, he’d have killed Antonio, shot him where he stood, or at least stayed with his sister and waited for the cops.”

That drew a frown and a slow, thoughtful shake of the head. “I can’t say I agree with that, no.”

“This guy you told us about, the hell-raiser, you think he’d just let it go? Watch his sister be killed and then clear out?”

“Oh, no. That’s not what I meant, at all. I was just thinking. Old Double, if he did see all that? He’d have wanted to take some time on your boy, there, what’s his name, Antonio? Double wouldn’t have let that end easy for him. Not after what he did to Nora.”

For a moment they were all quiet, watching Paulson arrest Tolliver on the screen, and listening to the rattling of snow and ice off the window. Then Perry said, “Let’s have a look around that car, Joe. Maybe there are more cameras, more angles.”

Joe nodded, but he didn’t turn away from the screen.

He was watching Nora Simpson’s blood spread out over the pavement.

Double wouldn’t have let that end easy for him, the maintenance man had said.

And he nearly smiled.

Antonio might have made one hell of a mistake leaving Cleveland for Georgia.

These crackers might not be all that easy to handle.

3:06 P.M.

JEFFREY PACED AROUND THE TINY holding cell in his underwear and T-shirt. He was still wearing one shoe and one sock. It was the only control he could assert over his person.

Thanks to his hangover, he had slept some, but now he was fully awake and fully freaking out. Claustrophobia had never been an issue for him until now. There wasn’t enough saliva in his mouth. His heart was vibrating like a tuning fork. He was sweating profusely despite the cold that whipped past the single-paned, barred window high up in his cell.

Ten hours ago he had asked the Helen chief of police to call sheriff Hoss Hollister in Sylacauga so that Hoss could vouch for him. He knew that ten hours had passed because there was a giant clock on the wall opposite his cell, mounted over the empty desk that held a telephone, a fax machine, and a computer the size of a dog’s coffin—corgi, not malamute—with a giant monitor on top of it. For the last ten hours, he’d listened to the tick-tick-tick of the clock, the second hand passing for something like Chinese water torture.

Occasionally, he heard voices in the next room, but nobody entered the holding space or sat behind the desk or checked on his welfare. Every once in a while the stainless steel toilet/sink inside his cell would gurgle, or his stomach would grumble, but other than the clock, those were the only sounds.

The phone never rang.

The computer wasn’t even turned on.

He sat down on the narrow metal bed with no mattress, pillow, or blanket. They’d even taken the string out of his one tennis shoe. He clasped his hands between his knees, not praying so much as begging his brain to start working. There was a dead woman. Nora. Someone had killed her. She deserved justice. Some kind of acknowledgment that her life had mattered more than the last few seconds at the end.

Flashes of memories kept coming back to him.

The bartender had poured a little more generously when Nora had shown up. The room she’d taken him to was freshly cleaned, no toiletries or suitcase to indicate a guest was staying there.

What were these called?

Clues?

It was a scam, but then the scam had gone horribly wrong.

Nora had stayed the night. He wanted to think that was because he was damn good in bed, and not because she’d drunk too much and he’d not drunk enough. She was obviously a grab-and-dash kind of woman. Get the wallet, get the keys, go to the alley, and meet up with whoever was going to take the car for chopping.

But she’d stolen the wrong car.

Then there was the old blue pickup. The two shapes in the cab. The black guy in the Cleveland Indians baseball cap.

His head pounded out each memory like a chisel on a stone tablet.

He’d provided the Helen chief of police with Hoss’s home phone number because he’d been close to the lawman his entire life. Hoss was the reason he became a cop. The guy had been a surrogate father, keeping him out of trouble, providing a nudge or a kick in the ass when needed. And Hoss would be a hell of a lot nicer about this current misunderstanding than his lieutenant back in Alabama, who would probably fax over a termination of employment letter the minute he hung up the phone.

But if the Helen chief had talked to Hoss, if he understood that Jeffrey was not, in fact, a murdering, coke-dealing, drug-running Yankee asshole from Cleveland, but an honest, God-fearing, law-abiding southern boy, the Helen chief wasn’t letting on.

He stood and started pacing again.

Sock, shoe. Sock, shoe.

Tick tick tick.

If the Helen chief of police wasn’t making phone calls, was he trying to build a case? By law, he only had forty-eight hours to hold a suspect before he had to charge him or let him go. The weekend was basically here. The courts would be closed for two days, maybe more if the storm turned bad. He should’ve been allowed a phone call, but in the last ten hours no one had been around to ask for that privilege. Today was almost a year that the cops who were accused of beating Rodney King had been acquitted of all crimes. If the Helen chief of police moved him to the county lockup, his life would be worth less than a pound of dog shit.

“Well, hello there, handsome.”

A tall, willowy black woman in a tailored police uniform entered the holding area. She held a tray with grits, a biscuit, some eggs, bacon, and, because there was still a God in heaven, a large cup of coffee.

“You must be the underwear murderer.”

He tried to smile the smile that usually won over women. “I never killed a pair of underwear in my life.”

She chuckled as she placed the tray on the ledge by his cell. Her eyes traced the outline of his boxers. “You an Auburn fan?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He crossed his arms over his chest. He knew a football fan when he saw one. “Played for two years.”

“Is that right?” She started going through the keys on her belt. “What position?”

“Halfback,” he said. “Like O.J., but without the athleticism or promising future.”

She chuckled again, which he took as a good sign. “I can see you running through an airport with a briefcase.”

She had found the key.

He watched the cell door swing open. The smell of sweet freedom put some warmth back into his body, even though she stood there with the tray in her hands, blocking the exit.

“You look like the kind of guy who would end up on the cover of SEC Monthly.”

“Actually, I was on the cover of SEC Monthly.”

“Roll Tide, asshole.”

She dropped the tray on the floor.

The coffee exploded, much like his ego.

The cell door clanged shut.

He resisted the urge to fall to his knees and slurp the coffee off the dirty concrete. Instead, he sat back down on the metal bed. The cold didn’t seep so much as drill into his bones. Whatever was happening to the weather outside wasn’t good. He could practically feel the temperature dropping by the second.

The woman sat down at the desk.

She opened a drawer, took out a nameplate, and slapped it onto the desktop.

Sergeant A. Fuller.

She reached around and turned on the computer, then the giant monitor. A loud whir temporarily overwhelmed the ticking of the clock as the computer booted up. He rubbed his hands together. He was freezing, but he was also sweating. He thought of all the things he could say to Sergeant A. Fuller. I’m a cop, too, bitch. Has your chief called the sheriff I told him to call? Why am I in a holding cell? With what crime am I being charged? I demand to speak to a lawyer.

Go fucking War Eagles.

He reached down and grabbed the biscuit off the tray. Hard as a brick. Cold as his left foot. He shoved some frozen eggs and congealing bacon inside.

The phone rang.

A. Fuller picked up the receiver.

“Yes.” Then another, “Yes.” Her gaze slid toward him as she gave a throaty, “Uh-huh.”

She stood up from her desk and picked up the phone base, stretching the cord across the room to the cell.

She held out the receiver a few inches from the bars.

Jeffrey pressed his palms to his knees and pushed himself up. He shoe-socked his way over to the front of the cell and reached out for the receiver. She pulled it just slightly out of his grasp before letting him take it.

He cleared his throat before saying, “This is Jeffrey Tolliver.”

Hoss said, “Hey, Slick.”

He could’ve wept. “Hello, sir.”

“You had enough time to contemplate your many transgressions?”

He gripped the phone as he listened to Hoss chuckle. Obviously, the Helen chief of police had called the Sylacauga sheriff and they’d worked out a ten-hour penalty in the box.

“You told them to keep me locked up?”

“Aw, now, don’t let your pride get in the way. I figger I did you a favor considering you was caught wet, hungover, and standing over a dead woman with a brick of coke and some illegal guns.”

“That woman had a name.”

“You remembering their names now?” Hoss paused, and he could practically see the old man frowning down the line. “Tell me, Slick. Ain’t you gettin’ a little old for this kind of behavior?”

“The thought had occurred to me earlier in the day.”

“Nothin’ wrong with settlin’ down.” Hoss sounded disappointed, which was far worse than him sounding angry. “ ‘Course, what’ll happen is, you’ll meet some knockout gal, much smarter than you—which ain’t hard—and you’ll fall head over heels until you get her pinned down, then your eye will start wandering again and you’ll fuck it all up.” Hoss stopped to cough, which is what forty years of smoking cigars made you do. “On the plus side, she’ll be a good excuse not to settle down with every other girl who comes after her. The one that got away. Your little redheaded girl, to put it into Charlie Brown parlance.”

He leaned his head back against the bars. “I get the lesson, Hoss. Are you gonna let me out of here or not?”

“Chief Eustace DuPree is the man’s name. Nice fella. Worked three murder cases in his thirty-two-year career, all of them domestics, which means he arrested the husband and that was that.”

“Will he take my help?”

“Last I heard the DEA was sending some boys down from Cleveland to give DuPree a hand, but you know nobody likes that kind of help.”

DEA meant federal. They wouldn’t want help any more than the locals. Still, he lowered his voice. “There’s a few things I can follow up on.”

“Just try not to get arrested again.”

He heard the phone click as Hoss hung up. For Sergeant A. Fuller’s sake, he said, “I appreciate your confidence in me, sir. Thank you.” He handed the phone back through the bars, but A. Fuller was already sitting at her desk.

She nodded to the phone base.

“Hang it up yourself, Slick. The door’s not locked.”

Jeffrey tentatively pushed at the cell door. It swung open. He shoe-socked to the desk and hung up the phone. “Did you find those two guys in the blue truck?”

“Nope.”

“Did you find the black guy from the hotel?”

“You mean Homey D. Clown? Yeah, they got him locked up in the other jail.”

Jeffrey ignored the sarcasm and looked down at his shoes so she couldn’t see the hate in his eyes. “Does the chief want to talk to me?”

“I’d say that falls under the headline of ‘When Hell Freezes Over.’ ”

“I want to help.”

“I’m sure you do, Auburn, but we got it covered.” A. Fuller pulled a large brown paper evidence bag from a drawer. She took out his left shoe and offered it to Jeffrey. He put it on. She handed him a sock. He took off his right shoe and donned the sock. She handed him his jeans.

“Really?”

He grabbed them, slid off his shoes, slipped on the jeans, then shoved his feet back into his sneakers.

“No wallet?” he asked. “Pager? Keys? ChapStick?”

She dug around in the bag, a blank expression on her face. Just when he was about to give up, she tossed him his keys.

“You’re free to go, Mr. Tolliver.”

He should’ve let it slide, but he couldn’t. “Detective Tolliver. Good thing I didn’t bring my Sugar Bowl ring on this trip to your beautiful town.”

“You mean from back when you tied with Syracuse?” She snorted. “Weren’t we the only team that beat you that year?”

“I don’t remember seeing you on the bench, Sergeant.”

She rested her hand on the butt of her gun. “I can put your ass back in that cell and nobody’ll think to look for you till Monday.”

He let it go and walked into what turned out to be an empty squad room. Two desks, each with a phone and stacks of papers. He guessed the nice leather chair belonged to the chief, and the Kmart special lowered about an inch from the ground belonged to Paulson. The kid wouldn’t be able to stick his knees under the desk otherwise.

He gave the front door one push and it was immediately snatched out of his hand by a strong gust of wind. His T-shirt rattled against his chest. He squinted his eyes against the stinging wind. Of course the trek back to the hotel was straight into the wind tunnel. The gust came down off the mountains like a scythe. He jammed his hands into his jeans pockets, bent his knees, and forced himself forward.

His first stop was not at the Schussel Mountain Lodge but at the trash can on the sidewalk outside the building. He had seen the Mustang stop here for a second, and sure enough, Nora had taken the opportunity to dump his wallet. What a break it was still there. His cash and cards were gone, but Nora had left his driver’s license and his key card to his hotel room. Next, he headed downwind to his Mustang. He unlocked the trunk, holding his breath until he found his badge and spare gun in the wheel well. He stuck the badge in his back pocket. The gun went into the waist of his jeans.

He felt whole again.

The lobby desk inside the Schussel was unmanned. Instead of waiting for the elevator, he used the stairs. His room was on the second floor, which happened to overlook the alleyway between the Schussel and the Linderhof. Once inside he pushed open the window overlooking the alley, his teeth chattering before he even had a chance to look down. The Mustang was two stories below, abandoned but for the police tape warning people away.

He saw flecks of white floating in front of his eyes. He blinked, thinking his brain was so tired it was throwing up hallucinations, but no—he really was seeing snow. In March. In Georgia. It was falling steady like you saw in movies, thick white flakes that looked like they had no intention of stopping.

He closed the window and rifled through his suitcase until he found some clean, nonnovelty underwear. He slipped on a new T-shirt and a flannel button-down that he almost hadn’t packed because he was afraid the weather would be too warm. He stepped into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then washed his face, combed his hair, and looked at himself in the mirror.

His reflection in the mirror revealed a man who appeared even more hungover than he had this morning.

Hoss’s earlier admonishments rang in his ears, but there was nothing he could do about changing his entire life right now. He left his room and took the steps down two at a time. When he opened the door to the lobby he found the front desk occupied by a teenager sporting a Chia-like goatee and a V-neck T-shirt that showed the top of a tattoo that probably read Damn Skippy.

The kid was reading Catcher in the Rye, because it wasn’t disaffected enough to have a tattoo and a goatee. He looked up as Jeffrey approached. “You’re the underwear guy.”

He let the comment slide. “Where’s the woman who was working here this morning?”

“Corinna?” The kid laid down his book. “At the funeral home. Nora was her daughter.”

He scratched his chin. He’d forgotten to shave. “Did you know Nora?”

A derisive noise came out of the back of the kid’s nose. “Not like you did.”

He leaned over the desk.

Like a switch being hit, his hangover evaporated and his cop brain took over. The kid seemed to get that things were different now. He cowered away, quickly understanding that Jeffrey was ready to punch him in the throat if he didn’t start talking.

“Nora was two years ahead of me in school, but I knew her.”

He felt the color drain out of his face. The kid looked around fifteen. “How old was she?”

“Twenty-two.”

He allowed some air out of his lungs. “Did she do this a lot?”

“What do you mean?”

The kid scratched at his hairless chest peeking out of the V-neck. A vein throbbed in his pimpled forehead. His visible fear heightened Jeffrey’s aggression. He leaned farther across the counter and turned on the dead in his eyes.

“What I mean, you stupid piece of shit, is that they were working a scam. Corrina gets the signal from the bartender that he’s got a live one. She sends in Nora. Nora gets the mark drunk, takes him up to an empty room, and pours more liquor down his throat until he passes out. Then she robs him, steals his car, and he wakes up the next morning thinking his only option is to lie to cops about how his car got stolen and get the hell out of town before his wife finds out he cheated on her.”

“Don’t sound like you passed out.”

“Lucky for me,” Jeffrey said, uneasy with his role in the situation. “Do the local cops know what you’re running here?”

“No, sir.” He held up his hands. “And I got no part in it. I promise on a stack of bibles.”

He knew that was a lie, but didn’t care. He glanced around the lobby. “Where did those missionaries go? I didn’t see their bus in the parking lot.”

“Left this morning before the storm came in. They had a long way to go.”

“Where?”

“Michigan?”

At least he hadn’t said Cleveland.

Jeffrey let his eyes travel around the empty lobby. Crappy leather couch. Overstuffed chairs. Card table by the door. A sign read COFFEE BAR but the urn was upside down and there were no cups, the same as it had been this morning.

He asked the kid, “Did Chief DuPree interview you?”

“Yeah. I told him I ain’t seen nothing. I work the day shift. I was just pulling up when Corinna got the news about Nora.”

“You were pulling up in your truck?”

“I wish. Drove in my mama’s Camry this morning. My motorcycle’s in the shop, which is fine by me ’cause the whole witch is cold today. You know what I mean?”

“Do you know anybody who drives a blue Ford pickup? Late model?”

He kept scratching his chest, like his brain was in there and could feel the stimulation. “Coupl’a three boys I went to school with. My grandpappy. Pastor Davis. Mrs. Fields who owns the—”

“Where does Nora live?”

“With Corinna up the mountain. And her brother, Double. It’s a fur piece, right up near the falls.”

“Ruby Falls?”

“Yep, just take Millar Road before you get to the falls. They’re the second trailer on the right, got an American flag outside—but, lookit, mister.” The kid lowered his voice as if inviting him into a confidence. “I wouldn’t mess with Double. He’s the kinda guy who’s always looking for trouble. Worse than his daddy, even, and his daddy’s doing hard time down in Valdosta for a triple murder.” He gave Jeffrey a knowing look. “That’s where ‘Double’ comes from, on account of compared to his daddy, he’s double trouble.”

He knew the sort, and he wasn’t scared. “Does Double drive an old blue Ford truck?”

“Black one. Brand-new.”

That sounded a little too nice for a kid named Double. “He deal drugs?”

The kid balked.

“I’m from Alabama, buddy. You can snort your fucking way to the state line and I won’t give a shit.”

The kid started nodding. “Yeah, he’s a dealer.”

“Big fish or a little fish?”

“Medium fish, but he’s always lookin’ to get bigger. Since he was in kindergarten even.” The kid cleared his throat. “I was in his class. He was hateful even then. Like, pull the wings off a butterfly hateful.”

“Does he run girls?”

“Just his sisters. And a wall-eyed cousin. And that neighbor girl with the funny name. And sometimes his mama, but that takes a certain type of guy wants an older gal. You know what I mean?”

Jeffrey let that sink in. “There was a black guy with—”

“A Cleveland baseball cap?” the kid asked. “Yeah, the chief asked me about him, but I ain’t seen him.”

“Did Chief DuPree go through your guest register?”

“Sure did, but he didn’t find nobody matching the description. Even knocked on the doors to double-check.”

He had no doubt Corinna went off-book with cash-paying guests.

The kid leaned over, suddenly chatty. “See, I don’t think there was a black guy in a hat. I think ol’ DuPree was testing me, ’cause there’s three black people in town, and Sergeant Ava, that’s the chief’s wife, is one of them, and her father and her mother are the other two, and if there was a fourth black person, she would know that fella, too, right?” He held up his hands. “I’m not being racist, all right? That’s how it is.”

“I get it,” he said.

And he did.

He worked in the Titusville area of Birmingham, a poor African American area. Oftentimes, he was the only white guy on the streets. People knew him by color, not name.

The kid said, “I told the chief to check next door at the Hof, but Mr. Tucker, he don’t rent to black people. Not that we get that many up here. Everybody knows they don’t like the cold.”

So much for not being racist.

“That’s all I got,” the kid said. “I promise.”

He was still lying, but Jeffrey wasn’t sure about what, or if it even mattered. Everybody lied to the police, even the ones who were trying to help.

Especially the ones who were trying to help.

He left the hotel.

The wind whipped at his clothes. In the twenty minutes he’d been inside, the ground had become thick with snow. He stuck his hands in his pockets, fighting the sensation of his skin being burned off by the wind. For once the weathermen had been right. This storm was going to knock the state on its ass. The sky looked worse than ominous, something stuck between a tornado and Armageddon.

Despite the arctic blast, he stood roughly where he had stood in the parking lot earlier that morning. He was pretty sure that the guy in the Cleveland Indian hat had come out of the Linderhof with his cup of coffee. He’d dismissed the event as random at the time, but with a dead body, nothing was random.

So maybe this is what happened.

Last night, Cleveland Hat stays at the Schussel Mountain Lodge. He parks his car close to the building, probably so he can see it from his room, which is at the front of the hotel because that’s what he asks for. Cleveland’s got the coke and guns with him in the room, but he wants to make sure no one is snooping around his stolen car—a cop, say, or an idiot kid looking for a joyride.

Cleveland stays the night.

Then goes downstairs in the morning to check out of the hotel, finds himself enveloped by cheery blond-haired and blue-eyed Michiganers for Jesus, which is bad, then finds out there’s no coffee, which is worse, so he loads up his car, walks over to the Linderhof, grabs a cup of coffee, and comes out to find his Mustang gone and a half-naked man standing in the parking lot.

Cleveland had played it cool with Jeffrey. The man’s casual tip of his hat said it all. This wasn’t his first rodeo. You didn’t get to be a black man traveling up the northeastern corridor with a carload of coke and guns without having a pair of brass ones. No wonder the DEA was on this guy’s trail. The murder charge would bring even more resources into what was probably shaping up to be an interstate trafficking investigation, possibly a RICO charge. Cleveland could be either the tip of the iceberg or, better yet, the tip of the spear.

Jeffrey picked up the pace as he walked toward the alleyway. His sneakers became soaked with snow. His jeans wicked up the cold as he approached the Mustang that was not his Mustang. The police tape was floating in the wind, torn in two and flapping off the side mirrors like flags outside a used car dealership.

He stopped by the driver’s-side door, took his keys out of his pocket, trying to think how Nora would’ve worked it. He imagined her running out of the Schussel, probably right when Cleveland was going into the Linderhof to score his coffee. She spots the Mustang parked out front, runs toward it, jams the car key into the door lock—

That wasn’t right.

The door would’ve been unlocked, because Cleveland had used a slim jim to open the door. He could see where the gasket had been sliced by the flat, hooked piece of metal that had been used to pull up the locking mechanism.

So she opened the car door.

He did the same.

Then she’d climbed in.

So did he, giving himself a second to enjoy the sensation of not being battered by hurricane-like winds. The car was bright white inside from the snow on all the windows. He found the ignition switch. Dash mounted, the same as his. Some engineer at Ford had had the bright idea to add a little sidebar hole in the face of the ignition switch. You slide the key in the ignition and turned it to Accessory, then bent open a paper clip and shoved it into the hole. Voilà. The cylinder inside the ignition switch popped out.

You needed a key to do this, of course, but the thing about the ignition switch on a ’68 Mustang is that it’s twenty-five years old. He was twenty-six and wasn’t holding up so well himself. The pins inside the cylinder weakened over time, so all you had to do was jimmy in a flathead screwdriver, or a pocketknife, turn it gently to the left, push in the paper clip, and pop out the cylinder.

A pro could do this in under ten seconds. A really smart pro, someone who wanted to be able to easily crank the engine again and again, possibly on a trip up from Florida, through Georgia, and onto farther points north with some coke and guns in the trunk, would shave down the tumblers inside the cylinder so that any key would turn on the engine.

Which he was able to do with the key to his own Mustang.

The engine coughed and sputtered against the freezing temperature. He pumped the gas to keep it going. While he was at it, he turned up the heater. Cold air blew in his face.

Now what?

He sat back in the seat, trying to consider his options. The kid at the hotel needed a second round, but not enough time had passed. Whatever he was lying about needed to fester like a rusted piece of metal inside his intestines.

Corinna was at the funeral home, but he doubted he’d get much out of the grieving mother, and besides, he wasn’t exactly working with the blessing of the locals. There was a fine line between what Chief DuPree would see as helping and what might come across as hindering.

Double up on the mountain was an obvious suspect to follow—drug dealer, connected to the victim—but he knew better than to go into some desolate holler without someone watching his back.

Not to mention that the snow was accumulating, which to a person living in the South was the most bloodcurdling thing that snow could ever do. Cars would be abandoned. Children would be locked behind doors. Grocery stores would be purged of milk, bread, kerosene, toilet paper, and Cheetos—all the vital necessities.

Anna Ruby Falls was half an hour drive and a quick hike into the Chattahoochee National Forest. The kid at the Shussel had said Double and his family lived on Millar Road. Second trailer on the right. American flag. Double’s neighbors would be watching out the windows. They might be involved in the family business, or making money off not being involved. Around these parts, crack was the new moonshine. The same people you saw in church on Sunday were the same people dealing on Monday.

He tried to turn on the wipers. The motor sent back a pained groan over the weight of the snow. He cut the engine and looked at his key, making sure the jimmied lock hadn’t damaged it. He could see white breaths in the air in front of his face.

The radio clock read 4:01.

The roads would be locked up by sundown, not because of the snow, but because even when it was cold, it always got warm enough in the afternoon to melt the snow, then it got cold enough to freeze it and come rush hour, people who thought they were driving home in the snow realized that they were sliding across sheets of ice.

All this talk about snow made him think of something.

He reached down and pulled the trunk release. He got out of the car, shivering like a beat-down dog as the wind cut open his skin. He had to squint his eyes almost closed as he walked to the back of the Mustang and pushed up the trunk.

The guns were still there.

The brick of coke was still there, but there had to be more than one brick of coke, otherwise, why bother?

“Shit,” he mumbled.

He didn’t have to think hard about how this had gone down. The chief, freaking out about the murder, the death notification, the hit to his budget, the risk to his department’s reputation, had run off to make phone calls, but not before telling Officer Paulson to secure the car. Paulson had put up the tape thinking that no one would violate the sacred words that beseeched all good citizens to DO NOT CROSS. Then he’d clapped his Jolly Green Giant hands together and ho-ho-ho’d off thinking job well done.

“Shit,” he repeated.

He would have to call A. Fuller and tell her to come get the coke and the guns. And then he would have to listen to her tell him that Alabama was going to be ranked number one or two this year, depending on where Florida State fell.

“What have we got here?”

He turned around.

The question had been posed by a guy with a northern accent who stood like a cop, legs apart, shoulders relaxed. He had a sidekick, another cop, a little younger, with a Glock in hand.

Police issued, it seemed.

The sidekick said, “Looks like we’ve got a guy with a bunch of guns and some coke in his trunk.”

The older guy said, “At least he’s put on some pants.”

4:04 P.M.

“HOLSTER THE SIDE ARM,” JOE told Lincoln Perry.

Joe had heard decent things about Detective Jeffrey Tolliver of Birmingham, Alabama, already from the DEA, and the surveillance video had proven beyond question that he hadn’t killed anyone today. But more important, Tolliver hadn’t packed up his shit and headed home once they kicked him loose from the holding cell. Joe had an idea that he was going to like the reason why.

“How long you been out of that cell?” he asked.

“Less than an hour.”

“And you’re here nosing around the car. Why?”

There was a little spark in the other man’s eyes that Joe liked an awful lot when Tolliver said, “A woman was gut shot in an alley and left to die. They never charged me, never searched me or my room or my car, and never asked me why I was here or what I was doing. The fact that I was locked up until the second shift came on—which consists solely of the chief’s wife—leads me to believe that the locals aren’t all that good at the detecting business.”

“So you came back here to work,” Joe said, which was exactly what he’d have done in Tolliver’s shoes.

Or shoe, as it were.

Tolliver nodded. “It’s been made clear that my help isn’t wanted, but it seems like they could use it.”

Joe said, “Okay. Here’s what I’d like to suggest. You close that trunk before we compromise the scene any more than already has been done, which would take some real effort.”

Tolliver closed the trunk with his elbow.

“We’ve got a surveillance video that will clear you completely, if they’re still talking about charges,” Joe said. “But we’ve also got a few questions. We came down here from Ohio to serve a warrant on the guy who did shoot the girl. What we’ve been told is that you think she stole your car. But this isn’t your car.”

Tolliver told him about the shaved tumblers, his theory about Antonio going to get a cup of coffee at the wrong place at the wrong time. He ended with, “Nora probably saw the Mustang on my key, thought she had the right ride, and ended up making the last mistake of her life.”

“The first cop who was on scene. What did you think of him?”

“Paulson?” He didn’t look impressed. “Young. Built like a radio antennae. Real jittery.”

“Jittery because he’s young, or jittery because he was scared?”

“Both, I guess.” Tolliver cocked his head and studied Joe through the falling snow. “Why’re you asking?”

Joe blew on his hands to warm them and then said, “Why don’t we talk in the car. Our car. We’ll drive, you ride, we’ll talk.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ve got three possible addresses in the mountains for a guy named Double Simpson, who may have been waiting to inherit a stolen Mustang from his sister this morning.”

“I can pin that down for you. Millar Road near the falls. Second trailer on the right. I heard he’s a small-time pimp, wannabe big-time pusher. Runs his own sister. And mother.”

Joe winced. “Terrific. I was cautioned that the mother was the type who’d come out shooting if she saw a strange car pulling into the drive. You good to ride along with us? I’d like you to, and we can’t stand here in the snow chatting. Got to move.”

“You’re acting like a guy who knows more than he’s saying.”

“I am,” Joe said. “One reason is up there.” He pointed at the gunmetal sky that was spitting snow. “And the other reason is that to my understanding the same police who managed to confuse a white cop from Alabama for a black gangbanger from Cleveland and neglected to review security cameras that were sitting right on top of the damned crime scene are due back in town any minute. At which point, I suspect my chance to get out of here without their escort diminishes dramatically. And based on the surveillance videos I saw, I do not want to be escorted into the hills by those boys. But we need to hear what you’ve got to say, Detective. Now, you want to ride along, or you want to stick here, or go on home and take a shower and get some sleep? I won’t fault you that, with the day you’ve had.”

“I’ll go with you,” Tolliver said, and Joe smiled.

He liked this guy just fine.

The debate about who was going to drive began before they even reached the rented Malibu. Tolliver said he should, because he knew the area. Joe wanted to drive because he held rank in the situation, out of state or not. He was the man with the warrant and the instructions from the DEA. Lincoln Perry, on the other hand, wanted the wheel because of the weather and his supposed skill in such conditions.

“It’s coming down hard and only going to get worse,” Perry said. “My father was an ambulance driver in Cleveland. I learned how to handle snow and ice. I’m not letting some southerner who probably gets gun-shy at the first flurry drive me off a mountain, and based on the way you rode the brake on the way up here, Joe, we’ll take six hours to get six miles.”

“Wouldn’t have gotten here at all, if I’d been reckless.”

“Christ,” Tolliver said. “Give him the keys, if it’ll shut him up.”

Joe didn’t love that. He hated to ride; the passenger seat always gave him an uneasy feeling. But he did want to talk to Tolliver while they traveled, and he couldn’t take notes and drive at the same time.

He tossed Perry the keys. “Just don’t pull a Barney Oldfield on us, now.”

“Who’s that?” Perry and Tolliver asked in unison.

Joe sighed.

Kids.

By the time they were ten miles out of town, two things were clear. Jeffrey Tolliver was a good cop plagued by a god-awful taste in women, and this storm was serious business.

The flakes fell from the sky the way only a hard rain should, more thundershower than snowstorm, and the accumulation rate was staggering. They passed only one home-brew utility truck, which consisted of an old guy sitting on the open tailgate, spreading sand and salt from five-gallon buckets. The roads were mostly empty, all the locals hunkering down to wait it out. That was about the only good thing that could be said of their conditions. The weather was bad, the road worse. They just kept climbing, winding up, up, up into the snow-covered mountains that suddenly looked as if they belonged to the Rockies, not north Georgia. Perry had turned the radio on and the announcer seemed in disbelief as he read the latest report.

“The National Weather Service is predicting an expected twenty inches in the Cleveland and Rome area, with heavier accumulations locally. Now, the same paper in my hand says that the all-time record is twelve inches, so that should speak for itself. Stay off the roads tonight.”

Perry clicked off the radio. “It occurs to me that it might not have been a bad idea to let one of the locals know where we are going, no matter how dim-witted they seem to be. If we end up running into trouble with Double—Lord, did I really just say that?—if we end up having problems up here, it’ll be a while before anyone can get to us.”

“We’ll be fine,” Joe said.

“That’s what the Donner Party told each other.”

A gust of wind buffeted the car.

The Malibu fishtailed, but Perry steered it into the skid and kept his foot off the brake and the car corrected. Still, Joe had grabbed the armrest and moved his own foot toward an imaginary brake like a jumpy driver’s ed instructor.

He should have insisted on driving.

“You just keep your eyes on the road, and let the Donners fend for themselves,” he said, but he was regretting the rush out of town now, himself. The rush had been planted by that seed of distrust the DEA had shared, unwilling to tell him what cops in Georgia were dirty, but just that they suspected some of them were. Between that and the way the locals had handled the scene the only person with a badge he trusted down here was, ironically, the one who’d just been kicked loose from a cell.

No, there was more than that.

It was also the idea that Antonio Childers was close at hand. They’d come all this way and into this storm for the singular purpose of picking Childers up with their existing warrant, but what they had now—that surveillance tape of the shooting—was something that had eluded Joe for too long. Courtroom gold. Evidence that would not just put Childers in prison, but keep him there.

If he was still alive.

From the back, Tolliver cleared his throat. He clearly had too much pride to stick his head between the front seats like a dog. Joe was beginning to wish he’d given Tolliver the wheel. Perry had a lead foot and too much confidence.

“Listen,” Tolliver said, “since we’re all in this together, why don’t you tell me a little bit more about this Antonio Childers. Are you thinking he’s your bad guy, or a hostage?”

“Both,” Perry said.

“Maybe both,” Joe corrected. “Surveillance footage shows him coming and going fast, but if our local source was right, he came and went with Nora Simpson’s brother. All the interesting dynamics of that family relationship aside, we’re starting to believe that Double Simpson might not have been pleased to see his sister murdered.”

“If nothing else, she was an earner for him,” Tolliver agreed. “So you’re telling me that we are heading into a potential hostage rescue wherein we’re looking for a murderer and revenge-seeking sadist. Plus no one knows where we are and we’ve got three guns to our names. Let’s hope we don’t run into any Wampas.”

Perry said, “I’ll take three guns over a nervous Tauntaun.”

Joe said, “Were those local Indian tribes or something? Or some sort of Civil War thing? I don’t know the history of this part of the country that well.”

Perry turned to exchange a shocked stare with Tolliver.

Tolliver shook his head in disbelief. “He hasn’t seen Star Wars?”

Before they could push that dialogue further, the wind rose to a howl and the Malibu shuddered and shivered, the back tires sliding again.

Perry dropped the speed.

“Why don’t you watch the road instead of thinking about Star Trek,” Joe said.

“Wars. Star Wars.”

“They’re different?” Joe asked, and he was legitimately surprised to learn this, thinking that it explained a lot of confusion over the years.

Headlights rose behind them.

Joe was hoping for a plow, but the headlights were set too low for that. And coming on too fast.

“Son of a bitch,” Perry said. “This asshole is really going to try to pass me, in this weather?”

“Then let him,” Joe said, and right then the vehicle behind them turned on its police flashers, painting the white landscape with red and blue light.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Perry said as he eased to a stop. There was no shoulder left to pull onto, only snowbanks, so he just stopped in the road.

“Just get your badge out,” Joe said, but the police car behind them didn’t stop, it just passed by. For an instant, they were side by side with it in the whirling white snow and fading gray day. It was still light enough to read the logo on the car’s door panel.

Helen Police Department.

Then the car was by and the flashing lights went off. The driver had just turned them on to goose the Malibu out of his way. The driver was keeping up a hurrying speed, like he had places to get and people to see, weather be damned.

“Seems like we’re outside of Helen’s jurisdiction,” Perry said.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Tolliver said from the backseat. “That giant stick behind the wheel was Paulson. He’s the kid who stuck his gun in my face in the alley this morning. Didn’t it seem like he was in a bigger rush to get up the mountain than we are?”

Perry looked at Tolliver, then at Joe. “Follow him?”

They both nodded.

The wind rose in the same proportion as the road, both of them crawling steadily higher. Perry was driving faster than Joe would have liked, but he had to do it to keep the Helen police car in sight.

“Any idea where we are?” he asked Tolliver.

“Not sure, but I’d say we’re in the park.”

“What park?”

“Unicoi State Park, which is inside the Chattahoochee National Forest, which is where Anna Ruby Falls is located.” He looked out the window. “I would say pay attention to your surroundings, but everything is white.”

“We didn’t pass through any gate,” Perry said.

“There aren’t any gates. You just drive in.”

Brake lights came on ahead of them.

The Helen police car was pulling to a stop.

“Drive past,” Joe instructed.

His hand had crept to the butt of his gun.

As they drove by, the Malibu’s headlights pinned two vehicles in the relentless snow. The Helen cruiser and a Ford pickup that was idling, the engine running to keep the heater going, probably. It was covered with snow, but the hood was warm enough to have left melted streaks across it that showed traces of the paint.

“Black, not blue,” Joe said, disappointed. “Has a roof rack of lights, too. That’s not the one from the surveillance video.”

“I was told that Double Simpson drives a new black Ford,” Tolliver said. “That one fits the bill.”

“So what do you want to do?” Perry asked as he drove around a curve and the road plummeted down, the other vehicles falling out of sight in the mirrors. “Go back in the car, or go back on foot? If it’s just Paulson and Simpson sitting there, with no sign of the blue truck, we’re going to have to explain—”

His words faltered as the Malibu caught black ice and slid, the car drifting sideways as if the steering wheel was an unimportant thing. Perry spun it and slammed on the brake. Neither effort made any impact. They turned in a near 360, the spinning headlights illuminating snow-laden limbs, and then there was a muffled thump and a jarring impact as the back of the car smacked into a snow-covered bank. Perry slammed the gearshift into first and hit the gas.

The tires spun without catching.

“Kill those headlights,” Joe said. “Kill it all, actually.”

Perry shut off the lights and the engine.

The stillness was eerie, no sounds save the wind and the whisper of falling snow on the glass.

“I guess that answers your question,” Tolliver said from the backseat. “We’ll be going back on foot.”

“For the record,” Joe said, “Barney Oldfield was a race car driver who couldn’t hold a curve. Maybe you’ll remember him now.”

He popped open his door and had to push hard to keep the wind from slamming it shut on him. Somewhere in the distance was a crashing, thundering sound that had to be the roar of the falls that Tolliver mentioned. In this weather it wouldn’t be long before that water would ice into spikes and daggers. Cleveland, Georgia, had gotten confused with Cleveland, Ohio, today. He thought about the dumb-shit remark he’d made that morning to Luisa, the DEA agent, about how they wouldn’t be troubled by the snow.

If only she could see them now.

Tolliver had found a flashlight in the back of the car. Perry had packed a go-bag, which seemed unnecessary at the time, but now that the car had spun out in the middle of nowhere, Joe was grateful for the supplies.

He was climbing out of the car when a moaning sound made him stop half in and half out of the car. For a moment, he thought it was the wind, low and mournful as it whistled through the trees. But then it returned, and while the wind might be able to moan, it was not able to cry out for help.

“That’s behind us,” Tolliver said.

He was already out of the car, standing nearly knee-deep in a drift, and had his gun in one hand and flashlight in the other. Perry got out carefully, taking care not to make any noise. The cry came again, and it might have been mistaken for the howl of a wounded animal if not for that single word it formed.

Help.

Tolliver handed Perry the flashlight and moved toward the sound without speaking. Joe followed, motioning at Tolliver to separate, and Tolliver nodded and moved laterally without hesitation, putting distance between them while Perry hung back, ready to provide covering fire. In this triangular formation they moved slowly through the snow. The wind gusted and a pine bow shed its weight, dumping fresh, cold powder across Joe’s neck and shoulders, some of it sliding under his shirt and melting in a chilled slick along his spine.

The voice came again, crying for help, but it was weaker now, fading.

Joe was just about to say they might have gone in the wrong direction, that Tolliver had been mistaken about where the voice was coming from, when they crested a ridgeline and saw the man hanging by his arm from the tree.

Five steps farther, and Joe recognized him.

Antonio Childers was handcuffed to a low-hanging pine limb. His face was a mask of battered flesh and blood, and he wasn’t dangling from the branch because he’d been hung too high for his feet to reach the ground.

He was dangling from it because his legs were broken.

Tolliver whispered, “What’d they do to him?”

“Whatever they wanted,” Perry said.

Joe looked out into the wind-whipped snow and the gathering darkness and said, “Let’s get him out of the tree and the hell out of here in a hurry. Before whoever hung him up there comes back.”

He tossed Tolliver the handcuff keys. Tolliver caught them with one hand, tucked the Glock into the back of his pants, and went to free Antonio.

Perry said, “They kept him alive for a reason. They’re not done with him.”

Joe was about to concur when he heard a sound that made him look over his shoulder. Nothing in sight, but he wasn’t sure how much that mattered. Thomas “Double” Simpson had grown up on these mountains.

Perry went to help Tolliver carry Antonio back toward the car. When they were close enough, Joe looked at the man’s battered face and said, “You’re a long way from Eddy Road, Antonio. Happy to see a familiar face?”

Childers, who’d once promised to kill Joe and all those dear to him, whimpered like a child.

Begging for help.

“Don’t worry,” Joe said. “We’ve come to take you home to Mansfield.”

There was a snapping sound in the woods, and Joe whirled again.

Still nothing visible.

The roar of the falls in the distance had seemed to quiet, and the temperature was dropping fast. The blackness of night was rising even faster. The moon fought through the clouds, casting eerie white light on the snow. He’d never wanted to get away from a place more than this one.

“We’re going to need shelter,” Joe said.

He was trying to remember old survival priorities. First aid was priority number one, but the only member of the group who was hurt was Antonio, and there wasn’t anybody in the group who was qualified to set broken legs. So let Antonio suffer a little longer, and move on down the list.

Shelter was next.

“Let’s go back to the car, dig it free, and get the hell out of here,” Tolliver said. “I don’t want to sit and wait. Let the locals handle Double Simpson.”

Nobody contested that advice.

Tolliver and Perry dragged Antonio through the snow, his bleeding, broken legs leaving a trail.

They’d made it halfway back to the car when headlights lit up the snow behind them.

6:13 P.M.

JEFFREY FROZE IN THE GLARE of the lights.

He glanced over his shoulder. The lights were high beam, casting everything behind them in shadow, but he could still make out exactly what he was expecting to see.

The black truck, and a figure holding a sawed-off shotgun.

Not Paulson, because Paulson was the circumference if not the height of a flag pole. This guy was solidly built, shorter, and had a hell of a lot more confidence about the weapon in his hand.

Had to be Double Simpson.

“Leave the black fella with me and I’ll let you walk off this mountain,” Simpson called out.

Pritchard, who came across as pretty cerebral for a Cleveland cop, asked, “Or we don’t drop him and then what?”

Double slapped the short muzzle of the shotgun against his palm. The smacking sound echoed in the snowy silence.

Pritchard said, “Seems like we have no choice.” His tone was convincing, but Jeffrey gathered the guy was like every guy on the Birmingham force, which meant two things. He was a consummate liar and he was never, ever going to let some thug tell him what to do.

Double said, “I’ll give you sixty seconds to get back to your car and get the hell out of here.”

Jeffrey let Antonio drop, which meant Perry had no choice but to do the same, and also meant that everyone had their hands free now.

Pritchard got it.

And gave Jeffrey a nod, moving toward the car, which was on his right. Jeffrey inched left, which was away from the car and toward a thick stand of trees twenty feet away.

Pritchard told Double, “You can have him. Just let us know where the body is when the thaw comes.”

“What?” Antonio, who’d been content to play dead while they dragged his two-hundred-pound ass through the forest, was suddenly coherent. “No, man. You can’t do that to me. This cracker’s gonna—”

“Sorry about your luck,” Pritchard said, and he kept making his way in the thick snow toward the car.

Perry seemed to be itching to make a stand, but he finally got with the program when Jeffrey moved left, following their lead. He understood that the plan wasn’t to get to the car and go. The plan was to get out of the range of the shotgun because no matter what Double said, none of them were stupid enough to believe he was going to let them walk off this mountain.

“Please,” Antonio begged. “Come on, man. You can’t—”

Pritchard slipped around the side of the car.

Jeffrey darted into the woods. He heard a gun blast as he dove to the ground, the air cracking like lightning from the sky.

Perry oofed as he landed beside Jeffrey. He didn’t move for a few seconds, and he wondered if the kid had been hit, but then Perry whispered, “Is Joe clear?”

He knelt on the lee side of a large oak, checking for Pritchard.

The moon gave off just enough light to make out shapes, but only if you knew what you were looking for. Pritchard was behind the Malibu’s engine block, gun drawn. No eye contact was needed. Pritchard was doing his job and he expected everyone else to be doing theirs.

Perry said, “We need to surround this asshole. That’s a double-barrel shotgun. He’s already wasted one round. That leaves one shot left against three people. I like those odds.”

“The shotgun’s been modified,” Jeffrey said, because young guys in small towns hack up their guns the same way they hack up their cars. “That second round couldn’t hit a brick in a bucket, but we don’t know what else he’s got on him.”

As if to illustrate the problem, a handgun was fired.

The bullet snicked into the trunk of the oak, about four inches above Jeffrey’s head.

Perry hugged the ground again.

So did Jeffrey.

The snow was so deep and so wet that he had trouble pushing himself back up. He sneaked a look at the black truck. Double still held the shotgun, but he also now had a handgun. Nine millimeter by the shape of it. The magazine hung way down like an extra set of balls. He’d modified the stack so that he could double the ammo.

Perry had seen the extended magazine, too. “That ain’t good.”

Jeffrey said, “And Paulson’s out there, too.”

“Probably backing him up.”

“Paulson’s not so easy with a gun. If he’s backing up Double, it’s from behind. Way behind.”

“I’ll remember to watch my six,” Perry said. “You go up the hill, I’ll go to Double’s rear. Joe’s got the third corner of the triangle.”

Those were good odds, because trying to sneak behind Double, maybe facing Paulson along the way, was clearly the more dangerous path.

He told the kid, “Wrong way around,” and took off, heading away from the hill, parallel to Double and his truck. It wasn’t the plan Perry had favored, but Jeffrey trusted he would move quickly to get into position.

Quietly, Jeffrey walked a wide circle around Double’s truck, trying to slip behind him. He kept an eye peeled for Paulson, but he had a gut feeling that Paulson would piss himself before he took a stand. Two against three was more like one against three, and Jeffrey liked the odds of the three who were highly trained law enforcement officers.

Then again, maybe the playing field was evened out by the deep snow. His breath started to come in pants as he picked up his feet from thirty-inch drifts. He and Perry were around the same age. Jeffrey was probably in better shape, then again, he always assumed he was the guy in better shape. But Perry was probably more accustomed to moving in snow. Then again, Perry had said he was more accustomed to driving in snow too and look how that had ended.

There were too many then agains in this mix, and if any one of them went wrong, it was going to be a fucking bloodbath.

If they were lucky, they would get to their opposite ends of the triangle about the same time. Then it was just a matter of making Double listen to logic. Having three Glocks pointed at your head could make even the stupidest man see reason. The problem was, maybe Double was too smart to be stupid. The thug seemed to realize a move was being made. He turned off the lights on his truck and everything went black. Jeffrey felt his eyes squint in protest, but he kept them open, tracking Double as the man crouched down low, pulled the hood up over his head and somehow disappeared into the shadows.

He felt his heart thumping inside his throat.

Their bad situation had turned worse.

His gun was frozen in his ice block of a hand. He couldn’t see Perry. He could barely make out the Malibu stuck in a snowdrift, let alone pick out Pritchard’s location.

There was nothing to do but stick with the plan.

He kept moving toward Double’s last known rear, making good time until he tripped over a fallen tree. He tried not to groan as he fell flat into the snow. Cold, sleety water went up his nose and mouth.

Over by the Malibu, Pritchard called, “Hey, Double. Let’s talk about our options.”

He was trying to locate Double, but their target wasn’t stupid enough to let him.

Jeffrey closed his eyes and listened for the crunch of snow that indicated a man was walking toward him. All he heard was the soft pat of snow hitting snow, overlaid with the tinkling sound of water freezing in the falls.

He pushed himself up.

He flexed his hands, swapping his Glock back and forth, because he knew that if he had to pull the trigger, it would take functioning fingers.

The snow gripped his legs like a child trying to play a game. The weight was enormous. His lungs were heaving by the time he forced himself into a clearing. He guessed he was maybe twenty feet to the rear of the black truck. The question now was, Were they hunting Double or was Double hunting them?

A gunshot rang out.

He dove behind a tree, realizing too late that the shot had come downrange. He spat a mouthful of snow onto the ground, wondering why in the hell he kept opening his mouth every time he fell into the snow.

He listened for another shot, some indication there was gunplay. He didn’t think Pritchard had pulled the trigger. He was too cool under pressure. Perry might have, but then again, Double could’ve been doing the same thing they were trying to do, only he’d sneaked up behind the Malibu.

The shot could’ve ended up in Pritchard’s head.

He shook off the image.

Snow flew out of his hair. It was coming down hard and steady. He flexed his hands again. When he stood up it felt like the cold was pushing him back down. Still, he trudged on, edging toward the rear of Double’s truck.

Paulson yipped like a dog.

He was behind the truck, holding on to the tailgate as he crouched down in the snow.

Jeffrey’s cold hands had no problem pressing the muzzle of his Glock to Paulson’s head. The kid was so thin that he could feel the bumps in his skull.

“Don’t move.”

Paulson flinched, giving another yip. He tried to cover his head with his hands. There was a rattling sound. In the faint moonlight, Jeffrey could see that Paulson was handcuffed to the hinge of the tailgate.

“Please, help me.”

He put his hand over the kid’s mouth, because he’d almost screamed the words. He waited until Paulson nodded before taking his hand away. Paulson was in uniform, but his gun was gone. So was his baton and mace.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“He killed Nora.” Paulson’s voice cracked on the girl’s name. “I saw it on the security video, and I was going to arrest him, but he—”

He could guess the rest.

A guy like Paulson would need a tank to go up against Double, and even then, he would’ve bet against the beanpole.

He still had the handcuff key that Pritchard had thrown at him. He gave it to Paulson and whispered, “Get back to your car. Radio for help. Not your chief, but the DEA, the GBI, the FBI, the fucking EPA—anybody you can get on the wire. Do you understand?”

Paulson, wide-eyed, could only nod.

He didn’t trust the terror in the young man’s eyes. “I swear to God, Paulson, if you leave us up here on this mountain to die, I’ll find you and put a bullet in your head. Do you understand?”

Paulson nodded in earnest this time.

His hands shook as he fumbled with the handcuff key.

Jeffrey didn’t stick around to help him. Instead, he crept toward the cab of the truck. The wheels were the waffled semitrailer variety. The cab was high off the ground, almost to his waist. Double had left the door open. He swung around, Glock drawn, ready to pull the trigger on anybody inside the truck.

Empty.

Snow covered the driver’s seat.

Double had left the keys in the ignition, which gave him a couple of options. He could turn the headlights back on, which meant he could see, but it would also signal that he was standing at the truck in case Double wanted to shoot him.

Or he could jump into the truck and drive.

Option two seemed likely to yield the biggest surprise. Double wouldn’t be expecting to have his own truck used against him, and the big wheels would cut through the snow a hell of a lot easier than exhausted legs.

He used the back of his sleeve to knock the fresh snow off the windshield. His sleeve got soaked in the process, but he was pretty sure that it wasn’t possible to get any colder than he already was. He moved the Glock to the front of his jeans and climbed into the truck. He put his hand on the key but didn’t turn it. He stared ahead at the dark expanse. Snow had already started to accumulate on the windshield again. He squinted at the Malibu. Had Pritchard seen him get into the truck? Was Perry out there somewhere tracking his movements?

He rested his other hand on the knob to turn on the lights. He turned the key, pulled the knob, and the truck roared to life. The lights came on and he saw several different things at the same time that took about a second too late for his brain to figure out.

Number one was that Antonio Childers had managed to drag his sorry ass and two broken legs into the path directly in front of the truck.

Number two was that Pritchard was no longer behind the Malibu. He was no longer anywhere that could be seen.

Number three was that Perry had managed somehow to sneak up on Double.

The scene was almost like something out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Perry, frozen in the headlights, was standing behind Double with the flashlight raised in the air, ready to bring down the butt on the thug’s head.

Not just a flashlight.

A police-issue Maglite.

Twelve-inch aluminum shaft with four D-cell batteries and enough weight behind it to stop a horse.

Perry didn’t know that Paulson was neutralized, and he wanted to take out Double without making a sound.

Which Perry did.

It was like somebody hit play on a paused movie. Perry’s raised hand got unstuck, and he smashed the flashlight down, and Double fell hard into the snow.

“Christ.”

He jumped and his hand went to his gun.

But it was Pritchard who’d said the word. So much for Perry’s triangle. Pritchard had taken it upon himself to sneak up on the truck, too.

“I think I’ll keep this kid,” Pritchard muttered. “Paulson?”

“Scampered off like a giraffe with its tail between his legs.”

“I thought that might be the case. I saw you give him the key to the cuffs.” Pritchard looked around the truck. “Any reason you don’t have the heat running?”

He turned on the heater but got out of the truck. “I’ll go see if Paulson’s still around. That cruiser looked like it had snow tires.”

Pritchard smiled at the monster wheels. “I think even I can get this thing down the mountain.”

He ignored the “I” because he wasn’t about to get into a dick-measuring contest about who was going to drive.

Perry had already lifted Double, throwing him onto his back like a sack of flour. If the kid wanted to show off, Jeffrey wasn’t going to stop him. He headed toward Antonio Childers. The hostage/fugitive hadn’t gotten the memo that the struggle was over and the good guys had won. Or maybe he’d realized that the good guys winning didn’t necessarily mean he’d get a happy ending. Even as Jeffrey approached, the guy was still pulling himself on his elbows, dragging his way toward the trees like he could make a getaway.

Antonio saw Jeffrey and quickly gave up the struggle.

“Please help me.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. If Double was a sack of flour, Antonio was a sack of sheet metal. No way he was going to blow out his back for this murdering asshole. Besides, now that Antonio wasn’t a hostage anymore, he was again a fugitive. He could wait in the snow while Perry cuffed Double in the back of the pickup.

“Bigger fish to fry,” he said, heading toward the road. “Stay here.”

“Fucksakes,” Antonio said. “Where am I going to go?”

Jeffrey chuckled at his own joke as he walked through the thick snow. Then he stopped chuckling because his adrenaline was ebbing and the cold was rushing back in. His shoes felt frozen to his feet. The legs of his jeans had turned into concrete. His shins ached. His thighs ached. His balls ached. Why in God’s name would somebody actually choose to live in a place where this kind of cold was a seasonal regularity?

He ran his fingers through his wet hair.

Tiny shards of ice came off in his hands.

Paulson was behind the wheel of his cruiser. He reminded Jeffrey of a praying mantis as he leaned down and tried to crank the engine. The engine did not reward the effort. They were going to have to abandon the cruiser with the Malibu if there was any hope of making it back to what passed for civilization.

He knocked on the window and made a rolling motion with his hand.

Paulson leaned down and started pumping the crank. The window squeaked against the frozen rubber gasket. Snow fell into the car.

“I got the GBI on the horn. They said to stay put, but I figger I should go down the mountain, bring them back up here so they know how to find you.”

“I think we’re better off if we all go down in Double’s truck.”

“There’s an injured man?” Paulson’s voice went up a few octaves. “I think we’ll need air rescue.”

He looked up at the sky, which was basically like looking into the business end of a saltshaker. Suddenly, Paulson wanted to be the hero.

Or did he?

Jeffrey’s eyes slid over the backseat of the cruiser and he spotted two black duffel bags bulging with bricks of cocaine, a cardboard box filled with handguns, and two large stacks of cash in ClingWrap.

He looked back at Paulson.

Paulson had his gun pointed at Jeffrey’s chest.

“Back up.”

He sighed.

His gut had told him a long time ago that this idiot was going to be a problem. “You could’ve just said that you confiscated everything from Double to take back into evidence.”

“Shit,” Paulson mumbled, realizing his mistake. “Too late now.”

Jeffrey thought of his Glock tucked snuggly down the front of his jeans.

Paulson thought of it, too, reaching over and grabbing the gun. The muzzle was so cold that it took some of the skin with it.

“What now?” he asked. “I mean past stealing Double’s guns and drugs and money?”

Paulson snickered. “Mister, do you think Double’s smart enough to set up a Yankee as the contact for his supply?”

He wondered if he was going to be killed by a guy who called him “mister.”

“I didn’t kill Nora,” Paulson said.

“I know you didn’t.”

“That guy, Antonio, he’s the one you want for murder.” Paulson waved his gun. “But don’t go thinking I don’t know how to get rid of somebody who gets in my way.”

He saw that his earlier guess about what went down in the alleyway was wrong.

New version of what happened.

Paulson had been in the parking lot that morning, too. It made sense because he’d arrived on the scene so quickly, playing Deputy Fife until Chief DuPree showed up. Probably, Paulson was waiting in his blue truck so he could do the meet with Antonio, get the coke and guns, then be on his merry way. Only Antonio had needed some coffee and his car had been jacked while he was in the Linderhof. Paulson had either seen the whole thing or rolled up just as Antonio realized that his car was gone.

“Nora went into the alley,” he said. “You picked up Antonio in the parking lot and followed. Antonio shot her and then what?”

“This ain’t no Batman movie, mister. I don’t got to explain myself.”

He cocked his head, wondering why Perry and Pritchard weren’t looking for him. “Double was supposed to meet Nora in the alley so he could take the car to the chop shop. He saw you and Antonio standing over his dead sister and decided to kidnap the man who was responsible.” He remembered a detail. “Only, Double’s not so single-minded that he doesn’t take the bulk of the coke with him, which is how you ended up here on this mountain.”

Paulson climbed out of the car. “I woulda got away with it except for those meddling kids.” The gun stayed on him as Paulson tried in vain to straighten his utility belt. “Oh, wait. I’m the meddling kid, and I am getting away with it.”

He’d underestimated Paulson’s abilities.

Or maybe motivations.

The guy hadn’t seemed eager to kill another man in response to the cold-blooded murder of a girl, but he sure as shit seemed eager to murder a man over some coke, guns, and money.

“Turn around,” Paulson said. “Start walking.”

He did. It was slow going. The snow was piled up past his knees. He couldn’t see the truck, but he could hear the engine. He hoped to God that Pritchard was as smart as he looked, and Perry was as cunning as he seemed, and they’d both figured out that something was not right. Though, considering his recent streak of bad luck, the two cops were probably warming themselves inside the truck, Perry explaining to Pritchard that Hoth is the sixth planet in some star system while Pritchard tried not to strangle him.

Not that Paulson was driving Jeffrey toward the truck.

The engine noise was actually fading.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Doesn’t seem wise to go deeper into the forest.”

“Shut up.”

He wasn’t planning on shutting up, but then he felt the gun press into his head, and knew that Paulson had a habit of leaving his finger on the trigger, so he did.

Paulson said, “I don’t want to shoot you.”

The refrain echoed from the alleyway this morning, but out in the dark, cold woods, he realized that Paulson didn’t have to shoot him to kill him.

“You just gonna leave me out here to die? Let’s talk this out, Paulson. Those two cops back there ain’t dummies. They’re gonna figure this out.”

“I’m betting they don’t.”

Then Paulson stumbled. His utility belt clattered.

The gun banged into Jeffrey’s skull.

“DuPree ain’t figured it out,” Paulson said, “and I’ve been selling coke outta my squad car for years.” Paulson stumbled again. “Stupid tourists come up here thinking they’re gonna have some fun. They go to the waterfall, take a couple’a three pictures, then head back into town and ask what the fuck do we do next.”

The waterfall.

He realized that the rush of water he’d heard when he first got out of the Malibu had slowed to a trickle.

“Through here,” Paulson said.

He turned into a clearing and they were at the falls. Or what was the falls when the temperature wasn’t in the polar region. He heard a weird noise and realized it was coming from the surface layer of the water. It kept freezing, cracking, then freezing again. The sound was like a squeaky basement door slowly opening in every single horror movie ever filmed.

There were no trees overhead, just an open, snowy sky with moonlight streaking down onto the frozen water. He’d read the brochure back at the hotel. Anna Ruby Falls was actually two waterfalls that were created by Curtis Creek and York Creek. The Curtis side dropped one hundred fifty-three feet. The York side fifty feet. They joined at the base of the falls to form Smith Creek. Jeffrey craned his neck to look over the side. Smith Creek was starting to freeze, a thin skein of ice making its way toward the falls. If you didn’t want to shoot a man, but you wanted to kill him, this was the place to do it.

Paulson said, “Move.”

He did, but only so that his toes were about eighteen inches from the edge of the falls. Again, he craned his neck to look over. They were on the Curtis side. One hundred fifty-three feet, most of it ice. What were the odds that he could survive the fall? Better than his odds of turning around, grabbing the gun out of Paulson’s hands and beating the shit out of him?

Paulson said, “You wanna jump or you wanna be pushed?”

He riffled through his options. Paulson was a man who kept his finger on the trigger. Grab the gun and he would squeeze.

“You’re gonna have to push me.”

Paulson jammed his gun between Jeffrey’s shoulder blades.

He didn’t move.

Paulson jammed him again.

He still didn’t move.

The math was against Paulson. He was taller, sure, but he was roughly one part bone and the other part gristle. Stuff like muscle and tendon had yet to develop.

“Come on, you’re doing this on purpose,” Paulson said.

“I need you to shove me harder than that.”

Paulson used his free hand to push Jeffrey’s shoulder, which torqued, but his feet stayed firmly planted.

“Jesus.”

Paulson sounded exasperated.

He heard him jam his gun back into his holster.

Then two hands pressed flat to Jeffrey’s back.

That’s when he darted right and Paulson fell forward.

The plan was to catch the guy before he went over the side, but Jeffrey didn’t count on his hands being frozen, his arms moving like they were in quicksand, his legs refusing to budge or Paulson, frankly, being so skinny that the only part of him that he was able to grab was the utility belt around his narrow waist.

Two fingers slipped inside the belt, which was actually a belt on top of a belt. The sixty pounds of equipment that a cop had to wear was so heavy that first you had to put an underbelt through the loops on your pants, then you attached two metal hooks that held the outer belt with all the equipment. When worn correctly, the belt system worked great when you were chasing bad guys. Not so much when you were teetering on the edge of a frozen waterfall.

“Help.”

Paulson mouthed the word more than said it.

Jeffery leaned back, trying to dig in his feet. Paulson’s belt slipped up to his armpits. He squealed. His gun clattered down the frozen falls. His arms windmilled.

“Don’t struggle.” Jeffery reached his other hand toward the belt and managed to loop in three fingers. “Stop struggling.”

Paulson’s mouth moved. He was praying. He kept flailing his arms. Jeffrey groaned. His fingers were going to snap in two. The muscles in his arms were like tightened wires. His shoulders were burning. Cold air stabbed his lungs.

“Listen to me,” he told Paulson, using the same calming voice he’d used in the alleyway this morning. “Slowly, I want you to put one of your hands on mine. Then try to climb your way back toward—”

“Help,” Paulson cried out. The bank of the creek was starting to give way. One of his feet slipped.

“Don’t panic,” he coaxed as panic filled every single cell in his body. “Just—”

He felt someone grab him from behind.

Pritchard.

Who held him in a bear hug.

Jeffery reached out for Paulson’s belt, but it was too late. The ground fell out from underneath Paulson’s feet. Jeffrey struggled to hold on to the belt as gravity took over. It all happened in slow motion, like the cold was trying to freeze them in place.

Paulson’s narrow shoulders rolled.

The belt slid up higher, over the arms, past the head, then finally past the hands. Like watching a magician pass a hula hoop over his floating assistant.

Ice cracked beneath Paulson. Water poured out. Paulson screamed and groaned, then pitched down into the creek below. He must’ve been like a pine needle hitting the water straight on. There was barely a splash.

Time sped back up to normal.

Jeffrey fell against Pritchard, the belt still in his hands. Perry fell back, too. He held on to the belt as tightly as Jeffrey.

None of them had been able to save Paulson.

They all three got down on their knees and peered over the side.

The skein of ice had broken apart.

Paulson was floating on the top of the water. His hands were still over his head. His legs were splayed. He was trapped somewhere between a snow angel and a crucifixion.

Pritchard stood up and brushed the snow off his pants.

Perry was still staring at the river, even though Paulson was now out of sight.

Nobody spoke.

Paulson had been a piece of shit, but they’d all wanted him in a cell, not being dredged out of the creek whenever the ice thawed.

Jeffrey coughed. He’d swallowed more damn snow. Why did he keep opening his mouth when he fell?

“What now?” Perry said.

“I guess we deal with what we’ve got left,” Pritchard said.

And Jeffrey nodded.

There was nothing they could do for Paulson except tell the coroner where to find the body. Double would have to be put in a cell. Antonio Childers, on a plane—once his broken legs were set at the hospital.

“One good thing about the snow,” Perry said as he turned from the water. “The trail back is clear enough.”

Jeffrey took one last look at the frozen falls. He shivered from the bitter cold. His fingers ached. His arms ached. His balls still ached.

He smiled.

The last part was easily fixable.

Nora hadn’t been the only woman at the bar last night. There was another girl he’d talked to—tall, brunette, not so smart, but smart didn’t really matter. She’d said that she was heading out of town this afternoon, but nobody in their right mind had headed anywhere this afternoon. Maybe no one would be leaving tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe for the rest of the week. If he was going to be trapped in this alpine version of hell, the least he could do was make sure he had a warm body to wile away the hours with.

He turned around and headed toward the truck.

Perry was right about the trail being clear. Even with the snow falling in waves, walking back the way he’d come was a hell of a lot easier than forging new ground.

Which seemed the story of his life.

At least so far.