Lost River Page 3

  “Yeah, I know her some, and this one, too.” Duck points at Duane’s quietly cooling body. “A real piece of work.”

  But Duck says it like he doesn’t know anything about Duane Scheel or Little Paris or any of the Glassers. Like they don’t all buy him beers at the Crowbar.

  “That’s one way to put it,” Dobie agrees.

  Duck ignores Duane and Kara and Dillon, turning instead to check out the recent paint job on Dobie’s van. Dobie had it done over in Ashland and Trey thinks it looks pretty sharp, all things considered. At least professional.

  But when Duck turns back, he’s not smiling, lips drawn like a white line across his ruddy face. He has one of those faces that’s always red and splotchy, forever sunburned.

  “I like what you did here, Dob. The new name’s nice. The way you put extreme on the bumper there with that big ole X. Even painted police on the left panel.”

  Duck looks closer, really leaning in to it. “Does that say tactical, right there?

  Dobie, embarrassed, just shrugs.

  Duck spits in the DQ cup again and then steps real fucking close to make sure Dobie really hears him—

  “Just ’cause you’re gettin’ some fat check from the county, got yourself fancy new lights and sirens, don’t make you the law now. Got that?”

  Trey figures the same can be said about all the remaining cops that make up Angel PD, but Duck is suddenly some kind of goddamn mind reader, because he turns and eyes Trey hard.

  “Boy, just what the fuck are you looking at?”

  And like always, Trey keeps his mouth shut.

  4

  Angelcare Rescue Service started out as American Med, a one-man, one-van band.

  A private ambulance service Dobie Timmons got up and running after he cleared his EMS certifications.

  For years, he contracted with several of the hospitals around Lawrence, Martin, and Boyd Counties, shuttling nonemergency patients between Our Lady of Bellefonte and Three Rivers and the VA. He also ran bodies around for the county coroner and lent an occasional hand on bigger callouts, like that six-car pileup on I-64 in ’15, and the gas fire two summers ago at the Marathon on Joshua Branch.

  But last year, when things got bad around Angel and the ODs started piling up faster than even county E-911 could manage—far more than the city police department or the county sheriffs seemed to care about—both Lawrence and Martin County hired Dobie to triage some of those calls, a way to stem the bleeding. For some reason, Duck and the other Angel cops took that personally.

  They’ve made it personal . . . and Dobie makes for an easy target.

  It’s not just the goofy name change and that gaudy new paint job on his old van or even the silly all-black tactical jumpsuit he wears. Everyone knows just how bad Dobie always wanted to be a real cop, until his eyes proved even worse. But Dobie sees well enough and a hell of a lot better than most: all of Angel’s problems and the way it’s slowly dying around them. How the whole place is sick, contagious, like Duane Scheel, gray and hollowed out and wasting away. Lung cancer’s always been bad in Angel anyway—the cigarettes and coal mines—but this is somehow different, a straight-up biblical plague. Trey’s got only thirty hours of his first-responder course, still working his way to his EMT-B certification, and doesn’t really have a clue yet what he’s doing when they get called out, but Dobie takes their shared responsibility seriously enough for them both.

  He’s saved dozens of lives alone since Trey started riding with him.

  Like Kara Grace, for at least one more day.

  But Dobie carries around every one of those lives he doesn’t save too, every one that doesn’t make it. He makes it personal. Dobie can’t, or won’t, let one go, even a piece of shit like Duane, who probably never said a decent word to him or ever gave him a second thought.

  The dead drag Dobie down. They pile up like the extra pounds he seems to put on every day.

  He weighs three-fifty if he weighs three hundred, and for something you can’t see, something you can’t touch or hold or that might not even exist at all, Angel’s lost souls add immeasurable weight to Dobie Timmons.

  He’s always going to carry their burdens.

  Just like it’s written all over Duck Andrews’s face with biblical certainty that all those souls or lives aren’t worth an extra minute or hour or day.

  Not worth his time or effort at all.

  “I’ll transport Duane,” Dobie says, ignoring Duck’s look as the other man spits thick into his cup again. “You want to search him first? Take a second to talk to Ms. Grace?”

  There’s also the issue of the boy, Dillon, but Dobie doesn’t even get a chance to ask about that, since Duck’s already shaking his head—

  “Same old nonsense, same old bullshit,” Duck says and sighs, heavy and exaggerated. “And it’s all the fucking same to me.” He pulls at his gun belt, way too tight beneath the half-moon of his stomach. He’s moving into Dobie’s weight class faster than he’d ever be willing to admit. “Hey, you hear about that mess down at Lower Wolf?”

  “Yeah,” Dobie answers, wary for the first time. Lower Wolf is the name of both a road and a creek in Tomahawk about thirty-five miles south of Angel, way down in Martin County, but it’s a lot more than that. A local legend. A curse, an implied threat. Lower Wolf is Glasser stomping ground, family land that goes back generations, larger than life and hardly defined by a few marks on a map or contained by some fence line. The Glassers have multiple homes and trailers spread across a hundred acres or more down there, including weed fields hidden along the creek and old barns and shacks for Saturday-night illegal cock- and dogfighting.

  The sort of secrets everyone knows.

  “Some, not much,” Dobie adds. “A shooting of some sort, so they say.”

  Duck nods. “A whole lotta shooting earlier today. The FB and I, the DEA, all of ’em down there right now, trying to sort the hell of it out. Everyone dead, the whole lot of them.”

  “Everyone?” Trey asks, suddenly forgetting where he is and who he’s talking to. But everyone is a lot, almost unimaginable, when it comes to the Glassers.

  Duck stares and blinks at him again, slow and heavy, like he’s finally waking up and seeing Trey for the first time.

  “Hey, you seen that worthless daddy of yours lately? How’s he doing?”

  Dobie starts up and steps in. “Now, Duck, you know there’s no call for that . . .”

  But Duck rolls on. “I’ll call it whatever the fuck I want. How about your mama, boy, how’s she gettin’ on, too?”

  Trey goes still, clenching his fists. His dad taught him to box and he knows how to take a punch, how to throw one. How to shift his weight and lead with his shoulder and turn hard into his hips.

  Stronger than his slight frame suggests, he’s a southpaw and most never see it coming.

  But Duck’s dumb, not stupid, and his pretend-bored eyes are already locked on Trey’s tense, whitened knuckles.

  “Christ on a cross. You do that, son. Please do that,” Duck says, still eye-fucking Trey, before casually turning back to Dobie and spitting in his cup. “Anyway, maybe not quite everyone . . . Don’t know about Little Paris.”

  Little Paris is the youngest Glasser, not much older than Trey. Danny was the oldest, but he’s been dead a couple of years already. Then there’s Ricky, the middle one, and Old Man Glasser himself. Also, a distant cousin—Jamie Renfro—who’s a Glasser in all the worst ways but name.

  Trey knows all about them, and his dad crossed paths with most of them more than once.

  In Angel, everyone crosses paths with the Glassers eventually.

  Duck hooks a thumb at Duane’s body. “Might have something to do with everything going on ’round here lately. No one’s talking much about it, though.”

  Everything going on ’round here lately is Duck’s shorthand for the latest firestorm of fatal ODs over the last seventy-two hours. Bad ones, worse than normal, and normal for Angel isn’t good by any stretch. A hot batch of heroin spreading around the county and dropping folks like flies, but hardcore users like Kara and Duane are searching it out anyway, risking it all, because it’s supposed to be that good. Trey and Dobie have been running ragged on little sleep—Dobie even less than usual—trying to keep up, and they can’t. Not even close.

  But Duck Andrews looks well rested and unbothered.

  “Well, I don’t know anything about it,” Dobie says.

  “’Course you don’t. But . . . they might just need you down there to haul all them dead bodies out, right?” Duck presses.

  “Might,” Dobie concedes. “Anything’s possible.”

  “If you do, you call me too, hear?” Duck braces Dobie, just to make sure he does hear him loud and clear. “Straightaway now. I need to know what the fuck’s going on down there. Ask some questions, take some pictures or something.”

  Since Lower Wolf is out in Martin County, Sheriff Dunn and his deputies are probably working it, leaving Lawrence County and city police like Duck on the outside looking in. But if the recent whispers about Duck and the Glassers are true, all those long-standing rumors about Dunn too, a lot of folks are about to be damn desperate to find out what happened down there. Everyone on edge.

  The sort of secrets everyone knows.

  “Jesus, just make yourself fucking useful for once,” Duck continues, then rolls his eyes over to Kara, who’s finally sitting up. Still weak. Still out of it. But come tomorrow, she’ll be right back at it, chasing that high again even if it kills her.

  And it will, despite what Dobie’s done here for her tonight, because most days it doesn’t matter what Dobie does. Duck’s made his point.

  “Sure, Duck, whatever you say,” Dobie agrees. Always trying to be agreeable.

  Satisfied his work here is done, Duck takes one long last look at Kara and Duane. Then shakes his head and starts back to the cruiser.

  “Now get these two outta my fucking park. It’s embarrassing.”

  5

  Whenever Dobie’s out of the van, like now, raiding the Marathon for 5-Hour Energy shots, Mountain Dews, hot dogs, bear claws, and a big bag of Takis, Trey slips in his earbuds and listens to his latest beats.

  This is how he sees the world now, how he hears the world. His recording setup’s not much, just enough to get him off the ground, but when he’s mixing and looping, it really does feel like he’s flying.

  Can easily get lost up there in his own head.

  His current favorite group is American Vampires, out of Texas. Their music is nearly impossible to find, scattered like clues, so underground no one even knows who they are.

  The band members’ names are mysteries too, little puzzles to solve—

  Anthem X Cross. Master the World. My Beautiful Disaster.

  It’s possible there’s no band at all, just some kid in some other shitty little town like Angel, another Trey with a laptop.

  Every few weeks he goes over to the Ten-Thirty Club in Charleston to listen to whatever band’s come through, but most of the time he’s content to just mix his own tracks in his bedroom. It keeps him close to home anyway, so he can keep an eye on his mom. He can later download them to his phone, forever revising and reimagining them, like the one he’s listening to now, little more than drones and glitches and a downtuned sample of Ben E. King singing the land is dark again and again. But he thinks it has promise.

  “Stand by Me” was once his mom’s favorite song, and he’s only just started searching for the beating heart of it. It takes a lot of work remixing something new out of something old, out of things long forgotten.

  Trey figures everything you could ever want to know about him is exposed in the music he makes—verse, chorus, verse—his whole goddamn life nothing more than that most basic of song structures, forever stuck on repeat. Rewind, replay. And although he’s flying high when he’s mixing his beats, high enough to almost imagine he might escape this place, it never feels he’s going far or fast enough to truly get him the hell out of Angel for good.

  The land really is fucking dark . . .

  Now Trey fishes around in his pocket for the glassine stamp bag he pulled out of Kara’s hand, that intimate moment when her fingers grasped for his, too afraid to let go. He risks a single glance toward the Marathon, checking for Dobie’s return, before holding the bag up to the parking lot lights, their sodium glow playing tricks on his eyes, shooting the milky powder inside with purple streaks. It’s pretty, like one of those bottles of colored sand you might win at a county fair, but the color’s far from right, unnatural, and Trey’s got a pretty good eye for these things now.

  That lavender dusting, the color of wildflowers along Old U.S. 23, shouldn’t be there.

  If Kara had been paying attention, she might have seen it, too. And maybe at the last moment she did, because unlike Scheel, she didn’t snort or shoot the whole bag. Some small part of her held back just enough, knew better.

  There’s a warning stamped on that bag that’s far easier to see, to understand, than the adulterated color.

  A tiny dancing skeleton and three letters underneath that—

  DOA.

  As Dobie and Duck were talking, Trey had searched her for more DOA stamp bags. Bindles, pills, anything.

  Furtive movements, practiced gestures, as the boy Dillon watched him mute the whole time.

  Trey did the same again when they loaded Duane into the back of the van, giving the dead man a good once-over. Since he’s been riding with Dobie, Trey’s raided kitchens and bathrooms and bedside drawers, shoeboxes in closets and inside-out pockets and kicked-aside shoes. Patted down shirts and run quick fingers into bras. He always leaves the money and the credit cards, the rings and watches, so he can tell himself later he’s not some goddamn thief, robbing the dead and dying. All he cares about are the pills and powder, the little bags like the one in his hand. Which is so fucking funny, because if the ODs do regain consciousness, that’s all they ever care about, too.

  Take it all, they say . . . just not that next hit, their next fix. Even if the last one almost killed them.

  Maybe Trey’s not a thief, but somehow, he feels fucking worse.

  * * *

  —

  Dobie finally trudges out of the Marathon, a thick shadow in the overhead lights, a plastic bag swinging in an invisible hand.

  He makes a key-turning motion with the other, signaling Trey to start her up.

  Already another call.

  6

  Trey recognizes the car parked sideways in the middle of the street.

  Like it rolled to a stop there and just gave up.

  It’s Mark Crosby’s old metallic-blue Firebird, the one with mismatched whitewalls and the University of Kentucky license plate.

  Trey also recognizes the hysterical girl standing next to it, waving her arms around in weird circles as they approach.

  Anna Bishop, trying hard to take flight. Working her arms so hard, so furiously, Trey half expects her to really rise off the ground. They went out once in high school, got burgers over in Catlettsburg and fooled around in the back of his mom’s borrowed car, and Anna wore this perfume then that had smelled like sugar and smoke, rich and exotic and expensive. Maybe she’d borrowed that from her mom. She’s since changed her hair color and lost weight, more than a few pounds, just like Kara, but the girl she used to be—that Trey remembers—is still there somewhere.

  An afterimage, superimposed over whoever she is now.

  Her eyes are wide in the van’s bright headlights—halos of harsh, unforgiving light—and she’s like the proverbial deer, trapped there, with nowhere to run. She has her cellphone in one hand and the Firebird’s driver’s door is open, where all six-foot-three of Mark Crosby is sitting still and unmoving, folded in on himself.

  His head slumped forward, touching the wheel.

  * * *

  —

  Mark Crosby was once a hell of a basketball player.

  Had a solid jab step and a fadeaway jumper smooth as butter. Wanted to play at UK, but as good as he was, and he was good, he wasn’t that good. He got a scholarship instead to Eastern Kentucky University.

  Trey had a couple of scholarship offers too, at both EKU and Centre, over in Danville, but not for sports. He really wanted to major in music, but since his dad left, he doesn’t ever bother to think about that anymore.

  Last he heard, Mark had blown out a knee, or maybe it was a shoulder. Dropped first the scholarship, then college altogether, and supposedly got on with Brown’s Food Service. Several of Trey’s old classmates have jobs there too, or at Woodland Oil or AK Steel in Ashland. Ten years ago, they might have all worked Licking River mine, but no longer. There’s still some good work to be had at the Big Sandy Power Plant (although it converted over to natural gas a few years ago) and even the Catlettsburg Refinery, and when the refinery’s lit up by a thousand lights, Trey can still imagine, like he did when he was a little kid, that it’s some sort of spaceship come down to Earth, something that could take him far from Angel.

  On most days, you can still smell it—sulfur, steel, oil—miles away.

  But Trey can’t remember when he last saw Mark Crosby alive. Never knew Mark and Anna were dating or even knew each other.

  And he doesn’t know the other body in the car—a young girl. Younger than Anna, pretty, delicate, with lots of dark hair. She has tiny bird tattoos winging their way up her neck, taking flight over the gentle curve of her shoulder.

  Swallows or sparrows gracing her slim throat.

  In the glow of Dobie’s flashlight, they look like pencil sketches on her bluing skin.

  Feathers, maybe.