Graveyard Fields Read online

“The house is a few hundred yards back behind the restaurant. There’s a light on, but I didn’t see any vehicles parked out front.”

  “All right then, you found the house. Now let’s go home.”

  I hesitated a moment and rubbed my leg. Just walking to the dumpsters and back had filled it with pins and needles.

  I nodded at Dale. “I’m going to go up and take a closer look.”

  Dale slammed the back of his head against the headrest. “Why the fuck would you want to do that?”

  I didn’t have a good answer. I just knew something was sticking in my craw. Maybe it was what Byrd had said he’d felt when he interviewed the man who had shot his coworker. Instinct. A gut feeling. Whatever it was, I had it, and it was a relatively new feeling for me. During my time on the force and those years as a private detective, I hadn’t cared who was guilty and who was innocent. I just put in my hours and cashed the checks. Instinct never got into the mix. I never once had a gut feeling that told me to dig deeper or look closer. It wasn’t that I couldn’t connect the dots; I just wasn’t all that interested in finding them in the first place.

  Until now. Maybe I had something to prove. Or maybe I was procrastinating on my book. Or maybe the angel on my shoulder was giving me a distraction to try to lower my beer and pill intake. Whatever the reason, my gut was telling me to go to that house, leg be damned.

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “Who knows, maybe I’ll find a clue.”

  “Dammit, Davis. You need to get your head on straight.”

  I grinned at Dale, then stepped out of the car. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  Dale sneered. “If you ain’t back in ten, I’m driving this thing home.”

  * * *

  I walked back to my spot between the dumpsters and waited again for the motion light to turn off. In the darkness I stayed low to the ground as I made my way across the field. When I came to the ditch, I could see a stream of water flowing at its base. It was too wide to jump over—anything bigger than a puddle would be for me—so I looked in both directions for a crossing point. Using the binoculars, I found what looked like a small footbridge thirty or so yards from where I stood. Once across the ditch I could see a gravel driveway leading to the house.

  I stood still for a moment and stared at the illuminated second-floor window. I listened for the sound of a TV or a conversation, but all I could hear were crickets and the faint babbling of the stream behind me.

  With the flashlight on its lowest setting, I made my way around to the back of the house, worried that a motion light would turn on at any moment. Thankfully, none did. The back of the house was completely dark. Limbs from a scattering of trees drowned out the moonlight, so I pushed a button on the flashlight to bump up the brightness. Shining the light against the edge of the house, I could see a couple of concrete steps leading up to the building’s back door. On the top step sat several brown growlers. I moved closer and saw that all the growlers were empty. One carried a Long Branch logo on its side, the others were blank.

  Standing on the top step, I peered through a small window carved in the middle of the door. I couldn’t see a thing and wondered if I should risk shining my flashlight through the window.

  As I was contemplating that option, a light turned on inside the house. I instinctively jumped aside, and the growlers tumbled down the steps with what sounded like a tray of dishes crashing to the floor.

  I jumped off the step and hurried toward the woods behind the house. Peeking around a large tree trunk, I watched the back door, waiting for it to open and Cordell to appear. But the door remained closed. Maybe Cordell hadn’t heard the breaking glass. Or maybe he had and assumed it was raccoons or possums or whatever other kinds of animals rummaged around for garbage at night in these parts.

  Suddenly I heard a loud pop. It sounded like a firecracker coming from the second floor of the house. Immediately following the pop, a section of the tree trunk exploded and a piece of bark slapped my cheek. I put my hand up to my face, then pulled it away, looking for blood. I realized the flashlight was still in my other hand and still on, its beam illuminating my white canvas sneakers. I dropped to the ground and turned off the flashlight. Another pop rang out, and dirt shot up into my face.

  Lying flat on the ground next to a tree, I thought about the dead man Byrd had seen in the woods. The man named Randy with the bullet hole in his head. Byrd wondered if Randy had ever thought he’d end up that way. Shot dead by a jealous husband, his body stashed under a pile of leaves for two kids to find. Over the years I’d tried many times to envision how I would die. But never once had it involved lying in the woods behind a house in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. Killed by a hipster who thought I was trying to break into his house.

  Another pop, and another clod of dirt ricocheted off my face. I needed to move. I turned the flashlight on to its highest setting, then threw it as far as I could to my left. Pop. Pop. Pop. The beam from the flashlight danced across the tree branches, then vanished.

  I crawled on my stomach, hoping to find better cover by the side of the house. But I was crawling in complete darkness. As I inched across the dirt and dead leaves, my hands finally found gravel. The driveway. I decided to crawl a few more feet, then stand up and make a run for it, or at least what passed for a run. My leg was almost completely numb, and I wondered how much longer it would cooperate before throwing in the towel.

  The gravel stung my hands and tore at the material of my jacket. I heard another pop, but nothing near me was disturbed. I assumed the shooter was still aiming at where I’d thrown the flashlight. At least I hoped that was the case. I pushed my knees up under me and adopted a sprinter’s squat. The next pop was my cue to take off at full speed, which for me was somewhere between a power walk and a skip.

  I heard another pop and felt something whiz past my head. I dropped down on my stomach again and tried to catch my breath. Another pop, this one followed by breaking glass to my left. I looked in that direction and saw a small garage at the edge of the driveway. I crawled across the gravel, then worked my way around the garage until it was between me and the house. Through a dirty window I could see a Land Rover topped with a cargo box.

  The Land Rover. I inched around to the front of the garage and yanked up a heavy wood door, then stepped inside. The garage was full of tools and paint cans, and in a MacGyver-inspired moment I wondered if I could fashion together something to help me escape. I tried the handle of the Land Rover’s driver’s side door, but it was locked. When I tried the rear door, something caught my eye: a metal detector sitting on the back seat where Jeff and Becky’s cooler had been. Another pop rang out, and I heard a thump as the bullet slammed into the side of the garage.

  I was trapped. If I stayed in the garage, the shooter would eventually come find me, and if I stepped back out on the driveway, I’d be an easy target in the moonlight. Suddenly my thigh quivered, and for a second I thought I’d been hit. I grabbed my pant leg and felt for blood, but then another quiver hit me and I realized my phone was vibrating. My phone!

  Like most people I’d become completely attached to my phone. But since coming to the mountains, I’d more or less forgotten about it. The service was so spotty it was practically useless unless I was sitting in the parking lot of El Bacaratos. But out of habit I kept it on me almost all the time. It was a good thing I kept paying the bill.

  I pushed the accept-call button and put the phone to my ear.

  “What the fuck are you doing!” Dale yelled over the sound of Cinderella’s “Nobody’s Fool.” I’d never been so happy to hear his voice.

  “Someone’s shooting at me. Drive up here and get me. I’m in a garage near the back of the house.”

  “Stop fucking around.”

  I told Dale about knocking over the growlers and the shots that followed. I also told him about finding the Land Rover in the garage.

  “Stay put. I’ll be there directly.”

  I knelt next to the Land Rover and wai
ted, staring out the garage door toward the driveway, anticipating the headlights of the Mercedes appearing at any moment. After a couple of minutes my phone vibrated, and I put it back to my ear.

  “How the fuck do you start this thing?” Dale said.

  “Put your foot on the brake, then push the ignition button next to the steering wheel.”

  “Where’s the key?”

  “It’s keyless. Just push the ignition button.”

  “How does it start with no key?”

  Another pop rang out, and shards of glass fell onto my shoulders.

  “Just do it!” I yelled.

  I stayed crouched by the Land Rover for a few more moments, then eased toward the opening of the garage. I wanted to be ready to hobble to the car as soon as Dale arrived. As I waited, I noticed something I hadn’t seen when I first entered the building. It looked like a wicker basket poking out over the top of a stack of paint cans. I moved several of the cans to reveal a red bicycle with a basket attached to the handlebars. I shook my head at the thought that entered my mind, but then decided it was just as good as any other. I’d give Dale one more minute. If he hadn’t shown by then, I’d take off on the bike.

  Ninety seconds later I was pedaling down the driveway on a bike with no gears and a flat front tire. I’d heard another pop as soon as I’d left the garage, but I was too busy pedaling to notice whether the bullet had hit anything. All that mattered was that it hadn’t hit me.

  The driveway led straight away from the house but then curved around a long bend surrounded by trees. If I could get around the curve, I would be out of sight of the house. Another pop rang out, this one fainter than the others. I was making progress.

  Past the curve, the driveway straightened out and sloped down toward a wooden bridge that spanned the ditch I had crossed earlier. I took my feet off the pedals and let gravity pull me down the slope. The handlebars started to shake, and it took everything I had to keep the bike on the road. I glanced behind me again, half expecting to see the Land Rover’s headlights trailing after me, but the road was dark. I turned back around just in time to see a car barreling across the bridge just a few feet in front of me. A horn blared, and I swerved off the road just shy of the bridge. The bike dropped down into the ditch and the front tire sank into the mud, sending me headfirst over the handlebars. When I dragged myself out of the ditch and up to the road, Dale was standing next to the Mercedes.

  “Where’d you get a bike?” he asked.

  “What took you so long?”

  “This car is way too complicated. First I had to figure out how to get the seat to go back. Then there ain’t no key. Then it took me forever to find the lights. There ain’t no reason a vehicle needs to be that difficult.”

  I didn’t know whether to hug Dale or punch him in the face.

  “You hurt?” he asked.

  My leg had gone from numb to on fire. But it was holding me upright, so I figured I was okay.

  “Just my pride. C’mon, let’s go.”

  “You want me to drive? I already got the seat where I like it.”

  When we were both in the car, I asked Dale what he was going to do. “I’m going to drive your dumb ass home.”

  “Aren’t you going to call for backup?”

  Dale ignored me and fiddled with the steering wheel adjustment lever.

  “Backup for what?” he said, after raising the wheel so high it looked like he was driving a bus.

  “Someone shot at me. Repeatedly. I was almost killed.”

  “Look, I don’t know how they do it down in Charleston, but around here if you find someone prowling around your house in the middle of the night, you fire off a couple of shots to scare ’em away.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me!”

  “A man’s got a right to protect his domicile.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Hey, they’s a big difference between being shot and being shot at,” Dale said. “You were shot at. Now if you’d been hit, that’d be a different story.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?”

  Dale spun the Mercedes around and sped across the bridge.

  “There ain’t nothing to do. We found the man’s house, and that should’ve been the end of it. But you had to go all Sherlock Holmes, looking for clues and shit.”

  “But I did find a clue.”

  Dale snorted and gunned the engine as we pulled out onto the main highway.

  “That couple’s Land Rover is in the garage,” I said.

  “That ain’t no fucking clue. It just proves Cordell and that couple is friends. And I told you that in the first place.”

  “There was a metal detector on the back seat of the Land Rover.”

  Dale laughed. “Well, shit. We’d better go back. Possession of a metal detector is a serious offense.”

  We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride back to the cabin, expect for when Dale said, “This is your new theme song,” just before playing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Flying High Again.”

  When I was driving, it had taken us half an hour to get to Maggie Valley, not counting the stop at Long Branch. With Dale behind the wheel, the return trip took less than twenty minutes.

  As Dale walked over to his patrol car, I felt obliged to thank him for coming to my rescue.

  “Well, it was worth it just to see you on that bike,” he said. “Man, I wish I had a video of you going over them handlebars. I could make some money on the YouTube with that shit.”

  “So what are we going to do now about the keys?”

  Dale pointed a finger at my chest.

  “You ain’t gonna do a damn thing. I’m gonna run by Floppy’s in the morning and tell him to give me them keys or else I’m going to arrest his skinny ass. Then I’ll give the keys to Barbara, and whoever comes to get ’em can have ’em.”

  With that, Dale wiggled into his patrol car and tore off down the gravel road. I limped into the cabin without the energy to grab a beer or open the pill bottle. I dropped on top of the bed fully clothed and was out before the devils could whisper a single word.

  25

  The next morning I wanted breakfast. A real breakfast. Bacon, eggs, sausage, pancakes, hash browns. A coronary on a plate. It was unusual. Most mornings my head and stomach both hurt so bad just the idea of breakfast was nauseating. But this morning I was hungry. Maybe it was the adrenaline still pumping from the night before, or maybe it was the fact that I’d had less than eight beers the previous day and I hadn’t taken a couple of pills before bed. I didn’t feel like running a marathon or even limping through a 5K, but I did feel better than most mornings. Maybe being almost killed was the secret to sobriety.

  The closest Waffle House was located in Canton next to the interstate exit. I remembered passing it on my way to meet Dale the day he showed me the cabin. The great thing about the Waffle House menu is the pictures. No matter how drunk or stoned you are, you can just point to a picture and soon it will materialize in front of you. I pointed at the menu, and a few minutes later enough food to scatter, smother, and cover my arteries for the next decade appeared before me. It was only eight bucks and it was delicious.

  As I was finishing my coffee, I saw a patrol car pull into the parking lot. At first I thought it might be Dale, but since the car didn’t skid in on two wheels, I figured it must be another deputy. I watched as Skeeter got out of the car and strutted toward the restaurant’s door. He was wearing his mirrored aviators, and between those and his tight uniform and goatee, he looked like he was on his way to a Halloween party.

  When he walked in, the waitresses, cook, and a few of the customers welcomed him with shouts of “Hey, Skeeter!” He nodded silently in return, like a celebrity walking the red carpet.

  When he finally noticed me, he sneered, and I somehow resisted the urge to throw my fork at him. A moment later he was sitting next to me. I turned to face him, and I could see my reflection in his aviators. My cheek was still red from the ricocheting
tree bark, and I noticed a large bump on my forehead, courtesy of the rock that had broken my fall when I went over the bicycle’s handlebars.

  I’m no psychologist, but I’d summed up Skeeter thirty seconds after meeting him the day he pulled me over. My guess was that he’d been bullied in high school. After graduation he’d probably done a short stint in the military, where he got in shape and learned a little discipline. Then he’d come back to his hometown, earned a two-year degree in criminal justice, and joined the sheriff’s department. Now he was the bully and thought every problem could be solved with force. A big fish in a teeny, tiny pond. He was finally big man on campus. Problem was, I didn’t attend this school.

  The waitress came over and brought Skeeter a cup of coffee. He poured three sugars and two creamers in the cup and stirred the beige mess with a spoon.

  “I never fancied you a cyclist,” he said. “I hear you have a unique form, ass over end.”

  When I didn’t respond, Skeeter chuckled.

  “Oh, yeah, Dale had us in stitches this morning with that story. Said you went over those handlebars like you was slung out of a slingshot. Oh, boy, what I’d of given to see that.”

  It was one of the rare mornings I felt halfway decent. My mind wasn’t foggy and my stomach wasn’t churning. I hadn’t even taken a pill, yet for some reason the devils were silent. I wasn’t worried about losing my temper with Skeeter, because I knew at some point I would enjoy five minutes alone with his vehicle. But until then, I was happy to play the game.

  “What’s your real name?” I asked. “Is it Reginald or Harold or something like that?”

  Skeeter grinned and took a sip of his coffee.

  “It’s Deputy Norris to you, asshole.”

  “Well, Deputy Norris, don’t worry, I’ll be out of this town soon enough. Unlike you, who’ll be here for the rest of your life.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I’ll tell you one thing—while I am here, I’m going to clean the place up.”

  I smiled, then blew a bacon burp toward Skeeter.