The Backwoods

(II)

Chief Sutter had felt not quite right all day. This morning, for instance, he’d wakened with a grand erection—rare for a man his age—but when he took a look at his wife snoring next to him, he realized he’d sooner attempt to copulate with a grounded manatee. The box of jelly-filled doughnuts he’d picked up for breakfast at the Qwik-Mart was stale. He’d had a headache and a half since morning, which turned into a headache and seven-eights by noon from the pollen and the heat. All kinds of shit was going down in his town, none of which Sutter could reckon, and the only thing he had to look forward to all day was the Squatter cookout, which had kicked off just fine, and then he got a call from Trey on the radio. Something happened at the station. Jesus.

“What are all the damn lights doin’ off?” were the first words to exit Sutter’s mouth when he came in.

Trey looked up from his desk with an expression like bewilderment. The younger man rubbed his face. “Things are startin’ to get really fucked-up ’round here, Chief. I don’t know where to start.”

Sutter looked at his watch, his patience ticking away with it. “Why’d you call me down here at midnight, Trey? And why’d you turn off the lights? Start talkin’. Now.”

“Ricky Caudill’s dead, Chief,” Trey blurted.

“Bullshit.” Sutter bulled past Trey’s desk to the cells. The only light that remained on was the hall light, which bled into Caudill’s unit. The cell door stood unlocked.

“Fuck!” Sutter shouted.

Eventually Trey came down the hall. He was edgy, fidgeting. “That’s how I found him, Chief. Looks like . . .”

Sutter was leaning over the cot. “It looks like all his blood’s gone is what‘choo were about to say.” The wizened face looked pale as old candle wax. There was no blood on the floor, none on Caudill’s clothes, no evidence of a wound. “It’s fuckin’ crazy,” Sutter murmured, staring.

Trey turned on the cell light. Sutter unbuttoned Cauldill’s shirt to reveal a sheet-white chest underscored with blue veins. The lack of color in the flesh made Ricky’s chest hairs look like jet-black wires. The nipples were purple. Sutter lifted up the arm that dangled off the cot, then pushed Caudill’s body on its side. “No lividity,” he said.

“What’s that, Chief?”

“We’ve seen corpses before, Trey. After they’re dead an hour or two, the blood settles to the low points a’ the body and turns blue. But not here. It’s impossible.”

“I know, Chief,” Trey agreed wearily. “Lotta impossible shit been goin’ on lately, and you know what folks’re sayin’.”

Sutter turned and bellowed, “I ain’t believin’ no shit about Everd Stanherd hexin’ people! Ain’t no reason for Everd to hex Ricky or Junior anyway!”

Trey shrugged where he stood. “There is if it was Ricky ‘n’ Junior who killed the Hilds and the Ealds.”

Sutter’s face was reddening. “Why would they do that? You’re sayin’ the Caudills were into selling crystal meth, too?”

“I don’t know, Chief. Gimme another explanation, then. Somebody killed Ricky in his cell, drained all his blood without spillin’ a drop? You tell me.”

“There ain’t no fuckin’ such thing as hexes ’n’ curses ’n’ magic! We’re cops, for God’s sake!” Sutter yelled. “You hear me?”

Trey waited through a moment of silence. “Roger that, Chief. I don’t believe the shit either, but then again . . . I don’t know what to make of any a’ this.”

“Did you call the coroner’s office?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Trey let out a breath at the same time he took an inadvertent glance at Ricky Caudill’s grub-white corpse. “This place is givin’ me the creeps, Chief. Let’s go back out front and talk.”

Sutter’s temper was ranging up and down. He didn’t like not knowing things, and right now the only thing he did know was that something was seriously offkilter. “Turn some fuckin’ lights on,” he griped in the station lobby. “It’s dark as a fuckin’ tomb in here.”

There was a click. Suddenly a cone of light blossomed at Chief Sutter’s very own desk. But Trey was standing beside him.

Then who the hell was sitting at Sutter’s desk?

“Good evening, Chief Sutter,” Gordon Felps greeted him. Only the bottom half of his face could be seen in the light. “We were going to talk to you eventually, but certain events have expedited that need.”

“Mr. Felps? What are you—”

“It’s best if we just begin as openly as possible,” the blond man said. “You are the law, after all. But sometimes the law is malleable, for the greater good. The Squatters, for instance.”

Confusion immediately swept Sutter. He looked to Trey, who remained standing beside him. “What’s going on, Trey?”

Trey sighed. “Chief, it’s like last week, when we shook down those shitheads in the Hummer. Common drug dealers. We fucked ‘em up and took their cash, and booted ’em out of town, right?”

The reference threw Sutter for a big loop. That had been private police business, the details of which he didn’t particularly want to admit in front of Felps or any citizen. “Trey, you better level with me about what’s goin’ on here.”

Trey nodded, crossing his arms. “That’s what I’m doin’, boss. And you are the boss; don’t get me wrong. We want you in with us.”

“I’m not likin’ the sound of this.”

Trey held up a finger to make a point. “Lemme put it this way. Those scumbags in the Hummer, okay? What if we’d gone a step further, Chief? I mean, what we did was illegal. You weren’t exactly keepin’ the Constitution in mind when you knocked that black dealer’s teeth out and busted his leg—”

Sutter was enraged. “You were part a’ that, too, so don’t ya go sayin’ that—”

“Chief, Chief, that’s not what I mean, so listen to me. We both fucked those guys up, and we took their watches and their cash—you and me. And we’ve done stuff like that before because—let’s face it—the common man don’t give a shit if the police steal from criminals and bust their faces in. Forget about the letter a’ the law—this is commonsense stuff we’re talkin’ ‘bout, stuff that all cops do, ’cos if we don’t take the law into our own hands when we can get away with it, criminals’ ll drag this great country of ours right down the shitter. You agree with that, Chief. We’ve talked about it. What it all boils down to is this: so what? We fucked up a coupla criminals. We stole from a coupla thieves. And in doin’ so, we did help make the world a teeny bit better, didn’t we? ’Cos those two assholes are probably still in the hospital. They ain’t never gonna sell drugs here again, right?”

Sutter’s blood pressure was starting to creep. “Right, Trey, so stop dickin’ with me and tell me what this is really all about.”

Trey nodded again, sticking to analogies. “Let’s go one further, okay? Let’s just say we’d killed those two losers in the Hummer. They kill innocent people with the drugs they sell. We know they’re guilty. Sure, the Constitution ‘n’ all says they’re innocent until proven guilty in court, but—shit, Chief—we saw it with our own eyes. We don’t need no judge to tell us. Those guys sell hard drugs, and folks eventually die from those same drugs. So say we killed ‘em to boot. That’s against the letter a’ the law, too. But what about the common man’s law? It ain’t that big a deal, right? We killed a couple of killers and the world’s a better place for it. Right?”

Sutter’s eyes shone hard on Trey. “What the fuck are you tryin’ to tell me?”

“What Trey’s trying to relate to you, Chief,” Gordon Felps stood up and said, “is that we’re all trying to make Agan’s Point a better place, while we’re serving our own better interests at the same time.”

“The Squatters,” Sutter croaked.

“Yes, Chief. They’re a negative element, and they need to go. I won’t lie to you. I want them gone so that I can make a lot of money by turning Agan’s Point into the clean, upscale community it deserves to be. Trey wants them gone so that he can benefit financially as well. The Squatters are slowly sliding away from acceptable levels of morality. They’re getting Into the drug trade themselves, which can only be bad for Agan’s Point. If the Squatters leave, then Judy Parker will sell the land to me and we can get on with the business of progress.”

“What Mr. Felps is sayin’, Chief,” Trey spoke up, “is that we want the Squatters gone . . . so we’re helpin’ ’em along.”

The silence seemed to tick along with the darkness, and with Sutter’s contemplations. “Helping ’em . . . along.”

“That’s right,” Felps continued in a monotone. “We knew that the Hilds were selling hard drugs, so I paid Junior Caudill to kill them, and to make it appear to be part of a turf-war scenario.”

“He jazzed up the facts,” Trey added. “To make it look more convincing to the state cops.”

“And then I paid Ricky Caudill to burn down the Ealds’ shack, because we also had it on good authority that they were running a meth lab out of it. Dwayne, too, by the way. He was the first contractor on my payroll. He killed about a half dozen Squatters who we also knew were working drugs.”

Sutter stood stock-still. Now it was all unfolding before his face and his very life. “Ah, and you say you knew that these Squatters were into drugs, so you were takin’ the law into your own hands by killin’ ’em. To make Agan’s Point a better place.”

“Yes,” Felps said. “And to serve our own gain.”

“So how did you know the Hilds ‘n’ the Ealds were into meth?”

“Street intelligence, Chief Sutter. The best kind, which, as a police officer yourself, you already know.”

“I’d been hearin’ about it for a while, Chief,” Trey said.

“Hearin’ about it from who?”

“State cops here ‘n’ there, and county. Plus just bits ‘n’ pieces I’d been hearin’ on the job. It’s all legit, boss. We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known it was rock-solid.”

“So what do you think, Chief?” Felps asked outright. “Are you going to join us? It will change your life if you do. Your financial problems will be over, and you will get to be chief of police in a much, much better place—the kind of job you deserve.”

Sutter stared.

“So what do you think, Chief?” Felps repeated.

The cards all fell down. Sutter turned straight to Felps and stared at him. “I think that you murdered them Squatters in cold blood. I don’t believe for a minute that the Hilds ‘n’ the Ealds or any other Squatters had anything to do with crystal meth. I think ya killed ‘em and flaked ’em with dope to make it look like they did. Just to get rich off the land.”

Felps’s lips could barely be seen in the darkness hovering over the desk. “That’s regrettable, Chief.”

Sutter reached for his gun, but—

Click.

—Trey already had his own revolver cocked against Sutter’s head. “Damn it, Chief. Ya done buggered everything up.” He reached around and hit his boss’s thumb snap, then took his gun.

“I can’t believe this,” Sutter said, remarkably stable. “You growed up white trash, Trey. I pulled ya out, gave ya work, trusted ya, and now after all that, you got a gun to my head? Are you really gonna kill me after all I done for ya?”

Bam!

Muzzle flash lit the station up for a split second when Trey’s piece bucked in his hand. A chunk of skull blew out of Chief Sutter’s head in a way that reminded Trey of the old JFK assassination footage he caught every now and then on the History Channel—the old melon shot. Sutter’s last act in life was to collapse before his own desk with a considerable thud.

At least he got to die with a bellyful of food.

“Good job,” Felps said. “An unfortunate happenstance, but there was no other option available. I need his body buried deep. Will that be a problem?”

“Naw. Won’t be the first time I been up all night.”

“Bury him and Ricky in the foundation trenches at my construction site. I’ll see to it that they’re cemented over. It’ll look like Ricky and Sutter were part of the meth network, too. Sutter let Ricky out of jail and then they fled. Be sure to plant some crystal in Sutter’s personal vehicle and Ricky Caudill’s house. In addition, that other job we discussed—the pier. I’d planned to have Ricky and Junior do that too.”

“But now they’re dead, so you need me to do it,” Trey finished what he already knew.

“Correct.” Felps looked blankly yet confidently to Trey. “Do you foresee any of this presenting a problem?”

“Nope.”

“Here’s something to tide you over for the time being.” Felps handed Trey a very fat envelope. “I’ll talk to you soon. And congratulations . . . Chief Trey.”

Yeah, Chief Trey. Trey rolled the title over in his head. I really like the sound of that.

Felps left the station through the rear exit. Trey pocketed the sheaf of cash, then began to mop up Sutter’s blood.

It would be a long night, but a productive one.