The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

Tom Franklin On Little Terry Road

from From Sea to Stormy Sea

Bad days begin with phone calls, so when his cell rang at 4 a.m., Dibbs rolled over with dread. He felt in the sheets for the phone. He didn’t remember getting into bed but knew it had to have been after two, when the bars closed. He also didn’t remember driving home. The phone rang again, and he found it. “Yeah?”

“Lolo?”

Jesus. “Ferriday?”

“I’m in trouble,” she said.

He swung his feet off the bed. “Where are you?”

“That Indian motel.”

“Are you alone? Are you hurt?”

“Yeah. Alone but not hurt.”

He stood, glad he’d slept in his clothes. The curtains were bright with moonlight and the room so cold he could see the captions of his breath. She was apologizing, saying she didn’t know how late it was.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Don’t move or call anybody.”

He hung up. He lived alone in this old hunting cabin in the woods, the fireplace in the den the only heat, and not too long ago it had occurred to him that not one other person had been here since he’d moved in three years before. His job — ​he was a deputy sheriff — ​kept him in plenty of contact with lowlifes, which went a long way in lowering his estimation of his fellow human beings, and besides the other deputies and police officers he worked with, there really wasn’t anybody else.

Except Ferriday.

He killed his lights as he pulled around the back of the motel. As usual, the parking lot was nearly empty, a couple of junky cars, probably migrant workers. He hoped Fouad, the owner, was asleep and wouldn’t see his lights. Dibbs eased past a green El Camino and parked in front of Room 12. He got out of the pickup and wiped his palms on his jeans and went to the door.

She opened it before he knocked, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and panties. She had mascara smudged below her eyes and a thumbnail bruise on her cheek, and her long, wet red hair was a rat’s nest.

She said, “Hey.”

He came in, and she closed the door. The room smelled like cigarettes. When he turned, she was hugging him, saying his name over and over. His own hands he kept in the air, unsure what to do with them, aware of her breasts against his stomach, gradually letting his arms fall to her back.

“What happened?” His voice was thick in her hair, which smelled of motel strawberry shampoo.

“I was out at Little Terry’s—”

“Jesus, Fer. What were you doing there?” Though he knew. It was the kind of place you went looking for trouble. Residence of a fuckhead dealer named Terry Little that everybody called Little Terry. Usually with him was his cousin Spike, who Dibbs had arrested more than once. Last time, couple of months back, Spike was “spiked up,” as he liked to say, and clocked Dibbs in the jaw, resisting arrest. Dibbs had tuned him up a bit after that while his partner turned away. Took it a little too far, couple of broken ribs. The sheriff didn’t say it in words, but Dibbs knew he had to pull back.

“Where you been staying?” he asked. “When’d you get back?”

“I don’t know. Couple of weeks?”

So long. Last he’d heard she was living in Santa Fe. She was into photography. This a year ago. And now she was back? How had he not felt her in his bones?

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

“I kept meaning to call you, but I needed to get myself sober first. I just wanted to go out there and get a little weed, you know?”

“What happened?”

She began to cry and pushed away from him and sat on the bed. He went and sat next to her and covered her long legs with a sheet and put his arm around her and began to untangle her hair. “Tell me.”

She did, between bouts of crying. She wanted pot, but they told her they had some exceptionally clean crank and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They drank pink wine, smoked some pot. Then somehow she found herself in their dirty little kitchen, and they were snorting this yellow shit with rolled-up dollar bills. Then they were leading her into the bedroom and taking off her clothes. “I tried to stop them,” she said, crying again.

“What happened?”

She took a breath. “They threw me on the bed, and then they started to argue about who went first.”

“Spike and Terry?”

“Yeah.” She said Spike pushed Little Terry, who was saying since it was his house, he got to go first, but Spike pushed him again and said Bullshit. Ferriday had looked on the nightstand and seen a pistol and began to scooch toward it while Spike had Terry in a headlock and Terry was pounding Spike’s back with his fist.

“I got the gun and checked was it loaded and it was—”

It had been Dibbs himself who had taught her to shoot, when she was seventeen.

“—​and I got off the bed. They didn’t even see me till I was nearly out the door. I had to get my clothes. Then they both let each other go and came for me. I raised the gun and shot Spike and then Terry started screaming and I shot him too.”

She began to cry, silent, the bed shaking.

He said, “Shhhhh.” It was Tuesday, he thought. That was good. It was after 2 a.m. Also good. The place would probably be deserted until midmorning, when the early crankheads started to stir. He leaned forward and took her shoulders in his hands and turned her.

“Are they dead, Ferriday?”

She shrugged and shook her head. “I just ran, Lo. I knew I had to call you, that you’d help me like you always do. Even though I’m not your responsibility.”

If she wasn’t his responsibility, then what was she? A question he’d been trying to answer for ten years. She was the daughter of the woman he used to live with. Dibbs had been dating Barbara for more than a year, and they’d been talking about getting married. Then one night Ferriday showed up. It was the first time he knew she existed. Barbara had had Ferriday when she was sixteen, and the girl had been raised by her father and her father’s wife and rarely saw her mother. But she’d fought with her father and stepmother, and there she was, with two suitcases. And as gorgeous a girl as Dibbs had ever seen, ever prettier than Barbara, with her same legs and smooth skin and red hair. Of course they took her in, though Dibbs felt uncomfortable with a sixteen-year-old girl living in the same house, a girl not his daughter or stepdaughter, a girl he didn’t know. He and Barbara got along fine, always had, but it began to trouble him that she’d never once mentioned having a daughter.

“Are they dead?” he asked again.

Ferriday pushed away from him and lay on the bed and covered her head with the pillow. “I don’t know. I threw down the gun and ran.”

“It was their gun.”

The pillow nodded.

“You’re sure.”

Another nod.

He rose and went and turned off the light and looked out the window.

“They were asking about you,” she said, her voice muffled.

“Me? How?”

“Saying wasn’t we related. Seemed to know all about you. Asking did we ever fool around, stuff like that.”

They hadn’t. After Barbara’s death, there had been all kinds of tension between him and Ferriday. Sexual was just one of them.

A car passed on the highway, and he watched until it was gone. He felt his body temperature rising; his face felt red and hot. “What else?”

“Asking was there any dirt on you. Anything they could use.”

“Use how? What’d you tell ’em?”

“Nothing, there ain’t nothing to tell, far as I know. What you got going on with them two?”

“We had a little go-round a while back. I’m sorry it caught you up.” And glad too, in some twisted way, because here she was. The thing about Ferriday, though, was that every way was twisted. It seemed all kinds of wrong, for example, how he felt about her. He was forty-four and she twenty-seven, for one thing. Not to mention that he’d once lived with her mother. “Nobody else was there?”

“No.”

“Did you leave anything?”

“No, I got my purse.”

“What about the gun?”

“I threw it down, I think.”

He came back to the bed and sat down and looked squarely in her face. Her eyes were glazed; she was still high. She gave him a little trembly smile. In a way, this was them at their best, her needing him and him being needed.

“Stay here,” he said. “Don’t make any phone calls or text or let anybody in. I’ll be back soon as I can.”

She stood, and the sheet fell onto the floor. “Where you going?”

He picked up her car keys. “Your El Camino?”

“Belongs to a friend.” When he gave her a look, she said, “I borrowed it, okay?”

He put the keys in his pocket. “It’s something I want to ask you. When I get back.”

She started toward him, but he slipped out the door before she could hug him again (during their last long goodbye, she’d picked his pocket). He got in his truck and started the engine and sat thinking about what he was going to do. What he was willing to do. He’d have to quit his job, for one thing, but that was okay with him. God knew this place could grind you up under its heel. They’d have to leave town too, maybe the state. When he thought about it, Arkansas was the place he thought about going, the Ozarks. Maybe she’d stay with him if there were mountains.

By the time he turned off the four-lane, the heater had kicked in. He slowed and veered onto a two-lane and then, soon after, a smaller two-lane and then a dirt road known as Little Terry Road, where there had once been a barn in which the owner hanged himself. Dibbs turned off his lights and stopped a hundred yards from the house. He got his personal, unregistered Glock out of the glove compartment and worked its smooth action. His service weapon, a Glock identical to the one he held now, was under the seat. He stuck a pair of rubber gloves in his pocket and checked his ankle holster, the tiny .22 in its place. He left his jacket on the seat despite the temperature and stuck his Maglite in his back pocket and, pistol in hand, trotted down the road, his breath trailing in the cold. The house came into view lit up like Christmas, the whole night world lit further by a high white spotlight of a moon. You wanted darkness, a no-show moon, on nights like this.

There were three vehicles in front of the house, a new SUV with its windows lowered and a car and a truck. These last two looked abandoned, tires flat, weeds growing along the doors. He crept past, his shadow morphing beneath him in this weird moonstruck night. He noted an old shed ahead. He’d have to check it next.

The door to the house was ajar. He nudged the door, and a messy room swung into view. A naked man lay on his belly half in, half out of the room, not moving. Facedown. It was Spike. Ferriday said she’d shot them in the bedroom, so he must’ve been trying to crawl out. He didn’t seem to be breathing, and there was a huge puddle of blood beneath him.

“Shit,” Dibbs said, glancing behind him.

Here. Now. Here and now was his last chance to call for backup. Every step from this moment on would be the step of a criminal.

He took it, went forward and peered beyond Spike into the bedroom, where the floor was smeared in yet more blood, a yellow rug now turning brown. Careful not to bloody his boots, Dibbs stepped over Spike and into the room. Following the Glock, he moved into the corner; nothing behind the bed.

He went back into the front room. He scanned the floor, looked beneath the old sofa, the chairs, nothing. Beyond Spike’s body, Dibbs noticed a bloody footprint — ​a man’s sneaker, looked like — ​in the dark hall. He eased forward and saw another print in the kitchen in the back of the house and saw that the door was open and the screen door ajar. He pushed it open the rest of the way and eased down the steps into the night, darker back there because of the trees.

“Help!” a voice called.

Dibbs clicked on his Mag and followed its light into the woods. He was on a path, careful not to snag a thread of his clothing on a briar, careful where he stepped so he wouldn’t leave a print. Going this slowly, this carefully, it took him a full two minutes to find where Little Terry lay.

He was passed out, lying flat on his back in the middle of the path that some part of Dibbs’s brain understood would eventually lead to the river.

Dibbs’s light showed that Little Terry’s long johns shirt was heavy with blood, his jeans too. Like his dead cousin Spike, Terry had bled a few gallons. Dibbs shone the light around the man, trying to see if he’d grabbed a pistol or a phone, but he didn’t see anything. He came forward, the Glock ready, knelt, and, with the back of his hand, tapped Little Terry’s pockets, feeling for the familiar weight of a handgun.

Nothing.

He stood and looked back toward the house, lights blinking through the dark trees. Where was the pistol? Ferriday said she’d dropped it. He made his way back and checked the shed. He came out and walked around, shone his light in the tall grass, into the interiors of the SUV and the junk cars next, a 1967 Thunderbird and an old Dodge Ram. Nothing, nobody.

Count yourself lucky, he thought. So far in a situation where a thousand elements could have gone wrong, none had. Yet. If only Little Terry would be dead when Dibbs went back...

He wasn’t.

His eyes were open, squinting against Dibbs’s light. He tried to lift a hand to shield his face but couldn’t. He was young, early twenties, Caucasian, pimples on his cheeks and kind of a goatee thing around his mouth.

“Who’s that?” he asked, in a voice stronger than Dibbs would’ve expected.

For a moment Dibbs considered not answering.

But he had questions of his own.

He lowered the light and came forward, the Glock loose in his right hand. “Hey, Terry.”

In the darkness it took a moment for recognition to change Little Terry’s face. People looked at you entirely differently when you wore the blue. Dibbs in his flannel shirt and jeans could be anybody.

“Thank God!” Terry said. “I never been so glad to see a fucking cop in my life.”

“I heard y’all was looking for me.”

“Not me, but Spike was.”

“Well, here I am.”

“You call 911?”

Dibbs took out his phone and looked at its bright face. No new calls.

“Thank God,” Terry said. “That fucking bitch shot me.”

Dibbs put the phone away. “What bitch?”

“Is the ambulance coming?”

“You didn’t say who. You didn’t say why.”

“Why call the ambulance?”

“Why she shot you. Who she was.”

“Does it matter? We can discuss it in the fucking hospital. Are they coming?”

“Let’s talk now.”

Little Terry gaped. He was clutching his stomach with both hands, his shirt soaked. “She came looking for crank. She’s been coming the last few days, and we all been having fun. I was about passed out on the sofa when they woke me up yelling in the bedroom. Screaming at each other, him saying she was robbing him. Then she shot him, and then she came out and fucking shot me!”

“Ferriday” — ​Dibbs said the name out loud in the night like a hex spoken — ​“said y’all was fixing to rape her.”

“Oh Jesus, Dibbs, that’s a fucking lie! She’s the one wanted to buy off us and didn’t have any fucking money. She said she’d blow us both if we set her up.”

“Did she?”

“Blow us? Hell yeah, she did. Like a pro.”

Sad part was that Terry’s version of the story was likely as true as Ferriday’s. Now, though, it was becoming Dibbs’s story. Or he was making it his. He knew Terry’s past. Everybody did. Terry had a bad dad, sure, but so had Dibbs. Terry’s file at the police station was full of things he’d done to people, starting in his early teens. The couple on Second Avenue. That lady’s dog that time. How he threw that kid off the railroad trestle at Chance. Lately he’d been helping his cuz Spike distribute low-grade crystal meth.

Dibbs knew all of this and knew that Ferriday had had an even worse time. Who could blame a girl for acting the way she did when she’d been raised by a father who (it turned out) sexually abused her? Barbara had had no idea but tried to make it up to the poor girl, and Dibbs had tried too, taking them to dinner, floundering, watching movies “as a family.” That weekend of redfishing at Gulf Shores. Crossing into Mississippi for the Neoshoba County Fair. The Lyle Lovett concert where Barbara and Ferriday danced and even Lyle noticed.

Barbara’s aneurysm killed her as quickly as a bullet to the brain, the doctor said. Dibbs began to drink. Ferriday stayed in her room. For two months the two of them were a pair of ghosts haunting different rooms of the same house. He kept volunteering for nights, and she was a senior in high school. When she came into his room one night, about three months after Barbara’s funeral, he was drunk. She slid into his bed and was kissing him and his hands filled with the weight of her, but it wasn’t Barbara’s weight. It wasn’t her smell. When he opened his eyes it was Ferriday, stoned out of her mind. He pushed her off and stumbled out of bed. She ran from the room and outside and was gone. The next day she’d called from an uncle’s house, her father’s older brother (a lie), and said she would be living there.

Terry’s eyes had been closed for several minutes, his breathing shallow, and Dibbs hoped this might be it. For a while he’d been shivering; now he stopped. His eyes opened. “This wasn’t my fault,” he said. “I swear. Most of the times it is, you know. Most of the times I’m the one fucking up.” He began to shiver again. “It’s so cold. Can you at least get me a blanket?” He started to cry and repeat that he was cold. He promised he would do anything Dibbs wanted, he’d say whatever Dibbs wanted him to, he’d say that Spike tried to rape Ferriday if Dibbs would call 911, please, he was so fucking cold.

Then he said, softly, “I know why you murdering me. It’s ’cause of Ferriday. You think you’re gone save her, don’t you?”

Maybe. Dibbs turned and went down the path toward the house, Little Terry calling after him. He walked to the edge of the woods and watched the house and considered turning off its lights and reconsidered. The less he touched, the better. He walked to the pickup truck, which was missing its tailgate, and sat on the edge. He lit a cigarette and adjusted his ankle holster. Terry still calling. The moon had moved, and he felt a little better concealed in this darkness, perhaps the way he would feel for the rest of his life. He’d crossed one line; now here he was looking at a whole other line. The question was, when would the lines stop?

He checked his watch. Five a.m. It had been quiet for a while, down there. Dibbs’s cigarette had burned to the filter and he crushed it out on his boot toe, put it in his pocket, and went down the path to make sure Little Terry was dead.

He got back to the motel at dawn and knew before he turned the corner that the El Camino would be gone. He’d taken her keys, but she still had the knowledge he’d once taught her, hot-wiring a car.

The room was empty too, of course, except for the smell of strawberry shampoo and cigarettes. He stood staring at the rumpled bed and then went in the bathroom. He rolled toilet paper around his fingers and knelt at the edge of the tub and cleaned the long red hairs she’d left, flushed them. He emptied the ashtray and took her little bag of garbage and went around the room rubbing away her fingerprints and trying not to think about how he had snapped on his rubber gloves and put his hand over Little Terry’s mouth and nose, expecting a fight but all the fight gone, Little Terry’s lips moving in silent words. It happened barely an hour ago, but Dibbs felt centuries removed and regarded the man he’d just been — ​hopeful at seeing Ferriday again — ​as the fool he was.

He sat on the bed. Sometime later this morning, somebody would go to Little Terry’s house for a fix and find Spike dead. They’d steal shit first, cell phones, the television, maybe the gun Dibbs couldn’t find, then eventually somebody would call 911. The crime scene would be contaminated as hell and there’d be a crowd at the door by the time Dibbs and his partner, Chaney, got there.

Dibbs rose from the bed and went to the window and looked out. A few big trucks trundling over the road, the sun beginning to redden the pavement. He needed to get to the station. He’d let Chaney drive the cruiser this morning. He was younger and liked it behind the wheel. Dibbs would suggest they get an early bite at Keller’s on Highway 3. He wouldn’t mention how close the place was to Little Terry Road, which, as everybody knew, was where you went if you wanted trouble.