RATTLEMAN: Praise for 18 Seconds 'Excellent! Stephen King Page 11

  Starting over was unimaginable. People did it all the time of course, but Judy knew she was in no condition to launch a new career. Gone was the confidence. Gone was the enthusiasm. She fingered the small gold cross at her throat and looked at the clock. It was one hour after midnight. She took a pill case from her purse and swallowed a sleeping pill. Then she walked unsteadily to the bathroom and brushed her teeth.

  At last she shut off the lights and went back to bed, head on the pillow, watching a shaft of light drifting back and forth across the carpet, curtain swaying rhythmically above the groaning air conditioning unit.

  Morning brought a sharp rap at the door. Splinters of sunlight replaced the incandescent streetlight. She felt a stab of fear before she remembered where she was.

  Her legs were unsteady and she needed to use the bathroom, but the knocking persisted so she staggered to the peephole.

  “Agent Wells?” a voice called.

  She squinted at the blur of a large pink face.

  “Agent Wells? It’s Sergeant Watson. We talked last night at the station.”

  “Watson,” she repeated uncertainly.

  “You said you wanted to go up see the plane?”

  “Oh my God.” She yanked the door open to the end of the chain. “What time is it?”

  “A little after eight,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d decided to stay back or not. Sheriff asked me to come down and check on you.”

  She looked dazed. “Wait right there,” she said, and put her index finger up in the air for him to see. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Okay. Just ten minutes.”

  She ran for the light switch and flicked it up. The display on the alarm blinked. The alarm clock had been plugged into an outlet wired to the light switch.

  “Fuck!” she hissed, stripping off the T-shirt she had used for a nightgown. She ran to the bathroom and washed her face, dragged a toothbrush around her mouth and raked a brush through her hair, tying it back with an elastic band. Then she put on clean underwear, jeans and a new pair of boots bought on vacation in Mexico. Judy had never had an occasion to wear them before.

  “Be right there,” she yelled, stomach still quite queasy from the wine. She put on a bra, pulled a top over her head, grabbed her calfskin jacket and walked to the door. She took a deep breath and opened it.

  Sergeant Watson smiled, but she felt unable to return it.

  The ride from Marion was miserable. The air was warm and sickly sweet and she longed for the bland air-conditioning of her Agency car. He had all but laughed when she suggested following him.

  With every turn the pavement deteriorated. Washouts and potholes looked like bomb craters; overgrown bushes and vines whipped the doors. Dust had turned leaves from green to brown.

  The truck springs creaked and the tailgate rattled. On the radio a country singer sang of hard times and Judy prayed she wouldn’t throw up.

  “Took an hour to find the plane,” he told her. “Pilot’s dead.”

  Judy nodded, wondering if anyone was preserving evidence. Wondering what Jack Halligan would think of her now.

  “It’s not too far from the power lines he said, so they got lucky. Only a mile, maybe a mile and half walk.”

  For a long moment she looked at him. “How long of a drive, Sergeant?” she asked.

  “Sam,” he said. “Everybody calls me Sam. Fifteen miles in the truck, half an hour on foot. The groundcover’s heavy up there.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, turning away. She hoped the Sheriff would be smart enough not to touch the bag full of narcotics. It was rare, but they sometimes got fingerprints off the insides of cellophane bags.

  “Can you reach him?” she asked. “The Sheriff? Can you ask him what’s going on?”

  He shook his head. “Doubt it from here, but we’ll give it a try. You need a straight line of sight between repeating antennas,” he told her. “Cellphones are out of the question up here.”

  “Three-One, you there, Marty? Three-One, over?” he tried to call.

  “Marty’s the Sheriff?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Martin Wayne.”

  No one answered the radio.

  They rode in silence for another mile.

  “So I guess there were drugs on the plane?” he asked.

  She looked out the passenger window.

  After a minute he looked over at her. “We don’t get a lot of drugs around here. Not in Marion anyhow. I mean there’s marijuana and prescription pills around the schools, but that’s about everywhere these days, huh?”

  He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “The town we passed below the bridge is a whole other story. Quills Landing is one of the biggest trucking hubs in the northeast. They switch north-south cargo there. Just a little bit of everything goes on in Quills Landing. Thank heavens it has its own police.”

  She turned her head away, hoping he would stop talking.

  The pickup jolted in and out of deep ruts. They passed dilapidated farmhouses and barns so splintered you could see through the walls. There were no crops or fences. Animals – what few there were – roamed the hillsides at will. There were rusted hulls of automobiles, trucks without beds, parts of farm equipment strewn casually across the hills.

  Twice she bumped her head on the roof of the cab and after a third she tried to slouch and ride the springs, but to no avail.

  “Ouch,” she said, gripping the dash after a particularly hard bump.

  “Sorry,” he said, “but it gets worse before it gets better.”

  The road climbed then fell as they entered a depression near the top of the mountain and the fields were strewn with shanties and trailers.

  “Kettle Hollow,” he proclaimed.

  Pale boulders littered the earth. Thistle grew abundantly and ivy snaked around the discarded tires and parts of rusted machinery. There was an air of decay: a mound of charred wood that had once been a house, old cans and plastic bottles, buckets and feathers bleached, animal bones scattered about on the ground, and an occasional patch of onion grass or dandelion the goats hadn’t discovered. There was a plastic lawn chair by the road where someone sat. Judy had never seen anything like this before.

  Sam slowed for a curve through a row of shanties built tight against the road. At the end of the shanties was a small building with a clay pipe chimney and signs advertising a general store. Behind it was a gray house trailer with jars of honey stacked outside. Judy thought the trailer looked neater than the others; it had a stone path lined with wilting sunflowers and someone had hung a faded American flag by the door.

  Sam pointed. “Hattie Wilson’s place. She used to be the school teacher up here, before they started bussing kids to public schools. Now she runs the store and distributes the mail.”

  “What did she teach?” Judy asked, trying to sound interested.

  “Everything,” Sam said.

  The road curved into a forest so thick overhead it looked like they had entered a tunnel. They sped through it for a mile, breaking into an open pasture that climbed the mountain toward the summit. Sam steered for a swath cut between the trees where large steel towers carried power lines over the mountain. Judy gripped the seat and the dash at the same time, holding tight as the truck rattled fiercely over uneven ground, angling skyward until there was only blue beyond the windshield. She scoffed at her foolhardy wish to bring the Agency car.

  Ten minutes later she saw sunlight glinting on chrome as a cluster of pickup trucks came into view. When they drew to a stop the sergeant reached for his radio. “Marty, you there?”

  Judy stepped out to stretch her legs. She heard the heavy cables humming on the towers overhead. A voice broke through the static. Someone on the other end spoke her name.

  “Agent Wells,” Sam called out to her, pointing toward the trees. “We go in over there.”

  The going was slow at first; wild grape and laurel thickets snared their feet as they moved along. The boots were stiff and unforgiving. Judy’s ankles were sore a
fter the first ten minutes. Everything looked the same as they got deeper in the forest and she wondered how he knew which way to go.

  “Are there snakes up here?” she asked, and when he nodded, she closed in beside him.

  Brilliant sunlight flashed above the trees; the temperature climbed and Judy removed her jacket and tied it around her waist. Thirty minutes seemed like an hour, but at last they heard voices and in another five minutes they were at the wreckage.

  “Not too bad, now was it,” Sam said, but Judy would not have agreed.

  A young man turned and watched them approach – the man in the newspaper picture from last night. He was probably in his mid-thirties, Judy thought, good looking and solid, wearing a pair of work boots and a green T-shirt tucked into jeans. There was a radio in his back pocket and a Browning semi-automatic pistol tucked behind his belt.

  “This is Agent Wells,” Sam said. “Martin Wayne is our Sheriff.”

  Judy walked up stiffly to take his hand. “My alarm didn’t go off.” She made a face to indicate how alarms in general couldn’t be trusted and he smiled back politely.

  Sam was mopping his brow with a red kerchief and dark rings of sweat began to expand under his arms. “Doc said he couldn’t make it, Marty. He’s got an office full of flu patients. Said we could put the body in his freezer though. He’ll do the autopsy tomorrow or we can call Pocahontas County?”

  “It can wait until tomorrow,” Marty said. “Have the boys take it to his office.”

  Sam nodded and walked away to join the others.

  Judy walked toward the plane, leaving the Sheriff behind.

  The wreck smelled of blood. A wave of nausea came and quickly passed. Flies swarmed the pilot’s seat and the instruments on the dash that had caved in around it. She could see the straight edged cuts in the fuselage where firemen had used a demolition saw to extract the body. She could see fingerprint dust on the exposed metal around the pilot’s window and on the fuselage and the tail. Behind the plane a woman in NTSB coveralls was taking photographs of a wing held aloft by two firemen. One thing was certain. The plane had not exploded midair.

  “Found a wallet when we took him out,” Marty said, coming up behind Judy. He handed her a plastic evidence bag, exposing a New Jersey driver’s license that had been removed and placed alongside the wallet.

  Judy took the bag, examining the picture of a man with long hair. The name was Edward Copeland with an address in Tom’s River, New Jersey.

  “You know who he is?”

  She shook her head and pointed at the plane. “Why are you fingerprinting the plane, Sheriff?”

  “Come here and have a look,” he said, walking around the tail section to the opposite side of the plane.

  Judy followed, finding him pointing to a jagged hole in the tail end of the fuselage. She stared at him for a moment and he nodded toward the hole. She approached it and crouched, looking inside. There was a dusting of white powder on navy blue carpet, and a foot-wide mark indicating something had been dragged across it and taken out of the hold. And that was it. There was nothing else to see. She looked up at him, bewildered.

  “Obviously there was something in there before all the powder settled over it,” Marty said. “Whatever it was, someone beat us to it.”

  She looked into the fuselage again, stood erect and turned to face him. “Excuse me?”

  The Sheriff pointed into the trees. “Someone spent the night back here. You can see an impression where he sat, a wad of discarded chewing tobacco, a footprint in the dirt and some human scat.” He reached for his back pocket. “Found this on the ground where you’re standing now. The strap was cut clean, most likely on the jagged metal.”

  She looked at his hands. He was holding a small buckskin bag. It was worn thin and had dozens of tiny black crosses etched in it.

  She laughed nervously, extending the open palms of her hands. “Okay. So what am I supposed to say now?”

  The Sheriff looked down at the bag in his hand. “Well, I don’t know what you were expecting to find on the plane, Agent Wells, but I’m assuming since you’re from DEA it was narcotics.”

  She glowered, recalling the conversation in Jack’s office. You can do this Judy, right?

  “Do you think I was born yesterday, Sheriff?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t beg anything.” She waved a hand. “You think I’m going to accept that someone beat us here and took the drugs? You said you couldn’t even find this plane in the dark.”

  She looked through the trees at the men in flannel shirts, a tight hard smile forming on her lips. She pointed at the plane. “What makes a lot more sense to me, is that someone was told I was coming here and there’d be time to beat us to the plane.” She locked eyes with him, reached for the cellphone on her belt, flipped it open and punched numbers on the keypad. “Or maybe the first man in took advantage of the situation.” She put the phone to her ear then looked at it again, tilting it sideways to catch a signal. Nothing happened.

  “That’s what you think, Agent Wells?” Marty walked up behind her. “You think we’re all just a bunch of hicks waiting for the next big opportunity to come along?”

  She shook the phone and raised it over her head, barely listening to what he was saying. Jack will just love this one, she thought: Agent oversleeps while locals steal a quarter million in cocaine. She needn’t worry about qualifying at the pistol range. This would be enough to end her good government career.

  She turned with lips open to form words, but the expression on the Sheriff’s face stopped her.

  “Agent Wells,” he said evenly, “someone spent the night beneath a tree over there.” He pointed toward a spot about twenty yards distant. “Everything we found is still here for you to see. You can go over and look at it or you can go away mad. I don’t see how that would help, but it’s entirely up to you.”

  Judy looked down helplessly at her cellphone, then up at him again. She tried to speak calmly. “Who would be up here, Sheriff?” She extended both arms and rotated in a circle. “I mean who,” she said, her voice rising dramatically, “could possibly be up here?”

  Some firemen turned to watch, as well as the NTSB investigator.

  “Could be anyone, Agent Wells. Several hundred people live on these mountains. This is their life, their food, their medicines and fuel. Everything up here is fair game. There are no property rights here, no arbitrators or rules. If they find something it’s theirs, even if they don’t know what it is, which I’m inclined to believe is the case here.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Drop the innocence crap. We’re in the Appalachians, Sheriff. Not Jupiter.”

  He shrugged and started to walk away. “Have it your way, Agent Wells. I’m just delivering the message. Be over there with my men. You do what you do. I’ll come and get you when we’re ready to leave.”

  This time when he turned, he kept walking.

  She looked around, taking it all in. The NTSB investigator was still studying the Cessna’s wing. Men were carrying parts out of the trees. Sheriff Wayne had walked beyond the scope of her vision. He seemed so genuine; could his argument have been plausible, she thought grudgingly. If the recovery team all arrived together it was unlikely that anyone could remove anything from the plane. She paced for a minute then stopped. Her feet were killing her in the new boots. Her ankles were sure to be blistered and bleeding. And then there was the mile long hike back to the truck.

  She spotted Sergeant Watson and waved to get his attention.

  “Sergeant,” she called out. He looked over and she waved. She wanted him to show her the place in the trees, the impression in the grass, the plug of tobacco and human excrement. She thought about the bag and the primitive looking crosses, thought about the light switch and alarm clock and wondered if she had made yet another mistake.

  Ever so politely Sam escorted her into the trees, pointed to a place where the grass was compressed, pointed to the discarded tobacco and scat.
She thanked him and he left to join the others. She stood there a long time and then came back to the plane, circling the fuselage, glancing off into the trees in the hope of finding the Sheriff, but he was gone. She took a seat on a log. She shouldn’t have been so quick to accuse. She should have kept her thoughts to herself. And all that anger pent up inside would have been more appropriately directed at herself. It wasn’t his fault she was not here when they first found the plane. He did his job. She did not do hers.

  It was hours before she could see him again – late afternoon as the men started collecting their equipment. Sam was helping to strap the body bag to a sled while others lugged medical equipment and tools. Marty was standing next to the collection of debris where the NTSB investigator was taking final pictures. A few of the men began the slow trek out of the woods.

  Judy brushed off her jeans and started to walk toward him.

  He turned as she came up behind him. “How are those feet?”

  She followed his eyes to her boots. “You noticed.”

  “Saw you wince once or twice. The EMTs can patch up those blisters or carry you out on a stretcher.” He was mocking her now. But then he smiled to make it all better. “Or I can grab some Band-Aids for you to put on and we’ll just walk out real slow together.”

  She smiled too at the thought of being carried out with the body bag. He must have sensed how much her ego had already suffered today: first she was hours late and then she came off as super bitch. “Let’s just do it the quiet way,” she said. “Band-Aids would be great.”

  Marty walked off to catch up with one of the EMTs, then told Sam he would take care of getting the agent back to her motel.

  Judy watched the men carrying their vast array of equipment from the scene, realizing how impossible it would have been to locate the wreckage at night. “I’m sorry about what I said back there, Sheriff. It was unprofessional and demeaning.”

  “Already forgotten,” he said. “And call me Marty.”

  She nodded. “You were first to arrive this morning? You were with the others when you found the wreckage?”