A Line in the Sand, page 22
She stood there thinking about her conversation with Lamar. “Thank you, Mr. Ewell. And I’m sorry all this happened to you. To Sally too.”
He looked over at his daughter. “It’s a mess, that’s for sure. But it ain’t happening to us. It’s just happening. We get a say in how it turns out.”
Arman looked up at the porch light, his thoughts adrift, only half listening to the conversation around him.
“Arman,” Mr. Ewell said. “I know you didn’t ask for any of this. But I want you to know you’re welcome to stay with us until Detective Wheel gets it all sorted out. We’ll look out for you just like you’re one of our own.”
He didn’t know what to say. His thoughts tangled into an impossible knot. Arman closed his eyes, and in the darkness of his mind, he saw pairs of boots in a gutter, sticky with blood. His father and mother stood before a sandstorm that walled off the world. He bounced his baby on his knee. The child’s hand explored his face and then reached for the unruly pages of his dissertation on his desk. One by one, his son flicked sheets of paper off the pile and watched with glee as they floated like white leaves down to the floor. He heard his wife’s laughter from another room. “Light Echoes of Collapsing Stars.” “Asymmetry in Supernova Remnants.” “Reconstructing the Explosion of Cassiopeia A.” He realized he had not gazed with wonder at the night sky since he’d lost them.
“Arman?” Mr. Ewell said.
He looked over at Detective Wheel and held up his hands with his palms out. “Tell me what to do,” he said.
“Mr. Ewell, Sally said you are friends with the chief of the Coast Guard station just off the island.”
“Sure. Chief Rawls and I go way back. He’s a good egg.”
“Call him up. Tell him to have someone call you if anyone comes across that bridge that they don’t recognize. Tell them Sally’s got a stalker. Tell them anything. Just get their attention, okay?”
“You got it.” Mr. Ewell walked to the house to make the call.
“Arman,” she said. “We’re gonna sleep at Violent Crimes tonight. I’ll set up the break room for you. You’re gonna stay there until I say you can leave.”
He nodded. “How long?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “As long as it takes. Lamar says he’s maybe got another lead. I’m gonna beg and plead for real protection.”
“Call me when you know something, okay?” said Sally.
Arman and Catherine took turns giving Sally hugs. “Will do,” said Catherine. “And don’t you go sending in this story yet.”
Sally’s eyes had begun to well up, but a laugh broke through anyway.
“Take care of your dad,” said Arman.
She held his hand in hers and said, “I will. Y’all be careful, all right?”
Arman and Detective Wheel walked to the cruiser and got in. Sally’s father called from the back door, “C’mon, girl. I don’t want you out there by yourself.”
TWENTY-THREE
Jimmy leaned against the motel’s second-floor railing and watched Chris pull out of the parking lot and take the Jeff Davis Highway toward I-95. He reached in his back pocket, pulled out two quadrants from a U.S. Geological Survey large-scale topo map, and unfolded them. He walked back into the motel room and laid them on the bed so one was situated just above the other and the boundaries met.
Now he had a detailed map that depicted the eastern tip of the Middle Peninsula from Deltaville south to Mathews County, including Gwynn’s Island and the various waterways that separated them. He followed the depths of the Piankatank just north of the island with his forefinger. He paid particular attention to the complex bathymetry of Milford Haven, which ran between the island and the mainland. He took out a fine-point red Sharpie and made some markings at the mouth of Barn Creek, then traced the road’s path from its end on the bank opposite Cockrell Point back to the bridge over the narrows. He circled stretches of land exposed at low tide and compared them to a printed tide table.
He leaned over the bed, grabbed the motel phone, dialed 411, and asked to be connected to the Mathews County Sheriff’s Office. He looked at his watch while waiting for someone to pick it up. It was ten o’clock, and the phone rang for forty-five seconds before a tired voice answered.
“Sorry, wrong number,” he said and hung up. He guessed they had only a handful of full-time deputies for the entire county. He guessed they were understaffed, even for a small department. He’d guessed correctly.
Jimmy looked at his watch again, then folded his hands behind his head and stretched out on the bed. The tide chart showed sunrise at 5:55 a.m. That put astronomical twilight at about 4:00. Nautical at 4:45. He needed enough light to operate but not so much as to be exposed. He’d give himself thirty minutes to get on and off the island—4:15 to 4:45 a.m. It would take two hours to get there, plus fifteen minutes more if he had to wait for the bridge. Add a half-hour cushion. He needed to be in the truck and moving by 1:15 a.m. Plenty of time.
He picked up the phone and called a number from an online classified service. He gave the address and room number. “Half an hour,” the woman said. He reached under the bed, pulled out a duffel bag, unzipped it, and pulled out a suppressed nine-millimeter submachine gun with a collapsible stock. Two dots of lubricant went into the action. A plastic Walmart bag was on the nightstand. He pulled out a new package of lithium button batteries from it and peeled open the cardboard backing. He replaced the battery in the red-dot sight and turned it off and on, then got up and turned the light off in the room and adjusted the red dot’s brightness. He flicked the light back on, placed the submachine gun back in the bag, zipped it up, and slid it under the bed.
At 11:00, Jimmy heard a knock at the door. He got up and opened it and looked out at the girl standing on the second-floor walkway. His shirt was off, and he caught her staring at the tattoo across his chest that read Infidel in a barely legible, intricate cursive. She looked up at him and forced a smile and, in her best attempt at a sexy voice, said, “Hey, baby, are you John?” but she couldn’t hide the fear in it, and she knew it.
“You’re late,” he said. “Don’t talk.”
She felt like he was staring past her when he looked at her, as if she either wasn’t there or wasn’t worth considering. He grabbed her by the forearm and pulled her slowly toward him and fully into the room. He shut the door behind her and leaned against it.
She had a brief moment of clarity, seeing herself in the motel-room mirror. The ratty fishnets. The dark mascara and eyeshadow she’d used in a vain attempt to hide the remnants of the black eye her dope dealer had given her a few days before. She thought she caught a glimpse of her double in the mirror, the girl she might have been, who she had been the year before, a fifteen-year-old who partied and smoked a little weed but had never shot up.
There would still have been the hunger. One meal a day. Maybe a six-piece chicken nuggets if her mom remembered after finishing her second shift. There would still have been an unbearable shyness, the paralyzing anxiety of showing up to school knowing she was the poorest kid among a thousand poor kids. Her clothes always worn for at least two weeks before being washed because even if the washer in the common area wasn’t broken, who had quarters for the laundromat? There would still have been heartache, wondering why her father had never come back, lying in bed with her little sister late at night, searching for memories of him that had never formed. There would have been all that and more yet to come. More pain. More hardship. More hiding in closets in tears while her mother’s next new man beat the shit out of her in the other room. More uncomfortable hugs from her gym teacher when they were alone in the girls’ locker room after PE. More, more, more. But there wouldn’t be this.
She flicked her bangs out of her eyes, and the moment passed, like sea glass exposed by one wave and washed away by the next. The fear came back, and then the desperate, relentless need for that first rush of escape the point of a needle brought. The feeling that the whole universe pressed down on her with its immeasurable weight, daring her to draw another breath. So she surrendered. She didn’t fight it. Couldn’t fight it. Running had only brought her here. She lay down on the white sheets, a doe frozen in a winter field, the whole world a wolf.
An hour later, he stood up from the bed, walked into the bathroom, and wrapped himself in a towel. He threw one at her. “Clean up. Be gone when I get out.” He left the bathroom door open, turned the water on, and she sat there and watched the little alcove with the sink and bathroom mirror fill up with steam.
She put her clothes on as quietly as she could. Her arms hurt where he’d torqued them behind her. She thought for sure he’d pulled out a clump of her hair. Blood ran down the inside of her thighs. She used both hands to pull open the drawer of the nightstand. A Bible. A pad and pen. She knelt down on the carpet and ran her fingers between the mattress and box spring but found nothing. She saw a black nylon strap peeking out from under the bed and pulled on it gently. The bag was heavy, and when she got it out, she walked over to the sink and turned on the water, splashed her face, and checked out of the corner of her eye that he wasn’t about to get out. She went back to the bag, unzipped it, pushed the two sides open, and saw the submachine gun and a heavy, bulky vest with a pistol shoved into a holster affixed to its front. She saw the two sheets of paper and unfolded them. She wondered what the map led to, but then she heard the water shut off. She coughed loudly, zipped the bag back up, and pushed it under the bed before she realized she was still holding the map pages. She stuck them in the open cubby above the nightstand drawer and sat up on the bed.
He walked out with the towel wrapped around him and saw her. “I thought I said be gone.”
“You didn’t pay me,” she said quietly.
“It’s sitting right there,” he said brusquely and pointed to the envelope tucked under the room’s rotary phone. He paused, and she could see that he was processing something, that he had noticed the map pages were out of place. She grabbed the envelope and tried to run to the door, but he took one hand off the towel and shoved her into the television cabinet. She crashed into it, and the corner bit into her side and cracked a rib. Her head hit the television and smashed the screen. She slid down to the floor and tried to catch her breath. He let the towel drop to the floor, walked over to the bed, and pulled the bag from underneath. The girl rolled over on her side and shrieked with pain as lightning emanated from her broken rib and pulsed through her body.
“You trying to rob me?” he said. He knelt down, opened the bag, and quickly inventoried the contents.
Still lying on the floor, she shook her head, her top lip swelling from the impact with the television. She rolled onto her back and looked up at him standing over her, seemingly seven feet tall, completely naked, his face utterly expressionless. She saw the black void of the pistol barrel pointing down at her. The way he held the gun and the angle he stood over her made it look like he was trying to cover his privates with it. She couldn’t help it. It made her laugh.
He reached down, wrapped one hand around her throat, lifted her off the ground, and slammed her against the closed door. He started to choke her. She felt herself drifting. She heard him say, “Funny?” and then she felt the tip of the barrel smash into her mouth. She swallowed at least one tooth. She didn’t know how long it would last. She started to choke again but didn’t know if it was from him squeezing or her trying not to breathe in the blood filling the back of her throat. Finally, he dropped her.
He walked over to the bed and sat down facing away from her. He had his hands at his sides, pressing down on the bed, even the one that still held the pistol. His whole body trembled with rage. She stood up and grabbed the envelope, went to the door, and pulled it open to run, but it bounced against the security chain. She started sobbing uncontrollably and leaned back against the door. She didn’t want to die. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she was sure she didn’t. She wanted to live.
He stood up and walked over to her. She covered her head with her arms, her whole body now the one trembling, but with an animal terror. He reached past her and flicked the chain from its socket. “Look at me,” he said.
She was too scared to move.
“Look at me,” he said again.
She pulled her arms down and met his eyes.
“No one will believe you. Even if they do, no one will care,” he said. Then he shoved her out the door.
She stood on the second-floor catwalk, shaking, the shock fading and the pain coming in to take its place. She looked up and down Jeff Davis for someplace she could go where the employees wouldn’t kick her out as soon as they laid eyes on her. There was an Exxon station where she’d scored before. Two eighteen-wheelers were parked lengthwise along a chain-link fence in the parking lot. She didn’t know what time it was, but the gas station’s small convenience store had its lights off and looked closed. Midnight at least. Probably closer to 12:30. She walked toward the exterior stairs and slowly limped down them and into the motel’s parking lot. She looked around, walked to the street, leaned against a telephone pole, and opened the envelope. Fifty bucks. Jesus. She knew she needed something, but it had gotten to the point that she often couldn’t tell if she was starving or fiending. She didn’t have a coin to flip, so she looked up and down the highway again, saw the yellow sign of a Waffle House lit up about a mile to the south, and started walking toward it. Halfway there, she saw an old Tacoma drive by with a kayak ratchet strapped in the bed. The man from the motel was behind the wheel. He didn’t look at her. She stopped for a minute and watched the truck shrink into the distant dark. She took the envelope out of her pocket. She didn’t have a pen, so she reached up to her face. She grimaced, took her hand from her face, and wrote the plate number down as best she could with her blood.
Master Trooper Charmayne Hendricks pulled her patrol car out from the highway underpass and turned north on Jeff Davis. She was three hours into a ten p.m.–to–six a.m. shift, and the night had been quiet. They usually were. A couple of tickets, a disabled vehicle, an accident every once in a while. Rarer, but not entirely unusual, an accident with fatalities. A month earlier she’d held the hand of a drunk who’d turned his F-150 over in a tobacco field out by Chancellorsville as they waited for EMS to cut his body from the truck’s cab. The metalwork was so mangled it looked like someone had balled up a piece of paper and tossed it into the field. He’d still been breathing when she’d arrived, pinned between the wheel and one of the twisted roof pillars, a spray of blood misting the air every time he tried to exhale with his broken lungs. He’d stared at her those last few minutes of his existence, but she didn’t think he actually saw her. An arm dangled out the pickup’s window, so she took his hand in both of hers and knelt in the dirt beside him. She’d felt the man’s fingers fluttering against the palm of her hand, and then he died.
In her sixteen years in the Virginia State Police, she had never really felt in danger. No one had ever pointed a gun at her, let alone fired one. She’d taken a lot of verbal abuse, but even the worst DUIs she’d locked up had never raised a hand against her. She’d drawn her service weapon five times in the line of duty, each time to put down an animal that had been hit by a vehicle. Three deer, a dog, and once, when she worked out by Big Stone Gap, a black bear that had been wounded by a hunter and limped down to a gas station on Highway 23, where it lay down between the pumps and waited to die.
As she headed north on Jeff Davis, her eyes scanned the roadside. Up ahead, she saw the sign for a Waffle House and figured it was as good a time as any to take a meal break. She parked in the lot, walked to the front door, and looked through the glass windows. A typical crowd for a weeknight. All members of the upside down, as she thought of the world of the night. A couple of workers getting off a B shift. The lone traveler headed who knew where. A girl in the back turned her head away as Charmayne walked up. She figured she was probably a working girl from how she’d reacted to her uniform outside the window. Still, Charmayne’s philosophy toward that profession was that if they weren’t causing trouble for anyone else, she wouldn’t add to theirs. Lord knows they had enough to deal with.
She opened the door and nodded when the shift workers looked up at her, made a mental note of the traveler’s studious avoidance, and saw that the girl in the rear now had her back turned to her. She sat down at the counter and ordered the All-Star breakfast. When the waitress came to pour her coffee, Charmayne said, “How’s everybody doing tonight?”
The waitress clicked her tongue and said, “Well, I’m doing fine, but somebody’s had a rough night,” nodding her head toward the girl in the back.
Charmayne took a sip of her coffee. Before long, the plate was in front of her, but she let it sit while she looked out of the corner of her eye at the girl. A half-eaten plate of bacon and waffles was in front of her. She still had her back turned. When the waitress came by again, Charmayne asked, “How rough?”
The waitress set the coffeepot on the counter and put her hands down on either side. “She looks like I did every Saturday night of my first marriage. Twelve rounds and didn’t win a one.”
Charmayne kept her eye on the girl and tried eating but she’d lost her appetite. She put her knife and fork down, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and stood up from the counter. She took her coffee and walked over to the girl, and when she got to her table, Charmayne realized she was passed out against the back of the cushioned bench with her knees tucked up under her chin. She walked around to the side to get a look at her. She was a lot younger than she’d first thought, and the waitress was right—some bastard had taken out his problems on her face.
She sat down in the chair across from her, folded her hands on the table, and waited. After a minute or two, the girl stirred. She squinted at the light through her swollen eye. When Charmayne got a good look at her face, she said, “Sweet Jesus.”
