Edward Lee: The Backwoods

“Damn, Ms. White. Ya scared the bejesus outa me.”

Patricia looked at him, confused.

“I just come in from outside. About an hour ago I was looking out the station window and thought I saw Ernie’s truck drive by, with Judy drivin’ it,” he explained. “So I run out and jump in the cruiser, but the damn gas tank was on E, so I had to fill up at the station pump. By the time I was done with all that, Judy’d already got back to the house and—”

He looked up the the body.

“You . . . saw her driving?” Patricia’s question faltered.

“Yeah, and I’m really sorry. If my damn tank hadn’t been empty, I probably coulda gotten up here in time to stop her.”

“But . . .” The information bewildered Patricia. “But what were you doing walking in just now? You didn’t seem surprised to see that she’d committed suicide.”

“I already knew. I found her about five minutes ago.” He explained more details. “So I went back out to the cruiser to call the state cops on my radio. Then I walked back in and found you standing here.”

“Oh.” Patricia continued to look at him. Something wasn’t right. “But . . . your radio’s right there on your belt.”

Trey’s eyes darted down to his gun belt, the Motorola heavy in its leather holder. “Well, yeah, sure, but that’s just my, uh, my field radio.” Trey’s eyes shifted. He bit his lip a moment, but by then his cool delivery was falling apart. “S-see, this radio ain’t got the, uh, the state police frequency on it. Just the station frequency and the county.”

“Why the county and not the state?”

Trey blinked. “That’s . . . just the way the . . . bands work.”

Patricia didn’t consciously decide to say what she said next. She simply said it. “I don’t believe you. You’re acting like you’re lying. You’re acting like a prosecuting attorney who knows his case is bullshit.”

Trey blinked again, blank faced. Then he sat down in the chair by the kitchen table, but by the time he did so, his gun was drawn and pointing right at her. “Holy ever-livin’ shit, Patricia. Why couldn’t ya just leave it?”

Patricia’s heart hammered so loud she could hear it. “You killed my sister, didn’t you?”

“Fuck,” Trey muttered. The expletive was directed toward himself, not Patricia. “Yeah. Wanna know what I did? I snatched her after the Squatter cookout, kept her tied up for a day at one a’ old shacks way out at the Point. Fucked the daylights out of her a couple of times, then hung the bitch in the woods.” He shrugged non-commitally. “Then I throwed her in the back a’ Ernie’s truck and brought her here and just threw the same rope over the kitchen rafter. Easy. And who ain’t gonna believe it? Alcoholic and a head case to begin with, been depressed since Dwayne got offed. Looks like a typical widow who just couldn’t stand to live no more without her man. Happens every day.”

“She wasn’t the only person you murdered, was she?”

Trey snorted. “These hayseeds out here? Squatters? No-accounts like Ernie? They don’t mean shit. But you’re different. You can’t just disappear. You can’t wind up dead with a pocketful a’ dope. No one would believe it. You ain’t no redneck; you’re a big-city lawyer. Someone would come snoopin’ around.” He shook his head in the chair, suddenly exhausted. “You fucked everything up.”

Trey’s attentions seemed diverted inwardly; he wasn’t really looking at her. Patricia had backed up against the wall, the entranceway to the foyer only a foot away. But when she edged aside an inch . . .

Trey cocked his pistol. “Don’t think I won’t do it. Shit, I been killin’ folks for a month.”

“You and who else? Sutter? He must have been helping you.”

“Naw, the fat ol’ boy just wouldn’t turn crooked, even as bad as he needed the money. It was me ’n’ Dwayne at first. The idea was to make a few Squatters disappear—to scare off the rest of ’em. But it wasn’t enough, so we had to start gettin’ rougher. We did the job on the Hilds and flaked ’em with the crystal, started makin’ it look like two dope gangs in a turf war. Then we burned up the Ealds with enough shit in their shack to look like a meth lab.”

“So the state police would think the Squatters were one of the gangs?” Patricia asked.

“Sure. And it was workin’. It was Ricky ’n’ Junior Caudill we paid for the rough stuff. They come on after Dwayne got killed.”

Patricia somehow kept her fear in check. “And let me guess. Gordon Felps is the ringleader.”

Trey looked up, duly impressed. “Yeah, the money man. Don’t you get it? Agan’s Point is a shit town full a’ shit people goin’ nowhere, and I’m one of‘em. But Gordon Felps was gonna turn this place all around, turn the Point into somethin’ special, with some big payoffs for whoever helped him. Shit, all your sister had to do was sell the land to Felps and everything woulda been fine. But no, the dumb bitch couldn’t turn her back on the fuckin’ Squatters—like they were her fuckin’ little sideline family, her orphans. Like one a’ these crackpot old ladies ya read about, takin’ in all the stray cats.” He pointed up to Judy’s hanging body. “Well, this is what she gets for her loyalty to the fuckin’ Squatters. We couldn’t let her stand in our way. When little folks stand in the way of big things, they get run over. I’m tired of small-time. I’m tired of bein’ town clown on a no-dick two-man department in a shit-for-nothing town. But once Agan’s Point booms, gets all full-up with rich folks buyin’ Felps’s fancy waterfront condos? I’ll finally be a big-time police chief. It’s still gonna happen. Don’t think it won’t. We just have to adjust the game plan a little.”

“Because of me,” Patricia realized.

“Uh-huh. I think tomorrow you’ll be drivin’ back to Washington.”

“What?”

“You’ll be drivin’ back to Washington, and you’ll have an unfortunate accident in that nice Caddy of yours. Far enough away from here that your people in D.C. will believe it.”

“They’ll never believe it, Trey. And I’ve already told my boss and my husband that I suspected you and Felps of having something to do with all these murders.”

Trey smiled. “I know shit when I hear it, and what just came outta your mouth is a crock of it.” He took a breath and stood up. “Come on. Fun time first.” He stepped right up to her.

Patricia’s heart began to slug in her chest. “I have a lot of money, Trey.”

“Not enough.”

“Don’t be stupid. If you kill me, someone will find out.”

“No, they won’t.” And that was when his hand blurred upward and smacked the side of his pistol across her temple.

Was it the dream again, the nightmare? Patricia lay on the bed, naked, splayed before the window. The curtains were open now, the moonlight pouring in.

It’s the dream again, she felt sure, the dream I had before I found Judy’s body. . . .

But in the dream there’d been no curtain at all, and the clock had been ticking madly, whereas now it ticked normally. In the dream she’d been lying paralyzed on the bed, but now . . .

She craned her neck in four directions and saw that her wrists and ankles had been lashed to the bedposts. She felt as if she were drowning in dread, remembering the scene from the kitchen. Trey had murdered Judy, then staged the appearance of suicide. He and his cohorts had been doing all the killing, not a drug gang, to frame the Squatters, to get them off the land, thinking Judy would finally sell out to Felps.

But Judy didn’t, so they killed her too. . . .

Patricia gulped, nauseous.

And now it’s my turn.