They loaded Russell James into the cargo bed of a mud-spattered GATOR 6X4. Worth had barely climbed in shotgun when Vince dropped the UTV into gear.
They headed out of the machine shed and out over bumpy ground. Worth bounced along, folding his arms against the cold, the main buildings receding behind them, the starless night growing darker all around.
A few hundred yards down the hill, Vince stopped at a padlocked gate and trudged into the beam of the headlights. He popped the lock, unwrapped the chain.
They rolled on, into the shadows of the scrap yard, through the weed-choked bones of junked cars. Vince steered the Gator along a bald winding track—through a huddle of eyeless schoolbuses, ranks of pastured farm machinery, great black mounds of old tires.
Soon they approached a clearing, where hulking silhouettes rose up from a rubble-ringed plain. A bulldozer. The elbowed boom of an excavator. A sprawling, belt-fed crushing machine.
Vince cut across, toward their destination, jostling over deep washboards in the cold, hardpacked dirt. Their load shimmied behind them, harnessed snug under bungee cords.
They arrived at a steel shed surrounded by bins and barrels. Worth saw the fat smokestack protruding from the roof of the shed and felt a salty twinge at the back of his throat.
Inside the shed, more bins. More barrels. In their midst loomed an iron stove the size of Worth’s pickup truck.
It took about ten minutes. Vince fired up the incinerator, jerked the hatch open with a rusty screech, and wheeled a short steel trough to the lip. They unloaded Russell James and fed him to the furnace, carpet shroud and all.
After him, Worth swung in three garbage bags, all stuffed full of clothes, bedding, the sections of mattress he’d cut away, other odds and ends from Gwen’s apartment. The lamp would have to go somewhere else. He assumed there was a compactor around here somewhere.
Vince wheeled the trough back against the far wall. He returned wearing a tattered, soot-caked oven mitt. He used his mitted hand to slam the incinerator door and set the handle with a hard downward yank.
They stood side by side then, neither speaking of what they’d just done, listening to the walls of the furnace begin to creak and ping.
After a while, Vince said, “Grocery patrol, huh?”
Worth hadn’t made a whole background of it. “Long story.”
“That’s a long story.” Vince chuckled but didn’t seem amused. “Who else knows?”
“Who else knows what?”
“Whatever you and this girl have going.”
“It’s not like that,” Worth said.
“No?”
“No.”
Vince let it go. After another minute, he nodded toward the furnace. “What about him?”
“He did a job on her.”
“You told me.”
“Poor kid’s still in the hospital,” Worth said. “Doctor said she’ll be lucky if she doesn’t lose a kidney.”
“You told me that, too.” Vince leaned down and checked the door handle even though he’d already clamped it tight. The air had begun to carry the faint, acrid scent of burning wool. “I’m asking what you know about the guy.”
“Mom and sister in Texas,” Worth said. “No family in town. Minor-league record, mostly kid stuff. But he carries a four-hundred-dollar scanner and a snub thirty-eight.”
“So?”
“So he’s into something.”
“Maybe he’s into guns and listening to car races.”
Worth didn’t argue the point. “According to the victim’s statement, he’d been drinking heavily over an extended period. When he fell asleep, she escaped the dwelling. The suspect was gone on arrival.”
“Simple, huh?”
There was still the mattress back at Gwen’s apartment. Worth had cut out as much blood-soaked fabric and stuffing as he could, then flipped the mattress. It would pass for the moment, but he’d need to find a way to do better soon.
The car needed to disappear. But Vince could make the car disappear. He could spread it bolt by bolt all over the bluffs if it came to that. Once it was gone, it was gone.
That left only whatever remained in the incinerator tomorrow morning, and then there would be nothing.
Worth said, “That’s the idea.”
“And the first time this girl slips up?” Vince spoke like they were standing on the side of a road somewhere, a hood up, talking engine repair. “One person from that store remembers seeing you two making googly eyes at each other.”
“I’m telling you it’s not like that,” Worth said. “There’s nothing between me and the girl except my name on the reports.”
For the first time since they’d unloaded the GTO, Vince looked at him. “So explain again why you decided to make it your fuckin’ problem, Matty. Right? Because I’m seriously not getting it.”
Worth didn’t have an answer that sounded any good. So he said, “I just did.”
He didn’t even realize Vince had moved. One minute they were standing there, feeling the heat emanating from the furnace; the next something heavy landed against his head. A cotton thud rocked him off balance, jarring his brain against the walls of his skull. Light flashed, and his left ear went quiet.
Worth stuttered back a step, still reacting.
Vince lowered his hand. Still wearing the oven mitt.
“That’s for making it my problem.”
“Jesus.” Worth covered his numb ear. The side of his face felt as though it were expanding; a buzzy hum echoed in the cup of his palm. He didn’t know whether to chop the asshole in the neck or sit down and cry. “Feel better?”
Vince rolled his shoulders. He seemed to give it some thought.
“Little,” he finally said. “Been so long since I hit a cop, I forgot how good it felt.”
They met eyes, and in the soap-opera pause that followed, the entire situation seemed utterly ridiculous. Looking at Vince Junior—wild and woolly, standing there in his coveralls and oven mitt with the furnace knocking along behind him—Worth felt a tug around the corner of his mouth. A maddening, involuntary twitch.
It was the stress, Worth knew. Just the stress of the past twenty hours, looking for a valve. Still. They’d just put a twenty-five-year-old kid in a garbage incinerator, and he couldn’t think of one funny thing about it.
Neither could Vince. A grin wriggled in his beard; he coughed and ground it out with a knuckle. They looked away from each other, breaking the connection, neither of them saying a word.
Eventually, Vince sighed heavily, put his hands on his hips, and shook his head. A guy standing over a mutt dog tangled up in its own leash.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You need a ride home, too.”
There wasn’t much more to it.
Back in the machine shed, Worth stashed the Judge under canvas while Vince finished mounting the snowplow on the truck. The shop radio said the storm meant business. It was wading across the river now, gathering power.
But it hadn’t reached them yet. They struck off in the big diesel quad cab, smoke still rising from the valley behind them, a gray column against the cold black sky.
11
“Hey, Sarge. How many years you been holding here?”
Sergeant Levon Williams leaned over the assembly room table, taking his time browsing the big box of Halloween cookies a lady from the Benson Citizens Coalition had dropped off for the B and C crews.
“Fifteen in January,” he said, finally picking a smiley pumpkin with orange and black frosting. “Why?”
“You ever ride with Kelly Worth?”
“I was his training officer.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. What made you ask?”
Tony Briggs shrugged and lied his ass off. “Some of the B guys were talking about him in the locker room. Guess it happened around this time of year?”