It Dies with You Page 2

  “That’s what happens when you hire a damn foreigner.”

  That’s the last thing I remember him saying that day, other than that he’d call me sometime soon. I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, Don’t waste your time.

  I thought about that as I dressed in a hurry. Jeans and a flannel. A pair of scuffed Vans. I threw a zip-up hoodie over my shoulder, didn’t bother eating.

  Outside, the sky looked like a slab of marble—smudges of grays and whites—and it was breezy and cold as I half filled my Jeep at a Tank ’n’ Tummy near the highway. I bought a large cup of burnt coffee in the gas station, popped a few more Advil, hoping they’d stay down long enough to combat my lingering aches. I headed south on I-85, still salt covered for a snowstorm that was supposed to have shown up two days earlier but dropped half a foot in southern Virginia instead.

  I was hardly five minutes into my thirty-five-minute drive when my stepmom called—in hysterics, almost unintelligible. “Oh my Gods” and “Why, Hudson, whys?” hemorrhaging through the phone. I said very little. Once she hung up, I made some calls of my own, starting with my roommate. I left a message but spared him the details of the situation. Then I called Brent.

  “Shit, Hud. I’m so damn sorry. Take whatever time you need,” he said. I hoped the time I needed would be as short as possible.

  Those calls worked me up to my last one, my mom, Ann, who’d divorced my dad almost twenty years before.

  “The cops just called me …” I told her, unsure how to say what I needed to. “From Flint Creek, Mom.”

  “Flint Creek?”

  “About Dad.”

  “Did he do something?”

  “No, Mom. The cops said that somebody …” I took a breath. “Somebody shot him at the salvage yard this morning.”

  “Is he—”

  “He’s dead, Mom.”

  A gasp on the other end. “No, Hudson. What are you saying? Tell me he’s not. Tell me …”

  “He is. I think they robbed the place.”

  “They?”

  “I don’t know who. The cops don’t know. I’m headed to meet Frank Coble now.”

  She started crying, far more than I’d expected. For years, she’d resented my dad. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t once loved him or that the news didn’t hurt. So I let her cry.

  She finally collected herself. “Baby, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Please let me know what I can do. I just pulled up for a women’s breakfast at church, but I—”

  “Drive on back home if you need to. Or stay at church. Whatever you think. Maybe going in will be good for you. Shit, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry about me, baby. I just want to be here for you. You’ll let me know if I can do anything?”

  I told her I would and that I loved her. She said she loved me too.

  I put my phone away. Choked down the last sip of coffee and exited toward Flint Creek, a town with no grand entrance, just a dated, green sign announcing: “Flint Creek: Miles of Friendly Smiles.”

  I rolled my eyes at the cheesy welcome as the Advil and coffee crawled their way back up my throat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Miles of friendly smiles … but hardly a set of teeth between them.

  That had been the running joke for as far back as I could remember. One of the countless jokes I’d heard throughout my life about Flint Creek and its locals. The country-bumpkin wisecracks were mostly exaggeration, but there was no denying the town tended toward rural living. A town built mostly on agriculture. Fields of wheat, corn, and tobacco along the roadsides. Farms and produce stands scattered about. There was even a concrete plaque next to Town Hall that boasted Flint Creek was pumping out more beef and dairy cattle per square mile than anywhere in the Tar Heel state. Next to the plaque, a concrete pig in sunglasses. Outside of farming, most folks in town held down blue-collar jobs, owned little businesses, lived in modest houses in small neighborhoods or sparsely populated back roads, like my dad did.

  His house was the last on the right on a gravel two-lane called Creekview Road. A long, ranch-style house from the seventies, with an attached garage and a front yard sloping into a ditch that met the road abruptly. In the yard, a concrete birdbath that I used to line with action figures before shooting them off with a pellet gun.

  But that was a different lifetime. A different Hudson Miller. Over the last several years, I’d visited the house sparingly, and when I had, I preferred to sit outside, endure minimal small talk on the porch during my brief visits. My dad and Tammy had always smoked in the house, and it was all I could do not to have a coughing fit every time I stepped through the door.

  I pulled up a little before ten. There was a black Dodge Charger parked crooked in the driveway. Definitely a cop’s. I rang the doorbell, and Tammy’s lapdogs, Cody and Stormin’ Norman, started up like lit firecrackers, yipping and barking, scratching at the door until Frank Coble answered it. He was a sturdy man with a goatee so expertly trimmed and stark white that it looked to be painted on. He swept the dogs back with his foot and opened the door. “Come on in,” Coble said.

  When I stepped inside, he put his arms around me, gave a quick, manly hug. Two firm pats on the back that reverberated through my ribs. “Real sorry about your daddy.”

  Coble and my dad had been close for many years, but the embrace surprised me. Last time I’d stood so close to the man, I was fourteen years old, in a pair of handcuffs that he held the key to. “Appreciate it, Frank,” I told him. “I’m sorry about it too.”

  “Tammy’s in the dining room.” Coble said, making eyes like “prepare yourself for a shitshow.”

  I took shallow breaths as I followed Coble through the living room, readying my lungs for the nicotine onslaught. The smell of smoke was even stronger than I remembered. Not for the first time, I imagined if I were to scrape my thumbnail across the wood-paneling walls of the house, the yellow tar from a million cigarettes would pile under the nail.

  I could hear Tammy in the dining room before we reached her. Low sobs and sniffles, a conversation. She was on the phone when we came in, dabbing her eyes with a balled-up Kleenex. Tammy wasn’t a hair over five feet tall, a hundred pounds at most, but her distress made her seem even smaller. When she ended her call, she squinted through tears and mouthed “Hey, Hudson,” the kindest greeting she’d offered me in years. The usual welcome was “Leland, your son is here.”

  I slid out a seat across from her and sat. “I’m sorry, Tammy.”

  She nodded. Another low sob.

  I looked at Coble, who was still standing. “Y’all have any idea who did this?”

  “They ain’t going to find who done this,” Tammy said with a bubble in her throat. “Some drugged-up piece of shit probably.”

  Coble tapped his fingers on the back of an empty chair. “I’ve got my best detective at the scene right now. If there’s anything to be found, he’ll find it.”

  My brain fog didn’t cloud my logic. “Did Dad have any security cameras?”

  “Not a one,” Coble said. “Guess he thought a padlock and that guard dog of his were all he needed. Some cameras could’ve helped us for sure. Even if there was just one at the front gate, to catch a suspicious car or license plate between six-ish, when your daddy went in, and whenever Charlie showed up.”

  My dad’s salvage yard, Miller’s Pull-a-Part, was in the middle of nowhere. The possibility of any witnesses seemed a long shot.

  Tammy’s hands moved toward a soft pack of menthol cigarettes but stopped. “What kind of monster would want to kill Leland?”

  “Maybe nobody wanted to kill him, Tammy,” the chief said.

  “The hell do you mean?” She took a cigarette from its pack, tapped it on the table, and lit it with a plastic lighter. I scooted my chair back a few inches, rested my elbows on my knees and cupped my hands over my nose, kind of nonchalant. A makeshift filter.

  “I mean, maybe they just wanted that money real bad,” Coble said. “They were desperate, h
it the first place they saw. Or they owed somebody. That’s how these things happen sometimes.”

  I suggested the killer could’ve shot my dad just to cover their tracks. Sounded reasonable.

  Coble said, “Exactly. Or something spooked them. Maybe they heard something outside—a car driving by, or that dog. Saw Leland’s gun maybe.”

  “He would’ve shot their ass if he had his gun on him.” Tammy’s cigarette dangled from her lips, twirling with her words. “Leland never would’ve let them have that money. He didn’t take shit from nobody.”

  “Of course he wouldn’t have,” Coble told her, “but the .38 was on his side, still snapped into its holster. Which makes me think somebody got the jump on him. That, and the fact he was facedown. He probably never saw the person, or at least not the gun they were carrying.”

  “Spineless coward,” Tammy muttered.

  “So where do y’all go from here?” I asked.

  “Well, after we fully process the crime scene, we’ll continue our investigation based on what we learn from the evidence at the scene and your dad’s body.”

  “The body?” Tammy jammed a finger toward her face. “He’s got a hole from the back of his head, out his goddamn eyeball. What the hell else do you need to know? Somebody fucking shot him.”

  The detail about the eyeball was something the cop on the phone hadn’t told me. Brutal. But at least it meant Dad had died quickly. The fact it had happened that morning also meant Dad hadn’t made those calls to me while bleeding out on his office floor. That would’ve been a difficult guilt to navigate.

  With effort, I pulled my attention back to what Coble was saying.

  “You’re right, Tammy. But there are still procedures we—”

  “Don’t start with your cop-speak mumbo jumbo, Frank. This is my husband we’re talking about. Your friend. So you need to go find the bastard that done this.”

  Coble interlocked his fingers across his belly. “I get that you want answers right now. So do I. I loved Leland like he was my own blood. I’m talking like a cop because the cop in me has to do what’s best, what’s right, to find out what happened.” After a long sigh and a few clucks of his tongue, he said, “I really hate to tell you this, but that involves us sending the body off to Raleigh.”

  Tammy slammed her hand on the table, an ash from the cigarette falling, burning out next to a tissue. “I don’t want my husband’s body going nowhere.”

  “I understand that,” Coble said. “But we need to know for sure whether there are any other injuries, signs of struggle and whatnot. Payne Regional don’t have the means to do a full examination, so we’ll have to send the body off to Raleigh.”

  “And how long until we get some answers?”

  “Could be weeks,” he said. “But they’ll likely release the body in just a matter of days. Meantime, we’ll continue doing what we can on our end.” Coble walked over and squatted next to Tammy, placed a hand weighted by a bulky class ring on the table. “We’re going to find out who done this, Tammy. And when we do, we’ll throw the law at them. Bet your ass.”

  Tammy shook her head.

  I cleared my throat to catch Coble’s attention. “So what are the chances the examiner finds anything?”

  He stood up straight, his knees popping. “May find nothing. Could be exactly what we said: a shooting from behind, and that’s it. But it’s always worth a closer look.”

  Tammy extinguished her cigarette in a near-empty cereal bowl, a sizzle in the sugary milk. “I got to pay for that?”

  “The autopsy?”

  She nodded.

  “Won’t cost you a red cent,” Coble said.

  “Bullshit it won’t,” Tammy grumbled.

  He tapped his watch. “I best get back to the station, get to work on this. If you need anything in the world, Tammy, call me. I’m awful sorry about all this. Maybe Patti can send some fried chicken and mashed potatoes over this evening.”

  Patti. Coble’s wife. I remembered her face and teased bangs, her high-pitched laugh. I thought about the fried chicken and mashed potatoes and wondered if they were to blame for the chief’s belly that looked at least two belt loops thicker since I’d last seen him.

  Tammy dismissed him with a wave of her hand. She turned in her chair and looked out the kitchen window, a gray light highlighting her tear-damp cheekbones.

  Coble left, and part of me wished he could’ve stayed a few minutes longer, served as a buffer in the room where Tammy was still crying and I wasn’t. I just didn’t know what to say to a woman I’d known for years but had never been close to. Never wanted to be close to.

  I was afraid she might mention Dad’s late-night phone call—assuming she knew about it—but she didn’t say a thing. She buried her face in her hands, silently trembled.

  I looked around the room that was hazy with smoke. A lot had changed in the house since my childhood. The linoleum floors and curtains and appliances. All different now. But one thing caught my eye, as it always did: a magnet picture of myself on the refrigerator. I was probably eight, in a bright orange baseball cap, an orange T-shirt that didn’t quite match. Number 9 for the Little League Astros. I hated those colors as much as I hated baseball. The mosquito bites in the outfield. Entire afternoons of little to no action except for parents shit-talking from opposing bleachers.

  Maybe the picture stayed on the fridge because it depicted the ideal son, suited up for America’s pastime.

  Or it was one of Dad’s few reminders in the house of how things were before he dismantled our family.

  * * *

  Rewind twenty years, and Tammy was just a neighbor of ours, renting a place two houses down with her boyfriend, Steve. They had moved from Cherryville and befriended my parents; for a short while they breathed some excitement into our household. Steve and Tammy were several years younger than Mom and Dad, had this exotic glow about them, partly from the tanning bed that eternally burned UV blue through their garage windows.

  Not long after they moved in, they came by to introduce themselves. Soon enough, they started coming over on Saturday evenings for cookouts, most times carrying glass bottles and a deck of playing cards. On one or more of those nights, I remember my dad walking me to the basement door, saying something like “I want you to stay down here tonight, Hot Rod, but you can stay up as long as you want, watch whatever you want to.”

  Back then, whatever I wanted to watch was The Goonies and a box set of Nightmare on Elm Street tapes. But when I tired of Sloth and Krueger and my Legos and Nintendo games, I’d sneak up the basement stairs and through the living room, just far enough to see the dining room table and the four adults who carried on around it. There were always beer bottles on the table, fancy glasses filled with icy, lime-green drinks, and loud oldies like “Sugar Shack” and “Hang on Sloopy” blasting from Dad’s cassette player.

  I think everyone enjoyed those nights—except for Mom. She’d never been much of a drinker, and she was too damn nice to put her foot down when those parties carried on well past midnight. As for me, I was fine with the get-togethers. They were a welcome escape from the routines of the week and the nine-thirty bedtimes, but within a matter of months the exotic Saturday nights stopped like a plug was pulled on that Sony cassette player. Suddenly it was no longer four adults sitting around that table; it was just Dad and Tammy Jenkins.

  The transition from normal family to my mom hiring a lawyer and moving into an apartment didn’t happen in the blink of an eye, though. After the luster of those Saturday night shindigs wore off, there had been signs that things were headed south that I’d tried to ignore. Arguments and more arguments between my parents, the I love yous between them stopping altogether. Dad helping Tammy with car problems and sink and gutter problems while Steve worked late. Tammy’s name becoming a part of the shouting matches at home.

  “Maybe you’d be happier with Tammy, Leland.”

  “Let me guess. Tammy’s car isn’t working again?”

  “I’ve
seen the way you look at her.”

  “I’ve seen the way she looks at you.”

  * * *

  So how was I supposed to feel, sitting across the table from the woman who was the driving wind of that shitstorm? Who’d caused her ex to sell their house and move back to Cherryville and added a layer of angst to my adolescence. A woman whose skin no longer held that tropical glow, but had aged to worn leather like her voice.

  It made me wonder, now that my dad was dead, how quickly Tammy would completely wither away. Fucked up as the whole thing was, I knew she loved my dad—at least in some sense of the word. They were perfect for each other in the worst ways possible. Cancerously codependent. It’s like Mom had kept Dad’s worst qualities in check for years, and Tammy in short order unraveled and amplified them.

  I pushed a box of Kleenex closer to her, certain I wouldn’t need them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The rest of my afternoon passed in a fog of fitful napping at the apartment, icing my ribs, and ignoring texts and phone calls. My dad’s death scene kept playing in my head, each time a little different. Sometimes the killer wore a ski mask, and another time it was a Ronald Reagan mask like one of the surfer-dude bank robbers wore in Point Break.

  One thing remained constant: a gunshot ending.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the phone calls Dad had made to me—I guess I’d never know what he had to say.

  * * *

  I slid on a Red Door Security shirt that evening and drove to my job in downtown Greensboro. Brent looked surprised when I walked through the door.

  “Damn, Hud. Dave’s already on his way. I asked him to cover your shift. Thought I told you to take some time.”