Mercy River Read online

  “You mean to say these assholes never had him checked out? Pak didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Leo’s choice.”

  “Convince him.”

  A reflexive order. Fain had definitely been an officer, and not so long ago.

  “You’re just out of harness, aren’t you?” Fain said, as if he’d been thinking much the same thing. “What was your operating base, last cycle?”

  “Howz-e-Madad. But I doubt our platoon spent more than a month of nights there.”

  He smirked, understanding. The relentless pace of the OPTEMPO—the amount of action our battalion saw in theater—had most Ranger platoons spending days on end away from the relative comforts of base life. We operated out of patrol bases, temporary homes in the field that might change every night. If we stopped moving at all.

  “Business as usual,” Fain said. “Kandahar Province was my last stop, too. Civilian life okay for you?”

  “Won’t complain.”

  “But you could, if you chose to.” He grunted. “Our troubles don’t come off with the uniform. If you need to leave here and get back to real life, you let me know. Drop a message at the Rally office. We can look after Pak.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

  “And I’ll let you get on to your friend. Good meeting you, Shaw.” Fain pulled his hood up over his short black hair and left mud-specked tracks on his way out of the station.

  Leo was already on his feet when I reached his cell. Maybe because he didn’t want me to see how much effort it took to stand.

  He limped over and bumped my fist with his.

  “You’re up and moving, at least,” I said.

  “I’m squared up.” The swelling on his forehead was down, but the bruise had spread and turned sickly yellow around the edges. “Guess you saw Captain Fain.”

  “I did. The Rally covers all bases.”

  “Covering their asses, is what I think. Ganz will get me out of here.”

  “He said that?”

  “It’s gonna happen.”

  I left that alone. “I met your girl, too. Dez. She was at the house when I went for your scrips. Did Ganz get those to you?”

  “Yeah. The cops bring the pills with every meal, like I’m a mental patient.” He leaned against the sink. “I’m feeling fine, man. Really.”

  “Turns out the constable who clubbed you is the brother of the guy you knocked out in the saloon.”

  Leo grunted. “I should’ve guessed. Explains why the cop was so pissed.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the Rally. That was a surprise.”

  “I didn’t?” He shrugged. “It’s what’s on the calendar. The Rally is Dez’s regular gig. Or one of ’em.”

  “How’d you meet?” I sat down on the hall floor. It gave Leo an excuse to sit down as well, resting his back against the cell wall. In profile, the bruises distending and discoloring his skin, he might have been an entirely different person.

  “In Utah,” he said. “Dez was going around the state for the Rally. Delivering aid supplies and checking in on local families. I was stuck in a half-day group therapy thing at the West Jordan Med Center, and she recognized I was a Ranger from my ink. She gave me a sales pitch for the Rally.”

  “So you gave her the pitch for yourself.”

  He grinned sheepishly. Leo didn’t smile a lot, but when he did there was usually a woman somewhere in the story.

  “She came out to visit a couple more times,” he said. “Then we started talking about her staying, when she could afford it.”

  “Money’s that tight?”

  “The Rally’s a good job. She wanted to stick with it through this week, when they need the most help. Plus”—he shrugged—“she’s lived in this town her whole life. There’s shit to deal with before she leaves. I figured making some cash working at the gun shop would help move our plans along.”

  “You ever see Erle have an argument with anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Because I heard Erle picked fights like some people pick lotto tickets. Habitual.”

  “Not around me,” Leo said, probing his cut lip.

  “You always start early? Seven-fifteen?”

  “Usually, sure.”

  “Did you find Erle’s body on the floor and leave? What happened?”

  He turned his head to look at me. “I told you.”

  “You told me you didn’t kill him. You skipped the rest. Like how you got blood on your shoes.”

  “I forget what I said.” He tapped his head. “Scrambled, yeah?”

  “Where’d you go all day? Before the saloon?”

  “Hiking. I blew off work. The witness got it wrong.”

  “Come on. You called me. Or maybe you forgot that, too.”

  “Well, I got it handled now.”

  I stared at him. “What the fuck’s going on, Leo?”

  “Nothing. They arrested the wrong guy.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  “Go back to Seattle,” he said.

  “Not happening.”

  “Then drink some whiskey, or find your own woman. Who gives a shit?” Leo spat pink on the floor. “I know you. Coming at me sideways, looking for the angle like with everything else you do.”

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  “Nobody needs it. Get out of my face.”

  I did exactly that. Leo stayed right where he was, leaning back against the wall, his hand curled around the bars.

  Roussa had stepped away from the front desk. I took down the clipboard hanging by the cell block door. Ganz’s name was on the list of approved visitors, and so was mine, both dated yesterday. So was John Fain’s, in a feminine handwriting dated today.

  When Roussa came to give me my belongings, I tapped the clipboard. “Who approved Fain for you this morning?”

  “The lieutenant.”

  “Yerby?”

  “Mr. Fain told me I could call him to check. I did. Yerby said yes straightaway.”

  “Is that normal for Yerby? Allowing visitors on the fly?”

  Roussa shrugged, a gesture that said, No, but I know when not to push back.

  The morning was full of discoveries. Did the Rally swing so much weight in Mercy River that the sheriff’s lead detective let Fain walk right in?

  “I never thanked you,” I said, “for keeping an eye on Leo after he was busted. That was good of you.”

  “Bad for the department if he’d died.” Roussa wouldn’t give an inch. Even as pissed off as I was at the whole damn world right then, I had to give that the respect it deserved.

  Twelve

  The woods covering the long rise behind Erle’s Gun Shop and Firing Range had been clear-cut at one time, leaving a line of trees at the top that looked more like a wooden wall than the organic edge of a forest. Nature was making good progress reclaiming the slope. Bramble thickets and saplings sprouted in a hundred patches.

  Shielding my phone from the rain, I examined the photos I’d taken of the security monitor’s image. They showed the trees as darker gray lines on a slate background. More like abstract art than a useful picture, even with the one dangling twig or whatever it was that I’d seen moving on the screen.

  The camera would be placed high, to show the angle on the images. I guessed the camera had to have at least a rough line of sight back to the gun shop to send its signal. It must be close.

  But close was relative. The woods topping the hill included a lot of square yardage. A lot of thick forest. I began to hike up the hill, picking my way around the clumps of brush and the rivulets of water and mud flowing down the slope.

  About a hundred steps into the climb, I came across parallel ruts of tire tracks carved into the wet and grassy earth. Only four feet apart, with a wide tread. Made by an ATV. Probably the same one I’d found in the carport beside Erle’s shop.

  Erle had the ATV. Erle had the camera. One might lead to the other. Hot damn.

  I followed the straight lines implied
by the path of the treads, onward and upward, diagonal to the slope. Nearer the hilltop, the soil was loose and muddy. My boots stuck with every step. Before long the effort of pulling them free made my stretched hip flexors ache.

  But I was rewarded when I picked up the ATV’s trail again near the forest edge. Deep channels remained in a patch of earth where the vehicle had turned to enter the trees, through a gap in the trunks wide enough to allow passage.

  Inside the canopy of the forest, fir needles and sodden leaves blanketed the ground, interrupting the trail again. My nostrils filled with the heavy smell of moss and decaying plant life. I picked my way slowly through the shaded interior, stopping every few feet to check the ground for tracks or to look upward, hoping to catch sight of the camera. All I found among the branches was a crow. It cawed what sounded like an emphatic profanity before flying off into the trees.

  The crow’s path arced down and past a thicket of pines. A bright blue plastic ribbon fluttered weakly against one of the trunks in the breeze.

  Fluttering back and forth. The ribbon’s movement was suddenly familiar. On the colorless camera image, I’d taken its motion for a loose twig on the tree trunk. I crashed through a line of rabbit brush to reach it.

  Glancing at the image on my phone again, I checked the angle of the picture against the position of the pine trees, following an imaginary line up to where the camera must be.

  There. Nestled under a wide branch and enclosed in a dirty brown camouflage housing large enough to include whatever battery powered it. Only the lens showed from the front, one black staring eye, like a larger version of the crow’s. From the side the camera was nearly invisible.

  Its lens centered on a patch of ground with a pile of leaves and twigs. A thicker mass than the natural ground covering nearby. I kicked the leaves aside.

  Concrete. I was standing on old, pitted concrete. And there was something else underfoot as well, an edge of gray plastic tarpaulin. I hooked my fingers under it and pulled up. A shower of wet dirt and pine needles fell aside with the tarp, and I was looking at a two-foot square of wood with a handle of weatherproof acrylic rope right in the middle. A trapdoor. A padlock secured one edge of the square to a hasp set in the concrete.

  I didn’t need more invitation than that. I knelt down and picked the lock, as the rain dripped off my cap and washed the dirt from my fingers. A hard pull on the rope, and the trapdoor swung upward to reveal a ladder leading down to a floor made of the same concrete, eight feet down.

  Holy shit. Erle had himself a bunker.

  A gun store owner with a hidden underground lair in the woods. I immediately pictured racks of stolen RPGs and squad assault weapons, complete with crates full of ammo belts. I grabbed for my Maglite and leaned in to shine it around the space.

  And almost laughed. The underground room was nearly empty. And felt even emptier with its startlingly large size, like a railroad car hidden beneath the wild brush above. Maybe it had been a storage basement for a small house once, crudely built decades ago out of simple poured concrete and rebar frame.

  I caught wafts of gun oil and grease, distinctive and dense enough to linger after the guns or whatever had created the scent had been removed from the bunker. Maybe my guess about Erle trafficking in stolen arms wasn’t so far off. It would explain why he went to such lengths to conceal and watch his hiding place.

  A row of rusted wire shelves stood against one grimy wall. On the topmost shelf, a red plastic container about half again the size of a large file box waited in solitude.

  I climbed down the ladder. The air inside was cold but not fresh. Black mold had formed on the eroded concrete, and water seeped at the corners and dripped down the edges of the open trapdoor. I set the Maglite aside to take the red box down from its shelf.

  It was a sealable shipping container, with a clear compartment in the lid to hold papers with the recipient’s address and other tracking information. No papers there now. The tape around the lid had already been broken. I clicked the latch and opened the lid.

  Inside the box were stacked trays of translucent plastic. Each tray held twenty-four slim rubber-tipped vials, each vial about half the size of a marking pen and filled with a liquid the color of maple syrup. I popped one vial out of the tray to examine its label.

  The brand name in big bold letters was Trumorpha. Under that in smaller type was its scientific name, Oxymorphone, and a bar code sticker. Each vial held ten milliliters of the injectable solution.

  After a long pull in the military, with time spent in and out of hospital wards, and the occasional bout with PT stress on top of that: you learn your drugs. I’d been given prescriptions for—or had acquired by other means—a dozen types of antibiotics and twice again that many painkillers. That wasn’t even counting the mood stabilizers widely available, like Leo’s Lamotrigine pills, or the sleep aids I still used when my dreams got aggro.

  Oxymorphone was in the painkiller family. Powerful stuff, somewhere between fentanyl and pure heroin on the opioid scale. So strong it had become a problem even for Big Pharma, and they’d pulled the injectable version off the market a year or two ago, after one too many accidental ODs from junkies expecting the gentler high of OxyContin. Drink alcohol before a shot of Trumorpha and you might as well be injecting powdered glass.

  The Trumo had been yanked from the pharmacies. Why was a box of it here? Was Erle a drug dealer as well as the local gun merchant?

  I didn’t doubt that rural Oregon was suffering through the same opioid crisis as the rest of the nation. Erle could have found customers. Had he been killed in a buy that went wrong? That might explain why he’d turned off the cameras—no witnesses, even electronic ones.

  But how much could the drugs be worth, street value? A few thousand? Less than ten grand, I guessed, even if demand was high after the recall. There were loads of other morphine substitutes to be had. Erle went to a lot of trouble to hide such a small quantity.

  Without the shipping information, or a way to scan the bar code stickers on the vials, I was in the dark as to where the drugs had come from, or how long the box might have been cached away in Erle’s bunker. There could have been more Trumo hidden here at one time and the red box was all that was left. Maybe Erle had made a deal to sell the rest of his supply and had been murdered for it instead. Or maybe he had anticipated more drugs arriving soon. Plenty of space here in his quiet room under the forest floor. Like a crypt.

  If I left the Trumo here in the bunker, I couldn’t be certain it would remain undisturbed. Better to hold on to it until I figured out if and how the narcotics were connected with Erle’s death. Move it, but without lugging a big red box out of the forest.

  Twenty-four vials to a tray. Six trays in the stack. Peeling off my coat and Henley, I removed my T-shirt and laid it flat on one of the shelves.

  I left the underground bunker with one hundred and forty-four vials of factory-produced heroin tied up in a V-neck cotton bundle. The empty red box looked incongruously bright in the shadows. It was the last thing I saw of the room as I lowered the lid and pulled the tarp back over, keeping Erle Sharples’s secret just between us.

  Thirteen

  As I came around the front of the gun shop, I found its doors wide open, making a black square in the gray steel storefront like a moaning mouth. A dented red Chevy Astro panel van had been parked crookedly off to one side.

  I’d been wondering about Sharples’s relatives. Maybe his family had finally turned up. Under the sound of the relentless rain, a high sustained keening drifted from the mouth shape of the doors. A little closer, and the sound resolved into the whine of a vacuum cleaner. I stashed my makeshift bag full of Trumo vials under the wheel well of Erle’s ATV.

  I called hello, and a moment later the whine whirred into silence. A woman came out onto the porch. She was old enough to have a full head of downy white hair and robust enough that she had no trouble carrying the steel vacuum canister with one hand. The photograph of Johnny Cash on her sh
irt stopped at the singer’s chin and the high elastic waist of her jeans. She peered at me through thick glasses.

  “Store’s closed,” she said. “Owner’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “So whaddya want?”

  “Erle’s next of kin. Is that you?”

  She snickered. “I weren’t Erle’s type of woman.”

  “What’s the joke?” I said.

  “Bein’ broke is its own joke. Why you want to bother the family?”

  “To see if we can help.” I gave the tough old badger what I hoped passed for a winning smile. “I’m with the Rally.”

  “I knew that. You got that I-chewed-bullets-for-breakfast stance all those boys have. Tea and sympathy, is that the idea? You wanna help somebody, c’mon in here and help me scrub the floor.” She glanced back at the room, and her shoulders jerked in what was almost a shudder. “Worse than a damn horror movie.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll trade you fifteen minutes of mop work for everything you can tell me about Erle Sharples.”

  She goggled at me like I’d brought her flowers and chocolate. “You mean that?”

  “Blood doesn’t bother me much.”

  “Well, damn.” She gave out a smile that was startlingly sweet on her craggy face. “All right, then.”

  I followed her inside and got my first look at the gun shop in the daylight. The windowless space wasn’t much more inviting than it had been at midnight. The brightest bits of color were the occasional orange hunting vest, and the wine-dark stains on the floor and lower walls. My new friend made sure to give that corner of the room a wide berth.

  “I’m Paulette,” the woman said.

  “Van.”

  She had already filled rolling buckets full of water and set them off to one side, the floor mop leaning against a rack of wading boots. I pushed the first bucket over to the edge of the stain and took the industrial-sized can of Bon Ami cleaning powder Paulette handed to me.

  “Who hired you for this fun?” I said as I scattered the coarse granules over the floor.