Levi would bet his badge that Cutter knew something, probably more than something. He probably knew a lot, and neither of them was leaving this godforsaken cesspool of pig shit until Levi knew what it was.
Levi yanked the door to the hog barn open and shoved Cutter inside. The smell was overwhelming and Levi swallowed back the urge to gag. “Hogs eat everything you put in front of them, but I bet you already know that, don’t you?”
“Let me go, man, you’re crazy,” Cutter tried to squirm away, but Levi held tight.
“Now, Brock, if you have any information about what happened to the Doyles and where Ethan and Becky Allen are at, you need to tell me right now.”
“Fuck you,” Cutter spat.
In one swift move, Levi kicked Cutter’s feet out from beneath him so that he fell to the ground, his fingers landing just inches from the hogs rooting along the edges of their pen.
Cutter tried to pull his hand back but, Levi lowered the heel of his shoe atop Cutter’s wrist, pinning it into place. Levi watched as the hogs’ fleshy, leathery snouts snuffled at Cutter’s fingers, their sharp canines grazing across his knuckles.
“Okay, okay!” Cutter cried out. “Ethan had a thing for that Allen kid. He was all over her that day.”
Levi removed his foot from Cutter’s wrist and pulled him up by the collar of his shirt.
“You can’t do that shit,” Cutter exclaimed, his eyes wide. “You’re not supposed to do that!”
“What else?” Levi asked, ignoring Cutter’s protests.
“Ethan hated his parents. Hated them. Said he wished they were dead,” Cutter said, sliding his arm across his dripping nose.
“So Ethan said he wanted his parents dead?” Levi asked. “He told you that?”
Cutter nodded. “He couldn’t stand it in that house. He couldn’t wait to be rid of them. He told me.”
“You better not be lying to me, Brock,” Levi said as he pulled him from the hog barn.
“I’m not. I promise,” Cutter insisted.
“When was the last time you saw Ethan, Josie, and Becky?” Levi asked.
“I don’t know, after dinner. Around six or so. We went shooting,” Cutter said.
“Shooting?” Levi asked. This was the first he heard of this.
“Yeah, just at targets, though. It was nothing. We shot a few rounds and I went home.”
“But you were driving around after midnight, why?” Levi asked.
“I don’t know, I was just bored,” Cutter said. Levi grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and started dragging him back toward the hog barn. “Okay, okay,” Cutter said, twisting away from his grasp. “After Ethan’s dad made him walk home for not handing over the shotgun, I met up with him. We drove around, went to Burden because Ethan wanted to talk to that old girlfriend of his.”
“Kara Turner?” Levi clarified.
“Yeah. We stopped to see Kara and her dad was pissed. Then we drove around for a while, shot a few more shells, then I dropped him off at the top of the lane and left.”
“What time was this?” Levi asked as they moved into the shade of a gnarled crab apple tree. The fallen ones squished beneath their feet, emitting a smell more like rotten cabbage than apples.
Cutter gnawed at his lip. “I don’t know, around eleven, I guess. I’m not sure.”
“I stopped you at about one, Brock,” Levi reminded him. “What were you doing for the next two hours?”
Cutter’s shoulders sagged. He knew he was caught. Levi crossed his arms and waited.
“I wasn’t ready to go home yet, so I drove around some more and then parked.” Cutter reached up and plucked a crab apple from the limb above him, rolled it around in his fingers. “I smoked a little bit. Listened to music.” Levi didn’t ask him what he was smoking.
“Where’d you park?” Levi asked, swiping the apple from Cutter’s fingers.
“I don’t know, some gravel road,” Cutter said. “Can I go now?”
“No,” Levi said shortly. “You can tell me what you saw while you were sitting on that gravel road. What you saw that made you tear down the road at ninety miles an hour.”
“I didn’t see anything, I swear,” Cutter insisted. Levi stared him down. “I heard the shots, okay,” Cutter said, his voice thick with emotion. “A bunch of them. And I thought, he did it, he really did it. Then I sat there for a long time, trying to tell myself that I was wrong, but then I heard more shots and got scared and left. I drove around some more completely freaked out and then you stopped me.”