He turned right and walked toward his office, which sat at the end of the hallway past the restrooms, the water fountain, the deputies’ shared offices, and the break room. He unlocked his door and tossed the papers onto his desk, and then he slid his holstered weapon from his belt and hung it from the coatrack. Winston closed his door and sat down at his desk. He looked around his office for a moment, his mind trying to decide exactly where to begin.
On the wall to his left hung a dozen or so framed photographs that Marie had carefully placed not long after he’d moved into the office almost thirteen years ago. There was a photo of him in Korea and another photo of him in his dress blues—his first uniform—just a few years later when he was back in Gastonia and a young, fresh-faced police officer. In the photograph he is standing outside his mother and father’s house, Crowder’s Mountain looming in the background, the canopy of trees above him broken just enough for the slash of sunlight coming through the leaves to cause him to narrow his eyes against the brightness at the exact moment the photograph was taken. In another photograph he is a few years older, wearing a white jacket and black bow tie, standing at a car wash and spraying the shaving cream off the back windshield of his Mercury. Marie, still in her wedding dress, her hair pinned up in an immaculate platinum beehive apparent even in the grainy black-and-white photograph, is sitting in the front seat. Beyond those pictures, there were framed photographs that traced Colleen’s childhood from newborn to high school, her face and eyes appearing the same to Winston in each photograph.
He turned his eyes from the wall of framed pictures to the pile of papers and envelopes on his desk, and he spent an hour or so listening to the muffled sounds of Vicki answering the phone at her desk while he leafed through the reports Glenn and a couple of other deputies had put together, all of them containing detailed accounts of leased storage facilities and rented trucks, vans, and trailers. All the information began to blur together, and Winston knew his exhaustion was affecting his concentration.
Other reports waited on his desk as well: a domestic assault at a trailer home somewhere out in the woods near Winnabow; a stolen car found burned in the woods on Highway 133 by Orton Plantation; a fourteen-year-old boy missing from Shallotte whose parents thought he had run away to Wilmington or Fayetteville.
The phone rang on his desk, and Winston picked it up. The call was from Sheriff Oren Petty, just across the border down in Horry County, South Carolina.
“You sitting down?”
“I sit down when I can,” Winston said.
“Well, I hope you’re sitting down right now.”
“I am.”
“Good,” Petty said, “because I think we found your cargo, some of it anyway.”
Winston leaned forward and picked up a pen and flipped to a clean page in the notebook that sat on his desk. “Go ahead,” he said.
“We just had us a big bust,” Petty said. “It’s a house way out in the county that we’d been watching for a while. We moved on it this morning and found the mother lode.”
“What was it?”
“About twenty kilos of cocaine so far,” Petty said. “They were packaging it up to move.”
“Tell me you found some suspects.”
“Oh, we found plenty of those, Sheriff. Made four arrests so far.”
“And tell me you found some weapons.”
“Plenty of those too,” Petty said.
“Well, I’ll be,” Winston said. “You mind sharing those names, prints, and those weapons?”
“No, sir,” Petty said. “As soon as we get them processed down here I’ll make sure my office is in contact.”
“If we can match the bullet that killed our guy up here to one of those guns down there then we’ll be getting somewhere,” Winston said.
“I got my fingers crossed,” Petty said.
“Me too,” Winston said.
Chapter 8
After finishing her dinner, Colleen had carried her tray down to the kitchen once her parents’ lights had gone out for the night, and she had taken five bottles of her father’s Old Milwaukee and brought them up to her room. She’d found her senior yearbook and sat on the bed, drinking the beers and leafing through the yearbook and finding every picture of Rodney Bellamy that she could. There he was in his senior photo wearing a tuxedo jacket and bow tie, a thin mustache above his lip. In another picture he was leaning against a car in the school parking lot, laughing at what someone was saying off-camera.
Before she turned off her light, she had taken the rotary phone from where she’d left it on the table by the beanbag chair and set it beside her pillow. Its ringing was what woke her, and with her eyes closed, her hand frantically searched for the handset. She found it and lifted it to her ear.
“Hello?” she said.
“Colleen?” It was her father’s voice.
“Yeah?” she said; her throat was scratchy and dry, and her mouth tasted terrible. She kept her eyes closed tight, afraid of the light seeping around her curtains, afraid of what time the clock on the dresser would reveal.
“You sleep okay?”
“Just fine,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “I had to run out, pick up this fellow at the airport, but I’ll be home later. Maybe we can all go out for supper or something. Just got a phone call from the sheriff down in Myrtle Beach. Might be some good news on Rodney’s case.”
Colleen’s yearbook still sat on the bedside table, and when she stood from the bed, she placed her palm on it to steady herself. She forgot that she had hidden the empty beer bottles beneath her bed, and she kicked one over. It landed with a soft thud against the shag carpet.
“Colleen?” her father said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m here. Dinner sounds good. I’ll talk to Mom.”
“All right,” he said. “Is she home?”
“I don’t know,” Colleen said. “I haven’t seen her.”
“She might’ve decided to walk a little. I almost wish she wouldn’t do that.”
Colleen’s hand was still propped on the bedside table. Her head was bowed and her eyes were closed. She waited, but her father didn’t say anything.
“Thanks for picking me up yesterday,” she finally said.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m glad you’re home.”
“Me too,” she said, then, “I just hate that you had to drive back up to the airport today.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “Tell your mother I’ll be home as soon as I can. And mention going out to eat tonight.”
“Okay,” she said. “Bye.”
“Bye,” he said.
Without lifting her head, Colleen reached behind her and dropped the handset back on the cradle. She stood up straight, used her toes to push the empty bottles as far under the bed as she could without losing her balance.
Downstairs, she heard the sliding glass door that led from the kitchen to the back deck open and close. She didn’t know what time it was, but she knew her mother was back from wherever she had been. Colleen kept her eyes closed, but she felt the room turn, and she realized that her head was splitting. She swallowed, passed her tongue over her lips. She took a breath, held it for a moment, and then she left her room and crossed the hall to the bathroom.