“I’m sorry, Sheriff,” somebody’s voice said. I looked up and saw that a paramedic had left the group at the ambulance and was standing right over my shoulder. He looked like he might’ve been twenty-five, just a few years older than Jeff.
“You haven’t called my wife.”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t. Make sure nobody does.”
I picked up a few more handfuls of snow and rubbed it down the back of my neck and covered my eyes with my hands. My fingers burned from the cold. I held that snow to my cheeks until my face went numb.
When I stood up, my stomach jumped again and I turned my back to the tree line and spit in the snow. I looked down the road and saw three boys in coveralls and heavy coats smoking cigarettes and talking to Owens. He had a notepad in his hand and looked like he was asking them questions. I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my coat and nodded toward them.
“Who are they?”
“Part of the crew,” said the paramedic. “They’re pretty shook up. One of them must have pulled him out of the road when he came off the line. He was lying under them bushes when we got here.”
I looked down and saw that the tracks that had been left from dragging Jeff out of the road were beginning to fill with snow, and my eyes followed them to where his body lay covered under that sheet. The line to the blown transformer ran through the trees overhead, and the wooden pole around the box was scorched black from the explosion. I looked at Jeff’s body under the arbor, and then I turned and walked down the highway toward the ambulance. The boys saw me coming and put out their cigarettes in the snow with the toes of their boots. I didn’t recognize any of them.
“All three of y’all work on this crew?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” said a short blond-headed boy. His hair was cropped close and sharp and made his ears look bigger than they probably were.
“Where’s your foreman?” I asked.
He didn’t have nothing to say to that question, and I faced him and squared my shoulders. His eyes were scared, and he looked like he was about to cry.
“Where is he?”
He looked to the two boys standing behind him for help, but they both lowered their eyes and I could tell they didn’t want to say nothing either.
“He left before the ambulance got here,” the first boy said. “He took the service truck and told us to wait.”
“Was he drinking?”
He wanted one of the other boys to answer that question, but they wouldn’t even look at him. One shook a cigarette from a pack and the other kept his eyes fixed on the road.
“Goddamn it, was he drinking!”
“Sheriff,” Owens said. He placed his hand on my arm like he was thinking about pulling me away from the boy, but I shrugged him off and stepped closer.
“Answer me!”
“I don’t know,” the boy stammered. “I don’t know for sure.”
I looked down the road where that blue sheet was just barely visible through the trees.
“Which one of you moved him out of the road?” I asked.
“Mr. Hall did,” the boy smoking the cigarette finally said.
I stared at him until he looked away, and then I pulled Owens aside and asked him what they’d had to say. He looked down at his notepad, but I could see that he hadn’t written a thing.
“Jeff was on the line working the transformer,” he said. “They figure something must have made contact, maybe something on his tool belt. It wouldn’t let him go. They had to wait for him to come off.”
“Jesus, Bill.” I turned away from him and put my hands over my eyes and then rubbed them across my face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You should go on home to Sheila. I can take care of this.”
“You can’t take care of this,” I told him. “Nobody can take care of this.” I turned to walk back to my cruiser, but I stopped and faced him again. “I want you to find Jimmy Hall. I want you to radio me when you do.”
When I got back to the cruiser, I sat in the driver’s seat and stared down the road and watched Owens talk to the boys. One of the paramedics had pulled the ambulance around and was backing it toward the woods.
I picked up the CB and radioed the office in Marshall and Eileen answered immediately.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I haven’t thought about it yet. I need you to call the house and tell Sheila that I’ll be home late.”
“You need to be at home right now,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said. “Jimmy Hall’s done run off. I need you to telephone Sheila.”
I put the CB on the cradle, but then I thought better of it. I picked it up and radioed Marshall again. The static of Eileen’s voice came back over the line.
“Eileen,” I said. “She doesn’t know about any of this. Tell her I’m running late. That’s all.”
It was getting dark, and the snow took on an eerie blue color against the clouds. I sat and watched the paramedics unfold the gurney out of the ambulance and roll it toward the shadows at the edge of the woods. I didn’t want to be there when they carried Jeff away, so I cursed myself out loud and turned the car around in the road and drove north toward Gunter Mountain.
NIGHT WAS FULL ON WHEN I KNOCKED THE CAR INTO FIRST GEAR and headed up the mountain. There was already a set of tire tracks in the snow, and I eased the cruiser into them. The gravel heading up the mountain was warmer than the asphalt had been on the road, and I could feel my tires searching the snow for pieces of rock to catch the tread. There weren’t any streetlights up there, and the trees rose up out of the darkness on both sides. Even though I couldn’t see it, I knew the land fell away sharply on my right and rolled down toward the bottom of the cove. Had it been daylight, I could’ve searched through the trees and seen farms and houses tossed like shot across the valley floor.
It had been a couple years since I’d been out to Jimmy Hall’s place, but I’d been out there enough to know exactly where it was. Ben was up at Western then, and Hall’s wife had left him for good about three years before. Things had been quiet until now.
I turned my headlights off in front of Hall’s place and pulled into the gravel drive. A light burned in the window, and a wisp of smoke escaped the chimney. I parked the cruiser by the house and opened the door slowly and sat there half out of the car and wondered what I was going to do.
The porch steps squeaked under my boots, and I stopped and listened like somebody else had made the sound. I undid the holster snap over my pistol and knocked on the door. There wasn’t any noise from the inside, and I stood there and listened close to make sure. I imagined Hall behind the door with a hand cannon, drunk as hell and holding his breath, hoping I’d leave. I knocked again and didn’t hear a sound. I gave the door a try, but it was locked.
I turned the car around in the gravel and headed back out to the road. My high beams fell into the trees across the way, and I could tell by the sagging limbs that the snow was getting heavy. I looked to my right and saw the tire tracks I’d followed coming up the mountain, but just as I was about to turn out of the driveway, I noticed another pair of tracks on the left that I hadn’t seen on the way up.
Hot air gushed from the vents in the dash, and I sat there with it blowing in my face and I stared out at those tracks and wondered who could be at the top of that road. I didn’t know what the hell I’d do if it was Jimmy Hall up there, but I knew either way I didn’t have a choice but to go and take a look.
MY FRONT FENDERS MADE AWFUL SCRAPING SOUNDS AS THEY PLOWED through the high snow. The ruts were deep, and my car had trouble on the inclines where the snow was packed hard and frozen solid. I held tight to the steering wheel and stared out at the headlights. Every now and then I looked out the windows and searched for tire tracks that led to side roads and switchbacks, but the light in front of my car made the darkness on either side seem that much darker.