Holding Smoke Read online

  Sherriff Dodger snorted and cranked down his window to spit. He closed the envelope of cash and stuffed it under his seat before turning to Ramey and stretching out his arm to brace himself against her seat. Ramey cringed but refused to move away.

  “So that’s it?”

  Dodger nodded as he drummed his stubby fingers on her headrest.

  “That’s it. That last sweetener I passed along finally did the trick for Miss Assistant State Attorney Wilkes. I knew it would. Jesus, I tell you, it were so much easier back in the day when we could count on getting Chuckie for a case. He was easy. And cheap. Turn a blind eye just as soon as look at you. I thought that new high-stepping, heel-clicking bitch would never cave, but, ain’t it the truth, everybody’s got a price. We just had to find hers.”

  Sherriff Dodger whistled and hooked his elbow out the open window.

  “I mean, it’s all well and good that y’all hired Rick Bell. Man could charm the pants off a preacher, but he should be handing half his commission over to me. All the running around I done for him, just so he don’t got to get dirt on his fancy silk tie.”

  Ramey thought about reminding Dodger just how much she and Judah were already paying him to do all that dirty work, but she knew it was pointless.

  “And the charges against Judah will be dropped? All the charges?”

  The sheriff winked his droopy eye at her.

  “Wilkes agreed this afternoon. Even without us just about paying off the mortgage on her damn house, she didn’t have much of a case to go on. My boys got all the bodies out of your yard with no trouble, excepting the ATF goon and the man Judah shot in the head in the woods out back of your house. Ain’t nobody shedding tears for a Daytona Beach drug lord. All Wilkes could’ve done would be to drag Judah’s ass through a messy Stand Your Ground trial which she probably would’ve lost in the end anyhow. God bless Florida law.”

  Ramey’s mind churned as she went over everything again in her head, searching for loopholes. She couldn’t quite trust the news yet.

  “We’re completely in the clear? All of us?”

  Dodger huffed impatiently.

  “In the clear, like I said. Judah, you, Benji, that Shelia piece of work, and those other two boys. Without a case against Judah, they got nothing on any of you. The paperwork will all be filed in the morning and then that’s that.”

  The sheriff smacked his hands together as he continued, but Ramey’s heart was racing. In the clear. That’s that. Judah would be coming home.

  “I wish we could’ve gotten him out on bail two months ago with the rest of y’all, but the judge weren’t hearing it with Judah already on parole. So no more worrying, you hear? Judah should get his walking papers around noon tomorrow. I were you, I’d be there to pick him up. I heard stories ’bout the last time Judah got out and decided to hoof it all the way down to Silas.”

  Dodger chuckled to himself, but Ramey’s eyes turned stony.

  “Who’s this last envelope for, then?”

  Ramey knew, but Dodger was still leaning in too close. She wanted to remind him that even if this was their last transaction, he was getting nothing from her but the cash. Dodger wheezed as he laughed, but twisted back around in his seat to face the windshield.

  “Why, me, sweetheart. Just a little bonus, like, for helping you out.”

  “On top of everything else?”

  The sheriff shrugged.

  “Might be my last chance to skim the cream ’fore I head on out to pasture. Without me running again, Tiffany Lewis’s got it in the bag. Folks won’t be too happy ’bout having somebody from her side of the creek with the badge on her chest, but there ain’t nobody ’round here dumb enough to vote for a Jennett. So Tiffany’ll be the new sheriff. And you Cannons are fixing to get your hands full trying to sweet talk her.”

  Ramey gripped the door handle. She tried not to imagine what was sticking to her fingers.

  “Well, I ain’t a Cannon.”

  “Cannons, Barrows. You’re all the same. Always have been, always will be. And make no mistake, missy-thing, you’re one of ’em. Oh, you can sit there with your chin all cocked, all proud like you got a stick up your butt or something, but you ain’t fooling nobody. I know you, Ramey Barrow. You’re just as bad as the rest of ’em.”

  He had reached over and pointed his finger in her face.

  “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be sitting here with me.”

  Ramey snatched the keys out of the Cutlass’s ignition and threw them up onto the dash. She didn’t feel relieved after her final meeting with the sheriff, she felt riotous. Livid and lawless, shivering with rage. She kicked open the door, but sat in the dark car for a moment longer, listening to the sounds of the fall night creeping up all around her like restless ghosts. The crickets and chorus frogs had already begun their ballads, and from the choked woods on the other side of the highway, a barred owl trilled its cackling call. It wasn’t just the sheriff or the bribes. It was the land and the county and its people. It was the Cannons. It was Judah. It was herself. As the panic rose up in her throat, thrashing savagely like a creature snared, Ramey bolted from the car and stormed across the field. Her pace quickened with every step until she was at a full-out sprint, tearing through the endless, snagging weeds. She ran until she couldn’t breathe and then she stopped, doubled over with her hands on her knees, her cheeks burning, salty and slick.

  The granite sky above her had faded into indistinguishable darkness. A few faint stars glittered in the east and the ladle of the increscent moon hung heavy above the opposite horizon. Ramey caught her breath, threw her head back to the heavens.

  And screamed.

  *

  With a frown of disgust, Dinah glanced down at the square plastic bucket on the concrete beside her and the moat of sludge circling around her forty-ounce High Life. The ice she’d worked so hard for was already melting. It had taken her about five minutes of jangling the dispenser and beating her fist on the side of the Blue Bird’s humming and rattling ice machine to get even a few inches of cubes to chill down the warm beer. Dinah dipped her hand into the bucket and draped her fingers around the stubby neck of the glass bottle. Her knuckles were scraped and beginning to swell. She supposed she deserved no less for losing her temper on an inanimate box of rusting metal. Dinah shifted in the rickety lawn chair she’d staked outside her room and stretched her legs. The brightly colored plastic straps buckling beneath her rasped like sandpaper as Dinah floundered around in frustration, trying to get comfortable. It’d been a long day. And if she wanted to stick to her plan, it would be a long night. Maizie had already called her twice since the sun had gone down, leaving pathetic messages whining for her to come back over. Dinah had finally stuffed the burner phone under a heap of rumpled clothes on her sunken bed to put off answering it. There was a trough running down the middle of the mattress as if a tree had fallen on it, sundering it almost in two, and, as exhausted as she was, she wasn’t ready to lay down, not even for a nap. Every night since she’d checked in to the Blue Bird last month, she’d woken at least once in a trembling sweat, unable to escape the swaddling ravine that gave her nightmares of never-ending caves and underwater trenches.

  Dinah hefted her beer and swung it up into her lap. She’d spent half the afternoon drinking with Elrod and Maizie, and though her buzz was fading, her stomach had turned sour. Dinah slouched down even farther in the chair, bringing the heels of her steel-toed boots all the way to the edge of the crumbling, covered walkway that embraced the sandy parking lot before her. She didn’t want to think about Elrod’s hesitant reaction to her initial proposal, or Maizie’s missed calls stacking up in her phone, or the yawning gullet of her uninviting mattress. She didn’t want to think about any of it. Dinah heaved her broad shoulders in a sigh and raised the bottle to her lips. She chugged.

  The Blue Bird wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal, but even with its collapsed bed and ratty carpet and missing shower curtain and broken ice machine,
it was a sight better than many a place she’d stayed before. From the layout of the single-story building—one long arc of rooms with a closet-sized office at one end, an even smaller laundry room with a single washer and dryer at the other—the Blue Bird appeared to have once been a 1940s motor court of some kind. Aside from the pop-up cathouse run by three sisters in the rooms closest to the road and the paranoid meth head two doors down who occasionally got into screaming matches with his bedside lamp, the motel was quiet. It was the only place close to the town of Silas where a room could be rented by the week, so it wasn’t exactly as if she’d had a choice in picking out her latest accommodations, but she liked the Blue Bird. She liked the sound of the semis rumbling by on the highway, their horns blasting when the sisters had their lights on, and she liked the electric blue sheen of neon flickering from the office window and the fact that she could pull her Tundra right up to her door and keep an eye on it. She especially liked that no one asked questions; no one wanted to talk. From the look of the parking lot at night, the Blue Bird was about half full, but it always felt deserted. Folks who found themselves in such a place kept to themselves by nature, and that suited Dinah just fine.

  She was about to wrench herself out of the lawn chair and try to excavate her cell phone from the pile of dirty laundry when a mint-green Rabbit with its license plate swinging from one loose screw tore into the parking lot and skidded past her in a spray of sand and gravel and a cloud of burning oil. She’d seen the car around, of course, but had never gotten a glimpse of its driver. The Rabbit swerved into a spot a few doors down and Dinah eased back into her chair, keeping still in the glare from the buzzing orange light on the stucco wall behind her. Dinah waited as the dust settled around the Rabbit and then watched out of the corner of her eye as the blond woman inside cut the engine and banged open the driver’s side door so hard Dinah thought it would snap off its hinges. The blonde stepped out, her keys jangling in one hand, cellphone up to her ear in the other, and kicked the door closed with a strappy, high-heeled sandal. She didn’t bother to pull down her hiked-up pleather miniskirt as she stalked around the backside of the Rabbit, fumbling to open its hatch. She just kept on screeching into the phone as she lugged out a brown paper bag of groceries and hitched it up onto her hip.

  “I swear to God, Benji, I mean it. I mean it! You keep listening to Levi and you’ll be so far up shit’s creek with me, you might as well throw yourself overboard and pray that you drown.”

  At the mention of the names Benji and Levi, Dinah sat up straight and leaned forward. She dipped her head slightly, letting her dull brown hair swing forward over her shoulders and her blunt bangs fall into her eyes. Dinah hoped the blonde didn’t notice how intently she was listening to her conversation.

  “Oh, come on. Levi thinks the sun comes up each morning just to hear him crow. Really? That’s what you think? And, what, that’s supposed to tug on my heartstrings?”

  The woman snapped the Rabbit’s hatch down and cradled the cellphone against her shoulder as she struggled to grasp the bag of groceries slipping out of her arms.

  “Oh, good one. Sure. Well, Mr. Smarty Pants, I don’t. You can just shove it, as far as I’m concerned. Yeah, I just said that. Yeah, I meant it, and stop changing the subject.”

  Dinah ducked her head down even farther, pretending to study the beer bottle in her lap, as the blonde came around the side of her car and up onto the covered walkway. She slammed the bag on the hood of the Rabbit and jabbed at the air with a cherry red nail.

  “Fine! No, fine! Do what you want. And don’t you Shelia-honey me. Oh yeah? Maybe you should remember that I stuck a carving fork in the backside of the last guy that pissed me off. And then he ended up dead. So you’re barking up the wrong damn tree with me.”

  So the blonde’s name was Shelia and she knew Benji and Levi, who had to be the two Cannon brothers. Immediately, Dinah was calculating, trying to figure out if this woman could fit into her plan. Did she know Elrod and Maizie? Did she have any influence over the decisions the Cannons would make? Could she be coerced? Trusted? Used?

  Shelia flung her cellphone into the grocery bag and kicked the Rabbit’s front bumper. With her back still to Dinah, Shelia flipped her hair over her shoulder and yanked at the hem of her wrinkled miniskirt. She picked up the bag in both hands and slowly turned around. Dinah was surprised to find Shelia staring directly at her. The airbrushed tiger cub on her tank top might have had purple hearts floating around its head, but Shelia most certainly did not. The look of combined suspicion and loathing on Shelia’s face was arresting, almost chilling. She tilted her head and cocked her hip out.

  “You got something you need to say or did your face just get stuck like that when you were born?”

  Dinah slouched back in her chair and only slightly narrowed her eyes in response, trying to keep as blank a face as possible. She didn’t want to make any kind of impression on this woman until she knew how to manipulate her.

  Shelia snapped her head back in the other direction and sneered.

  “Huh. I didn’t think so.”

  The blonde clicked her tongue at Dinah before turning to unlock her room and strutting inside. The door closed behind her with a reverberating slam. Now, Dinah’s flat, brown eyes narrowed almost into slits as the wheels in her head began to whir. If things with Elrod didn’t pan out, Shelia might be just the woman she needed.

  2

  Ramey stared at the green metal door on the side of the Bradford County Jail and wondered what would have happened if five months ago she’d been standing in a different parking lot, just a little ways up State Road 16 at the Florida State Prison, when Judah had first been released. The story of Judah walking home from the state pen was legend by now in Silas. Ramey had witnessed the tale settle like a mantle over Judah’s shoulders—from fluttery-eyed whispers, to slaps on the back, head shaking and boasting, to slurred reckonings that Judah was an even wilder son of a bitch than his father—and she had heard all the versions, too. In one of them, Judah had walked straight down the center highway line, forcing oncoming cars and trucks to part around him like Moses plowing through the Red Sea. In another, Judah had been ambushed by the now-defunct Scorpions motorcycle gang and challenged to a fight from which he’d only narrowly escaped with his life. Nebo Greene, who spent most of his waking hours nursing warm beers at the high top by the jukebox in The Ace in the Hole, swore that he’d seen Judah come in that night, covered in blood, looking like he’d been mangled by a pack of wild boars.

  Ramey knew this wasn’t true because she’d been there that night, coming into The Ace late after word of Judah’s arrival had made the rounds through Silas, accompanied by raised eyebrows in her direction. She’d been working the counter and grill at Buddy’s then, and no less than three people had stopped in just to tell her they’d heard the middle Cannon boy was out of prison and sitting up at The Ace getting lit to the gills with a couple of high school buddies. Finally, Cade, Ramey’s brother-in-law and boss, had taken her by the shoulders and pushed her out from behind the flattop, telling her she’d better find someplace else to make up her mind. Ramey must have driven past the bar a dozen times before she’d finally said to hell with it and swerved so sharply into the dirt lot out front she’d scraped the bottom of her Cutlass. Ramey had marched into The Ace as if on a mission, steeling herself for whatever hand fate decided to deal her way. The bartender at the time, Grady, later told her she’d come storming in with a look on her face like she could chew nails and spit out a barbed wire fence as she’d shoved her way through the crowd. Judah had once admitted to her that he’d been absolutely terrified when he came back to the bar and found her sitting in the empty seat next to his, just as cool as ice, as warm as honey, a smile on her lips telling him that the moment they’d been careening toward their entire lives was finally upon them.

  Judah had asked her about it one night, sometime after the shootout and fire at the church up in Kentsville, but before Lesser
had been murdered outside a gas station in Putnam County, when they were unraveled in bed, lulled by the whistling arias of the mockingbird outside their open window, slick with summer sweat, enervated and vulnerable. He’d whispered it into the cascade of her hair, flung all around them, blinding them both.

  “How’d you know? That night at The Ace? How’d you know it would all lead to this?”

  Ramey wasn’t sure she had known. But after waking up from their first night together to Levi Cannon pounding on her front door, standing in the harsh sunlight and passing along the word that Sherwood wanted to see his son, she’d been certain her life was going to change for either good or ill. Ramey hadn’t answered Judah’s whispered musings with words. She’d put her mouth on his instead, hoping that their bodies could speak in ways that words could not. Already, a rift was erupting between them as who they were, who they once were, who they wanted to be, and who they were destined to become grated against each other like tectonic plates, shaping their world. Even then, they were shredding one another, chipping away, giving and taking too much, wearing one another down. The quaking of her body had been as much a shifting of those plates on a hot summer night as it was a response to Judah’s own.