The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [107]
“I figured as much. Just the one shooter.”
“So, Willis told me some lawman down in West Virginia called you. Did it happen to have anything to do with this?”
Bodecker glanced over at the map on the wall. He thought about the photographs in the trunk of his car. He needed to get to that boy before anyone else did. “No. Just some bullshit about a preacher. To tell you the truth, I’m really not sure why he wanted to talk to us.”
“Well.”
“Get any prints off that car?”
Howser shook his head. “Looks like the back was wiped clean. All the others we found belonged to Carl and Sandy.”
“Find anything else?”
“Not really. There was a gas receipt from Morehead, Kentucky, under the front seat. Shitload of maps in the glove box. Bunch of junk in the back, pillows, blankets, gas can, that kind of stuff.”
Bodecker nodded and rubbed his eyes. “Go on home and get some rest. It looks like right now all we can do is hope that something pops up.”
He finished off the fifth of whiskey in his office that night, and woke the next morning on the floor with dry pipes and a sick headache. He could remember that sometime during the night he had dreamed of walking in the woods with the Russell boy and coming upon all those decayed animals. He went into the restroom and washed up, then asked the dispatcher to bring him the newspaper and some coffee and a couple of aspirins. On his way out to the parking lot, Howser caught him and suggested they check the motels and the bus station. Bodecker thought for a moment. Though he wanted to take care of this problem himself, he couldn’t be too obvious about it. “That’s not a bad idea,” Bodecker said. “Go ahead and send Taylor and Caldwell around.”
“Who?” Howser said, a frown breaking out on his face.
“Taylor and Caldwell. Just make sure they understand this crazy sonofabitch would just as soon blow their heads off as look at them.” He turned and went on out the door before the deputy could protest. As chickenshit as those two were, Bodecker didn’t figure they would even get out of their cruiser after hearing that.
He drove to the liquor store, bought a pint of Jack Daniel’s. Then he stopped at the White Cow to get a coffee to go. Everybody quit talking when he walked in. As he turned to leave, he thought maybe he should say something, about how they were doing everything possible to catch the killer, but he didn’t. He poured some whiskey in his coffee and drove to the old dump on Reub Hill Road. Opening the trunk, he took the shoe box of photographs out and looked through them one more time. He counted twenty-six different men. There were at least a couple hundred different shots, maybe more, bundled together with rubber bands. Setting the box on the ground, he tore a few stained and crinkled pages from a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog he found in the trash pile and stuffed them down in the box. Then he dropped the three film canisters on top and lit a match. Standing there in the hot sun, he drank the rest of his coffee and watched the pictures turn to ashes. When the last of them burned up, he took an Ithaca 37 from the trunk. He checked to make sure the shotgun was loaded and laid it on the backseat. He could smell last night’s booze coming out of his skin. He ran a hand over his beard. It was the first morning he’d forgotten to shave since his army days.
When Hank saw the cruiser pull in the gravel lot, he folded the newspaper and set it on the counter. He watched Bodecker tip up a bottle. The last time Hank could recall seeing the sheriff in Knockemstiff was the evening he handed out wormy apples in front of the church to the kids on Halloween when he was running for election. He reached over and turned down his radio. The last few notes of Sonny James’s “You’re the Only World I Know” ended just as the sheriff came in the screen door. “I was hoping you’d still be around,” he said to Hank.
“Why’s that?” the storekeeper asked.
“You recall the time that crazy Russell bastard killed himself up in the woods behind here? You