Bells of Heaven
Chapter 1
Some days, Tim Gutterson didn't fit inside his own skin.
Now, that was crazy thinking, and Tim didn't do Crazy. He knew it; some days he'd see it sitting off over near the dark horizon, backlit by flashes of something that looked a lot like mortar fire. Some days it was closer, so close he could smell the skin of it. It smelled like sweat, and fear, and something metallic that could have been gun smoke, could have been blood.
But he never invited it closer. He gave it a nod and kept pouring a river of alcohol between him and it, and that kept things just fine.
Still, there were days like today when he leaned back in his chair and wanted to keep going, keep pushing back with his feet till they left the floor and he upended against the cabinets behind him. Only on those days he imagined himself still going, falling with a momentum beyond his own power, down through the floor and the wall and the courtroom below. Falling and stretching out as he fell, so that all that was left of him was something long and flat and thin, ragged with holes, flapping in a breeze blowing from somewhere far, far east of Kentucky.
He hated those days.
"You busy?" said Art, the question mark redundant and both of them knowing it. "Got a fella wants chasing in Monterey. Shouldn't be too strenuous. Got an address and everything."
That fall was tempting him, so Tim held tight to the rope he was being offered. It was two weeks since the Mertens case after all. "What'd he do?"
"Well, now, not a whole lot of anything exciting. But he was at the right spot at the wrong time and saw a drug deal going down that the states attorney feels needs a more proper discussion in front of a judge." The file landed with judicious accuracy on Tim's desk. "Name of Cart Carter."
Art was waiting for the response. Tim gave the eyebrow raise required. He threw in the smirk for free.
"Carter Carter? You're shittin' me."
"Nope." Art blinked his eyes in appreciation. "Brother of Bart Carter, at whose luxurious establishment he now resides, and Dart Carter, recently deceased."
"With their sister Tart, I guess?"
"Now, now." Due acknowledgement of the naming genius given, Art was prepared to be magnanimous. "The sisters' names are something quite respectable." Art walked off towards his office, pausing at the door. Tim waited; his boss wielded an inaudible band sting most days for his best efforts. "Randi, Brandi and Candi, I believe."
Boom-tish. Tim gave it a chuckle. Art had worked for it.
He opened the file, noted the address as one of the less affluent rural towns in Owen County, and headed for the door. Crazy raised a salute to him as he left the fall behind.
Tim had an address, but after driving around High Street and the length of Taylor, he was no closer to finding it. It took several queries, and one wad of spit at his feet when he mentioned the name before he found the track off Gallant Lane. The house had only ever been utilitarian, but there were signs – a painted tire with cacti planted inside its circle, a strip of fabric half-tacked across the porch – that showed at some point, someone inside had wanted something they could claim as pleasing to the eye. The cacti lived on (nothing could kill that stuff, Tim knew), but the pink patterned fabric was stained and torn, and the aluminum siding had lost its neatness in an array of scratches and dents and even, on one particularly brutalized corner, a series of holes Tim guessed were made by someone with a hammer and a bucket of rage. It was depressing in its surrender, and Tim stopped looking quite so closely.
He stepped gingerly over the debris on the porch and knocked on the door. It rattled in its frame, a tooth ready to fall.
"Cart Carter? US Marshals." Tim called it clearly, expecting nothing in reply. He heard sounds from within – heavy noises, someone stumbling. Then, to his surprise, a latch was fumbled and the door swung inward.
"Oh." The man before him swayed and gripped the side of the door frame. "Oh."
A stench strong enough to make Tim's eyes water engulfed him.
"Hey, Mr Carter. It's Bart, isn't it?"
"Oh." That seemed the extent of the man's conversational abilities at this point. He squinted at and around Tim as if trying to hone in on his presence. Tim sighed.
"Bart, I'm Deputy Marshal Gutterson. You seen Cart lately? We'd like a word."
"Oh, man."
Encouraged by a two-word response, Tim pressed on.
"You know where Cart might be? Bart?"
"Thought you were…" Bart waved vaguely, clearly searching for some kind of meaning and maybe hoping Tim would give it.
"It's real important we talk to Cart. Do you think – uh…" The smell was growing more foul as he stood there, and Tim decided entering the place should earn him more than a medal. "Think I could come inside?"
Bart chose that moment to sway backwards, and Tim took that to be permission.
The room he stepped into was the definition of squalor. Food rotted on the floor, embedded so long in the carpet that some kind of mould grew from it and spread in a yard-wide patch. In the far corner, fungi sprouted up the wall. A used sanitary pad lay by his foot, and next to it, sunk in a bean bag and seeming to meld with it, was a woman. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, showing yellowed whites. For a moment, acid-clear and killing him all over again, he thought she was dead.
"Cart? You want Cart?"
There were all kinds of replies available to Tim, but no point in using any of them. He pushed past Bart to glance in each of the other three rooms. A used mattress in two of the three, and the third was a kitchen that challenged his gag reflex. It was possible Cart was staying here, but he wasn't on the premises today and Tim figured his duty was done.
"Here. Bart? My card. He comes back here, you let him know to call me." Bart took Tim's card as if it were some kind of talisman, with touching and uncalled for reverence. "All right. You take care now, y'hear?" He stepped towards the door and didn't look down at her because he couldn't just then.
"You bet. Sure thing. You – " and Bart was scrambling, coming up with something that made sense of the moment. "You here about the dog?"
"The dog? No."
But Bart grabbed at the topic to hold himself upright.
"Assholes down road. Sombitches complain about the dog. I tell 'em they can rot in hell."
"Okay, well, Bart, no, I ain't here for the dog."
Bart nodded. He'd accomplished something.
With am amswering nod, Tim backed out of the house, and found himself taking deep breaths the minute he was clear. The view from the porch wasn't too bad; a wasteland across the road, but pretty with spring flowers and tufts of grass big enough to hide a man under. Just the sight of the green helped steady him against the hell at his back.
A low-pitched moan caught his ears. Tim frowned, wondered if it was Cart, passed out round back. He hesitated, then left the porch and carefully followed the beaten earth track around the side of the house.
Against a shed at the end of the space that could possibly be termed the yard was a cage. A piece of plasterboard had collapsed against one side of it. Grass tangled up through the side of the cage exposed to the rear, and in front lay a pile of filthy rags. Inside, impossibly, was a dog.
Even before he reached the cage he could see that she had outgrown it by half her size again. Her bony flanks were pressed hard against the mesh, and open sores littered her body – along her back, where the spine rubbed against the top of the cage, across her head, where it twisted against the door.
And the rage filled his skin in a way he hadn't been able to for two weeks now.
It was beyond stupid. This was nudging towards Crazy, tipping a Raylan Givens sized hat to the sonofabitch.
But suddenly, Tim couldn't stand the fact of those bars. All at once the very existence of them was an iron spike in his soul, and as he watched that sore-ridden, bone rattling old dog lift her lips in a snarl as feeble as it was futile, he felt the storm-surge lift beneath his feet, sway him where he stood. Helplessness and a blood-borne resistance to it was the current that swayed him.
He crouched down, crooned a little, and lifted the latch.
The old girl whined. Faced with an opening free of lines, she floundered to ad lib her way to freedom. Tim was the prompt, low and sure.
"Come on, honey. Come on, baby girl."
The dog's back legs buckled under, but the tip of her tail began threshing furiously as Tim held his hand up to her, fingers curled towards him for safety. She tottered upright, then placed one paw after another as if stepping on hot bricks, each step a near collapse from one side to the other. When her shoulder cleared the cage, she gave a sound almost human in its anxiety to please.
"Oh, baby girl, they got you all caught up in there, haven't they, darlin'? You gonna come out now? You comin' out for a run with me?"
Tongue flickering, tail whipping back and forth, she crouched to his hand and further, until her head lowered to the ground and she stumbled into his chest. He didn't even have to think. Just ran his hands once, twice, down her sorry flanks, light as a lover; then scoped and picked her up, committing a crime and a kindness, with no one to blame him for either.
"Just what do you think I can do for this dog?"
Her hands didn't look gentle, but for all their strength they gripped the dog they moved over as delicate as a spider on a web.
"I don't know. She needs help."
As an exercise in inadequacy, his comment was a winner.
"Hmmph. And at what point did you come to this realization?" He looked at her, blankly. "How long have you had this dog?"
"About twenty minutes. Give or take."
Her face grew still, a grinding of gears – from fifth to neutral.
"You a ranger?"
Yes, he almost said, always. But then he realized she meant park ranger, animal wrangler for the council, and he shook his head.
"US Marshal. I found her at a house I was just at."
"So you're not the owner?"
He wanted a different answer, but as she looked at him, whiplash bold, he shook his head again.
"I just thought she – " He stopped, stymied by the impracticalities of his stupid kindness. The vet looked at him.
"You aim to pay for her?"
"Treatment? Yes, yeah. Sure." He paused, brain coming up with a side order of spite. "That's the bottom line, huh?"
"Of course it is. Romantic gestures never come cheap."