Bull Mountain(39)

“Button that back up, Deputy. We’re going to be fine.”

“I don’t know, boss. You sure this is a good idea?”

“No, I’m not, but you’ll be fine. I promise.” Clayton clicked on the blue light bar, but turned it back off after seeing the faces of the men in the road.

“Maybe we should just head back,” Darby said.

“Just be quiet. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I thought you’d be in danger. I grew up with these people. If anything, I’m the one in trouble.”

“What do you mean, ‘trouble’?”

“Just stop worrying.”

“That’s hard to do, sir, seeing as two big burly jokers with assault rifles are walking toward us.” Darby squinted his eyes to get a better look at the approaching welcome party. “Oh my God, boss. The one to the left looks all burned up or something.” Darby dropped his hand to his gun again. Clayton took his eyes off the two men and put them directly on Darby.

“Listen to me, Deputy.”

“Yessir?”

“You listening?”

“Yessir.”

“These men are not going to hurt you. I promise you that. You are a sworn deputy of Waymore Valley, and these men are not looking to be cop killers. That kind of thing will rain a metric shit-ton of trouble down on this place, and they do not want that. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Darby nodded, fast and sharp, and awkwardly straightened out his hat.

“So just relax. If for a second I think something is squirrelly, I will handle it and I will get us both out of here pronto. Okay?”

“Okay, boss. I trust you.”

“Good. Now, be quiet.”

The sheriff rolled down his window and turned off the rumbling AC as the two men approached the truck. One of the men stayed back by the tree line, while the one Darby thought looked burned rested his arms on the driver’s-side window ledge and leaned in a little to inventory the truck’s occupants. When Scabby Mike and Clayton finally locked eyes, Mike smiled wide and motioned for the other man to lower his rifle.

Scabby Mike had managed to become an old man over that past year, since the time Clayton saw him last, but there was no mistaking who he was. Mike had had a severe case of measles as a child, which left horrible scarring over eighty percent of his face and body. It happened that way up here sometimes because of the mountain’s lack of proper doctoring. The disease left his skin a muddled pinkish color with the texture of pitted asphalt, and his beard grew in patchy and only on the right side of his face.

“Sometimes, that’s just how shit is,” he’d told Clayton once when they were kids. “I just thank the Lord I never got it on my pecker.” The memory always made Clayton smile.

This made eye contact tough to maintain for strangers like Darby, but Clayton wasn’t a stranger, and Mike’s face was a welcomed one. Clayton considered him a friend. Maybe the only one he had left on the mountain.

“When they told me we had company comin’ up the mountain, I was hopin’ it was you. I wasn’t really in the mood for killin’ any real cops.”

“Well, I reckon I should feel lucky, then.”

“Lucky you got me standin’ here tellin’ you to turn around. ’Cause you keep drivin’ up this here road, your luck is gonna change.”

“I need to talk to my brother.”

“Hal don’t talk to cops. You know that.” Mike shot an intentional glare at Darby, who looked away immediately.

“I thought you just said I wasn’t a real cop.”

“He don’t talk to fake cops, neither.”

“Look, Mike, I’m not here in an official capacity anyway. I’m here as his brother.”

Scabby Mike leaned down on the Bronco’s window frame and shuffled his hat back out of his eyes to look inside the truck. “So what’s Deputy Dawg here for?”

“He’s here as a witness. That’s all.”

“We don’t like witnesses up here, neither,” Mike said, and spat tobacco juice in the dirt. Darby continued to study the floorboards with great intensity.

“Just tell your boys in the woods to come on out, and let the man know we’re coming up.”

Mike smiled wide, showing off a mouth full of straight but yellowed teeth. “Your brother knew you were coming twenty minutes back.” He spat again, then stood up and whistled—two sharp chirps. At least a dozen men, armed with everything from assault rifles to shotguns, shuffled out of the trees like ants from a mound that just got stepped on. Darby sank deeper and lower into his seat and gripped the armrest hard enough to push the blood from his knuckles.

Mike laughed a deep belly laugh. “Tell your fearless deputy there not to be so jumpy. If Hal wanted him dead, we’d have done did it by now.”

“He’ll be fine,” Clayton said.

“You sure you wanna do this, Clayton? He ain’t real fond of you, these days.”

“He ain’t never been real fond of me.”

“Well, it’s a little worse now, since the funeral and all.”

“Hal needs to realize that I lost a brother, too.”

“It was the uniform, I think, that set him off.”

Clayton shook his head. “Hal’s drinking and acting like an ass was a lot more disrespectful than my dress uniform.”