Chapter Twelve #2
“Parnell?” Tina repeats.
“That’s right,” he says, pausing to take another drink. “Chief Parnell’s daughter. She was all set to follow in her old man’s footsteps.”
Tina lets out a long whistle and I ask, “Did she survive?”
“Yeah, but it broke her hip so bad she never walked right again. Chief Parnell and Dishman arrested Joel and sent him away. Then, when Allison got out of the hospital, the chief retired early and him and Allison both left town. Ended up in South Carolina somewhere.”
“And Joel Shepherd’s been in prison ever since?” Tina asks.
He sniffs and says, “Till a couple weeks ago, yeah.”
“Okay,” I say. “And Dishman became police chief when all this happened?”
“That’s right,” Hollis says. “It was hard on him too. Parnell was like a father to him; Allison was like a sister. He lost both the day Joel Shepherd drove through that roadblock.”
Behind us, the noise from the Dairy rises and falls. A breeze blows through, but it’s hot as bath water and carries the scent of sulfur.
“Damn, that stinks,” Tina mutters, waving the air in front of her.
“It blows in from Brimstone Holler,” Hollis says. “Geologist came out here years ago and said the sulfur springs run under the whole town. It’s just, the only place you can really smell it all the time is Brimstone Holler and that’s because of the Hell Hole out there in the middle of it.”
“Charming,” Tina says. And then to me she says, “By the way, the officer who came out to check Honey’s brake line didn’t find any prints.”
“None?” I ask.
She says, “I wore gloves to remove it. Seems whoever filed the line down did too.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been Joel Shepherd,” Hollis says. “Aside from the fact that he’s even more ancient than me, he’s on house arrest as far as I know. Do you really think he’s connected to your case? To Ezra King?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But this is three dead bodies in three days. Ezra King for sure died on Friday night. Billy Shepherd’s place went up sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, but he probably didn’t die until sometime Saturday afternoon.
And now Dean Griffon, who was alive enough last night to probably screw with my brakes, is gonna be riding to Frankfort tomorrow in the back of the coroner van with Billy. So if Joel is—”
“Wait, Dean Griffon’s dead?” Hollis says, his attention now focused. “When? How?”
I glance from him to Tina. She’s giving me a look I’m familiar with from way back. The look that says You’re in deep shit again, aren’t you?
At about that time, the back door of the Dairy opens with a bang and Crystal—the waitress who’d skipped out on Frankie the night before—stomps out, her ear pressed to her phone.
“What—No. What do you mean? He was just…” she says, her voice high and breathy, almost panicked. When she sees us at the picnic table, she veers away and drifts toward the parking lot. The rest of her conversation is unintelligible.
“Hmm,” Hollis says. “She and Dean been on-again, off-again for years. She’s gonna be all tore up about this.”
I watch as Crystal leans against the hood of a blue Toyota RAV4.
She holds the phone to her face with one hand and wipes tears away with the other.
I remember, just this morning, Crystal taking my order at the window and telling me how her boyfriend had told her about the private investigator he’d seen in the Dairy the night before.
I watch as she doubles over in tears, then crouches down, leans against the car, and cries.
“What the hell happened?” Hollis asks. “How’d he die?”
When I tell him what we found in Griffon’s garage, he issues a loud whistle.
“Damn,” he says. “You have any clue who did it?”
“Not much,” I say and I explain the silver truck I saw on Griffon’s security footage.
“There wasn’t anything else about it? Nothing to ID it?” Hollis asks.
“There was a sticker on the window,” I say. “A Harley-Davidson shield. It was odd though. The truck was glossy. It looked brand new. But the sticker was faded, washed out like it was sun-bleached.”
“Hmm,” Hollis says.
Tina slurps some more Coke, sucking at the straw until it’s only sweet bubbles she’s getting. Then she puts the cup down.
“Faded?” she asks. “Or differently colored?”
I make a sound like Ummm? around a mouthful of BLT.
Tina leans forward like this is important and says, “Could the shield have been pink instead of orange and blue instead of black?”
I swallow and say, “It could’ve been, I guess. The angle and the light made it sort of hard to tell. Why?”
She grins and pulls out her phone, gives it a few taps, and then shows me the screen. It’s the Facebook page for the Bluegrass Biker Babes, a Harley club for Kentucky women.
“That’s it,” I say, looking at the pink-and-blue logo. “That’s the shield I saw.”
Tina hands her phone to Hollis and says, “You recognize any of these ladies?”
He smokes a whole cigarette while he swipes through them and then finally slides the phone back across the table to me.
“That right there,” he says, “is Scarlett Nickels.”
“Scarlett Nickels,” I repeat, studying the photo. She’s tall and thin and very tan with straight brown hair and knife-sharp cheekbones. In her Facebook photo, she wears a tank top, Daisy Duke cutoffs, and motorcycle boots while she straddles a huge Harley and winks at the camera.
“She seem like the stabbing kind?” Tina asks Hollis.
Hollis barks out a laugh so loud that people up the hill turn to look at us.
He says, “Hell no. Scarlett ain’t the type to get her hands dirty. Her husband on the other hand…”
“What’s his name?” I ask, already opening a PI database on my phone.
“Nathaniel Nickels,” he says. “He’s a real piece of work.”
Nickels’s record pops up instantly. The guy has a history of brawling in public and resisting arrest, plus a few minor possession charges and one charge of assault and battery. Though, I notice, it’s been a couple years since he’s been in trouble with the law.
The photos from his record reveal a lean, athletic guy with long white-blond hair, pale-blue eyes, and a pouty mouth.
Good-looking if you’re into that faux-Viking quality.
And, scanning through Scarlett Nickels’s Facebook photos, she clearly is.
There are tons of pictures of the two together, often posed in front of one of three vehicles: a Harley-Davidson bike, a blue Mustang, and a silver F-150 with a Bluegrass Biker Babes sticker.
In the latest one, Nathaniel grins, posing with a plump trout.
“Have you seen him around town?” Tina asks me.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “But it’s hard to know for sure.”
“He’s known as a tough guy,” Hollis says. “He works for a security company in Lexington. Hired muscle. He shows up and looks mean. But I’ve also heard other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe he’s also a—what do they call it? A leg breaker.”
“An enforcer?” I ask. “For who?”
“Whoever has the dough, I guess,” Hollis says.
And who, around here, would that be? I ask myself, as I zoom in on another photo of Nathaniel Nickels.
He’s standing next to a strung-up deer carcass, his rifle slung over his shoulder.
He’s wearing sunglasses and a cap, his blond hair pulled into a ponytail.
His mouth forms a straight, serious line.
I close the photo and then look up the address for Scarlett and Nathaniel Nickels.
“What you gonna do?” Hollis asks, as I slide my phone back into the bag at my side.
I shrug and say, “Don’t worry about it.”
He grunts.
“Don’t wreck my Bronco,” he says, and lights a fresh cigarette off the old one.
I stand, collect my trash, and walk Tina back to the wrecker and Honey. Hollis goes with us as far as the pick-up window, where he peels off to talk to a gaggle of wily old guys, likely to spread the word about everything I’ve told him.
When Tina and I reach the wrecker, I take another long, solemn look at Honey and do my best to swallow the thick feeling in my throat. Reaching up slow, as if she might flinch away from me, I gingerly touch Honey’s broken door; the metal is warm from the afternoon sun.
“You’ll fix her?” I ask, posing the question I haven’t even wanted to think about since I heard the sickening crunch of Honey’s steel. “She’s not … she’s not beyond repair, is she?”
“Come on,” Tina says, softly. “Who you talking to? Of course, I’ll fix her. The one I’m worried about is you. Are you just gonna go knock on the door of this guy that maybe killed someone today? And maybe killed the guy you’ve come to investigate? I don’t like just driving off and leaving you.”
“I’ll be okay,” I say, tugging the keys to Hollis’s Bronco from my bag. I start to turn and Tina catches me, her huge hand wrapping around my arm.
“You sure you don’t need backup?” she asks, making me meet her eyes.
“You know me,” I say. “I’m like a cat. And they say cats always land on their feet.”
“Yeah,” Tina says. “They also say curiosity gets them killed. Call me if you need anything, okay? Or, hell, call Leo. You don’t always have to do this stuff alone.”
I don’t reply, just lean forward and let her give me a big hug instead.