The ballad of dinah cald.., p.16
The Ballad of Dinah Caldwell, page 16
But dead things didn’t come back to life.
“Dinah.” He touched her hand.
She met his eyes, but she couldn’t wipe the fear and guilt off her face in time.
Johnny pulled his hand back. “Hey. If you don’t … it’s fine. It’s okay.” He tried to grin. He stood up, changing gears as fast as possible. “I have to get that last batch to my distributor. So I guess I’ll …”
Shit. “Johnny, stop. I didn’t mean that the way you took it.”
His back to her, he spun the sugar spoon around and around on the table.
“It’s not you. It’s not. I just don’t know what to do.”
Johnny faced her. “About what?”
She couldn’t think, looking at him. “Maybe everyone’s right. Even him being dead won’t be enough.”
His lips parted a little. He dropped down into a chair by the table. “So what, then?”
Dinah pulled on her socks and shoes. “The problem is you’re distracting me. I need a minute.”
“I’m distracting you?” He looked a little too pleased by that.
“You know you are.”
“I knew no such thing. You’re overestimating me again.”
She flicked the back of his head as she walked past him, and his laugh warmed the tunnel up to the door.
It wasn’t at all funny, though, and she could not let him cloud her judgment. He was too much change, too fast, and probably too late. Wild longing for something outside her constant grief had spiked through her last night. And like making Alan Fry scream and burning all his things, falling asleep beside Johnny had lifted the haze of her anger.
Outside, she sat down on the rock ledge by the door. The ledge was about two feet deep and ran along the face of the slope like a step. The cold sky was sunny above the treetops, but their branches held most of the morning sun out of the forest. She buttoned her coat and flipped up the collar to cover her ears.
A squirrel leaped from a dogwood tree to a spruce, leaving the branches shivering.
Last night Johnny had said it hadn’t been her job to pick up her father’s slack. That she hadn’t failed her mom and Warren.
Even the idea of it made her eyes sting. She had tried. She had tried to kill him, then tried to escape, and tried to protect Warren. She hadn’t failed them on purpose.
Her mom would say she hadn’t failed them.
Even if that was true. Even if she had done everything she could and there was nothing for her to need forgiveness for—how could she start over, after this? There was nothing left for her if she wasn’t Warren’s sister and her mother’s daughter and the girl with the well.
There was no way for her to start over. Even after Gabriel Gates was dead, she’d still want to kill him. She could spend her life looking down that barrel and tearing his world apart.
What she wanted was for him to feel what she felt, and he never, ever would. It wasn’t inside him to take away. He could not lose someone the way she had.
And he’d taken two people from her. She could not take two lives from him. She couldn’t have an eye for an eye.
So she couldn’t have true revenge and she couldn’t even have justice.
A shadow slipped through the trees. Dinah squinted in the morning dark. A dozen yards away, the gray glimmer of Wolf eased through the sumac.
Maybe living on the borders of each other like this, coexisting, was a tension people had just quit trying for. Last night Johnny had said people survived by consuming each other. And he was right. The human relationship was predator and prey.
Wasn’t it?
What did justice even mean, with Gates? Convincing Sheriff Anders to arrest him, charging him with murder, him going to prison if everything could be proven beyond doubt, and only if everyone involved refused the bribes that would be passed along under the table?
Not only was that not what she wanted, it didn’t even seem like actual justice. Even if he got a life sentence and wasn’t released early due to prison overcrowding or yet more bribes, Brian Shaw and Mitch Harding and his business managers would certainly get away with whatever they had done—and they’d still be running his little kingdom, collecting rent and foreclosing and price-controlling everything that came into town and raking in extra for his businesses by shaving away at people’s survival margins. What Burns had said last night was right—even if Gates was gone, someone else would step into the gap he’d left, and the machine would keep rolling.
Sending Gates to prison wouldn’t undo or even stop his damage.
Go to Kara’s, ask the neighbors for help, her mom had said.
But she hadn’t. She’d let shame and pain and fear of what Gates would do to them turn her the other way.
Dinah rubbed the frayed hem of her jeans between her fingers. She pulled another thread from the fabric and tugged on it until it started unraveling.
She stared at the thread in her hand, at the weakened hem of her pant legs, and then she tugged on the thread again, kept unraveling it until it broke off.
Dinah jumped to her feet. She ran back inside, leaving the door to bang shut behind her. “Johnny.”
He whipped around, nearly dropping the mugs he was holding.
“I figured it out.” Actually, her mom had figured it out.
Johnny thunked the clean mugs down in the cabinet. “I thought bounty hunters had seen you or something.”
“Oh. No. But we need to go back to your friends.” Dinah grabbed her backpack and shoved trail mix inside, then started filling the water bottle.
“Hold up, what? Why?” Johnny took the bottle from her and started filling it himself because she was spilling water everywhere.
“He wouldn’t have gotten where he is without a sheriff and a judge who took bribes, without people who would enforce whatever he said, without the money from one scam to fund another. I was pulling threads from my jeans when I figured it out.”
Johnny stared blankly at her.
“I’m not just going to kill him. We’re going to unravel his whole system.” Dinah slung her bag over her shoulder. “Ready? Let’s go.”
His mouth fell open. “Where? His ranch?”
“What? Of course not. To the other bootleggers. We were talking about the wrong thing. They need to hear this.”
He thumped the water bottle down on the table. “It doesn’t matter what you figured out. It won’t change their minds.” The resignation in his voice stopped her.
“Sitting in this cave won’t change their minds either, Johnny. Sometimes you just have to fight harder. We need to hurry; come on, let’s go.” She gestured to his coat, slung over the chair by the table.
He narrowed his eyes at her like he was thinking, a hand resting on the back of the chair. Then he shook his head. He grabbed his coat and pulled it on. “Okay, you weirdo. But if you want a different answer, we better talk to one of the others. Burns will be stubborn. Our best chance is Kwamé—the Ghanaian guy you met. And if we’re going to Kwamé’s, we’ll have to take the road, which means possible bounty hunters.”
Dinah couldn’t stop her smile.
Johnny pulled his Glock out of the cabinet. He ejected the magazine, loaded three more rounds into it, and clicked it back into the hand grip. “Put on your sweatshirt with the hood and pull your hair back. No blond showing. Get rid of the bag—put everything in your pockets. We can put water in the saddlebag. And make sure you have both your knives.”
Dinah rolled her eyes. “I always have both of my knives. Sometimes I even carry the third.”
Johnny looked her over, like he was wondering where else on her body she could carry a third knife.
“Stop that.”
“What?” He slid the Glock into his holster.
She yanked the sweatshirt over her head and pulled up the hood. “Stop looking at me that way.” She’d meant it mostly as a joke, but he moved away anyway.
He grabbed the water from her bag. “Ready if you are.”
Dinah bent to check the knives in each of her soft leather boots. “Ready.” Her heart was a chime in her chest, because she wasn’t ready, but Kara and Laura McCaffrey and the Franklins all needed her to be. Warren and her mom needed her to be.
Johnny padlocked the door behind them. Outside his garage, he started the little green and black Kawasaki and waited for her to climb on.
She slid on behind him, but she hesitated with her hands hovering over her knees. There was nothing to hang on to. He glanced over his shoulder at her. Before she made it any more awkward, she reached around him and held on to the strap on the seat in front, instead of wrapping her arms around his waist. Her forearms rested on his thighs this way, though, so she wasn’t even sure that was better.
The cold pre-dawn wind rushed faster as they sped up the mountain road, ruffling her hair and filling her ears with sound. Her whole body tensed, but not from the ride. Ahead lay yet another thing she could not take back—and she was hurtling toward it.
But this, it felt so different. It felt alive and like it came from every piece of who she was.
The curving, narrow road lay bare and quiet. A doe sprinted across the road ahead of them, and Johnny slowed down. Hitting a deer would total the bike.
A left turn took them to a gravel road, then a dirt road. Curving, winding up, circling around outcroppings and rocky spires marked with spindly pines. The knobby tires on the Kawasaki handled it just fine, but this road, the forest spreading out below them, the ground falling away on either side of the dirt path all made her heart slam in her palms against the leather strap. She almost asked Johnny to stop, not because of the distance she’d fall, but because he might, too.
They hadn’t seen a single other set of headlights yet. Living this far up the mountain was a good idea. Gates probably didn’t even know these people existed.
Because they stayed out of town business. And here she was, asking them to change that.
A light burned through the morning in a small riverstone house. Johnny braked on the path. A tiny stream, drying up in a larger creek bed, bubbled behind the house and wandered around the side of the yard by the barn and down the mountain.
Burns and Lissa and Kwamé had retreated to the peaks and folds of the mountains. No one could want anything or take anything from them way up here. And maybe that was part of the problem.
Johnny parked the motorcycle, and the engine cut out.
“I like this place,” she whispered. A pair of hounds loped down to them, followed by a mountain goat, big-eyed and nimble.
“What is that?” Dinah stared at the creature. It was a goat, of course, but why was it in the yard?
“I think he’s pretty tame. He’s not a pet, but he likes the dogs, I guess.”
Dinah shook her head, keeping an eye on the animal’s curving horns.
The door opened. Kwamé came out to stand on the porch with his hunting rifle. “That you, Johnny?” he called.
“It’s us,” he yelled.
They climbed up the sloped yard to his porch. Kwamé spit tobacco juice over the railing. “Lot of suspicious traffic around today. How you been?”
“Alright,” Johnny said.
Kwamé set his rifle down against the house. “People are a-runnin’ all over, down a bit farther, looking for you, Dinah. Ain’t come up farther than the blacktop, but they will.”
This spinning, rushing feeling inside her must be whirling toward some kind of drop. But right now, all she could feel was the rise. “That’s part of why we’re here,” she said. “I changed my plans. I need to talk to you about it.”
“Really.” Kwamé looked to Johnny.
Johnny raised his hands. “That’s about all I got out of her.”
“Well. Lissa and my sister are on their way here from running this batch. Supposedly. They shoulda been here nearly an hour ago. Burns and my brothers are already out back.” He nodded his head toward the barn. “Alice and the baby are inside.”
Dinah glanced at Johnny. He lifted one shoulder half an inch in a shrug meant only for her to see.
She’d wanted to talk to Kwamé alone, but maybe it was better to just get this over with.
An engine shifted into a lower gear on the road somewhere below them, and a moment later Lissa’s truck came into view. It pulled around by the riverstone house and jerked to a stop on the grass, the bed loaded with plastic crates. Lissa jumped down from the passenger’s side, and a petite Black woman in a green coat closed the driver’s door. The hounds charged over the rocks toward the truck, baying a song while their tails whipped the air. The mountain goat stood self-importantly on a ledge above the path, watching them while placidly chewing the frozen weeds he’d picked from between the rocks.
“We were tailed,” Lissa said. “Had to go all the way into Wright County to shake them.” She pulled jerky from her pocket and tossed two pieces to the dogs.
Kwamé immediately put two fingers to his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. His brothers and Burns came out of the barn, and the women headed for the porch, too. A barn, for a man who didn’t have crop land or livestock, as far as she could tell.
“Lissa and Akosua were followed,” he said.
One of his brothers turned right around and bolted the barn doors.
“Could you see who it was?” Burns asked.
Akosua pulled gloves out of her coat pocket and slid them on. “Sheriff Anders and two others in that blue Chevy of his.” Her glance flipped to Dinah.
Kwamé’s gaze tracked over to her. “Dinah. These are my brothers, Yaw and Kobe,” Kwamé said, as the two men stopped by the steps. “And my sister, Akosua—Lissa’s wife.”
Dinah leaned against the porch railing, next to Johnny. Clearly they already knew who she was. She could feel everyone watching everyone else—Johnny glancing at Kwamé, Lissa studying her, Burns staring unblinking at Johnny.
“You sure you lost that truck?” Kwamé said.
Akosua nodded. “They could find their way up here anyway, though.”
“We oughta sit quiet for a while. Run this batch but stay put for a few days,” Yaw said.
And here she was, putting a bigger target on them. “Sheriff Anders might have put out this reward on me, but it’s because Gates told him to. And his only reason is that I threatened a trespasser, in my own house, after Gates seized it. I still even have the deed.” She pulled the folded papers out of her pocket and handed them to Lissa. Lissa unfolded them and read, then passed them to Akosua, standing right beside her. “I’m not asking you to participate in my revenge. I’m asking all of us to pull together to cut out his entire system. For all of us. His loans, his ranch hands, his businesses, everything.”
Johnny grabbed her hand and squeezed it hard.
Yaw said something to Kwamé in a language she didn’t recognize. Then Kobe and Akosua chimed in.
“Asante Twi,” Johnny said quietly to her. “It’s Ghanaian, an Akan dialect.”
Kwamé looked from one of his brothers to the other, then sighed. “We’ve all got family and friends who work for that man. My aunt and uncle run his barns. Burns’s sister married his cook. We can’t kill each other.”
Dinah nodded. This was nothing if not a family matter, and that was both the reason to fight and the reason they had not.
Akosua looked at the papers then handed the deed back to Dinah. “That deputy nearly ran us off the road last time we went to pick up supplies. Y’all were there. Sooner or later, he’ll find us. Even without people looking for her, he’s making himself our problem—”
Kwamé held up a hand. “Quiet. The dogs.”
Both hounds had turned toward the road, folded ears pricked and hackles on end.
The whine and surge of engines climbing a steep grade rose in the air. It bounced off the rocks around them—either coming from the east or west, she couldn’t tell which.
The sound broke through the echoes to the west. “Go,” Kwamé said.
Yaw and Kobe ran to the barn and Kwamé went for his rifle on the porch. Lissa bolted to her truck. Johnny grabbed Dinah’s hand and ran for the trees.
Unlike the woods around her house, this high up the mountains, there wasn’t much underbrush. Tall pines and spruce, some scrubby bushes and downed, rotting trees. A thick layer of pine needles deadened their running, instead of the dry crunch of fallen leaves.
Two trucks surged over the hill to Kwamé’s house—one a blue Chevy, one silver.
“Stop,” Dinah said. “If we keep moving, they’ll see us.” She crouched down by two fallen trees crisscrossed on the ground. Decent cover, at least for now. Johnny sank down beside her on the pine needles.
The engines cut out and doors slammed.
“Stop.” Kwamé’s voice cracked like a gunshot. “You ain’t welcome here.”
“The law don’t need permission.” Sheriff Anders’s voice drifted back, over the growling of the hounds.
“Where’s your warrant?” Burns, this time.
Another truck door slammed. “We have cause to believe you’re illegally making and selling moonshine.” That voice. He was here.
His voice froze her from the inside out. Surely Gates could hear her breathing, recognize her heartbeat among every other sound.
“Why do you care? You ain’t any part of the law,” Kwamé said.
“Call it civic duty,” Gates said.
“You can stop pretending,” Lissa said. “Even if someone was running a still, it’s a dead law courts leave alone all over the country. You just think you’re owed a piece of anything someone else’s got.”
Johnny gripped her shoulder. “He might send his goons into the woods to look around,” he whispered. Strain lined his eyes. He couldn’t be seen, either. Gates could not know Johnny was still alive.
“We can’t move,” she said. They could see well enough to know if someone was heading their way. They’d make a run for it if they had to.
“I hate that I left them standing there,” he said.
“You had to.” It would have been worse for everyone if Gates and the sheriff had made the connection between Johnny and the other bootleggers.
Brian Shaw was with him, the bodyguard with the shaved head and a russet beard who had chased her and Warren through the woods. Another white guy she didn’t recognize was with him, too. “Who is that?”
