Bad Day Breaking by John Galligan

Author:John Galligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

Hoof rode behind her in the Ram’s club cab with the M16 across his knees and the SIG touching her skull. As the sheriff followed his commands, steering northwest on unplowed back roads, it occurred to her that he would be proud of Missy’s bridge-jump suicide.

“Turn left,” he rasped.

Thunder grumbled over the truck engine. The deluge shifted texture, pelting down in wet white globs. The turn onto Sumac Ridge Road elevated them out of the wide Ocooch bog, and now the truck toiled up untracked switchbacks, the gravel feeling greasy under the snow. Missy wouldn’t be Hoof’s first suicide, not in his mind. As the sheriff skimmed his face in the mirror, she began a grim tally of the girls she knew about. Shelby Mattix. Kassidy Wengert. Tatum Bonjour. The self-inflicted death of Missy Grooms would be at least Hoof’s fourth example of how intensely he was loved and feared. Suicide, she recalled, had struck him as the ultimate compliment.

“Right on County H.”

As she made the turn and they tilted onto high ground, her phone in the drink cup chimed and lit up with notification of another text. Seeing it was from Deputy Luck and reaching, she felt the SIG against the bone behind her ear.

“Don’t touch it.”

A snowplow had just cleared County H. In its path the sheriff drove smoothly east toward Farmstead. Hoof had boasted of the others, older girls ahead of her, mythic names and stories she had heard. Their love for Hoof had been so great that it had killed them—it was overdoses, actually—and the pitch to the next pain-dumb girl—say, a devastated ex–Dairy Queen—was how much love she would feel, and how long she could stand it.

She glanced in the mirror again. As if he believed he was immortal, he was chewing more horse pills. A new urgency, spun from threads of past and current dread, suddenly knit together. The House of Shalah… the Carpenters… would they die for their beloved father figure? Like so many disciples before them, did the Carpenters have a suicide pact? Were the current pressures driving them in that direction?

“Lights off. Turn in.”

At the private road into the property of Ernhardt Pig Feeder, Hoof tried to growl. But it was more of a gasp.

She turned in. Five hundred yards ahead, the Ernhardt office and barns pushed up a dome of incandescence against the shedding sky. On the sheriff’s left, snow fell upon an expanse of shredded soybean stems about to disappear. Opposite the soybean field rose the tall earthen berm that walled-in Ernhardt’s three-acre lagoon containing several million gallons of swine manure.

“Take a right.”

The heavy Ram fishtailed onto an access lane marked by two muddy tire ruts filling with fresh snow. The berm loomed like a moonscape. After a hundred yards, the lane cornered left and threaded a narrow space between the lagoon and a snow-clogged wasteland forest that reached out with claws and raked the crawling truck.

“Stop right here,” Hoof panted at the back of her head as they reached a dead end.

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