Blue Ridge by T. R. Pearson

Author:T. R. Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barking Mad Press
Published: 2019-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Kit drove, had insisted on driving. Ray rode in silence beside her in her spruce green Blazer as she roared out of town past the branch bank and the crumbling rolling mill, roughly over the railroad siding and onto the Lynchburg pike.

“Wave to Grover.” It was his opening bit of commentary.

Kit looked toward the margin of the roadway where Grover sat in his sagging lawn chair flailing his arms over his head, and only Ray threw up a hand. She turned off the pike at Ray’s direction and onto the secondary blacktop where she accelerated upslope. The Blazer’s suspension was rock-hard and unyielding, and they bounced and skittered through the switchbacks as they climbed toward the ridge. Ray clung to the armrest, to the frame of the wing window.

“Do you work out of D.C. pretty much all the time?”

Kit nodded. “We all work out of D.C. Precisely all the time.”

“And go all over?”

“East Coast west to the divide.”

“Are there all that many killings on federal land?”

They gained level ground and raced along the spine of the ridge. “Enough. Bears mostly.” She glared pointedly at Ray. “Hillbilly trash sometimes.”

Kit followed Ray down along the trail through the poplar grove, past the primitive log shelter and onto the springhead path. She only spoke along the way to ask after an insect that was sizable and gaudily speckled, armored and knobby-legged and sat upon a galax leaf.

“What in Christ is that?”

Ray examined it closely. “Some bug,” he told her.

The grave site was as they’d left it—haphazardly excavated and carelessly disturbed, and what ground wasn’t churned up had been trampled flat. Kit bent to pinch a cigarette butt between her fingers and rose to show it to Ray.

“The chief,” he said.

She shook her head as if she harbored a distinct distaste for amateurs.

“His head was down this way,” Ray told her, pointing. “His right-hand fingers were poking out of the ground.”

Kit sifted through the loose dirt, and Ray squatted beside her, sitting on his haunches. “I pulled out everything that was in there.”

Ray had hardly finished speaking when Kit reached to take his hand. She turned it up and dropped onto his palm the corroded tab of a trouser fly before standing to peer down the hillside toward a break in the trees.

“What’s down there?”

“Pasture.”

“Whose?”

Ray was still shrugging as she struck out down the slope. He followed at a trot, stumbling through the scrub and the rotting leaves, dodging the limbs that Kit loosed to fly his way. She and Ray eased through the upper strands of a barbed-wire fence at the edge of the tree line and stepped into a rocky highland pasture. A few dozen heifers loitered beneath a sycamore by the bank of a half-acre pond that was spring-fed and earth-dammed, hopelessly murky.

Kit pointed toward a gravel road on the far side of a fencerow. “Where does that go?”

Once Ray had shrugged, Kit waded through the fescue and the knotty tufts of weeds toward an orange pipe gate which she found latched by a simple hook and chain.

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