Page 43 of Brimstone Hollow

“I’m always hungry,” I answer.

“Good. I wanna hear whatever you found out but I’m starving. Corn dogs and funnel cake can only take a woman so far and I expect you’ve found the best place to eat around here.”

“You know it,” I say. “Follow me.”

A few minutes later, we arrive at Cherry Dairy. It’s packed, as usual, so Tina parks the wrecker in the big field off to the side where several other cars have already taken up space.

The afternoon heat, the drone of the cicadas, it all seems to press in onus as we order from the take-out window and then carry our food around to the picnic tables out back. We’re just sitting down as Hollis Patton—the motel owner—catches my attention and then swishes through the grass to us, carrying his own greasy white sack of food.

“Mind if I join you?” he asks, not waiting for an answer before sitting down.

I introduce him and Tina and then ask him, “You know anyone drives a silver F-150?”

“You want a list?” Hollis scoffs. “Must be nearly half the town.”

“That’s what Dishman said,” I say, as I unwrap my BLT. “I get the feeling he knows more than he’s letting on, but so far he’s not willing to share.”

“Chief’s a real by-the-book type,” Hollis says. “But he’s a good guy.”

I sigh and let myself be distracted by lunch. The grease from the mayo and bacon soak through the toasted bread and slick my fingers as I take the biggest bite I can manage. The thick tomato is thin-skinned and full-bodied, acidic and slightly sweet. The crisp, salty bacon and toasted white bread crunch together with the creamy mayo and I let out a long, low moan.

“Let me ask you something, Hollis,” I say, when my mouth is finally mostly empty. “You know anything about Billy Shepherd?”

“Joel Shepherd’s nephew?” he asks. “He’s the one died in a house fire the other night, right? That’s what I heard.”

“That’s right,” I tell him. “I’m betting he’s linked to my investigation, but Dishman seems guarded where Joel Shepherd’s concerned.”

Hollis nods, solemnly, poking around in his Styrofoam container of fried catfish and hush puppies before he says, “It’s because of what happened. It’s because of what Joel Shepherd did.”

“You mean the pot dealing? The King of Weed thing?”

A bee flies between us and Hollis shoos it gently away before he shakes his head, takes a bite, crunches for a while, then says, “Connectedto the pot. See, it was Dishman who brought Shepherd down. He wasn’t chief yet, just an officer. This was twenty years ago, remember. Back then, Chief Parnell was in charge. The problem they always had with Joel’s operationwas they could never catch him moving any drugs. I mean, it seemed like they were moving huge quantities of the stuff but no one could figure out how. Long story short, it was Dishman who figured it out. He narrowed down the route they were taking and when, how they were moving it in big rigs. It was his idea to set up a roadblock to catch them.”

He pauses to take a long swig of his drink, and Tina and I do the same.

Then he says, “But when Joel Shepherd got to that roadblock, he lost his head and charged right through it, knocked a cruiserandan officer out of the way, and kept going. The officer he hit was Allison Parnell.”

“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.”