I Want Candy Read online

  “I just … no.” Candy heard her voice break. “I think sometimes it’s my fault, that I got you into this mess.”

  “Hey, Candy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Everybody should be in the kind of mess I’m in.”

  Candy sniffled. “I guess it turned out pretty good for you, didn’t it?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Candy began to laugh outright, and Cheri joined her, then said, “And it will work out for you, too. Just wait and see.”

  She nodded in silence.

  “Now is not the time to give up, babycakes.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re Candy Freakin’ Carmichael.”

  She snorted with laughter. “Hell, yes, I am—currently residing at the Cherokee Pines Assisted Living facility, thank you very much.”

  “Oh, Lord, girl…” Cheri said with a sigh. “Are you going to be okay tonight?”

  “Of course. The couch is comfy. Tater got my car working again. I’ll go to Lenny’s tomorrow and see about that job.”

  “I’m here. Always. I love you to death.”

  Candy felt herself smile. That was one thing that had never wavered, regardless of the wheres and the whys and the hows of her life—she could always count on Cheri.

  “I love you right back. Oh! And just one last thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do not tell Turner where I am, okay? Don’t let J.J. tell him where I am, either. Let him assume I’m still at Viv’s. I need some space. I need to figure this out.”

  “What if he asks?” Cheri sounded torn. “You want me to lie to him?”

  “Ah, hell, I guess not. If he asks, tell him, but if he doesn’t ask, don’t bring it up.”

  “If you say so,” Cheri said.

  Candy ended the call and shoved her phone in her pocket, strolling toward the front door. She pulled on the handle but it was locked tight. Gerrall looked up from his laptop, grinned, and buzzed her in.

  “You have a good night now,” he said. “It’s sure nice to have a new face around here—especially one as pretty as yours.”

  “Thank you,” she said with as much politeness as she could muster, considering that Gerrall hadn’t been looking anywhere near her face when he’d said that. Do not trust him …

  Candy reached Jacinta’s apartment door and tried the knob. It, too, was locked tight.

  “Shee-it,” she hissed. She gently tapped her knuckles on the varnished wood. No response. She knocked a little louder. “Jacinta?” she whispered, looking up and down the hallway. “Jacinta? Mother? Open up!”

  “You know what they say—you can take the girl out of the trailer park…”

  Candy slowly turned toward the voice. Once again, she encountered the neighbor lady’s pinched little face framed in the halo of pink sponge rollers, and just had to laugh.

  “Lorraine, honey,” she said, “I’d freakin’ kill for a trailer right about now.”

  Jacinta flung open the door and glared spitefully at her neighbor. “Carmichaels do not live in trailer parks, you nosy old floozy!”

  “I never!”

  “That’s not what I heard!”

  As Candy staggered through the door and back to the couch, she told herself that tomorrow was another day. As soon as she was horizontal, she pulled the blanket over her head.

  * * *

  Gerrall grabbed the duffel bag from the trunk and made his way across the junk-strewn grass to the barn. The light was spilling out from the cracks in the old sliding doors and he sniffed the air for the telltale tang of meth production. It was nearly two A.M. and they were still cooking in there, which meant they were behind on product, which meant his daddy would be mean as hell. With the new organization pushing them so hard, his daddy was worse than he could ever remember. Gerrall figured the best he could hope for that night would be to drop the shit on the worktable and get out before his daddy decided to beat him black and blue. Maybe he’d sleep in the old tree house instead of the trailer tonight, just to be on the safe side.

  He pushed the door open a crack. Immediately, four sawed-off shotguns were aimed at his face. “It’s me,” he said, hearing the exhaustion in his own voice. He wondered how long it would be before one of these assholes started sampling the goods and got so jumpy they just shot his head off for the fun of it.

  “Well, looky who it is!” His daddy grinned at Gerrall and ground out his cigarette in the dirt floor of the workroom.

  The new cook screamed at him. “Fuck, Spivey! Stop your fucking smoking out here! How many times I gotta tell you this whole place and every one of us in it could blow up because of your fucking cigarettes!”

  His daddy chuckled, then pulled out a handgun and pressed it into the cook’s temple. “Talk to me like that again and I’ll put a hole in your brain.”

  Gerrall sighed. The cook looked like he was going to crap his pants. It was almost a done deal that this guy—who didn’t even have a name yet as far as he knew—would be gone in the morning and Gerrall would be looking for another college chemistry major dropout to run the shop. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded, since everybody and their uncle was trying to get in on the meth business out here. Anyone with a working knowledge of chemistry was a hot commodity.

  Gerrall smiled to himself. If he were really, really lucky, he’d come home one night to find the barn blown to all hell and his daddy’s body parts scattered all over the property like pieces of confetti on Main Street at the Fourth of July parade. His daddy deserved it. He was a worthless human being and too damn stupid to live. Nobody would miss him. That was for sure.

  Gerrall looked around the room. “Hey, everybody.” He swung the duffel bag up to the work surface, unzipped it, and began unloading boxes of cold and flu medicine.

  “Any trouble tonight?”

  Gerrall shook his head at his daddy’s question. “Everything’s good. But the new guy from across the Tennessee line seems kinda slow in the head if you ask me.”

  “Nobody asked you.” Bobby Ray walked over to Gerrall and slapped him on his ear by way of greeting, then began to riffle through the boxes with his filthy fingers. “This is it? This is all you got?”

  “Yeah. That’s everything they had tonight. Seven drop-offs.”

  “What the fuck?” His daddy slammed his palms down on the wooden worktable. “This isn’t anywhere near enough!”

  “I’m always looking for more smurfs, just like the Fat Man told me, but you know it’s getting harder and harder for them to make buys,” Gerrall said.

  Bobby Ray threw a box of cold medicine against the barn wall. His face went purple with rage. “What I want you to do is bring back more shit than this! I don’t care if you have to go out yourself and get it! Do you fuckin’ understand? These people we’re workin’ for now don’t fuck around!”

  The dozen or so men in the barn remained silent. It was like this a lot lately. Most of the losers who worked for his daddy figured if they didn’t speak and didn’t move then Bobby Ray Spivey would be less likely to notice them, so less likely to shoot them.

  Gerrall turned toward their new delivery driver, a big, rough-looking Hispanic dude who called himself “Dan.” He’d been working for his daddy for two weeks now and had hardly said a word. Gerrall didn’t even know if he spoke English, but he always made the deliveries to the Florida state line and always came back on time with every dime accounted for. His daddy seemed to think he was some kind of good omen for their business, since they’d got their new big-time backing right after he came on board. Though the Fat Man took credit for that.

  The Fat Man took credit for everything.

  The driver ignored Gerrall.

  “We’ll do better tomorrow night,” Gerrall said, heading for the door. He kept on walking, right past the trailer and into the woods. He used the light of his cell phone to locate the foot and handholds on the old sycamore tree, then began to climb in the dark. When he pulled aside the plastic covering to the tree house door, a flashligh
t nearly blinded him.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Sorry! Sorry!” The little girl he’d seen hanging around the property dropped the flashlight and shot up out of the sleeping bag, her eyes as wide as Frisbees. She gathered up her backpack and some matted-looking stuffed animal and scurried right past him out the treehouse door. Gerrall shook his head and watched as she skillfully scampered down the tree and hit the ground running.

  “If I catch you up here again, I’ll kick your ass! Understand?”

  “Okay! Okay!”

  “Fuck.” After Gerrall checked to make sure nothing was missing, he took off his shoes and crawled into the already warm sleeping bag.

  He hated the idea that some lab loser’s kid had found his hideaway. He also felt sort of bad that the kid was now out in the woods alone. But hey … not his problem.

  Chapter 6

  Turner glanced around the small sheriff’s department conference room and prepared himself to referee the latest disagreement. He was used to it. Though the newspaper headlines stressed only cooperation, the truth was that power struggles were a daily affair in joint task force investigations. It had been that way for last year’s big cocaine bust in Waynesville and the Spivey case was turning out to be no different. Turner figured anytime there were multiple law enforcement agencies working together, strutting and territorial pissing would be part of the bargain.

  The group that had gathered that morning represented seven separate government agencies. The current argument was about who would ultimately foot the bill for cleaning up the meth “superlab” once the suspects were hauled off in handcuffs and enough evidence had been collected to tie them in with a Mexican drug cartel. They’d discovered that the makeshift methamphetamine lab in Bobby Ray Spivey’s old tobacco barn had recently received an infusion of organized-crime capital, which meant bigger and more sophisticated equipment for the chemical “cooking” process, dramatically increased output, and a whole lot more traffic coming and going through the rural Preston Valley region. It was now apparent that when it was all over, there would be a veritable toxic waste site to deal with.

  Of course, Turner and the head of the Cataloochee County Health Department had already made it clear the local government couldn’t pay for it. Seven years ago, the county busted four meth labs. Last year, the number was forty-seven, and twelve of them met the criteria of “superlabs.”

  “Can’t get blood out of a budget-mashed turnip,” his comrade in the health department had explained.

  How about the U.S. Marshal’s office? “We see ourselves in more of a supervisory role here. Besides, we’ve already exhausted our annual cleanup budget for the entire state and it’s barely the end of May.”

  The North Carolina National Guard? “We’ve always left that to the DEA. We’re really here to do the aerial and ground surveillance.”

  The FBI? “Hell, no.”

  Well, what about the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency?

  One of Kelly O’Connor’s perfect dark eyebrows rose high on her forehead. She folded her manicured hands on the table in front of her. Turner smiled to himself, already knowing that whatever she was about to say wouldn’t match the prissy way she held herself.

  “I will remind you that it’s my guy in there risking his ’nads every day with those hillbilly knuckleheads, and if he doesn’t get his ass blown up before we’re ready to go in, it’ll be a fuckin’ miracle.” She tapped her ink pen on the tabletop. “Somebody else can pay for the damn cleanup.”

  “I don’t think we have any choice at this point but to call in the state Environmental Protection Agency,” Turner offered. “We know from the aerial video that they’re pouring all kinds of toxic stuff in the creek behind the barn, right?”

  His health department coworker nodded. “Acetone, toluene, xylene, and corrosives like hydrochloric and sulfuric acids—and that’s only the stuff we’ve been able to identify so far. It’s going to be your basic cocktail of death if it leaches into the groundwater around here.”

  “Spivey’s property is starting to look like the Wal-Mart parking lot on a Saturday afternoon,” added the FBI agent in charge.

  “They’re cooking tens of thousands of doses a day at this point,” O’Connor said.

  “That’s a great idea,” said Trent Marshner, the special agent in charge for the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation. “Have the state EPA pay for the cleanup.”

  “So where do we stand with the Spivey kid? Any chance he’ll turn?”

  Turner knew that question from the assistant district attorney was directed to him. He’d known Gerrall Spivey since he was in Junie’s seventh grade class. Back then, he’d been a dirty, underfed wild child three years older than his classmates, uncomfortable making eye contact with adults. Junie had taken a liking to him, of course, since she always gravitated toward the most desperate cases. The kid had even been over to the house for dinner a few times and he’d shoveled in food with the manners of a stray dog. Turner had driven him home on those occasions, and that’s how he made his first acquaintance with Bobby Ray.

  A twenty-foot-high flagpole sat at the end of a long, steeply declining gravel lane, proudly displayed the stars and bars of the Confederacy, which provided yet another clue that Gerrall’s father might not be the most evolved of men.

  “Y’all shouldn’t be feeding my boy,” was how he greeted Turner and Gerrall. Turner tried to keep his disgust hidden—the Spivey place was nothing but a twenty-acre junkyard. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a dead cat lying in the grass.

  “We don’t mind, Mr. Spivey.”

  Gerrall kept his head down as he moved silently from the shiny county-issued SUV to the broken front door of the family trailer.

  “I can take care of my own. I don’t need no help from your kind, even if you are the sheriff.”

  Turner was fairly certain the “your kind” label did not refer to college-educated professionals who showered on a daily basis. “I hope you do make an effort to provide for your son, Mr. Spivey. My wife has noticed that Gerrall comes to class in the same clothes most every day, and that they haven’t been washed. She said he’s often hungry in the morning. A lot of people are struggling, and there’s no shame in that. If you’d like, I can have social services stop by and—”

  “You and your uppity badge can get off my land. I know my rights as a private citizen.”

  From then on, Turner dropped Gerrall at the end of the lane. He never again spoke to Bobby Ray until a few days after Junie died, when a fellow teacher mentioned to Turner that Junie had planned to stop by the Spivey place on her way out of town.

  The news crushed him. He’d told Junie to never go out there. He’d warned her. But she’d gone in secret. I would have gone with her! Why didn’t she tell me?

  “She didn’t want you worrying,” the teacher added. “She knew you were busy at work.”

  Before he could answer the DA, Turner steadied himself by taking a deep breath. “I don’t think Gerrall is going to help us. He’s doing great, considering his home environment—even got his GED last fall and obviously he’s working the night desk at Cherokee Pines—but he’s still living with his father. I spoke to him a few days ago when he stopped by my uncle’s convenience store.”

  “What did he say?” the FBI agent asked.

  Turner laughed a little. “Not much of a talker—not to me, anyway. But I don’t get the feeling he’d trust anyone to keep him safe from Bobby Ray. He certainly doesn’t trust me—not after what happened with child protective services.”

  Everyone in the task force knew of Turner’s past involvement with the Spiveys. Just before Junie died, he’d filed a report with the state’s child welfare agency, asking them to open an investigation into possible abuse and neglect. Six months after Junie’s death, the agency deemed the results “inconclusive.” Gerrall had turned sixteen by then, and had dropped out of school.

  “Dante says the kid is pretty beaten down—does whatever his daddy tel
ls him to, and lately that’s been collecting from the smurfers,” Kelly said.

  Kelly was referring to DEA field agent Dante Cabrera, a guy in his early thirties more used to the New York streets than the North Carolina hills. But he’d finagled his way into the group as a regional driver. For the last couple weeks, his job had been to take shipments from the lab to the Florida state line and hand them off to the cartel for distribution. The detailed information Cabrera had provided now formed the backbone of their case, though Turner and everyone else knew the longer they kept him inside the greater his chances were of being exposed.

  Turner was troubled by that news. It was the first time he’d heard that Gerrall was actively involved in the meth operation. He turned to the state bureau of investigation agent at the table. “You guys still tailing Gerrall?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “He’s making four to five pickups a night after he gets off his shift at the nursing home.”

  “But he’s not accepting deliveries at Cherokee Pines?”

  “Not that we’ve seen.”

  Turner barely had time to register his relief when there was a knock on the conference room door. Bitsy stuck her head in. “Sheriff, I’m sorry to disturb you, but you wanted me to remind you when it was time to think about lunch.”

  “Right. Thanks, Bits.” Turner looked around the conference table, almost afraid to ask. “What’ll it be today? Lenny’s? The sub place? Pizza?”

  * * *

  Candy smoothed down her hair and pointed her chin high. She grabbed the HELP WANTED sign taped to the front window of the diner and ripped it off the glass on her way in the door.

  “Hi, Lenny,” she said, leaning on the counter, waiting for him to look up from the cutout window between the dining room and the kitchen. When he did, he smiled. Then started laughing.

  “Candy Carmichael? Am I seeing things?”

  “Nope.” She held up the sign and smacked it down on the countertop. “Your newest employee is here.”