Carved in Bone

take a big patch to bring in good money, and the county’s roadless ridges and hollows give farmers the kind of privacy once prized by moonshiners. But every now and then, somebody’s pot patch gets busted, and sometimes somebody gets shot, though it’s not usually the sheriff.
    In a special election held to fill the post, Kitchings outran his opponent—a local undertaker—as easily as he’d once outrun would-be tacklers. Since then, he’d spent a decade bringing the sheriff’s office into the modern era. With the money seized in a spate of drug busts, he bought a fleet of new vehicles: SUVs that could handle the rutted roads threading the county’s hollows; off-road ATVs that could cross swollen streams and reach hillside pot patches; even a helicopter from which he could survey his mountain kingdom from on high, with his brother, Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings, a former army chopper pilot, at the controls.
    Despite his success, and despite the passage of nearly twenty years, Tom Kitchings had never fully gotten over his football injury. He still carried a slight hitch in his step and a fair-sized chip on his shoulder. He’d gone about as far as he could go in Cooke County, but that was leagues away, literally, from NFL stardom.
    I didn’t actually know any of this firsthand. Everything I knew about Tom Kitchings came from UT fans like Jeff and law enforcement colleagues like Art Bohanan, a criminalist with the Knoxville Police Department. Unlike every other sheriff in East Tennessee, Kitchings had never consulted me on a forensic case. Not that I minded. Judging by things I’d heard from Art, getting involved in Cooke County cases was a lot like snake-handling: it was an act of faith that violated all the dictates of common sense—and it entailed a damn good chance of getting snakebit. According to Art and others at KPD, it was not entirely clear which was more venomous in Cooke County, the bad guys in the battered pickups or the good guys in their SUVs and aircraft. Nothing was certain; anything was possible.
    I had plenty of time to ponder these things as the Cherokee bored east on Interstate 40, traversing the broad valley of the French Broad River. Then, just before I-40 plunged into the heart of the Appalachians, Williams whipped the Jeep down an off-ramp, skidded left onto a county road, and began threading curves that made a corkscrew seem straight by comparison.
    The road had a solid yellow center line, but Williams drove as if both lanes were his alone, wandering from one edge to another. “Is this one way?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t, but hoping he might take the hint and stick to the right lane.
    “One way?” He laughed easily. Now we were in his territory, not mine. “Naw, but you got to straighten these curves or you’ll never get where you’re going.” By way of demonstration, he took both hands off the wheel, and the Jeep barreled straight ahead for a hundred yards, while the center line whipsawed beneath us. “It’s easier at night, when you can see the other cars coming.” He drifted left to hug the inside of a tight curve. “Unless they got their lights off. One or two nights a year, we get a bad head-on wreck long about here.”
    I switched to pondering that for a minute, but as the road grew more tortuous, my pondering shifted to another alarming topic: how many more curves could I take before I threw up? Not many, I realized, as sweat began beading on my forehead and premonitory saliva filled my mouth. I rolled down the window and thrust my face out into the bracing air, panting like a dog. It helped, but not enough to offset our continuing roller coaster ride. I pulled my head back inside. “Listen, I hate to do this,” I said, “but I’ve got to ask you to stop. I’m getting really carsick.”
    He looked startled, as if he’d never heard anything so ridiculous. Carsick? On this fine road? It was the look a camel might give a parched human in the Sahara. Thirsty? Didn’t you drink some water just last week?
    A pained expression worked its way from his mouth up to his eyes; then he shook his head once. “Sheriff said he needs you right away. Reckon we better keep on a-keepin’ on. Just hang out the window there and let fly if you need to.”
    As if on cue, I did. Flecks of vomit spattered the gold star painted on the door. I pulled my head back in. “It’s not that simple,” I rasped. “It isn’t just vomiting. I’ve got Ménière’s