A Living Grave (27 page)

That opened our mouths even wider.

“Assemblies of God,” Clarence Bolin, moonshiner and closet Democrat, said.

Things got loud again slowly—laughing, talking, and eating. No one tried to talk me out of the wedding or of doing it tomorrow. In fact, Nelson seemed to be buoyed by the thought. He was talking more. Joking loudly and laughing. When the food was gone he was the first to start clearing the table. Clare joined in and the pair of them went to work. Apparently, they had some unspoken plan to cut me away to let Uncle Orson have a talk.

“Come outside with me a minute, would you?” he asked me. Without waiting for an answer he sauntered out to stand against the railing. He flicked a switch that turned on an underwater light he had suspended below the dock. As I stepped up to the rail, Orson started dropping bits of bread into the water. He handed me half a roll. Minnows and sunfish came to the dropped crumbs as if they'd been waiting for the feast.

“Daddy will understand my decision,” I said, hoping to cut off the discussion.

“Of course he will,” my uncle answered. “He'd be the first to tell you, never put off today . . .”

“Then why the outside talk?”

“Nelson,” he said, flaking and dropping more crumbs. “I'm wondering about Nelson.”

I pinched off larger pieces and tossed them farther, watching the sunfish race to each impact in the water. “What about Nelson?” I asked. “You like him.”

“Yeah, I do. I like him a lot. Now, I'm wondering if you understand what you're getting into?”

“You mean his health? You knew about that. You and Daddy have practically been pushing me at him since we met.”

“It was different then.”

“Then?” My voice got a little loud and a little edgy. I brought it down to say, “What
then
? It's only been a few days. Do you mean now that he's getting better?”

My uncle tossed crumbs and wouldn't look at me.

“He is getting better,” I said.

“I've seen it before. All the old vets have.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All the energy. The new liveliness. Appetite. Hell, even new hair.”

“Those are all good things,” I said. Even to me it sounded a little like pleading.

“Those meds are horrible things to live with. Worse to die with. A lot of guys stop. Either they give up or the drugs aren't working.”

I threw what was left of my bread into the water. This time the fish scattered from the splash before cautiously returning to nibble.

“Any way you want it,” Uncle Orson said, “I'm behind you. Your dad is too. He'll be there if he can. If he can't—he'll be there for you later.”

My phone rang.

C
arrie Owens was missing.

Since the afternoon, while I was talking with Emily Benson, Carrie had been out of her house. Marion had gotten there to find the mother drunk and still drinking. When she wouldn't produce her daughter, Marion had searched for herself. She found no sign of Carrie. After that, Marion called in the deputy stationed outside. The second search was more thorough, looking under beds and behind piles of dirty clothes and in the dark crannies of the basement. Carrie was not in the house.

They did find one thing, though. On the floor of Carrie's bedroom there was a wooden dowel with a rough, blunt end and a threaded end. It was the handle from a toilet plunger. The end without the threads was bloody.

Her mother denied beating Carrie with the stick but neither Marion nor the deputy believed her.

By the time I was called, the sheriff was there. He had the same kind of search building up as had been done for Angela Briscoe.

* * *

I pulled up in the same spit of gravel where I had spent so much time lately. The high beams and emergency lights of my truck rudely intruded on the night. They gamboled over and within the trees on one side. On the other they licked in straight lines across the rock walls. Nowhere did they do more than shimmer in the darkness, dispelling nothing. It didn't matter. I didn't need them. The path I was following had become very familiar recently.

Carrie was sitting cross-legged in the same stained and matted spot where Angela had been killed. She wore the same robe I had seen her in earlier. It was still tied with the string I had put around her waist. Her head was bowed and her shoulders slumped. She had her hands in her lap. They were covered by the painting of Leech I had given her.

“You're so stupid,” she said without looking up. “You can't fix some things.”

“I know,” I told her quietly. “But the things you can't fix you can get away from. You can make changes.”

“I tried.”

“With Leech?”

She didn't say anything but her back was shaking. I didn't know if she was sobbing or laughing.

“That's why Danny did it, isn't it? For you. To get Leech to help you?”

“God, you're so stupid. You don't understand anything.”

I crouched in the grass in front of Carrie and brushed her hair back to see her face.

Crying.

“I understand that home isn't a good place for you. We can change that, get you out of there.”

“Go where? You put my dad in jail.”

“He's there so he can't hurt you anymore. I know you're mad at your mom for not protecting you. We can get her some help too, but first we have to get you away so she can't hit you again. That's why you ran away today, isn't it? They found the stick she hit you with.”

“You don't know nothing.”

“Help me, Carrie. Make me understand.”

“He was supposed to help me. I gave him what he wanted. Angela wasn't like me. She was a perfect little goodie with her perfect life.”

Carrie was beginning to sound sleepy, speaking slower, slurring. I touched her face and she flinched. Her skin felt cold.

“We need to get you out of here and someplace warm.”

“Angela was a virgin,” she said. “I did her a favor.”

“A favor? Letting Danny kill her?”

“Danny didn't kill her. I did.”

I froze. Even this far into the trees some of the strobes of my lights came through. Flashes bit at trees and leaves in a random staccato that gave the woods the appearance of moving slowly inward.

“You?” I asked.

“I hit her with the rock. She thought we were playing. I needed a virgin to give to Leech. He wouldn't want me. So I gave him Angela. When that didn't work we tried to make a baby here to give him. You screwed that up. You hurt Danny and spoiled everything.”

My head was spinning with the lights. The food I had eaten earlier was rising in my throat with a flush of heat. I wanted to get her parents here, in these woods where so much harm had been done and make them pay. I wanted to make them wish for Leech to come take them.

“How old . . .” I choked back the question and the bile in my mouth. Then I tried again. “When your father . . . When did it start, Carrie?”

“God, you're so stupid,” she said. “So stupid. You don't understand anything. It was Mama. It was always Mama.” Carrie raised her face to look at me and even in the darkness I could see she was pale. “She didn't hit me with the stick. She didn't
hit
me.”

Carrie slumped backwards, falling to the grass. When she did the picture that had covered her hands flipped up and revealed the bleeding gashes up her forearms.

“I want my daddy,” she whispered.

It was the blood that finally pulled me into action. I grabbed Carrie up in my arms and started running between the darkness and the flashes of light. At one point I tripped in the trail and fell. Carrie never left my arms. I tumbled and rolled over, clambering back to my feet and ran on without slowing.

At the truck, I pulled out my small first-aid kit, wishing I had Billy's. Then I wished that Billy himself were here. He would have been handling this so much better. I called in and got units on the way as soon as I had her wounds bound. Instantly she bled through all the gauze I had, so I pulled a blanket from behind the seat and cut it into strips to wrap her tighter and more thickly. As I was working, Carrie started convulsing and throwing up a frothy bile. It spilled down her face and into her hair as I turned her head to try and keep her from choking. Within the hot and sticky flow were small white chunks that, for some reason, I thought were teeth. It wasn't until I tried picking them up that I understood they were the remains of pills.

This was a serious attempt at suicide, not an attention-getting ploy. I could see why she thought she was out of options. All her pleas for help had been ignored or misunderstood. Worse, many had been directed at a fairy-tale character.

* * *

Carrie Owens died just shy of eleven p.m. I was in the waiting room still bloody and stinking and looking for someone to take it all out on. I tried telling myself I was past this, when my skin felt the grit of another land's soil. The calming pastels of hospital walls burnished out to dead brown and the hot wind carried the dust across my eyes again.

I cried.

I cried like I never had before, in wrenching sobs of pain and uncontrolled tears. No one wanted to be close to me. No one wanted to even look at me until Sheriff Benson arrived. He cried with me.

That should have been it. In a sane and compassionate world the night would have been done with us. We could have gone into the darkness to rage, or drink, or wail in private. The memory of two young girls deserved that, at least.

But there is nothing sane about the world we live in. There is no compassion in the spinning wheel of fate.

The sheriff's cell rang. He took a long moment to compose himself before answering. When he did, his face that was slack and wan, flushed red and turned to marble.

“I'm at the hospital now,” he said to the caller. “I'll meet them here. Get everyone not on scene to my office and call in anyone not on duty.”

I had enough presence of mind to turn to the water fountain and splash my face. When I turned back to listen, Sheriff Benson said “No” in a very certain tone. Then he added, “I'll call the feds after we talk with the witness.”

Once he cut the line he looked at me and said, “Come on, Hurricane. Our work's not done yet.”

I followed him out to where the ambulances brought in their passengers. Then we waited.

Billy was the first of our two deputies to be brought in. After him was Calvin. They each had skull fractures behind the right ear. Someone had hit them with something hard. They probably weren't trying to kill; they just didn't understand or didn't care that knocking someone out isn't like the movies.

I tried to talk to Billy but he was out with a tube down his throat.

Seeing Billy, the liveliest person I'd ever known, slack-faced with a matting of blood in his hair hit me like a wave of hot water. Rage and something else that I didn't want to think about washed all around me.

The EMTs cared nothing for my need to hold Billy's hand. They pulled him away, even pushing me aside to get him into the building. I had just enough sense left in my brain not to fight. I stood there in the night under the glowing red
Emergency
sign. The sheriff followed both of his men into the hospital.

When the next ambulance backed in I was still standing there alone with black thoughts and a feeling in my chest like a raw, open wound. Billy was my friend. In many ways he was barely even a friend. I had kept him at a distance that was comfortable to me.

I didn't like the question or anything it implied.

I love Nelson
.

It was true but all of a sudden it felt so damnably complicated.

Even though time seemed to be moving slow against a strong current, there wasn't enough of it to smooth out or even understand the complications of my feelings. The shrieking beep of the ambulance backup warning stopped. Then the doors burst outward. They were pushed by a pair of big hands and followed by a flurry of white hair. Lawrence, the same EMT who had taken care of Nelson that first day, jumped down from the deck like a much younger man.

“You part of this mess, Hurricane?” he asked even as he pulled out the loaded gurney.

His partner came out with the back end and I got look at the passenger. It was Riley Pruitt. He had been burned, probably shot as well. Lying there, he wasn't near the monster Leech was. As soon as I saw him I understood the basics of what had happened. We had plans with the feds to hit the bikers first thing in the morning. Someone had beat us to it. Someone who didn't have any problem with taking down the cops doing surveillance.

“I am now,” I told Lawrence as they started taking their patient away.

He winked at me and then grinned without humor. “Give 'em hell,” he said and they were through the doors, rolling smoothly into the light.

I knew exactly who had done this and where to find them. I went to the truck and headed for Moonshines. I should have told the sheriff. At least I should have called in to dispatch and given my location and reason for going. There were a lot of things I should have done, but I went alone in anger, paying no attention to the dry brown dust of other nations that swirled at the edge of my vision.

I hadn't forgotten Carrie Owens or Billy but I had laid aside my grief for them in favor of the rage that served only me.

Selfish
.

My truck, with high beams and emergency lights, looked like a low-flying UFO on dark roads as I raced to the bar.

Vengeance
.

When I reached the parking lot I stepped out, leaving the lights on. I pulled my weapon and checked its readiness, then I made sure I had spare and loaded magazines. It was just a precaution but it would have been foolish not to be sure. When I walked through the door I had my telescoping baton in my hand, not a gun. More discreet, less provocation, and I liked the feel of it. It's a good thing I did because I gripped it tighter the farther I walked into Moonshines.

The lights were off except for some in the far back, probably the kitchen. Most of the light came from Branson's neon ambience and the clear, moonlit night. In an eerie echo of the dark woods where I found Carrie, my truck's emergency lights shot through and died quickly within the angles of the restaurant. In the murk I could hear movement in two directions. On one side the slight sound of a footstep came from deeper shadows. On the other side, the bar, was the louder sound of ice in a glass. It was the combination of darkness, tiny sounds, and the threat within both that finally calmed me. I wanted vengeance but that wouldn't happen if I got myself killed. It wasn't the fear of dying, though: It was the fear of failing that let me be careful. I'd failed enough for one night.

Without turning my back on the shadows I went around the corner into the bar. There was Byron Figorelli in a square of sodium vapor light that came in through a high window. The yellow light reflected off the bottles behind the bar and through the glass partition, casting a speckled sheen on the stainless-steel distilling tanks. It was beautiful in a weird sort of way, like a promise you choose to believe against all reason. Figorelli put a cigarette in his mouth, then lit it. When the lighter flared the promise was lost to the light. His hands were swollen and cracked with one finger turned at an angle from the others. They weren't as bloody as his face. His right eye was blown and red and seemed to look at something not there. His nose was crushed and turned toward the bloody right eye. Everywhere there was blood. He smiled.

“You want a drink?” he asked. The slurred mumble wasn't because he'd been drinking.

“Who did this?”

“I ain't no snitch. A lot of things maybe, but . . . Fuck it.” He poured more whiskey into the highball glass.

“Are they still here?”

He took a sip, careful of the split lip and broken teeth, then said, “I don't know. But if I had to bet I'd say yes. I'm still kicking so someone is waiting to finish the job.” Figorelli took another longer drink and I felt myself craving one as well. “You should get lost,” he said after setting the glass down. It touched the bar almost silently and I was surprised by the fact that he was using a coaster. That seemed to be the most normal and the most out-of-place action in this entire exchange. He took a drag from the cigarette then another drink, setting the glass exactly in the center of the coaster.