Combustible (A Boone Childress Novel) (16 page)

"To
the house in Tin City. Abner wants me to visit Stumpy. I have to ask him for the finger."

"Again?"

"Again."

“
Okay,” Cedar said, “but this time, you're coming along. I'm got getting anywhere near. Too weird."

"It's just a finger."

"What finger? I'm talking about Stumpy."

Boone scooted the passenger seat back as far as it would go. He still had too much leg for Cedar's VW Bug, and his knee knocked against the dash vase holding an oversized tie-dye daisy made of silk.

"I'm too much man for your car," he told Cedar as s
he backed out of the parking space.

"And
they say size doesn't matter." She laughed, then hit the gas, and Boone's head snapped against the seat.

"
Ow! What are you, a jackrabbit?" he asked.

"You could use a little acceleration in your life," she said
.

Dust clouds billowed out behind the car as she whipped the car onto Highway
12.

"What's that supposed to mean?"
he said.

"It means what it means."

"Did I do something to make you mad?"

"Nothing," she said. Her eyes were fixed on the road as she rammed the
gearshift into fourth. "You haven't done a thing."

Boone decided to take her at her word, but he could tell from her body language that she was upset about something
.

"
Damn it," Cedar said, eyes fixed on the rearview.

Boone knew that look. He
glanced out the back window. A Bragg County sheriff's car was on their tail, lights flashing. It looked like Deputy Mercer had Cedar is his sights, too.

"Pull over," Boone said.

"I am pulling over."

Cedar
drifted to the shoulder of the highway, a soft berm that overlooked part of Black Oak Creek. He checked the side mirror. Deputy Mercer was not behind the wheel. It was the sheriff.

Hoyt climbed out of his cruiser, adjusted his trooper hat then set his palm on the grip of his Glock. The flashing blue lights lent a purple shadow to his face, blanching the ruddy color away and highlighting the
pockmarks on his cheeks. When he spoke, his voice full of the sound of gravels and dust, Boone didn't know him.

"Put that away," the sheriff barked
at Cedar. "I know who y'all are."

She stuffed the license in her pocket, but she was steaming.

"Boone," the sheriff said, "I'd like a minute of your time."

After shrugging to Cedar that he had no earthly idea what was going on, Boone followed Hoyt to the prowler. The car's lights were still going, and the radio squawked like an angry chicken. The smell of the cedar trees that lined both sides of the highway reminded Boone of an antique wardrobe Mom kept in her bedroom. It was a strange thought to have just then, but the whole situation was strange.

Hoyt put his foot up on the bumper.
"You need to keep out of police business."

"
What business would that be?"

"Don’t act stupid,
son, 'cause you’re not. I know your granddaddy's been sticking his nose where it don’t belong, and I don't appreciate it. I also know that you've been helping him."

Boone held out his hands, palms up. "What is it you think I'm doing?"

"There's a lot of things I can tolerate," Hoyt said. "Vigilantes ain't one of them."

Boone resisted the urge to correct his subject-verb agreement. "How do
Eugene Loach and his boys fit into that equation? You say you don't tolerate vigilantes, but he's running a pogram against Latinos right under your nose."

"A what?"

"A pogram. It's an organized campaign of violence against an ethnic group. The words comes from Russian—"

"
Boone, if me and your mama wasn't friends, I knock you upside the head." He stood ramrod straight, put a palm on the Glock, and stuck out his chin. "You just told me everything I needed to know. I'm going to say this once. You're just a college student, so you better act like one. Go to class, study hard, and all that bullshit. But that's it. I expect you to keep your nose clean and your ass wiped. Got that?"

Boone saluted. "Yes sir."

"Don't get smart with me, boy."

"No sir," he said and promised to do as he was told. But as he walked back to the Volkswagen, he could only think about the words
,
don't get smart with me, boy
. Deputy Mercer had used the very same phrase.

He wondered how much difference there really was between the two men.

The
yard around the Tin City property looked like Stumpy had been searching for buried treasure. The path between the main house and the tobacco barns was pocked with dozens of deep holes and mounds of black and white sandy dirt. Near the largest barn, the holes were fewer but larger, like the shape of a casket.

Cedar
parked in an undisturbed part of the yard. "Somebody's been busy," she said as they got out of her VW.

"You
have a gift for understatement." Boone spotted Stumpy's Airstream through the trees and started in that direction. "I didn't think Stumpy had enough motivation for digging."

Cedar
clipped the leash to Chigger's collar. He ran beside her up the path, panting with excitement, savoring the luscious new smells on the wind.

No
one answered the door when Boone knocked. He beat on the trailer and called, "Stumpy!"

T
he only answer was the echo of his voice.

"Nobody's
home," Cedar said and popped down the steps of the small a rickety deck. "Let's go."

"
You're not getting off that easy."

She
walked backwards toward the path that led to her car. "Watch me."

"Then
you," Boone said while pulling out his cellphone, "can call Abner and explain to him that we didn't get the finger."

"Chigger,
bite Boone. He's a bad person."

Chigger
yawned then took a great interest in the sole of Cedar's sneakers.

"Good
dog." Boone rubbed his ears. "Come on, vicious, let's take a look around."

"Hey,
don't call my dog vicious. You'll hurt his feelings."

"Who
said I was talking to the dog?"

Cedar
swatted at him, but he danced away.

"Coward,"
Cedar said.

"Y
ou proved my thesis," he said, right before he fell into a deep hole. He landed hard, the impact knocking the wind out of him and making his ribs scream. “Shit! That hurt.”

Cedar's head appeared in the blue sky above
. "Are you okay down there?"

Her
hair clung to her face, and she would have looked angelic if she had not been so worried. Chigger joined her, whimpering at the lip of the hole as his paws knocked loose dirt down on Boone's face.

"I'm
fine." He had been lucky. The loose sand at the bottom of the hole, which was only about three feet across but almost eight feet deep, had cushioned his fall.

"You
sure?"

He
waved the hand. "Truly, I'm fine."

Cedar
started laughing. "I'm so sorry. You lo-looked so funny falling into th-that h-hole. Bloop!"

While
she was laughing and Chigger was barking, Boone took a closer look at the sides of the pit. There were similar markings on all of the walls, as if a mouth with ragged teeth had scraped them clean.

Stumpy
hadn't dug these holes. Not by hand, anyway.

"When
you're done with your fit of giggles," he called up, "could you get something to pull me out?”

"Okay," she said. "Be right back."

While she was gone, Boone took several photos with his cellphone camera. He also measured the depth of the cuts, which came up to the second knuckle of his index finger. Whatever Stumpy was looking for, he was using some heavy machinery. Maybe Stumpy, he reasoned, wasn't working alone. There were a lot of holes on the property, probably over a hundred, and they had been dug in a short amount of time. Then it occurred to him as Cedar dropped a coil of water hose down the side of the hole, maybe Stumpy wasn't involved in the digging at all.

Cedar had
grabbed Stumpy's water hose, leaving it screwed into the spigot and counting on the brass couplings to hold Boone's weight. Using his legs to brace his back against the dirt wall, Boone crawled out of the hole, his shoulders digging through the loose dirt. As he rolled over, he saw tread marks in the ground.

"Let's
go," he said as he dusted himself off.

"You're speak
ing my language,” Cedar said.

"After we get the finger."

"But you said—"

"I think S
tumpy may have left before he expected to, which leads me to believe that a dismembered finger was not something he packed. He kept it in the freezer, right?"

"Are you insane
?” I didn't go into his house. I stayed out on the porch.” She tied Chigger’s leash to a post on the rickety porch and followed Boone inside. ‘The container was cold, though."

The trailer smelled like Stumpy had be
en making soup with old shoes, and the air was thick with the scent of body odor and mold. Cedar pulled her shirt over her nose as Boone hit the lights.

"
Ugh," she said. "I'm not strong enough for this. My stomach can't hack the smell."

"Fish sticks,"
Boone said as he opened the freezer door and Chigger barked.

“So the freezer’s empty?”

“Almost,” Boone said, pulling out a package of lightly battered cod fillets, which someone had sealed by folding the top flat and rolling it up. “It’s a box of fish sticks.”

He unrolled the box and shook the contents onto the counter, which also held several opened packets of ketchup,
breadcrumbs, and an empty package of wieners. Three sticks fell out, followed by the finger, which was wrapped in plastic.

Cedar yelped but
tried to cover it with a cough. “He put someone’s body part in with food? That’s just so wrong.”

“
It’s a terrible way to preserve evidence, that’s for sure.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He slipped the digit into a bag and marked it. “At least he wrapped it in plastic.”

“Boone!”

“What?”

“You don’t think this is really, I don’t know, ghoulish?
I mean, I’m okay with scientific inquiry and all of that, but that thing you just stuck in your pocket was once attached to somebody's hand. How can you not be totally disgusted?”

There was no
way to explain it to her. It wasn't that death didn’t bother him. It did. But it was the ending of a life that ate through his gut, not the corpse that was left behind. It was something you couldn’t explain in the middle of a deserted, completely trashed trailer.

Clothes were strewn everywhere. The closest had been tossed, the side table drawers emptied onto the floor. Broke glass lay at the edge of Stumpy’s favorite sleeping post, the couch. It was hard to tell because of Stumpy’s underwhelming housekeeping skills, but
the more Boone looked around, the more he was convinced that someone else had helped Stumpy redecorate.

“Th
ey were looking for something,” he said.

“Who?”

Boone started down the paneled hallway. “The people who tossed this trailer. Look at this toilet.”

“How did we go from talking about human dignity to examining toilets?”
She followed him to the bathroom. “Oh, that’s how.”

T
he toilet had been shattered. From the small wood splinters on the floor, Boone suspected the instrument of destruction was a baseball bat. The cabinets above the toilet had been tossed, too. A bottle of bowl cleaner lay on its side, leaking blue liquid onto a stack of brown paper towels.

“Let’s check out the bedroom,”
Boone said as they backed away.

“Let’s leave instead,”
Cedar said.

She didn’t wait for his answer.
Boone heard the door slam, followed by the sounds of Chigger’s welcoming bark. He didn’t blame her for leaving. She was more evolved than he was in many ways, including having a higher sense of self-preservation.

Space in the
bedroom was tight. The double bed took up most of the room, leaving space for only a narrow bedside table, which had also been dumped. The mattress was askew on the frame. From the marks on the ceiling, it had been lifted then dropped. A single, yellowed sheet lay rumpled on the floor in front of the closet. Inside the closet, there were no coats, no shirts, not even a coat hanger.