Eyes of the Predator (12 page)

Across the road, Pete’s Place was
lit brightly and glowed in the early morning mist. Business seemed to be
thriving although it was well past the mandatory two a.m. last call and
closing. Such minor details did not seem to apply in Roydon, at least not when
the entire Sheriff’s Department and all the state troopers within fifty miles
were tied up at the scene of a murder. Some old black guy in a church lot off
the Jax Highway got knifed, the bartender advised his customers after hearing
the news from one of his contacts with connections to the Sheriff’s Department.
The staff of Pete’s Place kept tabs on the movement of the law around Pickham
County. Such information was important, even critical, in Roydon. The patrons
of Pete’s Place were duly grateful for the information and contributed
generously to the bartender’s tip jar. No one at the bar paid any attention to
the old car pulling away from the StarLite across the street.

Turning west away from the dusty,
old motel, Roydon faded in the car’s rearview mirror. Ahead a quiet, empty two
lane highway stretched into the darkness. He followed it a few miles, able to
see only a couple hundred feet in front and the shoulder of the road. The rest
was black.

The dark, predawn hour suited him
and his purpose. He knew he was surrounded by farmland and woods, and he knew
what he was looking for. He just had to find it before the daylight exposed
him. The car proceeded at a steady pace, not so slow as to attract attention or
so fast that he would outdrive the visibility of the headlights…searching.

Five miles down the two lane
road, he spotted a smaller country road and turned right, north. Then he saw
another road, this time an unpaved dirt road leading off to the west again. He
slowed to a stop, quietly opened his door, and looked around for lights or
other signs of houses and people. There weren’t any.

The car turned onto the dirt
road, lights off, and crept slowly for about half a mile. Pulling as far to the
right as the gravel shoulder of the road would allow, he put the car in park
and left the engine running. He could see little but was able to get the trunk
of the car opened. He had to work for a minute to get his arms under the heavy,
wrapped bundle in the trunk so that he could lift it out. Again, he looked
around for signs of light or movement. He heard only the sounds of the night,
insects humming, and the rustling of small animals in the brush along the road.
Somewhere a rooster crowed. There were farms around. Unlike city folks, country
old-timers did not burn lights at night.

The early morning predawn glow
could now be seen off to the east, although he still stood in blackness on the
small, dirt road. The night was waning and soon the morning light would reveal
his movements and the car.

Moving more quickly now, he
hefted the bundle over his shoulder and walked about ten paces into the
roadside brush. Beyond that, the brush was much thicker, and it would have been
difficult to push through with his load. Besides, he could hear live things
scurrying in the brush near him. There was no need to take a chance and
possibly step on a snake.

He let the bundle fall from his
shoulder. It hit the ground with a heavy thud.

Walking quickly back to his car,
he gently closed the trunk lid so that it made only a barely audible click.
Pulling across the road, then reversing, and then forward again, he got the car
turned around and headed back the way he had come.

Fifteen minutes later, the car
was passing through Roydon. The eastern sky ahead was lit with a cherry glow.
In the soft, early morning light, Roydon was almost a pretty little hamlet.
Almost.

The screen door of Pete’s Place
slammed as the old car passed by heading towards the interstate. Two large
bikers stood outside blinking in the dim morning light after pulling an
all-nighter at the bar. They talked animatedly for a few seconds, fist bumped,
and climbed on their Harleys.

The gray eyes of the predator
clicked up to the rearview mirror as he passed by and watched the bikers cross
the road with a roar into the parking lot of the StarLite Motel. Smiling, he
wondered if they wanted a room for the whole day, and if it would be the one he
had occupied so recently. He was pretty sure the StarLite didn’t promise
patrons clean sheets and a complimentary continental breakfast.

A quarter mile further up the
dirt road from where the old car had stopped, Tom Ridley, who had lived in his
small, frame house all of his life, was up for the day and had just walked
outside to pee in the yard. His wife hated it when he did that, but early in
the morning like this, she wasn’t up and about yet. This was his private time,
and that included peeing in the yard if he wanted. That’s how they had done it
when he was growing up, and it suited him fine. Besides, there was a sense of
well-being and freedom, standing in the fresh morning air doing what nature
called him to do with no one around.

As Tom was finishing his morning
ritual, he thought he heard a small click. At first, he thought it was just the
last few drops hitting the ground. A moment later though, he could clearly hear
in the quiet morning air the sound of tires moving and turning and what sounded
like a car backing up and then going forward, changing from drive to reverse
and back to drive.

Probably Deputy Mackey sleeping
out his night shift on the deserted dirt road and now heading home, he thought.
He didn’t blame him much. All them sheriff’s boys had two or three part-time
jobs. If they needed to catch a little shut-eye on his dirt road before going
home, he was fine with that. He did the same himself sometimes out behind the
chicken barns where he worked. A little nap in the middle of the workday made
things seem right. They got it right down south of the border.
Siesta.
The
older he got, the more he appreciated the concept.

Tom stretched, scratched, and
pulled one strap of his overalls up over his shoulder. The night was beginning
to fade. A light breeze came up, thick with the smells of the earth. He watched
as the sky lightened. To the east, down the little dirt road, Tom Ridley’s
road, the sun cast a reddish glow up over the horizon. The red glow lit the
side of their small frame house in a way he never tired of seeing. It seemed
that of all the houses in the world, the sun had chosen to spotlight his little
house. The one where they had raised their boy, lived their lives, and most
likely, where they would die. But not today, Tom smiled inwardly.

“Margaret, you up?” he hollered
at the house.

A moment later, the rusty screen
creaked and then clattered shut as his wife shuffled in her slippers onto the
back porch.

“I’m up. I’m up. What you
hollerin’ about.”

The plump woman in a worn robe
and slippers lifted her eyes to the sunrise as she lifted a coffee cup to her
lips. She smiled.

“That’s a nice one, Tom. Real
nice.”

They stood quietly watching the
world wake up for a few minutes.

“Here,” she said. “Come get your
coffee… and have you been peeing in the yard again?”

She shook her head and went back
through the screen door. Tom Ridley thumped up the old porch steps and grabbed
the screen door before it closed, casting one last rearward glance down the
road towards the rising sun. The rightness of the scene made him smile.

The whine of the car’s tires on
the asphalt forced his eyes open.

George Mackey was fatigued. The
adrenaline had faded, and although Mrs. Sims’ admonition to catch the person
who had murdered her husband still echoed in his ears, he found his head
nodding and eyes closing as he drove. The radio chatter from the units, state
and local, responding to the murder scene at the church had faded into the
early morning silence so familiar on this shift.

Directed by the sheriff that he
had no further duties at the crime scene, he had made a wandering patrol of the
county. When he nearly put the truck into the roadside ditch, George decided it
was time to head for one of his ‘cracks’, a place where others usually did not
go, and a deputy could fairly safely pull over and sit undetected and watch, or
doze as was the case this night. All deputies had their favorite crack. George
was in his now.

It was an old rest area on a
state highway. Not one of the big, fancy rest areas on the interstate, it was
just a dirt pull off from the two lane highway with a couple of picnic tables
surrounded by large trees. The state maintained it, such as it was, because it
was on a stretch of state highway that crossed southern Georgia from east to
west, skirting the Okeefenokee Swamp.

Backing his vehicle as far as
possible to the rear of the rest area, George stopped in the trees and brush,
and cut the engine. The brown sheriff’s pickup was invisible in the dark and
shadows.

Rolling the window down, he gave
a knob on the radio a quick twist to turn the volume up and pulled his jacket
tight around him. A minute later, his eyes had fluttered closed.

A few minutes passed before the
tire and engine sounds of the approaching car had roused him. The noise
increased in pitch as the car approached. George sat motionless, head back
against the headrest, bundled in his jacket, arms folded across his chest. His
eyes were slit open and peering over the steering wheel as the car passed, the
Doppler effect causing the engine noise to decrease in pitch as it moved away
from the deputy’s position. It was an older model car, maybe a Chevrolet or
Pontiac or some other GM model. Color was uncertain, maybe gray or faded brown.
Very plain looking.

It was a little early for normal
traffic to be out, but not unheard of. Probably a car traveling from the west
across the state, headed to one of the coastal towns or barrier islands. George
was not aware that the car had already passed this way heading west, not more
than fifteen minutes before George had pulled into the rest area.

No big deal anyway, farmers
around here all drove old cars. Normally, they rose and slept with the sun.
While this was a bit early for them to be out, sometimes the old ones couldn’t
sleep like normal people and would be up and fidgety at ungodly hours for no
apparent reason, checking on livestock or a vegetable garden or the chicken
barns or some such farm stuff. They couldn’t wait until daylight. They were up
and bound to be stirring about. It was just their nature. He knew it because he
had come up on a farm not far from here, and he had made up his mind not to
live that life. George Mackey shifted in his seat a bit, pulled his jacket
tighter around his neck and waited for daybreak so that he could call the
dispatcher and tell her he was going off duty. His small, empty apartment and
bed awaited.

The old car’s taillights faded
out of sight. Dumb farmer, he thought.

Leyland Torkman, he actually went
by the nickname Lylee, was completely unaware of Tom’s morning ritual or
George’s secret napping spot. Having retraced his route in the old Chevy back
to the StarLite Motel and onto I-95, he relaxed a bit and scanned the
interstate for danger and opportunities.

The sobriquet of Lylee was one
used by those who knew him, not because they were friends and on intimate
terms. It would have been hard, maybe impossible, to find someone who actually
called him ‘friend’. But people who knew him just learned to call him by the
name his mother had used when he was a child because it was the name he used
for himself, although not through any attachment to his mother. He liked the
innocent, childlike sound of it. It suited his purpose. Another form of
camouflage. Others might have snickered at the childish name, but that was
between them, and not within the hearing of Leyland Torkman.

The nickname from his mother had
come perhaps because she thought it a cute name for her cute little boy. She
had told him in his younger years that
‘Lylee’
was how he had pronounced
his own name as a toddler, and so she had started calling him that. It was hard
to believe that there had ever been any motherly affection in the life of this
quiet, sullen man but, in fact, he had had a mother who thought he was the
center of the universe. While they had lived on the edge of poverty, she had
worked hard to make sure he had the nice things that other children had.

That was a bone of contention
between his mother and father, a man who worked at menial jobs trying to
support his family and who felt that they shouldn’t put on airs to be like
others. The dead end work and endless poverty had led his father to drink, and
eventually an early grave. The departure of his father from their life was
hardly felt by Lylee. His mother had kept him isolated from the only man who
could have been a part of his life. He belonged to her and no one else. He was
her little Lylee.

The pride of fatherhood had
brought them together as a family, at first. Although Lylee had no memory of it
and his mother would never have shared it with him, Bud Torkman had been as
devoted to his son as the boy’s mother was. But tension had grown between them
as it became clear that she considered Lylee hers, not their son…hers.
Eventually, the tension with his wife and the burden of barely being able to
provide for his family had worn him down. The alcohol and the emotional
distance he put between himself and wife and child were a barrier. It kept them
out and him in. In the end, the old man just came and went to work and barely
spoke to his son or acknowledged his existence.

The loss of his father was not
tragic. In fact, it didn’t register at all to Lylee. The event had no
significance and meant nothing to him. The boy continued in school as an
average student. He had no extracurricular school activities, but did have an
after school job at an early age. He was considered a good worker by a
succession of employers, but none ever asked him to stay when he left. An air
of inapproachability surrounded the young man. He moved through the world
invisibly.