Eyes of the Predator (17 page)

The Chief Deputy took a deep
breath. George could be a good deputy…sometimes. Other times he was, well, he
was from another time, the epitome of the redneck deputy. George presented just
the kind of image that Sheriff Klineman was trying to end. Still, he had a way
of being around when things happened, in the right place, or maybe the wrong
place, at the right time. In any event, it didn’t matter now. This was some
serious shit, and George was coming in.

“George, put your boots on and
come in. Now.”

“Aw, Ronnie,” he rubbed one cold
foot against the other.

“Now, George.” He paused and
added, “There was another killing.”

George stopped in his tracks and
closed his eyes as the image of Mrs. Sims pointed at him over the body of her
dead husband.

“What? What happened?”

“We don’t know.”

“Where?”

“Out on Tom Ridley’s road.”

“What? Tom Ridley killed
someone?” George sat down in the kitchen chair and reached down for his boots,
the phone against his ear, crooked in his neck.

“No, no. Not Tom. Tom found the
body. Some girl. Haven’t ID’ed her yet, but you were working the beat last
night, and the sheriff wants you in, immediately. You got it? Right now,
George.”

“I hear you, Ronnie. Be there
soon.”

“And George, start thinking about
anything you might have seen last night. We don’t have much on this one.
Nothing really. Anything you have is gonna be more than we have now. Oh yea,
one more thing, the GBI is here. They’re gonna take lead on this case too, so
try to look like a sheriff’s deputy, please.” Ronnie hung up and George started
pulling his boots off again so that he could put his pants on.

Ronnie Kupman knew, and George
knew, that Ronnie had saved his job a couple of times when the sheriff would
have let George go as a throwaway to the past.

Ronnie Kupman also knew that,
while George might be a throwback to a different era in police work, he was not
a throwaway. He was a natural hunter. He knew where to be when the bad guy
showed up. He was sloppy in his personal demeanor, some thought slovenly and
lazy, but he was a good deputy. Who knows, in a big city like Atlanta, he might
have been a great detective. Probably not though, George was one of those who
did not fit in. Scruffy and unkempt, he didn’t know how to fit in, and funny
thing was, he didn’t even know that he didn’t fit in.

Still, they could use his help
now. Ronnie looked across the small dirt road to the covered bundle in the
brush. His face twitched at the grisly pictures that flashed across his mind.
Bad. Real bad. He wondered what the animal that had done this looked like.

With slightly shaky hands, he lit
a cigarette and looked down at his boots in the dust. He was surprised to see a
little smudge of blood from the girl’s body on the side of his right boot. He
scraped the boot in the dirt trying to scrub the blood off.

He inhaled deeply and looked
across the road again. An animal did this. They needed a hunter. They needed
George right now.

Henry watched the two young men
tramp out of the truck stop cafe. One, the younger one, stopped as if he were
going to come back, but the girl at the booth just looked down at the slip of
paper he had given her. She wouldn’t look up at him. After a moment, the young
man followed his brother to their truck.

Such a tender scene. Henry gave a
grunt of disgust. He sat at the booth watching the girl and playing with his
coffee cup. Glancing down at his watch, he smiled. He didn’t have to be in
Chattanooga until tomorrow. Plenty of time. More than enough time. He held his
coffee cup up and caught the waitress’ attention, waving the cup at her.

The waitress got a hard look on
her face and walked over with the coffee pot. She didn’t like people waving
cups at her. It was about as rude as pointing a finger or whispering. She
sloshed coffee into Henry’s cup, deliberately careless.

“Hey!” the big man said. “Try to
get some in the cup, girl.” Henry grabbed some napkins out of the dispenser on
the table and sopped up the spilled coffee.

“Hey, yourself,” the waitress
replied, looking down at him, a hand on a hip and raised eye brows, like a
mother eyeing a misbehaving child. “Where’d you learn your manners?”

“Same place you learned to pour
coffee, I guess,” Henry said looking up from the wet napkins on the table. He
noticed the name tag on her chest, ‘Marla’. He also noticed the full bosom
underneath the tag. He could just make out the bra beneath the tight, white
fabric of her synthetic waitress dress. At that point, he smiled up at her, but
his eyes stayed on her breasts.

Marla shook her head and walked
off. Truck drivers, she thought. What a bunch of pigs. Aware that Henry was
staring at her ass as she walked, she threw a little more sway into her stride.
Let the fat pig try to get that out of his mind tonight, jacking off in the cab
of his truck.

Henry watched her go. In fact, he
was looking at Marla’s ass. A little plump, but he wouldn’t kick her out of
bed. She wasn’t really his type though, mouthy with lots of attitude. He liked
them more…subdued.

Henry turned his thoughts from
the temporary distraction of Marla’s tits and ass back to the young girl at the
table across the room. Nope, Marla was definitely not his type. Henry had
something else on his mind.

Unaware of Henry’s attention, Lyn
lifted her eyes from the napkin with Clay’s cell number printed carefully on
it. She looked around the truck stop cafe. How would she know who to ask for a
ride? Who would be safe, if anyone?

Unable to focus on anything, the
cafe and faces at the tables swirled around her in a kaleidoscope of movement
and color, with no meaning and no point of reference. How would she find a
ride? She had wanted to take Clay up on his offer, it was tempting, and she had
almost found herself saying yes.

But the need to see this through,
whatever it was, burned inside her. After eighteen years of living in the hell
created by her father, she couldn’t just take the first opportunity. It might
be no better than what she had escaped. She had to do this or doubt herself the
rest of her life. Besides, Daddy would be looking for her around Pickham
County. She had to put more distance between them.

After a while, she stood up and
walked from the cafe into the truck stop store. She did not notice the large
man who stood up from the booth across the room and walked at a distance behind
her. He watched her ass as she walked.

The big bosomed waitress, Marla,
glanced up from her order pad. Just a fat pig, she thought. Looking at that
young girl’s ass like he had any chance with her, or like he would know what to
do with it if he got his hands on it. And she was just a child. Besides, he
didn’t know what he was missing here, she thought, smoothing the tight dress
over her thighs. His loss.

 Very conscious of the other
truckers’ eyes following her, waitress Marla put the coffee pot down and walked
over to a customer that had just sat at a table. The tight white skirt
undulated over her round bottom as she walked. They were all watching. She knew
it and her hips swayed more widely. The round bottom rolled wonderfully under
the tight dress, to the delight of all the large men in the room.

Coming to the table, she
caressingly smoothed the back of her skirt over her bottom and smiled at her
customer. “What can I get you, hon?” she asked. The truck driver returned the
smile appreciatively.

Henry was long gone and would
have paid her no mind anyway. Henry had other plans.

The gravel road to Tom Ridley’s
house was blocked. Deputy George Mackey had to park the dusty, county issued
pickup at the end of a long line of emergency vehicles. He made his way up the
dirt road past four other county cars, two GBI investigative units, a crime
scene processing unit also from the GBI, an ambulance and Timmy Farrin’s van
from the radio station in Everett. Timmy was probably providing a feed to the
Savannah news channels, or hoping to.

The vehicles were all lined as
far to the right as possible on the narrow dirt road. There were no flashing
lights. That was all movie stuff. In real life, emergency lights were only used
when necessary, as a warning to traffic, or to move people out of the way, or
to alert the bad guy to stop. There was no traffic out here on this dusty road,
just the humming of grasshoppers in the weeds along the side, and the bad guy,
whoever he was, was long gone.

Up ahead, closest to the scene,
he saw a black Cadillac hearse from Morton’s Funeral Parlor. Two men, one short
and one tall, in dark suits were leaning against it smoking. They seemed
incongruously casual and unconcerned, as if they were waiting for the dinner
bell at a Sunday church social after services.

Just beyond the hearse, yellow
tape marked repetitively, “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” was stretched across the
road. The tape extended into the woods several yards on both sides, but went
further on the right a good fifty feet or so.

He came even with the two men
leaning on the hearse.

“How you boys doin?” he said,
walking by.

“Doin’ good, George. Yourself?”
the tall one said

“Had better days.” He reached for
the yellow tape to lift it.

“Yeah, well this one is bad.
Pretty little girl. Bad.” The tall mortician shook his head and took a drag on
his cigarette, leaning his head towards his younger, shorter companion he said
something inaudible.

George stepped under the tape and
into the crime scene. The hearse driver’s words fading behind him, he couldn’t
help but wonder what in the world would prompt a person to take up undertaking
as a career. They gave him the creeps. The men were harmless in themselves, but
their casual and unconcerned manner was somehow eerie and disconcerting. George
was used to death and mayhem. Even out in the Georgia countryside, bad things
happened—car wrecks, assaults, bar fights, and shootings. But when the police
or ambulance or fire department arrived on the scene, they were busy trying to
do something about it. The undertakers just stood there, smoking and waiting.
Like they were picking up a package. Nothing special. Just picking up another
package for delivery to a hole scratched in the sandy south Georgia soil.

It was probably not fair to judge
them that way. It was just their way of dealing with a bad situation. Still, it
gave him the creeps.

Timmy Farrin called to him as he
walked over to where Sheriff Klineman and Ronnie Kupman were standing.

“George, they won’t let me past
the tape. How about letting me know what’s happening. I got all the TV stations
in Savannah waiting for some word. They got their people on the way, but right
now, I’m it. Be something if we could scoop them and get the story out before
they get here. Put Pickham County on the map.”

George looked at him and
shrugged, “Timmy, you know I can’t do that,” and then added more loudly for the
sheriff’s benefit, “All statements have to come from the sheriff’s office or
the GBI.” It was a deliberately clumsy and blatantly insincere statement,
intended more to annoy the sheriff than ingratiate himself with him.

He stepped over to the sheriff
and Kupman.

“What’s up, boss?”

The sheriff’s gaze held a look of
resigned displeasure. They both knew he didn’t like George. Right now, he was a
necessary inconvenience. Ronnie was convinced that George could add something
to the investigation. The GBI agent, Shaklee had echoed the sentiment, and for
the moment, Sheriff Klineman would solicit assistance from any source. There
was an election at stake. To answer the question he had shouted rhetorically
back at the office, two murders in one day in Pickham County
was
‘a
fucking crime wave’. If they thought George could help, so be it.

George knew everyone. He had
lived there all his life. Still, being sheriff and having George as a deputy
was like fishing with worms. The fishing could be good, but every now and then,
you had to reach in the can and grab another slimy worm to bait the hook. For
the sheriff, dealing with George was like reaching into the worm can. He liked
being sheriff, but he still had to touch the worms every now and then.

As George walked up, Klineman
stated firmly, “
All
statements will come from the
sheriff’s office
,
not the GBI. Are you clear on that Deputy?”

“Sure. Absolutely Sheriff.”
George thought about spitting tobacco juice near the sheriff’s feet, but this
was a crime scene, and he didn’t want to contaminate it. Still…

Ronnie Kupman stepped in quickly.
“Come on, George. Want you to take a look at things.” He led George away.

 Kupman was different. He
genuinely liked George, although he wished George would clean up his act and
his boots some, and play the game with the sheriff and citizens a bit more
politically. He saw no reason why the common sense of good old police work by
good old boys couldn’t be combined with an appreciation for advancements in
police technology and procedure. He also acknowledged that times had changed,
for permanent. The old days and ways were gone. He accepted that as progress.
He knew that George had a difficult time with the change. He also knew that
that was why George would likely never be more than a road deputy. But, they
needed road deputies, and George was a good one. To Kupman’s mind, George’s
common sense methods and modern law enforcement practice were not mutually
exclusive, although he recognized that in George’s case they were often
mutually antagonistic.

 “Follow me, George. Got a
bad one here,” Ronnie Kupman took a drag on his cigarette as if to take a bad
taste out of his mouth. “Over here.”