Vile Blood (17 page)

Baby Laura lay in the crib, screaming, little face red as a beet, maddening yells coming from her, getting louder each time she filled her lungs. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and tears of rage ran down her squashed baby face, her little fists shaking in the air.

Aunt Sally came into the room. A younger Aunt Sally, no gray in her hair.

“Hush now,” she said, but the baby carried on screaming.

Aunt Sally lifted Baby Laura from the crib and held her, patting her back, but the little feet kicked and the fists pummeled and that mouth stayed open, hurling out screams that got louder and louder.

“Shut up!” Aunt Sally said, holding the baby at arm’s length, shaking her. “For pity sake, shut up!”

But it did no good—if anything the volume of the cries increased and Aunt Sally started sobbing too, quietly, drowned out by the baby.

Aunt Sally put Baby Laura back in the crib and the baby kicked and punched and screamed and Aunt Sally leaned against the wall and ran a hand through her hair that stood away from her head in a hard black mess.

“Sweet Jesus, give me some peace,” Aunt Sally said, wiping at the tears on her own face.

The infant seemed to hear and the cries stopped as Baby Laura took a few gasps and coughed.

Aunt Sally sighed. “Thank God.”

Then, as if a switch had been thrown, the crying began again. Even louder. Even more insistent. Even more demanding.

And Aunt Sally lifted a pink pillow from the crib and she put it over the baby’s face. The little fists still punched and the feet kicked but the sound was stilled and after a while the baby stopped moving.

Aunt Sally lifted the pillow and stared down. Then she put a finger to the baby’s neck. Picked up the infant and shook it again but it hung from her hands lifeless as a rag doll.

And Aunt Sally started to sob.

The spreading warm dampness brought Timmy back to the empty nursery and he realized he’d wet his pants, the pee running out of the bottom of his jeans onto his sneakers. It was too late to stop, so he just stood there, terrified, shaking, his bladder emptying itself onto the carpet.

When it was done Timmy found a dusty towel draped over one of the chairs and used it to mop up his pee. He folded the towel and shoved it under the crib and went out into the dark corridor.

He crept down to the kitchen and saw old gray Aunt Sally sitting at the table with her back to him, watching the TV on the counter, Oprah saying something to a very fat lady and a very thin lady. Timmy snuck past, through the living room, easing open the front door and slipping out into the night, running when he got to the road.

Running toward the neon of Earl’s Diner that flickered over the rooftops.

Running toward Skye.

35

The white line stretched long and straight in the headlamps of the Lincoln, dragging Gene closer to the distant glow on the horizon. Closer to Timmy.

Drum was asleep in the rear of the car, his huge form folded into the cramped space like a contortionist in a box, his breathing ragged but regular, the stink of old blood, liquor and sweat rising from him in waves.

Gene’s phone bleated in his pocket and he freed it, seeing Bobby Heck’s name on the display.

“Yes?” he said.

“Gene, your boy . . .”

Gene sat up straighter, a cold hand grabbing at his guts. “What’s happened?”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“One minute he was with Sally, next he just disappeared. She feels real bad, Gene.”

“Bobby, put out an alert, hear me?”

“I already done that.”

“I’m nearly in town. Call me if you hear anything.”

Gene killed the call and tramped on the brakes,
tires screaming as they bit the asphalt,
the car bucking and swerving, Drum thrown against the front seats, cursing. The Town Car came to a halt broadside to the road and even before it had stopped rocking on its springs Gene had the Glock in his hand, shoving it between the seats, pressing it against Drum’s forehead.

“Where is he?” Gene said,

“Who?”

“My boy?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

Gene’s finger was on the trigger. “I’ll shoot you Drum, if you don’t tell me what your people have done with my son.”

“Martindale, there’s no goddam people.”

“What?”

“Jesus, boy, you never played poker? I was fuckin’ bluffin’, man. To save my ass.”

“You knew he was at Bobby’s place.”

“I heard you on the phone to Heck. Didn’t take no genius to work that out.”

‘You’re lying,” Gene said, grinding the metal of the gun against bone, grabbing at Drum’s wounded shoulder with his free hand and squeezing.

Drum bit back the pain, glaring at him over the gun barrel, a fresh fall of sweat on his forehead. “Then shoot me, Martindale, if you ain’t too chickenshit.”

Gene released him, turning in his seat, seeing again the look in Skye’s eyes when she’d held his boy on the sidewalk outside the school.

He cranked the car and sped on toward the town, hoping that he was in time.

The diner was dead. Earl in the kitchen listening to Willie Nelson whining on about a broken heart, Minty sitting in a booth filing her nails, Skye restless, prowling, unable to keep still. Waiting for Gene to come with the money, so she could begin her exile, leaving behind everything she loved.

She felt a desolation so profound that a sob escaped her and when Minty looked up from her nail work, Skye pretended to cough.

“You okay, honey?” Minty asked.

“I’m just fine.”

Minty was staring at her.

“What?” Skye said.

“Girl you are ripening by the day, as God is my witness.”

Skye waved this away, but she caught her reflection in the window: her breasts seemed fuller, the nipples hard as thimbles beneath her T-shirt, her belly more rounded, her hips carrying more weight, the jeans that had once hung from her boy’s body suddenly snug as they flowed with these new
curves
.

 “All you need is some of this to make you hotter than hell on Sunday,” Minty said, uncapping a tube of lipstick and holding it up to Skye. She dipped a hand in her apron and
snagged
her small make-up mirror. “Come, sit your cute ass down and
pucker up.”

Skye shook her head.

“Do it for me, hon. For poor, used up, left-on-the-shelf Minty.”

She laughed and so did Skye. Shrugging, she slid into the booth opposite Minty and took the little round mirror and the tube. The waxy
cylinder of fat and oil
was warm and fleshy as she pouted and applied it. Seeing her blood-red lips triggered something in her, something that scuttled low and deep. Skye snapped the mirror shut.

The door chimed and Skye turned to see Timmy coming in, face flushed and distressed as he rushed across to her. She stood and let him run into her arms.

“Timmy, what’s wrong?”

The boy said nothing, burying his head in her midriff, clutching at her. Gently, Skye broke the embrace and knelt down, the ammonia whiff of urine reaching her nostrils.

“What’s happened, Timmy? Where’s your daddy?”

“Gone to the city.”

“Were you with Maria?”

Timmy shook his head. “No, Aunt Sally.”

“Does she know you’re gone?”

Timmy shook his head.

“Why did you run away?”

When Timmy shook his head again, Skye held his hand and walked him toward the bathrooms, shrugging over her shoulder at Minty who watched them, plucked eyebrows raised.

Inside the ladies’ room Skye wet a towel at the basin and led Timmy across to a cubicle. She stripped off the soaked jeans and skivvies and wiped him down with the towel.

“You wait here now, okay?” she said and he nodded.

She went into the locker room and found the small pile of blue check chef’s pants that Earl had laundered every week. Skye took a pair and went back into the bathroom.

She held the pants open and let Timmy step into them. Earl was a runt of a man, but Timmy swam in the trousers. Skye tugged at the drawstring until the material gripped the boy’s waist, then she folded the turn-ups, the pants resting on his sneakers. She pulled his T-shirt down and nodded.

“Hey,” she said. “Looks like Earl’s got him a new short order cook.”

This raised a smile from the boy and Skye hugged him, the smooth skin of his neck brushing her face, the smell of his blood rich and warm in her nostrils. And right then The Other
overpowered
her and she grabbed Timmy tight, her mouth opening, her teeth closing in on his flesh, her body shifting and changing, strength and desire surging through her.

36

Drum lay with his head against the rear door of the Lincoln, legs drawn up to his chin, knees brushing the roof, his blood awash with
booze, OxyContin and adrenaline.
The pain in his shoulder had subsided to a dull ache, the opiate in the drug working its magic, but he’d endured minutes of agony after Martindale had
messed with his wound,
got it bleeding again under the bandage, the flow pooling on the swell of his gut.

When the little bastard had withdrawn his Glock and got the Town Car speeding into the night, Drum had felt the purest impulse to shoot him in the back of the head just to see his brain splatter the windshield like road kill. Nearly goddam did it to, and would have taken his chances in the wreck—already bracing himself for the Hollywood-class roll and tumble that would’ve inevitably resulted—but for a jolt of pain that gave him a moment’s clarity and insight.

He saw that his alliance with Tincup was over, the preacher’s misjudgment nearly costing Drum his head, and he knew he’d have to find a new way to exercise power, knew the answer was Skye Martindale, or whoever the hell she was.

Drum found himself remembering a dirty hippie girl he’d busted years ago for carrying an ounce of hash in her backpack. She was one of that tribe of wild-haired creatures who’d traveled the roads back then, fleeing snowbound
northern
suburbia for the heat of the borderlands, lured by the promise of
abundant
narcotics and
unbridled
carnality.

He’d ended up smoking the hash with her and screwing her skinny ass in his big old bed. She’d shacked up with him for a month before wanderlust
took hold
and she blew away into the dust. 

Drum, never a reader, loved a good story, and the hippy harlot’s skill between the sheets was matched only by her talent as a yarn spinner. Lying naked on his bed, their sweat drying to salt, hash smoke making Jesus Rays of the sunlight from the window, she’d told him about her journey along what she called the Left Handed Path. How she believed that using an occult brew of drugs and sex and magic—slow dancing with the Devil, she’d called it—jacked you into a power beyond your wildest imaginings.

She’d dragged dog-eared books out of her backpack, books that looked like they’d been printed on used shit paper, sporting pictures of skinny Hindus sitting twisted as pretzels with their eyes dipped back to white, and jungle medicine men with Three Stooges haircuts and blood dripping from self-inflicted wounds. Told him these guys ate human flesh to bring them nearer to ecstasy. Said she was here to seek out men just the other side of the border who did this, too. Who had found the path to
ultimate power.

Now Drum had tried many things—threesomes with hermaphrodite whores, had eaten rattlesnake and sheep brains and goat’s balls cooked in mescal, and had used every drug known to man from weed to bathtub heroin—but he’d never acquired a taste for the flesh of his fellow man. Just never felt the urge, though he understood that there were those who did. Like the Martindale girl, as evidenced by her all-you-can-eat buffet out in the desert.

Breaking the last taboo, the hippie harlot had said. Crossing the line toward true freedom.

And as the lights of the town rushed closer, Drum understood that if he could harness the thing the Martindale girl became, his power would be limitless. He would terrify the borderlands into submission.

Drum knew it would be dangerous. The crazy bitch was possessed by something unnatural, but the key to controlling her was the skinny chief deputy and his whelp.

 So his revolver stayed holstered and he endured the discomfort: each vibration of the car sending little waves of pain deep into his suppurating wound. He held his tongue as the garish neon of the diner bloomed through the windshield and Gene Martindale swung the car into the gas station’s forecourt.

The Lincoln had barely come to a halt when Gene turned to Drum and said, “Leave this car and I’ll shoot you.”

Without waiting for a reply he
quit the Town Car
and pushed into the empty diner. No, not quite empty. Timmy’s unruly hair stuck up above the back of one of the booths and as Gene advanced he saw Skye sitting opposite the boy, her hands on the Formica tabletop.

Timmy was spooning a sundae into his mouth, his face a mess where he’d missed his target.

“Timmy,” Gene said.

The boy stopped, spoon halfway to his mouth and looked at his father.

“Timmy I want you to listen to me real good now, okay?”

“Yessir,” the boy said.

“Put down the spoon.”

“But I ain’t done.”

“Timmy, put it down.”

The boy lay down the spoon in the saucer, silver clinking against china.

“Now stand up and go and wait for me by the door. Don’t go outside, just wait there.”

The boy looked at Skye who nodded and Timmy clambered out of the booth. Gene saw he was wearing a pair of check pants that he had to hold onto as he hustled over to the door.

Gene slid into the booth. “I told you to leave him alone.”

“He just arrived here, Gene,” Skye said. “Real upset.”

“Like hell he did.”

Gene reached over and
grabbed
Skye by the bib of her apron, trying to pull her toward him. Her eyes darkened and for a second he couldn’t move her, then her gaze slid away from his and she softened, leaning in toward him.