Vile Blood (21 page)

Ghosts that whispered to him of punishment and retribution and a judgment not yet
done.

After the deaths of his parents Gene had lived a lie, sharing with nobody what had happened that night. When Skye tried to talk to him about fragments of memory that surfaced in her dreams, he’d shut her down, and repeated the story of the drifters with the vehemence of a mantra. He was the
single
keeper of the truth and it had corroded his soul, crippled him, despite the best efforts of his wife.

Fact was, he was scared to love too deeply. Or, more truthfully, admit to himself the depth of his love for his family lest some dark force take them for him in payment for the lie he had lived to protect his foundling sister.

Then, five years before, as if Gene had conjured them, Junior Cotton and a woman named Annie-Lynn Peyton—both members of the cult that had
found
sanctuary in Drum’s county—flagged down Marybeth, right here on this road, as she drove back from the store with a bag of groceries on the seat beside her. Heavily pregnant Marybeth, in her last trimester, ignoring Gene’s entreaties to stay at home and put her swollen feet up.

She stopped the station wagon at the exact spot where Gene and his mother had found Skye in the box all those years ago, and Junior Cotton and
Annie-Lynn Peyton
took Marybeth from the car and dragged her away from the road where they violated her and cut the baby from her and killed her slowly, leaving her lying in the dirt. Then they severed the umbilical and walked into the desert with the baby.

Bobby Heck found Marybeth. Patrolling, he saw the station wagon standing with its doors open and he parked his cruiser and followed three sets of tracks to where she lay, a red blanket of fire ants feeding on her flesh. Bobby made it back to his cruiser and just managed to call it in before he passed out, rendered unconscious by what he had seen.

When Gene arrived—on his day off, dressed in civilian clothes, driving his father’s old Jeep right up to where Lavender and his deputies cordoned Marybeth—the men tried to keep him back, but he broke free and as he knelt over his wife something died in him. An EMT arrived with a body bag and Gene insisted on zipping the black plastic closed on Marybeth’s face.

 He went back to his Jeep, racked rounds into the pump action Remington and headed into the desert. He found the remains of a fire, charred sticks of mesquite lying in the sand. And in the center of a pentagram traced into the dirt—edges blurred by the wind—lay the blackened carcass of his unborn child.

Gene was felled and found himself kneeling, pawing at the sand like an animal. He tore off his shirt and swaddled the baby, holding it to his bare chest as if to nurse it, moans coming from deep in him as the rich pork stink of its scorched flesh filled his nostrils.

He was returned to reason when the wind blew up fiercer and he saw the tracks that led away toward the horizon were being erased. He laid the baby on the passenger seat of the Jeep and drove after the two sets of foot prints. A man and a woman, he reckoned. The man walking faster, leaving the woman behind.

Gene found her first, lying like a bundle of rags on the sand. Her cries fooled him into believing that she was another victim, but when he crouched beside her, the pump action limp at his side, she sprang up with a knife and slashed him across the ribs and was coming at him again when he lifted the shotgun and blew her in two.

He left her where she lay and went after the man, crested a rise and saw him standing, a black shape against the sky, at first thinking that the man was surrendering. But when he drew closer and saw the long hair, the beard and the arms stretched out like Christ on the cross, he knew this was no surrender.

He raised the pump action, leveling it at the beautiful, sick face, the man smiling like sweet Jesus. But Gene couldn’t do it. Couldn’t kill in cold blood, couldn’t commit an act foreign to his nature. Junior Cotton laughed at him, staring into his eyes.

He hammered Cotton with the stock of the shotgun, dragged him to the Jeep and cuffed him to the roll bar. Stopped to load the bisected woman and drove into town, people coming out to watch, Junior Cotton smiling at them, his soft beard teased by the wind, lifting his cupped hands to heaven like he was releasing white doves, hands still bloody from Gene’s wife and unborn child.

Gene parked outside the sheriff’s office and walked past his hushed colleagues, carrying the swaddled baby into the interrogation room. He shut the door and placed the blackened body on the table and sat there for a long while, nobody disturbing him. At last Lavender came in with Doc Farnsworth and his aged nurse. The old woman took the baby and left the room with the sheriff.

Farnsworth cleaned and bandaged Gene’s ribs, lay a hand on his shoulder for a moment, then went away.

When Lavender returned he set a bottle of
Jim Beam
and
two glasses down on the table. Neither man was a drinker, but the liquor was poured and the glasses were emptied more than once before a word was spoken.

“Where are Timmy and Skye?” Gene asked.

 “At home. Their aunt is with them. They’ve been told nothing and she’s guarding the phone and the TV.”

Gene nodded. “And the man? Who is he?”

“He’s not sayin’ a word. The state police have taken him up to the city. We’ll hear from them presently.” Lavender drank. “Tell me what happened with the woman.”

Gene told him and
Lavender charged their glasses. “You wanted to kill him too, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But you couldn’t?”

“No. I didn’t have the sand.”  Gene emptied his glass. “What would you have done?”

“Same as you, I reckon. That’s what separates us from the likes of them.” He poured again. “Don’t worry. The state will do it.”

But the state hadn’t done it. Junior Cotton, his name dredged from some fingerprint data base, subsided into catatonia before he uttered a word in his defense or offered any explanation for what had driven him and the woman to do what they did, so he was sent upstate to an asylum for the criminally insane.

And n
ot a day went by that Gene didn’t find himself back there with the shotgun in his hand, wishing he’d done it. Wishing he’d had enough of his father in him to squeeze the trigger.

As he circled back toward town the radio squawked and hissed, Darlene the dispatcher in conversation with the three deputies. Laconic law enforcement small talk, haikus of life in a failing town.

“Report of a 10-10 at the Silver Dollar.” Drunken fistfight.

“Responding to a 10-16 at Double Heart ranch.” Old man Pruitt beating his wife again.

“10-45 at Mason and Ford.” Dead animal on the street.

“Report of a 10-56 on Main.” Intoxicated pedestrian. One of the bar brawlers was on the move.

These banal reports soothed Gene a little. No eviscerated corpses. No trails of blood. Not yet.

Gene drove toward Timmy’s school, past the graveyard where his wife and child lay, the white noise of the muttering radio filling the afternoon stillness of the town. He slowed outside the school for the tenth time that day and, like each time before, Dolly Marples, Timmy’s teacher, saw Gene through the classroom window and waved, signalling that his son was safe.

Gene accelerated away. He’d considered keeping Timmy with him at the sheriff’s office, sitting with his Remington loaded and his eyes on the door. But the boy had endured enough in the last few days. He would be better off at school, surrounded by his friends. Gene had warned the teachers about Junior Cotton, shown them his photograph. Urged them to call him if anything or anyone raised their suspicions.

As he neared the interstate his phone rang.

“Martindale.”

“Chief Deputy, this here’s Detective Winslow, state police.”

“Yes.”

“Nurse Santos’s car and the body of an unidentified elderly white male have been found fifty miles north of the city, on the old 103. Suggests that Cotton killed the man and took his car, and that he’s over the state line by now. Don’t reckon you’re going to be troubled none by Junior on this go round.”

“I’m obliged. But if you hear anything more . . .”

“You’ll be in the loop.”

Gene dropped his phone to the seat beside him, suddenly exhausted. Skye was gone. Junior Cotton was leaving a trail of destruction far away. Maybe, after all, this bloodletting was at an end and his thoughts of vengeance could be saved for the days when he laid flowers on those dusty graves.

Gene was passing
Earl’s
and pulled off the road,
sorely in need of a
cup of coffee. Stopping outside the diner he saw the place was empty but for Minty in a booth filing her nails. Gene couldn’t face an interrogation right now, so, sitting in the shade, he closed his eyes for a second and awoke when somebody tapped him on his shoulder. He looked up to see Minty holding a foam cup.

 “Black, two sugars.” When he hesitated, she said, “For Chrissakes, Gene, take it. It’s coffee, not hemlock.”

He took it and drank. Minty leaned in and the smell of her perfume mingled with the coffee.

“Now what in hell is going on between you and Skye?”

“That’s family business.”

“You about broke that poor girl’s heart, banishing her like that. You know how much she loves you and Timmy.”

“She’s changed, Minty. Let it lie.”

“Sure she’s changed. She’s become a woman. Remember them?” To underscore the point she stood, filling the window with hips and breasts, and just for a moment he was almost
overcome
by a swell of desire, a longing to lose himself in her scented flesh.

Gene shoved the coffee cup at Minty. “I have to go.”

He pulled away, heading back to the faded certainties of the dying town, but not before he heard her shout, “You’re a coward, Gene Martindale.”

And who was he to argue?

44

The transformation was miraculous. The grungy Goth—matted raven locks,
corpse-
white visage adroop with rings and bolts and studs, body sheathed in a
black
taffeta dress worn over tights and Dr. Martens boots—who’d sloped into the gas station washroom ten minutes before, emerged looking like a small town co-ed: blonde bangs framing an almost pretty face, blue eyes blinking behind tortoiseshell glasses, skin scrubbed and glowing, with just the slightest hint of peach colored lipstick on her mouth. She wore sneakers, blue jeans of a sexless cut and a white blouse designed to hide her breasts.

The girl dumped her backpack in the trunk and slid in behind the wheel of the Chevrolet.

“So what are you, blonde or brunette?” Junior Cotton asked.

“Not neither. Them’s all wigs.” She reached over and swiveled Junior’s head. “Your turn,” she said, and he heard the snap of an elastic band as she gathering his hair up at the back and pulled it into a ponytail.

She jammed a Caterpillar cap on his head, hiding the ponytail beneath it, and held out a pair of Aviator knock-offs. “Put these on.”

Junior obeyed and when she swung down the visor he saw an all-purpose
cracker
staring back at him.

 “You always carry these disguises?”

“Yep, helps hide my tracks.” She started the car and headed for the on-ramp.

Junior Cotton didn’t have it in him to like people but he felt a twinge of warmth for this girl. It wouldn’t stop him from killing her, when the time came, and the fact that she knew he was going to do it (welcomed it, in fact) made him warm to her even more.

Back at the drive-through, when she’d startled him as he ate, she’d known just how to reassure him.

“Don’t you worry none, I’m a fan of your work,” she’d said, sliding uninvited into the passenger seat. “And I would consider it an honor to be your victim.”

He’d stared at her, the soup burning his one hand, the ice cream chilling the other.

“You want me to kill you?”

“When it’s time. But for now, I’m here to help you.”

“Help me with what?”

“Help you do whatever you excaped to do.”

“How do you know I didn’t just escape for the sake of escaping?” Junior asked, carefully avoiding the pitfalls of her pronunciation.

She shook her matted head, the silverware in her face catching the sun and sending little orbs of light around the car like a glitter ball. “I done had me a dream that I was meant to meet you right here.” Junior stared at her. “Uh huh, last night in a motel room, where I fucked the night manager afore I kilt him.” She shrugged. “I kilt plenty folk. But not as many as you I will wager.”

Junior, his mother’s son, had been schooled to read people from when he was a toddler, and he caught no whiff of untruth here.

“Can you drive?” he said.

“Sure I can.”

“Then drive.”

The girl dumped her pack on the rear seat and came around to take the wheel while he scooted over. She cranked the Chevrolet and drove back onto the interstate. She was a careful driver, merging smoothly with the sparse traffic.

“What’s your name?”

“Della.”

“Tell me about this dream.”

The turn signal ticked as she overtook a semi. “He spoke to me direct.”

“He?”

She shot him a glance. “He. The Devil. Tole me he had a job of work for me. To help you on your mission.”

“What mission?”

“To take the boy.”

Junior stared at her expressionless profile. She was chewing gum and she blew a bubble, a pink balloon swelling from her mouth for a second before she popped it with a smack.

“Go on.”

“Don’t know nothin’ more. Expect it’s some kinda sacrifice, you’re intendin’.”

“He talk to you often?”

“The Devil?”

“Uh huh.”

She shrugged. “We’ve conversed since I was a kid. Since I kilt my step daddy.” She turned to look at him. “I can help you take the boy.”

“I don’t need help.”

“You’re a cripple.”

“I’m recuperating.”

“Whatever.”

They drove for a minute and he stared out at the wasteland and understood that she had been sent to him.