Vile Blood (3 page)

“Oh, baby, from you it's gotta be cream,” the scrawny one said, doing a little thing with his hips, his friends’ laughter the bass chorus to his falsetto.

Skye poured the cream, stirring it into the coffees,
the little whirls of white like seashells,
blocking out the voices of the men as she sealed the cups and seated them in a cardboard tray, adding paper sachets of sugar and plastic spoons.

One of the bigger men took the tray from her and the runt
seized
her arm before she could get it back across the counter.

“Could we maybe offer you a ride, Skye, in our limousine?”

“My brother’ll be along presently,” she said, wishing it were true. “The chief deputy sheriff.”

“Well, now, Deppity Dawg hisself,” the small man said in his idea of a
peckerwood
accent. “Hear that, boys? This little peach is kin to the law.”

The two men laughed, but they were restless and the little guy shrugged and turned and they followed in his wake as they went out to the car. The big man was behind the wheel, gunning the engine, the other three barely inside before he sped off with a scream of smoking tires, the car fishtailing as it
flew
out of the lot and onto the road, red taillights bleeding into the night.

Skye stood in the sudden hush, the silence broken only by the whirring and ticking of the Coca-Cola wall clock. Her hand was on the telephone, ready to call her brother and ask him to come and get her. The sheriff’s office was three blocks away and her brother would have done it without complaint—or no
spoken
complaint. But his irritation would have been thick in the air of the cruiser as he drove, letting her know that his time was too valuable to taxi his sister home from her meaningless job. A job that didn’t even keep her in pocket money.

So Skye stowed her apron and hat, killed the lights and locked the doors, passing Richie in his cubicle, nose in a book, making no response to her wave.

The town was quiet this time of night, and she could hear a snatch of guitar music swirling over the border fence, then nothing but the
croon of the night insects.
It was warm, the heat trapped by the shroud of
cumulus
that obscured the moon, and she felt beads of sweat on her upper lip as she left behind the last of the squat buildings, the pot-holed pavement stuttering out and giving way to dirt.

Skye had reached the ruins of the roadhouse, just a tumble of rotten roof beams lying like a discarded game of pick up sticks on the concrete slab, when she heard that squeal of a laugh and then saw the big car parked off the road, the glow
of a match coming from inside.

She caught the acrid stink leaking from the lowered windows
and
hurried on, willing herself into invisibility but she hadn’t gone far, the water tower on its skinny legs still a distant silhouette, when she heard the growl of the engine and the headlamps warmed the sand around her.

They toyed with her, letting her increase her stride to that of a speed-walker, the driver juicing the gas just enough to keep pace, letting her run, all the while holding their position behind her, only surging forward when she fled the road and onto the
sand
, the desert a flat table top stretching down to the border
.

And Skye ran, ran faster than she ever had at the track meets at school, pumping her legs and arms, sprinting, running from herself as much as she was running from the men. 

5

Sheriff Dellbert Drum was smart enough to know that he was dumb as a box
full
of hammers, and it didn’t perturb him in the slightest, never had done. He held no truck with this business of broadening the mind, in fact he’d spent a lifetime narrowing his down to the very essentials. Being dumb didn’t preclude low cunning, and that he had in abundance.

And he also possessed certain gifts: a photographic memory, for one. Growing up dyslexic and barely literate had made this a necessity. So, when tight-assed little Gene Martindale had turned his back on him at the crime scene and gone off to stare at the mess of body parts like one of those heads was going to tell him what in the name of sweet Jesus had befallen it, and Drum spied the ruined pair of eyeglasses nearly hidden in the dirt beneath a clump of agave, he knew immediately they belonged to the Chief Deputy’s sister.

What was left of the glasses lay on the seat beside him, safely encased in a ziplock bag, as Drum drove the Ford deep into his own county. The frame of the glasses was broken in two, snapped at the bridge, and one of the lenses was gone. The other lens was cracked and splattered with blood. Not the girl’s blood, he was prepared to wager.

What had made Drum so sure that these eyeglasses belonged to Skye Martindale was the blue paper clip employed in place of a screw where the left arm hinged. He’d been over to Earl’s diner for a cup of coffee a few days before, and when Skye had served him, barely lifting her feet as she scuffed her way to his booth, her mousy hair hanging over her face, he glimpsed the paper clip, and wondered how Martindale could let his sister be seen like that in polite
company.

So Drum hadn’t questioned the impulse that had him squatting down (surprisingly loose-limbed for such a big man) and snagging the broken eyeglasses, hiding them in his giant paw while he got into his vehicle. When he’d had a chance to examine the glasses, under the dome light of the Ford a safe distance from the crime scene, he’d been pleased to note
a mousy blonde hair
trapped in the grasp of the paper clip. A DNA test would tell a merry tale.

As he drove along the main road leading toward what had once been the county seat and was now little more than a ghost town, Drum slid a cell phone from his top pocket and prodded at it with a massive digit. The phone purred for long enough to get him riled up, and he had to contain his temper when he heard his nephew’s sleepy voice.

“Yeah?”

“Richie, this here is Uncle Dellbert.”

“Yessir.”

“You alive and kickin’ boy?”

“Yessir.” Sounding like he was down deep in a well.

“You seen a Dodge Charger down your way?”

“Black?”

“As the night.”

“One came on here to get gassed up.”

“What time would that have been?”

“
Midnight,
I reckon.”

“The men in it, they go into the diner?”

“Yessir, they did.”

“That Martindale girl workin’ tonight?” A pause. “Speak up, boy, goddamit fore I come over there and
beat you like a rented mule.”

“Yessir. She was workin’.”

“She get a ride home, maybe?”

“No sir, she walked.”

Drum heard the sound of a car through the phone. “Somebody there, boy?”

“Chief Deputy Martindale’s just come on, sir.”

“Okay, you go and attend to him. Tell him all you told me, but don’t mention we spoke, you hear me?”

“Yessir.”

As he crested a rise, Drum saw the flickering neon of the
Milky Way Motel
.
A sparkling constellation in its hey-day, the sign was reduced now to one stuttering yellow asterisk, like a faded star of Bethlehem leading him to the
domain
of the fallen man of God who cooked meth and ran harlots from the tumbled remains of the motor court.

The men in the Dodge, hotshots from the big city, part of a syndicate, had come down to tithe the smaller operators. They’d threatened Reverend Jimmy Tincup who had opened a dialogue with them on Drum’s advice, while he planned on how to deal with this. But now it was no longer their problem. Something he’d relish telling Tincup, but tonight his business was with somebody else.

As he neared the rundown motel, the neon jerking and jittering like a meth whore, Drum turned off the blacktop and onto sand, heading toward the clump of single-wides that were
surrendering themselves to the desert.

Until
the rampage of bloodletting five years before
that had caught Gene Martindale’s wife and unborn child in its wake, these trailers had housed Reverend Jimmy Tincup’s flock. Nothing to rival a compound like Waco in its
prime,
but it had provided Tincup with a steady supply of fresh pussy, a gaggle of brats and men young and stupid enough to do his bidding. Then Junior Cotton and
his rancid bitch
went rogue and the flock was dispersed
, leaving the preacher dreaming of faded glory.

As the Ford bucked and bounced across the dirt, Drum reviewed the situation around the slicks in the Charger. The why of it all was plain to see: big city gunsels who thought they could muscle in on the turf of
backwoods
meth cookers. It was the how that had been irking Drum. How had they known about Tincup and his trade, here in the middle of nowhere?

Drum had arrived at an answer. A hunch, to be sure, but an educated one, and since he wasn’t in a courtroom, there was no need to trouble himself with the burden of proof.

He stopped the Ford outside the least dilapidated of the trailers, the only one that was occupied. No electricity out here, so a candle threw a shadow show against the cloth that covered the window. Leaving his hat in the car, he took a brown paper bag from the glove box and went up to the door of the single-wide, tapping lightly.

“Yeah?” A female voice. Scratchy. Agitated.

“It’s me, darlin’.”

A bolt was drawn and the door swung open, revealing a disheveled woman somewhere between thirty and
death,
a nest of dirty blonde hair sprouting from her skull.

“Dellbert, Jesus. I’m climbin’ the fuckin’ walls.”

“Relax, Holly. I come bearin’ gifts.”

The woman backed into the trailer, the place stinking of mold and disuse, the stars visible through a gash in the roof. The single-wide had been uninhabited for years before Holly, Tincup’s oldest serving wife, had crossed him one too many times and was banished out here two weeks ago.

She slumped down at the table, her bitten fingernails scratching at the scuffed wood, the candle yellow lighting the wrinkled face of a seasoned junkie. Drum knew he was right in his suspicions when he saw a flash of chrome as she palmed a little cell phone and disappeared it into her dirty jeans. Reverend Tincup prohibited his flock from using the things, the only voice he ever wanted them to hear was his.

Drum entered the cramped trailer in an awkward crouch keeping his head away from the ceiling and his uniform clear of the filthy plywood room divider that sported a faded Sears calendar from 1999. He slid the bag across to her and she fumbled it open tipping three knotted, uninflated balloons onto the table top.

“Party favors, Holly.”

Holly untied one of the balloons, her palsied fingers clumsy, and poured
black tar heroin
powder onto the paper bag. Drum stepped out of the trailer, hovering in the doorway, and fired up a cheroot to rid his nose of the stink, watching Holly at work.

She ignored him as she went about the business of prepared her fix, the paraphernalia appearing from the shadows: the bent and blackened spoon, the knife, the cotton pellet, a bottle of water, a rubber tourniquet and, finally, the hypodermic. 

She cooked the heroin in the spoon over the candle flame until it bubbled, mixing in a little water, the acrid smell of
La Negra
burning Drum’s nostrils. Then she set the spoon down, and lay the cotton pellet in the mixture, drawing the heroin into the syringe through the makeshift filter.

She pulled up her sleeve, revealing the festered arm of a long time user, the skin a
sad tale
of scars and scabs and lesions. Holly tied off the tourniquet, pumped her arm and found a useable vein. Gave the hypodermic a tap and sent the needle to the vein, pushing down the piston.

The effect was almost instantaneous. She relaxed. She sighed. She smiled, and beauty’s ghost flickered across her face.

“Why don’t you come in and sit, Dellbert?”

“No, I can’t stay, Holly.”

“There’s a big old bed through there,” she said, waving a skeletal arm toward the bedroom. “Almost big enough for you.”

Whatever charms she once had were long gone and Drum just
grinned and
shook his head. Anyway she was nodding now, her chin slumping to her chest. He’d known her a long time, since she appeared out of the heat haze with Tincup and his little caravan, the preacher driven ever farther south
by outraged authorities, until he and
Drum struck a deal advantageous to them both.

Back in those days, the late nineties, Holly had been a big boned blonde with the ass of a cheerleader and the tits of a Playboy centerfold. She and Drum had pleasured one another regularly, Tincup too occupied with his harem to care.

The sex had come to an end as Holly’s habit took hold, a habit fed by Drum, keeping her on his string. She was his eyes and ears inside Tincup’s court. Or had been until her bad behavior exhausted Tincup's patience and he sent her out here to fester. A scorned woman, no longer the number one wife.

She was from the city, Drum knew. Still connected up there, he was prepared to guess. A scorned woman vindictive and desperate enough to swap information for money and drugs. She’d been the homing beacon that had drawn that old Dodge down here.

Drum stooped into the trailer and gently slapped her face. Her head lolled to the side, a slug-trail of drool tracing her cheek and chin.

Drum grunted and went to work, copying what she had done. Cooking three more spoons of heroin, the sickly sweet, cloying smell sending him to the door for air between batches, and injecting three more syringes into Holly’s wasted arms.

After the second shot her breathing was labored. After the final injection she loosened her bladder and bowels and died with a sad little whisper. Drum put a sausage-sized finger to her throat. Nothing.

Surrendering to a moment of sentimentality, he leaned forward and brushed her cold forehead with his lips. Then he found the phone in her pocket and transferred it to his own. Drum used a handkerchief to wipe his prints from her equipment, left the trailer and settled himself into the Ford, setting course for the road.