Vile Blood (6 page)

 “Is this mess your doing?” the plum-ripe voice of the preacher man came through Drum’s phone as he idled along in the Ford Expedition, the shimmering blacktop lying like a bolo tie on the barren landscape.

“And what mess would that be, Reverend?”

“My wife is dead.”

“And which wife would that be?” Drum asked, enjoying himself, knowing there was the only woman Tincup had legally hitched, the rest wives in name only.

“Holly. She’s lying in her trailer
with a needle in her.”

“My condolences, Reverend.”

“I need you here.”

 “Give me ten minutes.”

Drum clicked off the phone and fed the Ford some juice, and he was over to the Milky Way in seven.

He drove beneath the neon sign that was stunned to muteness by the hard sunlight, and parked the Ford beside what had been the manager’s office. Boarded up now, windows painted black, the dirt outside littered with debris—discarded rubber hoses, respiratory masks and latex gloves; empty antifreeze, drain cleaner and paint thinner containers; lithium batteries plundered of their innards—which hinted at the room’s new employment, and as he stepped down from the car Drum caught the stink of a batch of meth being cooked.

He adjusted the hang of his pearl-handled Smith & Wesson, waved a fat, lazy fly away from his hat and headed for the last of the rooms which were arranged in a horseshoe around the empty swimming pool, concrete cracked and
stained
by the sun.

Tincup appeared in the doorway of the room, dressed, as always, in a black suit and white shirt, clerical collar ringing his skinny neck. Tincup wasn’t a big man, but he had the hair of a movie star, combed away from his face, tumbling down in shining coils, dusted with gray. A movie star’s smile, too, not that he was using it now. But it was the voice that made him memorable, deep and slow,
dripping with the promise of salvation.

“Sheriff, did you visit with Holly last night?” he said.

“Yessir, I did.”

“To give her drugs?”

“Nossir, I visited her for sentimental reasons. It saddened me to see her in decline.”

“You’re lying.”

Drum watched a buzzard lazily circling a far-off bluff. He hitched his pants leg and placed a boot on the low brick wall of the balcony, resting his arms on his knee. Fixed Tincup with a blank stare.

“What am I to do with her?” the preacher asked.

Drum shrugged. “Direct some of your
flock
to dump her in the desert.” He waited for an argument. When there was none forthcoming he said,
“You alone?”

“Sister Marisol is inside.”

“Get rid of her.”

Tincup said something in Spanish and woman in her twenties, brown-skinned with skiddy black eyes, came out wrapped in a printed cloth, her feet in high-heeled mules. Her toenails were painted yellow. She looked at Drum and he looked back, then she walked away, heels slapping the dirt, and disappeared into the room closest to the car park.

“Those gunmen in the Dodge?” Drum said.

“What of them?”

“Holly brung them down here.”

 Tincup gaped at him. “That’s crazy talk.”

Drum waited for a beat, then he drew from his pocket the phone he’d taken off the dead woman, the chrome flaring as it caught the sun, sending a hot little circle across the pitted surface of Tincup’s cheeks as the sheriff handed it to him.

“This was in her trailer. Three calls made, all to a bar in the city. Last one night before last.”

 Tincup regarded the phone as if could rear up and bite him, then he laid it on the brick wall beside Drum’s boot.

“And the men? What are we to do about them?”

Drum made a performance of firing up a one of
his little black cheroots
, then he told Tincup that the bad mischief was over. The preacher man stood very still as Drum sketched the details, his dark, yellow-flecked pupils never leaving Drum’s face.

“The hand of God.”

“The Devil, more like.”

“Were they killed by the cartels?”

Drum shook his head. “No.”

“Who then?”

With a showman’s timing Drum delved once more into his shirt pocket and lifted out the ziplock bag containing the broken eyeglasses and dangled them before Tincup.

“You’re more full of trinkets than a snake oil salesman, Drum. What in God’s name is that?”

Drum told him his theory about Skye Martindale and Tincup took the glasses and sat himself down on a rotting cane chair and shook his head and laughed. Then he was serious, focused.

“You need to manage this very carefully.”

“Yessir, I do. Which is why I have come to ask your counsel.”

 Tincup nodded.
“It’s a game-changer.”

“Yessir, it is,” Drum said.

 “I’ll need to ponder this,” the preacher said, weighing the glasses in his hand.

“Only right that you do, Reverend,” Drum said. “Meanwhile, I hear tell that you have new merchandise?”

 Tincup nodded. “There’s an addition to our ranks. She has promise, I think.”

He shouted in Spanish, his rich voice drawing Marisol from inside the motel room. The woman stared at him, then at Drum, and she stepped back into the gloom. When she reappeared she held the hand of a girl dressed in a poorhouse dress. Barefoot.

“Why don’t you relax a while, Sheriff, while I ask our Heavenly Father for his guidance?”

Drum smiled smoke, flicked the cheroot away and walked toward the girl. She watched him without expression, black hair drawn back from a wide face as yet unpainted. Drum very much doubted if she’d
seen
her thirteenth birthday.

10

“Him and his woman done tortured and killed a pregnant lady,” emerging as pregger-
nant
from the big orderly’s mouth, “down near the border, and cut the baby right out from inside her while she was still alive. Heard it told that they burnt the poor little thing, offering it as a sacrifice to the Devil.”

Junior Cotton, parked in his wheelchair and ignored, listened in fascination as Alfonso told the perky Latina nurse, her uniform skirt stretched tight across her bubble butt, his dark and checkered history.

The nurse raised a hand to her face, covering her mouth, her eyes widening in pleasurable terror. “Ay, no. I can’t hear no more of this.” But hanging on every word that spilled from the big man’s rubbery lips.

She was only here for a week, she’d been telling Alfonso, to assist the doctor while his regular nurse was recovering from the flu. She worked in a hospital down in the state capital and was morbidly fascinated by these dangerous lunatics.

“Yeah, baby, this is one mean MF, I’m tellin’ you.”

The nurse shot a look across at Junior in his wheelchair, and he made sure to keep his eyes defocused, his jaw slack, hands dangling near the floor.

“Can’t he hear us?”

“No. His body’s here, but his mind is on a
looooong
vacation.”

“You are not afraid, Orderly?”

“Alfonso, baby. Al-
fonso
.”

“Alfonso, aren’t you scared, working with these people?”

He laughed. “Nobody gonna mess with Alfonso, baby. Nobody.”

 “Why is he not walking?”

“He’s shut down, girl.
Cat-ay-ton-nic
. Ain’t
moved a muscle
since they declared him unfit to stand trial and shipped him on up here. He’s my little baby boy, that Junior. I feed him and wash him and wipe clean his skinny white ass.”

“You are a kind man, Alfonso.”

“I does what I does.”

The nurse was sitting up on the steel desk of the infirmary, kicking her feet, her skirt riding high on her thighs. Alfonso rested a hand on her leg, delicately pinching her skin, fingers crab-walking under the hem of her skirt. She waited a while before she giggled and pushed the hand away.

“Now ain’t you a pretty little thing,” he said. “And shy, too. What’s your name?”

“Nurse Sanchez.”

“Not your
title
, baby girl, your
name
.”

She giggled. “Conchita.”

“
Conchita
? Wasn’t that a song?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, it should be, baby, it should be. What say you come for a little walk with me and Junior?”

“A walk where?”

“Out in the garden. I take him there for a few minutes every day, get him some sun on that white-ass skin of his.”

“You are allowed to do this?”

“Well, who’s to know? And he be harmless, my boy Junior.” Hand back on her thigh. And she left it there. “Come for a little walk, hnnnnn?”

“I can’t today. The doctor he is here any minute. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“That’s a date then.”

 “Alfonso, I’m a married woman.”

“Well, that’s good ’cause I ain’t proposin’, baby, just offerin’ you some fun.”

She giggled and the orderly delved deeper beneath her uniform, stepping in closer to the nurse, broad back to Junior, his body blocking her view.

Now.

Junior sent out a hand, still a little slow to react to his instructions, and snagged the scalpel lying on the table beside a kidney bowl and a pair of surgical gloves. He pushed the little blade up the sleeve of his jumpsuit just as the door opened and middle-aged man with a bald head speckled as an egg walked in.

“Yes, Orderly, what can I do for you?”

The nurse stood and clacked across the room toward the flickering computer screen and Alfonso lifted a clipboard from the desk, frowning down at it.

“Aw, Doc, I’m sorry,” the orderly said. “I thought my boy here had an appointment with you, but I’m done got my wires crossed.”

The doctor shrugged and walked
toward a door
with a frosted pane. “Nurse, I’ll need to see those admission files now.”

The Latina hurried after him, carrying a stack of buff colored folders.

“Tomorrow, baby, after lunch? Okay?” Alfonso whispered and she smiled at him as she followed the doctor and closed the door.

Alfonso gripped the handles of the wheelchair and pushed it out into the long, empty corridor, buzzing fluorescents leaking cold light down onto the shiny linoleum floor. The orderly broke into a sprint, the wheelchair flying, the lights blurring past Junior, then the big man jumped aboard the wheelchair, his feet resting on the frame and they sped down the corridor.

Alfonso laughing, saying, “I done got us a date, my man. With a pretty, pretty lady.”

Junior felt his left pulse drumming against the cool steel of the scalpel.

Oh yes, we got us a date.
Muthuhfuckah.

11

On the bus after school Timmy felt kinda quiet and inside himself, just staring out the window, not joining in the roughhousing and joking all around him, the other kids getting so loud Mr. Feeney, the driver, had to holler for them to shut the heck up.

The bus passed the graveyard and Timmy looked over the wall right at the graves of his dead mama and the little sister he never got to
see.
He thought of his mama waking him last night, like maybe she was trying to warn him about something. Waking him right before the Creepshow got a hold of him.

He hadn’t always called it that: the Creepshow. First time it happened he was too tiny to give it a name. He was just old enough to walk, his head still level with chairs, grown-ups giants to him. It was soon after his mama died, and his daddy was quiet, just sitting and staring, and Skye was trying to love Timmy but she was crying all the time.

Timmy had kept on asking for his mama, and they told him she was gone. Gone to heaven. When’s she comin’ back, he’d wanted to know. Never, Timmy, Daddy had said. Not never.

And Timmy didn’t believe that and went into the bedroom to look for her.

Mama. Mama?

His mama wasn’t there. Just her nightgown lying on a chair. Timmy lifted the nightgown, all soft and smooth and full of Mama-smell, and held it to his face.

And that’s when it happened for the first time. The Creepshow. He was in the bedroom, holding Mama’s nightgown, but he was looking at Mama laying on her back on the sand next to some road, Mama screaming and crying and begging and a Jesus-man and a dirty-looking lady on top of her, cutting at her, blood spraying thick and terrible, and they pulled something red and twisted from inside Mama, who screamed and the Jesus-man and the dirty lady laughed fit to bust.

Timmy had come back into the bedroom with Daddy and Skye calling his name, Daddy lifting him and holding him tight, Timmy crying so hard he thought he would choke.

For the longest time he’d seen no more of those pictures, and as he grew older they were like a fading dream to him, and that’s what he told himself: you were dreaming, Timmy. Just dreaming.

A few years later, when Timmy was four or five, he was with Daddy at a gas station, Daddy filling up the Jeep, Timmy getting out of the car ’cause it was hot and the gasoline was burning his eyes. He had a sliver dollar Daddy had given him and he was flicking it between thumb and forefinger, making it spin on the concrete by the pumps, Daddy talking to a guy in a pick-up truck, nodding at something the guy was saying.

Timmy spun the coin again, and it wobbled and scooted under a bench by the convenience store. There was an old fat man sitting on the bench, his back to Timmy, who got down on his knees and reached for the silver dollar that had come to rest near one of the man’s shoes, a black loafer with a hole in the bottom.

The man’s legs, white and hairless, came straight out of the shoes—he hadn’t bothered with socks—and disappeared into a pair of green pants, the cuffs frayed and stringy. A nasty old-man smell filled Timmy’s nose as he stretched for the coin. The man shifted, setting down a can of Dr Pepper on the concrete and saw Timmy.