A Darker Justice (30 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sallie Bissell is a native of Nashville, Tennessee. She currently divides her time between her hometown and Asheville, North Carolina. She has three children and is at work on her third novel,
Call the Devil by His Oldest Name.

Also by Sallie Bissell

IN THE FOREST OF HARM

And coming soon
in hardcover
from Bantam Books:

CALL THE DEVIL BY HIS OLDEST NAME

Praise for Sallie Bissell’s

A DARKER JUSTICE

“SALLIE BISSELL’S
A DARKER JUSTICE
IS ANOTHER PAGE-TURNER, A CHILLER THAT DELIVERS THRILLS AS FAST AS IT TELEGRAPHS THEM. . . . A FAST-MOVING STORY, ELEGANTLY TOLD, IN WHICH BISSELL (WHO IS UNFASHIONABLY BIG ON LOYALTY AND FRIENDSHIP) WEAVES A PALPITATING WEB OF SINUOUSLY DEADLY SUSPENSE.” 
—Los Angeles Times

“I don’t think I can say I’ve been more disappointed when a book ended. I wasn’t ready. I wanted it to go on and on. . . . The threads of the web came so easily, you didn’t know you were caught until you tried to put the book down.” 
—The Purloined Letter

“At the end of this book, I felt I had read a masterpiece.” 
—Deadly Pleasures

“BISSELL’S NARRATIVE DRIVE SHOULD CARRY READERS RIGHT ALONG.”
 —Publishers Weekly

“FOR THRILLER FANS WHO VALUE ACTION.” 
—Booklist

“MARY CROW IS A FASCINATING CHARACTER.” 
—Romantic Times

And for Sallie Bissell’s debut thriller

IN THE FOREST OF HARM

“A top-notch thriller.” —
People

“In the mode of Patricia Cornwell . . . Bissell masterfully drives the plot with . . . gut-wrenching suspense.” 
—
The Asheville Citizen-Times

“A nail-biting novel of psychological terror, survival, and loyalty and friendship.” —
The Purloined Letter

“Hair-raising . . . harrowing.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Bissell tightens the screws slowly and expertly. . . . A shrewdly imagined female actioner, tailor-made for audiences who would’ve loved
Deliverance
if it hadn’t been for all that guy stuff.” —
Kirkus Reviews

If you enjoyed Sallie Bissell’s
A Darker Justice,
you won’t want to miss any of her electrifying novels of suspense. Look for
In the Forest of Harm
at your favorite bookseller’s.

And turn the page for an exciting look at her next novel,
Call the Devil by His Oldest Name,
coming soon in hardcover from Bantam Books.

CALL THE
DEVIL BY HIS
OLDEST NAME

by
Sallie Bissell

Saturday, March 8
Madison County, North Carolina

He awoke that morning to the smell of coffee and salvation. At first he thought he was back in his old kitchen at breakfast time—coffee hot in his mouth, linoleum cold on his bare feet, the crackle of frying eggs loud in his ears. Then he opened his eyes and realized he was not dreaming of coffee at all—he was smelling it, for real. Hastily, he rose to his feet and peered out of the cave that had, for the past three months, served as home, hospital, and haven from the searchers. With eyes grown to prefer the mossy velvet dark of the cave, he turned to the outside and felt the sting of bright light. A damp mist ghosted up from the creek that gurgled past his slit of a door, and high in a pine tree, a crow he called Charlie cawed.

He listened. The creek and the crow he knew well. But if he turned his head slightly to the left, he could hear a new sound wafting on the coffee-tinged breeze. A deep, not altogether out-of-tune voice, singing.

“Shall we gather at the ri-ver . . . Where bright angel feet have trod . . . With its crystal tide forever . . . Flowing from the throne of God. . . .”

He ducked back into the cave, the hymn recalling a Sunday when he stood clad in a white robe, held by an old man with long yellow teeth who thrust his face into his and demanded
Do you surrender your life to Jesus?
Yes, he’d whispered in reply, not caring nearly so much about Jesus as he did about not looking any more stupid in front of his friends than he had to. The old man had dunked him backward in a cold river and then pulled him, shivering, out. Afterward his mother had kissed him and they’d eaten devil’s food cake on the wide church lawn. If his father had been pleased or proud, he had not shown it.

“Yes, we’ll gather at the ri-ver . . . The beautiful, beautiful ri-ii-ver . . .”

Who would be up here singing hymns, this early in the morning? Not the Feds. They came in groups, tromping through the bushes like elephants. He’d never seen any sign of a still up here, and hunting season was months away. Who could it be? Someone hunting him? Or someone he might hunt himself?

He sat down to lace up his boots. Mary Crow had left him with little vision in his left eye and a brain that sputtered like a faulty electrode, but he’d had the presence of mind, during his solitary convalescence, to exercise his hands and arms with heavy stones he’d pulled from the creek. Although his legs would never again move fast or with any kind of grace, his hands could crush bones like pipestraws.

He stuck his head out once more to make sure this wasn’t one of his hallucinations. Though the fog was lifting from the creek and Charlie had flown away, the voice continued its paean to the Lord.

“Gather with the saints at the ri-ver . . . that flows from the throne of God.”

“Okay, buddy,” he whispered. “You want a gathering at the river, you got it.”

He slipped out of the cave. The singing was coming from downstream, so he turned right and limped into a stand of evergreen trees that clustered along the creek bank. He walked east, his shuffling gait muffled by the orange carpet of dead pine needles. He saw a bright blue kingfisher swooping low over the water, the liquid glitter of the reflected sun, then, twenty feet away, he saw the singer. A man. A hard-shell Baptist, no doubt, tending a small campfire, brewing coffee in a blue enameled pot. A tackle box lay on the ground beside him.

Trout fisherman, he decided. And not a very smart one either, making all that early morning racket when the fish were just waking up to feed.

He eased behind a tree to watch. The man appeared to be in his mid-forties, with shoulder blades that protruded from a red flannel shirt. Though his neck looked creased and sun-worn, it also looked tantalizingly thin, holding his knobby head up like some kind of stem. He considered his odds. If this man had come up here alone, he might have a chance.

He brushed his suddenly itchy palm against his trousers as the man hunkered down to read the creek.

Over there, under that boulder,
he was probably thinking.
That’s where the big ones hide. I’ll wade out and lay a spinner in there. They’ll hit it like Sunday dinner.

Watching the man finish one cup of coffee and pour another, he realized there was no second cup, no second pile of fishing gear at all. He smiled. The Baptist had come alone.

He watched as the fisherman set down his coffee and opened his tackle box. Soon, he would have to decide what to do. Once the fisherman waded out into the middle of the stream, it would be too late. Right now he stood in the perfect position, no more than half a dozen yards away.
You once ran the hundred like a streak of lightning,
he reminded himself.
Surely you can cover twenty feet without falling down.

He rubbed his eyes and judged the distance one more time. Four good strides would get him there; four fast strides would keep him a surprise.

Opening his mouth wide, he sucked in a deep breath of air, then burst from behind the tree. Every step sent a jolt of pain up his spine, but he kept his eyes focused on the man’s neck. Though he felt as if he were thundering through the woods like a bear, only at the last second did the fisherman seem to hear him at all. He caught a quick flash of startled brown eyes as he grabbed the man’s neck.

The fisherman managed a single cry of surprise before he squeezed his windpipe shut. Although the man attempted to struggle, he had both momentum and surprise. After he shut off the air to the fisherman’s brain, he pushed him face down into the water. In his hands, the man’s neck felt like soft, wet rubber, and when he tightened his grip further he felt the soft
pop, pop, pop
of neck bones. The fisherman did a frothy little dance of twitches and tics for a time, then he relaxed into death, floating in the creek with the buoyant lifelessness of a hewn log.

I haven’t killed anybody like that in forty years,
he thought as the Baptist’s hair waved like seaweed in the water.
Yet it still feels the same.
This trout fisherman was no different from the skinny brown
cá hôi
fisherman he’d killed on that little estuary, where the Mekong enters the South China Sea.

He loosened his grip on the man’s neck and pulled him face-up on the bank. Ignoring his vacant eyes and sagging mouth, he dug down deep in the pockets of his jeans, pulling out a wallet, car keys, and fifty-seven cents in change.

“Okay, buddy,” he said, pouring himself a cup of the man’s coffee while he perused his belongings. “Let’s see who you were.”

A driver’s license revealed the fisherman to have been one Clootie Duncan of Church Hill, Tennessee, a 5'10'' tall male with brown (now dead brown) eyes. He’d signed his organ donor form and was additionally licensed to drive both motorcycles and school buses. He carried no credit cards, but had cash and a paycheck stub from the Hawkins County school system totaling $389.02. His wallet held one photo—an Olan Mills picture of himself, standing suited and bow-tied behind a sweet-faced old woman whose thin white hair looked like wisps of cotton. Besides a Sam’s Club card, the only other thing in Clootie Duncan’s wallet was something called a “Commit Your Life to Jesus” card that enumerated everything you had to do to become a member of Christ’s flock. Clootie had marked each item with a bright green X and then signed the thing at the bottom, where Jesus had chipped in his part of the deal, promising to “be with you always.”

He looked down at the body sprawled out beside him. “I don’t know, Clootie, but I’d say Jesus might have taken a powder on you this morning.”

He lingered over Clootie’s coffee. He hadn’t had a drop of anything hot in over three months, and it tasted like heaven in his mouth. Soon, he thought, as he jangled Clootie’s car keys, he would be drinking coffee again on a regular basis. Drinking coffee, and indulging the craving for chocolate that he’d developed since he’d been up here. Once he returned to civilization, he would indulge in a number of things again.

He drained the coffee pot, then he got busy. Even though he’d never seen a soul up here, he knew better than to linger out in the open with a dead man stretched out at your feet. He unsteadily hoisted the man over his shoulder. Though Clootie was heavier than he expected, he knew a nearby place where he and Jesus could commune for the rest of eternity.

Carrying his burden like a sack of meal, he limped through the trees and eased back into the cave. He threaded his way into the darkness by memory. Fifty feet in, he put Clootie down and began to crawl, feeling along the floor with his fingers. In a moment he found what he sought. The wide mouth of a hole so deep he’d never even heard a pebble hit the bottom. The air that issued from that hole was warmer than the cave air, and smelled sour, like sulphur. He figured it was as close to hell as he would come, at least in this lifetime.

With sweat beading on his forehead, he pulled two things from his pocket. The first was his own wallet, from which he removed his last remaining thirty dollars and a faded photograph of himself with a girl. The second was a small gold badge that had “Sheriff” engraved across the top and “Pisgah County” along the bottom. This was all that remained of his life before Mary Crow had gotten ahold of it. He ran his fingertips over the surface of the badge, then he stuffed both it and his wallet in the back pocket of Clootie’s jeans.

“Okay, buddy,” he whispered, patting the man’s lifeless cheek. “Time for you to go.”

Grabbing Clootie beneath the armpits, he dragged him to the lip of the chasm. When he’d gotten him halfway over the edge, the pressure on the man’s stomach forced air up through his vocal cords and the corpse groaned as if he’d come suddenly alive.

“Now, Clootie, don’t you go giving me any grief about this,” he scolded, straining to push the body on into the pit. The man’s belt buckle struck a tiny spark of light as it scraped against the cave floor, then he tumbled head first into the darkness, into a place where he would never see the sweet-faced woman in the picture again. She would die soon too, probably, grieving over the son who had gone out trout fishing and never come home.

He listened, as always, for any kind of noise, but he heard nothing except the resounding beat of his own heart.

After a moment he inched back from the hole, then walked to the mouth of the cave. As he re-entered the bright morning air, he began to hum Clootie’s hymn. Stump Logan, like Clootie Duncan, had just been born again. No longer consigned to this cave, he was now free to seek revenge for his bad eye and fucked-up brain. He had a little cash, he must have some kind of car not too far away, and he had a brand new identity as Clootie Duncan, solid citizen of Church Hill, Tennessee.

He took out Clootie’s wallet and looked at the
Commit Your Life To Jesus card again. Not much had ever come of his
own commitment to Jesus, but maybe things had changed. Shoot, maybe
Jesus had given him this get-out-of-jail-free card. Maybe his
salvation lay not at the end of that narrow gospel road, but at some
exit off I-85, the one that would bring him closest to Mary Crow.

Deckard County Courthouse
Tuesday, October 8

“Can you show us the Popsicle man, honey?” Mary Crow sat cross-legged on her office floor, close beside Jasmine Harris, a five year old who had lately reverted to the babyish habits of wetting her pants and sucking her thumb. Though the child was of normal height and weight, her huge brown eyes and doleful face reminded Mary of children she’d seen in advertisements beseeching aid for Zimbabwe or Somalia. Jasmine, however, was American. She came from the projects of south Atlanta and the chief disaster she and a number of other project children had suffered was a forty-one-year-old white male named Dwayne Pugh, aka The Popsicle Man.

“Come on, Jasmine. Don’t you stop talkin’ now.” Danika Lyles, the young attorney who worked as Mary’s assistant, spoke more gruffly to the child. “You be doing just fine til we ask you that question.”

Jasmine stuck her thumb firmly in her mouth and stared at the photos of four white men spread out on the floor. For a long moment she did nothing but noisily work her jaws, then she began to edge one tiny finger up on the corner of the photograph third from the left.

Mary held her breath. For weeks, Child Protective Services had brought Jasmine here to be interviewed; for weeks, they’d come up against this block. The child was bright, and answered their questions willingly . . . until asked to identify Pugh. Then she would stare at his photograph transfixed, as if the man’s very image rendered her speechless with terror. Now, as they neared the end of Pugh’s trial, Mary needed Jasmine to do more than suck her thumb as she stared at a picture. Mary badly needed Jasmine to tell the jury exactly what Pugh had done.

“Look carefully, Jasmine,” Mary coaxed. “Are you sure this is the man who gave you all those Popsicles?”

Jasmine sucked louder, then she moved her finger away from the corner of the photo and tapped it on the man’s right eye.

“Good, baby!” Danika knelt on the floor. “Now tell us what he did. Tell us how he hurt you.”

Jasmine stared at the photo, then, suddenly, she began to scream. Not weep. Not cry. But
scream,
like a small helpless animal twisting in some predator’s claws. The gooseflesh rose on Mary’s skin as she reached instinctively for the terrified child, who climbed into her arms with a death grip of her own.

“It’s okay, Jasmine,” she whispered, the odor of feces drifting up as the child helplessly filled her diaper. “He’s not going to hurt you any more. I promise. Never, ever again.”

Jasmine shrieked on. Mary began to rock her back and forth, singing an old Cherokee song about how the rabbit lost his tail. As Mary sang, Danika silently scooped up the photographs and set them face down on Mary’s desk. By the time Mary had sung the rabbit song twice, Jasmine had grown quiet.

“Guess what, Jasmine,” murmured Mary. “We sang the bad man away. He’s not here anymore. You want to turn around and see?”