A Time of Torment (45 page)

Later, Paige slept, but while it was still dark she woke to the sound of vehicles. Two trucks and a car pulled up in the Square, lit by flashlights, and she saw a group of armed men join the drivers before the vehicles headed away again. Oberon and Cassander were not among them, but it didn’t matter. What was important was that the Cut’s numbers had just been depleted considerably, and within hours Sherah and Hannah would be coming with breakfast, because they typically fed the women between six and seven a.m.

Paige turned to see Gayle, who had come into the room and was sitting on the floor in her nightdress, her arms folded on her knees, her chin resting on her arms, her eyes fixed on the woman at the window.

‘Why don’t you go get our new toys?’ said Paige.

H
enkel had gone to bed aching. Earlier in the day he had removed the back door from its frame because the hinges were busted, and next thing he’d started sanding it where it was sticking, and pretty soon he was all sawdust and sweat, but at least it was a distraction from the business of the Cut, and the arrival of Parker. He was sure that his physician would have advised against wrestling with a door until she’d done something about his heart, but if he started thinking like that then he’d never leave the house at all.

He was so deep in sleep when his cell phone rang that he incorporated it into his dream, and a shadow version of himself reached for it only to hear the sound of Perry Lutter’s voice emerge. Perry was crying for his mother. He asked Henkel if he could go get her for him, because his tummy hurt.

‘I’s got blood on my shirt,’
said Perry.
‘I’s got blood everywhere.’

Then Henkel woke, but the phone was still ringing. It was Irene.

‘I know it’s still dark,’ she said, ‘but can you come over here?’

Henkel sat up.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think there are men in the woods, watching the house. I could be mistaken, which is why I called you, and not 911. I didn’t want to look stupid if it was just shadows caused by the breeze.’

‘Lock the doors,’ said Henkel. ‘I’ll be there in ten.’

Deputy Rob Channer had just gone to check on Della Watkins in the drunk tank when Henkel got in touch with the dispatcher. Della wasn’t a regular visitor to the cells, but when she did tie one on – which was about three times a year – she was prone to kicking up a fuss, and trying to break objects that weren’t hers to break, like doors, windows, and other people’s heads. This time she’d limited herself to one of the old mirrors in Burry’s Bar, but it was unlikely that Burry would press charges. He would just want the repairs to the mirror covered, and Della would be all contrite once she’d sobered up, so the bill would be paid within a day.

‘Problem, Lucy?’ Channer asked the dispatcher, as she logged the call.

‘Sheriff is heading over to Irene Colter’s place. She thought she might have seen some men moving around.’

‘He sound worried?’

‘Does he ever sound any other way lately?’

Channer looked at the coffeepot. He’d just started a fresh brew, in case Della began coming around sooner than expected.

Damn.

Odell Watson was sitting at his bedroom window, trying to finish his geography homework, which involved mapping all the great rivers of the United States. Odell had no idea why this might be useful to him in later life, unless he planned on becoming the captain of a ship, which he did not. Being able to name them was one thing, but drawing them, tributaries included, was a bitch. He should have been asleep, but sleep seemed intent on evading him that night. He had woken shortly before three a.m., and read for a while using his night-light before be realized that he’d forgotten all about the great rivers. He figured that was why he had been unable to sleep, and marveled for a time at the ways of the brain before retrieving his schoolbooks from his bag and settling down to work. He had just finished connecting the Pecos with the Rio Grande when Perry Lutter appeared at the garden gate.

Odell knew all about the search for Perry, and he’d heard some of the rumors about his disappearance, too, because his mother and grandmother had been whispering about it. Perry was still the main subject of conversation at the diner, where his continued absence had cast a pall over the staff, and Miss Queenie in particular, who had become more fractious than ever. But now here was Perry: sneakers, pants, buttoned-up shirt, windbreaker.

Yet this wasn’t Perry Lutter, not really. Odell had known Perry all his life, ever since his mother used to take him to the diner when he was an infant, just so she could fit in a couple of extra hours. Miss Queenie hadn’t minded much, as long as Odell was quiet, which he usually was, Odell being one of those children who never cried much when he was young, remaining largely content to observe the world when he was awake, and dream about it when he was not, with the rest of the time occupied by food and play.

So Perry’s face was one of the first with which Odell had become familiar at the diner. It was ingrained in his memory, and while the figure at the gate bore a certain resemblance to Perry, it was similar to that between the airbrushed photographs of models in some of his mother’s magazines and the reality of them in the tawdrier journals that she secretly preferred, the ones in which women’s bellies sagged over their bathing suits, and circles were drawn around the fat on their thighs. It was as though someone had subtly rearranged Perry’s features, making his eyes – always too small for his face – more in proportion with the rest of him, and cleared up the spots that plagued his skin. He was almost handsome now, Odell thought. He was looking at the Perry who might have existed if the doctors hadn’t messed up during his difficult birth, clamping down on his skull just a fraction too hard with the forceps. This was Perry as he should have been, the man whom Perry Lutter saw in the mirror when he looked at himself.

Perhaps Odell should have been frightened, but he was not. He knew for certain that Perry was dead, because otherwise this entity in the shape of Perry wouldn’t be standing at the end of the front yard, but Odell detected no threat. The man still had Perry’s eyes, and they were as soft and friendly as ever, but an intelligence inhabited them that had not been present before, and it lit him up from within, like someone had put a lightbulb in Perry’s head and flipped the switch.

Odell’s mother and grandmother were sleeping. He didn’t call them, but instead opened his bedroom window and jumped down. He walked toward the entity at the gate – Perry, or this version of him – and stood within touching distance. A light breeze blew, and it carried the new scent of Perry to Odell: smoke, burnt timber, and mud, as though someone had set a fire in a swamp.

There was blood on Perry Lutter’s left sneaker, and not just drops of it: it was the kind of stain that came from a wound that didn’t stop bleeding until there was no more blood left to give.

‘Did it hurt?’ asked Odell.

Perry didn’t answer. He just smiled.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Odell, although he could not have said for what, exactly. He hadn’t done anything, and he didn’t think he could have prevented whatever had happened to Perry. He was just sorry for all of it, he supposed.

Perry nodded. He turned his back on Odell, crossed the road, and waited for Odell to join him. Odell looked left and right, then followed. He knew that Perry wouldn’t hurt him, and wherever they were going was where they were meant to be.

Odell didn’t even hesitate as they headed into the Cut.

T
he best thing about Dryden’s Inn, in Louis’s opinion, was that it was probably destined to fall down before too long, and then nobody else would ever have to stay there again. Maybe sometime in the past, long before people knew about fripperies like proper plumbing, A/C that didn’t sound like a failing jet engine, and towels with a consistency softer than sandpaper, Dryden’s might have served as an acceptable rest stop for those with suitably low expectations, but it now belonged to another, distant century, just like smallpox and tuberculosis, although Louis wouldn’t have been surprised if a sample of some of the gunk behind the sink in his bathroom had revealed traces of both.

Dryden’s consisted of twenty-four rooms organized in what Louis was convinced was a swastika pattern, with a small office at its heart. The walls of his room were lime green, which contrasted sharply, even painfully, with the brown carpet and harvest-gold drapes. The chairs matched the walls, the lamps matched the carpet, and the bedspreads matched nothing at all. His room had two beds and two chairs, none of which was actually comfortable, although each was uncomfortable in a subtly different way, making Louis feel like Goldilocks wandering through the Three Bears’ house after Baby Bear has left for college and Momma and Poppa Bear have put all his stuff in storage.

He and Angel had opted for separate but adjoining rooms, mainly in order to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. When Morton Dryden, the motel’s proprietor, had asked them their business in Plassey County, in the manner of a man who believed that they had no business being there at all, Louis told him they were researching a book on famous folk and country musicians from West Virginia, which softened the old man up somewhat, especially once Louis revealed that he knew the difference between Mollie O’Brien and Molly O’Day, and knew that Milt Haley, father of the blind fiddle player Ed Haley, had been murdered by a lynch mob in 1889 during the Lincoln County Feud.

If Dryden was tempted to ask what a black man was doing listening to music performed primarily by white musicians, and traditionally associated with Caucasian audiences, he resisted the urge. Instead, he supplied the names of a handful of local good old boys who could play a mean tune, and even burned a few CDs for Louis from his own collection. Louis had to admit that some of it was pretty good, although it all fell on deaf ears where Angel was concerned, for whom any music that involved fiddles, banjos, or tunes that Casey Kasem wouldn’t have played on
American Top 40
was safely to be dismissed as ‘hillbilly shit’. To maintain the cover story, Louis had acquired a small library on the area’s music, including Ivan Tribe’s
Mountaineer Jamboree
and John Lilly’s
Mountains of Music
, to leave in his room, and had spent two very contented evenings at The Hope Tavern in Mortonsville listening to the pickup bands that performed there most nights.

Now, though, other matters were about to come to a head. Parker had returned, and Oberon had been baited. The Cut could either wait to see what Parker did next, or it could strike. Louis was hoping for the latter: it was a while since he had killed anyone.

It was after four a.m., and Louis could not rest. Angel was fast asleep in his room, as was Parker in his, which was three doors down from Louis’s own. So far, they had not interacted publicly. Better that the Cut believed Parker to be alone. Dryden’s appeared to have a handful of other occupants that night, all of whom were in other wings of the motel. The building was quiet, and only the occasional car passing on the road broke the silence.

Louis usually slept well, but he had been on edge ever since his arrival in Plassey County. He was a man born of the South, but he no longer felt at home there, if he ever really had. He was also anticipating the violence to come. Louis, through his own observations and the probings of those who had come south with him – including a pair of departed Japanese visitors – had developed a sense of the Cut’s people. They were simmering, and soon they would boil over.

But for now, Louis was on a mission of his own. Not only was his latest change of towels more threadbare than usual, they were also pitted with cigarette burns, some of them fresh. Every man has his limits, and Louis had just reached his. So it was that he marched toward the motel office, the towels under his left arm, and a final glass of Vergelegen Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon in his right hand. Improbably, Turley boasted a gourmet store off its main street, with a small but perfectly formed selection of imported wines from which Louis had selected the Vergelegen. He had also bought a box of four Riedel glasses from which to drink it, because he didn’t want to sip good Cab Sauv from motel toothglasses wrapped in paper that boasted of their hygiene and cleanliness while containing what looked like spider eggs.

He reached the motel office. The door was closed, and a sign announced that the proprietor would be back shortly. Louis turned the handle. The door opened. A TV was playing softly, but there was no sign of Dryden or any of the kids who looked after the desk in his absence. A cigarette lay in an ashtray, smokeless but still warm.

Louis put down the towels. Behind the main desk were two rooms, one of which was a sleeping area for staff to use in the small hours. The bed bore the impression of a body, and the sheets were disturbed. A connecting door stood open, revealing an empty bathroom. Next to the bedroom was a small office that, upon closer investigation, proved to contain filing cabinets, boxes of soap and tissues, and two cartons of frozen doughnuts thawing on a table prior to being presented the next morning as part of the motel’s breakfast of coffee and pastries. After some exploration, Louis discovered a couple of packs of thick, fresh towels wrapped in plastic, and apparently never used. He exchanged his own for three of them, stepped into the main office, and departed, closing the door behind him.

He looked at the lot behind the office, where two spaces were reserved for staff. No car sat in either of them. Wherever Dryden or the night manager had gone, he’d taken his wheels with him.

It was a cool night. Louis took a deep breath and inhaled smoke, and the earthy aroma of dead leaves. Now that he had satisfied himself by solving the towel problem, he thought that he might sleep for a few hours.

To his right, a truck pulled up at the edge of the main lot, and three men got out. He heard a second vehicle draw to a halt to his left, although he couldn’t see it, blocked as it was by that wing of the motel. Seconds later, another smell joined the evening’s scents: that of strong, cheap aftershave. The men from the truck were now moving quickly but quietly across the lot. Two were carrying rifles, while the other had what looked like a bottle in each hand.