Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (11 page)

“Shit,” he said to himself. “This
is bullshit. I’m as crazy as Psycho Girl was if I believe this bullshit.” The
whore had mocked him and it pissed him off. That’s was all.
But I held the
razor to her throat and almost killed her. I wanted to kill her.

“Fuck it,” he said and turned up
the volume of his tape deck. Stevie Ray was singing about a Texas flood. He
sang along, trying to drown out his dark thoughts. He felt good. He’d had his
ashes hauled and things were looking brighter. He was a man. A man who could
handle anything life might throw at him. Even those low-life Porch
motherfuckers.

He pulled into his driveway, hopped
out of the car, and bounded up the back steps.

And froze when he saw the white
bloodstained envelope leaning against the back door.

“What the fuck is this?” He picked
it up and felt something lumpy inside. His heart started pounding on his
eardrums as he tore open the envelope.

“Jesus Christ,” he said when he saw
the severed finger still wearing the VHS class ring. The smiling Blue Devil
face engraved in the setting gave him a lascivious wink. His own fingers
trembled as he pulled the folded notepaper from the envelope and unfolded it.

Be at the old railroad trestle
at noon

Or we cut off his head.

He didn’t have to pull the ring off
the dead finger and check the initials engraved inside the gold band to know
that the finger was Skeeter’s; the knobby knuckle and the dirt embedded under
the nail from Skeeter’s daily handling of produce left little doubt. The
bastards had him, and he had told them who killed Odell, so now they were using
Skeeter to lure Joe Rob into their hands. The old railroad trestle was out in
the boondocks. A good place for an ambush.

Joe Rob glanced off to his left at
the patch of woods, suspecting that the person who had left the note was out
there watching him, making sure he got the bloody message. Yes, someone was out
there all right. He could feel the eyes on him. Weren’t they afraid he would
immediately go to the police with this? How dumb could they be?  

The black slithery thing coiled
around the base of his spine began to twine upward, sliding over vertebrae and
inching toward his brain. Joe Rob flashed a cold smile at the unseen watcher in
the woods, relishing the thought of a shootout with those pig-fucking Porch
bastards. Now was the time to be a man. The killing of Odell had been a reflex,
almost accidental. He would kill the rest of them with murderous intent. And
savor every bloody moment.

Luke was on his front porch,
listening to the late-morning wind sough through the leaves of the pecan tree
in the front yard and wondering if he should pay a visit to Fate Porch when the
phone rang. He had just pulled off his boot to get at an itch between his toes,
so he hobbled on one boot into the house to answer the phone on the third ring.

“Hello.”

“Just thought I’d let you know,”
said the familiar voice, “I’m gonna do what you never could. I’m gonna take
down the Porches.”

“Joe Rob?”

“I don’t have a choice. They got
Skeeter and say they’ll cut off his head if I don’t show.”

“Slow down, son,” Luke said.
“What—”

“But they got a big surprise
coming,” Joe Rob went on. “I’m gonna kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”

“Wait now. Tell me where—”

The line went dead.

“Shit,” Luke said. He depressed the
switch hook, then punched the number that used to be his. Chief Keller answered
in his smooth baritone.

“Bill, this is Luke. I just got a
call from Joe Rob Campbell. He said the Porches have Skeeter Partain and that
they’re going to cut off Skeeter’s head if he—Joe Rob—doesn’t show up.”

“What? Run that by me again?”

Luke went through it again, adding
that Joe Rob said he was going to kill them all. “He hung up before I could
find out where all this is supposed to happen. Or when.”

“Damn, Luke. You sure this ain’t
some kinda prank?”

“No, this is the real deal. I
talked to the boys last night but they wouldn’t tell me what the hell was going
between them and the Porches. Whatever it is, it’s about to come to a head.”

“Hang on a minute,” Keller said.
Luke heard muffled voices in the background, then Keller came back on the line.
“Kirby just told me Mrs. Partain just now called in to report Skeeter missing.
Said he didn’t show up for work this morning and she has no idea where he is.
His truck’s still there at the house. And she found a gun in his room that
she’s never seen before.”

“How you want to handle it, Bill?”
asked Luke.

“I guess I better send a car to the
Campbell house. Have ’em pick up Joe Rob if they can find him. I’ll run out to
the Bottom myself, see if I can get anything out of Fate.”

“If they’re using Skeeter as bait
to draw Joe Rob, it’s not likely they’d want him to come to their place. They’d
want to get him out in the boondocks somewhere, some place isolated.”

“Yeah, but where? There’s hundreds
of places like that.”

“Damned if I know,” said Luke. “But
if you’ve got any hunches, now’s the time to start playing ’em.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“Start cruising and hope I get some
hunches of my own.”

“You still got that police-band in
your truck?”

“Yeah. I’ll call it in if I luck
out and find these crazies.”

“Do that, Luke. But remember, you
ain’t the police anymore. Don’t you go getting in the middle of anything.”

“Roger that.” Luke hung up,
retrieved his boot and slipped it on, then strapped on his gun belt, checked
the load of his .38 and snugged it in the holster. He got his scattergun from
the closet, then jogged to his truck and drove off in search of the impending
shootout.

 ***

Joe Rob dropped the receiver in its
cradle after his call to ex-Chief Chaney, then put on his tan hunting jacket to
cover his small arsenal of weapons. His grandfather’s .45 semi-automatic was
stuck in the waist of his jeans, and on his right hip he wore his own .357
Magnum in a custom-made holster, slung low for maximum speed of the draw.
Sheathed on his left hip was his father’s old survival knife.

He bounded down the back steps and
went into the basement to cut down the barrel of his Remington double-barrel
.12 gage with a hacksaw. With the twin barrels shortened, he could hide the
shotgun under his hunting jacket. It would be effective only at close range,
but he intended to get as close as possible to the redneck bastards. Close
enough to see their guts blown out of their bellies and splattered to Kingdom
Come.

He checked his jacket’s pockets one
last time to make sure the extra ammo was there, then walked casually to his
Mustang and got behind the wheel. He cranked the engine, gunned it a few times
just to feel the throbbing of the engine, then he backed out of the drive and
rode up Main Street to the Economy Hardware Store. He figured he still had a
few minutes before Chaney’s old cop buddies would be looking for him, so he
parked in front of the store and went inside to buy a canister of pepper spray.
He didn’t really expect he’d have an opportunity to use it, but he thought it
best to have it as a last defense, just in case. Going into battle outgunned,
he would need every available advantage.  He figured his main advantage was
going to be surprise. He was counting it. He was going to hit them hard and
fast, with overwhelming force. And he wasn’t going to stop until they were all
dead or he was.

It was going to be a killer show.

***

Corny Weehunt moved up Main Street
in a shambling run, the partially detached sole of one shoe flapping against
the sidewalk as he raced toward big hole in the middle of the street. A dump
truck loaded with dirt was backing up to the hole, and several shopkeepers had
come outside to watch the late-morning spectacle. A few pedestrians paused to
see the first load of dirt deposited in the hole. Corny hobbled up to the edge
of the sinkhole just as the truck prepared to release its full load of
reddish-brown dirt into the hole’s gaping mouth. He clapped his hands together
and grinned, looking around for someone with whom he might share his
excitement. He was relieved that he wouldn’t have to spend any more nights
watching the hole for any evil thing that might want to come out of there and
do bad things to his town. But as he watched the dirt slide and tumble into the
pit, Whisperer commenced a whispering that was so loud that Corny was afraid
other people might even hear it.
RUN...RUN...RUN...

There was no mistaking the urgency of
Whisperer’s warning. Corny turned away from the hole and ran down the middle of
Main Street, past the saw-horse roadblock and into the path of a red car
turning into a parking space in front of the Post Office. He threw out his
hands just before he collided with the car’s left front fender, and the impact
snapped his right wrist and bounced him backward onto the asphalt. He sat
there, dazed and in pain, clasping his injured wrist with the armpit of his
opposite arm. The driver popped out of his car and looked down with a horrified
expression at Cornelius. Corny knew the man’s face but he couldn’t put a name
to the man with the splotchy red face and the big belly straining his red
suspenders. Then the street shuddered beneath him and the storefronts rattled
and a great cracking sound boomed up and down Main Street. The red-faced man
was looking aghast at something behind Corny, and Corny turned and saw the dump
truck dropping out of sight as if swallowed up by the street itself. A cloud of
dust billowed up from the spot where the truck went down, and Corny knew then
why Whisperer had urged him to run. The sinkhole had opened its mouth wider to
claim another victim. And it was still hungry.

***

Joe Rob was coming out of the
Economy Hardware Store when the dump truck fell into the hole. Like everyone
else on the street, he froze, momentarily stunned by the violent collapse of
another part of the street. No one moved until the hollow rumbling sound and
the earth tremors ceased, then people went scurrying, some toward the hole,
others away from it. Joe Rob’s first impulse was to run to the sinkhole to see
what had happened to the driver of the truck and to help get the man out of
there, if possible, but he remembered his mission and jogged to his Mustang,
anxious to get off the street before the cops showed up. He cranked the engine,
backed out of the parking space and peeled rubber down Main Street, thinking:
The
whole damn town’s going down.

 He didn’t notice the chopped Chevy
that picked up his tail when he turned off West Main and headed out Route 47,
nor could he see the leering grin of the Chevy’s driver who turned to his
companions and said, “
That’s
the muthafucka right there. I’m gonna fuck
his shit
up
.”

Agnes Porch sat in front of the
mirror, brushing out her waist-length white hair. She usually wore it braided
and pinned in crown-like circles on top of her head, but whenever she consulted
the oracle, she would first take down her hair and brush out the braided
crimps. She wasn’t sure how it worked, but she was convinced that wearing her
hair straight and natural augmented her visionary powers and increased the
likelihood that her second sight would be true—that it would cut through the
darkness and confusion to illuminate the true patterns hidden behind and
beneath everyday reality. Once she had tried to explain
the sight
to her
son, but that had been like trying to explain the workings of the telephone to
a chimpanzee. Fate just couldn’t grasp it, not because he was a stupid man—he
wasn’t—but because his mind wasn’t wired for thinking in abstractions. And his
sons were just as concrete as he was, chips off the old blockhead—except for
Odell. If he’d lived, Odell might’ve been able to develop his natural gift for
seeing into the otherworld and divining the future.
The sight
might’ve
saved him if he’d been able to tamp down his meanness long enough to get his
mind around that natural gift. But life had conspired against the boy. The
Marine Corps had taught him new ways to use his meanness, and those
head-shrinking doctors at Browner’s had tried to destroy his gift with drugs
and psychodoodle, making Odell think the voices in his head were a sign of
insanity.
Hereditary psychosis.
That’s what those quacks were getting
at. Damn fools.

She put down the brush and gazed
hard into the mirror, studying the features of the old hag who looked back at
her. Ninety-two years old, and just as ornery and full of spit as she’d been at
thirty. It didn’t seem possible that she could be that old. But when she
thought back over the decades of her life that spanned most of the last
century—from the Roaring Twenties, through two world wars and on into the new
Millennium—she
knew
she had the right to look like the old hag in the
mirror. In fact, it was a true wonder that she wasn’t already dead, given the
hard life she and her family had always had to live.

 
I’m a Porch and a Porch always
has a hard row to hoe, and the kind of enemies who want to put you six feet
under, then piss on your grave. Always on the wrong side of the law, pursued by
self-righteous lawmen more corrupt than any Porch ever dreamed of being.

Like the sheriff who gunned down
my daddy for stealing horses.

And the crooked judge who hanged
my uncle for no good reason.

Sure, we done some wicked things
in our time, but never to nobody who didn’t deserve it. It’s a hard life and a
body has to live hard to survive. And make no apologies for it.

She slipped on a stained apron and
went outside to the chicken run, caught one of the less spry chickens and wrung
its neck. Then she took the dead chicken into the barn, sat down at her ritual
chopping block and gutted the fowl with a carving knife, stringing out its
bloody innards and spreading them out on the scarred wood. She took a sip of
muscadine wine, spit three times in three directions, then said the incantation
learned long ago from a Creole conjure woman in Louisiana’s bayou country.

Then she cleared her mind and began
to read the entrails.

Patterns began to form on the
bloody chopping block. She bent closer, peering hard through her bifocals and
moving her palms in circular motions inches above the chicken guts to draw
forth the visions that would speak to her inner eye—the eye blessed with
the
sight
.

Her breath caught in her throat and
she moaned as the patterns coalesced, forming mental pictures that chilled her
old bones. She saw rats gnawing raw flesh. Daggers aimed at beating hearts. And
a black wolf leaping from liquid darkness, its teeth already wet with blood.

The signs were all bad, even worse
than the ones that had showed her Odell’s violent death.

But the entrails had more to show
her.

She wanted to rake the guts off the
wood with the carving knife’s blade before they showed her their worst, but she
stayed strong, stiffened her spine and watched in horror as the darkness at the
periphery of the vision thickened, writhing, slithering, encircling everything.
The black serpent devouring its own tail and eclipsing all with unrelenting
darkness.

Outside the barn a crow cawed.
Insects sang in the summer heat. A fly lighted on a strand of the chicken’s
intestines. Agnes closed her burning eyes and let the sights she’d seen in the
entrails resonate inside her skull, humming along the shallow convolutions of
her brain until they were translated by her inner eye—the eye that never
blinked, no matter how horrible the sights it beheld. Faces surfaced in oily
blackness. The face of the boy who had killed Odell. The faces of Cowboy and
Luther. The face of Fate, haggard and contorted with pain. The face of the boy
whose finger had been removed. Remaining below the inky surface was the face of
a man she couldn’t identify. The dark liquid bubbled into a rolling boil, each
bursting bubble resounding with the pop of a gunshot.

And in those dark bubbles she saw
the grinning face of Death.

She opened her eyes and pushed up
from the chopping block, standing on weary legs. “Oh, Lord,” she mewled, “I
done wrong by them boys. I never should’ve...”

But I couldn’t see it all then.
I was only trying to help them get Odell’s killer. I didn’t see the Dark Angel
riding that boy’s shoulders.

It’s too late now.

Nothing can stop it.

Agnes walked on stiff knees to the
barn door and pushed it open, grunting with the effort. She looked out at the
bright morning sky. The cumulus clouds were thick and tall, the weather
changing. She could feel it in her aching joints. She looked at Fate’s truck
parked in the dappled shade of spindly pines.

Too late, unless I can drive
that truck.