City of Heretics (14 page)

“Make sure the car’s nothing too flashy. And I could use a cell phone.”

“You sure you don’t want a smart phone instead?”

“A what? What the hell is a smart phone?”

“Never mind, you been in the joint too long. I’ll get you a cell phone.”

“ And a gun.”

“A gun?  You get busted with a gun, Crowe, you’re no good to me.”

“Me having a gun didn’t bother you the other day.”

“That was before everything went south.”

“I need a gun. Just let me worry about getting busted. Oh, and one other thing. I could really use some tools of the trade.”

“Such as?”

Crowe told him, and Vitower said, “What the hell, Crowe?  You planning on some kind of crime spree?”

“I have a lock pick,” Crowe said. “But the electronic device would make my life a lot easier.”

“Well, I live to serve,” Vitower said. “You get this motherfucker, Crowe, you hear me? I’m not fucking around here.” And he hung up.

Crowe found a doorway and huddled there with his coat collar up and his hands shoved in his pockets. The few tourists who decided to brave the weather to soak up some patented Memphis atmosphere gazed at him warily as they passed, making room on the sidewalk in case he leapt out at them.

Forty minutes later, a dark green Jaguar XJS yanked up to the curb and a lanky black guy in a bulky parka stepped out. He said, “You Crowe?”

Crowe nodded and the handed over the keys. “Mr. Vitower said you’d drop me back off on Mud Island,” he said.

“Did he?”

He got in the Jag. Nothing too flashy, he’d said. He wondered what Vitower considered flashy if the Jag was his idea of low-key.

Vitower’s man waited at the passenger door for Crowe to unlock it. A cardboard box rested on the passenger seat. Inside was a sleek little cell phone, a slightly battered electronic lock pick, and a slim hard plastic case. He opened the case. A .45 caliber Colt revolver nestled there next to two boxes of ammunition. That made him happy. Vitower remembered that he preferred revolvers. There was a hastily-scrawled message on a post-it note in the case that read
Try not to leave it on the side of the road this time
.

He turned on the cell phone and it chimed cheerfully. He shoved it in his pocket, started the car, and pulled away from the curb. The delivery guy stood on the corner and watched him go, looking dazed and hurt.

Every window in the place was shattered, and glass was strewn all over the bare floorboards. The wind outside whistled through every opening, but there was nothing left in Peter Murke’s house to be disturbed by it.

It was a simple, one story home, small enough to feel claustrophobic even without furniture or any signs that anyone ever lived there. Five long strides would take you from one end of the place to the other. Except for near the windows, a thick layer of dust covered the floors, and water stains marred the bare walls. Shadows pooled in every corner where the dim gray light couldn’t touch them.

Crowe moved through the house slowly. He wasn’t really looking for anything. Nothing tangible, anyway.

In the kitchen, the appliances had been ripped right out, and the empty spaces yawned with exposed plumbing coated with dried sludge. The linoleum had rotted almost completely away, exposed to rain and foul weather through a gaping window.

A small bathroom with nothing but a shattered toilet and a shower stall was just off the kitchen. A dead possum rotted patiently in the stall.

There was no bedroom. He assumed the front room of the house served as bedroom and living room for Murke. On the east wall, someone had spray painted in red MURKE U SYKO FUKK U ROTT IN HELL. On the north wall, in a different hand and partially obscured by water stains, the word HERETIC was written with green magic marker. It was written in neat block letters.

And that was all that existed of him now, in this place. Everything else had been stripped away.

Crowe stood in the middle of the house for a long time, listening to the wind outside and thinking. He thought of the Ghost Cat. He tried to think of Patricia Welling, and Jezzie Vitower, and whoever else Murke had killed, but his thoughts kept coming back to the Ghost Cat.

Heretic
, it said.
Syko Fukk
. Two different times, two different people, two different definitions of one man. The ‘
Syko Fukk
’ definition was obvious, once you got past the illiteracy factor, but the ‘Heretic’ thing… A very religious word, heretic. It made Crowe think of what Cole had said about the impression of
religious reverence
she’d gotten from seeing Patricia Welling’s body.

And the darkly holy fear he had woken with after his nightmare about the Ghost Cat.

So. Nothing tangible, right. But something stirred in this house, some deep-seated fear, residual emotion. From Murke?  From his victims?

He needed to meet this Arley Hampton guy.

He left the shell of Peter Murke’s house, got in the Jag, and drove away.

On Highway 78 he headed south, leaving Memphis behind. It felt good to do that. He hadn’t been back two weeks and already he hated it. He crossed the state line into Mississippi, kept going past Holly Springs and Cuba Landing.  By nightfall he was just north of Oxford. At ten, he stopped off at a roadside motel.

Sleep didn’t come easily, and when it did it was fitful and unsatisfying. He half-dreamed about Dallas. It was probably the fact of being in a motel room, just like that night almost eight years ago, or it could have been the persistent pain. He got up twice to swallow a couple of pain pills.

The next morning he changed out his bandages again, using a smaller one on his face. It still covered his left eye, but at least it didn’t rub against his jaw. He snagged a cup of coffee and a bagel from the front office and headed out.

Hampton lived just south of Oxford, in a small but tidy one-story house situated on what used to be farmland. Crowe got there just before ten-thirty. An enormous oak tree, about fifty feet tall, dominated the front yard. It fronted a dirt road, with unused fields along one side and thick woods along the other.

Crowe stopped the car halfway up the gravel driveway and got out. It was beautifully quiet. The sky looked metallic blue above, cloudless and cold. There was no wind. He walked up to the house, deliberately kicking gravel, clearing his throat, trying to make noise. Didn’t want the crazy writer guy to think he was sneaking up on him.

Stepping up on the narrow porch, he saw a curtain flutter in the window to his right, and a dark shape moving behind it. He rapped on the door, said, “Mr. Hampton.”

There were footsteps inside, a chair leg or something scraping along a wood floor. Then a gruff voice, “Yeah?”

“My name’s Crowe,” he said. “You mind if I talk to you?”

“’Bout what?”

“About God and the universe and the meaning of life.”

“That’s sort of a broad topic, mister.”

“Well, just the meaning of life, then. How long could that take?”

The door cracked open an inch, and a green eye peered out, topped by an impossibly bushy blond eyebrow. “I don’t have time for fucking around, son. I’m a busy man.”

“I know. I won’t keep you long. I want to ask you about the history of… evangelical movements.”

“Again, that’s a goddamn broad topic.”

“The Society of Christ the Fisher.”

The eye went wide, then squinty. “Who are you?” he said.

Crowe told him his name again. “Lori Cole, from the
Memphis Clarion
, said you were the man to talk to.”

“Cole, eh?  Yeah, I remember her. Was supposed to come by, what?  Two goddamn years ago.”

“She got held up.”

Hampton said, “Let me see your stomach.”

“What?”

“Your stomach. Lift up your shirt and let me see.”

Crowe frowned, unbuttoned his jacket and pulled up his shirt. Hampton squinted through the door at his belly button for a long moment, and then the door opened, and a small bony man with thick white hair streaked with blond stood there in nothing but his underwear. He had a sort of caved-in chest with random strands of white hair, and his belly was small and round. He looked like he’d been on a bender for the last ten years. Even from the porch, Crowe could smell the unwashed booze sweat.

Tucking his shirt back in, Crowe said, “Why did you want to see my stomach?”

He ignored the question. “Crowe, you said?  I can give you a little time, but not much. I’m working.”

He ushered him in. As ragged as Hampton was, his home was tidy, aside from the books everywhere—they were stacked up in wobbly towers all over the place, flowing off bookshelves and chairs and tables. Some of the stacks nearly touched the ceiling. None of them were on the floor, though; that was swept and clean, the wood worn by long years of traffic.

“You, uh… you want a drink or something?” he said uneasily. He clearly wasn’t used to company.

Crowe glanced at the pink neon clock on the far wall, above a battered desk and computer. It wasn’t quite ten-thirty yet. He said, “No, thanks. Coffee, maybe.”

“Coffee, right,” Hampton said. “Offering a man a drink, and here it’s not even noon. Stupid.”  He went into the kitchen and Crowe followed him, careful not to bump into any of the stacks of books.

In the kitchen, there were no books, not even a magazine. After going through the living room, it seemed strangely stripped down and bare. An empty whisky bottle sat on the table next to an empty glass. There were several more empty bottles on the floor next to the table.

Hampton pulled a tin of coffee out of the cabinet and started brewing up a pot in a small coffee maker.

While it brewed, he leaned against the counter and said , “So, you, uh… you’re writing a piece on the Society?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded doubtfully. “What happened to your face?  Did they do that?”

“Yeah,” Crowe said again.

“You’re writing about them, and they did something to your face. Because you’re writing about them?”

Crowe sighed. Hampton wasn’t buying it. “I’m not writing about them,” he said. “I’m just curious about them. I have my own reasons.”

“Right. Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Crowe, I’m glad you came clean about that. You know what Ernest Hemingway said?”

“He said a lot of things.”

“He said that a writer has to have a one-hundred-percent foolproof bullshit detector. I may not be a Hemingway, but I do have the required equipment.”

“So it seems.”

“So you aren’t writing about them. What about your face?  That still something to do with them?”

“No, probably not. Actually, that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

Hampton crossed his arms. The fact that he was half-naked didn’t seem to bother him. He said, “I wrote an article about them, you know that?  Appeared in
Religion & Society
, April ’95. Good article, too. They, uh, they didn’t like it. Wrote a very pointed response to the editor, and you know what?  That editor printed a retraction in the following issue and never returned any of my calls after that.”

“Religious groups can be pretty persuasive.”

He laughed a raw, phlegmy laugh. “Right, persuasive. It kinda surprised me, tell you the truth, that they cared that much. I mean, in my book I really let ‘em have it and they didn’t do shit. Course, no one read my book. And my agent dropped me shortly thereafter.”

Crowe said, “What did you say about them that got them so worked up?”

“All I did,” he said, looking at Crowe levelly, “was tell the truth. That’s all I ever do. It’s a lot harder than you think.”

“Maybe you should try lying once in a while, just for a break.”

He shook his head. “No, I’d sooner die.”

When the coffee was ready, he found two clean cups and poured and they sat down at the table. He pushed the empty bottle and glass away, sipped his coffee and looked at Crowe with his frank green eyes. “You’re probably thinking, what a sad, washed-up old has-been, eh?  Just another writer who never quite made it, killing himself with whisky, distracting himself with myriad conspiracy theories. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know. Is that what you are?”

“No,” he said. “Well… yes. But there’s nothing sad or washed-up about me. They think they got me licked, but they don’t.”

“Who?  The Society?”

He grinned tightly. “The Society of Christ the Fisher, those sons-a-bitches. The goddamn Society. A Christian charity group, right?  Raising money for abused children. Spreading the gospel, curbing hunger. You know their mission statement? 
Dedication to Good Works, in the name of Jesus Christ, and the honoring of God in all we do. Working from various communities all over the country and the world, bringing the message of God’s Love to a world sorely in need.
”

“Sounds dangerous,” Crowe said.

He frowned. “Don’t mock, boy. That innocuous mission statement makes my bullshit detector go off like crazy.”  He scratched his bare chest, and his skin was so dry it left white marks. “We’re lucky, I guess, that they only have ten churches, spread out all over the country. Closest one to us is over near Chattanooga, little town called Longbaugh. You heard of it?”

“Longbaugh?  No. Why are we lucky?”

He said, “That book I wrote, it’s called
The Rise and Fall of the American Evangelical Movement
. Put it out a couple years after my blockbuster novel,
All the Flesh
, and just like everything else I’ve ever written it sank like a stone. New York Times called it the most ponderous, hysterical diatribe against religion they’d ever seen. I don’t know, maybe it was a diatribe, I couldn’t say. But everything I said in that book, every little thing, was completely true. I did my goddamn research.”  His eyes went vacant, and for a moment he looked every inch the sad, washed-up writer he had mentioned. “I did my goddamn research,” he said again.

Crowe gave him a minute, not saying anything, and eventually he shook his head hard and said, “What I did, see, was I speculated about the Society being linked to this old church that most theological historians say went under back during the Great Depression. The Church of Christ, Holy Fisher. Holy Fisher sort of splintered off from the evangelical mainstream in the early part of the century. They had more of a… what do you call it… hands-on approach. An aggressive pursuit of what they called Divine Retribution.”