Crimes in Southern Indiana (5 page)

In the letter, Ina said she was unhappy, tired of his judging others with racist comments and never giving her the attention she needed.

Walking from the kitchen to the bedroom with his glass of bourbon,
he saw that the closets were empty. Ina's luggage was gone. Moon was too ashamed to call the station, post a lookout for her license plate, a description of her '85 Toyota Land Cruiser. Taking a sip from the glass, ice rattling, Moon thought that worst of all, he was too drunk to go look for her.

Speeding into the gravel curve, Wayne lost control of the Ford Courier, stomped the gas instead of the brake. Gunned the engine and met the wilderness of elms head-on. His head split the windshield, creating warm beads down his forehead, while flashbacks of an edge separating flesh and a screaming female amped through his memory.

Blood flaked off as Wayne balled his hands into
fists, remembering the need he could no longer contain.

From behind, light chewed through the night and into the Ford. Wayne turned, looked into headlights that tattooed his eyes with black-green spots until he saw the red and blue blinking from above.

The cruiser's door slammed. Boots trailed over the loose gravel. Wayne watched the headlights black out the features of the approaching officer
in the driver's side mirror. His right hand gripped the wooden stock of his Marlin lever-action 30-30 in the seat beside him that he had used to kill deer hours ago. The Need square-danced with the amphetamines in his bloodstream, driving the fever in his brain to a boil, and he opened the door.

Rookie Officer Fisher keyed his mic.

“Moon, you out there?”

“Just finished with those
kids at the mill.”

“Close to Wyandotte Road?”

“I'm a few minutes away, whatcha got?”

“Looks like Brady Basham sampled some of his home brew again. His Courier's head-on into a mess of elm 'bout a mile up from 62 on Wyandotte Road.”

“Shit. Crazy bastard ain't supposed to drive this time of night. I'm on my way.”

Fisher shone his Maglite onto the blue tarp over the Ford's bed, saw the streaks
of fluid shading down the patches of Bondo.

The driver's door swung open. A figure stepped out onto the gravel. Fisher shouted out, “You all right, Brady? Looks like you got yourself into a mess back here. Moon's on his way, might be helpin' to sort this—” His Maglite reflected a bone-tight face stitched with every angle of rage imaginable.

The barrel of the 30-30 rifled an orange flame. Separated
marrow and meat from Fisher's right shoulder. It felt as though he'd been struck with fifty pounds of pressure from a pickaxe. His light clattered to the gravel and he followed, trying to configure speech. “You…you…shot me.”

Wayne levered the empty brass to the ground. Stood over Fisher, listening to his lungs wheeze from what sounded like a combination of asthma and shock. Fisher tried reaching
across his chest for his Glock. Wayne pushed the barrel into Fisher's left shoulder. Pulled the trigger. Earth and bone exploded. Fisher jerked stiff. Wayne levered another empty brass and knelt down. His ears chimed from the gunfire and he laid his 30-30 beside Fisher, whose blinking eyes met Wayne's blank stare. Fisher's mouth began to foam like keg beer as he gasped, “Wayne, w-w-why you d-d-doin'
this?”

Wordless, Wayne unsheathed his razored skinner with his right. Pressed his left into Fisher's froth-filled scream. The Need tightened Wayne's grip around the knife. He pressed the blade between damp follicles of hair and ear, finding the soft connection of tissue. Bearded faces stained by war screamed familiar and foreign tongues in Wayne's mind. He cleaved ear from skull just as he'd
done in the mountains. Fisher thrashed into a limp state.

The Need made Wayne's insides all pins and needles as he picked up the ear and added it to the other one in his desert-patterned fatigues. Sheathed his knife and grabbed his 30-30.

Behind him the radio attached to Fisher crackled with a static voice. “Fisher, Brady all right?” Wayne knew the name attached to the voice. Moon. Memories
from years before he'd enlisted, served in Afghanistan. He and his father coon hunting with the man. Wayne heard the engine roar in the distance. Saw the treetops lighting up like roman candles as he disappeared into the woods.

 

Tires skidded to a stop. Moon stepped into the dust of headlights, saw the human form laid out on the road.

“Shit!”

Moon's fingers met Fisher's neck. He'd a racing
pulse. Wetness spat from his forehead. Moon keyed his radio. “Earleen?”

“Go 'head, Moon.”

“Got an officer down. Still breathing. 'Bout one mile up from 62 on Wyandotte Road. Get an ambulance ASAP!”

“It's on its way.”

Fisher's right shoulder had a railroad-spike-sized opening. Shot from four to six feet, Moon guessed. Fisher's mouth spewed over like Alka-Seltzer and down into the neck of his
county browns. Moon thought Fisher's left shoulder looked as though some son of a bitch had opened it with a small stick of dynamite. Close-quarter shot. Then he noticed all the dampness where his left ear used to be.

“Son of a bitch! You hold on, Fish.”

Moon turned around with his hand on his .40-caliber H&K. Shone his Maglite into the woods. Nothing. He searched inside the Ford. A near-empty
case of Milwaukee's Best on the passenger's side floor. An empty bottle of Old Forester. A large black canister on the duct-taped seat: a spotlight. A Ziploc spilled over the dash with traces of crushed crystal. It was meth. Moon thought to himself, Brady ain't no damn tweaker.

He shone his light on the blue tarp that covered the bed of Brady Basham's truck. Pulled it back. Fresh venison engulfed
him as he saw three outlines. It was early October, deer season wasn't even in and he had two doe, poached and gutted. And one human: a dead friend. Moon pursed his lips, keyed his radio. “Earleen?”

“Go 'head, Moon.”

“On top of the downed officer we got two poached doe and a fatality. Brady Basham has been murdered.”

“I'll radio a county unit.”

Moon studied the contours of Brady's pigment,
rough as worn rawhide. He'd slate-colored hair that matted into claws and his eyes were beaten into slits. Brady had flattened cartilage in place of his nose and, like Fisher, was missing his left ear.

One thing was certain, Brady wasn't the one who wrecked his Ford Courier.

Moon could hardly swallow, looking at his dead fishing buddy, and he asked, “What kind of hell did you find tonight, Brady?”
Knowing he was deader than the catfish they'd carved and boiled the skins from over many a late night, sipping whiskey in his kitchen, telling stories of women and passing hunting secrets and myths, Moon pressed two fingers to Brady's neck, wondering how warm his body was. Removing his fingers, Moon believed Brady had been killed within the last hour.

Whoever the son of a bitch was that killed
him was on foot. Which direction? Moon guessed downhill: easier travel. Moon had just missed him.

Moon keyed his mic once more. “Earleen?”

“Go 'head.”

“Wake up Detective Mitchell and County Coroner Owen. Also, radio Sparks, tell 'im to bring his canine. My guess is the suspect is on foot. Armed and dangerous. And send a county unit to Brady's home. He's a daughter stayin' with him. Let's hope
she's still breathin'.”

Moon flashed his Maglite to check on Fisher. Noticed the glitter of brass beside him. Kneeled down. Warm shell casing from a 30-30. Presumably the caliber that bored out Fisher's shoulders.

 

Lungs burned and leaves crumbled beneath each step. Wayne's eyes adjusted to the night with the 30-30 strapped across his back, dodging standing trees. Jumping over the fallen trees.
He heard sirens, dropped down behind a rotted tree trunk. Watched the red-orange wail of an ambulance and the blue-red screams of two cruisers following behind it, their lights strobing along the trees up Wyandotte Road.

Wayne's heart beat like a mule kicked, hard. He sat catching his breath, remembering the rapping of bone on his camper's door. Opening it to Brady, who stood out in Wayne's father's
hay field, a can of Milwaukee's Best dripping cold in his hand. Wanted to go spotlighting, poach a few deer.

Wayne told him, “Sure.”

Brady asked, “Could yuh bring that 30-30? All I got packed is a .22.”

Wayne grabbed a box of shells and the rifle that lay by his mattress of tangy sheets.

Brady took a sip of his beer, said, “Got a fresh case, and a untapped fifth of whiskey.”

Wayne had been
up for days. His eyes looked rimmed by bruises. He was trying to numb the Need, chasing amphetamines with bourbon, chain-smoking cigarettes. Every time his high started to taper off, visions came stalking with grunts and shrieks. He'd chopped line after line, inhaled the moist talcum burn that seared his brain, and castrated all feeling of dread and murder.

Coming out of his camper, he heard
a screen door slam in the distance, saw a man with age step from the sandstone house Wayne had grown up in. His father, Dennis, let Wayne stay out in the camper they'd used when he was younger, camping out, hunting and fishing. Wayne hadn't slept in the house since coming home from overseas. Since the passing of his mother, Dellma. He never got to grieve, to say goodbye, but he missed their talks
when things went bad, her telling him it'd be okay. Everything always worked out. He missed the flannel sheets and hand-sewn quilts, the stews and roasts from the meat he and his father had slain, mixed with fresh vegetables his mother had picked from the garden and canned. All the scents and textures. The woman brought comfort to his and his father's lives, their home. But Wayne had buried all of
that in the Afghan mountains forever.

Dennis's hair fanned over his head the shade of a turtle-dove. He stood in Dickies work trousers and a white Hanes tucked in at the waist and asked, “Goin' out?”

He was a Vietnam vet. He understood his son's ways of dealing with what he'd seen and done.

Wayne told him, “I be late.”

His father nodded his head, said, “Keep safe.” As if he knew that someday
the shit would no longer stir, it would be spilled. Wayne saw it in his father's movements. The shuffling of feet with unjudging stares, his hands shoved into the pockets of his faded blue work trousers, it was worry for when his son snapped. Dennis didn't know everything but some he did. Seeing the jungles of Vietnam, he'd taken in a lot of his own bad. Told Wayne therapy might help, though he
never had it in his day. No one respected soldiers back when he served. He was expected to come home, pretend nothing had happened, drink himself back into the person he was before he left.

Wayne asked his father, “Would therapy help those that switched sides?”

His father never asked what he meant by that, but he said, “War's a confusing way to solve a country's problems. Not everyone wants
our way of being, but when Uncle Sam gets involved, no one has a choice.”

Wayne waved to his father. Dennis waved back and went into the house. Wayne had the last of the meth in his pocket and his 30-30 in hand. Brady never could see to drive after dark, even before Wayne left for the military when he and Brady used to go catfishing down on the Blue River at night, so Wayne took the wheel. They'd
cruised the winding back roads down around the old mill that had been burned down years back by kids. Farm fields ran for hundreds and hundreds of acres. All the timber, green, wildlife, and quiet one could want.

Brady's brittle arm had held the spotlight over the harvested stalks that lay chopped and dried about the soil as they passed slowly. Until light reflected eyes scavenging for dropped
ears of feed corn. Wayne placed the shifter in neutral, pressed the emergency brake, grabbed his rifle, leaned over the idling hood as the engine missed and adrenaline stoked his tendons and shots opened the night.

The first deer dropped. A hollow shell fell from the rifle, rolled down the hood. Another explosion chewed the night and a second deer dropped.

Wayne had field-dressed each, using
his blade to cut from the ass to the sternum. Missing the stomach, then using his hand to dig up into the chest cavity, cutting out the esophagus, and the heart and intestines poured out along with the euphoria that coursed through Wayne.

Wayne had driven back to Brady's graying cabin to quarter the deer meat. Brady's daughter, Dee Dee, had come out to the Ford. She'd prepared a late-night breakfast.
Inside, Wayne sat at the kitchen table uninterested in nourishment, telling Brady they needed to take to the meat before it spoiled. Brady waved his worry away, said they'd time to share a bottle of Boone's Farm, what he referred to as Kool-Aid with a kick.

Dee Dee began to flirt with Wayne, tickling his neck with her long nails painted the color of a tongue. Wayne tried to ignore her leaning
in front of him while setting a bowl of white gravy down, a tray of towel-covered biscuits and a platter of bacon. Her brown eyes staring, shoulder-length hair black as burned wood. Her shirt loose with toffee-colored cleavage dangling.

Brady's hand wrapped around her arm and he jerked her from the table. Dishes clanged and broke on the pine floor. Brady raised his free hand and Dee Dee begged,
“Daddy, no!”

The Need from the mountain villages painted Wayne's insides black as ink. Alcohol and drugs had mutated into wrath. Wayne grabbed Brady's wrist from behind, didn't let the old man strike his daughter, spun him around face-to-face. Brady released Dee Dee. She fell back, watched Wayne hook his fist into Brady's left kidney. Wayne felt the pressure in his bloodstream rising and his
ears popped. He seared Brady's vision with his fist and pancaked his nose. Then he dug his hand around Brady's turkey neck, squeezed. Bones gave way like a number-two pencil.