Dirtbags (24 page)

The tear shitting down her cheek surprised her and before the threat of more, she was out of the office. Out into the room where the other girls danced, Passion on the stage and Sinnamon weaving through the men on metal folding chairs, passing the glitter-lined coffee can and asking after money for the juke. Out past where Big Jack stood, keeping an eye on things, on the angry and sullen tobacco farmers and folk wondering just when the mill would open again.

It would not. It wouldn’t open again, and all those folks weren’t coming back and nothing was going to be the same ever again. Rhonda knew it. She didn’t know how many others did, but she sure as hell knew it, and as far as she was concerned, she better get used to it.

“Where you headed, Miss Rhonda?” Big Jack asked as she opened the door to the parking lot.

“I’m off to get myself in position,” she said.

“Well best of luck to you,” he said.

“I don’t need luck,” she smiled, wiping dry her eyes. “Luck don’t matter when you got position.”

***

Calvin didn’t like it none. He stepped back inside the tent to collect his thoughts. She figured it best to leave him be and set about fishing around in the grocery bags to find a tin of something she could eat. No sooner had she popped the top from a can of Vienna sausages than Calvin stuck his head out of the tent, his eyes beady and brimming with hate and anger.

“That’s what he said? He said it just like that?”

She nodded.

“And he didn’t want to screw, neither?”

She shook her head.

“You tried, right? I mean, you definitely tried?”

She nodded. “He said he wasn’t getting involved with no one that was involved with you. He said what you got may be contagious and fat chance of him catching it. He practically threw me out of the 809.”

“Is that right?” He lay back on his sleeping bag in the tent and stared at the canvas ceiling. For a moment, she thought he looked like a punished child, confined to his room.

“He’s got a gun,” she said. “A nice one.”

“This is America,” he grumbled. “Everybody’s got a gun.”

“He also said he’ll put you out back in the pines if he sees you anywhere near the trailer.” She realized she hadn’t taken two steps toward the tent since she started playing her hand. She held her ground. “He said he’s got more than enough folk to handle his killing.”

He ran both hands across his head, stopping them at the base of his scalp. He sat that way a moment. Then, quick as a flash, ripped the knife from under his pack and bustled out of the tent. Rhonda had no time to react. He had the knife up and brought it down quick into her can of Vienna sausages. He skewered one with the tip of his blade and brought it to his face then, never taking his eyes away from hers, popped it between his teeth.

“He’s got too many people to do his killing,” he said through a mouthful of meat. “Is that so?”

She swallowed. “Th—That’s what he said, Calvin.”

He looked into her eyes, her soul. She feared he could somehow read her mind.

“That settles it then,” he said. He began stuffing his things into his backpack and slipped on a light jacket. “That’s the answer.”

“What is?” She caught herself backing away from him, hands clenching the canned meat.

“He thinks he don’t need any killing done,” he said. “My thoughts run counter. I aim to show him the light.” He slipped the knife into his pocket and began disassembling the tent. “Get your things, honey. We got shit to tend to.”

20

First, Sheriff Lorne Axel studied the doorjamb. There was no damage. He ran his finger along the cheap plastic as if he admired the craftsmanship, but there was no craftsmanship with doors such as these. Much like everything else these days, this door was made someplace far east. He studied the lock. Un-tampered.

Deputy Shackle waited patiently beside him. “The bodies are inside, Sheriff.”

“I know where the bodies are,” said Lorne, perhaps a bit too crankily. He didn’t blame Shackle. The younger ones were reared on lots of television, where each episode has a murder, and the crimes are cleanly solved over a predetermined time period. So many of them joined the Sheriff’s Department expecting the same thing. Hotheaded ones busting up every moonshine still, meth lab, and card game, sniffing after some greater conspiracy. Lorne knew what they didn’t: a cop out here could go years sometimes without a good murder. And a good murder
spree
came around about as often as Halley’s comet. Unless they were lucky.

He stepped into the house. Like most in this part of the county, it was a small one. Folks called them “shotgun houses” because you could fire a shotgun through the front door and out the back without hitting anything. From the looks of things in the living room, someone must have tried. And failed.

He noticed the walls freckled with blood in some spots, awash with it in others. Just inside the doorway was a pool of it. He put a kerchief to his nose and mouth and squinted. He was grateful for a gentle breeze at his back, the fresh air more valuable than gold right now. The entire house rankled of cheap toilet water and meat gone turned. Lorne jerked his head aside and closed his eyes. Try that he could to block all senses from his brain, just for a minute.

“Do you need to step out back, Sheriff?” Shackle asked. He put a hand to the old man’s shoulder, which was quickly rebuffed.

Lorne took in the room. It was a shit show. Blood everywhere. Knickknacks and whatnot lay broken in a layer across the drenched shag carpeting. Destruction total and complete.

“You said there was only two killed?” Lorne asked. He struggled to compose himself. Lorne fought in Vietnam. That smell still worked its way into his sense memories. He thought he’d become used to it. He was wrong. Those memories paled in comparison to what currently reeked in that trailer.

“Two, yes, sir.” Shackle swallowed. “We found two bodies.”

“Maybe you found two bodies, but this is more than two people’s blood.”

“It looks like there was quite a fight here,” Shackle said.

Lorne minded the blood and stepped into the living room. Everything had been torn asunder. On the coffee table sat a mirror, smeared and smudged with milky streaks. The sofa and easy chair across from it were saturated with blood.

“Drug deal gone bad?” Shackle asked.

Lorne didn’t think so. Not the way things were going this week. A swath of blood led from the living room, down the skinny hallway to the right. Lorne pointed at it with his chin.

“Let me guess,” he said. “They’re down there.”

“This way, Sheriff.”

He’d hoped the hallway would be less of a to-do than the living room, but he knew that had been wishful thinking. Lorne knew who it was before he’d gotten to the face, that large swell of stomach raising up from the bloody shag carpet. His throat had been ripped out and was more than likely the cause of death. The front of him good and mangled. The path of blood indicated the body had been dragged, but Big Jack was way too large for any one person—or any two, for that matter—to carry. It was as if they’d abandoned him there, unable to complete the task at hand.

No signs of struggle except for the hallway’s wood paneling had been knocked in. Lorne turned back to the living room. The killings had taken place there. Big Jack’s body dragged here and, from the blood leading to the bedroom, a second corpse dragged back that way. A bigger mess at the front door meant a third, possibly a fourth. But the damage to the hallway seemed out of place.

As Lorne inspected the wall, Shackle leaned in. “The mother,” he said, as if that answered the question.

Lorne’s expression said counter, and Shackle waved his left arm wildly at his side and contorted his face into cartoonish grief. Lorne nodded. He’d delivered his fair share of bad news to African-American women, and their painful displays of sorrow bordered on the theatrical. He imagined the mother throwing herself against the wall and caterwauling miserably over the death of her son, and he wondered why other mothers behaved any different.

Lorne took his time approaching Big Jack. He knew what he would find. He’d known when he received the call. He’d been waiting for it. He didn’t know where it would happen or exactly when, but he knew it was coming. Just like the FBI, which had yet to go home, knew. Folks who sent their wives and kids to family out of town, preachers that saw church pews fill up for the first time in a long while, streets that went empty as soon as the sun dropped below the horizon . . . everyone knew it was coming.

Big Jack laid there, his face frozen in eternal surprise. His eyes wide and bugged and all the life squeezed from them, leaving instead a grey, cloudy nothing. He’d been stabbed so many times in the throat that it would be impossible to count. Lorne imagined the killer would have tried to slit the throat, like done in the movies, but Big Jack’s size would have prevented a clean kill. So clean had been abandoned.

Big Jack’s T-shirt was no longer white, but grape juice-colored and bunched up along his chest, exposing that round, giant stomach. Lorne closed his eyes. He’d known Big Jack for years. So many trips out to the 809 for complaints or to scold errant deputies or give Bubba Greene a piece of his mind. Big Jack was always there: smiling, joking, doing what he was paid to do. Lorne looked at the dead man’s hands and wondered how many unsolved cases they were responsible for. Figured it didn’t matter anymore, not with no one to pin them on.

The savaged throat of Big Jack was the extent of his injuries. Not so for the woman in his bedroom, so obviously placed there after being killed back in the living room. She had been beaten to within an inch of her life. Knife, blunt instrument, fists . . . all had been used to do her in. She, Lorne reckoned, had put up the fight in the rest of the house. And what a fight it must have been. Her body was bruised and blackened, cut and gashed. Her head twisted atop her neck at an unnatural angle, and Lorne guessed that Doc Persons would be claiming that as the cause of death. But his work would be cut out for him.

Her shirt, like Big Jack’s, was soaked as well.

“Jesus,” Lorne whispered. He put his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “She one of Bubba Greene’s girls?”

“Ellis is asking the folks outside,” Shackle said. “Looks like Latrice. Goes by Sinnamon.” He studied the old man’s face. “What do you think? Break-in?”

Lorne shook his head. “No signs of it. I reckon they knew the killer. They let him in.” He softly covered the woman with a sheet, then tiptoed back into the hallway, as if he might wake her. He stopped at Big Jack’s body and lowered his head. He reached down with a trembling hand and touched the bottom of Big Jack’s shirt. It stuck to his skin.

“What do you think went wrong?” Shackle asked.

“Everything, by the looks of it.”

“You want me to get Coleman to run up to the 809? See about Bubba Greene?”

“No need,” Lorne said. He peeled the shirt off the big man’s stomach. He thought he would be sick. “This ain’t our case no more.”

“Do what?”

“For one thing, I don’t want it.” Lorne pulled the shirt back from Big Jack’s body, revealing the wide, lumpy chest. Just as Lorne expected, an
eleven
had been crudely carved. He looked to the deputy. “And for another, it belongs to the FBI now.”

***

There was a lot most folks didn’t know about Deputy Shackle, and that’s just the way he liked it. Not many knew Bubba Greene paid him to keep the 809 off the radar when things went sour. Since the last election, Judge Grimm Menkin had a hard-on for the strip club out on the county’s edge, and Bubba thought it prudent for less a ruckus raised on the police scanner or the weekly newspaper.

Most folks didn’t know Shackle had killed someone. Yep, one night, he’d gone to the 809 where Bubba comped all his drinks and had a girl or two give him a free dance. Maybe he got a bit liberal with the hands, maybe he didn’t, but what mattered was some trucker with crosshatched teeth got jealous and started pushing Shackle around. Big Jack tossed the guy, but Shackle, drunk off his ass, followed him into the parking lot to give him a what-for and, long story short, Bubba and Big Jack dragged the fella off to the pines and that was that.

Folks also didn’t know Shackle had a shoebox full of money beneath the floorboards under his bed. He’d saved up some cash paid by folks like Bubba and had a hankering to buy a boat and one day sail it to Bermuda where life, he heard, was a beach.

And most folks didn’t know Shackle sang in the shower. He would pop a cassette into the shitty radio he kept propped on the back of his toilet and jam hair bands and glam rock as he bathed under the warm water in his little one-room just over the Whitfill town limits. His nearest neighbor was over an acre away, so he could air out his lungs to the likes of Poison, Motley Crüe, or Guns and Roses and relive the days of his youth.

But Rhonda Cantrell wasn’t most folks. She knew all of those things about Pete Shackle. Shackle had a tendency to jabber after sex, and she and him had tossed a bed or two in their heyday, which again, was another on a list of things folks didn’t know about Deputy Pete Shackle.

Halfway through “Talk Dirty to Me,” he killed the shower. The shower curtain whooshed back, scraping against the metal rod, and he continued his wailing as he dried himself.

He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, scrubbing his head with the towel. He sensed something and stopped drying, his hands and towel frozen atop his head, then slowly lowered it to cover his bits.

“Holy shit,” he said. He looked Rhonda dead in the eye and seemed to immediately know the score. “Are you alone? Or with your husband?”

“I’m with my husband,” she said.

“Where is he?” He knew the answer, but kept his eyes on her. Didn’t turn around.

“He’s right behind you.” She said it, and suddenly he was, appearing from the back bedroom. He had the gun on him.

Shackle didn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on Rhonda. “Is this really how you’re going to do this?” he asked. “After everything, you’re going to let your husband kill me and carve a number on my chest?”