Lucky's Girl (32 page)

Frankie sighed. “Around four hundred K. Cash. Hidden where no one will ever find it.”

Errol nodded. “Yeah, I got less, but still a lot. I got more overheads. Keeping some things running in this town requires me to be the secret Santa.”

Frankie shrugged. “Are you regretting that? It seems to me that it wasn’t just business for you. You really care about folks here.”

Errol laughed. “Yeah, I do. Some of these people make it pretty hard to give a shit about them, but I do.”

Frankie looked over at his friend and had to laugh too. “We’re an unlikely pair to give a shit, but that’s life. What are we gonna do?”

Errol became serious again. “I’m gonna go get Sally. And if I gotta beat the shit out of Wally and keep him in your freezer until this is over, then I’ll do it.”

Frankie smiled at his business partner and friend of twenty-something years, “Errol, I know it’s a don’t ask/don’t tell kinda thing, but do you know what I do when I go on vacation every year?”

Errol shook his head. Some things they didn’t tell or ask each other. In some cases the less you knew, the better it was for all concerned.

Frankie sighed contentedly. “I cross the border like I’m gonna go ice fishing, then I fly to Thailand. I sit on the beach during the day, drink cocktails and take naps. At night I fuck the most gorgeous women on earth. These crops pay for that.”

Errol laughed and shrugged. “I didn’t know you had it in you, buddy.”

Frankie continued. “I inherited that bar from my dad. The old owner had croaked sometime in the fifties and my dad had just kept working. I don’t even know if it was really his. Steadiest job in the fucking U.P., but barely getting by in reality. But I get that one week a year, and when I blow this joint, no pun intended, I’m gonna sit on that beach in Thailand ‘til I die. My old man bit it standing behind that bar and that would have been me if not for you, Sally and Wally. Fuck Lucky, nobody’s taking mine or from mine. Especially some nude fucking revival preacher. Fuck him.”

CHAPTER 10

Blackie could smell
her
even through the jungle of ripe flesh and blood, sweat and shit, piss and human semen. Even past the smell of many humans and wolves in one small area.

She smelled of usurpation. She smelled of destiny and defeat. She smelled of the Big Tree’s truth made into a lie.

Why was she still here?

Why hadn’t she been driven away or killed?

Why couldn’t her Promised One see that she meant to wreck the great Covenant?

***

Lucky was standing on the pier again, with Jenny and Jake behind him on the shore. All the Faithful of Elton before him, a giant bonfire behind them, bathing everything in a great golden aura. Everyone who’d stayed after the Traitor had broken up the assembly with his rifle and drunk screaming was here. All those who had fled, the faithless and the weak, were at home huddled up against a new kind of darkness in the Upper Peninsula night.

Many had left Elton today, acting like they were just going to the grocery store in a nearby town, but driving on and not coming back.

Lucky smiled inwardly at the thought of that.

People pathetic enough to spend their entire lives in Elton were going to try their hand elsewhere. Fat chance. They had the chance to witness miracles… but they’d fled.

But now the Faithful were standing before him, eyes raised to sights beyond.

Pride swelled in his heart. The Faithful had chosen to
give up
– to give up on their wretched little lives, on their jaundiced little thoughts and minds, and to give up on the System, all of its ideas and religions, and finally to give up on themselves.

They really
weren’t
worth it, so they’d given themselves up to be part of something greater. It had taken real courage to see that. Yes, the Big Tree had helped that along, the miraculous and the supernatural could be very persuasive, but others had still turned away to hang on to life and its endless aches and wants, even though there was nothing waiting for them but further failure and disappointment. All they had to look forward to was shitting and dying.

Pigs.

Fighting to shit.

Fighting
over
shit.

That’s what they were; it was a perfect description.

When Mason was young, he’d sat in the living room with his dad watching 60 Minutes talk about Charles Manson. His mom almost made him turn it off but he turned to her and said, “It’s all right, Mom, I just really wanna know why these people don’t wanna do God’s Will. What makes them so sad and stupid?”

It had lulled her right back to where she needed to be.

Charlie had used that word,
pigs
, to describe the people of the System.

Charlie got it, sort of. At least he’d started to get it before he’d been locked up.

Lucky always knew there were
Pigs
; vile, corrupt sacks of sewage living to restrain the strong, to tie down visionaries, to keep truth seekers from finding it. Seekers like himself and Kenny, but even seekers could turn away from the path of knowing, to become the worst sort of
Pig
of all; a Traitor.

But his Tribe had rejected all of that. First the Most Faithful, and now the Faithful. Tonight they would turn the corner and move to the Unity of All Flesh.

Wen-ta-cho.

Wen-ta-cho.

Blackie stepped forward onto the pier, stopping momentarily to give Jenny a quizzical look, then shook her head and walked to Lucky’s side. She howled a long and mournful song, telling of hunger and exile, giving way to revelation and victory. At the final triumphant verse the other wolves joined in as the Faithful continued their unearthly invocation.

Wen-ta-cho.

Wen-ta-cho.

The women of the Most Faithful dropped to their knees in a line facing the Faithful. They slipped out of their robes and lay on their backs, spreading their legs to display their cunts.

Wen-ta-cho.

Wen-ta-cho.

Lucky’s robe fell to the wooden board of the pier, one hand went to his hardening cock with the other affectionately rubbing Blackie.

Five male wolves walked forward, each standing before one of the Most Faithful as they opened their cunts to the slick red wolf cocks. The wolves mounted and pumped back and forth, growling and clamping teeth to shoulders, drawing blood as they fucked under the rapturous eyes of the Faithful.

Lucky kneeled behind Blackie, gently raising her tail to lovingly slide his cock into her, an inch at a time. She yelped once, twice, three times as she expanded to take him and he began gently pulling in and out.

As one wolf finished with a woman of the Most Faithful, the next mounted and thrusted until he filled her with his seed. The women screamed and thrashed in ecstasy, the wolves growling as they rutted, and howling in furious joy as they reached completion.

Lucky and Blackie most of all.

Jenny’s eyes widened as Lucky’s head reared back and he howled out above the din to finish inside Blackie. There was a great groaning from the earth, a creaking and grinding as the limbs of the Big Tree moved of their own accord, not blown on any visible wind. His chest heaved, he opened his eyes to her and he smiled, and his lips formed the word
Soon
.

But the worship was not over. The Most Faithful rose, donning their robes while wolf seed dribbled down their legs. The Faithful rose and held hands in a ring around Grove Island.

Wen-ta-cho.

Wen-ta-cho.

***

Sally hadn’t seen it coming. After a weird, very solo day at Frankie’s where not a single stumblebum had walked through the damn doors, the Boss had sent her home and she’d found the note on the dash of her ‘93 Nissan pickup. It was a signal note, from Wally. She wasn’t surprised either.

Things were changing in Elton, big time, and they needed to powwow about it.

His dimwitted wife Penny had always been a Jesus freak with a big mouth and a birdbrain, but the Rev’s brand of Jesus freakiness had been of the love-one-another-and-try-to-help-out variety.

Lucky
was a whole different story.

She remembered him from the old days, and yeah, he was the finest thing she’d ever laid eyes on even though he was ten years younger than her.

Most folks up here seemed to have a weird case of collective amnesia about Lucky which Wally had chalked up to UFO’s or something. Wally was always going on about aliens and pyramids and government cover-ups of alien pyramids. He didn’t say it in front of his wife but he suspected that Lucky was really an alien CIA mole or… needless to say there was a reason people gave him the nickname Wally Weed, even before Errol had recruited him to be the green thumb of their operation over the last seventeen years. Wally was a flake, but he sure could grow weed.

But Sally and Wally had remembered Lucky from back in the day. Wally had given him weed he’d never paid for and Sally… well, she always ended up on her knees
and
giving him cases of beer. Cases that came out of her paycheck. She not only sucked his dick, but she bought him beer.

When he’d disappeared after all that shit had gone down with Ted Tellefsen’s daughter and the American Indian girl, she’d sat Wally down for a big sis talk. They’d had those about once a month since they’d been kids. Wally needed to be set straight. He wasn’t ever going to be a rocket scientist, but she could try to steer him in the right direction. That was why Errol had brought her onboard in the first place. She was babysitter and caretaker to their pot prodigy.

The conversation had been a weird one, because neither of them could quite explain why they’d given it up for Lucky. It was easier to explain why Wally had given Lucky free weed. Wally had wanted to be liked and Lucky was the cat’s meow. But why had she hit her knees so easily? Why had her chump blinders failed so miserably? She had no desire to be liked by Lucky’s kind of people. She wasn’t in high-school or the Jesus scene. Yeah, he was good looking, really
really
good looking, maybe better looking than any man she’d ever met, but she would never…

But she did with him, over and over.

And when it happened, she came, over and over.

He never so much as touched her boob, but she’d had her tonsils wrapped around his dick like an anaconda. And when she did it she came,
hard
. She’d gone down on a few men in her life, but only after a lot of fooling around. With Lucky she had dropped to her knees, puckering up within moments.

Something about Lucky made people lust after him, trust him and love him. When he was around people’s brains wouldn’t work right.

And she’d never seen it coming.
Wally hadn’t been looking forward to getting dragged to Lucky’s cult revival out on the dry lakebed. He’d told her and rolled his eyes. He went to church once a week to keep the peace with his wife. She went five to seven times, volunteering for everything they did. This was good because it kept her busy while he tended the crops.

But he went, and must’ve got brainwashed too, because the man who got out of his car wasn’t Wally Weed anymore, he was a fucking stranger. He looked like a meth tweaker, but worse. Like an animal.

And then he’d clocked her, and the beating had begun.

Now here she was tied up naked to the Big Tree.

Her eyes were swollen but she could see Lucky out on the pier talking to his
flock
; normal folks who’d turned over a new leaf and who had now covered themselves with mud and twigs like headhunters from Borneo. And the fucking wolves were with them. She’d been told by a starry-eyed fundie at the bar that Lucky could do a Star Trek mind meld with the wolves; proof that he was the
Prophet of Our God
. Sally was convinced Lucky was a prophet of something, but not one that would make good Sunday school stories.

It really looked like he was out there fucking the big black wolf.

And that everybody in town, kids included, were watching him.

And they should be able to see her, tied naked and bleeding to this fucking tree. But maybe that was just an agony-induced fugue. Maybe this part was all a dream. Maybe she was back at the Grow, neck broken, and this was the hallucination she was experiencing before dying.

Wally’s face.
It had been all wrong. She’d got to the Grow before he had, done a quick look around, and lit up. Good fucking stuff. Dark green. You’d expect it to be pure skunky because of the color, but it was really piney too. It possessed an initial kick, but a big creeper back end. Overall it was some stoned-to-the-bone stuff. She was hoping he’d bring some tacos and beer because all she had was a diet coke and Skittles.

She’d got halfway through the joint when she’d seen his headlights pulling up. She’d sat on the tailgate, taking another big drag and holding it out for him just as he got out of his car. He wasn’t listening to anything. Ordinarily he listened to Tangerine Dream or some other weird shit, but tonight, there was nothing. He jumped out of his car. Too fast. And there he was, right in front of her, wild eyes looking crazy as fuck.